How old where you when you learned to read? For me it was very late, I did not read at all until I was ten years old due to massive dyslexia (as you couldn’t tell from that I was dyslexic from my typos!) but once I beat the challenge I took to books like a duck to water.

These days I read a lot of the Internet on a daily basis to try to stay five minutes ahead of the zeitgeist and not post the same thing three hundred other bloggers are posting, but my first love is printed words on paper.

It is kind of tragic but the average adult reads less than one book a year here in the US. So if you managed to complete a single book, you’re actually ahead of the curve. So I thought I’d use tonights’ Water Cooler to tell you want I have been reading lately and hear what you have in your hands or on your night stand.

We’ll break this into two sections fiction and non-fiction. First off non-fiction.

I have just finished The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmond Morris. It is the story of the early life and career of one of my favorite Presidents. As I quipped to my wife the story is so detailed and complex that it is almost like it is happening in real time. There were plenty of things that I learned about TR that I had never known, his ups, his downs the fact that he would have been a Democrat but he did not like the drunken and rollicking nature of the first Democratic Party meeting he went to and so became a Republican.


All in a all a fascinating read which makes one of our best known Presidents more three dimensional, not just a President, but a man.

The fiction is Stieg Larsson’s Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series. I know, I know, I am probably the last person in North America to have read these books, but if that is true, then I urge you to read them again.

The series is not only a set of interesting mysteries but you get a great peek into life in Sweden. I for one did not realize that every other action in that nation is to make or consume coffee. It may have been just the authors whim but they drink a hell of a lot of it in land of the Midnight sun.

The books are great, but they could have used a bit of tightening up in my mind. It might be the translation into English was not as good as it could have been, but I suspect that it had more to do with the fact that Larsson died just after presenting the three manuscripts to his publisher. It is hard to get a rewrite out of a dead man and there is always a squeamishness (rightly so) to altering an authors work when he can’t object.
For all that they are good reads and I highly recommend them. So that’s my recent reads, what are yours?

And what else is on your mind tonight Firedogs, the floor is yours!