I’m back in Minnesota, and oh! what a grand state it is. I start my internship at Medtronic on Monday, an experience that I eagerly await. In the meantime, I’ve gathered together several books that I plan to read this summer:

• Henry David Thoreau’s Walden – It’s a classic, and I’ve been trying to read many of the classics. I bought a four-work compilation of Thoreau’s writing in a single leather-bound volume, so I might also read his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, and Civil Disobedience.
• Louis Gerstner’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? – My dad gave me this book for Christmas, I started reading it during the trip to Steamboat in February, and I finished it yesterday. It was an insightful look into the challenges of directing a large company (IBM in this case) and of the qualities required of a successful leader. My favorite part of the book was Gerstner’s postulate that “People don’t do what you expect, they do what you inspect.” How true, indeed. It’s not a long book — my reading was merely sporadic.
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion – I liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, so I hope that this manuscript will be of the same caliber.
• 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know – Okay, so this isn’t a ‘real’ book, but it’s a fun compilation of good words. I strive to expand my lexicon, so this book tickled my fancy. The words within are not extremely obscure, though I found a not insignificant number that I was previously oblivious to. Certain members of you, the readership, might find the inclusion of ‘inculcate’ particularly amusing.
• Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason – This text is Paine’s treatise on organized religion, using Reason as a guide. Should be interesting…

I was also going to read The Scarlet Letter, but I forgot the book in Terre Haute. At one time, I was also planning to finish Dante’s Divine Comedy, but I lost interest after reading The Inferno. Ug. Some classics are extremely enjoyable; others, not so much. The Inferno itself has a good story, and I’m glad I read it. However, I think that much was lost in the translation. I suspect readability degraded during the translation of the epic poem from Italian into verse English.

Switching gears to something completely unrelated to poetry, my current Bonneville (not to be confused with the now pancake-shaped Bonneville) just rolled over 161,000 miles and is still going strong. Gotta hand it to the engineers who designed her; they sure can build a reliable machine. Needless to say, the Bonnie is in MUCH better condition than my Thunderbird was when I got it at 171,000 miles.