3 recreational reads and the best of the school reads so far. 1. Dark Money (Jane Mayer) - An expansion of Mayer's own piece in the New Yorker abt the Koch Brothers. I'd say this is a nec read to understand where we are today. Trump didn't happen overnight and he didn't happen by accident. As of y'day, there's story going around that Kochs have pledged to $ back reps who vote no on AHCA. That's bc they want to want to make it more terrible. They don't believe in gov't and actively fund its destruction. Also they let some employees die bc they didn't want to enforce env't regs. Everyone profiled in here (including Betsy DeVoss!) is heinous but the book is excellent. 2. Heat & Light - or... gas & oil. Haigh's novel abt fracking in rural PA is sort of the literary equivalent of a Soderbergh film abt fracking. Lots of characters and POVs, lots of narrative threads but a good, fast read. 3. The Gloaming - Weird but v good novel. American, Pilgrim, is abandoned by her husband in Western Europe and in her grief, is involved in an accident that kills 3 kids. After being exonerated, she tries to start a new life in Africa but something has followed her intent on doing her harm. Kind of a ghost story, kind of a treatise on race and class, kind of a theoretical look at experience and being. Also a fast read. 4. Everything Is Miscellaneous - Weinberger looks at the third order of order, the digital order, which unlike the first two (physical and representational), is defined by multiple simultaneous points of access. Includes discussion of metainformation especially the use of tags (and hashtags) to explore how we search, retrieve, and use information in the digital world. Really well done, lots of real world application. Read it for an Info Retrieval Systems Design class (which is a lot more interesting than it sounds). #bookworm #fiction #nonfiction #infoscience #february2017reads #playingcatchup #goodreads