bragan's 2009 reading list

Hello! As I just said on the Introductions thread, I'm entirely new here. For a while now, I've found myself stumbling onto this group and randomly sampling people's reading lists, and I finally decided it looked like too much fun not to join in.

I'm certainly a bit late to the 2009 reading party, it being April already. I've finished 41 books so far this year, so I figured I'd just list them here instead of trying to find something to say about all of them, but from this point on, I'll try to at least post a few brief comments on each one. It might be a little while until the next one, though, as I've just started in on an 800 page behemoth.

Anyway, here's the list of what I've read so far in 2009:

1. Stalking the Vampire: a Fable of Tonight by Mike Resnick
2. Time edited by Katinka Ridderbos
3. Songs from the Drowned Lands by Eileen Kernaghan
4. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo
5. Count Zero by William Gibson
6. The Pluto Files by Neil deGrasse Tyson
7. Ship of the Line by C.S. Forester
8. Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition
9. Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz
10. Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander
11. The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
12. Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin
13. Doctor Who: Timelash by Glen McCoy
14. Nation by Terry Pratchett
15. The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula by Eric Nuzum
16. A Trio for Lute by R.A. MacAvoy
17. Hart & Boot & Other Stories by Tim Pratt
18. Murder & Mayhem in the Highlands: Historic Crimes on the Jersey Shore by John P. King
19. Wormwood Volume 1 by Ben Templesmith
20. Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
21. Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
22. The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison
23. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
24. The Living Dead edited by John Joseph Adams
25. Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, Revised and Expanded Edition by David Quammen
26. The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons
27. Doubt and Certainty by Tony Rothman and George Sudarshan
28. Redshift Rendezvous by John E. Stith
29. Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid by J. Maarten Troost
30. Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold
31. Phraseology: Thousands of Bizarre Origins, Unexpected Connections, and Fascinating Facts about English's Best Expressions by Barbara Ann Kipfer
32. Survival of the Sickest by Sharon Moalem
33. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
34. The Atheist's Way: Living Well Without Gods by Eric Maisel
35. Flying Colours by C.S. Forester
36. Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End... by Philip Plait
37. The Discworld Graphic Novels: The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
38. Stupid American History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions by Leland Gregory
39. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
40. Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox
41. 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories by Michael A. Arnzen

And there you have it!

ETA: Except my touchstones suddenly decided to stop working halfway through. Sigh.

Welcome to Club Read bragan. Your reading list is interesting. I just finished Gibson's Count Zero although I have yet to post comments about the novel. I did enjoy it. At his best, Gibson is eerily prescient. Of late, his books have lost that quality. He is now with the times rather than ahead of the times.

Thanks for the welcome!

I've read of few of Gibson's novels, and I think Count Zero may actually be my favorite of them. I suppose it does feel these days as if reality has finally caught up to him. I know I found Spook Country pretty disappointing, and that may well be part of the reason.

Of course, being ahead of your time can sometimes work against you, too. I know I had a big problem with Neuromancer because I only read it for the first time a few years ago, and I had to keep reminding myself that no, really, it was all terribly original when he wrote it. But it was sadly difficult to shake my irrational feeling that, yeah, it was just a big pile of Cyberpunk cliches. Talk about being a victim of your own success, I guess.

Finally, I've finished my first book for April, and #42 for the year:

42. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson



How to describe this book? The only adjective that comes to mind is "trippy," but that doesn't remotely capture my feelings about it. It's more like... Well, it's like taking the concentrated essence of conspiracy theory, every brand of mysticism known to man, the turbulent politics of the '60s and '70s, H.P. Lovecraft, fractured fragments of history, bad puns and bits of Philip K. Dick's brain, spiking it with LSD, spiking it with more LSD, adding Viagra, putting it all into a blender, and turning it on without the lid in place so that it makes gooey, chaotic spatters of prose all over the walls of your kitchen. Except that that sounds kind of cool and fascinating. And maybe it is in concept. But in execution? Not so much. As I was reading, part of my brain kept thinking things like "Well, in theory what the authors are doing here is very interesting" and "You have to admire their audacity," while the rest was thinking, "Oh, god, how many more pages of this do I have to get through?!" By the end of the first volume, that second reaction had more or less won, though I kept going, anyway, because I'm stubborn like that.

The thing is, I do get the sense that there's a very funny postmodernist joke at the core of this book. I just didn't feel that it was worth wading through 800 pages of gooey wall-splatterings in order to be able to say I was in on it. Ah, well. At least now when I come across references to this series, as I sometimes do, I'll be able to, well, not understand them, really, but at least recognize them. And reading this has given me a new appreciation for the game Illuminati, which I enjoyed playing back in college. Amusingly, the game really does have the exact same plot and structure as the books (in other words, none), though it's approximately 2,300 times more entertaining.

Rating: 2.5/5

That review takes me back! I never finished those books, but I had very much the same reaction to those parts I read. The only thing I remember about the Illuminati game is "orbital mind control lasers" - am I on the right track?

I really am stupidly stubborn about finishing books once I start, or I probably would have bailed out by the end of Book 1, myself. That's what I get for picking it up in an omnibus volume, I suppose.

I don't remember orbital mind control lasers specifically, but I think I'd almost be surprised if there weren't some group in the game that had them. :) There weren't any in the book, though, which seems like an oversight, now that you mention it.

and the worst thing is that readers end up getting poor Robert Charles Wilson, a v. good SF writer, confused w/ RA Wilson to Robt. Ch. Wilson's detriment. One really has to be into stoned conspiracy theory stories to dig the Illuminati. Probably responsible, on some level, for the DaVinci Code.

I agree that at some level the books are meant as a literary joke but the joke's not worth getting.

Yes, I confused the two of them for a while, too, and if that drives anybody away from reading Robert Charles Wilson's stuff, it's a shame. His Spin is possibly one of the best SF novels I've read in recent years.

I think I might be able to take 100 pages or so of stoned conspiracy theories and find it entertaining, but 800 pages is beyond pushing it.

(And, geez, 100 touchstone possibilities for Spin, and not one of them is the right one.)

43. SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History by Dan Linehan.



An in-depth look at the craft that won the Ansari X Prize, and the people behind it. With lots of pictures.

The prose isn't likely to win any literary awards, but it's very, very detailed, with extensive quotes from the people involved, and it does capture the excitement of the endeavor. Worth a look, if you're a serious space enthusiast.

Rating: 3.5/5

(And, oh, look, the touchstone isn't working again. I've made it an HTML tag instead.)

44. Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse



I only really discovered Wodehouse a few years ago -- shockingly late in life, I know -- and since then I've been making my way through the Jeeves & Wooster books far too slowly, but with considerable delight. I think Code of the Woosters is my favorite of the ones I've read so far, but this is definitely up there in terms of wit, charm, and laugh-out-loud silliness.

Rating:4.5/5

45. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser



When I try to imagine what my life would have been like if I'd had the internet as a kid, I just can't do it, any more than I can imagine what it would be like not to have it as an adult. So I was really interested in this book, hoping it would provide some good insights into what it's like to grow up in the Information Age. Alas, I was to be disappointed on this score. The authors -- who are lawyers, not sociologists-- talk a lot about how parents, teachers and lawmakers should think about kids' online activities, but never give any real sense of how any of it looks from the kids' perspectives. And they spend much of the book re-hashing all the usual internet-related concerns that apply not just to young people, but to everybody: privacy issues, the legality of file-sharing, the difficulty of sorting through an overwhelming and often unreliable sea of information, etc. They do have some level-headed, if not necessarily original, things to say about those issues, but unfortunately they do it in writing style that I sometimes found annoyingly simplistic and repetitive.

Rating: 3/5

Oh Bragan,

You must read Wodehouse's Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (published in the US as The Catnappers). It is hysterical. Additionally, I recommend all of the books about Blandings Castle (not part of the Bertie and Jeeves series but just as funny)

Nice eclectic mixture of books!

How did you fiind Perdido Street Station. I was impressed by the world, but rather turned off by the imagery.

Urania1:

I see Wodehouse has written something like 90 books, and I am possessed of a burning desire to read all of them. It's going slowly, though, because the To-Read Pile is threatening to eat my entire house, and I've had to impose strict quotas on my book-acquisition in an attempt to tame it. (Very painful! *sniffle*)

I'll make a point of picking that one up sooner rather than later, though! I see Amazon in the US actually does have it under the name Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, too. They must've re-released it here with the UK title.

Reading_fox:

Yes, "eclectic" is probably the word. :)

I had a few words to say about Perdido Street Station on my blog after somebody else asked me the same question, so, being lazy, I'll just cut and paste my response from there:

I'm actually not entirely sure what to say about it... On the one hand, the plot is, objectively, pretty thin for a novel that long; I'm not at all sure how satisfying I found the ending; and the long passages describing people's exact routes through the city every time they traveled somewhere where not exactly excitement-inducing, no matter how cool the city itself might be. On the other hand, the setting was amazingly cool and imaginative and well-realized, the characters were believable, and all of the individual plot elements were interesting. For me, at least, the stuff on that second hand dominated, and I found it on the whole to be a decidedly enjoyable and worthwhile (albeit rather slow) read. I'll definitely be interested in checking out more of Mieville's work.

46. Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty



A bunch of second-string superheroes -- people whose powers are too weak, too useless, or too disgusting to make it into the official superheroes' league -- find themselves caught up in a struggle against both the not-very-heroic regular heroes and a destructive group of supervillains. Fun concept, mediocre execution. I really wanted to like it, but it's just so poorly written that even the elements that should have been entertaining fell utterly flat.

Rating: 2/5.

47. Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn



A short epistolary novel about a fictional island where the letters of the alphabet are outlawed one by one. It's partly a celebration of language and partly a piece of social commentary, and there were moments when I sort of got the feeling that perhaps it was trying just a little too hard to be one or both of those things, but I definitely did enjoy it -- enough so that I essentially read it in one sitting.

Rating: 4/5

48. The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry by Larry Gonick & Craig Criddle



I'm not sure how well this would work as a first introduction to the subject, but for someone like me who took basic chemistry mumblety-mumble years ago, it serves as a nice refresher course presented in a fun, entertaining format. I will admit that the more technical chapters at the end lost me a bit, but for the most part it was both educational and painless.

Rating: 3.5/5. (It may well deserve four, but I docked it half a star for the problematic chapters. That's what you get for making me feel dumb, book!)

>11 bragan: If you find a good one written by sociologists let me know, will you? On a similar theme, have you read the Clay Shirky book, Here Comes Everybody? While some of it is beyond me and beyond my interest, there are some parts of the book I found really interesting. Here's the Amazon page, for more info (I would be at a loss to provide a synopsis, I think). http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/159420153...

