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Due to a combination of good fortune, review copies sent by publishers and exercising wide-ranging discretion over a budget account at work, I’ve added an eclectic mix of tomes to the ever rising Antilibrary book pile.  Some of these are recommendations from readers left in my comment section last January ( working on improving my traditionally lame following -up skills)

   Alexander II The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky

    Engaging the Muslim World  by Juan Cole

    The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader by Peter Bergen

      The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato

                          and  The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx by Karl Popper

      Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

and   Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson

            How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

    Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets 

                                 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality  

                                by Charles Murray

   Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations 

                                by Clay Shirky

   The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age 

                                  by Joseph Turow & Lokman Tsui

  Islands in the Clickstream: Reflections on Life in a Virtual World 

                                   by Richard Thieme

Engaging the Muslim World is not long for the Antilibrary, as I have already begun reading it and will review it here soon. Some of these books can be read relatively quickly, a day or two but others, like The two volume The Open Society, I expect will require a greater investment of time and thought. It pays rich dividends though.

Note, Richard Thieme, despite his past as a scholar-clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, is not t be confused with the historicist, fundamentalist, theologian, Colonel R.B. Thieme.

UPDATED!:

Ha! A good one arrived today, courtesy of Columbia University Press:

   The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity

                                        by Antoine Bousquet

While I’m not much for formal lists, I do like to make some resolutions for change or improvement each year. Last year I was pretty good at following through on at least half of them and fair on most of the rest. Here are a few of mine for 2009, no particular order:

Read more books that are out of my field – especially those about Science:

While I’m an avid reader I noticed recently that my reading habits have gotten pretty narrow in the last few years and that’s not good. While drilling down on subjects that one already knows well increases expertise, learning new information is a critical catalyst for creativity and insight. Science holds so many keys for future evolution as a society that I feel a need to get a better grasp on the potential of major scientific trends. Book suggestions here from readers are welcome.

Become a better informed, more upscale, drunkard:

Excepting hot summer days and certain events, my consumption of beer has dwindled down to very occasional bottles of really good microbrew.  Wine and scotch are more appealing at social occasions or at dinner and I’d like to learn more about them. Not so much to become a connoisseur as to know what the hell I’m talking about and not waste money on bad selections. I picked up some Glenlivet for my friend Shane’s holiday roadtrip stopover but, alas, the Wizard & co. lost their way in Wisconsin 😉 and never arrived.

Diversify my workouts:

Having done bodybuilding and powerlifting for over twenty years, I’m experiencing some wear and tear issues from the repetitive stress as well as boredom. Every January, I tighten up my diet and intensify my training but this year I’m going to widen the spectrum of exercises, do more conditioning and try periodic cross-training.  I’d like to jump back into martial arts like Dan from Madison  ( though not Muay Thai, I ache enough from lifting weights) but given the time constraints of grad school, that will have to wait until 2010.

Take the kids on more “field trips”:

The Eldest and the Son of Zenpundit are now at an age where they will be able to appreciate museums, cultural events, outdoor sites and doing new things. Time to get out and explore!

Set and pursue strategic goals but include “downtime” as one of them:

I have to say that my lifestyle since midsummer was too frenetic to be healthy. While I had a lot of concrete and significant accomplishments in 2008 compared to previous years, I also took on too much, left many tasks unfinished, failed to follow up on occasion and shortchanged my best in order to do “more”. I fell into the habit of sleeping around 4 hours a night in order to read more, write, blog or get in mundane tasks and I’d keep it up until I either got sick or lapsed into unproductive vegging. It’s too much and I’m going to schedule more “unplugged” time and learn to say “No” to low priority or non-value added tasks ( this will be the hardest resolution for me to keep).

What are your resolutions ?

Spent much of the day working on an important outside project as well as tedious grad school assignments. Hit probably 2500-3000 words but unfortunately that was interspered with having to read and look up specific details, footnote etc. Plodded along steadily though.

Normal blogging will resume in a day or two.

I have a decent cell phone that doesn’t involve a switchboard operator named Mabel. Nice to be connected now everywhere.

I am currently working on an op-ed, about four grad school assignments, a sizable project for work ( 30 minute methodology presentation), a burst of administrivial but required paperwork for same, teaching, Saturday is a social event for work, Sunday has one for the family, I have two seminars in two different towns on Monday plus grad class in the evening. At night I try to blog and I’m reading Epictetus and a sizable manuscript in PDF format.

I’m beat. I ‘d like to read the 4GW Decision Making Manual and Friedman and Biddle’s monograph on Hezbollah and Lebanon but there simply is no time right now.

How do the rest of you full-agenda bloggers manage these schedules anyway?