A few weeks into the new TBR Takedown Challenge (Bigger! Better!), I’m making excellent progress:
Taken down!
Liberty, Defined, Ron Paul
Big Box Swindle, Stacy Mitchell
Saving Congress from Itself, James Buckley
Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security, Richard Clarke
When Asia Was the World, Stewart Gordon
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum
“Six! Wowzers! You’re halfway home!” Well, not quite. The ‘full’ count will be seventeen, but we’re a third of the way in and going strong. There are a couple of reviews pending.
Still to come:
The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday.
Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy, Shane Hamilton.
10% Human, Alanna Collen.
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left, Yural Levin.
Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff, Matt Kibbe.
Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World, Richard Francis.
The Orthodox Church, Kalistos (Timothy) Ware. A history of the Eastern Orthodox.
And more!
Also, I’m all but finished with the planned series into early Islamic history that’s been ongoing since the beginning of the year. So far, we’ve had Destiny, Disrupted; After the Prophet; and In God’s Path, with unplanned works sprinkled in. It’s become more of a series on the middle east in general, and has been especially heavy on Iran, and only one remains in the ‘planned’ reading — a work on Islam and Central Asia. There will be more ME stuff than that, however, as I intend on doing one book each for Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
Annnnnnnnnnnd I’m almost done with my Cybersecurity sweep! This year we’ve had Data and Goliath, Future Crimes, and more recently, Cyber War plus a couple of extras. No Place to Hide will follow later in the year, after the TBR challenge. So, halfway into the year, things are looking good.
Reading Freely 
Do you rely mostly upon your library connection for books or other outlet(s)? I've lately been staying far away from bookstores (except for Kindle free via Amazon) and spending more time at my local libraries (two state/county systems available to me within 15 miles — one east and one west). I haven't been in a brick and mortar bookstore for years. It was an addiction I had to break!
I note that you “specialize” in nonfiction. I am moving in that direction. For some reasons, I prefer those titles over novels and stories.
All the best from the Gulf coast. v/r Tim
Fiction is almost wholly from my public or university library, the exception being Star Trek novels. Those I purchase used. Nonfiction started off solely from libraries, but after 2010 I started purchasing more offline. I still visit my univrsity library in Montevallo every month to stock up on nonfiction, but books on stranger subjects like urban infrastructure are more likely to be direct (used) purchases. I also use my library's interlibrary loan system to red books that my libraries don't carry, but which are too expensive to buy. (“Too expensive” is anything over $10, really. I'm nearly Puritanical when it comes to spending.)
I found that I was hardly reading any of my growing non-fiction collection so I started non-fiction Sunday's. That helped a lot. Now of course I'm addicted to History books!