For the second year in a row I tracked my reading on Goodreads, and challenged myself to read more than I had in 2010 (20 books), initially setting the bar at 36 books before raising it mid-year to 50. Including a mix of graphic novels, novellas and short-story collections, I beat that goal by two books as of today, and am halfway through Eduardo Galleano’s Genesis, quite a book to end the year on!

Here are my five favorites (plus one honorable mention), in order of combined awesomeness and emotional impact, in what has arguably been one of the best years of reading in a long time, not just in quantity, but quality, too:

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Most books you read and review, but some just cut too close, so you simply demand that everyone read them because a review would be too reductive.

Mockingbird is an absolutely wonderful must-read, skillfully combining Asperger’s, To Kill a Mockingbird and the ripple effects of a tragedy on a small community; it had me in full-on tears by the end.

Go read it now! I insist.

Nine Lives by Dan Baum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has all the rave reviews it needs, so let me not belabor the point. Nine Lives is an important book, a necessary book, a simultaneously heart-breaking and heart-warming, frustrating and inspiring book. Read it.

Now.

I expected the Katrina section to have the most impact, but Dan Baum does an excellent job of putting it in perspective by focusing on what really makes New Orleans special: its people. By starting with Hurricane Betsy and deliberately following these nine lives over the following 30+ years, he paints an insightful mosaic with poignant vignettes that alternately left me laughing, smiling, shaking my head, and choking back tears, all before he even gets to August 2005.

When it comes to that proverbial fantasy dinner party meme, I have a new answer: Timothy Bruneau, Belinda Carr, Billy Grace, JoAnn Guidos, Ronald W. Lewis, Frank Minyard, Joyce Montana, Wilbert Rawlins Jr., and Anthony Wells.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“There it is.”

Karl Marlantes juggles a large, diverse cast of complex characters (that sadly narrows over time), while deftly exploring one of America’s darkest periods from the proverbial fog of war with as close to a matter-of-fact, non-judgmental, nuanced hand as might be expected from an actual veteran. It’s a relentlessly gut-wrenching read that absolutely broke my heart on numerous occasions.

Read it.

The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“We get the media we deserve,” declares NPR’s Brooke Gladstone in her excellent The Influencing Machine, an insightful graphic manifesto that sits comfortably alongside Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business and Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, both of whom make cameo appearances.

Gladstone, aided by Josh Neufeld’s seamless visuals, makes a compelling case that the ills that plague media today — mass and social — are nothing new, that “we’ve been here before: the incivility, the inanities, the obsessions, the broken business models. In fact, it’s been far worse and the Republic survives.”

What follows is a broad, contextual overview of the history of media, recounted with a healthy sense of humor, and a refreshing undertone of optimism. eg: Near the end of the book, in two pages, she covers Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, Lanier’s skepticism, Planet of the Apes and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs… and it all makes sense!

“Graphic non-fiction” is a tricky format to pull off and not to everyone’s taste, but Neufeld does a great job complementing Gladstone without letting the medium overshadow her message, and any student of media, formally or arm-chair, should read The Influencing Machine without hesitation.

Kudos to W.W. Norton for taking a chance on such an innovative book, though it’s rather disappointing that the publisher of Frank Rose’s excellent The Art of Immersion has zero online presence for it. A missed opportunity, but one that should be easily (and quickly) rectified.

This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us a by Marilyn Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Love, love, LOVE this book! Johnson’s clear-eyed look at one of our most devalued resources, the librarian, is part love letter, part wake-up call. In the digital age, libraries and librarians are more important than ever, and Overdue presents a variety of examples that not only make that case, but illustrate how, in many ways, librarians are WAY AHEAD of the digital curve.

READ THIS BOOK! NOW!

HONORABLE MENTION – SELF-PUBLISHED

Make a Move by Steven Gaskin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps the European definition of “slacker” is different from my American interpretation, but categorizing Make a Move as a “slacker-thriller” feels unnecessarily narrow and reductive; like referring to Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels as “recovering alcoholic crime fiction.”

Steven Gaskin’s debut is a deliberate, methodical thriller which owes as much to its genre ancestors as it does the character-driven wave of indie movies from the 90s, and it’s no surprise that he notes Grosse Pointe Blank as an inspiration. Much like Block does with Scudder, Gaskin pays an atypical amount of attention to developing his engaging trio of lead characters — twenty-somethings at similar crossroads in their respective lives, but far from slackers — amplifying the story’s many thrills via empathy and smart dialogue instead of simply relying on well-worn genre tropes. Mind you, the tropes are all there: the violence, the double-crossing, the mysterious past, the bomb; but they never overshadow the characters, certain key events taking place completely off-page, experienced only in reflection or via their aftershocks.

