Weight

Sundays for me are always filled with books. Because I don’t get the chance to read too much during the week, I stuff in as much as I can on the weekend. Today, for example, I read three volumes. Grant it, the last of them had to be a graphica, as my brain had just had enough. That has more to do with the type, rather than quantity of book, though.

I love social commentary titles because they force readers to think critically and keep informed about the world. The drawback is that they can be distressing, particularly when they discuss issues nearly impossible to remedy in any significant way. I know people who won’t read them because they feel too depressed afterwards, and others who read nothing but. I usually take them in doses, but today I didn’t. I’d not recommend two in a row.

Susan Linn’s Consuming Kids: Protecting Children from the Onslaught of Marketing and Advertising is one of many books out there on the subject of marketing to children. The author is a psychologist/ventriloquist, and as such she is more interested in imagination and play than economics. That said, what she discusses is not really new. I’ve read it so many times before, and yet I can’t seem to neglect any title I come across to do with this topic. I don’t have children, but I can’t help but feel grateful that Quebec has laws against advertising to kids under 13 years old (it’s the only place in North America that does). It’s a wonder youth could ever think for themselves anymore. The marketing machine is just so expansive and well-funded. Ugh.

That, of course, is nothing at all in the face of the thousands upon thousands of orphans in Africa left on their own each year because their parents have died from AIDS. Stephen Lewis’s Race Against Time, the Massey lecture for 2005, is bleak but excellent. Lewis works for the UN and has involved himself in Africa for over four decades. Where in the 1960s there was hope that the lives of those he met would get better with decolonization, today there is just so much death. He discusses the Millennium Development Goals set at the turn of 2000, and how they will not be met at this rate. It’s not that they can’t be; it’s that richer countries like Canada (and more egregiously the United States and Japan) do a fraction of what they could and should do.

With all the weight of the books today, I was mentally exhausted. The evening was topped off with The Dark Horse Book of the Dead, a collection of short stories in comic form about zombies. Don’t ask me how the walking dead are relaxing… Some of the stories were better than others, but aesthetically, the book is pleasing (in a dark and creepy way).

This coming week is flush with activity, and I have no idea what I’ll be in the mood to read. Certainly, a couple of audiobooks I’ve been listening to will be finished. It’s a long weekend with the holidays coming up, so maybe a thicker book is in order. I’ll let you know.