Friday Reads

I love the trend of posting “Friday Reads” on blogs – and I intend to try and do it weekly here! Now that I am out of school (this is going to sound like a counter-intuitive statement), I am reading constantly again and it. is. awesome. I hope to never stop!

I’ve got two books going at the moment:

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers

I am like, the only person from my generation to have not read this book yet. I love Dave Eggers from McSweeny’s (and the column – he doesn’t write it but – Dispatches from a Public Librarian. It’s AMAZING) and from his work on the 826 Writing Centers. I started this book earlier this week and was crying before the end of the first chapter. I was thinking (and I don’t know why) that it would be funny so, uh, I’m hoping the whole this isn’t quite *this* heartbreaking. But it’s good. So. Yeah.

Performing Qualitative Cross-Cultural Research, by Pranee Liamputtong

This is the nerdiest book one could ever possibly read for ‘fun’ (as Mike likes to tell me every time he catches me reading it) but I am actually enjoying it. I am a co-chair for one of the training conferences for a unique study abroad program called InterFuture and all of the conference chairs are reading this book together (nerdy book club!!). We are having a discussion on it on Sunday so I really have to finish it soon. I am finding it interesting outside of InterFuture life, as well, as it provides tips that can be applied to both working with cross-cultural students and practicing the evaluation of library services (not specifically but things I’ve learned from this book can be applied there).