Books have taken over our house. They're underfoot in the living room, piled up on the dining room table, and cluttering the kitchen. Not that we're all that erudite, mind you. Too many of those books are along the lines of Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy for me to pretend to any high intellectual caliber on the part of my family. We're just sloppy. Part of the problem is that with a family of six, we just don't have enough bookcase space to hold all of the various books that come and go from the library. But a greater part of the problem, at least in my case, is that there rarely seems to be enough spare time to read all of them, especially the ones we buy. As a result, there are books scattered hither and yon that I 've started but have yet to finish. But there are advantages to living in a house with books scattered willy nilly, especially when those books have been chosen by someone else. It's like being in a bookstore. You can sample a little here and there from a wide variety of topics.

First of all, there are the medical books that I've collected hoping to review, but haven't been able to devote the time needed to do them justice. For those who yearn for immortality, there's Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever by Ray Kurzwell, "inventor, thinker, and futurist" and Dr. Terry Grossman, director of a "leading anti-aging clinic." The book is part how-to manual and part review of things to come if anti-aging technology fulfills its promise. Suffice it to say, the state of the art isn't yet perfect. In a related vein, there's Coping With Methuselah: The Impact of Molecular Biology on Medicine and Society, a book I don't have lying around my house, but which was reviewed favorably in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, even though it was written by committee:

The book is the product of the collaborative efforts of 17 scholars, including three medical scientists (Drs. William B. Schwartz, John T. Potts, and Alan M. Garber); a large team of reputable economists, most of whom are from the Brookings Institution; an ethicist, Alexander Capron, from the University of Southern California; and a journalist, Nicholas Wade, of the New York Times.