It’s Thursday.  It’s raining.

Once in a while I am blessed with a day where I am forced to just sit home and relax… today is one of those days.

Im off work today because I’ve pretty much already worked 40 hours for the week.  My girlfriend had to work this morning so plans to visit the gym have been pushed back, leaving me alone with iTunes and my fabulous Kindle Fire.

iTunes: I woke up this morning with Fast Car by Tracy Chapman rolling through my head, so, much thanks to iTunes, I’ve been listening to Tracy all morning, with a few throwbacks to my acoustic Dave Matthews days and some vintage Caedmon’s Call.  Along with a nice pot of coffee, it’s been a pretty laid back morning.  In other music news, The City Harmonic came to town a week or so ago with the Newsboys.  While I didn’t go to the show I heard that people really liked them and actually invited them back for an encore concert, without the Newsboys, next week.  I liked the one song of theirs that gets played on the radio so I looked them up and got the 5 song EP… I have to say, the one radio single is really the only good song they have, and honestly I think that’s because it sounds a lot like Wake Up by Arcade Fire…  sooo, check out The City Harmonic and download Manifesto, but don’t bother with the rest of the album.  I’m also really digging Toby Macs latest single City On Our Knees… Toby is a lot like Gwen Stefani in that he’s got the hook down to a science.  You should also check out Starfields The Kingdom and Son of God.

Kindle: I’ve been reading The Hunger Games… I’m not sure why… the movie did so well I kinda wanted to see it, but I know that books are almost always better their movies so I decided to chunk through it pretty quick before I see the movie.  Much love to Amazon for the $5 Kindle specials!  I saw an article online that said The Hunger Games is the future of literature… I was curious so I read on.  The writer said that “young adult fiction” is the future because people are too busy to concentrate on anything above a 6th grade reading level… Hunger Games is written for grade school level readers with short chapters (to make you feel like you’re making progress) and short, choppy, productive first person sentences.  There’s not a lot of subtleness or nuance to the writing, it’s straight forward and to the point… the author doesn’t tell you anything more than what you need to know, letting your imagination fill in the rest.  At first this really irritated me, in a time where Americans are becoming dumber and less-educated I feel like we need to challenge our young people to excel, to actually focus on something other than rap music, video games and Red Bull… but then I started reading the book, and I have to say that everything the article said was true… I’m really busy and I don’t always have more then a few minutes to sit down and read, and Hunger Games has been really easy to fit into that kind of schedule.. I don’t need to review what I read last time, I can just pick it up and read from exactly where I left off.  It doesn’t take any real concentration and it moves fast enough to keep you interested… the story moves so fast that you really do move through it quickly even when you only read a few pages at a time.  You can still tell it’s written for younger readers.. I would like a little more artistry in the words, but it is a good story… even if it is pretty predictable (but 6th graders wouldn’t know that).  It’s in this same sort of genre as the Twilight and Harry Potter books, all written for kids but darkened up a bit and turned into movies that adults will enjoy as well.  So, if you’ve got a little time, you should read The Hunger Games.  I read it on my lunch break at work.

I’m also really happy with the Google Reader app on my Kindle.. a lot of what I like to read is blog posts from the likes of Don Miller, Mark Driscoll via The Resurgence, and a few others (linked to in the sidebar>>>).  It automatically updates and downloads new posts and alerts me when theres new stuff to read so I can keep up without taking much time to surf the web looking for things.

Well, time to bring this to a close… I’ve got some laundry to rotate and some guitars to dust off.

Cheers.