>15 bragan: I loved Perdido and everything else Miéville has written; however, looking back, I might acknowledge that some of Perdido was overwritten and it functioned a bit more like a literary novel than a genre novel, imo (which I liked). What was he 25 when he wrote that? It's been interesting to watch his writing mature and see the interesting things he does with it. Un Lun Dun is certainly very different but equally inventive, and the same can be said about the new one The City & the City (tip: don't read the reviews before you read the book; I'm sure they will include spoilers and it's worth it to not know what's coming ahead of time).

i, too, have read all of Miéville (except The City & the City - soon, soon) and liked all his books (unlike the rest of my family). I think if appealing characters and a recognizable plot are in order, Un Lun Dun - perhaps because it was YA? - is a good choice for Miéville in a easier to digest mode.

Miéville is just as over the top as Bolano but, for whatever reasons, the overwriting and self-consciousness in Miéville's books don't bug me the way i'm turned off by Bolano. Perhaps because i found Miéville by accident, early on and i read Bolana after reading far too many reviews. No more mentions of Bolano, promise. Miéville's style, in general, seems to have gotten leaner with each book.

Avaland:

I would love to find such a book written by sociologists. If I do, I'll be sure to call your attention to it! And I've read bits and pieces of Shirky's writing on the web, but haven't read his book (yet). Maybe I should.

I did quite like Perdido, despite my reservations about it. I'm really happy enough, in general, to see the lines between "literary" and "genre" novels blurred to any extent possible.

Un Lun Dun does look interesting. Although I was thinking about picking up The Scar next... That's set in the same universe as Perdido Street Station, yes? It did seem to me like a world worth revisiting.

Re 17 -- sounds interesting! I'd never heard of this author before, so now have a few new additions to my wishlist. Thanks for helping to expand it. :)

I'd never heard of that particular author before, either, until I randomly stumbled across some LibraryThing posts from people who'd read and recommended the book. So I guess I'm just a link in a chain, really. :)

I hope you enjoy it if/when you get around to reading!

#21 yeah, the scar iirc is the next in line. And then, a bit later in time, Iron Council. If you liked Perdido, i think you'll like the rest (and, the converse is true, i think. No one to whom i loaned Perdido liked it at all - not family, not friends. I think Un Lun Dun might work for a larger audience.

I'll move The Scar up the wishlist, then, I think!

49. Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen



A novel about low-lifes, eccentrics, and the just plain dysfunctional as they cross each others' paths, often violently, in the wake of a destructive Florida hurricane. I thought it was okay, but I must confess that I don't really understand Hiaasen's apparent reputation as some kind of brilliant comic satirist. At most, I think this book occasionally hit the "mildly amusing" mark. Maybe Hiassen's sense of humor and mine just don't line up all that well, although it isn't that I don't like my humor dark. Or maybe it's just that his characters never particularly clicked for me.

I got this book, along with another Hiaasen novel, Tourist Season, in the SantaThing exchange last year. (The fact that I'm just getting around to reading it now is a small indication of just how backed up the To-Read Pile has gotten.) On the off chance that my LT Santa might happen to read this, I want to make it clear that I did appreciate the books! I had been intending to check out some of Hiaasen's stuff one way or another, and I did find both of them readable. I'm just afraid that they haven't converted me into a fan.

Rating: 3/5.

>25 bragan: The Scar is a pirate story (how very timely) set in the Bas Lag world but not in New Crobuzon. And, I believe, it is set in the same time period as Perdido. Bella Coldwine, the protagonist, is fleeing the city. I think, she is a former lover of the scientist in Perdido (I forget his name, but hey, how can one forget a name like Bella Coldwine) and the authorities are looking for here because of her connection. HOWEVER, that's pretty much the only direct connection with Perdido. Of course, being in the same world, there are the same interesting peoples, and a few new ones, but the setting is where you'd expect for a pirate story, on the high seas:-) I think you might find the prose a bit less baroque than Perdido. The prose in The City & The City is really pared down, but that's in keeping with his premise of a Chandler-like police procedural.

That sounds pretty good to me! How can one resist a pirate story? (In fiction, obviously. The real life ones are more problematic, if also interesting. :)) And it seems to me that there was enough background detail in Perdido that the author could easily develop settings for half a dozen books from it.

It'll probably take me a while to get around to reading it, though, alas. The To-Read Pile is getting smaller, but only very, very slowly and incrementally.

50. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins



Richard Dawkins is probably best known these days for his writings about atheism and religion. No matter what you think of his take on that particular topic -- and I have rather complicated mixed feelings about it, myself -- it's a bit of a shame that this has come to overshadow his career as a writer of books on evolution so much. Because the man really does have a marvelous talent for explaining even the most complicated aspects of evolutionary biology in clear and comprehensible terms through the use of apt analogies and the careful construction of simple examples. This gene's-eye view of evolution, which pays particular attention to issues of self-interest and altruism, is certainly no exception. It's by no means the last word on the subject -- Dawkins doesn't for a second pretend that it is -- and since it was written in 1976, some of the details are doubtless a little dated now. (Dawkins' attempt to use a computer-based metaphor at one point is amusingly quaint now, if nothing else.) But there are good reasons why this has remained in print for three decades plus.

The version I have, by the way, is a 2004 reprint of the 1989 edition, which included two new chapters and a large number of excellent new endnotes correcting, clarifying, and expanding on the original text. Apparently there was also a new 30th anniversary edition in 2006, but other than a new introduction, I'm not sure what, if anything, was done to update it then.

Rating: 4.5/5

51. Turn Coat by Jim Butcher



This is the latest book in the Dresden Files series, which I'm very much enjoying. I'm a bit of a sucker for stories that blend completely different genres together, and this one is a rather nicely integrated combination of fantasy and detective fiction, so it had something of an advantage with me from the start. But a lot of the appeal lies in the main character: a deeply decent guy with some scary potential and an irrepressibly smart-alecky attitude. The plots are generally fun, too, full of complicated supernatural schemes, lots of magical mayhem, and poor Harry Dresden constantly finding new and more extreme ways to define the phrase "having a bad day."

This particular installment, while it does a few things that I'm sure will be important in the large-scale story and character arcs, is probably a bit less complex and frenetically paced than the last few. But that's not really a complaint. I think one way that a long series can start sliding downhill involves the author falling into the trap of trying to make each book bigger and badder and more spectacular than the last, until at some point he inevitably starts to over-reach. But this one, fortunately, is still entertaining eleven books in, which is probably rare enough to be noteworthy.

Rating: 4/5

#26 - I read a Hiaasen once, that was enough. To his credit, at that time* he was writing a really nice column for the Miami Herald.

*I say "at that time" because it's been over 10 years since I've looked up an article.

You know, from the two books of his I've read, I almost suspect I'd like his writing style a lot better applied to a newspaper column instead of a novel.

52. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee



A look at the history of Chinese food in America (which, unsurprisingly, is very different from the history of Chinese food in China). I picked this book up after seeing a video of Lee's surprisingly engaging TED talk on the subject. I must say that after having watched that the book was a tiny bit of a disappointment, just because she did such a thorough job of condensing so much of the book's contents into the lecture that for at least the first half of the book I didn't feel like I was learning anything new. It could also have benefited from a bit more narrative focus; many of the chapters tend to jump back and forth between different parts of the story they're telling in a rather disjointed fashion. It was definitely worth reading anyway, though, and has as much to say about the interaction of American and Chinese people as of American and Chinese food.

Rating: 3.5/5

Thanks for that review. I've had this one noted down for awhile, it's just such an interesting idea.

It may not have been quite as good as I'd hoped, but, again, I do think it's worth reading. Some of the trivia it offers up about the history of Chinese food is interesting, and Lee, who is second-generation Chinese-American, is as interested in telling the story of what life is like for Chinese immigrants as she is in exploring the mysterious origins of the fortune cookie.

And kudos to whomever designed that cover.

It's better than it looks in that picture, too, since you can't actually read the text very well there.

53. 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill



I was going to say "this sort of looks like a collection of horror stories, but..." Except I realized that that makes me sound like one of those people who say things like, "Well, this isn't really science fiction, because it's well-written and insightful and doesn't have any rayguns." And I hate that. So I'll just say that this is a collection of stories most, but not all, of which feature horror or dark fantasy elements, and which, generally speaking, is more interested in the subtly creepy and the emotionally evocative than it is in thrills and chills or in concentrating heavily on plot. Some of the stories worked better for me than others, and none of them quite strikes me as a work of brilliance (although a couple of them do seem to have affected me rather more than I was expecting). But it's a solid collection, overall.

I liked Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, too. I'll definitely be on the lookout for more of his stuff in the future. I've already added his graphic novel Locke and Key to my ridiculously long wish list.

Rating: 4/5

I ended up buying a copy of Heart-Shaped Box last weekend after hearing a few people tell me how frightening it was. Now to bump it up a little in the reading queue.

More than the scariness, what I most remember about Heart-Shaped Box is the main character feeling very believable and interesting and real. I like Hill's writing style, too. It's not fancy, but it reads very smoothly.

54. The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death. by Gene Weingarten



A humorous guide to all the things that might be in the process of killing you right now, including your own rampaging hypochondria. Generally amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, even mildly informative and, in the end, a little poignant, in a darkly tongue-in-cheek kind of way. But, man, if I wasn't a hypochondriac when I started reading, I probably am now. Which is good timing, I guess, what with the whole swine flu thing.

Rating: 4/5

55. What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable edited by John Brockman



Every year the Edge website gathers together a large number of "scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world," many of them giants in their fields, asks them to answer some broad, philosophical question, and then collects all the answers together into a book. 2006's question was "What is your dangerous idea?", defined as "an idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true." The result is a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of the answers failed to strike me as either particularly shocking or remotely likely to lead to social destabilization. There was a fair amount of repetition, as multiple people offered essentially the same answers in different words. A number of folks seem to have subtly misinterpreted the question, choosing to talk more about other people's false ideas than their own true-but-dangerous ones. And a few of them were just plain wacky. On the other hand, there were also quite a few answers that were both intriguing and provocative, and the book as a whole is interesting as a snapshot of what really smart people are thinking about and finding themselves disturbed by here in the early 21st century. The central question itself is also interesting, since it raises the further question -- which a number of respondents addressed explicitly -- of whether "dangerous" ideas ought to be suppressed or embraced.

Rating: 3.5/5

56. Breathers: A Zombie's Lament by S.G. Browne



This was my Early Reviewer book from March, and one I was very excited to receive. Here's the review I wrote for it:

So, the idea here is that every so often, for some reason, a dead body happens to reanimate after a few days as a zombie. Zombies have all the same memories, thoughts, and feelings (well, OK, emotions) as they did before death, but society regards them as lower than animals. Andy, who recently lost both his wife and his Breather status in a car crash, is not happy about this. Andy wants civil rights. He wants self-respect. He wants love. And he wants some more of that mystery meat his new zombie buddy is hoarding in his secret hideout...

Despite a zinger of an opening, this book took a little while to really get going for me, and early on I found myself reflecting that it wasn't nearly as broadly comedic as I was expecting. But it has a sly, gruesome, incredibly dark sense of humor that sneaks up on you like a zombie in a dark graveyard, and after a while I suddenly realized I was enjoying the heck out of it.

