I “attended” parts of a virtual cyber conference last week. The best sessions were interviews by the company CEO and various speakers. One of the questions the former asked was, “What are you reading these days?”
Paul Nakasone, head of the NSA, recommended Dark Territory: The
Secret History of Cyber War (Fred Kaplan) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream,
a Temptation and the Longest Night of the Second World War (Malcolm
Gladwell). Sue Gordon, former principal deputy director of national
intelligence, had several, but the one I wrote down was American Scripture:
Making the Declaration of Independence (Pauline Maier).
(Gordon described the members of the Second Continental Congress
as “average schmos”. My ex-boss said he agrees with her; “Not all of them were
a Hamilton or a Franklin.” My thinking is that—while not all of them were intellectual
titans, the very fact that they could afford to spend months in Philadelphia
debating political philosophies set them aside from average schmos.)
When I say, “wrote [the titles] down”, I mean that I pulled up the Fairfax County Public Library online catalog and placed holds on the books. For good measure, I also reserved Donna Leon’s and Louise Penny’s latest police procedurals. Friday morning I popped over to the People’s Republic branch and picked up two of the recommendations and Leon’s Transient Desires. I spent most off the weekend polishing off the mystery—such a luxury to spend a Sunday afternoon reading about Venice and eating madeleines (with the occasional break to toss a handful of seed onto the patio for birds and chipmunks).
That’s my gratitude today: the immense resources of the public library
and hours of being lost in a book.
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