Freshman year of college: check.

Now I'm home to enjoy a few relaxing weeks with my family until I start work as a counselor at a Lutheran camp.After unpacking all my crap and realizing I have the potential to become an exceptional hoarder, I made a trip to the library. For fun. For the first time in a year.
Because what's summer without books? My plan is to have my nose in a book at all times, so as to make up for the many months of un-fun reading at college. I keep an obsessive list of all the books I've read, and it used to be that I could find the time to finish four or five a month. When I looked at what I had put under the year 2012, it read one lonely title, "Great House," by Allison Krauss. One book for the entire year so far.

This is truly a tragedy.

So, I started my atonement by picking up three books the other day: "Sacre Bleu," by Christopher Moore,

"Einstein's God," by the wonderful Krista Tippett,and "The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson." Since I don't have much time to totally immerse myself in Emerson's Trancendental philosophy, I'm going to narrow down "the essential writings" to the "absolute essential three essays," and save the rest for another summer.

I'm really enjoying the books I started, butI'm at the point where I get to the library and feel like I've read everything already, so new authors and story suggestions are welcome.

Along with the reading, I'm keeping up the piano stuff as well (because it's kind of why I'm in school). A Bach Partita, Mozart sonata, and a few Debussy preludes are on my rep list this summer and fall, which should be fun, and while I'm here I'm going to finish up some pieces I've been trying to write. Already my sister has commissioned me to write "a hymn to Isaac Newton and gravity," after being inspired by this video.



So we'll see how that goes.

Encyclopedia

My dad read these encyclopedias when he was a kid--he really likes history.
My older brother spent hours flipping through them as a five year old, looking at the pictures and absorbing the information. And they still sit there on our shelf, still being used.



Most of the time if I have a question I'll ask my mom, or Google it, or when I ask my mom she'll tell me to Google it. But a lot of the time I still like to crack open these dusty smelling books. Most of the pictures are black and white, but every once in awhile a page will just jump out in color



I like looking through the books because I usually stumble on a random something that I hadn't noticed before. There are silly pictures illustrating how a bill gets passed into law in the Canadian government, and also of the dangers of space travel.



And since it was published in the 1960s, there's a bit of information on countries that don't exist anymore and gadgets that have been proved obsolete.




Even encyclopedias are in danger of becoming obsolete. But as long as they're around, I'll keep reading.