What Are You Reading?

By DHinMI

If you're like me, the holidays are a time for getting caught up on some reading you've been neglecting or kept from, a time to get excited about new books you want to start, and often an opportunity to get books as gifts (or to buy with giftcards). 

For me, this holiday season has had an added facet, with me being reunited with some books and other reading material that's been spread between three locations over the last few months as I've been getting settled in a new city but still have most of my belongings in Michigan.

Regardless of where I am, typically I'm reading several different books simultaneously.  Let me give you a brief idea of some books on my reading agenda, and I hope you'll then share with me and everyone else what's on your reading list for the holidays and beyond.

I usually have several works of non-fiction in various states of completion.  Sometimes that means I'll go several weeks without completing a book, but other times I'll finish four or five books in the span of a week.  The later may occur in a couple weeks, as I'm about half way through several books.

David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East has been revelatory.  I've always sorta known that the modern Middle East was a creation of British policy makers dealing with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  But seeing how haphazardly so many crucial decisions were made--some blithely reversing many decades of imperial policy principles with nary a debate--has made me shudder at how many mistakes we seem to be making with insufficient awareness of what came before in the Middle East.  And man, bumbling on all sides during the years 1913-1922 really shaped the Middle East we have today.

Robert Baer's See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism is a great, great read (and the inspiration for the movie Syriana).  He tells some great stories, the narrative momentum is intoxicating, and he shows many of the problems of our intelligence agencies by charting his own 22 year career.  And it's not giving away much--since it's how the book starts--by letting you know that one of the main players in ending his career was Ahmed Chalibi. 

I'd read many of the essays collected in Thomas Powers' Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda when they were originally published in the New York Review of Books (the best intellectual journal in America), including two that discuss Baer's book.  But it's been good catching up on the ones I missed, especially those about the OSS and the early years of the CIA.

I also typically work on some more challenging reading that requires a pen in hand and lots of marginal notes.  While written quite clearly, the density of ideas and implications in Manuel Castells' The Rise of the Network Society, the first volume of his three volume "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture" has been compared to the works of Max Weber.  I'm not sure I'd go that far--his intellectual reach isn't as broad as Weber's--but it's still incredibly impressive, and I'm really learning a lot about the growth of the information economy and technological innovation.

And when I'm done with one of these books--I'll probably finish Baer's book in a couple days--my next book is Samantha Power's "A Problem from Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide. 

As for fiction, I've been distracted with other stuff lately, but I'm almost finished with Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods. I just picked up two novels for when I finish the O'Brien book.  I read about half of The Atlas by William T. Vollmann a few years ago, and had to set it aside because his world was just feeling too grim. Therefore, I shouldn't have picked up Europe Central, but what the heck, it's about combat on the Eastern Front in WWII and the moral and ethical quandries faced by soldiers, diplomats and even Shostakovich, so it's probably light reading, right?

On a lighter note--if one can say that about a book dealing with, among other subjects, the Holocaust--I also picked up Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. 

And I'm happy to be reunited with some of my unread books, so I can fulfill a craving to read some more Graham Greene.  I just saw The Third Man for about the fourth time a couple weeks ago, and it's got me craving stories illuminating some of the ethical and moral questions Greene dealt with so brilliantly.

[I'm also happy to get back in contact with my Simpsons DVDs, so it's not all heavy reading for me.  And I was recently given a Family Guy DVD for variety's sake.]

OK, so how about you?  What are you reading, what did you just read that you have to talk about, and what's on your "I gotta read that book" list?

Comments

[DemFromCT]

republican war against science, monster at our door, ringworld (reread again), the great flood

[orionATL]

thanks,

this is a treasure of suggestions. the printer is going to go.... now!!!!

[Semblance]

Yeah, winter is the time to read. :)

Currently reading:

"Why The Electoral College Is Bad For America", George Edwards

"The Incredible Shrinking Son Of Man", Robert Price

Next up:

"The Truth, With Jokes", Al Franken

"Active Liberty", Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

"One Market Under God", Thomas Frank

"A Man Without A Country", Kurt Vonnegut

"Hiding In The Mirror", Lawrence Krauss (argues against string theory)

[Fr33d0m]

Programming in the key of C# and other related. You can call them works of fiction if you like. My favorite part is about using an imaginary file to precompile web pages. Those MS folks are really inventive with their imaginary stuff.

