I often realize that between the books I’m reading as books and the books I’m listening to, I have way, way, WAY too many books going at once. I recently told someone that I wouldn’t get much use out of a Kindle, because I don’t carry several books at the same time. But what I meant by that was that I’d be unlikely to switch books in the middle of a train ride or something. It certainly doesn’t mean I’m not in the middle of reading a million things at once, because…well, here is a partial list of what I’m in the middle of. This includes only things that are relatively current, and not all the stuff I never got around to finishing. Incidentally, all my audiobooks are unabridged; I never, ever listen to abridged books. I figure the author and the editor had reasons for what they left in and took out.

• In Cold Blood. (Audio) This is a long, difficult book, and although I very much enjoy it, it tends to wander off into these winding tangents — which, of course, are part of what makes it good. But the audio format makes it especially easy to fumble my concentration and realize that five minutes have passed, and I missed the whole story about Perry Smith’s prom or whatever. I’m almost halfway through it, though, so I’m in for the long haul.
• Getting Things Done. (Audio) Hey, I didn’t want to be the last person on the bandwagon. I want to be organized, too! This, I’d say I’m about…a third of the way through.
• Made To Stick. (Audio) This is where I confess that I have a weird affection for books about marketing. In a lot of ways, they’re just books about sociology and psychology, when they’re good. They tend to have corny names like Bang! and that sort of thing, but I always feel like I’ve learned something.
• The History Of Love. (Print) My sister and her book club loved this book, and I’m most of the way through it and keep forgetting to finish it.
• The English American. (Audio) I started this just recently and listened to the first hour or so of it on a long walk. I try to make sure I expand my horizons beyond too many “plucky girl has adventures” books, but I do indulge from time to time.
• Fighting For Air: The Battle To Control America’s Media. (Audio) This is just the right book for all your Clear-Channel-hating needs, and it’s very involving. But I like to listen to it when I can concentrate.
• The Appeal. (Audio) Grisham, and it’s much more Grisham-y, in the classic sense, than many of his recent books. The problem with this one is that like all of his plots, it’s very convoluted, so if I get interrupted, I have to go back about ten minutes and remind myself what the hell was going on when I left it.
• The Long Tail and The Search. (Audio) I’m pairing these, because these are my Dig That Crazy Internet Economy books, and if I don’t get back to them soon, I’m going to lose track of them entirely.

There are plenty of books I’ve totally abandoned, including that Stephen King thing about being a Red Sox fan, and several very bad whimsical romances, and I haven’t even gotten myself to start Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team Of Rivals, even though I’ve been carrying it around on my MP3 player for a year. But I’m thinking I need to actually finish some things, because I’m going to start mixing up the tragic murder mysteries with the marketing books, and something kind of bad will happen at that point, even if only inside my head.

The title of this book is misleading in a way I think is unfortunate. Frankly, I’m a bit ambivalent about the trend toward stunt writing — a person doing a thing in order to write a book about it. This has resulted in some books I’ve really liked, like the A.J. Jacobs books about reading the encyclopedia or living by the Bible for a year, but the more you get these “I ate six eggs every morning for a year, and here’s my book about it!” books, the less impact they have. The title Gang Leader For A Day makes it seem like maybe Sudhir Venkatesh (who first came to prominence when his research on gangs and drugs was featured in the terrific Freakonomics chapter about why drug dealers live with their moms) dove into a gang just to do a stunt, be a “gang leader for a day,” and write a book.

The irony, given that title, is that what will strike you about the book as you read it is the length and depth of Venkatesh’s research. He wasn’t remotely famous then; he was a student working on a dissertation under the supervision of, among others, the superstar urban sociologist William Julius Wilson. As part of his work — and against the advice of Wilson and others, in many cases — Venkatesh spent years as a companion to JT, a Chicago gang leader, drug dealer, and community facilitator of sorts. He got to know the people in the Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago’s most notorious public housing projects, in their last years of life before they were demolished. He went to parties, he had dinner with families, and he listened to discussions of possible drive-by shootings. He even dragged a guy who had been shot to safety. The title makes it sound like a dabbler’s story or a gimmick, and it’s the opposite.

It’s refreshing that Venkatesh is so open about how charmed he often was by people he met, how put off he was at other times, how utterly naive he realized he was, and how often he did things that could have gotten him in an enormous amount of trouble had he not developed the close relationship with JT that he did. His account is warm, but impressively unsentimental in most respects. It’s an absolutely fascinating book, both as his personal story of carrying out such an unusual research project and as a study of poverty and gangs.

I will add that I actually listened to this as an audiobook (I am a big, big audiobook fan, as I’ve sometimes mentioned), and the only thing I didn’t like about the book was the hilarious attempts of the gravitas-filled narrator to sound like a young Chicago drug dealer when reading JT’s words. Audiobooks often have this problem, where the reader has to do different “voices,” and one of the things that makes a successful reader, for me, is the ability to do it unintrusively. This is not a great example of that. But it’s still a marvelous book — highly recommended.