Make a Move is a smartly paced, immensely enjoyable read that defies simple categorization. While there’s plenty enough genre elements to satisfy thriller fans, I think its appeal is far broader than that and highly recommend it.

*** Later this week, I’ll post my favorite movies and games, the two media that steal the most time from reading, but until then, let me know what some of your favorite reads were this year and why.

Still awake? I just did a stealth relaunch of The Digital Shift: http://t.co/uIiIhAkv (follow @ShiftTheDigital for more...)

September 26, 2011 11:34 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@glecharles

Guy L. Gonzalez

My last post here was on August 7th, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had anything to post about, I just haven’t had the time. At least not for anything in-depth.

I’ve actually been pretty active on Google+, using it as a micro-blog for a mix of what Facebook now refers to as “lightweight” updates (mostly related to beer and bourbon) and brief thoughts on topics that in the past might have been full posts here, including:

• The Netflix/Qwikster kerfuffle
• Facebook’s latest privacy shenanigans
• Rethinking social sharing in light of privacy concerns

Interestingly, after a brief dip in activity, I’m finding myself rejuvenated on Twitter, partly driven by my increased activity on Google+ where engagement is much higher and more substantial. Twitter surfaces the interesting content, while Google+ offers a platform to have real conversations. Facebook, meanwhile, is about 3-6 months from being completely dead to me, regardless of who continues to use it.

ITEM: DC COMICS – There’s been a lot of debate and discussion about DC’s latest relaunch, particularly around the recurring issue of their treatment of women, and while I have a number of thoughts about it, I’ve only flipped through a couple of issues because I truly couldn’t be less interested in this latest ill-conceived, desperate attempt to goose sales that doesn’t include outreach to new audiences. Instead, I recommend reading “Dear DC Comics,” a brief post that perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with superhero comics today.

ITEM: NEW ORLEANS - Last month, I was able to squeeze out a week’s vacation down in New Orleans, this time with the whole family, and we came back giving serious thought to the possibility of relocating next summer. Schools, of course, were the sticking point, and after some serious consideration of all of our options, it looks like we’ll be staying in Bloomfield until the kids are done with school. That’s eight more years! Being a responsible parent sucks! means making tough compromises.

In related news, I recently had the honor of being profiled at a great new parenting site called Parent du Jour: “I knew special could not contain you.” Check it out (there’s a poem!), and poke around the site, too, because I love the concept Lisa and Steve have going there. One of my favorite profiles was of Mary Champagne, who candidly shared her worst parenting moment and offered up this wise takeaway: “I realized I would never be the perfect parent, but with the willingness to use the support of others, I could still be a very good mother.” Amen to that!

ITEM: DAY JOB UPDATE - The day job continues to be awesome and time-consuming, and I have my hands in a number of exciting projects, most behind the scenes for now, but two you can and should check out are the new websites for The Horn Book and The Digital Shift. Let me know what you think!

Both sites are built on StudioPress’ Genesis framework, and if I didn’t already love WordPress, I’d totally be a fan now. In the process of developing those two sites, I’ve gone deeper into WordPress than I ever had before, leaving me thinking “If I knew then what I know now…,” though some of what I uncovered I’ve integrated into the backend of my blog, including the Twitter Blackbird Pie plugin that created the cool little Twitter excerpt above.

ITEM: ONE BOOK, ONE MOVIE

• Nine Lives by Dan Baum: LOVED IT! Read it now.
• Dolphin Tale: Sappy and manipulative as hell, but in an honest way. I really liked it.

That’s all (for now) folks!

rotary dial by lilszeto, via Flickr

I believe we’ll need a multitude of social services to satsify the needs and desires of all the users of the web. Google+ fills a void between public and private, it serves what is likely to be an older demo less interested in hooking up or hipstering out and more interested in the social utility it provides. That’s a good thing.

-Fred Wilson, A VC

So, Google+? I actually kind of like it.

[UPDATED BELOW WITH SOME SPECIFIC REASONS WHY.]

It’s an intriguing mash-up of Facebook and Twitter, but its use of “circles” does a better job of reflecting and managing the variety of solid and permeable walls that exist in real-life networks, and when it comes to privacy, I trust our robot overlords a slight bit more than the new kids on the virtual block. Among the early adopters in my initial circles are an interesting mix of people I connect with via different interests, including comics, gaming, libraries, marketing, publishing, technology and transmedia. I also have a circle for “creatives,” a fun mix of writers and other smart, talented folk.

Beyond Facebook and Twitter similarities, Google+ also integrates, or has the potential to integrate with a number of Google services I use regularly, including Gmail, Google Reader and my Android phone. And it’s already spurred me to make the switch from Flickr to Picasa, which is allegedly being rebranded as Google Photos.