It's not for the faint of stomach, or for those who might find it disturbing not to know quite who they ought to be rooting for. But if you have a twisted sense of humor and like your comedy dark, this one is definitely worth checking out.

Rating: 4/5

>43 bragan:, bragan, your review of Breathers cracked me up. I had just been thinking that its very amusing to me how zombies are basically the only conventional horror creature (vampires, werewolves, etc.) that haven't been turned into sympathetic creatures by someone. I will now have to revise my thinking.

That thought had crossed my mind, too. I suppose it was only a matter of time! I liked Breathers's version of making the monsters sympathetic, though. They were not glamorous or cool or, in the end, particularly nice.

Zombies are the new vampires! I tend to avoid the entire paranormal genre, but find myself highly intrigued by a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I may have to read that one.

Apparently Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is now Amazon's #2 recommendation for me. There are times when I wonder a about Amazon's impression of me. :)

>47 bragan:, Honestly, I think Amazon's recommendations are overly sensitive to "newness". When I read World War Z, suddenly I was being recommended every trashy zombie novel ever written.

I've noticed that, too. Whatever you've just bought, it seems to think you'll immediately want to buy a ton of other stuff just like it. Which is kind of sad, because the sort of book I'd really like to have recommendations for is the kind I'd probably never think of by myself.

57. For Love and Glory by Poul Anderson



A lame science fiction/romance novel with a plot so disjointed and pointless I can't even bring myself to summarize it. I seem to remember quite enjoying some of Anderson's stuff when I was younger, but either he went seriously downhill or my tastes have significantly matured or, more likely, both. This book has it all: cardboard characters who spend most of the novel sitting around delivering long chunks of exposition to each other, a complete lack of anything remotely creative in the way of world-building, a lifeless and unromantic romance (or two), even an annoyingly quirky writing style full of weird archaisms and exclamation points. It does gain a few points for having slightly better science than a lot of SF novels, but it loses them and then some just for the moment during one character's melodramatic rendition of his Defining Moment of Traumatic Backstory when I found myself bursting into inappropriate laughter. (It was the gratuitous dead kitten that did it.) Sigh. Why is it that the ability to write realistic science and the ability to write realistic characters so seldom seem to go together in science fiction? I like an accurately rendered, sense-of-wonder-filled description of a nifty astronomical event as much as the next geek, but the older I get, the less I find myself able to tolerate characters who have at at most one personality characteristic each and tend to talk about themselves as if they're narrating a particularly dull documentary on their lives.

Rating: 2/5

58. Day One: Before Hiroshima and After by Peter Wyden



Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of the atomic bomb or the day-by-day workings of the Manhattan project, Wyden mostly concentrates on the personalities involved, and on the chain of policy decisions that led to the development and deployment of the bomb (and ultimately to the Cold War). He also spends a large section of the book talking about the bombings' effect on Japan, including some rather horrific descriptions of post-attack Hiroshima.

In the early chapters of the book, something about Wyden's writing style kind of rubbed me the wrong way, for reasons that are hard to pin down. He was discussing colorful people doing interesting things of lasting importance, but I still often found it hard to keep my eyes from glazing over. I think perhaps I felt a bit as if he were throwing lots of facts and descriptions and anecdotes at me, rather than weaving things together into a coherent narrative. Once the bombs actually started exploding, however, the book suddenly became much more compelling -- whether because the writing improved or because the subject matter is powerful enough that it no longer really mattered, I don't know. What I do know is that it took me several days to get through the first 200 pages or so, but after that I finished the book almost in one sitting.

Rating: 3.5/5

59. Commodore Hornblower by C.S. Forester



This is the ninth book in the Horatio Hornblower series, which I've been slowly making my way through over the past few years. It really surprises me how much I'm enjoying this series, as I'm not exactly fond of military fiction in general, nor do I have any great personal fascination with sailing ships. (Even after nine of these books, I couldn't tell a sloop from a frigate if my life depended on it.) I'm pretty sure I know why I'm enjoying it, though: I grew up with Star Trek and other works of science fiction that tend to lift their battle scenes and even their whole general feel from the earlier traditions of naval fiction, so a great deal of it feels pleasantly familiar, even nostalgia-inducing. Also, I do find the character of Horatio Hornblower both interesting and sympathetic. There really ought to be more melancholy-introvert action heroes.

This particular volume has Hornblower on duty in the Baltic, where he encounters a variety of action on both land and sea. There's some rather painfully sappy romantic stuff at the beginning, and it's possible that Hornblower is, by this point, starting to become a little too uber-competent. (He invents brilliant naval maneuvers! He leads an infantry charge! He works great feats of diplomacy! He foils an assassination!) But who cares? It's exciting, entertaining stuff.

Rating: 4/5

60. The New Kings of Nonfiction edited by Ira Glass.



A collection of articles, most of them originally published in magazines, on a wide range of topics. Among other things, it includes a look into the lives of a conservative talk radio host, a teenager indicted by the SEC for stock market fraud, Saddam Hussein, Val Kilmer, and a random American ten-year-old.

The somewhat clumsy title isn't entirely accurate. Certainly it's stretching the definition of "new"; the oldest of the articles first appeared in 1985, and several of them feel a bit dated now. Also, the field it draws from is a little more limited than the broad term "nonfiction" implies. All the articles are what editor Ira Glass calls "original reporting" (as opposed to, say, reflective essays), and all are to one degree or another presented with the kind of personal touch that Glass apparently favors.

As to whether the authors presented here are the "kings" of this particular kind of nonfiction... Well, a couple of these pieces I didn't care for. The hand-by-hand description of a poker tournament, for instance, was pretty much guaranteed to put a glazed look on my face, no matter how much testosterone and adrenalin the author tried to inject. But otherwise the writing ranged from moderately interesting all the way to utterly compelling. Bill Buford's piece on soccer hooligans made me immediately go out and add the book it was excerpted from to my wishlist, even though I would pretty much never have expected to find myself interested in a book about soccer hooligans. And Lee Sandlin's discussion of World War II in the perceptions and memories of the American people and in the actual experiences of soldiers on the battlefield was as fascinating and thought-provoking as anything I've read in ages. I think this book would feel worthwhile just for those two articles alone.

Rating: 4/5

bragan - A book you might like along the same theme is : The New New Journalism : Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. This title is accurate, there are no articles, it's all interviews of different nonfiction authors by Robert Boynton. It's not for everyone, but I found it fascinating. And, if you want to read more along the same lines, it might be a great book for you.

That might be interesting. I'll check it out. Thanks!

61. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows



An epistolary novel about a group of people on the island of Guernsey, in the English Channel, who formed a sort of book club during the Nazi occupation of the island, and a journalist who befriends them after the war. Despite the sadness and horror of some of the events it touches on, it's a very pleasant read with likable and believable characters, a strong sense of time and place, a touch of romance that never gets too sappy, and an unapologetic streak of bibliophilia. Basically a quick, light, entertaining read.

Rating: 4/5

62. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich



A look at the history and sociology of what the author calls "communal ecstasy," including tribal dances, medieval carnivals, and 20th-century rock concerts, with a particular emphasis on the political aspects of such festivities and the consequences of authoritarian attempts to suppress them. At times the central conceit seemed to me like a fairly tenuous thread with which to connect widely disparate historical events, and Ehrenreich's assertions and conclusions often strike me as very, very speculative. But it was pretty interesting, nonetheless.

Rating: 3.5/5

63. The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes



A Victorian stage magician and his giant mute sidekick are called on to investigate a murder. Except that description doesn't remotely capture what the book is about at all. Honestly, I'm not sure how to describe it. It's a strange, surreal tale in which the bizarre and the fantastic seems to lurk around every corner and behind every detail, told with a droll, self-aware sense of humor by a profoundly unreliable narrator. In the end, I'm not sure whether any of it makes any actual sense, but I very much enjoyed it, anyway.

Rating: 4/5

I've been eying The Somnambulist and will now have to read it. Thanks for the review! I can't resist an unreliable narrator!

I'll definitely be interested to hear what you think of it if you do. I've been reading the reviews of it on LT, and they're very mixed. A lot of people thought that the plot was too full of random weirdness, or were unhappy because the fantastical elements were never really explained. Which I find absolutely understandable, as those kinds of things often bother me, too. But in this case, I think it's a feature, rather than a bug. The sense of wonderful, inexplicable strangeness about the whole thing really worked for me; it struck me as mysterious and fun. A lot of people also didn't like the narrator, but I thought the narrative voice was marvelous. It hooked me in right from the first paragraph.

I purchased The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society last year (much against my will). I still haven't been able to bring myself to read it. I thought my husband (who did not read fiction before he married me) might like it, so I passed it on to him. He loved it. One of these days, I'll break down. I should go into book consulting. I'm an ace at figuring out what others might like to read. Unfortunately, others have a harder time with me. I don't know why.

It's a very pleasant book, in my opinion, but I think the feeling that you're reading something against your will can really ruin the experience. I still haven't forgiven my high school English classes for some of the books they made me hate.

And maybe you're just harder to choose books for than others? In my experience, some people are easy, and some are just impossible. I know I'm generally very easy, because I'm willing to try just about anything. I like to think of it as being open-minded and eclectic in my tastes, but it probably just means that the hard-to-buy-for people have a finer sense of literary discrimination than I do.

64. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell



The author recounts his boyhood experiences on the Greek island of Corfu, which consisted largely of wandering the countryside investigating and collecting animals of all shapes and sizes. His descriptions of the island are wonderfully evocative, and many of the stories about his family, their eccentric collection of friends, and his even more eccentric menagerie are laugh-out-loud funny. Very charming book.

Rating: 4/5

I remembered loving this book as a child and picked it up again and found, to my dismay, that I loved it a little less. I will still read it with my own children in a year or so.

It took me a short while to get into it. I think the things I'd vaguely heard about it led me to expect something a bit different, a bit more of a constant laugh-fest. But once I got over that, I found it delightful.

65. This Will Kill You: A Guide to the Ways in Which We Go by HP Newquist and Rich Maloof



A handbook of things that can kill you dead, from alligator attacks (horror factor: 11 on a scale of 10) to working in a coal mine (not the safest career choice), complete with details on how, what, when, where and who.

This was my LT Early Reviewer book for April, and I almost didn't request it for fear it would be too morbid. But it's... Well, OK, actually, it is a bit morbid. But it also offers up lots of fascinating facts, instills a surprisingly powerful impression of how amazing and how fragile the human body is, and is written with such a breezily macabre sense of humor that the gruesome fates it's describing actually become rather fun to read about, or at least pleasantly scary in much the same fashion as a good horror movie.

All in all, I enjoyed it rather more than I'm entirely comfortable with, which is probably a pretty strong recommendation. I also suspect that it'll come in handy for playing "guess the diagnosis" while watching House.

Rating: 4/5

(Touchstone's not working, so I've linked to the book's work page.)

66. Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold



This is one of Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books -- yet another series that I'm slowly making my way through. It's a great series, too: fun, well-written sci-fi adventure stuff with good characters and interesting plots.

Miles himself doesn't appear for large sections of this particular installment, and I'll admit that at first I missed him; he's a likable character, with a fun, quirky brilliance and an entertainingly smart-assed sense of humor. But the character that it mostly does focus on is fascinating in his own right, and very well developed over the course of the story. To say much of anything about the plot or the premise would probably involve giving spoilers for either this book or the previous one, so I'll just say that it turns out to be a surprisingly complex take on various kinds of identity crisis, with a bit of darkness, a bit of action and a bit of politics along the way.

Rating: 4/5

67. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman



A collection of essays about reading, writing, and living a book-filled life. Fadiman and I disagree on a few matters of great import, such as the proper way to organize one's library, or the acceptability of dog-earing pages. But I forgive her. She writes with such charm and such obvious love for her subject matter that it would be impossible not to, and besides, nearly every essay in this book made me smile.

Rating: 4/5

68. A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly



A murder mystery set in New Orleans in 1833, at Mardis Gras. It's definitely not a bad book, though the mystery plot itself didn't really engage me as much as I'd hoped, despite some interesting twists towards the end. Mind you, the fault there might have been in me, rather than in the book, since I'm afraid I read most of it in a state of serious sleep deprivation. There is a lot of good historical detail, however, and since the main character is, as the title suggests a "free man of color," it's presented from a social and cultural viewpoint that's a bit different from what one might normally encounter in this kind of story. Indeed, the novel really is as much about the racial and sexual injustices of the time as it is about the murder, and it generally manages to handle the subject without resorting to oversimplification or platitudes.

Rating: 3.5/5

69. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell



An informal history of the Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Vowell's writing style takes a little getting used to: for the first handful of pages, it seemed as if she were trying a bit too hard to be breezy and casual and funny, and I really, really wish she'd just pick a tense in which to discuss the Puritans and stick with it. But those are minor flaws in a generally very appealing book. Vowell clearly loves this subject, and she makes it interesting in ways that my American history teachers never remotely managed. The result is informative, engaging, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. It also features what I believe are some fairly insightful thoughts about connections between the Puritans' attitudes and some of the more problematic aspects of American politics today. (Those of a more conservative political bent, though, will probably feel differently.)

Rating: 4/5

70. Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine by R. A. Lafferty.



This is one of those surreal, experimental science fiction novels that were very popular for a while in the 60s and 70s, the kind that make you think that perhaps the writer was on some really interesting drugs and that if you could get hold of some of them for yourself, the book might make a lot more sense. In the case of this particular work, I found that if I could achieve a certain Zen-like state in which I just let it wash over me, it sort of worked, but I have trouble keeping that up for more than a page or two, so it kept see-sawing back and forth between being sort of pleasantly bizarre and being just plain annoying.

Rating: It's nearly impossible to decide how to rate this. It's actually a good example of the kind of thing it is, and it was interesting to read, but I can't say I recommend it or even that I entirely enjoyed it. I'm going to call it three stars, in recognition of the fact that Lafferty does seem to know what he's doing, even if he's not exactly doing it for me.

Well, that was an interestingly diverse selection of books. You don't pigeonhole yourself.

I really enjoy Sarah Vowell, although she does write a little like she's putting together a blog, rather than a book. I do like her assumption that her reader is both politically aware and excited about history. Her book Assassination Vacation is well worth reading.

Yeah, my reading tastes are pretty eclectic, to say the least! I actually make something of an effort not to read books that seem similar too close to one another. What can I say? I like diversity! (I like to listen to the contents of my iPod on random shuffle, too. Something about having hard rock and folk music and novelty songs and pop and whatever all jumbled up next to each other really appeals to me.)

I'm also finding, interestingly, that my reading tastes are getting broader as I get older. In my youth, it was mostly a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and a narrower range of non-fiction.

As for Sarah Vowell, her style is very... bloggy. But even though I wasn't too sure about it at first, I think she really makes it work for her. I've already added Assassination Vacation to my wishlist, so I'm glad to hear that you recommend it.

71. Anything Goes by John Barrowman, with Carole E. Barrowman



I've very much enjoyed John Barrowman's performance as Captain Jack on Doctor Who (a show of which I am a huge and unabashed fan), and every time I've come across an interview with him, he's struck me as being full of appealingly goofy charisma, a kind of infectiously enthusiastic energy, and a deliciously raunchy sense of humor. So I figured his autobiography had to be fun to read, and I wasn't disappointed. This book would be worthwhile, really, just for the funny stories from his childhood, which he tells in a pleasantly rambling style with the assistance of hilariously cheeky footnotes. The rest of the book is a bit more of a mixed bag, I suppose: funny anecdotes, sad anecdotes, straightforward biographical information, lots of the usual celebrity name-dropping, and a fair amount of egotism that's pleasantly leavened with an occasionally self-deprecating sense of humor. Barrowman says at the outset that his hope is that "you'll feel as if you and I are lounging in our pyjamas on the couch in my Cardiff living room, sharing a bottle of champagne or a pot of tea, with music on in the background, having a blether and a laugh about my life so far." And that's exactly the feeling he manages to achieve.

Rating: 4/5. A little generous, maybe, but doggone it, I had fun.

72. A Wizard Alone by Diane Duane



This book is part of Duane's "Young Wizards" YA fantasy series. It's generally a very good series, with realistic characters, interesting world-building (even if the metaphysics occasionally feels a tiny bit too pseudo-Christian for my personal tastes), and a surprising amount of emotional depth and thematic sophistication. But this particular installment, while it has an interesting premise, suffers a little from being too slow. Any time it takes the characters 200 pages to figure out things that seemed obvious to me almost immediately, it's pretty much guaranteed to detract from the experience. Admittedly, this may be an unfair criticism for a YA novel, but Duane is usually very good at not underestimating her readers' intelligence.

Rating: 3.5/5

73. Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet by Jim Bell



A coffee table book featuring gorgeous high-resolution pictures taken by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, along with a detailed personal account of the mission (up until 2006, when the book was published) and of the art and science of Martian photography, written by the man in charge of the cameras. Looking at these amazing images, it's impossible not to get a thrill at the realization that there are actual photographs taken on an alien planet. Man, but we human beings have done some pretty nifty stuff!

Rating: 4/5

74. The Cat-Nappers (aka Aunts Aren't Gentlemen) by P.G. Wodehouse



Urania1 recommended this as the next Jeeves & Wooster novel I should read, so thanks, Urania! It's definitely up there with the best of the ones I've read so far, which is definitely saying something. Wodehouse is just such a complete joy to read. Sure, the plots of these stories all tend to be pretty much the same, but never mind that; the fun is in listening to good old Bertie telling them in his own utterly hilarious fashion.

Rating: 4.5/5

75. The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues by Plato



I took an Introduction to Philosophy class back in college, and for the most part it was very, very boring. It wasn't that I was uninterested in the subject, but sadly, neither the teacher nor the textbook were exactly lively and engaging, and those Enlightenment philosophers we spent most of the semester on could be awfully heavy going. I was surprised, though, by how much I enjoyed reading Plato, and always figured I'd give him a second look someday. Hence, this little Dover Thrift Edition volume.

Socrates' oratory, it turns out, is rather more dense than I remembered it being, but it's still just as witty and incisive, and was well worth revisiting. That one college class is the only formal study of philosophy I've done, so I can hardly count myself an expert on the subject, but it honestly seems to me that in some respects no one has really topped him since. His kind of philosophy, which consisted of an emphasis on clear and logical thinking, an insistence on pinning down the definitions of words so that we know exactly what we're arguing about, and a willingness to question everything and to accept ignorance when no clear answers are forthcoming, seems to me to be exactly the best way to go about approaching the significant questions in life, and something that we could do with a great deal more of in today's world. In fact, reading these dialogs, it becomes both painfully and amusingly clear that neither the world nor human nature has really changed in the last two or three thousand years. The kind of arguments that led to Socrates' execution are still entirely current and familiar. "Please, won't someone think of the children?!"

All of which isn't to say that I think all of Socrates' logic is sound. In the final dialog, which is mostly an attempt to prove the immortality of the soul, I think I disagreed with nearly every point he makes, and yet the arguments are so marvelously constructed and well thought out that I swear, I wanted to agree with them. Except, of course, when I wanted to jump into the discussion and dispute with him, an impulse I'm sure he would have appreciated.

Rating: 4.5/5

76. I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb



This is the story of one Dominick Birdsey, a guy who has a lot of bad crap in his life, chief of which is an identical twin afflicted with schizophrenia. In fact, Dominick and the other characters in the story have so much awfulness in their lives that at some point it ought to start feeling ridiculous... and it seems that every time I found myself thinking about that, some new setback or tragedy or twisted revelation would come up. And yet my suspension of disbelief never did snap, mainly, I think, because Dominick himself is such a very, very real-feeling character -- often painfully so. I came to care deeply about the guy; when he was anxious, my heart would start to pound as if I were reading a horror story, and it would break a little every time one of those setbacks or tragedies or revelations came up. This novel is just about 900 pages, very few of them having much of anything in the way of plot, but it flew by incredibly fast, and after a while I started resenting little things like work that would force me to put it down. There's also a great deal of thematic, as well as physical, weight to the book, as it tackles issues such as identity, family, abuse, guilt and forgiveness, power and oppression, and the damage that can be done by conventional "tough guy" forms of masculinity.

It's definitely not for everybody: it deals with a lot of dark and ugly subjects, and features sympathetic characters who do terrible things and terrible people with whom it's impossible not to sympathize at least a little. And there may be a few flaws that I could point to if I were feeling nitpicky. But nitpicky is the last thing this book makes me feel, and I am definitely awarding this one the coveted five stars (aka, "Holy CRAP, that was a good book!" or "Yeah, this is one that's gonna stick with me").

Rating: 5/5

77. Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human by Michael Chorost



The author, hard of hearing all his life, suddenly went completely deaf in 2001 at the age of thirty-six. Shortly afterward, he was fitted with a cochlear implant. In this book, published four years later, he offers up his thoughts, feelings, and philosophical musings on the nature of life with a bionic ear, and he makes every single one of those things absolutely fascinating. Also fascinating is the technology itself, which Chorost explains very clearly and very well, simultaneously conveying a sense of how utterly amazing it is that human beings can create devices like this and of how frustratingly limited those devices still are. Even more interesting, though, are his personal responses. Chorost has a considerable degree of expertise with computers, but greatly mixed feelings about them, so that the idea of having one implanted inside him both piques his curiosity and badly freaks him out, and he writes about both these reactions with real emotional honesty. From there, he goes on to intelligent, thought-provoking and sometimes surprisingly moving reflections on the nature of perception, the nature of humanity, and the ways in which technology can both diminish and enrich our lives. He's an excellent, extremely vivid writer with a knack for coming up with brilliant, perfectly apt metaphors, and I'd call this non-fiction writing at something very much like its best.

Rating: 4.5/5

(And, man, this has turned out to be a pretty good month for me, book-wise!)

