Summer Reading List

I'm trying to decide what books/documents to bring with me to read (that are pertinent to what I'm doing. I probably should throw in some other casual reading, as well, though I've got no idea what...it's been a while since I've had much time to read for fun).

So far I've got a few, but not that many, lined up. There are a few that had been sitting on my shelf for a while but that I had to turn in at the end of the semester, and I doubt I can check out campus library books now. Well, I can probably check them out, I'll still show up as a student until the fall semester starts -- but I won't be back until after that, and if they should get recalled I would be somewhat SOL (or rather, the recaller would -- but I'd be the one to get fined).

The ones I'm pretty certain of are:
Mastering the Machine Revisited by Ian Smillie. This is a respected (I gather) book on a variety of technologies and technological approaches intended to alleviate poverty (recently updated to address ICT, as well). I've read some of it (assigned in Prof. Burrell's technology and poverty class) but not the whole thing, and have been meaning to for a while.

The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank by David Bornstein. I presume this history of Grameen was written primarily for popular audiences, but I've heard good things about the author, so it should be at least enjoyable, and likely informative, as I don't know a whole lot about its earlier history.

The World Bank in Uganda: Country Brief 2005-6. A pretty standard institutional document. Good for an overview of broader conditions, recent trends in income/poverty, demographics, etc., as well as for a sense of the larger scale development policies and such, which my own narrow study of telecommunications didn't really address in the depth I'd like. I'll be digging around for other similar documents.

Livelihoods and the Mobile Phone in Uganda, by Prof. Jenna Burrell. This document was written by Prof. Burrell for the Grameen Foundation and particularly its Application Lab (the branch focused upon novel uses of ICT, and that the Question Box project falls under). I've had it around for some time after finding it on the AppLab site, quite by chance, but decided to hold off on reading it until after finishing my thesis out of concern that it was too similar and, significantly, that it was based upon some of the exact primary data (her interviews) that were a major part of my thesis. It seemed problematic to read someone else's (and particularly my own advisor's) analysis of the same data I was using. Now, however, I'm very interested to read it (although she herself dismissed it as "consulting work").

There are a number of relevant documents I, in some cases read and used in writing my thesis, and in others than I found but didn't end up using much or at all, that I would like to reread in a more leisurely fashion, as well. Among these in particular are researchictafrica.net's "Towards Evidence-based ICT Policy and Regulation" and "Towards an African e-Index" series of papers.

Obviously, many of these are relatively short papers and documents, and only a few are full books. This may be a problem; hopefully I won't get there having exhausted my whole reading list. Nevertheless, books I don't own are somewhat out of the question, so I may have to stick with my reports and such. Some of them are pretty long and they're all pretty dense, so I imagine I'll be fine. At this point, it's looking as though I'll be spending most of my (LONG) trip there analyzing call logs, and I don't anticipate having much free time there to read until I get settled and figured out. Even then, I don't know. Anyway, it's always better to have too much to read than too little. At any rate, I'll have an internet connection (such as it will be) and, for a while, my CalNet proxy access, so I can always find more, too.

Still, if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be interested to hear them.