links for 2008-07-13

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Summer Reading List

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Chris Lehmann tagged me with his Summer Reading meme, so below I have listed what I have been recently reading and what I plan to read over the summer.

Recently Read:

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson

Shakespeare, by Bill Bryson

Currently Reading:

A Schoolmaster of the Great City, by Angelo Patri
This weeks selection in the Gary Stager book club is quite frankly a remarkable book. I am about a third of the way into it, and am finding it fascinating to read the reflections of this man who wrote of his experience over 90 years ago. I believe that we who work in education do not think enough about those who came before us and this book is a good reminder that we need to take advantage of that knowledge.

Queued up in the Kindle, or soon will be, or on the coffee table...

The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It , Jonathan Zittrain
photo.jpgI have this on my Kindle, and also on my phone thanks to a Twitter post by Bud Hunt who alerted me to the fact that Zittrain has made electronic copies of the book available on the web. Recently I came across a great ebook reading tool for Mac OS called Stanza. Stanza has the ability to read and convert from several different ebook formats and one option is to convert a book to a .plist file, or basically a bookmark. It's an interesting way to put ebooks on an iPhone/iPodTouch. More about Stanza here...

The Post American World, by Fareed Zakaria

In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen

The Great Deluge, by Douglas Brinkley

Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
The story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and the eight ball players who threw the 1919 World Series...

Wanted to also note that I am really enjoying the ability to download a sample chapter to the Kindle before buying a book. I find myself listening to interviews with authors and then looking on Amazon for the Kindle edition of the book and then downloading the sample chapter. Quite frankly, Amazon makes the book buying process a little too easy... :-)