Odd, but this blog is mostly for me to track my own reading habits. I want to trace the path from book to book and eventually organize my library by when read or purchased vs. subject. I have this great software called Readerware that catalogs my books. It even sucks in information on purchases from Amazon. I'm doing the cataloging in Readerware (about 2,500 books so far, still have a lot of manual entry to do) and then will match what's on my shelves to the database.
I'll normally track my reading and purchases from week to week and maybe write a little bit more about each book, but for this first post, I'll list my recent reads (and maybe a few purchases, there are too many to remember) over the past couple of months:
Reading for "fun"
I'll normally track my reading and purchases from week to week and maybe write a little bit more about each book, but for this first post, I'll list my recent reads (and maybe a few purchases, there are too many to remember) over the past couple of months:
Reading for "fun"
- To the Scaffold (Biography of Marie Antoinette) by Carolly Erickson, Pushkin's Children by Tatyana Tolstaya, and Shah of Shahs by Rysard Kapuscinski. After I read these three books I realized that I was reading along the theme of fallen monarchies/dictatorships (Pushkin's Children contains several essays about the fall of Communism).
- The Tragedy of Puddin'Head Wilson by Mark Twain. This was one of my father's favorite books but I never ended up reading it until recently. You should read it free of summarization from me. All I'll say is if you have to choose between reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Puddin'Head, go with Puddin'Head.
- Barabbas and The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist, Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike. I found both of these books in this used bookstore in Kent, WA of all places (I don't remember the name of the bookstore, but it was right near the Kent county courthouse--I was on a break from jury duty.) The weird thing is that these books have something in common--Barabbas and The Dwarf are from this amazing Swedish writer I had never heard of before, and never seen in a traditional bookstore. But he apparently won the Nobel prize in literature in 1951! John Updike, on the other hand, is obviously a very famous author but I had never heard of this particular work before. I'm not a super John Updike fan, but you must read Gertrude and Claudius. As you can tell by the title, it's a story about how the Gertrude and Claudius characters in Hamlet fell in love. Think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead but much nastier and better.
- The Crazed by Ha Jin. This is a remarkable book in that really gives the reader insight into what it's like to live in "Tiananmen" China. Yes, lately I am really into this "despotic" theme.
- Slab Rat and Funnymen by Ted Heller, son of Joseph Heller, who of course wrote one of my favorite books of all time, Catch-22. (More on favorite books of all time in a later post). These are about too very different subjects: The first is about an editorial assistant trying to make it up the ladder at a magazine suspiciously similar to Vanity Fair; the second is about the rise and decline of a comedy team suspiciously like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Much funnier than it sounds.
Reading for school
I'm doing three things that can be characterized as "school": 1) finishing my master's in modern European history (specialty in post-war Germany) 2) taking some online business courses b/c I'm considering getting my MBA after that and 3) taking "living the jewish year" class at my synagogue so I can be a better-informed Jew. Here's what I'm reading right now:
- When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland by Brian Porter. The course I'm taking is about Eastern Europe from the 19th century to 1939. This book's main thesis was that National Democracy, a quasi-fascist Polish political party that gained prominence in the 1920s and 30s, was borne out of liberal, "modern" ideas of the nation vs. from a reactionary, backward looking school of thought. The thing that was really interesting about the book was that in tracking the discourse of Polish political thought it pointed out that certain types of "liberal" (liberal in the 19th century European sense, not the "Masschusetts liberal" sense) rhetoric could "open spaces" for more sinister thoughts and actions to become acceptable. This definitely reminds me of the rhetoric that "compassionate conservative" George Bush uses that has opened up the path to huge deficits and encroachment on fundamental American ideals such as civil rights and the separation of church and state.
- For next week, I need to read Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990 by Anastasia N. Karakasidou. I don't know anything about modern Greek history so it should be interesting.
- Managerial Accounting, 10th edition. The less said about this, the better. The book is fine. It's accounting.
- The Book of Jewish Values, by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. I haven't started reading this yet. Will start tonight.
Reading for work
I work at Microsoft and from time to time do some reading either on technical issues or things that help me do my job better in general. Here's what I'm reading for work lately:
- Execution: The Discipline of Getting things Done, by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Lots of common sense that no one ever actually follows.
- Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication, by Ralph G. Nichols, Leonard A. Stevens, Fernando Bartolome, Chris Argyris. HBR never fails to pinpoint the exact issues that plague my organization.
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