qebo's 2011 books

Intro here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/104688#2372501.




01: Japanland by Karin Muller -- details (Jan 1)
02: Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder -- details (Jan 3)
03: Golden Compass by Philip Pullman -- details (Jan 9)
04: The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson -- details (Jan 11)
05: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami -- details (Jan 16)
06: Born to Run by Christopher McDougall -- details (Jan 22)
07: Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer -- details (Feb 4)
08: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi -- details (Feb 13)
09: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin -- details (Feb 19)
10: Blackout by Connie Willis -- details (Feb 20)
11: All Clear by Connie Willis -- details (Mar 5)
12: Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick -- details (Mar 10)
13: Pyongyang by Guy Delisle -- details (Mar 15)
14: This Body of Death by Elizabeth George -- details (Mar 26)
15: Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows -- details (Mar 28)
16: The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart -- details (Mar 31)
17: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin -- details (Apr 3)
18: H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O'Brian -- details (Apr 16)
19: The Koreans by Michael Breen -- details (Apr 24)
20: Anthill by E.O.Wilson -- details (May 9)
21: The Genetic Strand by Edward Ball -- details (May 19)
22: Naturalist by E.O. Wilson -- details (May 23)
23: You Are Here by Colin Ellard -- details (May 28)
24: The Emerald Planet by David Beerling -- details (May 29)
25: Chaos: A Very Short Introduction by Leonard Smith -- details (May 31)
26: The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick -- details (Jun 5)
27: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell -- details (Jun 12)
28: The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron -- details (Jun 13)
29: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell -- details (Jun 23)
30: Four Colors Suffice by Robin Wilson -- details (June 27)

I just want to be the first person to visit someone's thread for a change. Hi!

Wow, you got here fast, Terri! Welcome, qebo, and enjoy a stress-free year of being perpetually unable to catch up with the threads of the few people you'll come to love, buried amid the cluttering chattiness of the rest of us.

Well, that's how my life here has turned out! Wouldn't have it any other way.

Welcome!

Thanks!

Glad to see you back with us!

Thanks! I remember you as one of the people whose threads I was, as richardderus describes it, "perpetually unable to catch up with".

#7: That's OK. I never can keep up with me either.

#1: Japanland by Karin Muller

I picked this up while shopping for Christmas (one more example of why I should not walk into a book store), noticed because I was in Japan over the summer. The author spent a year in Japan, for a combination of personal seeking and documentary film (http://www.japanlandonline.com/). The book is written in anecdotal style, each chapter a snippet of culture entwined with stories of individual participants: religious ritual, sumo wrestling match, agricultural harvest, a homeless man collecting aluminum cans, a sword craftsman, a geisha. More interesting to me though were the mundane cultural frictions (e.g. months of ultimately unsuccessful efforts to be accepted by her host family, negotiating a landscape of rules spoken and assumed), and the kind gestures of ordinary people (e.g. when the highest ranking among a group of passing businessman gave incorrect directions, the lowest ranking, who could say nothing publicly in opposition, surreptitiously returned to set her right).

Just saw you're reading Mountains beyond Mountains over on Darryl's thread. I read it last year and liked it. Something tells me you're going to add books to my TBR list!

If only I knew what's next... I'm not a plan-ahead sort of reader, tend to go down unexpected roads. I am mostly a non-fiction reader though I'm keeping an eye on science fiction threads. I sometimes read mysteries to unwind, but I don't keep the books and thus don't add them to my LT catalog.

Today I'm sorting threads into stars and xes (sorry, but I can't do justice to 100s of threads, triage is necessary), which is eating into potential reading time...

#9: I am still waiting for my local library to get a copy of that one. I am glad to see you enjoyed it.

