Time // 9:45 a.m., although I’ve already been up for two hours today…

Place // At my desk

Eating // Apples, Wheat Thins and cheddar cheese

Drinking // Black tea

Reading // It feels like I read a lot this week, but when I went to check in on Goodreads it turns out I only finished one book — The Boys in the Boat by Daniel Brown (out June 4 from Viking Books). But that one book was such a good read, it was totally worth it. I’m a junkie for sports nonfiction, so The Boys in the Boat, a story about the 1936 Olympic eight-man rowing team, was just up my alley. I loved it.

Today I’ve been reading The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, which is wonderful in a totally different way. I am really enjoying the twisting in time structure and the way Wolitzer has captured some deep and true things about friendship and achievement and jealousy and love.

Reading Along // I’ve now gotten myself into three “readalong” type projects for the summer. My sister and I made plans to re-read the Harry Potter series, which we’ve been talking about for like a year but finally put on the calendar. I’m doing a Bible study with some close friends of mine, which is fascinating and wonderful and challenging since I’m not a person who has ever thought about the Bible. And I decided to join a summer readlong of Stephen King’s Under the Dome being hosted mostly by Natalie at Coffee and a Book Chick. I’m not planning to do updates here on the blog, but I’m hoping to be more active on Twitter with the #DomeAlong hashtag. It’s a lot of “committed” pages, but I think it’s doable? We’ll see, I guess!

Watching // I don’t think I’ve watched anything interesting this week, but I know the boyfriend and I are going to settle into a few episodes of Arrested Development tonight when he gets home from work. I’m so excited!

Listening // I have had really bad luck with audiobooks lately. I lost interest in Outlander (I know!) and may give up on Insurgent (Tris and Four are super melodramatic…). I downloaded And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, which I’m optimistic will be good.

Making // I finally got the supplies to make this amazing sampler! I’m only through the B, I and T, but I think it’s going to be awesome.

Blogging // It felt like a bit of a slow week on the blog, but it was gratifying to get so many lovely comments on my gushing “review” of All the President’s Men. And it looked like there were a lot of new or unfamiliar commenters — thank you!

Promoting // Over at Book Riot, I wrote a post about 5 perfect books for The cOlbert Book Club that I think is fun. If you haven’t watched that episode of The Colbert Report, I highly recommend it.

This is a little old, but I thought this piece from Margaret Sullivan, public editor at the New York Times, about repeat book reviews across NYT properties was interesting.

Hating // Something is wrong the mouse and/or keyboard for my computer where it refuses to highlight thing correctly. I have no idea what is going on. Also, people who change the subject lines in e-mail replies. Why?

Appreciating // I got many thoughtful comments on the couple of survey questions I asked during my blogiversary giveaway. They’re giving me some good suggestions for things to keep doing and ways to keep evolving this blog. I don’t anticipate any major changes at the moment, but I’ve got some ideas to noodle around.

Wanting // I am so excited for my vacation at the beginning of July. I’m going to take a road-trip down to Madison, Wisconsin to visit friends and get day drunk on the Terrace, then swing up to my parents’ cabin in northern Wisconsin for the 4th of July weekend. I just can’t wait.

Anticipating // Although I’m starting to feel bummed that I’m not going to be in New York for Book Expo America this year, I am excited to get to fully participate in Armchair BEA. I think I’m going to skip post any new book reviews this week and focus the blog on the daily discussion topics. Sorry in advance to non-blogging readers — I’ll be back to regularly scheduled bookish posts next week.

I’m 26-years-old, not even close to old enough to remember Richard Nixon’s presidency and the Watergate scandal. But ever since I knew I wanted to be a journalist, I’ve meant to read All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein:

In the most devastating political detective story of the century, two Washington Post reporters, whose brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation smashed the Watergate scandal wide open, tell the behind-the-scenes drama the way it really happened.

Beginning with the story of a simple burglary at Democratic headquarters and then continuing with headline after headline, Bernstein and Woodward kept the tale of conspiracy and the trail of dirty tricks coming — delivering the stunning revelations and pieces in the Watergate puzzle that brought about Nixon’s scandalous downfall. Their explosive reports won a Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post and toppled the President. This is the book that changed America.

