Summer Reading

"Old Hermit Roy Ozmer" // Image: Flikr/State Library and Archives of FloridaONCE A MONTH, WE POLL OUR editors and writers for deep thoughts on an issue du jour. This time, we thought we'd leave the politics aside and ask them instead about their one (or two) absolute must reads for the rest of the summer.

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CHRIS ALBON

There are a number of good releases this summer, but in a first for me a comic book tops the list. War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones is the memoir of one David Axe, a young freelance war reporter and my close friend. Axe has lived enough adventure to fill a dozen lives, but that’s not my reason for buying his book, nor I suspect his reason for writing it. Rather, War is Boring promises to offer an honest self-reflection from a man both addicted to the thrill of war and aware of the damage his quest for the next high has wrought on his relationships and himself.

JOHN MATTHEW BARLOW

Christopher Andrew’s In Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5.  MI5 let Andrew, an historian, have unfettered access to its archives to write this history for its centenary last year.  I find it astounding that a secret service would let a civilian not only have access, but also have absolute freedom in writing the official history of the service.  So we get an unfettered, exciting view of the development of MI5, warts and all.  Amazing stuff, really.

CHARLI CARPENTER

Bursts by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi. Barabasi first captured my imagination with his book Linked, a lay person's guide to network science, and his new book is said to extend his analytical vision through time as well as space. His argument -  drawing as usual on wide swaths of interdisciplinary science plus fascinating anecdotes of historical and current events - is that "we work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by next to nothing: our daily pattern isn't random, it's 'bursty.'" I'm in it for his methodology more than for his findings: Barabasi has developed this theory by culling data from our digital lives. "Mobile phones, the Internet, and email," he writes, "have made human activities more accesible to quantitative analysis, turning our society into a huge research laboratory. All those electronic trails of time-stamped texts, voice-mails, and searches add up to a previously unavailable massive data set that tracks our movements, our decisions, our lives. Analysis of these trails is offering deep insights into the rhythm of how we do everything." I'll be interested to see how he converts that mass of data into an argument, and I'll be interested to see if I buy it.

JOSH COCHRAN

The Passage by Justin Cronin is hands down the best book you'll read all summer. Not just another "vampire book", Cronin is able to describe a post apocalyptic world with such vivid detail I was instantly hooked. It contains mutated vampires, government conspiracies and "Lost Boys"-like characters all set against a savage, wasted world. You'll be taken on a horrific journey where you'll undoubtedly find yourself cringing and sweaty-palmed at 4 o'clock in the morning, glued to the pages. This book is definitely a guilty pleasure. Don't judge me!

JOSHUA FOUST

Nabokov's Pale Fire is, to me, the consummate summer book—that is, one best read in a single sitting, in a place far away from home. It rewards linear reading, but I'd say it's best enjoyed with two physical, paper copies, so you can read the epic poem and the confounding footnotes that drive the "actual" plot at the same time... unless you enjoy flipping the book so often the pages practically wear out (as happened to me the first time I read it while wasting away from food poisoning on a train in central Kazakhstan). Like many of Nabokov’s novels, it is exhilarating, exhausting, and leaves you at the end with a mute sense of wonder at what he manages to wrangle out of our language.

MIKE INNES

Definitely Matt Gallagher's Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War. I've only recently started diggging in to all the new Iraq and Afghanistan memoirs that have been published over the last few years - I find them to be real troves of insight into problems of social distance and psychological alienation. Most of what I've focused on so far have been those written by journalists - Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, Rajiv Chandrasekharan's Imperial Life in the Emerald Palace (what a great title), and George Packer's The Assassin's Gate. Gallagher's book will be the first soldier memoir I tackle, and I'm looking forward to it.

WILLIAM O’HARA

I'm particularly interested in reading Breakpoint, by Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism chief of the Clinton and Bush administrations.  The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act was recently introduced in the US Senate, which would provide the President with an internet "kill switch". It may be helpful to read more about the potential worst-case scenario of technological armageddon that Clarke described in the book, before forming an opinion on the legislation that’s currently being developed. 

ZACH PETERSON

George Will’s Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball tops my list of summer must-reads. After two years of living in Europe, I've developed a creeping nostalgia for America’s national pastime. With a premium on intelligence and coordination, baseball allows for a guy like David Eckstien (5’7" - 177 pounds) to be no less valuable to his team than a steroid-jacked freak like - well, most power hitters in the 1980s and ‘90s. The game’s ability to survive and even thrive after the steroid debacle is predicated on the game's appeal to the everyman. At 5’10", 180 pounds, that’s something I can get behind.

ERIC RANDOLPH

Having had David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla stolen from my bag last year, I'm finally going to read it this summer. There's added interest now since the Afghan mission looks increasingly doomed despite people listening to wise souls like Kilcullen. I hear great things about Curfewed Night, about the Kashmir conflict, and in fiction, I might give David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest a go. I read the first chapter in a hostel once and it was very weird. Otherwise, I can’t go wrong with some Philip Roth.

GREG J. SMITH

At the risk of sounding dated, my key summer read is William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956). Over the past few years I've been developing a minor obsession with scientific management and office culture and it is time to finally pay homage to this classic text. A few years ago I stumbled across Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool (2004) and it profoundly changed how I think about design and information aesthetics. Since I'm interested in how the organizational hierarchies of corporate culture drove the design standards of the late 20th century workplace, Whyte's text is obviously an essential read.

TIM STEVENS

Hot on the heels of Christopher Andrew’s history of the Security Service (MI5) and the first part of Keith Jeffery’s examination of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ completes a recent triad of treatments of UK spook institutions.  The difference with Professor Aldrich’s book is that it doesn't come with the imprimatur of his subject, nor was he granted access to its archives — GCHQ has yet to open up in quite the fashion of its sister services.  It remains, as the subtitle to Aldrich’s 448-page whopper suggests, "Britain’s most secret intelligence agency."

KATHERINE TIEDEMANN

Thomas Barfield's Afghanistan has been sitting on my nightstand for a few weeks now, and I'm hoping to get to it this summer for a comprehensive, academic history of the country at the forefront of the U.S.'s foreign policy. I've also just picked up Jere Van Dyk's Captive, his deeply personal account of the time he spent while kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008. As for more traditional "summer reading," I just blew through the three Stieg Larsson books about the adventures of Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his troubled investigator friend Lisbeth Salander, and while the books are not exactly high culture, they were definitely page-turners.

TONY WATERS

I used to be an Africanist, or rather I am still an Africanist, but have not been engaged with the subject for several years. So a prime summer reading goal is Gerard Prunier’s Africa’s World War: Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. It is a meaty read of 368 pages, with another 160 of notes and indexes designed to appeal to my scholarly sensibilities. An excellent read for many planned summer flights and hotel rooms in…Asia, where I'll be traveling this summer.