I just finished reading "The Intuitionist", by Colson Whitehead, a strange but ultimately winning novel about race and intrigue amongst elevator inspectors. This choice was itself inspired by some great lectures and readings I found online with Harvard's Du Bois Institute -- discussions with contemporary black writers, as well as great lectures on anthropology, sociology, etc.
Also, without quite meaning to, I've started learning a bit of French. What happened was I became a fan of the "Journal de France" newscast they used to run with English subtitles on cable. But now that's off the air, and so I have/get to web-stream it from the source -- thus I'm finding I need to pick up a bit more vocab to have it make any sense.
