I consider myself to have had a great reading year, particularly because going to graduate school has exposed me to a wider variety of authors and books than I likely ever would have encountered.

Not all of these books are new—only half were released in 2011—but I read each in the past 12 months and each one had a lasting effect on me. They’re listed chronologically, as it would be difficult for me to pick any one as more important than another.

 

I pursued this after seeing “The Social Network” last fall and then reading that much of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay was based on Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires,” much of which wasn’t entirely accurate. This more strictly journalistic account was just as entertaining and more believable than some of the film’s premises.

 I first tried reading this book, my first entry into David Halberstam’s non-sportswriting world, back in late 2008. I didn’t make it far, for I don’t think my appreciation of the broadcasting and publishing industries was yet as nuanced as it needed to be to fully appreciate it. In January, then, I began it again and found it truly unputdownable. Somehow, I’d read much of Feinstein’s work before delving into his first book. But during a February blizzard, I picked up a tattered copy from the Erie County Library. It so pulled me in that I sometimes read it as I walked up a frigid Myrtle Street on the way to taking basketball scores by phone during nights at the Erie Times-News.
In increasing my perspective on what a great form journalism can take, outside of the daily crime reports and sports box scores, I credit this book as being the most important I read this year. And for that, I credit Merciad advisor Bill Welch, who left me his paperback copy of the book in the newsroom one afternoon. Reading it also gave me the desire to explore Simon’s extremely detailed fictional world of “The Wire.” I read just about every important book on the War on Terror this year after the bin Laden raid, feeling that I, too, had become not quite as informed as all Americans should be in this modern, completely connected age. This was the last one I read, and it was a perfect capper on the selections I made. Then, when Peter Bergen made a visit to UF in October, this book solidified an even more prominent place. While I also read Miller and Shales’ book about Saturday Night Live this summer and found that one to be more original, this was important to help understand a course I took this fall called “Sports Media and Society.” (Indeed, it was the course’s only assigned textbook). I learned much about ESPN, its beginnings and its scandals, but it didn’t really change my negative views of the station.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Peter Bergen’s serious work about Afghanistan and Pakistan sits Kim Barker’s first book. A former correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who now works for ProPublica, she provided a humorous, sometimes flippant, account of her time covering the War on Terror in this region of the world. I loved her writing style and thought she took the perfect approach to an account of how absurd this war has sometimes been carried out. Pearlman visited that Sports Media class via Skype early in September, and since then I’ve been a big fan of his work. When this came out later in the fall, I was the first to put a hold on it at the library. When that took too long, I bought the audio version from Audible and ripped through it in about two days. It was that good. And I never cared about Walter Payton before reading it. He’s that good of a writer. The book that was seemingly on everyone’s Christmas list. And for good reason. Jobs was one of the defining figures of our time, Isaacson is one of the most talented living biographers. A great match. Even though I was largely familiar with the Apple/Jobs narrative, this clued me in on many things about his life that I was fuzzy on. Worth the hype.
While it was one of the last books I got to in 2011, Wilkerson’s account of the Great Migration was also one of the most important. It defines thoroughness. The writing is lively, the research is unending and the narrative is what one would expect from a Pulitzer winner. I hope to visit Boston University during spring break to conduct research on a project I’m working on, and hope to get this copy signed by her, since she heads the university’s narrative nonfiction program there.