Last Friday, I got one of those 25%-off-a-single-book-regular-price-only coupons from Borders Rewards, which, naturally, I felt compelled to use. Of course, we all know that the purpose of a coupon isn’t really to give us price breaks, but to get us in stores; and I have no doubt there’s marketing research somewhere that confirms that once coupon-bearers get in stores, they do a whole lot more than purchase just what the coupon calls for. That’s true for me, anyway, especially when I go on bookstore runs, during which I usually visit several bookstores within my stomping grounds and seldom (probably never) come home empty-handed.

This bookstore run was no different; the magical coupon gave me three pleasant hours of browsing about the store that set me back about 80 bucks. The first fifteen were on there way out of my pocket as soon as I walked in and saw This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin on one of those conveniently-placed, book-filled tables just inside the door. It was the last copy from a stack that had once been there, and this blurb on the back cover totally got me:

Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin argues that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language.

If I ever wanted to direct my energies toward something completely outside the interests that have come to dominate my life lately, I’d embark on a detailed study of music and its cultural meaning. I have believed for a long time that there was something more to the mental characteristics of music than is typically recognized; I would probably even go so far as to suggest that music is significant to human beings because it has an important relationship to the way the mind actually works — especially to the way the mind forms (and comes to understand) complex concepts. That’s way outside the scope of a short entry about a bookstore run; but I expect as I read Levitin’s book, I’ll spend some time exploring this a little more. I also just discovered that Levitin is appearing locally in Decatur, Georgia at Wordsmiths Books on September 15, so now I’ll need to see if I can get through the book by then and attend the event. I haven’t been to Wordsmiths yet, so it will be a good reason to go. (If you’re interested in learning more about the store, they have a blog, and are new enough to the Atlanta independent bookstore scene that you could even start with their opening press release, We’re proud to announce that Decatur has a new independent bookstore, from earlier this year.)

Next, I went looking for a couple of business/work/life/career books, because I had been following both authors’ blogs. I bought Marci Alboher’s One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success and Ben Casnocha’s My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley. Neither of these books is my typical fare; I haven’t read books of this type in a long time because so many of them seem filled with buzzwords, and they all sound alike. Still, from what I’ve read of Alboher’s work and from grazing through the book, I think she’s on to something with this notion of “slash careers” — and my interest in that stems from some discussions in the Science and Technology in Western Culture class I took early this year, as well as from my own thinking on the way I’ve been splitting my life into several distinct sets of activities over the past few years.

When I originally returned to school, I assumed I was preparing to replace my current career with another, but then began wondering if that was necessary, or even desirable. When I came across Alboher’s writing on The Heymarci Blog — starting with the first article I read, Slash Careers as Works in Progress — I realized there were some emerging ideas about careers that coincided with my own thinking. What had seemed like a strange notion in my head at the time suddenly became something much different. More on all of this when I read the book.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it was from Ben Casnocha that I first heard of Marci Alboher, when he wrote a short but lively review of her book. Not everything Casnocha writes is short by any means, but everything he writes is lively. I’m only about thirty pages into his book, but it reads with the same pace at which you can imagine him running through an airport, and you realize you’re following along, caught up, and not even panting. As with the other books I’ve mentioned here tonight, more on My Start-Up Life as I get further into it.

Finally, I bought a new book on writing that looked fresh and different,
Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark. If I can manage the time for it, I’ll write about the exercises in the book (which are definitely not typical of a writing instruction book) as I work through them. To learn more about Clark, take a look at his blog and note that he’s hosting a web seminar later in September.