78. Lord Hornblower by C.S. Forester



This is the second-to-last book in the Hornblower series. And it's a good installment; it drags a bit in the middle, but the surprisingly moving ending makes up for that very nicely. It's definitely less fun than the previous book, though. There's a strong note of war-weary melancholy that runs through the whole thing, which is entirely appropriate, but also a little depressing.

Rating: 4/5

79. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley



This is the story of one Flavia de Luce, preteen aristocrat and budding mad scientist, who finds herself investigating a mystery involving a dead bird, a dead body, family history, postage stamps, and pie. I have to say, I think this book suffered from over-hype for me. The buzz I'd heard about it, on LT and elsewhere, seemed to suggest that young Flavia was just about the most vividly rendered, admirably intelligent, instantly likable protagonist ever. And yet I spent a fair amount of the book honestly unable to decide whether she struck me as a precocious and endearingly quirky scamp, or just as something of a snotty brat. Although, come to think of it, my inability to make up my mind about that may well be a good indication that she is in fact a realistically written eleven-year-old. In any case, I did eventually warm towards Flavia considerably, and if the novel wasn't nearly as engaging as I'd hoped, it was not without its charms. Ultimately, it's not a bad light read, but I doubt I'll bother with the sequel.

Rating: 3.5/5

80. How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, M.D.



Groopman takes a close, thoughtful, balanced look at the all-too-human, and thus all-too-fallible thought processes of doctors. He draws on a large number of case histories (many of which are fascinating in their own right, both intellectually and emotionally), on his own experiences as both a doctor and a patient, and on interviews with doctors in which they discuss their triumphs, their mistakes, and their strategies for avoiding common errors in thinking that can lead to bad diagnoses. The result is a book that is not only extremely interesting to those curious about exactly how the practice of medicine works on a human level, but also full of clear, useful advice for doctors and patients. But I think it has an even broader scope than that, as the kinds of mental mistakes Groopman talks about -- seeing what you expect to see, letting emotions or ego affect your judgment, making unwarranted assumptions, settling for the first plausible answer you hit upon, etc. -- are things that all of us, not just doctors, do all the time in our personal and professional lives. And his analysis of these problems, how they manifest themselves, and how they can be dealt with is simply excellent.

Rating: 4.5/5

81. The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum



A collection of short stories, some of which sit firmly in the realm of science fiction or fantasy, and some of which are simply uncategorizably strange. Rosenbaum reminds me of Italo Calvino in many respects: the use of dreamlike or fairy-tale logic, the playfulness, the fascination with meta-narratives. One of the pieces in this collection even seems to be a deliberate homage to Calvino's Invisible Cities. But Rosenbaum isn't just some sort of Calvino imitator; he also shares Calvino's inventiveness. There's an incredible feeling of originality about these stories. Even when Rosenbaum is using familiar SF elements or riffing off of well-known works of fiction, he gives the sense of looking at whatever it is through absolutely fresh eyes and inviting the reader to do the same. Some of these stories did more for me than others, but I came away from the book with the overall impression of having just experienced something marvelous, in every sense of the word.

Rating: 4.5/5

bragan,

Your comments on The Ant King and Other Stories are interesting. I hadn't really thought about him vis a vis Calvino. I found traces of Le Guin in his books (when she is at her more playful). I am thinking here of her short story collection Changing Plains. I had just started The Ant King and Other Stories before I read your review. I'll be looking for the Calvino touches now.

It was "Other Cities" that really made me think of Calvino, and once I had that thought in my head, it stayed there. I haven't actually read Invisible Cities, to be honest, but I have The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, which riffs on it extensively, and once I started thinking about Calvino, I realized that the sensibility of a lot of Rosenbaum's stories made me think of Cosmicomics, which I have read, and a few of his stories also play around with meta-narrative in a very If on a Winter's Night a Traveler... kind of way. I'd be interested to hear whether or not you agree when you've finished it.

And I can see perhaps see the similarity to Changing Planes, too, now that you mention it.

Hmm,

I can see I will have to read The Dictionary of Imaginary Places as well. Another one for the wishlist. I am not fairing too well this week. And it isn't even on Kindle :-(

Man, I do know how that is! I've had weeks when my wishlist managed to acquire another dozen books or so without any apparent effort on my part.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is probably better enjoyed as a physical copy, anyway, if only for the maps scattered through it. My own copy was a gift from my sister many years ago. She always was pretty good at finding books I didn't know I wanted to read.

Thanks for the tip bragan. I'll start searching for a hard copy.

82. The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown



The author draws not just on historical documents and the work of earlier researchers, but also on his own travels along the Donner Party's route and on such fields as medicine, psychology, and meteorology to create an incredibly vivid and detailed account of what the unfortunate members of the infamous Donner Party experienced. But he also writes with tremendous compassion, and neither sensationalizes or trivializes the horror of the events he's describing.

And, man, "harrowing" is right. Books like this can certainly give you a sense of perspective on your own problems. Even on the worst days of my life, at least there was never any cannibalism.

Rating: 4/5

83. Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon



I keep wanting to think of this as a fantasy novel, as it has the general sensibility of one, but aside from a possible anachronism or two, it really doesn't have any fantastic elements. So I suppose it's really just an adventure story -- a very slight one, especially when compared to Chabon's other novels, but reasonably entertaining. I do have mixed feelings about the writing style, though, as it mostly made me feel quite distanced from both the action and the characters. Which is a pity, as said characters seem very interesting, although not very well developed. It's also full of sentences so convoluted that often by the time I got to the end I'd have forgotten how they started. On the other hand, Chabon does occasionally come out with a wonderfully clever turn of phrase, and there's a certain arch humor to the whole thing that's very welcome.

Bottom line: it's fun, but left me wishing for something a bit more substantial.

Rating 3.5/5

84. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by W.S. Baring-Gould



A fictional biography of the great detective, which mixes accounts of Holmes' official cases with various speculations, previously unpublished adventures and anecdotes (including an affair with Irene Adler, and, of course, an encounter with Jack the Ripper), attempts to reconcile apparent contradictions, and imaginative connections with other real and fictional events. All of which sounds pretty nifty, and there is no doubt in my mind that the author had a lot of fun putting it together. I've played this kind of game with other fictional universes, myself, starting with an obsession with Star Trek when I was eleven, so I know what an entertaining intellectual exercise it can be, especially if you have other people willing to play along with you. Unfortunately, though, I think this was really aimed at much more hardcore Holmes fans than I. I'm more of a casual enthusiast at best: I love Holmes as a character and have read several of his stories more than once, but I'm just not the sort of person who is capable of getting all excited at an assertion that, gosh, if you assume Watson meant X when he said Y, then it neatly explains thing Z! On the other hand, if I were that kind of obsessive Holmes fan, I suspect I'd find the frequent recaps of Doyle's stories, complete with extensive quotes, even more tedious than I did, since I wouldn't even need the refresher. Really, in my view these mostly just served to highlight the fact that Doyle was a better writer than Baring-Gould.

Rating: 2.5/5

85. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell



I didn't find this nearly as engaging or persuasive as Gladwell's previous books, unfortunately. His premise, basically, is that success isn't solely a matter of talent and drive, but depends just as much on having the right opportunities, being in the right place at the right time, getting the chance to develop good people skills on top of your other abilities, and absorbing useful attitudes from your cultural environment. On the one hand, all of this seems obvious enough that it scarcely needs an entire book to elucidate it. On the other, Gladwell mostly just provides lots of anecdotes and assertions, which don't really serve to support his thesis in any very useful or scientific way, and some of his conclusions about the cause and effect of specific phenomena seem dubious to me at best.

I'd still say this was worth reading, though. Some of his anecdotes are interesting in their own right, and his assertions are thought-provoking, at least. And it's certainly not a bad thing to be offered a reminder of the fact that the American myths of equal opportunity and the self-made man are, to say the least, unrealistic oversimplifications. I just kind of wish that he'd done a more satisfying job of it.

Rating: 3/5

86. The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks



A collection of stories (and one novella), some of which are set in the universe of Banks' Culture series. It's a decent collection, and Banks' talent for inventive science fictional detail is definitely in evidence, but nothing in it stood out for me as particularly special. The title novella, in which representatives of the galaxy-spanning Culture arrive on Earth in the 1970s and debate about whether or not to interfere, was interesting in a philosophical way, but I think it could have benefited by being considerably shorter.

Rating: 3.5/5

87. Anti Gravity: Allegedly Humorous Writing from Scientific American by Steve Mirsky



A collection of humorous pieces, most of which are inspired by science-themed news stories. They're very short, very silly, and mostly very fluffy, but good for a few chuckles, especially if you're of a scientific bent and have an appreciation for bad puns.

Rating: 3.5/5

88. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara



The author's mixed-race mother, along with two of her cousins, were forcibly taken from their Australian aboriginal mothers and sent to a school run by whites in 1931. It was clearly a horrible place, so they escaped and walked home. For 1,600 kilometers. At the time, the oldest of them was 14.

The writing is very unpolished, but it's a compelling story told in an authentic voice, and the window it provides into aboriginal culture and into one of the darkest moments in Australian history is both fascinating and sad.

This served as the basis for the movie The Rabbit-Proof Fence, which I haven't seen, but am thinking now that I ought to. It would be very interesting to be able to see the landscapes described in the book.

Rating: 3.5/5

#88 - I can definitely recommend the movie...the books sounds interesting.

I think I really am going to have to check out the movie.

The book wasn't quite what I was expecting. It doesn't attempt to dramatize the girls' journey, and is actually remarkably matter-of-fact about what was clearly an impressive feat by anybody's standards. Mostly it's just a plain account of the facts, with some historical context. But the fact that the author was both a member of the same aboriginal culture and a family member made it feel very personal, anyway. I did find it interesting.

Edited for a bit of clarification.

89. Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan



This book's premise, in which a science experiment gone wrong accidentally creates a region with new physical laws that is now slowly expanding to threaten the galaxy, is a fairly promising one. Especially as Egan handles it in a scientifically realistic way, as opposed to just inventing yet another Star Trek-style Magic Space Anomaly. Unfortunately, I found neither the physics nor the characters at all interesting. In fact, the main character, to the extent that he had a well-defined personality at all, seriously rubbed me the wrong way; I found most of his attitudes deeply disagreeable, which I really don't think was the intention. There's also the fact that when you're dealing, as Egan is here, with people from 20,000 years in the future who have almost unimaginable capacities to manipulate physics, biology, and their own human nature, you almost inevitably run into one of two problems. Either the characters and their actions and environment are effectively incomprehensible to the reader, or else they come across as implausibly similar to modern-day humans. I don't know how he manages it, but I'd swear Egan falls into both of these traps simultaneously. As for the physics, discussion of which constitutes the bulk of the novel, I found it tedious and difficult to penetrate. And that's coming from someone who passed three semesters of quantum mechanics.

I really do enjoy this kind of Big Idea SF if it's handled well. It's been quite a while since I read them, but I remember finding Egan's Quarantine and Permutation City enjoyably thought-provoking. But I don't think he's written a novel I've genuinely liked since.

