The great book hunt

Mason and I went on a little bookstore-to-bookstore expedition yesterday afternoon, before picking up Bailey from school. Short version of a long story: My work hours were only guaranteed to be full-time up until the first of this year. I talked to my boss on the 3rd, he forgot about it but gave me another guaranteed extension in full-time hours for “another few months.” Since that hamstringed my plans to take one or two journalism courses at the local Junior College, I began my search yesterday for a decently priced, quality book on journalism and news writing for the web. When you write for an actual paper versus the web, there are different guidelines, rules of thumb, formatting, etc that you need to take into consideration to be a truly effective writer.

Basically, I’m trying to learn this stuff the ghetto way. Blind leading the blind here.

First we went to Barnes and Nobles and they had a total lack of writer’s resources other than dictionaries and thesauruses. We then drove across town to Borders and while I despise Borders for their drastically inflated prices on just about everything you look at, I did find they had a decent writers resource section. Which is terrific! If you want to be a poet, or know how to write and market your own screenplay or novel. They had two copies of a single 50 page long book by the Associated Press on news writing which basically consisted of page after page of examples of alternative ways to say something. This, I don’t need as I already have a copy of the 2005 Associated Press Style Guide which handles most of that anyways.

While looking for my desired section, I stumbled across the Science reading section. Remembering mine and Ian’s winded debate on evolution vs. “intelligent design”, two books caught my eye: Finding Darwin’s God and The Origin of Species. Odd books to come home with when you go searching for a book about news writing and journalism for the internet.

So far they’re good. The Origin of Species is interesting although Darwin was apparently a painfully wordy man. Some sentences were so long I had forgotten how they began when I had come to the end. I’ve read bits and pieces of The Origin before but never actually read it word-for-word which I intend to hopefully do very soon. I figure it’s inappropriate of me to form an opinion on something when I have never actually read the original (or as close as we can get to it) book that generated the turbulence to begin with.

The second book, Finding Darwin’s God stood out to me because it’s written by a biologist who believes evolution took place and is still taking place, but also acknowledges the existence of the God of the Christian bible. This makes me curious. Because it seems to me that you cannot believe in both, without one contradicting the other. With the little time I’ve had to read (maybe an hour all day yesterday) the author of Finding Darwin’s God claims to answer some interesting questions, and if he does, it could be a very good book. However, for example, he spent about 6 pages talking about all the scientists over time that helped us learn what we know of the sun. The point he was trying to drive home was that it is possible to learn about something when we can’t actually experience it, such as evolution of centuries past. He also spends some time talking about the evolution of the beer can. Beginning with the early days of needing a “Church key” to puncture two holes into the top - one for air, the other for drinking out of - all the way to the modern day “Wide mouth” opening. Why? I don’t know. I just hope he cuts out the erroneous crap and gets down to the subject matter he claims to discuss - can God and evolution coexist and is it possible for them to share a common ground?

Seems to me it’s not possible, but maybe this mans book will prove myself, and millions of others, wrong. Depending on the severity of the pain killers, I may post my thoughts as I crank through these books over the next few days while I try to not think about all the food i can’t eat while I rebound from having my wisdom teeth pulled out.