Anyone here want to help me put together a summer reading list?

It’s been a bloody month. The sky has been bleached from the acidic waters evaporated from the mile high piles of crumbled up term papers laid out in the dirt to die and students hid from their professors in the shadows, occasionaly crashing out with caffene filled syringes sticking out of their arms and mad academic babbling, a vomit of pot luck education. They were usually the first to die out from exhaustion and despair. But now the end is here, and my school semester is over. The professor’s sadistic cravings have been satisfied, and it’s time to compile a list of books to read on my time off. Here’s what’s on the plate:

[ul]
[li]Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix[/li][li]Practical Homicide Investigation Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques, Third Edition (assuming I can find it cheap enough)[/li][li]Candide by Voltaire (Or some other writings) [/li][/ul]

Now there’s three other books I’m looking for, but I don’t know what they are.

Since I have some time off, I’ll be picking up a new job to replace my gig as a resteraunt dishwasher/bussboy/food garnisher/tortilla maker/janitor. My brother says he can get me a job selling cell phones for Sprint, and that it pays pretty darn well too. So I’ve decided to take him up on this offer even though I know little to nothing about:

  1. Phones or
  2. Selling

But I’m a firm believer in that where there’s a will, there’s a way. I’ve power sold items for stores before (and was quite good at it too), and I don’t imagine this being so much more difficult just as long as I take the time to learn everything there is to know about the product and the technique. With having said that, I’m looking for a good book on being a good salesman, or a cell phone salesman to be specific.

Next up, I’m looking for a book that details what it’s like to be a prisoner, preferably an american one. Or if there’s a book out there that lists the different effects of being imprisoned in different ways with a slew of testimonials, true accounts of real people and studies, that would be great too. While taking my Creative Writing class I wrote a story about a prisoner. The prison itself was just a way to inject a type of social dynamics that are usually only found in isolated cases, jail, or high school, and while it’s not the center of the story, the classroom ruled out that it did need to be more believable when we workshopped it. The story got a B, and was said to have a really good premise and story, but overall shoddy execution, which was about what I expected considering the circumstances of my rewriting it.
Anyways, it would be terrible to let the story remain half finished. I want to complete it, but I need to know what a prison is really like before I can properly play with the idea. I’m sure there’s books on the topic out there someplace, but I don’t recall seeing any.

At the beggining of '06, I made it my New Year’s resoltion to lose my flab, and bulk up. Well, I’ve bulked up some, but not nearly as much as I would have liked, and the flab is very much still there. Now I have the dedication aimed towards losing weight. I’ve made these resolutions before and passed with flying colors. Cite!:
Christmas '04
Christmas '05
That’s a 40-60 pound difference there. Maybe more. I wasn’t really looking at the scale when I was heavier.

Anyways, ambition isn’t the problem, I just have no idea how to coordinate my diet with my workouts. I need to know what to do, how to do it, and what’s happening to my body while it’s happening. I don’t want to just be told what to eat. I want to be told what to eat and why. I want to build my body from the inside out and know what’s going on. A coworker suggested Body for Life by Bill Phillips, but some of the Amazon reader reviews lead me to believe it wouldn’t go into as much detail in the diet category as I’d like it too. So I’m leaning towards this currently, but am way open to new suggestions too.

Also, if a book is going to help me diet, I’d like it to be realistic. I love food, and I love being full. I lost my weight a year ago doing atkins, which I loved because I could east as much meat as I wanted…so any diets along these lines would be supoib.

And finally, Volatiare. I’ve read a little about him, and from him online, and am intrigued. I’m thinking of reading Candide, but if there’s a collection of essays that makes for better reading, suggest away!

I leave for the bookstore sometime either tonight or tommorrow

Bump.

Suggestions? Reccomendations? Anyone?

I came in all fired up to offer what I could, but I’m afraid I know nothing about any of your interests.

I can say that sales is about listening, reacting to your customer rather than to some idea of a prefab conversation. It’s about knowing the product, but selling yourself.

I can sell myself fairly well. I’ve honed my ability to make quality small talk over my jobs at a deli I used to work at, and my current Barnes and Noble.

But then it’s always easy to comment on different book and tastes. Cell phones might be drastically different. In any case, being a empathetic conversationalist and sales pitcher should be a universal skill

When I hire for sales positions, that’s what I’m looking for.

OK. . . I’ll jump in here! My favorite book so far this year is MY LIFE IN FRANCE by Julia Child. It reads just like she talked. Fabulous! Funny! And very, very interesting.

For books about prisoners, I’d recommend Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor, about a notoriously dangerous Confederate prison during the Civil War (I think the book won the Pulitzer back in the '60s), and Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, about life in a fictional prison much like the Soviet gulags.