News & Updates
We all (I hope) have our habits and approaches to help us with self-care and managing our sanity.
Most of you know that I like to exercise. Earlier this month, I took an acoustic cycling trip (pedal power only) from Bozeman, Montana, through Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons to Jackson, Wyoming. The trip brought to life Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: “The good of going into the mountains is that life is reconsidered.”
This week is also my first week using Hal Higdon’s guide to train for a half-marathon, which I am scheduled to run in December. Having a specific date gives me some sense of control of my calendar when there is really no control. It gets my mind off work, and when I am running, my mind is free to wonder about what is possible rather than dwelling on problems.
Yet reading — which research says can strengthen the brain, increase empathy, reduce stress, etc. — anchors me! As Mark Twain reminds us, reading is only valuable whenever you do it. As he said, “The [person] who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
While president at Montgomery County Community College (Pennsylvania), I started sharing my summer reading list as part of my opening fall convocation comments, and a tradition was born. I carried the tradition to ATD, and I use our annual Data and Analytics Summit to share my list.
This year’s list, my 24th annual, includes a mix of nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and biography/memoir. Admittedly, though unplanned, this year’s list is heavy on nonfiction. I have “stacks” of fiction titles in my bedroom and on my iPad, but my head took me in a different direction this year as I was focused on learning more about AI and digital transformation of organizations that might inform ATD’s thinking on our updated Institutional Capacity Framework.
I love poetry, and the two books on this year’s list that graced my bedstand this summer gave me a chance to read one poem a day, usually at night, as a form of meditation.
I read fiction on the beach, and three of the fiction authors on this year’s list are among my favorites. Percival Everett is new to me, but his book, James, a retelling of Huck Finn’s travel on the Mississippi from the perspective of Huck’s friend Jim, the escaped slave, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and will be a classic.
Memoir and biography have always been my favorite forms of literature. I am two-thirds through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story, about her late husband and a journey through the 1960s, which has many parallels to the times we are in now.
My 2024 Summer Reading List
Nonfiction
- Recoding America: How Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Palika
- The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao
- The Age of Grievance by Frank Bruni
- Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
- The Digital Mindset: What it Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI by Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley
Poetry
- You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited and introduced by Ada Limón, Poet Laureate of the U.S.
- A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver
Fiction
- Long Island by Colm Tóibín
- James by Percival Everett
- Lessons by Ian McEwan
- Day by Michael Cunningham
Biography/Memoir
- Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Marcus
- An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin
