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sadly, these non-fiction threads don't seem to take off or last very long, which is a shame because there is a lot of good stuff out there. One of my personal reading goals for the year is to signficantly increase the amount of non-fiction I read. I've tackled about 15 NF books so far this year. There isn't much rhyme or reason to what I pick. My library has a huge digital selection of e-books and audiobooks and so I just pick stuff out of their lists when something catches my eye. just finished "Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace" which wasn't amazing, but it was still pretty interesting. I seem to enjoy the subject even though my understanding of computers is insanely limited. "Ghost in the Wires" by Kevin Mitnick is pretty good, if you can stand how arrogant and smug he is. Jon Ronson has some really interesting stuff. The Psychopath Test was good, but Lost at Sea was probably much better. A bunch of shorter journalism pieces about fascinating subjects. Ben Mezrich's SEX ON THE MOON is a must read, mindboggling that most people don't even know about one of the most insane heists of all time. If you are the least bit interested in true crime, "The Monster of Florence" by Douglas Preston was outstanding. I'm pretty sure somebody is trying to make it into a movie (George Cloony?) It's not so much the story of a serial killer, but a story about how grossly incompetent police officers turned it into a witchhunt. At one point, the writers of the book are investigated as suspects in the case.
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Mar 29, 2014 02:07
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Earwicker posted:I'm currently reading Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, it's by a dude who grew up in middle class southern California and then went to grad school in Chicago to study sociology, became interested the poor black neighborhoods that surrounded the school and decided to focus on studying them, and then wound up becoming friends with a gang leader in the projects where he was essentially "embedded" in a way that is fairly rare for sociologists and allowed him to have a lot of very direct involvement and observation. Really interesting book that focuses a lot on the relationship between the gang and the non-gang residents of the projects and how they rely on and feed off one another. i am pretty sure i listened to a This American Life episode about this guy. it would have been quite some time since I heard it, but it was pretty fascinating how he was able to insert himself into that world so easily. I'll have to put this on a to-read list.
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Mar 30, 2014 05:15
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