The Librarians Are Reading... Part II

On any given day I'm usually working on an eclectic mix of non-fiction and crime or mystery novels. In the latter category (my "brain candy") my latest was: The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri [Wikipedia profile].

On its face The Shape of Water is a standard police procedural. What distinguishes it from its cousins in this genre are the protagonist, the seafood-loving Inspector Salvo Montalbano, and the setting, Vigàta (said to be a thinly-veiled Porto Empedocle), the small town in Sicily whose society and politics Inspector Montalbo must navigate delicately in solving the crime.

In the non-fiction category, I'm just starting Beautiful Evidence by Professor Edward Tufte.

Beautiful Evidence is the fourth in a series of books on analytical design addressing  problems of conveying complex, multivariate information about numbers, statistics, processes, causality, etc. in the two-dimensional world of paper or the computer screen — or "flatland," as Tufte would put it. Beautiful Evidence "identifies excellent and effective methods for presenting information, suggests new designs, and provides tools for assessing the credibility of evidence presentations."

Tufte designs and publishes his books, each of which beautifully embodies the principles he is trying to convey. Since I spend a lot of my day looking at ways to better explain intricate techniques of legal research, I find Tufte's ideas and examples helpful and inspiring.

Chapter 7 of Beautiful Evidence is Tufte's devastating essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. After I read the first edition of this essay (which is available at this Zief Library call number: T 385 .T84 2003) I felt compelled to revamp all of my research presentations!

The incendiary debate over the war in Iraq has moved me to seek out soldiers' own accounts of their experiences, both in this war and the controversial war of my childhood, the war in Vietnam. So in addition to checking in regularly on The Sandbox, a convenient sampling of current milblogs, I've worked my way through a few works on each war: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction (interlinked stories set in Vietnam that at times blur the line between fact and fiction); John Crawford's The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq (by a National Guardsman who participated in the invasion in 2003 and ended up staying for the following year); Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, (about his time in Vietnam); and Brian Turner's Here, Bullet  (poetry inspired by his experiences in Iraq. Two poems from Here, Bullet are available on the web; another two poems, "Jameel" and "9-Line Medevac," — for which you'll need the actual book — nicely demonstrate the varying tones and themes of the entire collection.) All of this has been slow and harrowing going, made possible for me only be frequent applications of the mystery/crime novel "brain candy" mentioned above.