WHAT have you finished reading recently? Conversations with Carl Sagan, a collection of interview transcripts; and I’m within 30 pages of finishing Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It ends a bit like War and Peace, with an essay that’s connected to the foregoing book but is distinct.

WHAT are you reading now? Nosing into Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, a history of Lisbon during World War 2. I’d also started looking at Lonely Vigil, a history of coastwatchers in the Solomons. Goodbye Darkness has kicked the year off with a WW2 mood, I suppose!

WHAT are you reading next? Very possibly Neil Shubin’s new release, Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and our Future.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “A Story about a Memorable Friend”. Move-in day for my college dorms was a full weekend and a day before classes started, and I arrived at Napier Hall as soon as possible — eager to experience both the college town I would grow to love, and the wonders of high-speed internet. In my first weekend there, I stumbled into the same guy several times — literally, as we bumped into each other in the bathroom, getting breakfast at the “caf”, etc. We bought brought books to the dining hall and wound up becoming friends, despite very different political leanings: he was a Bill O’Reilly conservative, and I was an earnest and zealous progressive. We both loved history, though, and enjoyed arguing with one another other and a mutual friend, a Buddhist libertarian who liked cigars. (We’d stay talking in the dining hall until the staff were putting chairs up and giving us the stinkeye — boy, do I miss that.) Since we had the same major, we were in a lot of classes together. Although I’ve mellowed over the years, back then I still tended to be very formal and serious, and he had the kind of personality that would bring my own fun side out — so we’d do stuff like go on night walks through the town and parks, investigating stores that were still open, etc. Possibly my favorite memory stemmed from a running joke: we’d made up some organization called “The Elders of Napier”, some secret society that met in the attic and did secret-society things. I created a fancy letterhead, got a sheet of stationary, and printed an invitation to a meeting of the Elders of Napier and slid it under his door. My friend, having forgotten about the joke, took it to the RA (the student-supervisor who made sure no one was smoking pot or running a brothel out of their dorm rooms). I walked out one day to refill my water bottle and was shocked and hilarified to see my friend and two RAs holding the invitation in the hall and trying to figure out who these Elders were and how they had attic access.

We’d watch movies together, and I still remember the moment in Das Leben der Andern when we both yelled at the TV in shock that subjects of East Germany had their typewriters registered. Eventually we had a falling out when a political argument went too far, probably connected to the 2008 election — one I abstained from because Obama bitterly disappointed me as senator when he voted to renew the Patriot Act. A few years later, though, we reconnected on facebook and discovered to our mutual amusement that both our politics had changed and become more mutually libertarian and anti-state. Happily, though, we still disagree on enough that we can enjoy energetic discussions, only now we can’t bang on the table or gesture wildly for emphasis.