Reading List: February 2010

For some reason these monthly recaps of my reading have also become a place for me to keep those who read this space updated on my scholarship and academic life, and though I am not all that traditional, I do not like change all that much either. As such, I haven't spent as much time as I would have liked working on my conference paper on hyperlink cinema, but I do have a decent outline. Currently, I am working on the tone, wanting to move away from the style of reading a paper to tailoring a presentation for an audience, a skill in which I possess some talent that I would like to further cultivate. I've spent a lot of time the past week or so watching the presentations given at the various TED conferences, and I'm planning something along these lines. If this approach is successful, I think it will go a long way in helping me make a name for myself in the field, for hopefully at future conferences I will start to generate preliminary buzz. That said, I worry that such an approach may not be met with respect due to being outside the norm. However, I have got to be me.

March 1st was the date by which graduate programs were to let me know their decisions on admission to a doctoral program, yet that day ended without a letter, email, or phone call. Perhaps that's holding them too strictly to a standard, but somehow I feel like if my application would have come a day (or more?) late then it wouldn't have been accepted. The stress over the uncertainty is palpable, for so many decisions that affect not only my life but also the lives of my wife and others wait in the interim. And while a friend of mine received an acceptance email last week, I am unsure whether or not to wait on a letter like I did for college thirteen years ago.

To the point of this post, a list of the books I read in February, there were 4 books and 7 graphic novels. Here is what they were:

• Ex Machina: Dirty Tricks by Brian K. Vaughan & Tony Harris
• Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns by Geoff Johns, et al.
• You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
• Green Lantern: Agent Orange by Johns & Philip Tan
• DMZ: War Powers by Brian Wood & Riccardo Burchielli
• Precipice by David Mack
• Green Lantern Corps: Emerald Eclipse by Peter J. Tomasi & Patrick Gleason
• Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman
• Flight, Volume 4 edited by Kazu Kizbuishi
• Strangers in Paradise: Pocket Book 1 by Terry Moore

Anyone interested in technology or Web 2.0 needs to read Lanier's book, something I should have written about while I still had a copy. I was a bit underwhelmed by the Green Lantern stories, making me a bit skeptical concerning Blackest Night, though I'll almost certainly read it. And I think Chuck Klosterman is doing the sort of thing with journalism that I'd like to do in academia: writing seriously, if humorously, about semi-serious things.

Give me some feedback, ask me some questions, tell me about your most recent dream, etc.