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: Outside Counsel

By Bill Altreuter

EGA invited me to join Goodreads, a site that is something like Facebook, I suppose, dedicated to what you and your friends are reading or have read. It kinda looks like EGA is using it to procrastinate, but I am living in a glass house myself on that score. In order to add some content I did what I often do, and checked the back pages of Outside Counsel for some quick content. This site is supposed to function as a notebook, and it is surprising how often it comes in handy, but I was surprised by how seldom I write straight reviews of things that I have read or am reading. I'm more or less always reading something-- right now, for example, I'm reading Richard Russo's "Bridge of Sighs". It seems, however, that whatever I am reading at any given moment is mostly in the background of what I'm writing, and is only occasionally a jumping off point. Frequently the things I read are merely light amusement, and not worth the trouble to analyze or review; even more frequently what I would have to say about them wouldn't be worth the time of anyone else to read.

For whatever it is worth, the books I found that I have dedicated posts to are fairly representative of the sorts of things I read: Nick Hornby's "Songbook", Brendan Gill's "Here at The New Yorker", Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Years of Rice and Salt", Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild", Art and Laurie Pepper's "Straight Life", "The Adventures of Augie March", and a few other things. I've got a review of "Temptations of a Superpower" out there somewhere that I should add for some PoliSci credibility, and maybe I should hunt up a few other things in that line-- as a friend has noted, people curate their bookshelves, and why should this sort of thing be different? If you read this site you've read what I have to say about these books; as with Facebook I'm not sure what value the additional web presence adds. I kinda think these things are actually tools for people who don't care to write much, or don't really know how.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on July 17, 2008 (boomark / email).