Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!

Discover Magazine’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog put together a long list of female science writers, many of whom have some interesting looking pop science nonfiction. Thanks to @BiblioEva for linking to this one.

NPR and ProPublica put together a powerful multimedia package on five soldiers who suffered traumatic brain injuries during the same explosion in Iraq. I haven’t gotten through the entire package yet, but the parts I’ve read and listened to are great journalism.

In her recent review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s second memoir, Committed, Raych (books i done read) made a point I really liked about the purpose of travel writing (emphasis mine), which speaks to exactly why I find Bill Bryson so frustrating as a travel writer:

In the end, I’m unsure how to feel about this. Gilbert speaks my language – jovial white girl, casual tourist, occasionally pissed by how The Man is screwing her – but I LIVE with my own voice. I read to live a thousand lives, not to have my own ignorant worldview parrotted back to me.

One of my guilty pleasure television shows for the last couple of years has been ABC Family’s Greek, a look at Greek life on a college campus. This show has always been more interesting and engaging than the premise suggests, and I’ve really liked seeing the characters grow up. After the series finale, which I just got around to watching this weekend, I found a couple of good television critic wrap ups of the show. EW’s Pop Watch blog give five reasons they’ll miss the show (all reasons I agree with), and EW’s Inside TV blog had an interview with the show’s creator, Patrick Sean Smith. I loved this explanation of the end of the show (and his explanation of Cappie’s name, which means nothing unless you’ve watched the show):

What I came to in that name was — and what I wanted the end of this to be — was a bit of an anthem for our millennial audience we’ve been so aware of through the run of the series. Things are rough right now. There are no jobs, but keeping that fighting spirit and say, “We can get through this together” was the thing I really liked in his name. [It] kind of brought that all together for me.

One of the most interesting pieces of bookish news in the last week was about how a self-published author who has made about $1 million selling her books on Amazon, Amanda Hocking, signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press. This profile from the Star Tribune is great, and gets at a lot of the interesting questions this deal brings up for both Hocking and publishing in general.

I haven’t used Google’s new recipe search, but this in-depth article from Food52 points out some of the problems it might have. I’m curious whether Google is planning other topic-specific search engines, and what other challenges might come up.

A couple Sunday Salons ago, I wrote about reading and doing, and I mentioned starting my own Day Zero Project. It took me a couple of weeks, but I finally got my list put together and posted at the blog I started to record how my project is going, called Stepping Off the Page. I’m going to be posting my updates for the project there because I didn’t think this blog was a good place for that.

For those not familiar, the idea of a Day Zero Project is to come up with 101 goals to complete in 1,001 days. Starting today, I have until December 23, 2013 to try and make it through my list, which is divide into a number of categories: Cooking and Eating, Lifestyle, Arts and Culture, Organization, Travel, Randoms, and, of course, Reading. I’ve actually got 13 reading goals for the next 1,001 days, some more complicated than others:

1. Read “A Great Russian Novel.”
2. Read (or re-read) all of Tracy Kidder’s books. (0/8)
3. Re-read the Harry Potter series. (0/7)
4. Do an entire Dewey’s 24-Hour Read-a-Thon (not all 24 hours, just not actually do anything else during that time).
5. Read a “Book on Books” and 5 of the books mentioned in it. (0/6)
6. Read 5 books of journalism theory. (0/5)
7. Read a book by an author who’s last name starts with Q.
8. Read a book by an author who’s last name starts with X.Host a reading challenge/project.
9. Read 33 graphic novels. (0/33)
10. Find a good smart phone app for organizing my bookshelves and TBR list.
11. Categorize my nonfiction reviews by the Dewey Decimal System.
12. Learn how to use OverDrive to check out ebooks and audiobooks from the library.
13. Write a Bucket List of 50 books to read before I die.

