After a Long Weekend, a Day to Restock, and Now for a Bit of Reading

I have to stop working sometimes, just so I can keep up with reading. After the big weekend, I spent part of the day receiving some product I ordered earlier in the month. We restocked some of the New Yorker magazine puzzles we had this spring, plus the hanging globes are back in stock too. And we also got some Spot and Eric Carle plush, but the sad thing about that order was that what we really wanted were the dish sets, and the vendor was out of those.

This morning I finished The Fates Will Find Their Way, a first novel by Hannah Pittard, who is getting a lot of buzz. We will be hosting Pittard when the book comes out, but it doesn't make sense to write about something now. You'll hear more from me closer to the publication.

I'm currently reading Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth about the "Real" America, by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel. It's an outgrowth of the Patchwork Nation Project, a collaboration among the Christian Science Monitor, the PBS Newshour, and PBS member stations, funded by the Knight Foundation. Chinni, a journalist, and Gimpel, a professor at the University of Maryland College Park, try to argue against a red and blue state America. Instead, they have 12 profiles that divide as small as county.

I like these sorts of sociological surveys. Years ago I read The Nine Nations of North America, and another of their jumping off points, The Rise of the Creative Class. Another book on their list, The Big Sort, is still on my to-be-read list. And there are others they haven't mentioned, like Bobos in Paradise.

I'm currently working my way through their profiles, from Boom Towns to Evangelical Epicenters to Military Bastions and Mormon Outposts. The only problem I can foresee is that sometimes the counties could be further split by type. I'll let you know what I think.