so many books

I did something again today that I hadn't done in a while: spend a whole afternoon in a bookstore.

It's quite a humbling experience, wandering through all those aisles of books. You realize that there is so much you don't know, so much you COULD know, and then you get this urge to pull all the interesting books off of the shelves that catch you eye and voraciously skim through each one to absorb all the nuggets of wisdoms contained within.

It's an adventure trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. Is Suze Orman (cable finance talk show chick) really credible when she dispenses financial advice off the air? (My take: not really.) Who writes a better travel book on Rome--Lonely Planet or Fodors? (Kudos to Lonely Planet, where you can find all the cheap but good eats in almost every major world city) And do you really need to have Chicken Soup for Ocean Lovers, for Pet Owners, and even for French Chefs? (No. But someone is clearly milking every last drop of a cash cow here.)

Also, these [insert number here] traits of [insert adjective here] people books seem to be popular these days; first came "The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People" Now there's a whole bookshelf of these titles at the store. I guess when you publish one good book you just want to keep on milking the cow. There's now "7 habits of highly successful teens," "18 things that important executives do," "21 characteristics of team players," and even "15 pillars of corporate governance," and all the associated "workbooks" and audio instruction tapes. Why team players have only 21 characteristics and corporate governance has only 15 pillars is beyond me.

In fact, the whole Business & Management section is particularly facinating. Larry Ellison has several biographies about how he has personally conquered the world and why you should bow dow down to him (my god the cover photos of him look make him look like a crazed dictator). There's countless books on "Real Estate Loopholes" and how to implement "6 Sigma" in your company. There are the countless books on why [insert bankrupt dotcom company] failed. Not to mention all the self-help books that any sales person with too much free time can ever need to read to figure out how to close a deal ("the 8 techniques of deal closing of really stupid salespeople" anyone?).

In the end, however, I left the store only with Quicksilver. Neil Stephenson's past novels have always been highly entertaining, and I have no doubt that I'll be in for another great ride as I spend the next couple of weeks emgrossed in 900 pages of 17th-century fun.