Silence

When I get bored, I'm likely to go to a bookstore. Tonight, having left work at 5pm (which seems obscenely early for me, as I'm used to being on campus for much longer than 9 hours at a go), I ended up at Barnes and Noble, cruising around not really interested in any of sections I usually go to for reading material.

I ended up in the nature section, and by sheer chance stumbled on Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann's book One Square Inch of Silence. I'm less than two chapters in, at the moment and thoroughly enjoying it. Essentially, it's the story of an acoustic ecologist trying to preserve one square inch of area in the continental US that has no human sound intrusions. He traveled from Washington state to Washington DC making recordings along the way and meeting with politicians at the end. If you have the time, go read this book. Please. The more people that know about the value of silence in a noisy world, the better.