Barry Weiss is a Software Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech and the man in my life for the last 26 years.

Traveling and hiking are some of our favorite activities.

Some of our favorite hiking spots include:

Mineral King - Columbine Lake Loop
Mt. Whitney - Sierra Nevada, California                                              Heather Lakes at Lake Tahoe
Catalina Island - From Avalon to Little Harbor to Twin Harbors
Pecos Wilderness
Wilson Peak (outside of Telluride)
The Presidentials in New Hampshire
Langenfeld, Austria
Kranjska Gore - Slovenia
Snowmass Creek - Aspen, Colorado
Observation Point and Angel's Landing, Zion National Park
Mineret Lake - Mammoth, CA
Mt. Cook - New Zealand
Cradle Mountain - Tasmania, Australia
Wineglass Bay - Tasmania, Australia
Ormiston Range - Alice Springs, Australia

Here are some of the places we've recently visited:

One pleasure in life is reading. Here are some books I recommend that I have read/reread over the last few years:

• Angle of Repose - Wallance Stegner
  Mountains beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder
  The Buru Quartet - Pramoedya Ananta Toer
• Before Night Falls - Reinaldo Arenas
• The Stone Raft - Jose Saramago
• Blindness - Jose Saramago
• O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
• Midnight's Children - Salmon Rushdie
• The Butcher Boy - Patrick McCabe
• News of a Kidnapping - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt
• Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
• A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
• The God of Small Things - Arunhati Roy
• Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

I was recently involved in a project on the role of the academic in literature. Here are a few novels that made me think:

• Faithful Are the Wounds - May Sarton
• Blue Angel - Francine Prose
• Ravelstein - Saul Bellow
• The Human Stain - Philip Roth
• The Groves of Academe - Mary McCarthy