The web interface includes a “+1″ tab that tracks everything I’ve, um, plussed (?) on the Internet, making it immediately more useful to me (as opposed to marketers) than Facebook’s similar “Like” button, while the mobile app includes a feature called Huddle that will become a great alternative to SMS once more of my network is plugged in. While it’s clearly still in Beta (what isn’t these days?), its potential is a lot clearer than the ill-conceived Buzz and Wave initiatives were, and there’s a huge gap between Facebook and Twitter that Google+ seems to fit in perfectly.

Andy Woodworth, one of the librarians I’m connected with, posted a solid overview last week that’s worth a read, but if you snag an invite before it goes fully public, it’s definitely worth checking out.

FACEBOOK IS SAFE… FOR NOW

While I don’t love Facebook, far too many of my family and close friends are active there for me to bail on it any time soon, but that was also the case a few years back when most of them were on MySpace. And before that, Friendster. Or AOL.

If anything, I can see my Facebook network narrowing even further than it did the last time my social media mix changed, so it will be interesting to see what happens over the next 6-12 months as Google+ goes mainstream. Or, like Friendfeed, doesn’t.

In the meantime, I’ll likely be cross-posting between them occasionally while I shift more of my attention to Google+, and have even downloaded all of my Facebook photos so I can upload them to Picasa.

TWITTER IS BEING MARGINALIZED

Ever since I left Digital Book World back in February, I’ve been significantly less active on Twitter, partly for lack of time, but mostly because I don’t feel the need to be knee-deep in real-time chatter any more. The publishing industry LOVES Twitter almost as much as it loves pundits and anecdata, but I’ve been thrilled to find in my new gig that librarians are a very diverse (and generally more level-headed) lot when it comes to social media, and there’s arguably a lot more interesting library blogs to follow than there were in the publishing world.

[Check out some good library blogs here and here.]

A couple of years back I had a few rules of thumb for Twitter, including a 60:30:10 — community:self-promo:conversation mix. I didn’t really participate in many chats back then and would quickly move 1:1 discussions to direct messages and/or email. Nowadays, I’m more likely to participate in a chat or get into prolonged conversations with a few people than I am to be posting 15-20 links/day.

That’s not to say Twitter isn’t a useful source of information, though. Paper.li’s ability to pull links from my News, Transmedia and Libraries lists on Twitter, categorize and present them for me as daily archives to consume at my leisure means Twitter still has a place in my personal social media mix, albeit very different from what it was at its peak.

WHAT ELSE?

I still find Goodreads to be a very a useful social network, if only for sharing reviews of books I’ve read, reading reviews of books I’m thinking about reading, and tracking my ever-growing to-read list. Beyond that… there’s not really any other social networks I’m using on a regular basis, at least for personal reasons.

Evaluating the various networks from a professional perspective, both as a marketer and as a writer, will likely lead to very different scenarios, at least in the short-term. That’s fodder for another post, though.

How has your personal social media mix changed over the past couple of years, and how do you manage the potential flood of information?

UPDATE: 7/11/11

Now that I’ve been on Google+ for a couple of weekends, a few interesting developments have shifted my thinking a bit, all for the better:

• The rate of adoption (or at least curiosity) among close friends and family has been far faster than I’ve seen with any previous social networking platform. It took about two years for that core group to move from MySpace to Facebook (or to jump on the social networking bandwagon at all), and the majority of those people are still not using Twitter.
• My current use of Twitter — a handful of links/day plus a conversation or two — fits much better on Google+ and I’m already discovering interesting new people via conversations on posts of people I’m already connected to. That’s always been one of the more appealing aspects of Twitter, and it’s happening without the crush of the real-time firehose; eg: next bullet.
• Circles, while extremely intuitive to me, seems to be tripping a lot of people up. Simply put, they’re an option not a requirement, and Salon‘s Karen Templar nails it.
• There’s a great article in Wired that really puts Google+ and the paradigm shift it potentially represents for social networking in perspective: ”Networks are for networking. Circles are for the right people.”

As I noted in the comments below, over the past week Google+ has sucked equal time and attention from Facebook and Twitter, but much more so from Facebook, if only because of my already declining usage of Twitter. If the migration rate of my core group of family and friends continues at the current pace, I could realistically be done with Facebook by the end of the summer!

And for Twitter power users who love to claim it’s all about engagement, I think Google+ is already a clearly superior platform with plenty of room to improve. Of course, that’s a personal perspective, not from a marketing angle, but that’s a whole ‘nother thesis for another time.

In 1943, there were seven food groups; one of them was BUTTER! (via How Uncle Sam Helps Define Ameri

“In an age when all media are converging, we had best concede that there are means other than

gaslightnyc-storytellers: Writing teachers and critics frequently point out that having a story begi

“Awkward.” LOL!

Hopefully WTF will only apply to this Lagunitas, not the final score in the Mets game!

This shared-use facility brings the Parks Department and the library together on the same campus to