Happy New Year.

I'm reading Growing Trees from Seed: A practical guide to growing native trees, vines and shrubs by Henry Kock. Not only reading it, but reading it aloud to my husband as he drives.

He got it for Christmas and asked me to read it on our daily commute. I'm amazed that he's able to absorb this information aurally.

I'm reading Crazy 08 right now. I love baseball.

I'm right in the middle of A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All by Luke Dempsey. It's very funny, and Dempsey is good at explaining what's so great about birdwatching, something that mystified me in the past. I actually went out and bought a field guide so I could start identifying some of the ones I see in my yard.

In case anyone browsing here in the next 2 hours (until noon Pacific time), our very own rocketjk has a jazz show on Internet radio over here! It's really cool so far!!

jfetting, how are you liking Crazy 08? I am about halfway through. It's really gripping me...I know how it ends, so that seems silly...but my mother's mother was a 16yr old baseball nut who raised me on tales of the '08 Series, which she saw, and it's been fascinating to discover facts she couldn't have known and imagine telling them to her.

Message edited by its author, Jan 1, 2009, 1:19pm.

Still working on Justinian's Flea by William Rosen.

I am finally to the part about the Plague, sort of. He goes back billions of years to the start of bacteria. Interesting, but again a lack of focus.

richard - I'm loving it! I'm also about halfway through, although I keep flipping to the picture of Three-Finger Brown's hand. How could he pitch with that? And as well as he did?

I love how much detail she's giving us about all the really important games. The only thing that would make it better would be box scores.

I also love the chapter about how lousy the Yankees and Cardinals were back in 08 *grins evilly*

Happy New Year!

I have four days off work so I plan to start 2009 curled up with books. First up is Waiter Rant, which has received quite the range of ratings on LT.

>6 jfetting, as a dyed-in-the-wool Mets fan since the 1969 season, AMEN SISTER-WOMAN!! And I get the feeling that Cait (I feel we can be on a first-name basis, since she is clearly a soul sister) would have given the box scores IF her editor had not said "Oh come on now, who cares 100 years later?!" or some-such.

Three-finger Brown...you know what my uninformed opinion is? (Don't look like that, your face will freeze that way.) Well, I will tell you: The huge pointer-finger stub actually IMPROVED his ball control! I know that after I lost the big toe on my right foot to gout, I actually had better balance than before because the little-piggy-that-went-home is longer and better able to give me forward support than even my docs thought it would!

Ewww. Was that over-sharing?

ETA: I forgot! I found a cool baseball-themed book publisher: http://www.siu.edu/~siupress/index.htm

They publish books on the early LITERATURE of baseball, and the stuff is a lot more interesting than I had hoped!

ETA again to suggest...do you think a group read of Crazy 08 over in the Baseball forum would fly? Or would this be a bunt? I think one could ask Cait herself to join in a discussion here. She has a website that pretty much offers that...what'cha think?

Message edited by its author, Jan 1, 2009, 2:17pm.

#5 Hi, Ficus ~ I read Justinian's Flea too and was also not thrilled by it. If you haven't yet read Ghost Map, about the cholera outbreak in London in the mid- or late-1800s (I don't recall the exact date), you might find that is more like what you had hoped for from Justinian's Flea.

I'm reading The Secret History by Procopius and A Pirate of Exquisite Mind.

I just went to Barnes and Noble today and bought five books, all nonfiction. I'm always so excited when I buy books and if I buy more than one, it's so hard for me to choose which one I'm going to read first. I love reading so much, I wish there was a way to read more than one book at a time. I mean literally at the same time.

Has anyone read any of these? I just can't decide how I want to kick off 2009, reading-wise.

The World is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman
The Working Poor - David K. Shipler
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Peace is Every Step - Thich Nhat Hanh
Mysteries of the Middle Ages - Thomas Cahill

(PS - I'm pretty new at posting here so I don't know how to include links and stuff - please bear with me as I figure it all out!)

>10
I really liked The God Delusion, but Dawkins was preaching to the choir in my case.

Mysteries of the Middle Ages sounds intriguing.

Hi Jennifer and welcome. A single SQUARE open bracket at front and close bracket back of a title makes a touchstone; watch out that the most-common book of that or a similar title is the one you're looking for, and be sure to scroll through the "more" possibilities if it is not.

