Turning the pages of a year, book by book

I always look at what people have on their bookshelves, because what they read tells you much about them. 
I'm excluding the administrators' official bookshelves, properly arranged and there to impress visitors. I suppose I'd include professors' bookshelves, because there are favorite books there, books that have long histories of research or teaching, though many of them are free textbook copies or books that have been forgotten. I'm primarily referring to personal bookshelves.
So I guess you can tell something about me this year by the books I've read. I'd lost track of the books I'd read this past year, as fall seemed to buzz by, and a feared I'd not made my goal of a book a month. But when I started gathering them up for this post, I was surprised, with 11 more. 
In August I'd completed two books, the eighth and ninth of the year. Thus the year's total is more than 20.
So what does this list tell you? 

• Non-Fiction:

1. Fresh Air Fiend, Paul Theroux
2. The Blue Zones, Dan Buettner--about areas of the earth where there are an unusually large number of people in their 90s and 100s.

• Spiritual:

3. 4.5.6. --How God Changes Your Brain, The Meditations of John Muir, The 21 Skills of Spiritual Intelligence, Living the Questions--the Wisdom of Progressive Christianity,

• Poetry (I'm working on a story about poetry in Oklahoma, and find it difficult to write about poets without reading their books):

7. The Smell of Good Mud, Lauren Zuniga
8. Nocturnes and Sometimes Even I, Carl Sennhenn

• Self help(?):

9. I Don't Know, in praise of admitting ignorance

• Fiction:

10. The Lovecraft Anthology, graphic collection

• Writing:

11. Several Short Sentences About Writing, Veryln Klinkenborg--my favorite NY Times columnist ("The Rural Life"), and the book I'm adopting for my feature writing class this fall--the first book I've required in over a decade.

• Uncompleted (Probably never to be completed):

1. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss, about punctuation
2. Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, Constance Hale, about verbs.

• Underway

1. And at this time last year, I was wading through Across the Wild Missouri, history by Devoto about the fur trade--I'm still wading through it.
2. Misplaced, to my chagrin, maybe disappeared is better, first edition gift from son Vance, All the Little Things, fiction by Wallace Stegner. I began it, and laid it down and cannot find it.

Obviously, I need to read more fiction. To quote by former student and friend Sheri Guyse, @MyJRNY, speaking to my twitter class last week--"Read fiction, it'll make you a better story teller."

Thought jam

Headed toward a traffic jam on I-70

I drove through Kansas City Sunday a week ago, heading for home from a visit with children in Columbia, Missouri. Leaving before sunrise, I'd made it  120 miles to the city in less than two hours, enjoying the sun coming up in the rear view mirror, dramatic lighting of the cornfields and barns with little traffic, listening to some NPR, and mostly driving in silence, enjoying the thoughts and sights of fall.
That ended  abruptly before 9 a.m., with a huge traffic jam on I-70, near where I needed to take the exit on I-435 to loop around the south side of the city. I switched to the outside lane and buzzed past. Kansas City Chiefs flags waving from some of the cars clued me in.
There was at least a two mile backup on the edit to Arrowhead Stadium. I turned south, and saw three more miles-long traffic jams of cars coming from north, south and west, trying to exit to the stadium, hours before game time.
Freed from that nightmare, I was soon in Kansas, heading southwest.
For the past two months, I'd been sailing along at slightly over the speed limit in blogging, posting almost every day, racking up record numbers of hits from visitors around the world.
But then I hit a traffic--a thought--jam. So much happening, and not sitting down and writing. So there have only been five posts this month. Blogging well requires a lot of time--just consider how long it's taken me just to put up the links for this post, and a couple of photographs. I really admire blogging friends Alan Bates' Yogi's Den, and Kurt Hochenauer for their consistency. As this blog evolves, it'll probably go to perhaps three times a week, instead of my unrealistic pressure to post daily. That will relieve some of the thought jam, I hope.
Here's what's backed up in my head, moving slowly, waiting to exit, from the past month. So many stories to tell. Click on the links or the photo for more information.

• "The key is in the ignition," for totalitarian government in the USA, about the NSA spying on its own citizens, from our UCO Media Ethics conference.
• How God changes your brain, about a new book I've learned about, yesterday and ordered today.
• Barn again--barns and corn and more from a road trip to Missouri.
• Turning the pages of several books that I have read this year.
• "Doctors for America" poetry reading at The Paramount in OKC with poet Lauren Zuniga, for the Affordable Health Care Act.
• "Carmina Burana," opera and program from the OKC Canterbury Choral Society. Just wow.
• Sample more Oklahoma City area coffee houses--this is long overdue and a series to be continued.
• "Herman" is back, hanging right outside our kitchen window. Must be fall.
• Blogging--thoughts from colleague Kurt Hochenauer speaking to my class about blogging..  
• Links to my students' blogs.
• A new favorite poet Carl  Sennhenn, former Oklahoma Poet Laureate and Oklahoma Book Award winner, plus readings in The Paramount Coffee House, OKC Film Row.
• Another article coming in the next issue of Oklahoma Today, about the Oklahoma Honor Flights to Washington D.C. for WWII veterans, a great success story.
• And, I've added readers in two more countries, bringing the total to 123 the number of countries with readers of this blog.