#9 Books I'm Reading

As usual, I have several books going at once.    

At bedtime:  Skeletons on the Zahara, Dean King.  A true story.  In 1815, an American merchant ship out of New England wrecked on the west coast of Africa, and the captain and crew were captured and enslaved by the nomadic people of the Sahara Desert.  This is the story of their travails and eventual rescue, as detailed in their own journals.  I had been entranced by the Shackelton (sp?) story, so I thought I would like this - there would be more interesting things to observe in a caravan than alone in Antarctica - but it is very dryly written.  I guess the author has taken pains not to attempt to color the men's own journal accounts.     

Carrying around in my purse for "waiting times":  The Odd Women, George Gissing.  First published in 1893, a novel about marriage and spinsterhood in the Victorian era.  I haven't got very far into it yet, but the introduction by Elaine Showalter was very interesting.  I highly recommend at least the introduction.  I hope the novel lives up to it.  I'll let you know later.    

For bits and pieces of time:  Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss.  About the sad state of grammar, in particular punctuation.  Subtitle: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.  I'm less than a quarter of the way through, but I already have a renewed urge to paint over that "10 items or less" sign, and all those apostrophes on plural nouns (noun's!) all over town!