very simple

• America: A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, by the Daily Show with Jon Stewart – clearly I had to pick this one up, although I’m kind of sad that I’ll probably be stuck at work on Wednesday night when Stewart will actually be speaking at my B&N.
• The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind – I meant to pick this up a while ago, largely for educational purposes – I practice corporate/securities law for energy companies, so this was an even bigger deal in my little world than it was anywhere else.
• *A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson – I actually picked this one up while browsing through the store, but it seems interesting, and I always enjoy books that are "explanatory".
• The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth – Roth has authored more than one "great American novel", so it seemed like a good idea – Plus, I’m always intrigued by fictionalized "alternative history".
• The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs – see the comments above to Bryson’s book.

I also finished reading What Liberal Media? by Eric Alterman – I thought it was good and well-researched, but I will admit that I’m clearly politically disposed to agree with Alterman’s thesis. It’s certainly interesting to read in light of the heating up of the Presidential campaign for this next month.

The other thing is, I know my list of books doesn’t change that often – part of the reason is that I’m just too lazy to update the javascript file (which I will do tonight), but part of it is that I have a tendency to go to the bookstore and buy a big stack of books, and then pick and choose which ones I want to read over a fairly long period of time. I’ll buy 5 or 6 books when I still have another 5 or 6 on my shelf waiting to be read. I’ll eventually get to all of them, but it’s almost like I’m creating my own library at home, so that, at leisure, I can read books that piqued my interest at some other point in time. When I’ve got serious downtime (like vacations) I tend to read a lot more – I think I read 7 books in 5 days the last time I went to Mexico. But when I’m busy, I tend to read much more "short-form" material, like magazines (and I tend to read Newsweek, Time, US News, the NY Times Magazine, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Time Out NY, and Entertainment Weekly every week). And that’s not even counting the newspapers and blogs. And all of this is really not counting the reading and writing of corporate disclosure documents that I do on a daily basis at work…

So…I read a lot, even if it’s not entirely reflected by this rather sporadically updated section of the blog.