Weekly Geeks 4

This week’s theme: Choose a political or social issue that matters to you. Find several books addressing that issue; they don’t have to books you’ve read, just books you might like to read. Using images (of the book covers or whatever you feel illustrates your topic) present these books in your blog.

Okay, this one is a hard one for me. I’m a worrier. I worry about everything. I worry about biofuels, and running out of oil, and the price of rice, and the price of petrol, and climate change, and child abuse and animal abuse, and money and my job and … but that’s straying from the point of this week’s theme.

I looked at the list of social issues, and there’s certainly plenty on there to be worried about. Mostly I worry about what kind of world Patrick will be growing up in, and how we can best guide him in that world. I want him to be socially aware, and responsible and not to turn into a boy racer. For some reason, that’s my biggest fear; we have so many young men here who lose their lives, or badly injure themselves on the road.

Which ties back into oil supplies, and biofuels. I get that biofuels are important. But aren’t we cutting off our noses by destroying tracts of rainforest to grow them? And by growing them instead of food crops? What’s the point of being able to get wherever we want to go – if we can’t breathe, or we start running out of staples, like rice?

Okay. I’m supposed to find books to illustrate my point – if I have one!
I got a bit rambly there; let's start with a couple of parenting books:
There's quite a few on raising boys; this one from my part of the world has good reviews here. It's by Celia Lashlie:












There's the whole worrying thing, and I'm sure there are many, many, many books out there about that. I like this title, from Amazon:














This looked interesting, on the biofuels issue:












And I read this book many years ago, but I think it still has a lot of relevance today; by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwadine. I remember it as being funny, and wistful. I must see if our library still has it ...