*The Problem With Reading

My job lately is not exactly action-packed. People apparently have other things going on right now. Like dealing with flooding...golfing...whatever.

So I took an extracurricular book to work for funsies. It's about Captain Scott, who led what he hoped would be the first expedition to reach the South Pole. Someone beat him to it, and Scott died on the way back. The biography is short, elementary, and not exactly in-depth; so it left me with a lot of questions.

Like: why did they have to bring the Russian guy along when they used sled dogs? I understand the dogs only knew Russian commands, but while everyone was sitting on a boat for months, couldn't they have maybe learned those Russian commands?

Like: why does the author refer to a trip to collect penguin eggs as "murderous"? Did they slaughter penguins? Or is the murder constrained to the death of the chicks within the eggs?

Anywho, I will be able to answer at least that last question, because it just so happens that I already have the book written by one of the egg-stealers in my "to-read" stack.

This brings me to the problem with reading: there is always more of it to do. The more you do it, the more you have to do it.

The more you know, the less you know. You know?

(P.S. I don't really recommend the first book except maybe as a brief introduction. And there better not be gratuitous pengie-murder going on in the second. For food, I can live with. But I've long been a big fan of the pengie. Digression: I saw this documentary on little blues once, and became extremely upset when they said they had to cross a highway to get to their breeding grounds...and showed tiny little blue penguins watching semi trucks zipping past. Not cool.)

Posted by Jennifer at June 29, 2008 02:56 AM | TrackBack

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