#2 Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

I've had this probably for several years, was reminded of it recently as it made the rounds of acquaintances, so I plucked it off the shelf. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners In Health (http://www.pih.org/) occupies, with enormous energy and dedication, a continuum of global ideals and individual care. After a focus on medical anthropology in college, he was drawn to impoverished Haiti, where he established a hospital that eventually became an internationally respected model for community health. Tracy Kidder accompanies Paul Farmer around Haiti and around the world, and traces his life through conversations with family and friends. Along the way we see practical medicine in the context of traditional voodoo, the scientific and political process of developing a protocol for multiple drug resistant tuberculosis and persuading the World Health Organization to accept it, patients who survive and patients who die. And decades of support from Ophelia Dahl, daughter of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal, who met Paul Farmer in Haiti at age 18, and is now the president of PIH.

I was very inspired by this book. I wish I might have had a fraction of the energy and drive Farmer has. Kidder did a wonderful job of describing his work without making him patronizing or condescending but truly dedicated to helping people.

I agree with mamzel. I read both Mountains Beyond Mountains and Strength in What Remains last year, but I preferred the former book to the latter.

I read Mountains beyond Mountains last year and thought Paul Farmer and the others were amazing. If you're on Facebook, the Partners in Health page is quite a good one to follow to keep up with what they're doing. I thought Tracy Kidder put himself into the book a bit much, though, but I still will be looking for his other ones!

16 (cmt). I've read others of his books, which I suspect is the reason I'd gotten this one awhile back. I wasn't bothered by his insertion of himself into the story. I suppose with his style of reporting there's a balance to be struck between stepping back as if he wasn't there, and stepping forward to become the center of attention. I actually appreciated his on-the-scene perspective at times, for example on the full day walk to a remote hut, all in a day's work for Paul Farmer but arduous for mere mortals.

15 (alcottacre): Another one for the wish list.

#17: I will be interested in seeing what you think of the book once you get to it.

#17 I know what you mean, and I liked it early in the book - and I've added more books by him to my WL. (And a couple by Paul Farmer himself that Darryl (kidzdoc) recommended.)

That book keeps moving up and up the TBR pile. Maybe I'll actually read it soon!

Hi and welcome! You're off to a great start! Japanland sounds like it would be very interesting, so thanks, I'm addting it to my wishlist.

#3: Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

I started this a month ago, got about halfway through, set it aside as something of a trudge, picked it up again a few days ago because (a) someone else in this group mentioned it and (b) only halfway to go. Can't say it did much for me, but the story picked up, and I was kinda interested by the end. A classic, but I'm not seeing why. Anyone want to enlighten me? I'm not a fictiony sort of person, so the problem is more likely to be me than it. I added the movie to my NetFlix queue.

#22: I have not read that one, so I cannot enlighten you. Sorry!

#22: I recently read the whole trilogy, and the first is the worst of the three - the story really picks up in the second and third books, and although I didn't really enjoy the first one all that much, but the end I was completely hooked. So maybe give the second book a try and see how it goes?

24: Thanks, that's good to know.

I felt differently! I thought the first and third books were the strongest, with the second getting rather tedious around the middle. And I hated the film. I found that Pullman had some interesting ideas and concepts in the trilogy, concerning the nature of dark matter, innocence, and religion... though I didn't agree with him most of the time or particularly like where he was going with it, I thought the ideas were fascinating and worth spending time thinking about even after the books were finished. His work isn't for everyone, though.

#4: The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

Joseph Priestly entered the upper echelons of science by writing about book about the people investigating electricity, with the goal of informing the public about the current state of knowledge. He was an advocate throughout his life of freely conveying and exchanging information, and there is mention of the concerns this raised as he shifted from being a member of a small group of amateur scientists, to being funded by the emerging industrialists. He gets credit for discovering oxygen, though neither uniquely (it was discovered earlier but published later by someone else) nor definitively (he was confused by his adherence to the phlogiston theory). More emphasis in this book is on his fascination since childhood with placing small critters (bugs and mice) into sealed containers to see what happens. Well, what happens is they die. Unless a plant is there too, a previously unknown phenomenon that quite intrigued his friend Benjamin Franklin. The book detours into the Gaia hypothesis and the Carboniferous period (gigantic animals and gigantic plants correlated with the high percentage of oxygen in the air). The second half of this book is more about politics and religion than science. Joseph Priestly supported the American and French revolutions, and advocated in extensive publications a version of Christianity that quite enamored Thomas Jefferson, but that got him into trouble at home in England, to the extent that he emigrated to Pennsylvania at the age of 61. The author's stated approach was to "cross multiple scales and disciplines", and he did succeed in making connections between disparate scientific and cultural developments of the mid to late 1700s, and in getting me a tad more interested in the all to ubiquitous in my part of the country Benjamin Franklin.