Double SQUARE open brackets front and close brackets back of a name make an author name into a touchstone. Again, there could be multiple similarly named authors (eg, Joe Hill or Diana Preston) so shop for the one you're interested in using.

I'm reading Invisible Chains Shawn Hornbeck and the Kidnapping Case that Shook the Nation by Kristina Sauerwein

and

Women in the Bible for Dummies

Happy NewYear to all of you!
My kick-off for the non-fiction year is a biography, Gerald Durrell by Douglas Botting

I just started reading A Hero of Our Own by Sheila Isenberg.

i kicked off the year with a non-fiction,Empires of the Monsoon by Richard Hall, a fascinating account of the history of the Indian Ocean and its invaders.

i am planning to start reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, which my friend has recommended me.

The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson. Highly recommended.

{touchstones not working at the moment)

Message edited by its author, Jan 2, 2009, 9:31am.

3, 17, 18, These are all on my enormous TBR pile.

I had previously read The Big Year which was outstanding.

I am just finishing up Hot, Flat and Crowded which is the most important book I've read in 2008 and 2009 as well, I am sure. We humans need a couple more planet earths, and if we don't get them soon (not likely), we have some serious, immediate changes to make.

And finally, although his writing can be a bit uneven, who doesn't love the humor of Bill Bryson? His touchstone (sorry, also erratic) provides 96 choices. Wow!

#10 Jennifer, I haven't read The world is flat yet but really enjoyed his From Beirut to Jerusalem.

American Lion - Andrew Jackson in the White House - by John Meacham. A Christmas gift from my dear daughter and her hubby. They know me pretty well!

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer Lee -- the story of Chinese food in the U. S. A.

Firehorse by Diane Wilson

Lighthouses of the World by Marie-Haude Arzur... Excellent photographs of lighthouses and tidbits of information about them. (It's a tall, narrow book.) And... touchstones... it has nothing to do with Virginia Woolf.

I really enjoyed The World is Flat, I read it a few months ago. My next non-fic is The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.

Message edited by its author, Jan 3, 2009, 10:57pm.

Having finished Bill Bryson's delightful The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, I've now moved on to Richard Fortey's equally absorbing Dry Storeroom No. l: The Secret Life Of The Natural History Museum

(touchstones not working)

Mayflower: A Story Of Courage, Community, And War. So far, so good.

I'm in the middle of two non-fiction books right now: Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, and Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich by Kevin Phillips.

ellevee -- read Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War a year or two ago and found it very interesting. An illustration of the fact that one generation's dream is sometimes hard for the next to maintain (or even understand).

Wombat -- the traffic book sounds fascinating. Was it revealing, humorous, or disappointing?

snash: I'm only 25% of the way into the traffic book. So take my comments with a grain of salt. Tom Vanderbilt seems to want to describe every single study of traffic behavior that's been done. So there are lots of interesting tid-bits. But on every page it seems that he has one more tangential study he wants to discuss, and as a result the book (so far) has a meandering quality which makes it hard to see what bigger points (if any) Vanderbilt is trying to make.

I'm amazed (sort of) at some of the things people study. There's apparently a long line of studies where researchers sit at green lights and time how long it takes for the car behind them to honk. From this they've learned that drivers are slower to honk at female drivers and more expensive cars.

Overall, I'm enjoying it, but it's not as good as I had hoped it would be.

#29 It's very interesting so far. And it's amazing to see the impact these people had on the world.

#10,#11--I have Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill on my 999 challenge list. I have read the entire Hinges of History series--this is #5. They are all fabulous--emminently readable, well researched, and each has greatly enhanced my appreciation of western civilization and culture. This one of the few series where I buy each book NEW as soon as it comes out. Somehow last year, I didn't get to read this one --the book is so large, that my rheumatic hands couldn't hold it. It's very near the top of this year's list however.

I know you'll enjoy it and look forward to seeing your comments.

Message edited by its author, Jan 4, 2009, 11:26pm.

I finally got two works with my Christmas gift card: BIG HISTORY; from the Big Bang to the Present by Cynthia S. Brown and the highly rated classic autobiography THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS.

I finished The End of Faith from last month, which was quite a bit different from what I was expecting. I've started Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction which isn't going so well, as she started out with a lecture about how evil Westerners pigeonholed the eastern religions and how her readers better not do the same. Which is all fine and good, but I think you can assume that someone interested in learning more about the regions philosophy does not need this particular lecture. She also reassured her dear readers that we wouldn't have to learn too many scary new words. What a relief? I guess I'm feeling maligned.

