On the Nightstand

For unexplainable reasons, I feel the need to keep track in some public way of what books I'm reading. Sometimes during the year I don't really have a chance to read much on my own at all. I'm just too busy keeping up with college essays. I barely have time to read magazines. Other times, I'll catch a break and I'll want to read something. I find myself moving away from literature and philosophy, that sort of thing, and more towards social science, biography and the random piece of pulp. I think I'm still recovering from graduate school (and have feverish moments where I contemplate going back for a PhD), and I don't really want to read more scholarly articles or academic books, unless they're not so cut and dried. Here are three I've just finished recently and am passing on recommendations for.

The first one is called I'm Perfect, You're Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah's Witness Upbringing by Kyria Abrahams. Sister loaned me this book, and it's absolutely hilarious. It's the kind of book that makes me think I ought to write something about life after JWs, just to have the complete set going on for people to get into. I think it would be rather amusing to talk about figuring out how Xmas works, running into people years after you've been kicked out, etc. I might try my hand at it, who knows? Kyria Abrahams has a way of showing you just how incredibly bad her life was while at the same time interlacing it with such humor and sarcasm it's easy to forget that she basically dropped out of high school, got married at 17 to a man who didn't really care about her, cut herself, was an alcoholic, got kicked out at around 19 or 20 and engaged in all kinds of risky behavior that could have gotten her killed. You really just don't notice it, because the whole story is laced with JW lore and religious urban legends. It's a great book. Normally I don't like ex-JW stories; I find them too sobby. Yes it sucked, please move on and do something with your life. For the ex-JWs who read this blog, I don't mean that to be harsh or unkind. I just don't find it to be a very productive way to cope, I suppose. But you all would love this book.

Turn Coat byJim Butcher is book 12 in the Dresden Files series, about a guy who lives in Chicago who is a wizard. A former student of mine loaned me this book. They're like crack. Some critic describes this series as "Phillip Marlowe meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and really, that's absolutely perfect. But where Buffy really hit people in their teens and early twenties, Dresden seems geared more towards people in their late twenties and their thirties. I don't know that I've ever thought much about the age demographic certain books are aimed at, but that seems to me to be the case about the Dresden files. He's grown up, and he has grown up issues. Again, crack.

Outliers is Malcolm Gladwell's third book, and I guess it falls under the category of "social science." It's a lot like Freakonomics, if you've ever read that book, which if you haven't, you really should, because it's very good. Gladwell looks at what we think of as "geniuses" and determines whether that is really so, and his conclusion is that there are certain things that make people successful that we would never think of looking for but that can be proven without a doubt statistically. It's fascinating. He proves, for example, that in terms of successful intelligence, it isn't so much that you need a high IQ -- just a high enough IQ; high enough, basically, to get into college. Intelligence has a threshold, and once you've crossed it, it doesn't matter so much if someone has significantly more points than you do. What makes up the difference after that is the ability to be creative and the ability to get along with other people. It's really fascinating. He argues very, very convincingly that what would close the achievement gap is not more money nor more equipment -- but less summer vacation. He proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the reason most Canadian hockey players turn out to be great is not because they have more talent ... but because they were born between January 1st and March. If you want to know why, you'll need to read the book. It's really worth it.


What's still on the nightstand? Michael Berube's What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politicas and 'Bias' in Higher Education; Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader (a collection of his writings with a forward by Howard Zinn); Mama PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (a collection of essays); and Salman Rushdie's The Jaguar Smile about his time in Nicaragua -- a small but good book so far.

What about you?

-- DV