I have a serious weakness for books about the history of journalism or books that show how the process of journalism works. Watergate is one of those huge moments in the history of my profession, a time when the full power and importance of the press was made totally obvious. If it weren’t for the work of Woodward, Bernstein, and other journalists at major newspapers and magazines around the country, Nixon and his closest aides would have gotten away with a massive political conspiracy. It’s awesome they were caught! By reporters!

As you probably can’t tell, this isn’t a proper review because I couldn’t honestly tell readers at large (or even a reader individually) whether or not I think this would be a good book for them to read. It’s just so very particular and so tied into my interests as a journalist and a political junkie that I can’t really think about it as “literature” in the same way I can about other works of nonfiction that I’ve read.

Part of what I loved about this book was how “inside baseball” the whole thing was about the process of journalism. Every chapter details how Woodward and Bernstein went about gathering information or putting together key puzzle pieces in the process of uncovering the Watergate scandal. Given that the book was originally written in 1974, almost before the full extent of Watergate was revealed, there are a lot of vague sources and veiled references to who each of the journalist talked with to confirm key details. That was  fascinating to me because showed how committed both Woodward and Bernstein were to protecting their sources (an important value for a journalist).

It was also cool to really see how the process of old-school reporting works. Today we rely so heavily on the Internet for information, it’s easy to be lazy about looking up things as basic as a phone number, address or job title. But when the Washington Post reporters were trying to track down a lead, they often had nothing but the phone book and a long afternoon to try and get what they needed. I admired Woodward and Bernstein’s tenacity and willingness to just put in the amount of time it takes to do a big story like this, particularly the time it takes to let a story develop and see how the pieces will fit together.

I think it’s easy to get down on journalism today, especially if you just look at what is happening online or on cable news (which… don’t even get me started). If All the President’s Men did one thing for me, it was remind me how much the big picture, investigative, combative but factual type of reporting matters. I love my job as a community journalist, and I know for a fact that I don’t have the personality to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. But someone has to do good journalism like this ethically and effectively to keep people in power honest. When the good stuff happens, it matters. And now I’ll get off my soapbox.

I loved this book. I had a ton of fun reading it, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily a book for everyone.

I feel like these two reviews, You by Austin Grossman and World War Z by Max Brooks, are a long time coming. I read both of them back in April, then just procrastinated on putting together even some short thoughts. In brief, I liked both of these books well enough, but I didn’t love them in a way that’d make me recommend them unequivocally  as I have some books in the past. Read on to find out why!

You by Austin Grossman

When Russell joins Black Arts games, brainchild of two visionary designers who were once his closest friends, he reunites with an eccentric crew of nerds hacking the frontiers of both technology and entertainment. In part, he’s finally given up chasing the conventional path that has always seemed just out of reach. But mostly, he needs to know what happened to Simon, the strangest and most gifted friend he ever lost, who died under mysterious circumstances soon after Black Arts’ breakout hit.

Then Black Arts’ revolutionary next-gen game is threatened by a mysterious software glitch, and Russell finds himself in a race to save his job, Black Arts’ legacy, and the people he has grown to care about. The bug is the first clue in a mystery leading back twenty years, through real and virtual worlds, corporate boardrooms and high school computer camp, to a secret that changed a friendship and the history of gaming. The deeper Russell digs, the more dangerous the glitch appears–and soon, Russell comes to realize there’s much more is at stake than just one software company’s bottom line.

I think I went into You with slightly misplaced expectations. Because it was about video games and because Austin Grossman is Lev Grossman’s brother, I had this idea that You would be a mix between two books I really love — Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and The Magicians by Lev Grossman. But given how much I adore both of those stories, it’s an entirely unfair standard to judge You by.

But even when I managed to adjust my expectations, I think You fell a little bit short. There are three threads to the story — the making of a video game, the experience of playing video games, and the history of a video game company — but they’re not equally interesting. The characters are what really drive this story, so when they’re “off screen,” so to speak, while Russell is playing through the Black Arts backlist, the book flounders. Still, parts of this book were a ton of fun (I loved, for example, a scene when a demo for the game goes hideously and violently awry in front of a room of games journalists) and I’m glad I read it, even if it wasn’t a perfect read.

