Once I have tearfully witnessed Commencement, I don my invisibility cloak. From the perception of many persons used to finding me ubiquitous, I disappear from the Net. Summer is a time for being outdoors, for travel, for gardening, for playing with children, for taking advantage of our living on North Lake and for being mentored by Leo the Great Pyrenees.
Here are prior expressed summer ruminations when Robin the Newf mentored me.
After last semester I pretty much dropped off the Net for a couple of months (due to an unreliable home networking situation) and spent time reading printed books, hard copies of magazine subscriptions and paper newspapers. I highly recommend it. I am convinced that online reading is a different experience. I look forward to reading Naomi Baron’s latest thoughts on this.
Here are books I found well worth my having read:
- Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things– praised by several of my favorite contemporary authors David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, and Yann Martel.
- John Scalzi’s Lock In: A Novel of the Near Future.
- David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks.
- Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age.
- Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
- Andy Weir’s The Martian
I presently am finishing Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and am looking forward to reading Ann Morgan‘s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe when it becomes available in the US in May 2015. Before then I plan to read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
Tomorrow, after my classes, I’ll invite my students into my office to take any books I have read. It always pleases me to see them walk off excitedly with some pleasure reading.
What books do you recommend that I read? That I encourage my students to read?
