Green Herring: The making of many books

The Making of Many Books

"... Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body."

-- Ecclesiastes 12:12 (NIV)

Okay, so I may have been consuming a bit too much content lately - a bit!

And I'm really feeling that I need to move from only reading to also writing. So to start, here's a little piece of writing on what I've been reading.

I've always been a bookworm, and I appear to have a bit of a book hoarding issue, according to my spouse. The last few years the accumulation of instances of the dead-tree format has slowed appreciably, as I've mostly switched over to consuming content in e- formats: ebooks (Kindle, Kobo, PDF, or web-based), audiobooks (checked out of the Toronto Public Library, or accessed via my beloved Scribd subscription - see www.scribd.com) and podcasts. All these download into the appropriate app on my iPhone or iPad Mini: Libby, Scribd app, and DownCast.

For audiobooks and podcasts, I've got a couple of nice Bluetooth wireless headsets that let me keep on 'reading' while I'm working around the house or the boat, commuting, or just vegging out. By keeping a selection of content in the audio queue and keeping the phone and the 'phones charged and handy, I get through a number of titles per week, week in and week out - on top of my actual reading of text off of screens.

So, great: no more ever-growing stack of unread / barely begun (physical) books on the nightstand - yay! Unfortunately the queue of "save for later" titles, both text and audio, continues to pile up in i-space, i.e. on the screen of my mobile devices. The concomitant 'book guilt' -- the sense that I was kidding myself about ever getting through all these titles I told myself I want to read -- well, that hasn't gone away. This is a special kind of weariness the sage of Ecclesiastes might find it hard to grasp, but the gist of 12:12 still applies.

I'm trying to view the backlog with a sense of opportunity - I'll never run out of choices for the next read! -- and to focus instead on what I am getting through. So what have I been reading?

I'm consuming quite a lot of nonfiction titles this year:

History, especially of colonialism:

Charles Mann's 1491 and 1493
Matthew Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortes (saved for later)
Alexander Anieves's How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism

Earth history:

Peter Brannen's The Ends of the World

Energy and climate change:

Paul Hawken's Drawdown
Chris Turner's The Patch

Agronomy(? - hard to name the category, but a great book):

David R. Montgomery's Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization

Race in America:

Kevin M Kruse's White Flight
Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me
Charles M. Blow's Fire Shut Up in my Bones (mostly read)
Joan Walsh's What's the Matter with White People (begun)
John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me
W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Men (saved for later)

U.S. politics:

Peter Bremmer's Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism
Malcolm Nance's The Plot to Hack America
Steven Levitsky's How Democracies Die
Ellen R. Malcolm's When Women Win: EMILY's List
Katie Tur's Unbelievable
Luke Harding's Collusion

Biology / ecology (for an online biology book club):

Peter Marra's Cat Wars
Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees

Science

Sharon Moalem's Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives

A few standouts in my 'save for later / really should get back to' queue:

Donald Boudreaux's Globalization
S. Niggol Seo's The Behavioral Economics of Climate Change (in progress)

All that U.S. politics, colonialism and climate change can be pretty heavy, even unsettling reading, so I try to pace myself by interspersing some fiction (especially right before bed!) I enjoy detective and spy novels, both classics and newer contributions. I've scoured the Scandinavian crime fiction scene, which offers a nice range of crime novels set in Nordic countries.

I've found several authors with fresh takes on each genre, based in different times and places in recent history: