Lorelle has posted a blog challenge to write about what we are reading right now. Lorelle’s post was actually posted early, a week or so back, due to a glitch, but I have delayed my post until now as that was the original intended date.

Reading is something that is quite important to me, but this year in particular.

I set myself a goal late last year to read something different; to read something other than the low cost best-sellers that I have stacked high around the house and so that is what I am doing.

I ended last year reading Bill Clinton’s Autobiography which inspired me to read a few more bigraphical works: Nelson Mandela, David Coulthard, Jackie Stewart, and, in a true departure from the norm Russell Brand, of whom I am now a fan.

Intermingled with those I read books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and, an author that I particularly liked, Dan Dennett. These authors, with a significant focus on evolution, have spurred me on to read up on C#. It is a few years since I have written anything in C# and my idea, to build an object oriented, simulated ecosystem, featuring evolving plant life, into which I could add various selection pressures and ‘observe’ the results, seemed best placed in a desktop application, and therefore using C#.

This is not going well, due to time more than anything else.

Another area I have wanted to explore is philosophy. I have always felt particularly lost when hearing discussions that refer, in however small a way, to the classics, the Greeks, and to philosophy, and so I wanted to find out more about these.

For the past few weeks I have been working my way through a History of Western philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, although in small chunks, and I am almost finished a very readable translation of Dante’s Inferno which has been on my shelves for a long time and seems far easier now than it did the first time I failed to finish it.

These may seem like weighty books and subjects to fill my free time with; they always intimidated me a little so I am glad to find that actually most are much easier than I had imagined; although, not actually easy. Having said that I have also bought a book I have been looking forward to reading for some time, a biography of Slash, a man I idolised when I still considered music a possible future.

Finally, I have also been reading up on PHP. Every six to nine months I consider going for a Zend Certification, and I am again considering it. If only there was a WordPress exam.