I will admit that this one isn't entirely without redeeming features. There are one or two interesting bits of world-building, and I imagine the ending would have been kind of cool if I weren't feeling so bored and eager to finish by the time I got there.

Rating: 2/5. Possibly it really deserves another half star or so, since I recognize that it might be enjoyable if you've got a serious passion for quantum physics. But I'm feeling too annoyed with it to be charitable.

90. The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman.



The subject of this book is a fake newspaper story published in New York City in the 1830s, in which it was claimed that a famous astronomer had discovered life on the moon, including such improbable creatures as bipedal beavers and humanoid bats. Not unreasonably, I went into it expecting an amusing story about bizarre science fictional imaginings and public gullibility. What I got, though, was something much more than that. Goodman doesn't just tell the story of the newspaper hoax; he delves deeply into everything in the world of 1830s New York that remotely touches on it. The result is a rambling account of the history of journalism, the politics and social concerns of pre-Civil War New York, the lives of various prominent and colorful men (including familiar names like P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe), the religious and scientific attitudes of the time, and much more. It actually takes the author 130 pages to do more than mention the hoax story in passing, but I didn't mind at all, because everything he was talking about was fascinating. I came away from the book feeling a bit like I'd just taken a trip in a time machine to walk the streets of the city myself.

Rating: 4/5

(Hmm, I couldn't get the touchstone to work on the whole title, for some reason... Maybe the subtitle was too long.)

I think that newspaper story drew from a decades older article by the VERY famous Brit/German astronomer, William Herschel, (first famous for discovering Uranus, later for MUCH more - double stars, infrared radiation, the concept of "deep space" etc. who was convinced that he saw verdant forests on the moon (Herschel's home made scopes, even his earliest, had a much high resolution than those available to other European astronomers of the time).

The book actually talks quite a bit about the sources of inspiration for the article, and he was definitely relevant. Though there were in fact quite a few astronomers at the time who firmly believed that the moon must be inhabited, and more than one who, like Herschel, managed to convince himself that he saw signs of life there. As it happens, the astronomer that the article attributed these "discoveries" to was none other than John Herschel, William Herschel's son, who was very nearly as famous in his own time even if he's less well remembered today. Unlike his father, though, the younger Herschel never took any professional interest in the moon at all.

(Edited because apparently I am incapable of spelling "Herschel" consistently.)

John Herschel set up the first major observatory in the southern hemisphere, a few miles outside of Cape Town, SA, iirc. (Wm & his sister Caroline, as well as his son, John, all figure prominently in the age of wonder - which describes the interaction between literature/science in GBritain @ the turn of the 19th C)

Yep, there's a fair bit about his observatory at Cape Town in the book.

I'd vaguely heard of The Age of Wonder. Looks like it might be interesting.

I liked the age of wonder a great deal - as no one else on LT had reviewed it yet, i stuck my post on it as a LT review. But the book received praise from both the New Scientist and the NYTimes.

Maybe I'll add it to my ever-growing wishlist. It does sound like the sort of thing I might like.

Ooh, and I see the Scientific American Book Club is offering it now. With a buy-two-get-one-cheap offer in place, and at least a couple of other books I'm interested in available, too. Sigh. I may well be hitting the limits of my self-imposed book-buying quota very early next month. :)

91. Cat's Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel



This is one of the Doctor Who "New Adventures" series, which came out in the 1990s while the show was off the air. I was very impressed with these at the time; on the whole, they were astonishingly sophisticated for books based on a TV show, and often surprisingly well-written. Being a starving college student, though, I wasn't able to purchase all of them back then, so when I found a bunch of them in a used bookstore a few years ago I took the opportunity to fill in some of the gaps in my collection. Only, the state of my To-Read Pile being what it is, it's taken me until now to start in on them.

This particular novel has a sort of Cyberpunk Lite setting, featuring environmental degradation, urban decay, evil corporations, and a dependence on computer technology that's... well, that's actually rather less than it turned out to be in reality. Reading near-future SF that was written in the early 90s is always kind of interesting that way. In any case, it all somehow manages to feel slightly less cliche than I was expecting.

The main distinguishing feature of the story is the fact that it's told mostly in bits and pieces through the eyes of various secondary characters, none of whom has a clear view of the big picture. Meanwhile, the Doctor, whom one might normally expect to be center stage, flits in and out in a shadowy fashion, obviously setting up some plan the details of which are not fully clear until the end. I kept going back and forth on whether I felt this worked or not, but in the end I think it does make the plot much more interesting than it would be otherwise, if only because it helps distract from the fact that said plan may be implausibly over-elaborate and that it ultimately features a resolution that's a little too pat. One can maybe argue about whether all the details of the scheme, which frequently involve a fairly high level of violence, are entirely in-character for the Doctor, even in what is unquestionably his most manipulative incarnation. But since it's often not entirely clear what's part of the plan and what's not, it's a bit hard to say for sure. I do, however, rather approve of this portrayal of the Doctor as a mysterious, powerful (though far from infallible), and slightly scary figure. He really is all of those things, and it's a good thing to be reminded of that once in a while.

Rating: 3/5

92. Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why Why Buy by Martin Lindstrom



Lindstrom is a highly successful marketing expert -- a fact he makes a point of discussing at great length -- who was involved with some studies using fMRI brain scans to investigate people's responses to various forms of advertising. This seems like a really interesting topic to me, but unfortunately his explanations of the experiments and their results are often vague, confusing, and/or scientifically iffy. I have absolutely no idea, for instance, how he gets from the stated results of the experiments on product placement to the conclusions he eventually asserts. Which is a pity, because I'm kind of interested to know whether product placement works, but I feel like I might actually know less about it now than I did going in, because I've got no idea which of several possible things I should believe.

I also found aspects of the way the book is written extremely irritating. Lindstrom uses a lot of examples when talking about how advertisers appeal to our irrational, subconscious minds, repeatedly inviting us to "imagine you're doing X" or "remember when you did Y." In principle this is great; it's important be able to relate this stuff to our own experiences if we're going to understand it properly. And yet every single time he launched into the second person, I found myself protesting. Almost none of it bore any resemblance to my own experiences at all, often to a degree that was downright offensive. If I'm invited to imagine myself in a clothing store with the ambiance of a trendy night club full of beautiful young things in hip clothes, my irrational inner brain is not flooding itself with happy reward chemicals as it imagines how purchasing their clothes will make me cool like them. My irrational inner brain is flooding me with nasty fight-or-flight chemicals and screaming things like, "Aaaaah! It's the popular kids who made my life hell in junior high! Must get out before the social humiliation starts! The tedious shallowness, it burns!" Now, I know perfectly well that I'm not remotely immune to the kind of influences and irrational thought processes that Lindstrom's talking about here. I know that because I've read better books than this that dealt with the subject by offering up examples and explanations that I could actually relate to. But if this book were my only encounter with these ideas, I'm almost certain that I'd walk away from it thinking that either it was all complete crap or else I was clearly a special snowflake to whom such normal human foibles did not apply. This strikes me as a pretty serious failure, but I think it has provided me with a potential insight into why the vast majority of advertising does absolutely nothing for me, or else has a deeply negative effect. It really just isn't aimed at me. I am, not, on reflection, entirely sure that hotshot ad execs are even aware that people like me exist. My guess is that they just don't tend to have many nerds in their social circles.

It's funny. Lindstrom takes great pains to assure the reader that there's nothing "creepy" about the whole brain-scanning thing, reassuring us that, hey, he's a consumer, too, and isn't remotely interesting in brainwashing people into buying things they don't want. He's all about helping companies make products people genuinely want, he says, and his main goal is to show us how this advertising stuff works so we can become more aware and less easily manipulated. Well, I think that's an excellent and worthy goal, and I don't really doubt that he means it. And yet, in some hard-to-pin down but deeply disturbing way, he just comes across to me as... smarmy. This is no doubt largely an irrational emotional response on my part, and I might be inclined to feel a little bad about it, except that there's something richly, stupidly ironic about having that reaction to the work of someone who's supposedly an expert on making people feel good about the stuff he's selling.

Anyway, there are books which offer much better treatments of kind of psychology Lindstrom is talking about here, minus his focus on "branding." Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational comes to mind, and I would definitely recommend that over this.

Rating: 2.5/5

>109 bragan:, haha, bragan, your review is hilarious.

If I'm invited to imagine myself in a clothing store with the ambiance of a trendy night club full of beautiful young things in hip clothes, my irrational inner brain is not flooding itself with happy reward chemicals as it imagines how purchasing their clothes will make me cool like them. My irrational inner brain is flooding me with nasty fight-or-flight chemicals and screaming things like, "Aaaaah! It's the popular kids who made my life hell in junior high! Must get out before the social humiliation starts! The tedious shallowness, it burns!" hear, hear!

Ha! Thank you. I could've slammed it even more, too, but I was already being way too wordy. And, really, it wasn't that dire, it just managed to annoy me beyond reason.

And I appreciate the "hear, hear!" I know I can't possibly be the only person who has that kind of reaction, but it's nice to have some reassurance on the point. :)

93. Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies by C.S. Forester



This is the final installment in the Horatio Hornblower series, and it goes out on a pretty strong note, with a series of episodic adventures in the Caribbean featuring pirates, slavers, revolutionaries, hurricanes, and Frenchmen who just don't know when to quit. The romantic elements still don't really work for me, but otherwise it's an extremely enjoyable read. I'm almost a little sad to finally be finished with the series, though. I'm starting to miss good old Horatio already.

Rating: 4/5

109 - I'm glad I am not alone in this feeling. I have always wondered how some marketing techniques work since they seem so far from my perspective. Of course, shopping in general makes me want to run and hide. :)

I hate shopping for things like clothes, so every time the book wanted me to imagine some kind of positive shopping experience I had to stop, throw out whatever uncomfortable example the author had come up with, and imagine that it involved a bookstore instead. It was way too much work. :)

94. Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama



A thoughtful, nuanced, emotionally honest exploration of race, identity and community, viewed through the lens of Obama's unique personal experiences. This would be well worth reading even if Obama had remained a relative unknown, but knowing that the young man described in these pages is now the President of the United States makes it even more fascinating.

Rating: 4.5/5

95. Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt



Another book in the Doctor Who New Adventures series. (Although they can't exactly be called "new" anymore.) In this installment, the Doctor and his companion Ace head to rural Wales for some R&R, but end up stumbling through a portal into what appears to be a fantasy realm, complete with unicorns and centaurs. The putative fantasy elements were a bit less annoying and out-of-place than I half-expected them to be, but unfortunately they're also much less interesting. While this story might perhaps have made a halfway decent episode of the TV show if filmed, in book form it's just dull. I think a large part of the problem is that the author tends to describe both the most mundane and the most dramatic events, from making breakfast to witnessing atrocities, in exactly the same tone and with exactly the same level of detail -- one that's not really appropriate for either.