World War Z by Max Brooks

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

On the one hand, I love the idea behind World War Z. It is a shining example of one of my genre weaknesses, process dystopia (thanks to Jenny of Jenny’s Books for the term), in which the reader spends the whole book watching the world slowly decline into chaos. And so from that standpoint, I enjoyed reading the book and had a lot of fun with it.

The problem I had is that I don’t think Brooks fully executed the concept. The book is supposed to be a collection of oral histories, but nearly all of the characters sounded exactly the same. What’s the point of writing the book in this format if it’s impossible to distinguish most of the narrators from one another? When I mentioned this book during the Readathon, several people mentioned that the audio book is done like a radio play with multiple narrators. I wish I’d listened to the book rather than read it, since I think that could have covered this flaw a little bit.

Disclosure: I borrowed a copy of You from a friend and borrowed a copy of World War Z from the library. 

Photo Credit: albertogp123 via Flickr

Time // 8:50 a.m.

Place // My sister’s couch in Minneapolis

Eating and Drinking // At the moment, a glass of water. But I hope we’re going to go out and get some fancy coffee and donuts soon.

Reading // I had to go look at my Goodreads queue to figure out what I’ve been reading this week! It’s been one of those sorts of busy, no time to settle in sorts of weeks. But I did finish two books, All the President’s Men by Carl Woodward and Bob Bernstein and Queen of the Ait by Dean Jensen, which is a June release about the two most famous circus aerialists in the 1930s. I thought it was awesome.

Yesterday I stared reading The Boys in the Boat by Danie James Brown, which is about the U.S. Olympic crew team in 1936. I have a total weak spot for historial sports nonfiction, so this one seems to be right up my alley so far. I’m also slowly making my way through Getting Things Done but David Allen and getting nerdy excited to try implementing his systems to get my life more organized.

Watching // I didn’t have much time to watch much this week. I think I forgot to mention that I finished season four of Fringe last week or the week before (the season got MUCH better about six episodes in), but I’m holding off a bit on starting the final, abberviated season. This week was all about season finales for the shows I’ve been into. My sister and I watched the finale of The Office last night, and although it was a bit heavy-handed it was also nostalgic and funny and lovely.

Listening // I’m taking a break from my current audio book — Insurgent by Veronica Roth — to catch up on some of my favorite podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour. I love those guys, but I’m bad at keeping up week-to-week and so end up getting caught up in big batches.

Working // I have had a crazy couple of weeks at work, but they’ve been the good, lots of news to cover and write about kind of crazy. This Friday I got to come down to the Twin Cities to see our local FFA (Future Farmers of America) chapter teach some inner city elementary school kids about where their food comes from. There is really nothing more fun than taking photos of little kids with animals.

Updating // Last week I mentioned a phone photography class that I was thinking about signing up for. I decided to just go for it, and I’m happy about that decision. I take a lot of photos on my phone, but I want to improve them. I think that’ll be fun. Plus, starting it on the week of my vacation will be fun because I’ll have new and interesting things to take pictures of.

Anticipating // My sister and I are heading out to do some shopping this morning, including a stop at Half Price Books, one of my favorite places to visit. I got rid of about 20 books this week, so I’m anxious to sell a few (and see what goodies I can bring home). After that, we’re meeting one of my best friends from college for brunch at a place that does $2 mimosas. Yum.

Organizing // The “to do” list application that I have been using, Astrid, appears to be going away thanks to an acquisition by Yahoo. So I’m shopping around different apps and looking for some recommendations. Right now I’m testing out Remember the Milk and Todoist, but I can’t seem to make up my mind on either.

Wanting // I would love if there was a way to teleport from where I live to the Cities. The drive isn’t long, about 2.5 hours, but it’s awfully boring. I’m not really looking forward to it this afternoon.

Apologizing // I’m sorry for any typos in this post! I’m writing it on my tablet in the WordPress app, and I don’t think there’s a way to do spell check… that’s annoying!

Hmm… I’m at the end of the post, and I don’t think I’ve explained any of the photos in my picture at the top… so, from top left going clockwise: the sign in front of a grocery store that is owned by a distant relative, Hannah stretching in a super weird way, some art that I bought last week, and my current read, The Boys in the Boat.

Happy Sunday, everyone! What are you reading today!