I’m already reading War and Peace for #1, and am signed up for the April Read-a-Thon for #4. Reading 33 graphic novels (#9) might seem arbitrary, but it comes out to one per month through the course of the project. I’m already planning on reading Essex County by Jeff Lemire (thanks to Lu’s lovely review) as well as The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman and the rest of Bill Willingham’s Fables series.

And I cannot wait to get started with #13, since there are so many great books to add to a reading Bucket List.

I’m really looking forward to this project, of having a motivation, arbitrary as it might be, to step out of my shell and take on some of the things I’ve been meaning to do but always find excuses not to. You can read my full 101 in 1,001 list over on my other blog, and find me over there a bit over the next 2.71-ish years trying to complete my list!

What sorts of things would be on your Day Zero list? Do you have a reading bucket list? Any recommendations for books to fulfill some of my goals?

For my big road trip home last weekend, I picked out Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book SuperFreakonomics as an audio book for my car ride. When I grabbed it at the library, I was pretty skeptical about whether it would be any good, but within just an hour of listening I felt like most of my initial concerns were allayed pretty convincingly.

In fact, all of my notes on the book start out something like, “This was more funny than I expected!” or “Wow, economics is more understandable than I thought it would be!” The entire listening experience felt like I was constantly reassuring the Skeptical Reader in my head that the book was going to be good.

If I, a healthy lover of nonfiction, had so many questions about the book, I thought other readers might too. Hence, a Q&A about SuperFreakonomics between a Skeptical Reader and myself.

Skeptical Reader: Is it necessary to read Freakonomics before taking on SuperFreakonomics?

Kim: I don’t think so, but it’s hard for me to say. SuperFreakonomics does make a number of passing references to the first book, along the lines of, “Remember the cheating sumo wrestlers?” but I don’t think they’re such important references it makes reading the first book a necessity. Boyfriend and I did recently watched the documentary version of Freakonomics on Netflix, so I knew vaguely what they were talking about. If you’re concerned but short on time, check out the documentary, otherwise I think you can dive right in.

Skeptical Reader: I don’t know anything about economics. Is this book going to be too hard for me?

Kim: Absolutely not. In fact, I think this book is probably most enjoyable for people without much of a background in economics or who don’t know much about how economic research works precisely because Dubner and Levitt work so hard to use as little jargon as possible. And when they do use jargon, it’s often with a memorable example — pimps and prostitutes or capitalist monkeys — that makes the definition stick in a workable way.

In fact, I think my favorite part about this book is the fact that Dubner and Levitt were able to expand my idea of what economics research can cover. As they explain it, economics is not just about money and the economy — it’s a different way of looking at an issue and defining a problem. The book is an exercise in economic thinking, re-framing complicated issues into questions of incentives and statistics. It’s a different way of looking at the world, and one they make a good case for supporting.

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Even though I always love being a book blogger, I feel like there are some especially exciting events and projects going on right now in this corner of the blogosphere, and I wanted to take just a minute to share three of them with you.

2011 Indie Lit Awards

Earlier this year I posted quite a bit about my involvement with the Indie Lit Awards, and my role as the Director of the Non-Fiction panel. Apparently I did a good job last year, because I was asked to take that on again. I’m excited to report that the Non-Fiction panel is mostly intact from last year, with three of our four expert panelists returning.

The biggest news related to non-fiction is that the category has been split, with a new Biography/Memoir category that will be directed by a former non-fiction panelist, Florinda of The 3R’s Blog. Personally, I think splitting non-fiction into two categories is a great decision. Memoirs are such different books than other more fact-based nonfiction, it will be good to assessing them separately.

The bloggers who will be serving as the voting members of the 2011 Indie Lit Award Non-Fiction panel are:

• Debbie at readerbuzz
• Betty at Reflections with Coffee
• Shauna at Evergreen Junior High Library
• Lorren at The Story Girl

Since we’re starting earlier this year, there is more time to pay attention to all of the great non-fiction books coming out this year. If you have suggestions — books you’ve read and loved, or books you think we may miss, please send an e-mail my way so I can keep my eyes open.

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