World Is Round: Books

World is Round

On living halfway around the world and having an opinion on just about everything. By Jen.

Subscribe to The World is Round's Feed
Receive instaneous updates of this site via Bloglines or your other favorite feed reader

My Flickr Stream
If you are familiar with RSS, you can subscribe to a feed of my best public photos (the ones I tag "RSS") or signup via email.

Data Mining
Matthew Hurst is Director of Research at Intelliseek, co-creator of BlogPulse, and Data Mining is this neat blog where I lurk to get my regular fix of maps, graphs and other wickedly cool quantitative presentations of the virtual universe
kiskeyAcity
My Heart's in Accra...
Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development and hacking the media.
Global Voices
Featuring people blogging about just about everything all over the world. Very cool. I am starting to become a digital democracy believer too
Ed Finn
Writer/Comp Lit Grad Student

Lawrence of Arabia
This movie is by far my favorite of the old 1960s period epics of the Dr. Zhivago / Ben Hur variety. Like the others, it's great eye candy (and by eye candy I mean both David Lean's stunning visual interpretation of the desert and a very yummy young Peter O'Toole). But it's also a lot smarter, darker and complicated as T.E. Lawrence, at least according to Lean, was a man of some demons. Prefer to read the book? Check out Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's detailed account of his escapades in what is now Egypt and Saudi Arabia as a young British officer.

Nick Flynn: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
I'm reading this book right now. Apparently it will soon be a movie starring someone in 2006. I checked out from the library (it's about a month overdue) and I had to repeat the title to the librarian about six times until we were both thoroughly embarassed since I don't think he quite believed me the first five times. Memoirs are something of a fad now, but this book is arguably the best one out there.
Jeffrey Herbst: States and Power in Africa
I first realized I wanted to be a political scientist while reading this book for the second time. Stresses imposed borders, population density and distribution, and the problem of "broadcasting" authority across vast tracts of sparsely populated lands as key challenges of African political development.
Jeanette Winterson: The Passion
The Passion, a story of a French peasant boy who cooks chickens in Napolean's army and the cross-dressing, web-footed Venetian daughter of a boatman he falls in love with, I fell in love with for its language. I haven't read a book this beautiful The Great Gatsby. Incidentally, I saw Jeanette Winterson at PEN World Voices 2006. She was humble and frank and really next to Chinua Achebe the most impressive person there.