Help Me Stay Literate
I've just gotten myself back in the habit of reading on a regular basis. E kind of screwed that up for me, but I can't really blame him. I'd gotten out of the habit when I moved to the same schedule as K and didn't have the alone time I had back on my old 4 p.m.-midnight schedule. I've got a couple of bookshelves worth of books that I've got in my backlog (just because I stopped reading regularly didn't really slow my purchases and receipt of gifts), but I'm looking to diversify my reading material. Since childhood most of my reading has been fiction and either science fiction or fantasy. There are some truly great authors in those genres like Charles de Lint, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Orson Scott Card, but there's a lot of crap too.
Starting last year before E came along, I spent a brief period of regular reading (I bought K a pair of wireless headphones so she could watch TV while I read since she couldn't handle me reading in another room) I got into more nonfiction. I read (and loved) Guns, Germs, and Steel, and A Long Way Gone, but honestly, I got lucky with both books. Both are inherently interesting. One is written about an interesting take on the success and failure of human cultures (basically why Western Europeans ended up technologically and financially superior to the American Indians and Pacific Island peoples) and the other told a first-hand account of what it was like to be a child soldier and to find redemption after the psychological damage that caused. I actually use A Long Way Gone in my classroom now.
I'm still not well versed in nonfiction, though. I know a lot of it is dry and boring, or just crappy biographies that don't really serve any purpose other than informing fans about their favorite pop culture or historical figure and pop politics. I'm interested in neither. I want something that shows a unique spin on the world or shines a light on more obscure aspects of our lives and culture. I'm hoping to get a few suggestions from my (usually) literate friends to make up a reading list. If you've got any really interesting fiction suggestions, I'm game for those too.
4 comments:
A fairly quick and interesting nonfiction read is "Freakonomics." I have read it and recommend it.
Basically an economics professor teams up with a writer (N.Y. Times guy, I think) to summarize some of his research. And he doesn't research what you'd normally expect from economists. He researches things like the incidence of cheating/throwing matches in sumo wrestling, the best incentive system to get parents to pick up their kids on time from day care and (perhaps most famously) a drop in crime rates roughly 18-20 years after the Roe v Wade decision. He hypothesizes on that last one that a generation of children that would have grown up unwanted were instead aborted and so never grew up to be maladjusted trouble-causing adolescents and young adults -- which made a lot of people mad at him.
I was thinking about that one. I saw it in Barnes and Noble this weekend. I also was intrigued by My Lobotomy, written by one of the subjects of the creator of the "ice pick lobotomy" back in the 50s. Funny in Farsi sounds interesting too, but I didn't get a chance to thumb through it to see if I liked the writing style.
I really enjoyed "The World is Flat" and in your hands, it would be an arsenal of trivia knowledge for future use.
Word to the wise, stay away from John Grisham non-fiction. My boss asked me if I'd like to borrow it and I thought it would be a good connection for us to have (plus it couldn't hurt, right?) but it turns out that he sucks at recounting the facts. Or maybe they were boring facts and the book was just 100 or so pages too long. Either way, just say no.
For fiction, I recommend anything by John Irving. He's a great writer. I also just read a book called "Life of Pi," which I think you'd like. Also, "The Kite Runner" was depressing but very good.
For nonfiction, right now I'm reading "The Art of Happiness" by the Dalai Lama. It kind of reads like Buddhism 101, but interesting nonetheless. I also recommend "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" -- very short, but the dude who wrote it could only communicate by blinking one eye, so it's pretty remarkable that he wrote anything at all.
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