My Gadget Life

I’m back to the blog after more than a year of not posting! Today I felt inspired to write about some of the books I’ve been reading lately. It’s my habit to read several books at the same time. Here’s what I’m reading now:
- Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: how intelligence increases when you think less
- Slow is Beautiful: new visions of community, leisure and joie de vivre
- Why We Do What We Do: understanding self-motivation
- Better Off: flipping the switch on technology
- Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnick

These appeal to me because I’ve been thinking about the following: creativity and different kinds of creative thinking, the speed of modern culture and how we’re all dealing with information overload, why it’s easy to motivate oneself in certain areas but not others, how to make thoughtful conscious choices about technology, and the differences between everyday life and culture in the U.S. and other places (something I’ve always been interested in). Also Adam Gopnik is coming to Harvard Books soon to talk about his new book and I wanted to read this older one first. I’m about halfway through all of the above and I think the one I’m enjoying most is Hare Brain because of the interesting summaries of research about intuition, sudden insight, and the kind of creativity that comes with patience and stillness.

I’m in a book club and Friday night we had our last meeting with my friend Deb there. She’s moving to Madison, WI, to become head of the engineering library at U. Wisconsin. So we made this little collage of our smiling faces floating behind the book jackets of all the books we’ve read. We’ll miss Deb!