Finished Why We Eat What We Eat last night. Will start My Tank Is Fight! today.

Left from last year's TBR list: The Dark Side:The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer. I'm sorta glad I didn't get to it 'til now. Since this group in DC is on the way out, I may not end up as scared as I am now in the middle of this book. My review will be on my 999 challenge page

Message edited by its author, Jan 5, 2009, 4:17pm.

I'm amazed that you can read in a moving vehicle!

I'm reading The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan.

Thrin #24 "Lighthouses of the World by Marie-Haude Arzur...."

I once visited the oldest lighthouse in the western hemisphere on Cay Sal in the Bahamas. At that time in the early 70's the island was deserted, great diving, birds all over. Graffiti in the lighthouse from the 1600's!

Finished reading Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History -Patrick Hunt. Interesting book about all 10, but my favorites were Machu Picchu, Pompeii, Thera & The Rosetta Stone. The other 6 picks were Troy, Nineveh's Assyrian Library, King Tut's Tomb, Dead Sea Scolls, Olduvai Gorge & Tomb of 10,000 Warriors. The Machu Picchu chapter has a very touching story from the author when he was there on a expedition.

I'm still reading Invisible Chains Shawn Hornbeck and the Kidnapping Case that Shook the Nation by Kristina Sauerwein

and

Women in the Bible for Dummies

Message edited by its author, Jan 6, 2009, 11:58pm.

#40 DugsBooks... How wonderful for you! Unfortunately that lighthouse is not featured in "Lighthouses of the World" - Too remote do you think?

Just finished Splendid Solution.. good book, good man.

I'm preparing for my last examination before I'll become a BA in history with: Theories of mythology - Csapo and Approaches to Greek myth - Edmunds (ed.)

I'm reading Self-help for Fear and Anger which offers cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). It is quite interesting

Tonight I'm going to start Designated Hebrew: the Ron Blomberg Story by Ron Blomberg. For non-baseball fans, Blomberg played for the Yankees, mostly as a part-timer, in the 1970s. As the Yanks' designated hitter on Opening Day 1973, he is credited with being the first player ever to come to bat as a DH, as that was the first season the DH was put in place by Major League Baseball. Blomberg was, obviously, also Jewish, so his book describes what it was like being one of the few Jews in the major leagues at that time.

A friend of mine in New Jersey went to a book signing Blomberg gave last month and bought a signed copy of the book for himself, for me, and for another friend of ours. Being Jewish myself, I'm very interested to see what Blomberg has to relate.

Message edited by its author, Jan 7, 2009, 2:55pm.

#40: DugsBooks
"Lighthouses of the World by Marie-Haude Arzur...."

I once visited the oldest lighthouse in the western hemisphere on Cay Sal in the Bahamas. At that time in the early 70's the island was deserted, great diving, birds all over. Graffiti in the lighthouse from the 1600's!

My favorite lighthouse is Sanganeb Lighthouse. It is on a coral ring just north of Port Sudan in Sudan on the Red Sea. The building is unremarkable, and there is no land to speak of, but oh my god, the sharks. Best shark diving in the world, hundreds of them coming up from the deep, over a sandy spit in about 70 feet of water. We made our liveabord spend about 3 days there just because of the sharks.

Pictures I found on the web:

http://www.robertosozzani.it/Sudan/conto...

Oh to be warm, and in the water, and hanging with sharks !

On Literature by Umberto Eco a fine Christmas present from my son.

#47: FicusFan

Sanganeb Reef lighthouse does figure in Lighthouses of the World. Your experience there sounds quite remarkable I must say! "hundreds of (sharks) coming up from the deep". Hmm... I suppose you learn to handle such a situation with equanimity! Certainly must have been quite a sight.
The photograph of Sanganeb Reef Lighthouse in my book shows the structure as being a warm, yellowish sandstone colour, although apparently it is made of concrete and the picture of it on the site you linked us to is likely more realistic. Thanks for that link: lovely photos.

I am starting on The Incredible Voyage by Tristan Jones and Roosevelt and Churchill by David Stafford while continuing Zarafa by Michael Allin.

#49: Thrin

I think the yellow is not wrong, it just depends on the time of day and angle of the sun on the rock.

Sometimes people do a shark feed there, so when the sharks hear the sound of the motors they come to investigate. We didn't feed, but they still came and hung around.

You can see in some of the photos on the link the deep blue next to the lighter-shallower water. The deep blue is the deeper water, and they are right next to each other.

Nothing to handle, just what you aim for when you dive (sharks). Concentrates the mind wonderfully.

I finished The Summer of 1787 yesterday, and started After Elizabeth at lunch today.

Thrin et al, regarding lighthouses, maybe the coolest one I've been to is at Cape Spear in Newfoundland. Perhaps nothing particularly impressive about the lighthouse itself, but it stands at the easternmost spot in North America, which I thought was neat.

5hrdrive....ohhhh, tell me how it is....I almost bought it the other day but my wife would kill me if I added another book to the house (actually just bought five while she's still visiting family)!

I'm really enjoying Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

This comes after a recent Holiday trip to Disney World in Florida. Lots about the history of animation is included too another interest of mine.

Just started Lobotomy: Surviving The Ramones by Dee Dee Ramone. Really fascinating, as this is one of my favorite bands.

Have just started The Pankhursts by Martin Pugh.

I've abandoned The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley. It was too detailed for what I felt like reading at the end of last year.

Finally finished reading the manual on Growing Trees from Seed, which was very well written. I appreciated the author's commitment to his work and his enthusiam for the subject was contagious. That being said, it's not the kind of thing I ever thought I'd read aloud, and have warned my husband that I won't be reading any more manuals on our commute.

We decided to read Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. Seems appropriate for reading while commuting.

A little more than halfway through The God Delusion, and next on my list will probably be Revolutionary Characters or finish up 1491.

I liked Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World but would like to sell it here rather than amazon.com. Let me know if you're interested. Cute book.

Just started Orwell in Spain, a collection of his writings about the Spanish Civil war, which also includes the entire text of Homage to Catalonia.

A Late Dinner: Discovering the food of Spain by Paul Richardson -- certainly comprehensive, though he seems to wangle invites to places that mere mortals couldn't hope to manage.

The Bluegrass Conspiracy by Sally Denton. Being from Lexington, I am enjoying this book. I know a lot of the places she discusses and a lot of the names are pretty familiar.

I'm halfway through Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman. I just finished the scary models of what will happen if we don't stop destroying the world now, but I haven't yet gotten to the how-to-fix-it part. Which means that right now, I want to turn off all the lights and the heat and hide under my covers and prepare for the coming apocalypse.

I just finished it earlier today. The story doesn't have to have a sad ending, and as an engineer, I'm fascinated by the technical development we need to do. Some lucky engineers are really going to have fun figuring this stuff out!

I hope so. I'm not an engineer, and it all seems impossible to me (Friedman's solutions, that is. Not climate change). Good to see that you think engineers will enjoy fixing this problem!

About to start John Lennon, The Life by Phillip Norman. Has anybody read it? What did you think, was it everything you thought it would be?

I just finally got started on Designated Hebrew: the Ron Blomberg Story.

My wife and I are also reading a good book on dog training, as we are trying to figure out the best way to train Yossarian, the 9-month-old yellow lab mix we got from the shelter just after Thanksgiving. The book is called Mother Knows Best: the Natural Way to Train Your Dog by Carol Lea Benjamin. The main theory of the book is that the best way to learn how to train a dog is to watch how a mother dog instructs her puppies when they're young. So the emphasis is on tone of voice, (gentle) physical correction and rewards of hugs rather than treats (food). Seems to make sense and the methods we've put in practice seem to be taking effect fairly well. It's a slow process, though.

I've just started Don't Go There: 1001 Rude Things People Have Said About Places in Britain & Ireland by Colin Plinth.
Touchstone not working.

Message edited by its author, Jan 14, 2009, 11:13am.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, a perennial how-to book. It's good.

Jennifer7600, I'd put my vote in for Peace is Every Step, but then, I have always greatly enjoyed everything I've read by Thich Nhat Hanh, so I am probably biased. :D Which one did you end up starting first?

Empires of the Monsoon sounds very intriguing. Presently I'm (slowly) working my way through Lion of Jordan: the Life of King Hussein in War and Peace, a biography by Avi Shlaim.

"Message 42: Thrin
#40 DugsBooks... How wonderful for you! Unfortunately that lighthouse is not featured in "Lighthouses of the World" - Too remote do you think?"

It is in the "middle of nowhere" and can only be reached by boat. Not a large island at all.

