What I read during our recent trip

A certain someone (Ryan F.) has compared me unfavorably with my pal over at Sunny Southwest, saying that I don't post as often as she does. Sad but true. In that spirit, I'm going to concentrate in April on posting and not worrying so much about links or multimedia.

We got back from a trip to Pittsburgh this week. The spouse raised his eyebrows because I brought four books on a five-day trip, but I'm glad I did.

I finished Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin on the plane. This is the memoir (it became a movie) of a chess dad and how his little son became national champion. Lots of interesting stuff on where a parent's ambition ends and a child's begins. The father and son also go to Russia for an exhibition -- this is the 1980s, the Soviet era -- and there are fascinating examinations of how the Russian government viewed chess players as important symbols for the promotion of communism and thereby corrupted the game.

I finished The Web Library for my library science class "Digital Libraries." It's a guide to free, high-quality information sources on the Web. My biggest gripe about this book is that it was published in 2002 and some of it is out of date. But it had interviews with information professionals that I found useful and have blogged about previously.

I also finished The Ha-Ha on this trip, which I will blog about later as our book group is meeting tonight to discuss it. (It was very good.)

I did not get to read my fourth book, Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, by Alex Wright. It's good and I'm about halfway through it. It starts at the beginning of human history, and I'm in the Dark Ages right about now.

So reading three out of four books is not a bad record for this trip.