Yay, Books!

Why, in car commercials, must we know that it's a "professional driver on a closed circuit?" It has a "don't try this at home" ring to it, which seems strange to me since nothing the driver does appears to be reckless or even unusual. Are they warning me not to drive on a country side road with beautiful scenery?

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Today, we took a cab over to the Boulevard Mall, because we happened to know that there was a Barnes and Noble in the vicinity. And boy, do I like American book stores. Not that we don't have book stores in Sweden, of course, but I just happen to read mostly books in English - and Swedish retailers naturally tend to specialize in books in... Swedish. The books available in English usually occupy only one shelf (if even that) and many of the books I want aren't translated. My common way of solving this is by ordering books from Amazon, but there's something quite a bit more exhilirating about walking around in a book store and picking out stuff for myself.

I went there looking for two books: "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo (see this post for reference) and Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." I ended up, while browsing, also picking up:

• Dennett's "Consciousness Explained"
• Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and
  
• "Pale Blue Dot"
• Terry Pratchett's "The Color of Magic" and
  
• "Light Fantastic" and
• "Equal Rites," also known as his first three Discworld novels. I've read a few of the books from his Discworld series (and quite a few of his other books) including, as it were, "The Color of Magic" but I wanted to start over and move through the whole series. The man is a genius.
• Simon R. Green's "Swords of Heaven" which is some kind of fantasy book, that Lori's friend Pat recommended. It's apparently a whole series of books and this was, if I understood the backside brief correctly, the first three in the series combined in one cover.

So 10 books total. I'm pretty pleased with myself.

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I have a few more days here in Vegas before returning home and Lori and I decided that she'd go to the Twin Cities and visit her parents for a few days before we return home. Because of the kind of tickets we have with KLM, she has to come back to Vegas before we get on the flight home, despite the first leg of our return ticket stopping in the Twin Cities. So she'll leave MSP airport on Wednesday afternoon, land in Vegas, and then go from Vegas back to the Twin Cities on Thursday. Makes perfect sense, thinks KLM. They flat out refused our suggestion that she just board there instead of here, despite how it would obviously be cost saving to them (not to mention us) but because of unfortunate circumstances there was no better way of solving it. Grrrr.

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Now if you'll excuse me, I have a big pile of books awaiting my attention. I'll start with "Cosmos" I think.