Curling Up With a Good Book

Whoa. Where have I been? Well, I have been surrounded by babies recently, and dealing with some upheaval on the homefront, but now that I have emerged from the sea of cheerios and sippy cups, it's time to start reconnecting with the grown-up world. Since W. gets to take a five week vacation in Crawford, and all I get is to hang out in the air-conditioning in Northern Liberties with my gin and tonic, I thought I might take a brief break from politics (sort of). I recently had the very satisfying feeling of finishing a novel I really did NOT enjoy - all I wanted to do was tear out the last hundred pages, but I hung in there! So today, chilling out with my cat and my honey, I started what seems like is going to be a great novel: Scott Simon's "Pretty Birds." (Thanks to big sis for the loan.) I am hoping to learn a lot about the Serbian/Bosnian conflict, and get a serious glimpse into life in Sarajevo during the war. I've always been fascinated by this tragic chapter in recent European history, so this novel stands to be a good start in getting some insight into how Yugoslavia self-destructed.

Mr. Simon may be familiar to you from his great work as an NPR journalist, but so far, it seems that he's a pretty snazzy fiction writer, too.