night blindness and books

My cousin is attending the University of Baltimore for accounting as an international student, so I've been going around with her, most to coach her on her driving and help her out with some administrative stuff. Her driving was initially pretty god awful, but it's improved dramatically. Except for the fact that she has trouble seeing the lanes on MLK blvd at night and her classes end at 8:30pm. On the way back today she switched lanes without knowing it once or twice; thank goodness we didn't get into an accident. I think she has a vitamin A deficiency so I fed her some carrots and my parents gave her some vitamin supplements, but we're going to have her eyes checked anyways to see if her current eye glass prescription is at all accurate.

The good side of all this is that while I've been waiting for my cousin's classes to end, I've gotten a lot of reading done. Yesterday I finally finished Nabokov's Lolita, which I started a long while back. I think I actually read it because I wanted to read Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, but for some reason, in order to do so, I had to first read Lolita. I'm all in all really impressed by Nabokov's writing. I have some mixed opinions about the controversial nature of the story. The book's unique and flowing writing style kind of draws you along, so that the actual obsession between the narrator and the namesake didn't really bother me too much until about the middle of the book, when it takes on a more sociopathic bend. I think this is where I initally put the book down. I picked it up again because I wanted to finish it before I headed off to Cameroon and it would mean one less book to pack, but the end went by faster than I had imagined it would. The writing is amazing immersive and I can see how it was ranked one of the best english language novels. I would highly recommend it.

I had time today, while my cousin was getting some academic counseling, to head into downtown Baltimore and visit the Powerplant, one of the most visually impressive bookstores I've ever seen. The store itself is a Barnes and Nobles and isn't remarkably different than any other besides maybe a larger selection. But they did have the remnants of giant furnaces that made up the base of cyclopean smokestacks that you could walk though. Pretty nifty. Anyways, I picked up some more books for the trip: The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier, the White Man's Burden by William Easterly, and the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I also wanted to pick up Malcolm Gladwell's the Tipping Point, but they didn't have it in stock.

I made my way though to about a hundred in the poisonwood bible today. great so far. I'll probably finish it before next week, and I might post something about it then.