Are you a reader? A book reader? There's always a list of books to be read when time allows, or when this book is closed, or when the kids eventually go off to college.
When I made the announcement to Jason that I was going to start flying again, I was between books. It seemed like a good time to consider ye old private pilot texts and have a crack at them. The problem was that I was in the mood for fiction, and, well, flying is anything but. Even more of a problem was that I have been doing a lot of thinking about rebellion lately, with all the junk in Egypt and Syria, with stories of parents refusing immunizations, with listening to NIN's Year Zero while cutting the grass, and what I really wanted was a gritty and visceral work of fiction about rebellion. That's not the kind of stuff you'll find when reviewing requirements for FAA exams; they kinda frown on rebellion in that arena. (It wouldn't be rebellion if they smiled on it, though, now would it?)
So Jas handed me his copy of Stick and Rudder, the 1944 Wolfgang Langewiesche explanation of flying. I think I made it part way through the first page before I sighed and put it down. I just wasn't going to be able to get into it with my brain in fight-the-power mode.
Long story short, I'm a third of the way through Atlas Shrugged, which I've been wanting to read for a long time and though it is bringing the gritty (yet?), it has the potential to bring the antiestablishmentarianism. (Score 50 for using all my letters!) This is a long dang book. I'm satisfying the fiction craving by night and whipping myself into study mode during the three hours of "free" time while the kids are both in school three mornings each week. You'll notice my meandering thoughts on air density were on a Wednesday morning, and most posts are likely to come during those timeslots.
Anywho, here I sit, typing this post with Stick and Rudder by my side. I'm going to forego Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden tonight to see whether Mr. Langewiesche can help me uncock my eyebrows with regards to certain altitude-related concerns.
**Update: five minutes later and I'm on page 7 where he says the best thing you can do to understand how a wing flies is to forget Bernoulli. Ha! He doesn't know me at all! But, on the other hand, I do agree with his metaphor that for practical matters, you don't have to understand how rubber molecules move and change in a tennis ball in order to observe and predict its bounce....
