Three Books: Thanks for the books, KW; and thanks for the memories Lee and John

As usual, I am living my life around the books I'm reading. I almost always read more than one book at once and they are much of the time being read while I'm re-reading something or another that I'm teaching. But for now, since we're on Winter Break (what we used to call Christmas Vacation), I can read just exactly what I want to and don't have to drift back to this or that title in The Writer's Presence or spend more time thinking about Hamlet's precise age.
So right now I'm working with three titles: The Help, Generosity: An Enhancement, and The Humbling. The first was a piece of escape reading about African American women powering themselves up in the early 60's. This easy read took me back to my own young days when I didn't much care to discuss Civil Rights with my dad but felt a certain energetic and smug rightness about what I thought and felt. I distinctly remember sitting next to him on the couch, both of us rigidly erect as we watched and listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. The tension between was sparking and zinging like power lines in an extreme wind storm.
There's lots to be said about Generosity-surreal description and endless lists that remind me of Umberto Eco, characters who seem to be existing in stop-time animation, genetics, CNF, reading student journals, and the whole power of creativity. But I don't know enough about Richard Powers to present even a semi-qualified discussion. What I feel compelled to suggest is that the way he presents the writer/narrator is fascinating. Just about the time I had totally forgotten about the first person perspective, Powers reminds us readers of his relationship not only to the narrative, but to the characters themselves. He is especially involved with the character of Thassa. The whole book moves on both a realistic and a science fiction plane at the same time. This book is probably more important than I can even guess.
Then there's Philip Roth's The Humbling. I can't resist Roth. Again, I am taken back to my youth. Portnoy's Complaint was a book I didn't dare let my family even see. But I reveled in it and felt that immediate kinship with it maybe because it became almost a character itself in teacher-student relationships in our English department office at the end of the 60's. It was simply a title that meant enlightened and intellectual rebellion if I would have dared to list it on my then favorite book list.Now I take Roth very seriously. He is a true and real writer and I am really wanting the time to absorb this book.
Today then, I wrapped countless gifts, baked those damned snowball cookies that have so many names and have to be rolled not once but twice in powdered sugar and create a sweetish, white smog in the kitchen and planned an art project all upstaged in my mind by these three books. As a reader, that's how I live my life.