“Just Moms” is out now! Amy’s got an essay in it, and it’s the first thing she’s ever had published. I’m super stoked for her, and can’t wait to read the whole book. It’s a bunch of essays written by moms on topics like non-violence, simplicity, and contentment. It’s got an unabashed Christian bias, though not all the essays are explicitly Christian. Also, the cover was designed by my skate buddy Darryl Brown!

Looking forward to reading it…

I love to read, and I’ve been moving more and more of my reading from paper to mobile devices since my first Palm whatever-it-was. I read a lot on my iPhone these days, and I’ve got my schtick down pat. Basically, in terms of categorizing content, you’ve got: books and articles. The articles are further broken into short form and long form. Short form can be considered blog posts, Twitter, Facebook updates, etc. Long form articles are what you’d be familiar with in a serious magazine or journal.

I’m not going to list out all the different ways you can read stuff on your particular digital setup. I just want to point out some good tools that I’m currently using. For books, I use the Kindle and Nook apps. Both are free, and both allow you to lend/borrow books from other users (someone’s gotta buy the book first, of course).

I acquire my short form articles via RSS, and I use Google Reader as the clearinghouse for storing my subscriptions. I use the native Google Reader web interface on my computer, and I use the Reeder app on my iPhone. Everything is sync’d up nicely. I have a lot of subscriptions, and I’m not particularly fastidious about reading every update that comes through every subscription every day. I’m totally comfortable “marking all as read” and just moving on. I’m confident that if I initially miss something that’s interesting/important, I’ll eventually see it.

Finally, the really great trick is with the longer form articles. I’ll run across stuff that I’m interested in reading, but just don’t have the time to read. I used to mark these with a star in Google Reader and revisit them from time to time. That didn’t work terribly well for me. These days I use an app called Instapaper. The app lives on my iPhone, but I also frequent the web site. Instapaper provides a bookmarklet that I click when I’m on a page with a longer article that I’d like to read later. It simply saves the article, with advertisements stripped out, for later viewing on mobile device or computer. It’s genius, and I use it all the time to read stuff during those previously wasted minutes standing in lines or waiting for others. It’s great. Instapaper is iPhone only, but Android users can achieve the same thing with Read It Later (also available on iPhone and other platforms). Instapaper and Read It Later work so well that there are now aggregators of long form articles that might be of interest. Check out Best of the Moment, The Essayist, Give Me Something To Read, and Longform. There is occasionally overlap with the offerings, but it’s worth the annoyance.

On top of all this, there are apps like Evernote which allow you to store your digital detrius, some of which might be important documents to which you may need quick access. I view these kinds of apps as more of a backup/storage solution for certain types of information, and not a primary location for general reading. Still, it has it’s place.

What’s your reading workflow?

I’m reading Griftopia by Matt Taibbi right now. It’s like an edgier and more recent version of Liar’s Poker. Taibbi is a journalist with Rolling Stone, and his writing style is pretty fast paced, a bit profane, well researched and definitely from his particular viewpoint. This book is an expanded version of this essay.

Liar’s Poker was a good story because of it’s first-person perspective. Lewis was personally involved in much of the book, and where he wasn’t, it was also well researched. Taibbi was “there” in the same sense that all Americans were “there” and his writing easily matches Lewis’ for depth and readability. Taibbi pulls no punches as he tirelessly walks the reader through the events leading up to the various financial crises of 2008. He devotes a whole chapter to Alan Greenspan, and utterly skewers him and the whole nutty Randian Objectivist movement. That chapter definitely made me think differently about Greenspan. While Greenspan was heading up the Federal Reserve, his economic analysis never quite seemed to add up, and now I’ve got a much better insight into why that may have been the case.

Taibbi walks you through the gas spike that happened during the Obama/McCain circus. That whole spike didn’t make sense to me back then, though I always figured it had something to do with instability due to peak oil. Turns out it was a direct result of some newly opened loopholes for commodities speculation, which were essentially closed to normal investors like you and me, but available to investment banks like Goldman Sachs.

And speaking of Goldman Sachs. Geez. He unloads on them (justifiably) throughout the book. Hilariously, he included a blurb from Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman) on the back of the book. Anyway, it’s a good read, though I’d be surprised if it didn’t make you more cynical about big business and government.

Just finished reading a great book called West of Jesus by Steven Kotler. I’m not going to do the full-on book review because this one already covers it perfectly. I will say, however, that I loved this book. It’s a quick and enjoyable read. I busted through half of it the day it came in the mail, and spread the other half over several evenings of bed-reading.

I enjoyed the read because it delved deeply into surfing, spirituality and science. Kotler isn’t a Christian, at least he never presents himself as such in the book (which has autobiographical elements), and I never quite got why Jesus is in the title (probably passed by me during one of those sleepy bed-reading sessions). So if you’re drawn to the book because of the title, you might reconsider.

I was sucked into the book because Kotler hinges much of what he writes about, as well as his recovery from Lyme disease, on the spiritual aspects of surfing. These aspects are near and dear to me–when I’ve skipped church on Sunday in favor of surfing, I’m more likely than not to call it “alterna-church.” The cleansing and renewing elements of surfing are difficult to describe, though they aren’t always there. Sometimes surfing is just a chore, other times it’s closer to a nightmare. But frequently it’s a watery communion with the Creator, and I cherish those times. Kotler’s descriptions of the spirituality of surfing rang very true to me.

A fair portion of the book is dedicated to Kotler’s quest to track down the source of a myth he heard while surfing. The basic gist of the myth is that there’s a Conductor who controls the waves and the weather, using a magical human bone. The stories he tells about chasing down the source of the myth are fun reading, with some good descriptions of surf sessions thrown in.

Along the way, Kotler delves into some serious scientific inquiry about the reasons for “flow” states and why they might occur while surfing (or rock climbing, or coding, etc). He’s got a knack for making hard science a bit more accessible (at least to my soft brain).

Anyway, it’s a great book. I’ll be passing on my copy to my surfing buddy Pete, and pimping the book to my surfing friends (and even those who used to surf *cough* Brandon *cough*)