publish first, edit later

Stuff I read recently

In the spirit of Nick Hornby/'The Polysyllabic Spree' and also to help me feel I'm not just wasting my time on the train home from work, I'm going to list some of the stuff I've read in the last few weeks/months.

The idea is to goad myself into taking some decent notes on them and, by doing that, struggle towards organising my ideas a bit (and to make myself read more, and with more purpose).

So, stuff I've read since end of summer:

'The Hungry Years' by William Leith

'Bait and Switch' by Barbara Ehrenreich

'Never Had It So Good' and 'White Heat', both by Dominic Sandbrook

'Cultural Chaos' by Brian McNair

'Information Age Journalism' by Vincent Campbell

'Online News' by Stuart Allan

A chunk of 'The Internet Galaxy' by Manuel Castells

The Culture of the New Capitalism by Richard Sennett

Zines by Stephen Duncombe

'Labyrinths' by Jorge Luis Borges

A chunk of Press Gang by Roy Greenslade

A chunk of Arthur Marwick's  social history of post-WW2 Britain

Half of 'Hello, I'm Special' by Hal Niedzviecki

Most of 'You Are Here' by Katharine Harmon

'Convergence Culture' by Henry Jenkins

Half of 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell

'From Counterculture to Cyberculture' by Fred Turner

'Freakonomics' by Levitt/Dubner

First third of 'The Undercover Economist' by Tim Harford

First chapter of 'The Economics of Attention' by Richard Lanham

'The Media and Power' by James Curran (I think that's what it's called).

Culture and Consensus by Robert Hewison (again, I think that's the title - will check in a bit)

There's probably some more. And you can add the stuff I read in the  BChristmas break (Sennett, Johnson, Hornby) but it's not much really, is it? Also, it's a bit all over the place, not exactly focused. Also, there's no fiction (apart from Borges). The book I really want to read, and haven't, since summer, not sure why, is George Saunders' collection of stories/novella, 'In Persuasion Nation/The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil'. Not sure why.

What I'm reading

I always get a little bit of personal reading done at Christmas. In the past, I've allowed myself to re-read some Calvino or catch up on the  Geoff Dyer stuff I haven't read yet.

Last year, I managed to mix work and personal pleasure via 'Consider the Lobster', the most recent collection of David Foster Wallace's journalism. I thought... I still haven't managed to smuggle Foster Wallace onto one of the units in college. I have a feeling the students would report me to the college for cruel and abusive behaviour...

This Christmas I was mostly reading Richard Sennett - courtesy of K, who bought me 'The Corrosion of Character' and 'Respect' after I went on about how much I enjoyed 'The Culture of the New Capitalism'. Have read the first. Looking forward to the second.

Also read Steven Johnson's latest, 'The Ghost Map', which I liked. But I found it kind of repetitive... Not sure why. I really like the long zoom methodology - seems to me the book is an argument for this multi-level perspective on reality. Though it seems v. different, it's also of a piece with his last book - and develops the systems approach to culture... I think I need to think about it a bit more. Maybe by reading those ICA notes.

I'm currently in the middle of Nick Horby's Polysyllabic Spree - which I think will be useful for thinking about blogs and books and the whole face-off between book bloggers and professional critics which I linked to before. More on this this week. If work doesn't intervene.

Richard Powers on Speech Recognition Software

I think I need to read this. I like Powers and I dream about finding some decent voice recognition software to help with transcriptions and the like. But I find the illustration, from the NYTimes oddly off-putting.

More online books to check

A couple more books online to check - Neal Lawson is writing a Bauman-influenced critique of consumerism and the ways it limits genuine freedom/democracy - and he's blogging about it as he goes along.

From a different pov, Charles Ledbetter follows up his co-authored Demos essay 'The Pro-Am Economy', (which obviously I need to get round to finishing), with 'We-Think' which he's made available online prior to publication next year. The book sounds like a pop/business take on the whole Web 2.0 hype - Ledbetter wrote a summary for The Times a few weeks back.

Writing books online

A couple of links I want to find time to explore properly - have read lots of McKenzie Wark's work over the years - his new book is GAM3R 7H3ORY - it's been published online as an interconnected set of ideas/theses, open to comment from readers. Wark's blurb to the site is:

I am interested in two questions.

1. can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?
2. can there be a critical theory of games?

I thought it would be interesting to share the book in its draft state to see if these questions are something other people might have ideas on or might want to pursue.

This site has been put together with help via The Institute for the Future of the Book, who are also working on another book/blog in progress - Mitchell Stephens' 'Without Gods'.