As is often the case for summers, I have been catching up on some reading lately. A fairly eclectic list both in subject matter and format.

Standouts on the book front include: The Hunger Games trilogy (highly and rightly recommended by my 13 year-old Emma); The Insiders by Craig Hickman, he of The Oz Principle fame (a guilty pleasure action story about the struggle for a more humane capitalism in America–global sequence sure to follow); and, As They See ‘Em (Bruce Weber’s insider’s look at baseball umpire culture and training, a topic I’ve been thinking about writing about myself sometime down the line).

The only academic book on the list (I’ve read others, they just weren’t particularly memorable) is Impure Play: Sacredness, Transgression, and the Tragic in Popular Culture. It is by Alexander Riley, a old grad school classmate of mine who I have inexplicably and inexcusably not stayed in touch with.

Lots and lots of magazine articles as well. As has been the case several times in the last few months, it was a New Yorker piece that made the biggest impression: Lauren Collins’ piece in the July 4th issue on the failure of British multiculturalism and the rise of the Islamophobic right “England, Their England.” Many great points on its own terms in this piece–about how fashionable it has become for European leaders to decry multiculturalism and separatism; about religion as a crucial dividing line in Europe; about how difficult it can be to disentangle liberal democratic rhetoric from racism and hysteria.  But what stood out to me was how central soccer and soccer fans have been to the whole right wing movement. Especially with the recent and ongoing riots in England, I want to hear more.

And finally, two recommendations. One is a book from a few back that I think would be a fun read for the ASA meetings in Vegas: James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street. Part crime trial reporting, part travel log, part poker tutorial, and all fun. The other, which I haven’t yet read, is Robert Bellah’s long awaited magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution (for a great Q and A with the author, go to: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/where-does-religion-come-from/243723/).