I picked up some books at a book sale yesterday -- mostly animal reference material including 9 out of 13 volumes of an Animal Encyclopedia. I can find the rest on the Internet (already checked). I started reading the first one and couldn't put it down. I realized that I love to learn things. Animal behavior is something relatively new to me, so I just began devouring the material. The books are about 500 pages each. My arm hurts from carrying it around. I even took it to bed with me last night and read for about another hour.
For years I've done this with history. And while I can't claim to really know that much about history, I have read enough that the average books on certain historical subjects just don't give me the 'learning something' feel any more. I picked up the first of these animal books and the rush of 'I didn't know that' was great.
I think I'm going to treat these like I did The Story of Civilization by the Durrants and the Cambridge Ancient HIstory books -- set X number of pages per day, take a quote from each day's work, and keep a log of them. Maybe I should even log the quotes here.
The Story of Civlization and the Cambridge books gave me quotes that led to story ideas. I don't know that I'll have the same thing here, but I will definitely have some nice worldbuilding ideas, especially for science fiction stories. Amazing how so much of the real world sounds alien when you read about it.
In other news, spring has finally arrived. We're almost up to 80f today! It's lovely out. A shame Russ has to work tonight. Or maybe not. I have work to do, too.
I'm going to try to get him to take me back to the sale, though. I realized something I want to check out. It might be fun.
In fact, I think I'll go talk to him about it right now...
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