Oh and what is missing from my diet that keeps me from being able to read several books at once? Is it because adult ADD keeps my mind wandering too much or what? Seriously, what is it?

[revere]

Two I just finished: 1912 by James Chace (the Taft-Roosevelt-Debs-Wilson election); and A Matter of Opinion by Victor Navasky, which has a lot to teach bloggers and blog readers. Navaksy was long time editor/publisher of The Nation. About to start John Dunning's latest mystery about bookselling and booksellers.

ps Dem: I tagged you for a meme on Effect Measure. You can thank we at your leisure.

[DemFromCT]

thanks, revere.

[rasmus]

Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

This little book should be rewarding even if you're not an artist. Many of its observations apply to any sort of individual human endeavor.

[Giuditta]

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr (who wrote A Civil Action). True story about the rediscovery of a lost Caravaggio work. So far the setting is Rome, but looks like the tale will take readers to Dublin too. What a treat!

Jar City, Icelandic mystery finally translated into English. Icelandic detective reminds me of Mankell's Kurt Wallender: divorced, slightly hypochondriacal, brooding on his country's future. The tale touches on Iceland's geneology / genetics project at the University of Reykjavik.

[Gotham Image]

American Aurora - R. Rosenfeld (about early American pamphleteers/bloggers)

Power and The Glory - G. Greene (coincidence there)

Liberal Answer To The Conservative Challange (1964) - Sen. Gene McCarthy

Plus some other good stuff. Powers is always good and that Froomkin book was excellent. Maybe time to revisit.

[Melanie]

DH,

Once you get into Samantha Powers, all of the other books will go away for a bit. Getting into her book means leaving everything else behind for a while, and I read as promiscuously as you do.

"The Great Influenza" and "The Monster at the Door" are on my docket at the moment, along with the first Robertson Davies trilogy.

[Mike in MI]

In the last few months I finished all three of David Mitchell's novels, Ghostwritten, number9dream, and Cloud Atlas. Of the three, Cloud Atlas is the most adventurous and most overtly political.

The current non-fiction selection is Sunstein's Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America, which puts an entorely different glass to the problem with dividing jurist with liberal/conservative labels. It has a lot to say in this Roberts/Alito age.

[Mike in MI]

Oh, and the O'Brien is a classic.

[emptypockets]

not much time for novels (or other pastimes) lately except in short spread-fire bursts, but this recently caught my eye from an old book:

Somebody -- was it Mr. Gladstone? -- placed it on record that there is nothing quite so dangerous, quite so ferocious, quite so terrifying as a mad sheep. Similarly, as we know, there is no person quite so indiscreet, quite so foolishly talkative, quite so amazingly gauche, as the diplomat who for some reason or other has run off the rails.

I happened to read that a day or so after Ted Stevens exploded.

[emptywheel]

I want to second the A Peace to End All Peace recommendation. One of the best history books I've ever read, and my undergraduate degree and a good chunk of my graduate degree were in history.

What am I reading?

Scott Ritter's Iraq Confidential. Unfortunately, Ritter is not very good at syntehsis. He includes LOTS of evidence to support his argument--that from 1991 the WMD inspections were not about making Iraq safe, but about regime change. But he doesn't make the argument for you. I'm really loving the book, though, because it is providing a superb primer for some subjects I hope to post on soon.

Shadia Drury's Leo Strauss and the American Right. Someone here tipped me off to the fact that Drury also wrote a book I relied on during the dissertation stage, Alexandre Kojeve (I'm terrible with names, even of scholars, which might be why I left academics). But that made me want to read this. Nothing I didn't know, but a quick review anyway.

Lawrence Walsh's Firewall. I've been reviewing the past crimes of Republican Administrations, but this is one of the most applicable (well, All the President's Men is more so, I guess, but this is pretty damn good too).

Yankelovich's Magic of Dialogue. Kind of at the crossover point between my academic work (someday I'll write it all up and turn it into a book!) and my day job. But a quick read and interesting.

