Finished The Know It All by A.J. Jacobs

As a librarian and lover of reference books, I applaud A.J. Jacobs for reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A-Z. Since I'm pretty sick right now, I can't give the book justice, but like The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs is honest, intelligent, and supremely witty. I laughed out loud a few times. Also like his other book, you come away feeling that even though mankind can be a bunch of right evil bastards, we done some wonderful things that we can take pride of as a species. Now if they could just come up with an instant cure for sinus infections, I'd have a lot more pride in homo sapiens.

Still working on American Project. Started A Few Bricks Shy of a Load by Roy Blount, Jr., an account of his year with the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers. So far, so awesome. But I'm a long time Steeler fan.

Back to Slogging

I'm still reading...don't give up on me! I started American Project by Sudhir Venkatesh a while ago. It's a history and sociological study of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes housing development. From what I've read of Venkatesh in Freaknomics and on the Freakonomics blog, he's a very good writer. However, I don't think he was that good of a writer when he published this book in 2000. It just doesn't even seem like his style...it's just not that engaging. I'm glad to see he's grown as a writer though.

So since that was slow going, I figured that since I liked A.J. Jacobs' biblical living book, I started his book on reading the Encyclopaedia Brittanica from A-Z. So far, I'm not disappointed. I'm trying to read both right now, but Jacobs is winning since he's a really funny guy (and it's an easier read).

The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange by Mark Barrowcliffe

Barrowcliffe, reared in Coventry, England, takes us on a tour of his adolescence, which revolved almost entirely around playing various forms of Dungeons and Dragons. A light, funny memoir than will appeal to anyone who ever enjoyed D&D growing up.

True Enough by Farhad Manjoo

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society is one of the most important and relevant books I've read in a long time. I'd recommend that every librarian, heck, every educator and every citizen read this book. Manjoo looks at a lot of topics, but the main theme revolves around how, paradoxically, the overload of information today gets us further away from a factual accounting of the world and more into a world where opinion counts more.

True Enough looks through various information sources (internet, TV news, print journalism, advertising, others) and shows how people pick and choose information to create the world they want to see based on their pre-disposed opinions (and liberals are skewered as well as conservatives for those of you who worry about ideology). Manjoo translates the psychological scholarship on these issues into a very readable form. Other forms of fact/opinion influences (peer-pressure, public relations efforts, others) are also discussed.

Manjoo's book highlight's why information literacy and critical thinking are so important in today's world, and yet so undervalued by society at large. A terribly important book for the times.