What are you reading these days?

Infinite Jest. Bought it half a decade ago for whatever reason I've since forgotten. I basically never read books but always wanted to be one of those "reading" "people". Finally succeeded in making a consistent effort in getting through it. Currently passed the half-way mark at page 570 or so out of 1000 🙏

I don't know if I'm getting Stockholm syndrome or if it has just grown on me. I remember when I started I was confused at why this book about a tennis academy, a random pupil therein, and his drug related adventures, was heralded as one of the best novels ever, but at some point I just started having fun reading the experiences of the ensemble of characters.

The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools? by Dale Russakoff

The cover and title cheapen this book a bit IMO, which was written by a career Washington Post and New Yorker journalist. It's honestly one of the better books on US education I've read.

It follows the school reform efforts of Newark, New Jersey, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, using that as a proxy for education in the United States at large. Mark Zuckerberg famously pledged $100 million dollars to help reform the district, and both Democratic Mayor Cory Booker and Republican Governor Chris Christie were in alignment with how to make that happen. On paper, this all should have resulted in a slam dunk, but, as the book painstakingly details, the results were anything but that.

I appreciated the book's even-handed look at a very complex and complicated situation, with no easy answers. Russakoff doesn't offer a lot of analysis, instead simply laying out events for the reader and letting them come to their own conclusions. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in a deep dive into educational issues in the United States.

I'm reading The Patient's Playbook by Leslie D. Michelson. It's a manual about how to handle the US healthcare system to get the best outcome for yourself (or your loved ones). It's about how to find good doctors, advocate for yourself to doctors, and find others to help advocate for you.

The author runs a business that will do all of these things for you for a fee, but he presents the methods they use so you don't have to pay someone else to do it. (Though he's also nearby, so I'm debating just calling him.)

This is relevant to my life because my spouse has a chronic condition and has an average of 2 doctors visits per month. The amount of lost, forgotten, or missed stuff is infuriating. And that doesn't even get into getting incorrect diagnoses, inappropriate treatments, etc. (And that's just with the doctors we like! I'm not counting the ones that dismissed her or told her it was just anxiety so we bailed on them.) I'm also advancing in years and need to start being more organized about my own health.

The book itself is a little dry, but not too bad. The advice does sound genuinely useful, though. My spouse has a big binder full of notes and test results and articles about her condition, and she's been asking for help organizing it for a couple years, but every time we try, we get analysis paralysis. I come up with a system, but she doesn't like it. She comes up with a system, but I can't seem to implement it correctly. So I hope this gives us a better idea of how things should be organized.

In January I read Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad. It's a narrative of the history from the pivotal Second World War theatre in the city, written in 1998.

With Afghanistan in mind, I'm reading Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945 about the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich from the start of 1945, and how the international community responded gradually through the famous conferences between Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt and later Truman.

With a work from 2002, it's impossible to escape the cultural differences of how we look at history just through the last 20 years. In that way, you get history twice, both of the period in question, and contemporary life and perspectives to the time the work was written in.

I thoroughly enjoy reading historical non-fiction. I enjoy new perspectives and knowledge regarding how we got to where society is today. There's so much to unpack in current international diplomacy that stems back to 1945, the UN, and the splitting of empires into countries. Without those references, it's extremely hard to make sense of it all.

I just finished I Alone Can Fix It by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. It was juicy, but not quite as tabloid-like as some of the other Trump books. Reading through the last few years was definitely entertaining. There was just one bat-shit crazy moment after another that at the time I didn't truly appreciate. And this book doesn't even hit on them all.

I picked up Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny, after reading a couple pages of it online. The way it was written really caught my eye. It was weird and interesting in equal amounts. Definitely written in a unique way. I read the book in a day, and will probably read it again once work lightens up a bit.

Also bought and reread Her Majesty's Spymaster, by Stephen Budiansky. It's a book about Sir Francis Walsingham, who was a very interesting person. I'd checked the book out years ago from the library, but then I moved and decided to just buy my own copy. I learned the concept of video et taceo from this book, which is always a good idea.

And I finally bought a hard copy of the second edition of The Rexx Language by M.F. Cowlishaw. It was only $1.50 from a nearby Goodwill, which was nice. What little scripting I do anymore mainly involves text manipulation, so I do it in Rexx. Bonus: I can move the code around between Linux, Windows and my old Amiga 500, if need be. Plus it's a fun and simple language.