What are you reading?

In 2010, Paul and I spent 7 weeks in NYC, and ever since, we’ve had a subscription to New York magazine. It’s such a great read, and is brilliant for keeping a person up-to-date on what’s up in fashion, theatre, movies, books, food, etc. The only thing is, a new issue arrives every. single. week. It’s relentless, and it tends to gobble up the space I usually make to read books.

For the last month, there’s been some kind of strike at the main post office hubs, and our New York magazines have simply not arrived. I miss them, of course, but boy oh boy have I been getting back into reading. This is what’s currently on my bedstand:

Everything I Know about Business I learned from the Grateful Dead by Barry Barnes

It’s probably as light a business book as you can get, but I’m enjoying the way that Bates unpacks the way that the Dead’s way of doing things was very Web 2.0 even before the Web was a concept. Those guys know stuff…

Telegraph Avenue – Michael Chabon

I loved every moment of this book, and although I initially found Chabon’s lush writing style a bit overwhelming, I enjoyed slowing down to savour his prose (and his epic chapter-long sentence!), and would emerge from bouts of reading in the kind of daze one gets coming out of a movie theatre in the daytime.

Becoming Animal – David Abram

I’m reading this for the second time, and will probably read it over again after that. Abram is an ecologist with the heart and voice of a poet, who can express some pretty out-there concepts in words that are not only exceptionally lucid, but also make your heart beat faster. I highly recommend this book.

Hope: A Tragedy – Shalom Auslander

Paul got this out of the library, and I wondered if that really was the author’s name. The more I read the book, the more I doubt it, because the story is just as outlandish and the characters just as conflicted.

Bird Sense – Tim Birkhead

I just bought this award-winning book on the weekend, so as long as a month’s worth of missing New York mags don’t arrive today, I’ll soon be discovering – as they promise on the cover – ‘what it’s like to be a bird’.

What are you reading?