Swimming and reading

Lake Myllyjärvi, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

When it is very hot, some things get more attractive. Swimming, for example. We have gone for a swim most days during the last couple of weeks, to a nearby lake where the water is still quite cool.

Another thing is reading. I have read thousands of pages, mostly Finnish books, both fiction and nonfiction. I have written some "book review" postings at Valopolku (in Finnish). These are not really book reviews, just personal feelings about the book. Writing - even a little - about the impressions helps to understand what you have just read.

Of Finnish writers, I have read Kari Enqvist, Antti Tuuri, Väinö Linna and Kjell Westö, among others.

Of non-Finnish writers, I have read Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, and José Saramago's Blindness. Of these I'm still wondering what to think about Elizabeth Costello. The other two novels are of the greatest literary quality.

Of non-fiction I can recommend Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, Robert Park's Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, and Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. All these are first-rate science books for the general audience.