Psyching yourself up to jump off a cliff into water twinkling below you shout “1,2,3, Go… ” I feel the same way as I contemplate jumping into regular blogging after being lazy and sporadic and reliant on 140 bursts on Twitter. So here goes; this is my dare to blog something every day for a week.
Here’s what I tell my clients: don’t try and be brilliant; don’t write a lengthy essay; just write something. Ugh. There’s nothing worse than a dose of your own medicine.
I’ll start with what I’m reading this summer. I’ve got a huge stack and it’s wildly diverse. One of my goals is to read as much creative nonfiction as possible in order to get ideas for how to write / structure a book that will be a narrative story of open government or Government 2.0. (Reading creative nonfiction is the idea of my brilliant book strategist Mark Levy.)
What’s on Your Summer Bookshelf?
So far I’m reading John McPhee, Ben Mezrich, Joan Didion, John Hersey and The Battle for America 2008 (Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson). Got any other suggestions? I’m searching for an author whose style resonates with me. It would be helpful if the topic were Internet / online related.
Other books in my stack include: The Elegance of the Hedgehog (having trouble getting into this one; maybe it’s the translation); The Gathering (by UK author Anne Enright); Justine (by Lawrence Durrell; saw a rave about it somewhere), Disclosure (by Michael Crichton; an oldie but goodie and surprisingly prescient about the impact of the Internet given that it was published in 1994); The Casino by Margaret Bonham (from my favorite British press, Persephone Books). I also ordered USAToday’s summer bestseller The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
Not a stretch to say that I’ve got Catholic tastes. My one unbending metric for reading a book is that it be well written.
So what’s on your summer bookshelf? I’d really like to hear.