New Mexico, Non-Required Reading, and Other Adventures

The second half of May has presented me with some great opportunities to do some travelling and to catch up on some reading.

After I finished up my finals at the University of Oklahoma (putting to an end my least productive semester of my acedemic experience), I packed up and headed out west with some friends. Although I have relatives in New Mexico, this was my first trip to the area. We spent three days in Navajo Lake State Park camping, hiking, and fishing the legendary San Juan River. This old Navajo stone building was about a mile from the river on the wall of Simon Canyon.

Next, we stayed an afternoon and night at El Vado Lake. Many laughs, good food, good drink, and a good campfire.

After that, we spent a couple of days at Wild Rivers National Recreation Area near Taos, NM. From our campground it was about a mile hike down to the Rio Grande.

Aside from travel, I also have been catching up on some reading. I finished Mohsin Hamid's best-seller The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It is a well written novel that reminds me of the way Gatsby looks in on the lives of the rich, except it is looking at the lives of Americans and Pakistanis (and in a way the relationship between the two countries since 9/11) through the eyes of a person who is both yet neither.

I am almost through The Essential Rumi and plan on following that up with Nathan Brown's Karma Crisis, Carol Hamilton's Lexicography, and hopefully some more books that have been at the ready on my shelf.

Hopefully, I can shake this lazy phase I'm in long enough to do some more writing in the coming days. Until then...