Weekly Reader
I read a lot of different things, books, magazines, newspapers, short stories, and web articles. I thought I'd try keeping track of what I read each week and each Monday post about what I read the prior week.
This week's books:
- Hell to Pay by George Pelecanos
I started reading Pelecanos because of his work on the phenomenal TV series The Wire. Pelecanos' books take place in D.C. neighborhoods very reminiscent of the Baltimore neighborhoods he wrote about for the wire, and deal with the same issues of race, crime, drug, and police work. Hell to Pay is the second in a series featuring detectives Derek Strange and Terry Quinn.
They're great reads, not too dense, but full of brilliant observation surrounded by quickly moving plots. I can't wait to read the next in the series, and the rest of Pelecanos' works.
- Imbibe! by David Wondrich (reading)
- Flight by Sherman Alexie (reading)
I didn't get around to many articles this week.
- 'The Uses of Adversity' by Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker
I try not to miss any of Gladwell's writing, he writes brilliantly through anecdotal evidence about a variety of topics. This piece covers the rags to riches story, that someone from a poor, minority background was once able to "end up on top, by starting at the bottom" versus todays version of sucess seens as "a matter of capitalizing n socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage."
- 'The Oval Office Facebook Group' by Dr. Mark Drapeau for Science Progress
An insightful look about how government intranet sites based on popular social networking platforms like Facebook and Google Docs are changing the way our government shares information.
