What are the edu-wonks reading during the last lazy (or not so lazy) dog days of summer? National Journal asked the following questions: “What education-related books are you currently reading, or have read, that you would recommend to others? Why? What is the most important education article you have read in the past year? Why?”

As one would expect, most of the responses consist of dutiful lists of non-fiction tomes that have some bearing on some pressing aspect of education. These are well and good. But let’s be honest: Devouring those things is a lot like devouring sawdust a lot of the time. I plough through a fair number of such books myself, and I would have to say that I don’t even regard the activity involved as “reading” per se. Yes, my eyes track all the words. Yes, I follow the argument and make notes and marks in the margins. Yes, I cross-reference and read the footnotes and mine the bibliographies. But it’s professional excavation work, necessary but not fun. (Maybe if I were a born wonk it would be fun — but, as Nixon might have said, I am not a wonk!)

There are a few exceptions, though, and these are the ones that drew my eye. Alexander Russo, who writes for This Week in Education, mentions that he’s reading The Corner, the 1997 non-fiction look at a Baltimore street corner that led authors Ed Burns and David Simon to create the unbelievable HBO series The Wire. I cannot say enough about The Wire, and I agree absolutely that it’s about, among other things, the failure of inner city public schools (that becomes explicit later in the series, with a season devoted specifically to a former cop turned teacher). But The Wire is also about so much more–about the impossible end-game of law enforcement in chaotic, dying cities; about the spontaneous emergence of free-market entrepreneurship in the hood (via the drug trade); about the leviathan-like power of bureaucracy to stifle, deflect, and destroy human creativity and will. If this series is new to you, change that.

Diane Ravitch, whose writing about the history and politics of public education in America is not dry-as-dust, is re-reading Moby Dick. “Watch for the Ahabs among us,” she writes. I’m a big fan of re-reading. Great books grow with you, and are entirely new upon re-reading every few years.

Steve Peha, president of Teaching That Makes Sense, is an animal. He and his Kindle have been tearing it up this summer. Highlights include Stuart Buck’s Acting White (“powerful and provides a reasonably original theory that can be said to at least partly explain the achievement gap”) and David Price’s Love and Hate in Jamestown (“Unlocking the truth about America stimulates something in kids that can rarely be accessed in any other way. As Ms. Ravtich showed us in her stunning book The Language Police, we must get away from textbook-based, state-board-of-education-controlled, bastardized, and bowdlerized US history. To my mind, this means giving up on content standards for history as such tools give states exactly the power no true American would want them to have—the ability to write, re-write, and suppress the very things we so desperately need our children to learn”). I think Ravitch is embracing content standards in the form of a national curriculum — in the wake of her rejection of school choice — but that’s another argument for another day.

Me? Setting aside the ed reading I do for work — I’m vastly enjoying Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I always like to try to solve my murder mysteries, rather than just letting them wash over me. So I sat up late last night reading Leviticus, which is pivotal to the novel’s pattern of serial killings, looking for clues. Didn’t find any — but learned a lot about burnt offerings and ways that pigeons, rams, goats, and more may be used to cleanse away sin.