Reading List

Two things happened pretty much simultaneously today.

After I made my last post, I started reading the "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" article in prepartion for the class I'm teaching tomorrow.

Around the same time, reader Ioana commented on the post about the role of fatherhood to suggest that I read the book Halving it All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works.

Now, in the Google article, I came across this statement:

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

 The author, Nicholas Carr, suspects that he's experiencing this struggle because the way he is consuming media (primarily online) is literally changing the way his mind works. I've read enough Ong and McLuhan to buy the argument, but I still feel the urge to personally resist the phenomenon. I love books. I love prose. I want to be lost in it.

So, right after reading this article, I read Ioana's comment suggesting a book for me to read. How convenient. I realize that a lot of the intellectual work I've been doing in prepartion for parenting has been through short works: blog posts, articles, conversations, etc. No books yet.

You should know that I tend to overdo the reading thing. I hardly ever have one book at a time (on top of the fact that I'm also reading for the one PhD English class I'm taking this semester, which is about 20th century black culture).

So, I went to the library and got the suggested book as well as one about parenting biracial children. I then ordered a few more through inter-library loan. I probably won't read all of these books cover-to-cover, but I like the physicality of a book much more than an online review, so I will at least give them all a thorough look-through to determine which ones I want to read in their entirety.

The list:
Halving it All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works by Francine Deutsch
Partnership Parenting : How Men and Women Parent Differently--Why it Helps Your Kids and Can Strengthen Your Marriage by Kyle Pruett, Marsha Kline Pruett
NurtureShock : New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman
Is That Your Child? : Mothers Talk About Rearing Biracial Children by Marion Kilson and Florence Ladd
I'm Chocolate, You're Vanilla : Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-conscious World by Marguerite A. Wright