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Making an effort this week to finish up books I have picked up or been sent to me by publishers, PR folks and authors, so I can review them….and two books pulled from the ominous antilibrary.

 Here’s what is currently on my desk and nightstand:

Reading and taking notes:

Grand Strategies by Charles Hill
Narcos Over the Border by Dr. Robert J. Bunker (Ed.)
TEMPO by Dr. Venkat Rao
Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson

This would be an interesting group of authors to put on a panel for a strategy-related question, such as – “How can we fix our AfPak policy?” – as you would get a high-level practitioner-policy wonk-cognition expert mix.

TEMPO is not yet available for sale, but Dr. Rao was kind enough to send me a PDF of his manuscript, which I am reading on my iPad along with another author’s manuscript and a screenplay, both of which are embargoed. I’m enjoying them all but reading most of them for review is slower going than just reading one for my own interest. I frequently end up taking detours because the authors bring up so many intriguing points. For example, Charles Hill has a section on Grand Strategies on Montaigne, the brilliant intellectual diplomat of the politically tumultuous French Renaissance and Father of the literary essay. Hill made a number of assertions, so I stopped, pulled a copy of The Essays ( which I have never read) off a shelf, flipped it open to a page, and started reading for and discovered that a) Hill was right and b) it will be a profitable use of my time to go back and read The Essays some day.

Next Up in the Queue:

The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War by Drs. Williamson Murray, Richard Hart Sinnreich and James Lacey (Ed.)
Counterinsurgency by Dr. David Kilcullen

The first book I mentioned recently, the second is one I have had sitting unread for quite a while but I need to read for an article I started writing. Among practitioners and policy makers, Colonel Kilcullen is the George Kennan of COIN.

What are you reading?

A lighthearted exchange in the comments section here last week prompted a reconsideration of the future of this blog. In a modest way, Zenpundit as a personal solo project had a good run.  It is time to move forward and initiate some changes. Perhaps, many changes.

First and foremost, I would like to start by welcoming Charles Cameron as co-blogger. Over the past year or so, Charles has been an increasingly frequent guest poster here, introduced with the short bio:

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute

There is more to Charles than that, which he will make evident in due time. His deep knowledge of theology and comparative religious culture, social psychology and powers of horizontal thinking would make Charles Cameron a welcome addition to any blog, magazine, editorial staff or university faculty. I am extremely pleased to have him here as an author because the insights that Charles can bring to bear on contemporary issues will extend the analytical reach and audience of Zenpundit.

 His body of work here simply speaks for itself.

I’d like to thank Joseph Fouche, T. Greer and Scott Shipman for nudging me in this direction. Also, Lexington Green, who years earlier encouraged me to bring the period of solo blogging to an end and who cordially invited me to break bread at his home with Charles. Sage advice, all.

Welcome aboard, Mr. Cameron.

Every year I make an effort to increase my reading of books during the summer months. Inevitably, I fail at completing whatever overambitious reading list that I compose while somehow finding time to read other books that were never on the list. This year was no exception.

Starting this weekend, I am going to be reviewing all the books I did read from late May to early September. It was an eclectic collection and I hope to complete this series of posts by mid-September. A few reviews that have already appeared in this time period will be re-posted to make the series complete.

Readers are free to offer comments and recommendations about their own favorite summer books or their idiosyncratic reading habits as the series rolls along……

To the ominously increasing antilibrary and the waning summer reading bookpiles:

Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak

Spook Country by William Gibson

Hope to start  a couple of these by the end of the month. A number of other books to be finished first.

I have a new decentralized reading strategy that seems to be helping me wad through books faster. Books that I am reading are distributed to be read in different places – one in my gym bag for the treadmill; one in my car in case there’s time to kill at an appointment or at a restaurant; one or two books downstairs to read on the couch or outside on the deck; one to take to the pool with the kids and four of five on my bedstand. There are also a store of books on my iPad, “just in case”.

The strategy allows me to concentrate on finishing several books – my “primary” reads – even as I steadily chip away at the rest and there are enough choices available to suit my mood on any given day so it doesn’t feel like I am doing a literary marathon. Books that I am focusing on, usually histories, strategic studies and social science works, I will mark up with marginalia and the others are just read without recourse to notation.

How do you handle your reading time?

Posts have been slow here lately because my real-life workload has temporarily increased. Irrationally, I’ve attempted to compensate for my lack of blogging by ordering yet more books; perhaps I should order more free time instead!

 In any event, esteemed readers, @cjschaefer and @CampaignReboot have requested a full accounting of what is new and here it is:

 Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh

Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop by Antonio Giustiozzi

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter

Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall

The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans

The War Lovers by Evan Thomas

The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch

Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Energizes the Soul by Stuart Brown

Rewired by Larry D. Rosen

The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture by “Ishmael Jones“

Coupled with what was leftover from last year, my 2010 summer reading list is set.