Take a look, it's in a book

It's almost time to pack for the Bahamas, and I'm concerned that I won't have enough room in my suitcase.

Not for my clothes. For my books.

We're staying at Old Bahama Bay, where there is apparently nothing to do except lie on the beach and drink daquiris -- just the way I want it. By then the only schoolwork I'll have to do is grade papers (I think that'll work out well for my students. Grading papers on the beach, everyone gets an A!), and I want to make sure I have enough reading material. What if I don't bring enough books, and I run out of things to read? Tragedy!

My mom says that when I was a kid and we went on family vacations, we'd have to bring along an extra suitcase just for all my books. (And that was back in the day when you could only take out 25 books at a time from the public library, too.) Alas, the books I read as a kid took up a lot less space in a suitcase; all the books I got yesterday at the library are dismayingly large and heavy, and I shall have to choose among them.

Fiction
Please, Mr. Einstein, Jean-Claude Carriere
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
Not the End of the World, Kate Atkinson
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ann Brashares

Non-Fiction
Hard Lessons: The Promise of an Inner-City Charter School, Jonathan Schorr
Finders and Keepers: Helping New Teachers Survive and Thrive in Our Schools, Susan Moore Johnson
Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression, Spencer Overton
Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley and America's Greatest Marathon, John Brant

Education, liberal politics and running -- my non-fiction choices say a lot about me, don't they? I'm not totally psyched up about any of these books except possibly Please, Mr. Einstein, which got a good review in the New York Times (we all know how seriously I take my New York Times).

And speaking of non-fiction, I went a little wild yesterday adding documentaries to my Netflix queue; I think the best thing about Netflix is that I can get all these movies I've never heard of because they'd never have them at Blockbuster. Right now I'm expecting Running on the Sun, a documentary about the Badwater ultramarathon, and after that My Flesh and Blood, about a California woman who adopts eleven children with special needs.