Rating: 2.5/5

96. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak



The story of a young girl living in Nazi Germany, narrated -- oddly, yet all too appropriately -- by a personification of Death. The writing style is interesting, full of strange metaphors and off-kilter descriptions, but it reads smoothly and it's incredibly effective at conveying the sense not just of a not-quite-human narrator, but of a time and place in which everything is askew. The characters are incredibly, painfully real, too: deeply ordinary humans in a world full of inhumanity. It's a moving, compelling story, and the ending left me with a huge, bittersweet lump in my throat. Definitely one of the best books I've read this year, and probably close enough to one of the best books I've read ever that I've decided to just go ahead and give it the five stars.

Rating: 5/5

97. Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today edited by John Brockman



A collection of essays, and interviews edited into essays, by various scientists and science-based intellectuals. Actually, almost all of them are by evolutionary psychologists, computer scientists, or cosmologists, presumably because those are considered the most controversial and cutting-edge fields at the moment. The book itself, however, is not especially cutting-edge; it's a reprint of a collection that appeared in 2003 under a different title, and while the cover says "updated edition," it didn't seem to have been updated very much to me. Surprisingly little in it is glaringly out of date, but nothing in it seems particularly new, either.

Most of these pieces are pretty short, which means it was a quicker read than I was expecting, but also that it wasn't terribly satisfying. Few of the essays felt like they were doing much more than scratching the surface of their subjects.

Worse, the editing is terrible. There's one particular section in which it's painfully obvious that the text was transcribed from verbal presentations by someone completely unfamiliar with the science in question. Some of the resulting errors, such as referring to the COBE satellite as "the Kobe satellite" were vaguely amusing, but others, such as repeatedly representing a figure that was clearly supposed to be ten to the 90th power as "1,090" were unforgivable. Worse still, three out of the four pieces in that section were simply less polished versions of works by the same authors that appeared later in the book. I'm half inclined to believe that these were included by mistake, because otherwise I simply cannot imagine what the heck anyone involved was thinking.

Rating: 2.5/5. Most of the individual authors probably deserve better, but the editor deserves a smack in the face.

98. Urban Tails: Inside the Hidden World of Alley Cats by Knox (photography) and Sarah Neely (text)



Photographs of feral city cats. Some of these pictures are quite beautiful, and there are plenty of adorable, fluffy kittens to "awww" at, but the underlying story of these animals' lives is very sad, as the simplistic but heartfelt text conveys.

What really gets me, looking at these photos, is how much these hard-living, essentially wild animals still remind me of my own much-pampered house cats, who would themselves be living wild or not at all if they hadn't been rescued from the streets as kittens.

Rating: 3.5/5

(Grrr, I don't know why the touchstone refuses to work.)

>119 bragan:, bragan, I've been thinking about Urban Tails for a while but I just don't know if I can handle it - even reading your review makes me teary-eyed.

I actually found it less upsetting that I was afraid it might be. None of the pictures are of animals who are obviously suffering; it's full of dignified-looking adults and playful kittens. The stories in the brief sections of text are sad, though.

99. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson



A Swedish mystery/thriller about a journalist who is hired to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl nearly forty years earlier. I'd seen a lot of positive buzz about this one, and I have to say that I don't quite understand what the hype was about. The writing style is kind of stilted, which may be an artifact of the translation, and it's prone to large amounts of infodumping, which certainly isn't. Plus, the ending drags on far too long after what should have been the climax. On the other hand, the plot is fairly good (if rather more grotesquely violent than I was expecting), and the title character is very interesting. All in all, it's not a bad read, but it hardly blew me away. I may or may not feel moved to pick up the sequel at some point.

Rating: 3.5/5

100. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke



A collection of fantasy stories, most of which seem to be set in the same magical version of England featured in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell. All of them have a definite fairy tale sensibility and mostly they are charmingly written, but rather slight. But I very much liked "Tom Brightwind or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby," which was written in the style of Jonathan Strange, footnotes and all, and "John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner," which was simply, oddly delightful.

Rating: 4/5. I was going to call it 3.5, but the two aforementioned stories easily bump it up half a star.

Bragan,

My favorite story in The Ladies of Grace Adieu is the titular one. The ladies do give the men their comeuppance.

P.S. If you're interested in marketing, Naomi Klein's No Logo is interesting. Scarlett Thomas used some of the information from No Logo for her novel Popco. Popco is a fun, light, but reasonably intelligent read about evil corporate marketers.

urania

P.S. I wonder why LT takes umbrage at certain titles on certain days and refuses to touchstone certain books. Is Tim Spalding into Chinese astrology and will only allow certain touchstones on propitious days?

122> I started to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when I was on vacation a few weeks ago and couldn't get past the first 20 pages -- too much finance or something. Life is too short for a long book that doesn't grab me fairly quickly.

>124 urania1: I'll check those out, maybe, and see about adding them to the wishlist. Although I think it's very nearly as long now as my actual TBR list, which is quite a feat. :)

It's not that I'm especially interested in marketing, per se, but I'm very interested in the psychology of everyday life, and, like it or not, marketing and advertising certainly do their best to manipulate us every day. And after having read Buyology, I'm not feeling any better disposed towards corporate marketers than I was before, so a novel about evil ones sounds good to me.

And I have no idea what obscure logic the touchstones operate on in deciding whether to work or not, but it's certainly been frustrating to me lately. Actually, I think I've finally figured out that it hates anything with an ampersand -- which is annoying, as it crops up in a lot of titles -- but why choke on Urban Tails or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Sigh.

>125 janeajones: I found the first 100 pages or so kind of boring for exactly the same reason. It does pick up a fair bit after that, as it leaves the financial stuff behind and starts in on the mystery (with lots of sex and violence and, uh, sexual violence). I think one of the reviews here on LT said that it seemed like two separate books stitched together, with a mystery thriller stuck into the middle of a corporate/financial thriller, which seems pretty accurate to me.

Which isn't to say that I think you should have persevered with it. I really don't think it's a must-read.

101. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language by Arika Okrent



A linguist looks at artificially constructed languages, from the familiar to the obscure, at how they work (or, more often, fail to), and at the people who invent and speak them. The stories of these languages are full of idealism, kookiness, and interesting philosophical insights, and I found the whole thing to be a fascinating and highly accessible read.

Rating: 4/5

>128 bragan:, I've been looking at Okrent's book for a while - it sounds really neat!

>128 bragan:, I think I'll have to seek this out having read and really enjoyed Spoken Here, a book about languages under threat. It will be interesting to look at how new languages are created and how old languages create new words to keep alive.

It's a nifty book. I recommend it if sounds like the sort of thing you're interested in.

>130 charbutton: I've also read and enjoyed Spoken Here. It's actually kind of interesting, perhaps, to consider those two books together and think about the fact even as people have been working on creating new languages, so many old ones are disappearing.

By the way, Invented Languages does talk a bit about the revival of Hebrew as a living language, which I suppose is something of a success story, as far as language preservation goes. There's also a very brief, but IMO fascinating discussion about the fact that Esperanto is showing signs of evolving as a living language. (Into something ever-so-slightly less consistent and logical, unsurprisingly.)

My only criticism of the book -- and it's a slight one -- is that Okrent seems to have gone into things with the idea that people who choose to study Esperanto or Klingon must be complete freaks. Hanging around with them in the course of researching the book seems to have largely changed her mind about that, and she's very fair to the people in question, but she still seems to find it a little embarrassing to be associated with them and to expect that her readers most likely will be rolling their eyes going, "Yeesh, what a bunch of dorks!" as soon as the subject comes up. Whereas my immediate reaction to her introduction to Esperanto was, "Ooh, that looks like fun to learn!" and I, uh, happen to own an autographed copy of The Klingon Dictionary. (No, I don't speak it. Too hard on the throat. :)) I suspect she's greatly overestimating both the "coolness" and the judgmental tendencies of the average person who'd actually pick up a book on artificial languages.

102. The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse



Another Jeeves & Wooster novel, featuring all the things I've come to expect from a Jeeves & Wooster novel: misunderstandings, deceptions, goofy hijinks, a game of musical romances and, of course, Jeeves sorting everything out nicely in the end. I find it rather impressive, really, that Wodehouse can take story elements that would make me roll my eyes if I encountered them in a sitcom, and somehow make them feel fresh and funny. The secret seems to lie both in his natural comic wit, and in the fact that Bertie Wooster is just so haplessly, lovably... Bertie.

Rating: 4/5

I had so many books to catch up on here, I think I'm too overwhelmed to comment!

I picked up The Ant King after reading a great short short of Rosenbaum's in a flash fiction anthology (and also because we buy almost everything Small Beer Press publishes) but the collection just didn't grab me. I got through a couple of stories and put it down. Perhaps I will try it again in the future.

re: Egan. I think Distress was the last novel of his I read. I thought it pretty good but I had to struggle through some of the physics bits. No, that's not correct, I read Teranesia also. I've moved away from most SF since then, but my husband is a big Egan fan (less for story, than for the science buzz, I think).

I've been reading at a pretty good clip. I'm trying desperately to stay ahead of the TBR pile!

The Ant King may well be the sort of thing that you have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy, and I think it's definitely the kind of stuff that either works for you or doesn't, without a lot of middle ground. I'd heard an audio version of the title story on a fantasy-fiction podcast and loved it, so I had a good idea what I was getting into with the collection and was strongly predisposed towards liking it. I'm not in the least surprise if others' mileage varies, but here's hoping it works better for you sometime on a second try.

I've read both Distress and Teranesia. I vaguely remember being unimpressed with the latter, but I honestly didn't remember reading Distress until I went to shelve Schild's Ladder next to it, which must say something about my response to it. It's a pity. I really did like his first couple of novels, and his short story collection Axiomatic was terrific. (Or so I remember it; it's been a while.) So I keep going back to him, and I keep being disappointed.

103. E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon



Sturgeon's output was pretty variable, but I think one could argue that he's written some of the best stories in the history of speculative fiction. (I use the broader term because his writing covers science fiction, fantasy, horror and, not infrequently, all three at once.) I remember encountering his incredibly poignant "The Man Who Lost the Sea" and the shudder-inducing "It" at a young age, and both of them made such an impression on me that I swear they've been living somewhere inside my head ever since.

Neither of those stories is in this collection, though. With a possible exception or two, I'm not sure it showcases Sturgeon his very best, but overall the quality is most definitely on the high end. Sturgeon was generally much more interested in emotions than in ideas or plot, and this collection is full of emotion, especially love, longing and loneliness. Many of these stories are also weirdly disturbing, some in very obvious ways, some in ways that leave me feeling as if they've done something creepy to my brain without being entirely sure what or why.

It was a little odd to read, though, because all of the stories were written in the 1940s and 50s and they occasionally strike notes that ring strangely to the modern reader. The dialog, in particular, is very much of its time, which probably made it feel familiar and immediate to contemporary readers, but frequently left me with the distinct, weird feeling that I was reading about characters in an old Technicolor movie. There are a few instances where I can't entirely tell whether he's critiquing the sexist attitudes of the time, or reflecting them, or doing something else entirely, which is a little disconcerting. And there's one story in particular that seems carefully crafted to challenge the reader's preconceptions about certain social attitudes and taboos... except that said social attitudes and taboos have changed immensely in the meantime, so that what the story does to a modern reader is something entirely different from what the author must have expected it to do. Which is fascinating, really, but not exactly emotionally satisfying.