Also, I'm editing a very cool book on Meiji Japanese literature and I'm listening to Feynman's lectures on Quantum Mechanics.

[DHinMI]

The Drury book is pretty good, and considering the topic a pretty easy read.

[dksbook]

Lincoln's Melancholy. Just proves you can be a pssimist and still save America. It also has some personal resonance for me, and may for other folks who live with clinical depression.

Since http://larrystallingsforlege.com/>Mr. dks declared for TXHD122, I haven't had a minute for any fun except a little sex - no cooking, no travel, no junk reading, no roadhouse dancing... but the Baby of The Family got accepted to Harvard this month, which is kinda close to fun. Happier New Year to all Democrats!

[romdinstler jones]

"The Sound and the Fury".

[Paul@01852]

I also like you try to get caught up during the Christmas season.

I have recently finished Tony Judt's Postwar, one of the best history books I have read in a long while. I learned more about why Europe is like it is from this book than I have in all the other reading I have even done re: Europe. Highly recommended.

Now I am reading Richard Crawford's America's Musical Life: A History. This is a narrative history beginning with American Indian dance music and Puritan hymns through rock and rap. A very readable history for someone not technically competant in music theory.

On my shelf are Doris Kearns Goodwin: Team of Rivals (a Christmas present from one of my boys), Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson ( a history of the rebelions in Kenya during the 50's), Risng '44 by Norman Davies, and The Missing Peace - The iNside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace by Dennis Ross.

I am also occasionally interrupting my regular (reading) program with readings from The Encyclopedia of New England, edited by Feintuch & Watters and The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Edited with Notes by Leslie Klinger.

[teacherken]

just finished The World is Flat May do a blog about it (dailykos and mylefwing) but not before friday (bloggin about something else tomorrow)

A couple of quick thoughts

- it annoys the heck out of me that every time Friedman refers to an expert it is"my friend" so and so . ugh

- the book was - to me surprisingly - much more coherent and focused than I expected. There are the little clever Friedmanisms - replacing his metaphor about coutnries with mcDonalds not going to war with instead an image of the supply chain of the Dell laptop on which he wrote the book. He does acknowledge that it is not a guarantee that countries in the same supply chain will not go to war ow/one another, but uses as an exsample how golbalization may stave off con flict India's backing down in a recent conflict w/Pakistan ..

What was interesting was to see how bluntly critical he is of the current administration, on so many issues. And since he is a bright guy and does talk with quite a few people, it gives a fairly thorough portrayal of how globalization is now working as seen through the eyes of many key players, including Americans like Michael Dell and Bill Gates.

Again, as I have said elsewhere, I would balance this portrayal by also reading two Nobel Prize winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joe Stiglitz. And since IANAE (the e is for economist, obviously), I certainly claim no expertise.

I do worry about the vulnerabilities to many economies because of the interrelated nature of the supply chains and distribution. If a war does happen it could cause major economic dislocation, not only here but around the world, with an impact even greater than what an oil shock by itself is capapble of doing.

[nerosviolin]

The Last Tycoon
A Go player's strategy guide
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

[emptywheel]

taecherken

Yeah, I'm with you, I worry about the supply disruptions that might come through war or might come through increased transportation costs. It's not going to be easy for entire countries to switch back to subsistence agriculture overnight (and even in the US, which presumably WILL have money for transport, it will take some time before people can eat locally again). But I don't think the folks running the shop really care about that kind of vulnerability.

[Melanie]

Teacherken,

Put panflu into that mix and see what you come up with.

[4jkb4ia]

David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council. Finished GRRM and Jordan last week. Melanie, first RD trilogy highly recommended. I am truly meaning to read Samantha Power one of these days.

[Mimikatz]

I just got back from a Christmas visit where it rained the whole time. I finished "See No Evil," enjoyed it thoroughly, and want to read Baer's next book about us and the Saudis ("Sleeping with the Enemy", I believe; read "The Dream of Scipio" by Ian Pairs (I loved it, even though I didn't like "An instance of the Fingerpost" so much); and am now reading "The Plot Against America." The theme seems to be when and how to oppose evil, and what is it? Glad to be home.

[Keith Brekhus]

I'm currently in the middle of....

Night Draws Near : Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War by Anthony Shadid.