I'm on a reading binge

...better than an eating binge, no doubt.  Food for the mind.  Today I happened to notice that I am reading nine books, somewhat simoultaneously.  While I've always been a "reader," I can't recall any other time when I was reading so many books at the same time.  George W. Bush is doing strange things to this dimension.

I do wonder, however, how much of this reading material I will retain, and not just because it may be disjointed.  They say that your brain records every single experience during your lifetime.  Presumably that would include every single word that you had ever read.  If we only possessed total recall, how different things could be.  And as we get older, the memory seems to fade and falter.  One might say that we're simply living TOO long in this age.  Dementia and Alzheimer's suggest this may be true.  But I'm not going to sacrifice the sheer pleasure of reading simply because I may not remember every word and phrase of what I'm taking in.

Here's my (and my wife's) current reading list:

1) The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals/Michael Pollan

2) Mac OS X Leopard edition: the missing manual/David Pogue

3) Dreams from my father: a story of race and inheritance/Barack Obama

4) The audacity of hope: thoughts on reclaiming the American dream/Barack Obama

5) Great American hypocrites: toppling the big myths of the Republican politics/Glenn Greenwald

6) Moyers on Democracy/Bill Moyers

7) Dream: re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy/Stephen Duncombe

8) Seeds of change: the living treasure/Kenny Ausubel

9) Songs older than any known singer/John Phillip Santos

All of them exceptional.  

Shit!  Happy Belated Birthday, San Frannef!!  I've uh...had my nose buried in some books...yeah, that's it!  Birthday #26.  Wow.  I remember #26.  I think.