Rating: 4/5

104. Earth from Space by Andrew K. Johnston



Satellite pictures of many places on Earth, taken at varying scales and in true and false colors. The pictures are attractive and very well-chosen. There's a lot of cities and mountains and sand dunes, and all the usual things you'd expect, but also surprising and fascinating sights, such as a giant cloud of dust blowing out over the ocean from the Sahara, or a lava flow running through the middle of a city. The captions are good, too, and make it very clear what you're looking at.

Unfortunately, the text proper is far from great. The information in it isn't bad, but I found the writing rather annoyingly dull; the style makes me think of a junior high school textbook. (And since this volume was published in 2004, some of it's a bit out of date by now, too.)

Rating: 3.5/5

I might check this out if it's at the library. I did look up Postcards from Mars based on your comments above and really enjoyed it.

>137 dchaikin: I don't know if it was worth whatever I paid for it, but I'd say it's most definitely worth checking out of the library if you can find it. Although I might be a bit surprised if you do; based on the fact that I'm one of only two people on LT who seems to own a copy, I'd guess it's fairly obscure.

And I'm glad to know you liked Postcards from Mars! I think there really is just something incredibly compelling about being able to look at photographs taken on another planet.

>138 urania1: Urania, was there supposed to be a comment there? Alas, I see only blankness...

Blankness yes. I realized I was going over ground already covered.

Oh, OK! Not that I mind hearing things twice anyway. :)

bragan - no worries, my library has Earth from Space. As for Postcards, yes, I totally agree. It's a powerful and strange effect.

Three cheers for your library!

105. Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry by David Alexander



This book has literally been around the world with me. Ages ago, I decided that it was an ideal book to take on vacation: It features a subject matter than I'm interested in -- I was an embarrassingly obsessive Star Trek fan in my youth and still have a great nostalgic fondness for the old show -- but not so deeply fascinating that I'd resent having to put it down and go do vacation-y stuff. Plus, it's over 600 pages, so there'd be less danger of running out of reading material while traveling. So nearly every time I went somewhere, I'd toss this book into my suitcase or carry-on bag, but somehow I never got around to actually reading it. There'd always be some other book I wanted to finish up first, or some more interesting book that I'd brought with me or picked up along the way. Well, I just got back from a sort of mini-road trip with my mother, during which I decided that, doggone it, this time I was finally going to read the damned thing. Of course, having done that, I have no idea what I'm going to bring with me when I travel now. I almost feel like I've lost a security blanket.

Anyway. I had decidedly mixed feelings about this biography. On the plus side, it turns out that Gene Roddenberry had a much more interesting life, pre-Star Trek, than I would have expected. For instance, during his military and civilian piloting career, he was involved in not one but two deadly plane crashes, the second of which would have made for pretty good television in itself. And once the book gets into his television career, there's a lot of detail about the process of writing and producing TV (including the uglier details involving studio politics, disputes over credit, and the frustration of projects that never get off the ground), which may be worthwhile reading if you're interested in the human story of where the shows on your TV set come from. The best parts of the book, in my opinion, are the excerpts from Roddenberry's letters to various friends and colleagues, including such science fiction luminaries as Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell, in which he talks about writing, politics, Star Trek, and all manner of other subjects. These letters reveal much more about Roddenberry the man than any of David Alexander's biographic writing, and they provide some insight into the thinking that went into his TV projects, including Trek.

On the other hand, I have to say that this book is not terribly well-written, on a couple of levels. It's littered with misspellings, mostly words that have been mistaken for their homonyms or for other similar-sounding words. The author also repeatedly and egregiously misuses the word "ironically," which is something of a pet peeve of mine, although I admit that I may be on the losing side of a major linguistic battle there. I don't think that pointing this out is overly nitpicky of me; it really does make the whole thing feel a bit amateurish. Also, this book did not need to be more than 600 pages long. I often get the impression that Alexander thought he was writing a scholarly work in which as much information as possible should be preserved for the ages, rather than a biography of a television writer, destined to be read primarily by science fiction fans. How else to explain the pages and pages tediously spelling out the details of Leonard Nimoy's contract negotiations, or the inclusion of a multi-page itemized letter in which Roddenberry meticulously catalogs the budget differences between Star Trek and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, when a paragraph or three summarizing the issue would have been fine and much more readable?

It's worth pointing out, by the way, that this purports to be a warts-and-all biography, by Roddenberry's own request, and the author is clearly making some sort of attempt at this, but it's equally clear that he's deeply biased. The book takes something of a worshipful tone at times, occasionally referring to Roddenberry as a "genius" and generally putting the most positive possible spin on even his biggest flaws and worst moments. It's also clear that in many cases, we're only getting one side of a highly contentious story. I gather there's also an unauthorized biography out there which takes a much less flattering view, but while it might be interesting to compare and contrast them, I think I've had more than enough Roddenberry to last me for a while.

Rating: 3/5

106. The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers



The fantastical adventures of a seagoing bear and the various strange creatures he meets. I'm not really sure what the target age is for this book. In content, style and sensibility, it seems to be very much a kids' story, right down to the illustrations. But it's 700 pages long, uses a fully adult vocabulary, and features moments of rather slyly sophisticated humor. I figure that it should appeal to bright kids, but it's also ideal for adults who've retained a sense of whimsy and who'd like to recapture happy memories of reading this kind of thing when they were young. Well, that definitely puts me in the target audience, and I very much enjoyed the book. It's cute, it's fun, it's funny, and by the end I was so surprisingly caught up in the story that I found myself rapidly turning pages, eager to know what was going to happen to the blue-furred hero next.

Rating: 4/5

107. Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirschenbaum.



It's almost a cliche at this point to say that science and technology are more important to our lives and futures than ever, but the American public, and far too many American politicians, fail to genuinely understand or value science. The question is, why? And what can we do about it?

The authors of this book reject -- in my view, a little too readily -- the idea that the problem lies with some deficiency in the public that can be rectified by changes in the educational system. Instead, they put some of the blame on scientists themselves, contending that they don't communicate well with the public, fail to combat negative stereotypes, aren't sufficiently politically active, don't take the feelings of the public into account in their professional decision-making (as in the "demotion" of Pluto from planetary status), and are often unnecessarily hostile towards religion. I have mixed feelings about this assertion... On the one hand, I am a huge fan of scientist/writers who explicate their work clearly for a public audience; it's not an exaggeration to say that Carl Sagan is the reason I'm where I am today. I think dispelling bad stereotypes, interfacing positively with the public, and informing political decision-making from a scientific perspective are all excellent, useful things to do. And, while I'm no great fan of religion personally, I do agree that strident hostility towards religious faith does at least as much harm as good. On the other hand, I don't believe it's reasonable or fair to expect scientists to also be writers, public relations specialists and political activists, or to suggest that they should keep inconvenient religious opinions to themselves. And I think that pandering to public opinion in the course of doing science is a hideously bad idea.

Well, Mooney and Kirschenbaum do have an idea that seems acceptable to me on both hands. They propose adding classes in communication and other relevant skills to college-level science curricula, and creating non-profit foundations to employ people thus educated to interface with politicians, the media, and the public to improve science's image and influence. This, they point out, would have the added benefit of employing graduates with science degrees who might otherwise have trouble finding decent jobs, academic job prospects being what they are. I don't think I could possibly object to that idea. It sounds great! I'm afraid it also sounds a little unrealistic, but I'd love to be proved wrong about that.

Rating: 3.5/5

I just have to say how much I enjoy seeing this review come right after the one on the 13 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear.

Heh. Yeah, it is kind of an interesting juxtaposition, I guess! Let it not be said that my reading tastes are less than diverse. :)

I agree. Scientists are scientists because they are good science and not necessarily any or all of that other stuff. Other people are good at those things which is why they go into careers involving them and scientists go into science. A book like this would never be written about say... the way lawyers work and the stereotypical lawyer personality making the public not value the judiciary system or doctors and the health care system for that matter.

Exactly. Now there are scientists who are good at and enjoy explaining science to the public and getting involved in politics and so on, and I am 100% in favor of encouraging them and providing them with opportunities, because I do completely agree with the book's premise that it's important to bring an understanding of science to non-scientists, particularly the ones who make decisions about issues in which science is relevant. I also can't imagine objecting to adding communications classes to scientific curricula, because I think that sort of thing can be useful for everybody, particularly if it's not something that comes naturally, and scientists do have to deal with non-scientists during the course of their careers, whether they like it or not. But to say that all scientists should also essentially be taking on second careers as PR people to promote their field? Um... no. In fairness, I don't think that's quite what the authors of the book are suggesting, but it's a little too easy to get that implication from it, especially in the early chapters before they start suggesting any alternatives.

108. Strange England by Simon Messingham



Another Doctor Who New Adventures book, from a bit later in the series than the last couple I read. This time the Doctor and his companions arrive in what looks like a beautiful summer's day in 19th century England, but quickly discover that there is something about it that's a little off, a little unreal, and more than a little sinister. It's an interesting setup, with the potential to be nicely mysterious and creepy, but unfortunately Messingham's writing isn't really up to sustaining the atmosphere. He's not great with pacing, either; things move terribly slowly for most of the book. Worse, the normally competent and proactive main characters seem to be frustratingly passive in all the ways that are actually important. They fight back against the physical threats that attack them with tedious regularity, but never seem to bother trying to make any real progress in dealing with their situation until, I don't know, the Doctor suddenly realizes that the book's almost over and decides to actually get off this butt and do something. It was clear that this was going to be a problem from the very beginning, since practically the first thing that happens is that our heroes encounter a young woman who's been attacked by some kind of alien parasite -- business as usual for them, really -- and pretty much just stand around going, "What should we do? Gosh, we should do something!" until the poor girl dies.

Sigh. I'm beginning to suspect that these books are just not as decently written as I remember them being. Which is entirely plausible. Not only have my standards gotten a bit higher in the last couple of decades, but it's entirely likely that only the good ones have stuck in my mind, and I've mostly forgotten all the mediocre ones, even if there were a lot more of them. It's also entirely possible that I was smart enough back then to seek out the good ones, so that on re-visiting them I'm left with the dregs. Ah, well. I have six more of them to read, so I guess we'll see.

Rating: 2.5/5

I'm up over 150 messages here, many of them with images, and it's getting a little bit slow to load. So I've started a new topic for the rest of the year's reading. You can find it here.

I just finished For Love and Glory and I agree with much of what you said about it; however, I found one idea in it rather interesting. It was that if you could live for a thousand years or more, you would run out of room for memories and that you would have to clean some of them out. I tried to imagine what that would be like and what memories would I be willing to give up.

That is kind of an interesting idea, although I don't know that it's really original with Anderson. If there had been more exploration of that kind of thing and less of the tedious plot -- which, I admit, I've largely forgotten since I read it -- it probably would have been a better book.