Stuck in town this summer?
For the most part, I’m stuck in town all summer. This is more or less self-inflicted, so I can’t complain too much. However, I still occasionally get the childish why-can’t-I-go feeling when I see cars with camping gear heading over the bridge out of town.
One of my consolations this summer has been the fact that I’ve had some great fortune in the reading department. For a couple of years I kind of got out of the habit of reading regularly. Over the past few months, however, I’ve been able to get back into it, with the help from some great books.
So I’m enjoying the cool summer evening breezes, in town, with a book in hand. I might not be going anywhere, but my brain is traveling far and wide. This is especially true with the book I’m reading now. It’s was a bestseller when it was published in Europe, and lucky for us, it was translated into English. It’s called Measuring the World, and it’s by a young Austrian writer named Daniel Kehlmann.
Here’s a blurb from Publisher’s Weekly:
“Loosely based on the lives of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt and a contemporary, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kehlmann’s novel, a German bestseller widely heralded as an exemplar of “new” German fiction, injects musty history with shots of whimsy and irony. Humboldt voyages to South America to map the Orinoco River, climb the Chimborazo peak in Ecuador and measure “every river, every mountain and every lake in his path.” Gauss is the hedgehog to Humboldt’s fox, leaping out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a formula and rarely leaving his hometown of Göttingen. The two meet at a scientific congress in 1828, when Germany is in turmoil after the fall of Napoleon.”
It’s a fascinating and engrossing read, so check it out! There’s no one on hold for it after me, and I’m almost done. 
Posted by Lisa, a second floor librarian
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