Avatar and Round-up

I'm in the middle of an almost unprecedented number of books, but the only one I actually finished today was a corporate by-product. My kids and I were big fans of the Avatar show, and we've been picking up some of the books at Scholastic Fairs for a few years now. I finally read one last night, because it bugs me to have books my kids have read that I haven't. I found The Lost Scrolls: Air lying about and zipped through it.

The Lost Scrolls seem to be collections of information -- there are details about the Airbender tribes and then stories from the series apparently narrated by each of the three main characters. Being a big fan, I recognized all three episodes, so none of the narrative had any surprises. I think the authors are listed as Tom Mason & Dan Danko, but they stuck very closely to the story from the show. It really reminded me more of fanfiction than anything else. But the short sections were an inducement to my less addicted reader to try it out, and I like fake nonfiction quite a bit. So an interesting sixty pages of so. C+

Since that was a less than overwhelming book, I'm also looking at the magazines I've skimmed this summer. I'm not a big magazine reader, although sometimes I pretend to myself that I am, and then I drown in the issues delivered to my door. And I'm incapable of throwing them out without at least leafing through them. A few years ago my cousin, who worked at the New Yorker at the time, gave me some invaluable advice -- don't read the articles you aren't interested in. Be ruthless; it it doesn't grab you in the first few paragraphs, move on. So now I have hopes of working my way down the stack of magazines I'm still hoarding, but at least that pile is getting shorter. I shall be recycling: 10 New Yorkers, 3 Natural Historys, 1 Redbook, 1 Parent & Child, 1 Journey, and 1 Economist (with Tech Quarterly). I haven't subscribed to the Economist for almost four years -- when you find yourself lugging around WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINES for this long it may be time for an intervention. But it was actually quite interesting -- I knew all the long-term results of the crises and issues reported upon. And I got some good book recommendations, and they are probably all out in paperback by now!