One of the people in the college SCUBA class that rented a trawler? type boat to visit there was a professional photographer who made some great photos I wish I had gotten copies of. One of me diving off a cliff like an idjit when there was no hospital available for many miles of ocean.

I might have been wrong about the oldest in Western Hemisphere according to this link as follows {says 1839} but I was told that was its age by the folks leading the trip . The Graffiti might have been faked perhaps but looked convincing.

http://www.lighthousedepot.com/lite_dige...

Message edited by its author, Jan 16, 2009, 11:14pm.

Message 47: FicusFan
#40: DugsBooks
"Lighthouses of the World by Marie-Haude Arzur...."

""My favorite lighthouse is Sanganeb Lighthouse. It is on a coral ring just north of Port Sudan in Sudan on the Red Sea. The building is unremarkable, and there is no land to speak of, but oh my god, the sharks. Best shark diving in the world,

Pictures I found on the web:

http://www.robertosozzani.it/Sudan/conto..."

Great photos! That must have been a mind boggling experience.

#73 It was wonderful. Just hope the shark finners haven't found the place. The people on the boat were worried about that.

#72 I've bookmarked the lighthousedepot site on the offchance my interest should become a fetish!

I'm reading Gangs of New York.

I've been especially lucky so far this month, as 2 of the 5 books I've read were fabulous things, and both are guaranteed to make my Favorites of '09 list. The first stunner was Lionel Shriver's 2007 novel The Post-Birthday World, a "what if" story of a woman pursuing parallel destinies that is as smart and as enthralling as anything I've read in a long while. The 2nd book is Jayne Anne Phillips' much-praised new novel Lark & Termite, and though it took me more than a few pages to get pulled into Phillips' wonderful story, her writing was never less than exquisite, and over the last 150 pages or so, I could barely put this marvelous book down.

Right now I'm in the middle of the most dumbed-down piece of trash I've read in months, a crime/thriller called Beat the Reaper by first-time novelist Josh Bazell that I'm almost embarrassed to admit to reading. Its premise is preposterous (Mafia hit-man becomes a doctor, yeah right), while the writing and dialogue would hardly challenge a 5th-grader, and I'm positive the whole thing was originally written on an etch-a-sketch. I'll finish it, of course, because something this resoundingly awful brings out my latent masochistic reading tendencies, which always keeps me on my toes, and helps me in the continual re-defining of "awesomely bad".

I read this book a while back and was drawn to it because the review placed it in the same league as Guns, Germs, and Steal. I was very disappointed in Justinian's flea and like you found it very unfocused. I also feel that he did not prove his main thesis, that the plague reshaped Europe. In fact, if I recall correctly, he spent very little time on the topic of how the plague did reshape Europe. I guess he expected the reader to fill in the blanks.

I started two new ones yesterday. The first is A Good Idea At The Time: The Rise Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam, about the geniuses/hucksters who created and sold the Great Books of the Western World.
The second is Imagined London by Anna Quindlen, a memoir of her times in the city searching out famous literary sites.

Got sucked right into Blood and Roses by Helen Castor, which is "one family's struggle and triumph during England's tumultuous civil war. I wish I could remember who on LT recommended this so I could thank them!

High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver -- essay format works well for what's really an autobiography.

I am currently reading Why They Kill by Richard Rhodes.

I ended up reading The Working Poor first on my list. Sad, but I am certainly glad I read it.

I'm now diving in to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Fascinating. I love his sense of humor.

I read Why They Kill and thought that was an interesting read, too. I can't remember any particulars because I read so many books that I can't keep them all straight. But I know it was really interesting. :)

now reading The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn

Tangled Web by William P. Bundy About foreign policy making by the Nixon Administration.

I read the introduction to each of the volumes of The Oxford History of English Lexicography last night, but tonight I will likely get back to The Mahabharata or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance both of which have fictional versus non-fictional slant. I find myself missing The Mahabharata when I am away from it.

Robert

I just finished Peaches and Daddy, the story of a tabloid media sensation in the 1920s. Right now I'm reading Karen Armstrong's Islam: A Short History.

Cold snowy weather is the best time to read classic non-fiction, so when I learned that the Random House publishers had surveyed the experts and they mostly agreed that the best non-fiction work of the twentieth century was an autobiography called THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS I bought my own copy. I hope it's not too subtle for me, but the reviewers say it is a good history of nineteenth century America as well. Apparently it has been in print since 1918. Wish me luck!

