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Last week Adam and I took a trip to go climbing at Red Rock Canyon, outside of Las Vegas. Red Rock Canyon just might be the most beautiful and amazing place I have EVER been. That says a lot, coming from a beach girl like me! The trip was awesome, adventurous, terrifying, and exhausting all mixed up together, and I could go on and on about it BUT since this is a blog about reading I will keep my commentary book-themed (ish). Here are some observations, thoughts, and lessons-learned from the various reading materials encountered on my trip:

• Reading on a Kindle is weird. On the flight out to Vegas I borrowed Adam’s Kindle and read an entire book, The Private War of Corporal Henson (review forthcoming – I KNOW, I keep saying that. I really do mean it, I just have a back-log of sorts…). I just can’t figure out whether that’s impressive or not…I don’t know what “4 hours and 20 minutes” equates to in pages. I kept trying to swipe it, and I couldn’t figure out how to highlight or make notes without help. I missed my paper pages and sticky-note flags. It was oddly convenient, though, and I think I could be encouraged to join this century and give it another go.
• Do not trust guidebooks. Ever. Ok, that’s a little dramatic. HOWEVER. Thanks to Fun Climbs Red Rocks: Topropes and Moderates I will never again read, “scramble down” the same way. It was treacherous! and scary! and, in Adam-speak, “just a little sketchy” getting down from our climb on Tuesday. (Thank you, Adam, for getting me down and out safely with only one tiny whine!).
• “Rare Bookstore” is NOT the same as “Used Bookstore.” We visited Bauman Rare Books at the Venetian, which was really cool. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but my first thought when I saw the sign advertising the store was that I’d get to browse a really cool store full of used books. It WAS a really cool store, but it was more like a museum and no touching was allowed – a $13,000 first edition of the Cat in the Hat was on display, safely behind glass! I haven’t had a chance to really look at the website, but I plan to.
• Pope Francis is awesome. I mean, I already knew that, but every time I read more of Laudato Si — On Care for Our Common Home I can’t keep from exclaiming about how much I just love him. Just after Adam and I were commenting on how much more amazing God’s mountains are than the man-made “wonder” of the strip, I read this:

But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention…is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, even more limited and gray, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves (27) (emphasis added).

Now – some non-book thoughts: I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY dislike the Strip and I will NOT bring my kids there until they’ve had a chance to REALLY learn right from wrong; Il Fornaio Italian restaurant at New York New York is fantastic; and I thoroughly enjoyed M and M World 🙂

Ciao for now!

We went to Seneca Rocks, WV this weekend to go rock climbing (which was awesome!), so there was no time for writing. I did read a bit, though, and finished up Kabul Beauty School (review forthcoming). At one point, the author, Deborah Rodriguez, shares directions to her house, out of which she ran her beauty school:

Go to the Internet café near the rotary in Shar-e-Now, the one near the emergency hospital with the red and white paint on the wall. Take a right, and you’ll then be on the main street in Shar-e-Now. Before you get to the bombed-out movie theater you’ll see a bright yellow building. Turn right there, then drive past the street with all the dead cows. Continue past the old warlord house, then go left at the next street. You will see a blue-and-white-striped box and a sign that says ASSA in black letters. Just ahead, there’s a gray building with a lot of Afghan men hanging out in front, a tailor shop, a compound with a blue gate, and a hand-pump well on the corner. My guesthouse is the one with the blue gate (177).

For some reason, I was reminded of the Kabul directions the next day when Adam read aloud the guide book’s directions to our climb:

About 150 feet uphill (north) of the edge of the Southeast Corner is a long, vegetated, low-angled ramp. Climb the right-leaning ramp in two easy pitches, until Lower Broadway Ledge is reached at a point below UP AND COMING (200 ft). (168)

