With Memorial Day and Harvard’s commencement in the rear view mirror and temperatures in Boston threatening to stay over 50º F, it’s time to start thinking about summer reading. Not a lot slows down at work, but I invariably put together an overly-ambitious summer reading list. This year, I’ll try get through at least five of them, lest the sea of tweets reduces me to faking cultural literacy.
A few useful lists as starting points:
- The New York Times By the Book Archive, especially Gillian Flynn and Gary Shteyngart (whose own “Little Failure” was hilarious)
- Condé Nast Traveler: David Sedaris tells you what to read this summer
- Harvard faculty picks: Summertime, and the reading is easy
- Roundups for product managers and digital strategists (with a few adds, including colleague Misiek Piskorski’s Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media)
- In-person scanning of the shelf tags at our terrific independent bookstore, Newtonville Books
Many swear by goodreads, but the site feels too vertical a social network to stay connected with more than periodically. Also, I trust someone’s reading tastes far more when served up within the context of an overall social network profile. After all, how seriously will you take a satirical novel recommendation when it’s posted among 74 toddler pictures?
Mostly I read on Kindle for iPad, but for vacation I rely on the physical books, which are excellent for resisting the temptation of toggling to work email. Summer provides an opportunity to shut down the laptop and with focused attention — something too often in short supply.