#27: I have had Johnson's The Ghost Map in the BlackHole forever. Looks like I need to add this one too.

28: I have Steven Johnson's Emergence, read it some years ago, though the author didn't register in my mind when I picked up The Invention of Air, caught by the title. I have not read Ghost Map, but from the description it sure seems another for the wish list.

I loved Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You. I will have to check out one of these books too. I had no idea he wrote about so many different topics!

NYT best sellers for week ending 19/10/1958 (here)...

FICTION
1 LOLITA Vladimir Nabokov
2 AROUND THE WORLD WITH AUNTIE MAME Patrick Dennis
3 DOCTOR ZHIVAGO Boris Pasternak
4 ANATOMY OF A MURDER Robert Traver
5 THE ENEMY CAMP Jerome Weidman
6 WOMEN AND THOMAS HARROW John P. Marquand
7 THE BEST OF EVERYTHING Rona Jaffe
8 THE KING MUST DIE Mary Renault
9 ANGELIQUE Sergeanne Golon
10 THE IMAGE MAKERS Bernard Dryer
11 EXODUS Leon Uris
12 THE TIME OF THE DRAGONS Alice Ekert-Rotholz
13 THE BRAMBLE BUSH Charles Mergendahl
14 THE DAY ON FIRE James R. Ullman
15 THE LAW Roger Vailland
16 THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING Terence Hanbury White

NON-FICTION
1 AKU-AKU Thor Heyerdahl
2 ONLY IN AMERICA Harry Lewis Golden
3 BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP Gregory "Pappy" Boyington
4 INSIDE RUSSIA TODAY John Gunther
5 THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY John Kenneth Galbraith
6 KIDS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS! Art Linkletter
7 PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES Jean Kerr
8 ON MY OWN Eleanor Roosevelt
9 WAR AND PEACE IN THE SPACE AGE James M. Gavin
10 EISENHOWER: CAPTIVE HERO Marquis William Childs
11 MASTERS OF DECEIT J. Edgar Hoover
12 THE INSOLENT CHARIOTS John Keats
13 MORE IN SORROW Wolcott Gibbs
14 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION Alan Moorehead
15 THE NEW TESTAMENT IN MODERN ENGLISH J.B. Phillips
16 DEAR ABBY Abigail Van Buren

I have read not a single one.

#5: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

This has been vaguely in my mind for awhile, for its combination of running (which I do) and Japan (where I've been). I know nothing about Haruki Murakami as either a novelist or a person, and it's maybe for this reason that the book seems rather peculiar in tone, navel gazing without revealing much interior life. For example, he describes the moment when he decided to become a novelist. And that is it. He describes an event, without discernible connection to anything personal. Perhaps he has revealed elsewhere, and he wanted this book to be different. He mentions his wife, but she is fleshed out in only two places: she is from an entrepreneurial family and provided inspiration and support during his years as owner of a jazz bar, and she recommended her swimming coach when he wanted to compete in a triathlon. Otherwise, she makes sandwiches and meets him at the finish line. The section about the swimming coach was actually rather nice, because he was attentive to details of her teaching style, and describes how she gradually changed his form. He links running to writing with the discipline and ritual of each. Which I found mildly interesting, but the essence of both was that if you trudge long enough you'll eventually achieve a marathon or a book. In sum, meh.

Sorry you didn't like that one better.

