What are you reading right now?

[beerbecue]

The Creation - E.O. Wilson
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Parasite Rex - Carl Zimmer

[mkmound]

The last few days I've been reading a book which I had known about since college days, but never gotten around to buying . . . The Humanities in Retrospect, by Bill Francis. Bill, who was a university-level art educator, takes 50-year slices from 1100 AD to 1950, and lists artists, scientists and inventors and inventions, historical and political events, musicians, etc. from eight Western European countries in which he had traveled -- England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and one other which escapes me right now. It gives a very quick reference of which major figures were contemporaries of each other, and probably influenced by the ideas of the others.

I was inspired by a tour guide on a recent trip to Italy which I was privileged to take. The guide gave a lot of political, historical, and cultural background and context to the objects we were seeing, and it was exciting to learn the bigger picture, rather than "this artist did this work in 15xx".