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Transcripts of Terkel’s interviews with men and women about their jobs. Absolutely fascinating.

An extraordinary self-referential novel. I will say no more because it’s best to experience it for yourself.

Morgan and Reynolds put the ‘Ethics Establishment’ on trial and find it wanting. The establishment in question is the network of federal regulations, federal regulators, lawyers, public interest groups, and corporations that has grown up since the Watergate scandal and which is concerned with the appearance of wrongdoing as much, or more than, actual wrongdoing itself.

The authors charge that a focus on appearances rather than substance is the principal cause of the loss of trust in government and business in the later part of the 20th century.

Allen explains, in rather extreme detail, his methods for attaining productivity without stress. His most effective and persuasive point is that you must get everything ‘out of your head’ and into a system in order to reduce the stress of ‘knowledge work’ (I hate that phrase).

The material is quite dry and could easily have been condensed into a pamphlet without a significant loss of information. After a few chapters of reading I opted for skimming the rest of the way.

I’ve decided to try recording at home and got a couple of titles to help me out. This one has been very helpful.

Wow. This is Sapolsky’s account of his experiences studying baboons in Africa. And it’s fantastic.

Lessig explores the benefits that the open architecture of the Internet has brought to innovation and creativity. He then turns to the reaction against this architecture by the entrenched stakeholders of the pre-Internet era, such as the music and film industries. His conclusion is pessimistic – the old is fighting successfully to protect itself against the new and stifling innovation in the process.

Baker teaches five fiddle tunes for fingerstyle guitar. I’m finding these quite challenging but enjoyable.

I bought this because it has an arrangement of Elizabeth Cotton’s Wilson Rag. I don’t much like the arrangement here, though, so I ended up learning it from another source. But there are some other good tunes in here and a transcription of an interesting interview of Van Ronk.

Beowulf: 3 Monsters: 1. And some very fine versifyin'.