activities of daily living

When I saw a window filled with copies of the new Jared Diamond book, Collapse [$], at the downtown Barnes and Noble, I suspected that it was something to get excited about. Today on the way to class, I read Malcolm Gladwell's review, and the book sounds really good:

The lesson of "Collapse" is that societies, as often as not, aren't murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.
[New Yorker, 03 January 2005, pp 70-73]

If I were the type to make new year's resolutions, one might be to try to get back into the habit of reading more.¹ Books like this would certainly provide incentive, since it seemed like so many of the important nonfiction of 2004 was about how goddamn crappy and corrupt the government is. To some extent, maybe Collapse might be like that, but in a way that I'm willing to face.

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(1) I'm already trying! I'm about halfway through Cloud Atlas.