Some Good Reads, If You're On Your Deathbed

During my extended illness (which has transformed from the flu to a wicked cough, laryngitis, and finally -- as diagnosed yesterday-- some severe bronchitis) I plowed through a lot of books: Tim Cahill's ode to Yellowstone National Park (Lost in My Own Backyard . . . apparently, when we visit the park this summer, my family likely to be eaten by a bear . . . or at least bitten by a horsefly) and Duane Swierczynski's psychedelic Philadelphia time travel mystery Expiration Date (as usual, when you go back in time to solve a problem, you're probably going to create a bigger one) and David J. Hand's fairly fun book on statistics and probability, The Improbability Principle and I finally finished Alan S. Blinder's account of the financial crash, After the Music Stopped and followed up the mayhem with Michael Lewis's fast-paced non-fictional financial tech thriller Flash Boys, then I read the later chapters of Jennifer Senior's wise, well-researched, and nonjudgmental All Joy and No Fun :The Paradox of Modern Parenthood . . . I didn't need to read the early chapters because my wife and I have survived those years, but it sounds like the teen years can be quite a strain on marriage, and now I'm in the middle of Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers, a bleak and trippy '70's crime novel about a heroin deal gone bad . . . I'd like to thank these books for getting me through some sleepless nights and feverish days, and though I doubt I remember much of them, I'm still going to give them all a big thumbs up (and a big thumbs up to the Kindle, which is a great resource when you're too sick or hopped up on codeine syrup to drive to the library).