I'm reading a variety of books right now, for a variety of reasons. I received Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer for Christmas and for writers it is very seductive. Dyer plans to write a book about DH Lawrence but for one reason or another can't seem to do it and so instead writes a book about writing a book about Lawrence. You would think this would be tedious but it's not as Dyer clearly is fascinated by his subject and so there is plenty about Lawrence in here. Plus there is Rome and England and Rilke and figuring out where to live. I'm liking it.

The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan is for research on the next book. This is a much cheekier book about Thoreau than most but not flip. Sullivan is intrigued and he spends a lot of time talking about the false impressions others run with about the writer. This is particularly interesting to me as those false impressions are part and parcel of the whole solitary wilderness myth I'm writing about.

For my March column I am reading two books at the moment: People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East by Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk and Coal Country: Rising Up Against Mountaintop Removal Mining, an accompaniment to the PBS film. The theme that month is truth and I don't think I could have chosen two better books to include (among several others). Luyendikjk was stationed in Cairo and then Lebanon for a Dutch newspaper starting in the late 90s and he is brutally honest about what life is really like living under a dictatorship and how incredibly off base Westerners in general, and the media in particular, are when it comes to understanding the truth about those lives. He traveled to Syria, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank & Gaza, Iraq and more to cover stories and for readers seeing how it really was - especially in Iraq - compared to how we have been led to believe it was is staggering. Here's just a bit that I think is especially relevant in light of the brutal crackdown going on in Iran at the moment:

The same went for the images - for example, the angry men burning a flag and shouting "America, Satan!" Certainly in the aftermath of 9/11, these were frightening shots for Westerners, and even more so if they weren't put into context: Guys, you probably think that a demonstration is something citizens use freely to express whatever they are for or against, but in a dictatorship such "outbursts of anger" are often staged or are at least heavily managed by the regime. Many of the demonstrators work for the secret services or, at the least, closely watched by them.

The whole book is forthright and gutsy and I can't get enough of it. Politically interested high school kids are going to love it.

As for Coal Country, this is not my first look at mountaintop removal mining but it is an unusual approach. The editors sampled a lot of things already written by folks from the region on the subject and interviewed people who live there. It's much more personal then a screed from distant environmentalists who are always very passionate but can never understand why jobs could be so important in the Appalachians. This book nails it though and you can see how hard it must be when the industry is killing the countryside you love and slowly killing your family but you love the place so much that you don't want to leave and you need that damn industry in order to stay. It's easy for us to judge from out here but not so easy for them. The Appalachians need new industry, bad.

There's also a brand new study that just came out blasting the process. Hopefully the EPA will take note.

Finally I just finished Richard Sala's gn Cat Burglar Black. This is candy reading for the middle grade set - a Nancy Drew meets Lemony Snickett mystery that is quite funny and an easy one to run right through. I'm doing a mystery column for April and will include mention of it there but I was disappointed by the big miss here on diversity. There are four teenage girls in the story: one blonde, one brunette, one red head and the protagonist whose hair has gone white (it's a "family thing"). Yeah - four teenagers in a story where ethnicity has 100% nothing to do with the plot and yet we're looking at four white girls. Sala missed a chance in a major way and so did the editors at First Second who could have suggested he open the book up to girls who might find the hijinks that much more enjoyable if only one of these girls was drawn to portray them. If only.

A big diversity fail on this one.

[Post pic: Kayford Mountain in West Virginia is the site of a coal-mining operation that blasted off the mountaintop. (Jeff Gentner/associated Press) ]