Message edited by its author, Feb 2, 2009, 7:21pm.

I'm reading John A: The Man Who Made Us, a biography of Canada's first prime minister, by Richard Gwyn.

88> Jim, I had heard of The Education of Henry Adams in grammar school in the fifties. A few years ago my church book group had no spontaneous suggestions, so we turned to the list and picked the book. We pretty much all thought highly of it.

He doesn't much discuss his wife in it. There are those who think him a rotter with respect to her. The book on its own, however, doesn't make him(self) out to be one.

One of the church resident caretakers came through a potluck sometime after that and said that he had the list. He wondered that a book named The Education of Henry Adams could be at the top of it. He wondered whether anybody there had heard of it. Several of us had. He wondered whether it was the best non-fiction of the century. My answer which nobody disagreed with and to which a few nodded their heads was, "Maybe."

Have fun.

Robert

Message edited by its author, Jan 21, 2009, 3:17pm.

I'm reading a book about the United Nations: Parliament of Man by Paul Kennedy for a book club.

I am currently reading Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets by David Stafford.

I am reading House to House by David Bellavia. The story of the battle for Fallujah. I am reading it for a RL book group.

I finished House to House by David Bellavia

I started it today, and read it in one sitting.

Just a searing and amazing book.

I saw him giving a talk about his book in a bookstore, on C-SPAN. It was back in 2007, when the book was out in HC. I was so memorized by his talk that I vowed to buy the book when it came out it paper. And I did. I didn't read it until now, because I got one of my RL book groups to read it as the January selection.

The passion and honesty of his presentation made it seem like he spoke for an hour or more on one breath. It was fast and it took you to the events he talked about, the horror of war, the men he fought with, those who lived and those who were lost. That same vitality comes across in the book. I could not put it down.

The book is a series of connected stories about their life in Iraq and the battles they get into. There are lots of descriptions of battles, and weapons. It is gory, brutal and quite frank. Not for the faint of heart or those who require sugar-coating. The major part of the book is about his unit going into Fallujah to clean out the insurgents after they killed and hung the bodies of 4 American contractors from a bridge. The rest is in my review on the book page ....

I started The Perfect Scent by chandler Burr yesterday and am already over half-way through. It is sooooo interesting and well-written! I'm absolutely thrilled with it so far. It's my December ER book.

Plus, there's a scented bookmark that came with, of Sarah Jessica Parker's Lovely. Half the book is about SJP, and I'm going to pull away the plastic seal over the scent after I've finished the book so I'll have a better idea of what it is I'm smelling.

I just started The Perfect Scent by Chandler Burr tonight. Very early going but it seems interesting and well written. I got it through ER as well.

I, on the other hand will trash the bookmark with the cover in place. Someone should have something terrible happen to them, for sending scented anything to an unsuspecting person, and especially in a book !

Message edited by its author, Jan 25, 2009, 10:37pm.

Today I read Mortal Danger and Other True Cases Ann Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 13 - Ann Rule. It was a quick read and I'm on the last chapter.

#96 FicusFan - I guess I never thought about the allergy factor. (I'm assuming that's the problem?)

There's an interesting bit in the book where Burr discusses natural vs synthetic scents and comes out in favor of the synthetic scents in most cases - one of his reasons is that a synthetic scent is pure, one molecule of something, whereas natural scents can have dozens or hundreds of different molecules in them and they are more likely to trigger an allergic reaction. Interesting point and I'd never thought of it before.

That is a reason too, but no its just that it stinks.

Sending anything scented to someone who didn't ask or expect it is an awful thing to do. Like they used to put them in magazines. Nasty thing to do to a book also.

Like they used to put them in magazines.

Some magazines still do. OH has had to throw out out a couple of issues due to scent stink and is contemplating cancelling the subscription.

Hey, since you're interested in baseball books, there's one that might tickle your fancy that I read last year and really enjoyed. it's called A Well-Paid Slave, by a guy named Brad Snyder. The book is about Curt Flood's attempt to become a free-agent, and it goes into detail not only about Flood, his life and career as a ball-player, but about his court case, the lawyers and judges involved, etc. Since the case went before the Supreme Court, you learn about the faults and foibles of the legal system, and how even Supreme Court justices can be complete idiots. Even though the case is now about 40 years old, the book is still an eye-opener.

