Starvacious

I have been a reader since long before I was ever interested in food, and realistically, since long before I could cook most food without running a severe risk of burning myself due to being a young child. Now I just run a moderate risk of burning myself due to being moderately inattentive or distracted.

I am also cheap. I don’t like to spend money on things that I will not get a lot of use out of (I will drop lots of money on things like shoes, glasses, and le Creuset cookware that I will use a majillion times, but not on things like books, which I will read once). So, I have also been a library maniac for ever. That’s right. Libraries. They were green and frugal before people started getting all het up about that stuff.

I check a LOT of books out of the library. Some, I succeed in reading. Some, I start but do not succeed in finishing.

I failed to finish a Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters by Rebecca Solnit.

Overly Simplistic Pocket Reason I didn’t Finish this Book

This book sounded like it would allay my occasionally recurring fears of a terrible disaster striking and the whole world turning more or less into the Road (Cormac McCarthy. Dystopian, dark and horrifying, misery, yet with fatherly love). But I couldn’t get into it, because when I read the first chapter, focused on the 1906 San Francisco quake, what I read between the lines was basically, “people are usually kind of a-holes, but for the first few days after disasters, they find ways to cooperate and help each other (unless they were helping the Chinese, maybe) because they can focus on surviving instead of making money, until some military guys and industrialists, who are mostly a-holes in any circumstance, try to take over and start shooting people and lighting fires for no good reason.”

Yeah, I didn’t get into it. Maybe it gets better, but there’s a giant waiting list at the library, so I have to return it, and I don’t get a fourth try.