Craig's Blog of Destiny

Ok, so here’s what I’ve been reading:

 I just finished Neil Peart’s book “Traveling Music: The Soundtrack to My Life and Times.”  Frankly, I was a little worried about liking it because I had read “Ghost Rider:  Travels on the Healing Road” and wasn’t that excited about it.  It seemed to me a little to much like a simple travelogue.  However, I believe this one, “Traveling Music,” was better written and much more enjoyable to read.  You probably need to be a Rush fan to find it terribly interesting, but of course, I am and I did.  One of my favorite passages is a description of Alex creating a lead solo.  He describes Alex as playing “with total abandon, total surrender, his body nodding and twisting like a puppet to his own fingers, rapt in the physical expression of his soul.”  In addition to the insights into the creation of some of that music, it was very nice to have a background on Neil’s life, the music that influenced him and some of the glimpses into some of the things that he’s experienced.

I’m right now in the middle of “102 minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers.”  I’m disappointed in it, as I was expecting a little more of a story quality to the narrative, but it reads more like a text book.  And the tone is very critical: critical of the procedures of the NYPD and the NYFD, critical of the New York Port Authority (which owned the property), critical of the designers, architects and builders of the World Trade Center; critical of politicians who enforced (or failed to enforce) the building codes, even those who wrote the codes.  In fact, about the only folks the book hasn’t been critical about are the victims and the terriorists that flew the planes.   I don’t think I’ll actually make it all the way to the end of this one, though I’ll get close on the plane rides I have coming up.