I've been reading Shipwrecked!: Deadly Adventures and Disasters At Sea by Evan L. Balkan. Really interesting, if you like that sort of thing. It relates the stories of the Medusa, the Essex, the Mignonette- and the worst shipwreck/mass insanity on a desert island I've ever heard of-the Batavia.
Touchstone not working.

Message edited by its author, Jan 28, 2009, 11:21am.

Terry Jones' Barbarians is my latest nonfiction read. Just about done with chapter one which was all about the Celts. Next up are the Germanic peoples.

Lion of Jordan is a massive book so it'll likely be on my "still reading" list for a long time. Meanwhile, I'm finishing up Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew by Sasson Somekh. It's my third memoir from/about the Jews of Iraq, and quite good thus far.

Last night I started Kaltenborn Edits the War News by H. V. Kaltenborn. Kaltenborn (http://www.otr.com/kaltenborn.shtml) was one of the America's most known and respected radio correspondents in the 30s and 40s. After America entered WWII, one of the movie newsreel companies began a series of features wherein Americans would be encouraged to send in their questions about the war. Kaltenborn would select a few representative questions and answer them on the newsreels, which would then, of course, be shown in movie houses before feature films.

This book is a compilation of some of those questions, with Kaltenborn's answers. What most fascinating about the book is that it was published in 1942. We have a tendency now to look back on the events of the war as if they were written in stone, but looking at the questions people had in 1942, and Kaltenborn's answers, show us how uncertain everything was and how many of decisions made by the Allies were far from inevitable.

Many of the questions concern things like the timing of the opening of a second front in Europe, which Kaltenborn believed would happen much sooner than it did. Kaltenborn also gives assurances that Russia will soon begin helping in the war against Japan, at least to the extent of allowing American bombers access to airfields on Soviet soil, a development which never occurred and which might have really changed the war in the Pacific.

Those misconceptions aside, Kaltenborn here provides a great amount of fascinating insight about what was going on in 1942 and what Americans' concerns and questions were about those events.

Message edited by its author, Jan 30, 2009, 2:19pm.

I've been all over the place in my reading lately. I am currently going through The Supreme Court: the personalities and rivalries that defined America.

I am also 2/3 through What is the what which though written as a novel, is essentially a auto/biography of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.

Recently, I finished
The worst hard time,
the wordy shipmates,
The Case for Democracy,
hot, flat, and crowded
as well as the beak of the finch.

Message edited by its author, Jan 30, 2009, 4:31pm.

Currently reading Vietnam Witness by Bernard B. Fall.

Well, I almost finished THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, but I had to quit when it finally descended into poorly written psycho-philosophical ruminations on the foibles of individuals and organizations, both political and social. No doubt there are pearls of wisdom to be found, but, call me a pop-psychologist, this work, even with its insights, should be re-titled as DIARY OF A MODEST INTELLECTUAL MELANCHOLIC. Even he admits that his education was never completed, as little he thought of education itself. After graduating from Haarvd with little or no respect for the curriculum, the instructors, the institution, the graduates or his own education, he found himself with no career ambitions, independently wealthy, and wondering what to do with his life. With such a start as this we should not wonder that such a man, already world-weary at age twenty-one, should spend the rest of his life finding nothing worthy of his efforts or admiration, not even his own intellectual accomplishments, much less those of his contemporaries. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here! In the vast sweep of eternity all our efforts are ultimately futile; eternity cares not at all. It did not help that he had to watch his brilliant and beloved older sister die slowly and in agony of Tetanus until the Angel of Mercy delivered her from this Vale of Tears. There is a twenty year gap in the narrative, beginning apparently when he met his future wife, and he does not mention that he was the one who discovered her body after she committed suicide-while the balance of her mind was disturbed-after the death of her father. No doubt marrying a melancholic did not help her balance of mind. It may have made no difference, but if he had paid more attention to the Greek classics he might have noticed that seekers after wisdom or meaning eventually realize that it is mostly a construct existing only in their own minds. He would have been better off building wooden boats all his useless life.

Message edited by its author, Feb 2, 2009, 7:22pm.

Due to a silly compulsion, I am breaking from Lila and from The Mahabharata to read The Next 100 Years by George Friedman.

I am only 64 pages (a quarter of the book) into it, but two big themes have emerged already; one is the immense military and economic power of the United States, and the other is the expectation and role of decreasing human population world wide. I hope to finish it promptly; I am wishing for an academic review of it.

Robert