Erroll Le Vant Observations

When my girls were at home we all had library cards to the local public library. It was one of the favorite places for our family to go. The girls loved to read and always joined in the summer reading club that was offered every year.
For some sad reason, when the girls grew up and moved away from home, neither my wife nor I went to the library often. When we moved to a new town neither of us obtained a library card.

But now we are raising two of our grandsons because of health issues our youngest daughter is battling. The boys love for us to read to them. We all have signed up for a library card and have a regular schedule for a trip to check out new books every other Friday! It is once again a big part of our life to go to the library!

A good friend of mine has decided to put together a Book Club gathering of bloggers each month. She will post a book for any one who is interested in participating to read by the 25th of the month. Then each participant will post his or her report on the book on their own blog, with a link to the book club site. My friend will include links back to the various posts so that the participants can peruse the other posted reports. The book to be read for the month of April is To Kill A Mockingbird. I have not read it since high school, so I will pick up a copy at the library and give it a reread. The whole idea sounds like fun to me, and of course, the more the merrier!

I like Michael Crichton's writing, he always tells a good story and usually has considerable intellectual substance with which the reader is stimulated to thought.

I had no idea what to expect when I ordered the audio book version of Crichton’s latest work, Next. It was published last November and I had not read any reviews. But it happens to touch on a topic that I'm generally fascinated by, and that is biology. In this case specifically is about genetics and society.

Crichton addresses the world of genetics, and research, and business, and law in such a way as to really shed light on a dilemma that needs to be dealt with openly. In an interview at the end of the audio book, Crichton said that his purpose was to hopefully help open a dialogue about all of these subjects.

I was not aware of some things that are happening these days that give pause for concern. I did not know teenage girls are selling eggs extracted from their bodies in order to buy cars or to have breast implants. I was not aware that most of the major universities have made commercial ventures out of their genetics research. And that they have been allowed to patent genes from the human genome.

The book is worth your time if you're interested in such subjects. Our maybe you just don't want to know what is NEXT!