I appreciated Murakami's take on the discipline of running, but I agree the book is a bit short on pathos. I think he wants to say certain things about running and certain things about writing, but outside of those things he doesn't care to volunteer much.

#31: I have only read one of the books on your list, The Once and Future King, which I loved.

33: I didn't dislike it either. It's sparse, which is a style I'm OK with in principle, but maybe I was expecting more of a trajectory.

34: Your profile says "I do not sleep a whole lot." and I can see this on the talk page, where your comments span the wee hours. I recall The Once and Future King and The King Must Die around the house, but I'm nearly certain I never read them. Maybe I read Exodus? If so, it was a long time ago.

#35: I really need to get to Exodus one of these years!

#31 - I read Aku aku by Thor Heyerdahl back when I was a high schooler. In fact I read almost everything I could get by this amazing man. Baa Baa Black Sheep by Gregory Boyington, is on the TBR pile, as is Bruce Gamble's Black Sheep One: The Life of Gregory "Pappy" Boyington. In fact, I'll read anything Bruce Gamble writes. His book Darkest Hour: The True Story of Lark Force at Rabaul - Australia's Worst Military Disaster of World War II is brilliant, and he recently published a sequel with Fortress Rabaul: The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942-April 1943, which I plan to pick up when I get back to Australia (that's Thursday!).

#32 - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, is one of those books I've always thought about reading but never have. I went Murakami crazy when I first moved to Japan 10 years ago, but totally overdosed, and haven't read anything by him in over 7 years..... and still don't feel inclined.

#37: I have not read anything by Bruce Gamble. My local library has a copy of Black Sheep, so I will have to give it a try.

#6: Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

I began reading several books simultaneously, then dutifully picked up this one because the author is local and scheduled to speak at the county running club banquet next week. I vaguely knew of it as the barefoot running book, did not expect to get so immediately caught up in a story of adventure and mystery and human character. It's about the Tarahumara people, whose distance running skills are developed through childhood games, of the Copper Canyon in Mexico, accessible by a bus winding along the edges of cliffs, where below lie the mangled vehicles of less skillful drivers, followed by a hike through hot desert mountains, where getting lost can mean a frighteningly rapid descent into dehydration and death. It's about ultramarathoners, for whom marathons are too trivial and mundane, who thrive outside the scope of scientifically designed training plans. It's about a white man with unrevealed origins who has lived among the Tarahumara for a decade, who runs miles along trails to the nearest telephone line to email ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, challenging him to a 50 mile race with the best Tarahumara runners. It's about Chris McDougall's foot, which made running a mere few miles too painful to endure. It's about running shoes and technologically advanced cushioning of the heel, which causes injuries the manufacturers claim to prevent. It's about human evolution, how slower weaker primates with bodies that release heat can endure beyond the capacities of the faster stronger animals they hunt. All neatly and humorously and affectionately woven together.

So, has he convinced you to run barefoot?

40: I'm kinda interested in trying. I haven't had any injuries, but I'm a very plodding runner. My 80 year old father switched to the "barefoot" shoes (blue toed booby shoes, my mother calls them) after he hurt his ankle (essentially by denying that his reflexes aren't what they were in his youth) and it was taking forever to heal, and he's been impressed by the results.

I've seen the barefoot shoes, and I have a friend who swears by them. I'm not ready to try them myself -- I _love_ my running shoes -- but I'd be interested in hearing your experiences.

42: January may not be the best time to experiment...

43: Probably not. In my mind it's always May (of course the treadmill may be making delusional).

Interesting sounding book. I know a few people who have experimented with the Vibram shoes and swear by them. I know others who've said that humans may be "meant" to run barefoot, but they'll stick to shoes!

I've been reading up on running shoes, and there's quite a range between the standard padded heel and an extreme such as Vibram fivefingers. To change running style from heel strike to midfoot/forefoot strike, the key is for the shoe to have a minimal drop from heel to toe. I don't especially care to be a conversation piece, and also I suspect I'd be irritated by individual toes, so no Vibram fivefingers for me. I'm inclined to try shoes with a standard appearance but more barefoot-inspired interior.

