More books

The National Parks: America's Best Idea by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns
Ken Burns made a documentary about national parks. I haven't seen it. But I have read the book they made to go along with it. This is a large book with lots of pictures; it borders on becoming a coffee table book, but it has plenty of meat to go along with the big beautiful pictures. It covers mostly the early history of the idea of the national parks with a lot of focus on Yosemite and Yellowstone. Having been to more than a dozen of these parks, it was fun every time the book got to one that I was well acquainted with. The book starts with a long preface (it's only like 8 pages, but the pages are really big) that about made me want to poke my eyes out as it went on and on talking about how nature feeds our souls or something like that. Thankfully that part ended and it stayed, for the most part, just a history book.

There's Nothing in this Book That I Meant to Say by Paula Poundstone
I love listening to Paula on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and she has a new book out. This is not it. This one is 13 years old. But it was available at my library. The premise of the book is Paula comparing and contrasting herself with historical figures in each chapter. So there's a chapter on Joan of Arc, one on Sitting Bull, one on Hellen Keller, etc. It pretty much goes like this: "When Joan was 17 years old, she took command of a company of troops. When I was 17 years old, I got my first pet turtle." And then you get three paragraphs about the turtle. It seems to be what most comedians do when they write a book - invent whatever system they want which is basically just a vehicle for writing out jokes. But Paula also gets very personal very quickly, covering her arrest for child endangerment, her problems with alcohol, and the year that her kids were taken away from her. And yet, she made me giggle through all of that.

Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald
Hopefully you've seen the film adaptation of this book with Chevy Chase, because it's terrific. Tracking down this book, though, was a lot harder. It was written in the 70s, and doesn't seem to be widely available. The movie follows the book relatively closely, so if you've seen the movie there won't be too many surprises. It was a good read, though, if you pick it up, be warned that there is more drug use, prostitution and language than the movie has.