I had a successful venture at the library last week and came home with several very good books. One is Birth of a Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom, which I found to be a very entertaining book and plan on writing more about later.
I also found a book on the Korean “comfort women”, women held as sex slaves by the Japanese in World War II. It’s titled Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaeves of the Japanese Military, and features nothing more than each woman’s account of her experiences. It’s a compelling, though oddly unemotional book — stark, and made more so by the photographs of the women included with each woman’s testimony.
A third book was The Hungry Ocean by Linda Greenlaw, the female swordfish captain featured in the movie The Perfect Storm. This is an interesting story about life on a swordfishing boat, but for some reason her writing just hasn’t grabbed me that much and I’m not sure I’ll finish the book.
The last book was a lucky find, One Hundred Nature Walks in the Missouri Ozarks. This book details several new hiking areas I wasn’t familiar with from my other books. And since today is the first nice day we’ve had in almost a week, I think I’ll take a break from this computer and my work on the commerce site and weblogging, and go for a walk. Maybe I’ll be lucky and find a photo or two.