So we are making yet another attempt at eating right around here - not that we are total pigs when we go off the wagon but we do tend to forget to eat meals at certain times and are known to indulge in chocolate ice cream to excess if we aren't careful. (We are only human after all.) I have been thinking about balanced eating and that has led to a recent observation about balanced reading. I am finding that is critical to carefully choose my reading material or much chaos ensues - here's what I mean.

I am always reading several books at once; it's what I've done all my life and it works for me. There is usually a book for Booklist - and this could be anything, nonfiction, fiction, on any subject. (Recent reads are The Ice Museum, Afterlands and One Tribe.) I am also always reading something off the To Be Read Pile. This is my ongoing program to finish the pile that developed when all of my books were in storage for two years and I bought way too many books because I was books starved and I also bought a ton of books using up my bookstore credit before we left AK - and promptly stored them all. Anyway, there are also books from birthday and christmas last year. These are mostly all fun books and certainly books I want to read but not books I am going to review. Sometimes they get to be big books (TE Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom very nearly killed me) but I want to read them. Current book of this pile is Last Child in the Woods.

Then there are the review books. Because I have the monthly YA column where I review 4-6 books I'm pretty much always reading a YA book (there is also the YA books for Eclectica to consider as well). These don't take me very long usually and are pretty much always fun. I just got King Dork in the mail today and as I'm done with the last YA book (Julia's Kitchen), I will be starting that one tonight. There are also the other review books, the adult books, for either Bookslut or Voices of New Orleans (and sometimes Eclectica - I have an essay on five Arctic exploration books for the Spring issue). I'm reading the Neighborhood Story Project books for Voices, sort of fitting them around everything else, and the big nonfiction book I'm reading right now is Kabul in Winter.

And that is where the whole balance thing is getting critical.

Kabul in Winter is one of those books that is so infuriating, so frustrating, so throw against the room and rail about the government inducing, that I can honestly only take so much of it before I feel like screaming. This book is amazingly good, but such a hearbreaker. It has actually persuaded me to write letters to my senators and congressmen - something I have never done. I'm going to point blank reference the book by page number and demand to know if the Afghan children are still be educated with textbooks we paid for (and printed) back when the Soviets were occupying the country and thus include a lot of text about becoming martyrs for the cause of freedom. (Believe it.) The history is not correct, it's Arab history, it's Pakistani history, it is not the history of Afghanistan and it is driving me nuts to know that we are making the same damn mistakes all over again.

And yes, I'm writing Oprah too.

The problem is that I get so frustrated with a book like Kabul that I really really need another book that will help me get my mind off of it. Last Child in the Woods is just pissing me off in a whole other way - reading about all the money we pour into math and reading and the 10 minutes a day our kids get for phys ed (while they are the most overweight generation in American history) is enough to make me scream again.

And don't even get me started on the NSP book - Between Piety and Desire. Life in the 9th ward is not easy for such a complicated set of reasons. And I just hang my head when I read a teenage boy saying he is trapped by circumstance and the police in a life he doesn't want - trapped in a net with no way out.

Thank God for King Dork!

It might seem crazy to put any kind of work into a reading balance, but it's moments like this, when I have two books making me mad at the world (two great books by the way), that I realize I really need to keep scales equal. I also got Wild Lives today - a book about the history of the Bronx Zoo. It has a great picture of a tiger cub on the cover, and I love it already.