I’m still processing attending Eileen’s 45th reunion of her high school graduating class last night. I’m a bit exhausted this morning. I started my day randomly listening to the NPR show The People’s Pharmacy as I cleaned the kitchen in order to make my morning coffee.

Show 1002: How Bowel Bacteria Affect the Brain – The People’s Pharmacy

Note that the podcast of this show won’t be available until Monday. This broadcast caught my attention enough for me to finish listening to it as I was waking up and sipping coffee.

I do know that the science around gut bacteria is evolving, but the claims (both explicit and implicit) by Perlmutter in this show were mind boggling and a bit confusing.

After the show I googled him and found this little article.

The Problem With the Grain Brain Doctor — Science of Us

I read enough of this article (admittedly by an assistant professor of religion) to think that it might not be time to swallow Perlmutter’s ideas whole (so to speak).

For what it’s worth, I took an undergrad class in nutrition years ago and integrated several ideas from it into my life style such as the less processed something is the better and that body weight is directly related to caloric intake.

Whew, MY brain is on the fuzzy side this morning due to large extrovert type input from last night’s experience and a bit less sleep than usual.

That being the case I think I will use the rest of this blog to point out some books I ran across at the library yesterday afternoon.

My eye fell on this book on the new shelf. I think more and more about faulty logic. This is increased by my Facebooger use as I try to make sense of people’s posts and point of view.  Eileen instantly sat down and read this book after we got back from the library so I haven’t had much of a chance to look at it.

She and I talk quite a bit about the holes we see in the reasoning of people on Facebooger. I have given up going at this directly due to the fact that people parrot the language of coherence in a confusing uninformed way.

It reminds me of Trump calling our leaders stupid. Since Trump himself says spectacularly dumb things it’s clever to lead with the very words that might accurately describe his own behavior.

I stopped by the library primarily to pick up Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch. I’m almost done reading his Lies of Locke Lamora.

I purchased the ebook a while back while visiting my nephew Ben and his partner Tony. Tony reads fantasy and turned me on to this book. I was surprised to find out how long this book was when I checked out a real copy of it recently. Ebooks can be deceiving that way.

I was also happy to find out that Lynch does bring the plot to a close and not do a cliff hanger at the end of this book. I found this out reading the flyleaf of the next book. I will probably review the first book here after finishing it but will say for now that it is an uneven read, but did interest me enough to think about reading the second in the series. I think he’s a better writer than George R. R. Martin. Martin can make sentences but annoys me with his labyrinthian approach to plot piling story on story and introducing new characters.

Lynch’s prose is leaner and the story is cleaner so far.  But he does get a bit predictable. But more on that later.

I also noticed this book yesterday (I was waiting for Eileen to finishing chatting up old colleagues at the library). I recently read an article in the NYT which quoted from it and remembered the title. I read a few pages in it yesterday and it looks excellent. One of its insights is that as soon as the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, opponents of it began a campaign against it which can be traced to the recent weakening change in it the Supreme Court made. Scary stuff.

This was on the new poetry shelf. Baraka died in 2014, I checked it out primarily to read his later poetry but have followed his career all my life.

I think my oldest daughter Elizabeth has either met him or heard him lecture.

I have to admit I’m a helluva lot more interested in Shirley Jackson’s unpublished work (of which this is a volume) than Harper Lee’s.