My friend Carolyn circulated a list of books she’d found especially enjoyable in 2006, saying “I was hoping for a reciprocal list from a like-minded biblio-omnivore…”, and it got me thinking about books and other stuff of 2006. Turns out to be quite a challenge to summarize, particularly when one strays from the printed page and tries to summarize engagement with the various media that brighten one’s days. <\/p>\n
I read quite differently than I did when I was employed –no classes to prepare, nobody to please but myself– but the inspirations are as varied as ever. I don’t seem to have stopped buying books, though the rate has slowed considerably. I re-read a lot of stuff, especially Terry Pratchett (either you do or don’t understand WHY one would do that), and I’m in and out of lotsa books that I don’t read cover to cover. Here’s a list for the year<\/a> of memorable ones that I did<\/i> finish (or am surely working on as we speak).<\/p>\n I realized that my Netflix history would tell another facet of the media tale, so I extracted that<\/a>. Anybody with a day job will be envious of the time I’ve clearly spent in viewing mode.<\/p>\n Web video has attracted a lot of my interest in the last year, mostly via YouTube, and I’ve grabbed a lot of Flash video files (but don’t feel the need to catalog them here… but see this one<\/a> for all you need to know about WHY the medium Matters). I’m also a devoted follower of Ze Frank’s daily The Show<\/a> . <\/p>\n A lot of hours during the year were spent walking or otherwise exercising, usually with MP3s in the ears, mostly talk. Radio Open Source<\/a> is absolutely GOLDEN, viz: Bach’s Chaconne<\/a> (24MB, about 50 minutes). This American Life<\/i><\/a>‘s archives were open for a while, and are now being podcast one at a time. And then there’s WFMU<\/a>, and especially Secret Museum of the Air with Citizen Kafka and Pat Conte<\/a>. I download a LOT of mp3 stuff, NONE of it from the pay-by-the-drink sites.<\/p>\n Every day includes a couple of hours of blog reading, from a list of some 300-odd that I follow (some fall off, some fall on). Boing Boing<\/a>, Language Log<\/a>, Informed Comment<\/a>, EatingAsia<\/a>, several<\/a> Google<\/a> Earth<\/a> blogs<\/a>… those are the absolute essentials, and I’m still following IT Conversations<\/a> and Stephen Downes’ Edu_RSS<\/a>, but getting further from the IT and pedagogical interests that used to be pretty central.<\/p>\n I’ve bought CDs during the year, probably more than I’d like to admit. Making a list would be ummmmmm dangerous… and I also acquired my late brother David’s vinyl holdings, many hundreds of records across quite a few genres and including a couple of hundred Bach, and hundreds of hours of cassette tapes of Bach, Vivaldi, etc. I’m gradually thinking through what to DO with that trove (satrting with cataloging, a daunting prospect).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My friend Carolyn circulated a list of books she’d found especially enjoyable in 2006, saying “I was hoping for a reciprocal list from a like-minded biblio-omnivore…”, and it got me thinking about books and other stuff of 2006. Turns out to be quite a challenge to summarize, particularly when one strays from the printed page […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}