I can tell you that in that moment, they seemed a lot more similar to me than they do now as I write them out – there are no bombed-out buildings, dead cows, or warlords in the wilderness of West Virginia. In all seriousness, though, I think what really struck me was how incomprehensible both sets of directions are. Kabul and Seneca are “wild” in completely different ways. In Kabul, it’s because the city was underdeveloped and none of the streets were named, at least at the time. Unfortunately, things aren’t likely to get a whole lot better for Afghanistan anytime soon. At Seneca, there is barely any development because it’s still wilderness. Thankfully, I have Adam to translate the guidebook and we happily found our climb. It isn’t easy, though, if you don’t know where you’re looking. I was thinking about how to fix this difficulty because I always want to fix things… and I came up with the ridiculous and impossible idea of posting a little sign at the base of each climb with its name and difficulty rating (so CONVENIENT, right?) Convenient, yes. Wild, no. Part of the draw of climbing for me is, most basically, the physical act of climbing and the puzzle of figuring out the route. But I can do that in a gym, and I don’t. One of my favorite parts of climbing, really, is being out on the rock: the feel of real rock under my hands, the wind and sun on my face, the view from up high on the rocks. We saw a turkey vulture fly by below us this weekend and talked about how rare and awesome that is to experience, particularly on the east coast. I really don’t want to make climbing more “convenient” because that would make it less “wild.” I want my rocks as wild as they can be while still being climbable.

Oh, PS – Regarding the title of this post: There are plenty of LIVE cows at Seneca. Every once in a while on the rock you hear a loud “moooooo.” Also, there are hunters in the area so sometimes there are gunshots as well. I have to say it crossed our minds: WAIT – IS SOMEONE SHOOTING COWS???

So I’m a little late to this party–Amazon published this list in early 2014–but I just heard about it recently (that fits, right?). Anyways, it’s not a particularly inspiring list as far as I’m concerned. Amazon’s editorial team compiled it through “taxing months of deliberation,” basically picking books they liked. It does, though, offer a nice range of books and gives me some idea of books I may want to think about reading. That, and dredges up memories (good and bad) of high school English class. I don’t know what list I was looking at the first time I counted, or maybe it was just past my bedtime, because I determined that I had read 26 of these…No. I’ve read 18. But I still consider that pretty good.

Here’s the list, with the ones I’ve read bolded and starred, sometimes with a comment. Note that I only star the books I’m sure I’ve read. Look through the list and let me know what you’ve read from the list!

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
4. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
5. A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition by Lemony Snicket
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
7. Alice Munro: Selected Stories by Alice Munro
8. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
9. All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
10. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt***
11. Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume
12. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
13. Beloved by Toni Morrison
14. Born To Run – A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
15. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl***
18. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
19. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
20. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown
21. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1 by Jeff Kinney
22. Dune by Frank Herbert
23. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
24. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
25. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
26. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown*** (Has anyone NOT read this? a million times?)
    
27. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
28. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
29. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
30. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote*** (This was the first book to actually terrify me. I slept with the lights on while I was reading it.)
    
31. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
32. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
33. Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
34. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
35. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
36. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder*** (I read the whole series, starting in 2nd grade. I decided I was going to be President when I grew up and return the whole country to covered wagon times. HA!)
    
37. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
38. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
39. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
40. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl***
41. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
42. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
43. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
44. Moneyball by Michael Lewis
45. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
46. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
47. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
48. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
49. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
50. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen***
51. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
52. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
53. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
54. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
55. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
57. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
58. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
59. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger*** (I unconvincingly played the prostitute in my 11th grade class’s movie about all the books we read that year; I did not, however, wear a green dress, which was silly of us…)
    
60. The Color of Water by James McBride
61. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
62. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson*** (Disturbing. BUT I learned a lot, including about the invention of the Ferris Wheel!)
    
63. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
64. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
65. The Giver by Lois Lowry***
66. The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
67. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*** (I really, really disliked this book. As a result, I will not see the movie.)
    
68. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
69. The House At Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
70. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
71. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot*** (I read this earlier this year – VERY interesting discussion of where the cells for so much of our medical advancements came from)
    
72. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
73. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) by Rick Riordan
74. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
75. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
76. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
77. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien***
78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks***
79. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
80. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
81. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
82. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
83. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
84. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
85. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
86. The Shining by Stephen King
87. The Stranger by Albert Camus***
88. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
89. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
90. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
91. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
92. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
93. The World According to Garp by John Irving
94. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
95. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe***
96. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee***
97. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
98. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann***
99. Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
100. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak