A sold-out Giants game and a general lack of planning left me with a Saturday afternoon without anything to do, so I hopped a train to Berkeley.

I stepped out of the BART station and, almost immediately, a kid asks me to sign a petition. I chuckled. I also wandered through the farmers' market (Madison's is so much better), where cute college girls hawked copies of the Socialist Worker. I politley declined and smiled to myself, knowing that, despite the fact that I had my hair cropped short and the unkempt two-week beard of a left-wing grad student, I had a copy of The Road to Serfdom in my messenger bag.

I ended up wandering used bookstores. I need more reading material (though I'm not sure when or if I'll make it through all of these).

The haul:

• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam. Replaces the hardcover copy I have back home.
• Better Together: Restoring the American Community, Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein. It's the sequel. Bowling Alone II
• The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, Paul Krugman. It's a little old, but ever since Times Select, I haven't been reading much PK.
• The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich August von Hayek. I'm no rabid Hayekian, but I feel that I should at least own a copy.
• Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris. Purely pleasure reading. I'll probably read that one first.
• They Marched Into Sunlight, David Maraniss. I ran into Maraniss randomly at a Dean campaign office in Iowa during the caucuses. Maraniss is a Madisonian-turned-Washington-Post journalist. The book is important read on Vietnam and the UW. I also need to read his biography of Vinci Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered.
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich. It seems like everybody has read this but me.
• The Good Society, John Kenneth Galbraith. He died recently, so I think I should read it.
• On the Road, Jack Kerouac. It's amazing I've never read it, it's just that I've never had a copy around. This should fix that.