Mr. Burke's Reading List

Tuesdays with Morrie , by Mitch Albom, 1997 If not for those New Year lists of Reading Challenges , I don't know if I would have picked up this book and held onto it. The copy belonged to my wife, who read it years ago. It was about to go into a donation box, but I rescued it (along with the next book I'm reading, which she suggested). Mitch Albom went to Brandeis University where his favorite professor was Morrie Schwartz. Upon graduation, Morrie gave Mitch a present and hoped to see him in the future. Albom then got caught up with life and didn't see Schwartz again until by sheer luck, he flipped TV channels and caught the beginning of Nightline with Ted Koppel who was about to interview Schwartz who was still teaching, despite being diagnosed with ALS , or Lou Gehrig's Disease . What follows are the notes from his first meeting with Schwartz to catch up on old times and discuss life, which then turns into his final class, which will meet every Tuesday. They ...

Analog's Lighter Side , by S. Schmidt, ed, 1982 Anytime I get any kind of notice that some online catalog now has magazines, I check it out. Unfortunately, those magazines are usually either scholarly journal-type publications or popular newstand magazines of the slick and glossy variety. They don't ever have, for example, old science-fiction magazines. One of the first ones I search for is Analog because I had a subscription from the late-80s to the mid-90s. The problem was I never seemed to have time to catch up with them, so I let the subscription lapse. Anyway, while searching for Analog, I found an anthology, Analog's Lighter Side , a collection of humorous stories, edited by Stanley Schmidt, who was the editor I remember (and could possibly still be editing it today). The anthology is from 1982, which meant I'd likely never read any of the material before. As you can see from the Table of Contents above, most of the stories date from before I was born (...