Next week, the team I am on at Automattic is meeting up in Tel-Aviv to attend the NetSci X conference. There is so much to be excited about — the opportunity to spend 10 days with colleagues, the interesting talks on network theory and analysis, the opportunity to visit the holy sites of the Bahá’í faith and soak up the spiritual energy, the gift of spending days in some of humanity’s most ancient cities, and then the magic of the unexpected.
I am looking forward to experiencing and blogging about those adventures. I want to take time to discuss one of my favorite things to do on long plane rides — reading books that I have long had on my list and rarely get the chance to dive into.
There is a Lonely Planet travel guide to Israel (maybe better for pre-travel reading? My colleague has hooked it up!), the memoir Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret who I’d enjoyed listening to on Fresh Air, Blood at the Root an analysis of one Georgia town’s painfully recent struggle with its history of racism, The Attention Merchants on the impacts of the behavioral advertising models that dominate the Internet, and Weapons of Math Destruction which I’d started but not finished. I have laid them out on the table tonight and thinking today about which one or two to take with me.
Usually it happens that a fellow traveler feels compelled to share something and I am all there to listen. On a journey back from Vancouver, a fellow traveller shared beautiful and haunting pictures she and her husband made of the botanical gardens around Vancouver.
I want to be open to all that can happen on this journey. But it is great to have books on the plane to share the ride.
Charles write here 