Citizen Reader

Okay, I get it. Times are hard. We're screwed financially. The country is heading toward bad things in the way of war debt and foreign debt. We've also bankrupted ourselves morally by waging war and encouraging torture. I know it. Sometimes I can read books on these subjects, and sometimes I cannot. This is shaping up to be a week when I've looked at the following titles and have decided that if I read them, I won't get anything done except curling up in a fetal ball and weeping, so I have decided not to read them for the time being:

(Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class, by Nan Mooney.

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse.

Standard Operating Procedure, by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris (about Abu Ghraib).

The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, by Joseph Stiglitz.

and Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries), by Jared Bernstein.

I want to read them at some point; my passion for Gourevitch in particular hovers on the maniacal (not quite on a level with my love for William Langewiesche but close) and I've been waiting for the Three Trillion Dollar War book forever. But just for today I can't do it.

So what did I do this morning? Read a little Agatha Christie. Ahh, escapism.