I really look forward to a train or plane journey for the opportunity it gives me to catch-up on reading uninterrupted (thank God for bad or non-existent mobile reception). So much nicer than getting travel sick and being unable to read when travelling by car. I’m sure my love of long train journeys is due to the combination of watching the world go by and reading. My most extreme examples of this have been on train journeys from New York to San Francisco and from Melbourne to Cairns.
Last time I had a decent opportunity to indulge in reading whilst getting from A to B was my trip to Hawaii via San Francisco in March. With 17 hours of flying each way I got through a pile of ebooks. I firstly read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which was incredibly well written and completely fascinating. I agree with many others who’ve pointed out that Steve Jobs wasn’t a very nice man, that the products that he was the figurehead of are assembled by Chinese workers in poor conditions, and that he failed to give much of his vast wealth away in philanthropy as Bill Gates and others have done. I also found it interesting that this wasn’t because he lived an exceptionally lavish lifestyle, but rather seemed to be because he was single-mindedly focused on himself and the products he loved, to the exclusion of pretty much everything, and everyone, else.
In my many flying hours I also read Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (I enjoyed it and agree with the argument, but not sure I needed to read the whole book to get that) and The Honest Broker: Making sense of science in policy and politics by Roger Pielke, which I found a bit of a joyless struggle to plough through to be honest. What would google do? by Jeff Jarvis was a very useful study of what we can learn from the way google develop their business.
Whilst these were all helpful reading for work, I got another level of enjoyment altogether from reading Taxing the Poor by Katherine Newman on one leg of the journey. I always enjoy returning to the subject of my PhD – the experience of poverty in America (and Britain) and how reforming tax and benefit systems could help to alleviate it. I found this book having decided to search for some of my favourite non-fiction writers to see if they’d written anything lately (her earlier book No Shame in My Game was one of my biggest influences 10 plus years ago). This was also how I found Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich. Whilst it isn’t a subject as close to my heart as her other books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, I liked the fresh look at the breast cancer survival movement, which goes beyond uncritically accepting it all as a good thing.
In the next couple of weeks I am flying to Denmark for the day to speak on social enterprises in the UK for the Danish Ministry of Employment, as well getting the train to Brighton and then Liverpool. I can’t wait.
