At work, we have one week left at our current office. Next Friday, we're being moved (kicking and screaming) to another office almost 50 miles away. Right now I leave home about 15 minutes (or less) before I have to be in my desk at work. Now I'll be leaving an hour earlier. (Before I moved houses, I used to walk to work....) And no one has given us a rational business reason for the move. So we're all rather dispirited about the whole thing.

This book from Sunday's LA Times Book Review looks intriguing: Sunday's Silence, by Gina B. Nahai. Here's a quote from the review by Marcos McPeek Villatoro:

The Kurds and the Appalachians meet just east of the Cumberland Plateau. It's 1975. Adam Watkins, a reporter, has returned from the wars of Beirut to his hometown of Knoxville. His father, Little Sam Watkins, moonshiner, gambler and snake-handling preacher, is dead, supposedly murdered by a woman who shoved a rattlesnake into his face. This final bite, after 446 bites that through the years have left him swollen and blackened with venom, does him in.

In Knoxville, Adam meets the woman: Blue was born "in an area divided among five countries, [where] live twenty-five million people who call themselves Kurds." She was taken from her family in Iraq by a Jewish-Arabic man called only the Professor, who taught linguistics at the University of Tennessee. Once settled in Knoxville, the Professor wants to study Watkins' church to record their speaking in tongues, hoping to find evidence of a genetic link that connects all humans to an original language. Little Sam doesn't trust the Professor, but the Professor uses his svelte new bride as bait: He brings Blue to Sunday meeting.

I'll put the book on my list of books to read someday.