{"id":1154,"date":"2004-10-02T21:14:03","date_gmt":"2004-10-03T01:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2004\/10\/02\/new-books\/"},"modified":"2007-07-29T23:13:32","modified_gmt":"2007-07-30T03:13:32","slug":"new-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2004\/10\/02\/new-books\/","title":{"rendered":"New Books."},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p>Just took my trip to the Union Square Barnes &amp; Noble in order to pick up a few books in anticipation of my two week vacation (only one week to go!) &#8211; I got:<\/p>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/search.barnesandnoble.com\/booksearch\/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=bsq1vqYiLT&amp;isbn=0446532681&amp;itm=1\">America: A Citizen&#8217;s Guide to Democracy Inaction<\/a>, by the Daily Show with Jon Stewart &#8211; clearly I had to pick this one up, although I&#8217;m kind of sad that I&#8217;ll probably be stuck at work on Wednesday night when Stewart will actually be speaking at my B&amp;N.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/search.barnesandnoble.com\/booksearch\/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=bsq1vqYiLT&amp;isbn=1591840538&amp;itm=2&quot;\">The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron<\/a>, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind &#8211; I meant to pick this up a while ago, largely for educational purposes &#8211; I practice corporate\/securities law for energy companies, so this was an even bigger deal in my little world than it was anywhere else.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/search.barnesandnoble.com\/booksearch\/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=bsq1vqYiLT&amp;isbn=076790818X&amp;itm=1\">*A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/a>, by Bill Bryson &#8211; I actually picked this one up while browsing through the store, but it seems interesting, and I always enjoy books that are &quot;explanatory&quot;.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/search.barnesandnoble.com\/booksearch\/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=bsq1vqYiLT&amp;isbn=0618509283&amp;itm=1\">The Plot Against America<\/a>, by Philip Roth &#8211; Roth has authored more than one &quot;great American novel&quot;, so it seemed like a good idea &#8211; Plus, I&#8217;m always intrigued by fictionalized &quot;alternative history&quot;.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/search.barnesandnoble.com\/booksearch\/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=bsq1vqYiLT&amp;isbn=0743250605&amp;itm=1\">The Know-It-All<\/a>, by A.J. Jacobs &#8211; see the comments above to Bryson&#8217;s book.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I also finished reading <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/search.barnesandnoble.com\/booksearch\/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=bsq1vqYiLT&amp;isbn=0465001777&amp;itm=2\">What Liberal Media?<\/a> by Eric Alterman &#8211; I thought it was good and well-researched, but I will admit that I&#8217;m clearly politically disposed to agree with Alterman&#8217;s thesis.  It&#8217;s certainly interesting to read in light of the heating up of the Presidential campaign for this next month.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing is, I know my list of books doesn&#8217;t change that often &#8211; part of the reason is that I&#8217;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&#8217;ll buy 5 or 6 books when I still have another 5 or 6 on my shelf waiting to be read.  I&#8217;ll eventually get to all of them, but it&#8217;s almost like I&#8217;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&#8217;ve got serious downtime (like vacations) I tend to read a lot more &#8211; I think I read 7 books in 5 days the last time I went to Mexico.  But when I&#8217;m busy, I tend to read much more &quot;short-form&quot; 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&#8217;s not even counting the newspapers and blogs.  And all of this is <em>really<\/em> not counting the reading and writing of corporate disclosure documents that I do on a daily basis at work&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>So&#8230;I read a lot, even if it&#8217;s not entirely reflected by this rather sporadically updated section of the blog.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just took my trip to the Union Square Barnes &amp; Noble in order to pick up a few books in anticipation of my two week vacation (only one week to go!) &#8211; I got: America: A Citizen&#8217;s Guide to Democracy Inaction, by the Daily Show with Jon Stewart &#8211; clearly I had to pick this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-1154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBi-iC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}