Genius Toiling in Obscurity

What I MIght Be Reading

My friend Adrianne wants to know what I'm reading. So here is the list of things I have in my "to read" pile. All but one are library books. I'll be blogging today or tomorrow about a few things I've just read.

In no particular order (all the links are just Amazon links):

• Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform by Diane Ravitch. I'm reading this now; it's readable, but very long (467 pages), and I'm not sure I need to know that much about the history of school reform...but we'll see.
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Anticipated this one for a long time, but am having trouble getting into it.
• Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation by David A. Price.
• Signal and Noise by John Griesemer. A novel about laying transatlantic cable! What could be more fun?
• Jonathan Edwards: A Life by George M Marsden. Massive. Quite possibly, I won't actually read it.
• Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich.
• I Should be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark by Brian Hall.
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
• Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public by Terry M. Moe.
• Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the Wold of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis.
• The Funnies by J. Robert Lennon. A novel about characters in a comic strip. Or something like that.
• Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg.
• Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire.
• Hamlet's Dresser: A Memoir by Bob Smith.
• Stet: An Editor's Life by Diana Athill. Seven pages in, I am loving this so much I quit reading it because I want to be able to look forward to it for awhile first.

As a bonus, here is Adrianne's current list of books she has on hold at her library. I am not going to do links; too tired. I didn't even clean up formatting; she cut-and-pasted the list to me from her library's website.

• Lies : and the lying liars who tell them ; a fair and balanced look at the right/ Franken, Al
• Bend it like Beckham
• Blow fly /Cornwell, Patricia Daniels.
• Rainforest hiking in Pueto Rico/ New Media, Inc.,
• Caving in West Virginia/ New Media, Inc.,
• Shackleton's Antarctic adventure
• Six modern plagues and how we are causing them
• Woodswoman IIII : book four of the woodswoman's adventures / LaBastille, Anne.
• Bushwhacked : life in George W. Bush's America / Ivins, Molly

And Adrianne highly recommends His Mother's Son by Cai Emmons.

Posted by Su Penn at December 2, 2003 09:50 PM | TrackBack