Official Book Club Selection

You may have noticed Musicwhore.org is branching out into book reviews with a new category, Book Club.

While I was staying in Honolulu before and after my trip to Japan, I started reading for recreation again. Recreational reading was pretty much been squeezed out by music-making and Internet-surfing in the last decade, and I don’t have a good reading chair.

If I get too absorbed in a book, I’ll contort myself on the futon uncomfortably, then realize I strained something when I reach a stopping point. If a book bores me, I end up messing up my sleep schedule because I dozed off. Those are my hazards of reading while prone.

This time, I’m reading non-fiction. Most of the non-fiction books on my shelves are references, guides or textbooks. No narrative non-fiction. So I used all the flights on my trip to read such books as Freakonomics and Blink. I also passed some time re-reading Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise.

I’m staying away from fiction for the time being because whenever I read fiction, I feel the compulsion to chip away at my own. Non-fiction gives me the luxury of distraction without distracting me to work. That’s really a weird circular reason there.