Books I'm Reading

I generally read a few books at a time, concurrently.  Here's what I've got in my current stack.

Pomerantsev confronts head-on the problem of persuading people who can't be reached by appeals to their better nature. The vast majority of counter-propaganda tries moral or rational appeals that simply don't work with most people who've fallen for fascist or authoritarian propaganda. This book is a biography of Sefton Delmer, an ex-reporter for an English paper who worked to figure out what kind of counter-propaganda would work to persuade the unpersuadables.

 

The Data Vault is a kind of modeling paradigm I haven't run across much, so I'm doing some research for Practical Data Management. Linstedt is the originator of the concept. The DV approach emphasizes abstracting business concepts from source implementations, and it provides a long-term solution to reporting in a large, complex business.

More research for Practical Data Management. Giles wrote the book on agile data modeling, with his The Nimble Elephant. This was an interesting if uneven introduction to using the Data Vault modeling paradigm in application. I say "uneven" because it left me with some unanswered questions, which is perhaps to be expected. Giles is a serious practitioner though, and the book is still well worth your time.

I'm finishing up a playwrighting workshop in my off time, and so I've been reading a lot of plays. The Threepenny Opera is a masterpiece, one of the foundational works for "Epic Theatre," a school of theatre designed to make audiences stop thinking so much about the characters, setting and plot and think more about the social issues raised by the play. That might seem like the opposite goal of an entertainment, but Brecht's genius is to do that with an entertaining play.