I have found rather consistently that Donald Westlake and Paul Levine write books that are lightweight stories involving crime that use language, settings and situations that put me in a good frame of mind. So, when I looking for a mood lift, I often go to one of those authors. I do find that doing something, such as the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen, while listening to music is another quick way to shine up my mood.
But on what might be called a normal business-like day (yes, retired people have business to attend to as well), various non-fiction books call. One of these is T. R. Reid's "The Healing of America." It is a look at national health care in several different countries, comparing them. I like reading it but haven't buckled down and finished it. It is copyrighted in 2009 so it is a little dated but still very interesting. It can be surprising to me to see how many directions, disciplines, and philosophies are connected to the subject of health care. Almost every page of the book so far has memorable quotes on it.
I have a bad habit that is possibly not entirely my fault of getting distracted from a book that is valuable by another book that I learn about and get interested in . I start on that other book and don't finish the first one. I am a channel-hopper, only with books. That is the situation with the helpful volume "Thinking: Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in economics and an author whose work and imaginative ideas figured in my dissertation more than 40 years ago.
"The Rise of Global Free Speech in the Digital Age" by PBS relates to the phenomenon of the Arab spring and other events that are related to and affected by the rise of "alternative media" such as blogs, forums, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. The phrase "alternative media" was first introduced to me in the Peninsula Bookman bookstore in Fish Creek, WI. It is part of the jacket art on "Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America". The whole business of individual communication seems related to the emerging technology of cellphones around the world coupled with the smart tech of touch screens, apps, Google and the whole internet. I want to read a bit more about that.
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