Powell’s Books is too close to my apartment.

The weather was a little better today, so I walked down to Powell’s Books to pick up three books. If you don’t know about Powell’s Books, it is an independent chain of bookstores with their largest store taking up an entire city block in downtown Portland, and rises several floors. I’ll look for a short video tour from YouTube and post it at the end.

American Nations

This is the fifth or sixth time I bought a copy of American Nations a History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard. I keep giving it away to someone who says they haven’t read it.

Woodard makes the case for eleven regional parts of the country which he calls nations. America is more complex than North and South or Liberal and Conservative. According to Woodard, the separate nations formed as different peoples bringing different values and ideas settled in different parts of the continent. It wasn’t until the American Revolution that these nations came together to form a government. We’ve been at odds ever since.

I plan to look at this in more detail in a later post.

Union

Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood is another book by Colin Woodard exploring the same subject. I don’t know anything about it, but I bought it because I liked American Nations so much. I previously tried reading The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down, by Woodard, but I was bored by it and put it down. I hope Union, will be as interesting as American Nations.

Creating the Quran

Several years ago, a local mosque was passing out free Qurans at the Saturday Market. Religious studies is a major interest of mine, and I knew very little about Islam, so I was happy to take it. After reading it, I realized I was unaware of the cultural background from which Islam and the Quran originated. I’m currently reading The Islam Book, by DK books to get an overview of Islam. The section of the book about the Quran moving from oral to written tradition interested me, so I wanted to learn some more about that history, and I hope Creating the Quran: A Historical-Critical Study will be a good source.

A Tour of Powell’s Books

A randomly selected video.