Current logjam started with City Room, by Arthur Gelb. I'll definitely get back to it, but it wasn't the right book at the right time. After only 20 pages of City Room, I tried Maimonides by Sherwin B. Nuland. Loved holding it (it's from the Jewish Encounters series published by Schocken and Nextbook, nice & compact); reading it, not so much. More like Maimonides' travel itinerary than about him and his work, which is what I was really hoping for. I'm bummed, because I liked Sherwin Nuland's other books: How We Die (I wouldn't recommend this for everyone!) and Lost in America. Hey, maybe that's a clue to why he focused on Maimonides' whereabouts.
Dropped Maimonides only 60 pages from the end & picked up Arthur Hertzberg's A Jew in America for only a page or two. I do want to read this & will try it again, but I couldn't focus on his family tree from the old country. (I'm not especially good at figuring out my relationships with my own relatives.)
Now here's the really odd part. Next I picked up Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Bestseller, a must read, wonderful, brilliant, funny, insightful, etc. No interest whatsoever! Why is this? Can someone explain this to me? You'd have to know me, and have read the book, to have some inkling as to why I'm totally not interested in reading it. Read about 20 pages and flipped through the rest. It's true that I sometimes resist getting swept up in trends (one look at my shoe collection and you'd know that), but I'm ready to love reading anything, whether it's popular or not.
Now I'm reading The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, by Robert Kaplan. The author comes out with some odd comments every so often, and it's not an easy read. But I've had the book on my shelves for two years and its time has arrived. So I guess right now I'm reading a book about nothing.
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