As scheduled, Christopher McDougall was at the local running club banquet yesterday. (He's not an official member but apparently participates in "fun runs" on occasion.) He's as self-deprecatingly humorous in person as one would expect from reading his book.

#7: Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

I picked up this book because of its author, not because of its subject. I knew the basic outline: affected by 9/11, Pat Tillman exited the NFL, enlisted in the US Army, and was killed by "friendly fire" in Afghanistan. I'm not a particular fan of macho heroics, but I trust Jon Krakauer to tell a good story, and he does. The early chapters switch between Pat Tillman and family, and the history of Afghanistan, interest held and tension sustained because it is known from the beginning that the two will meet in tragedy. The merging of brute force and honor is rather lost on me (Pat Tillman, as a teenager, in a mistaken effort to avenge a friend who was actually instigator not victim, did serious damage to another boy, and spent time in jail the summer before college, after his family managed to get the charges diminished so he wouldn't lose his athletic scholarship), and channeling the inclination into professional football is a tad eye-rolling, but what could be caricature becomes a real fleshed out person with an active mind and strong sentiments, as described by family and friends. Hagiographic is a plausible accusation, but my guess is it's a minor elevation after death, not a major distortion. Regardless, all Pat Tillman all the time would be a dull book, and where I became attentive, frequently flipping back to bookmarked maps, was during the two military incidents described in minute by minute detail (in a style reminiscent of Into Thin Air): the events leading to the capture and rescue of Jessica Lynch, and the events leading to the death of Pat Tillman. Pat Tillman and his brother were opposed to the war with Iraq, but Iraq was their first deployment, and the rescue of Jessica Lynch was their first mission. Both incidents were composed of errors in judgment made under intense pressure, resulting in multiple deaths by "friendly fire", a euphemism for tragic layers of misperception and fear, covered up by military bureaucracy, and converted into propaganda by government and media. Some LT reviews criticize that the book "bogs down" in the detail, and the descriptions are "neutral and inconclusive", but I thought the opposite. Both incidents packed a lot of activity into very little time, and are made more compelling and more chilling by the slow motion unfolding. There is no need for the author to add emotion when the reader is already watching in horror.

I've contemplated picking up Where Men Win Glory for the same reason as you but I hesitated, I was concerned that his tragic death would be, I don't know, cheapened, perhaps. Your review, however, has me rethinking my position.

I read Born to Run last year and was impressed with it. My neighbor swears by his Vibram five fingers, but he did kind of look like a frog. (His were green).

#8: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

This is not a sort of book that I typically read, so I have little context for evaluation, and my comments should be taken accordingly. The world is about two centuries in the future, after the depletion of fossil fuels and destruction by rising oceans and subsequent social upheaval of previously prominent nations. The setting is Thailand, ostensibly governed by a child queen and her regent, and by the Trade Ministry and Environment Ministry, which are in perpetual conflict. The story begins with Anderson noticing that street vendors in Bangkok Thailand are suddenly selling a fruit that has not come from the "calorie companies" in control of the world's genetically engineered food supply, and that may instead have its origin in the natural fruit of previous centuries, evidence of a secret seed bank. Anderson is employed by a calorie company based in Iowa, and his job is to discover the source of rogue food. Such a job cannot be done overtly, so as cover he owns a factory that manufactures the "kink springs" that power vehicles and other devices. The factory operates on the labor of megadonts, genetically engineered elephants tended by members of the megadont union. Hmm, this could be interesting, and compellingly sciency. Alas, after a setup of detailed imagery, it fades into backstory for the action. A megadont breaks free and damages factory equipment, including the algae tanks, which must be replaced illegally. The shipment of algae tanks has the misfortune to arrive at the dirigible "anchor pads" while Jaidee of the Environment Ministry is there with his assistant Kanya asserting authority. He orders the shipment chopped to pieces by his crew of men wielding machetes, thus enraging foreign businessmen and the Trade Ministry, and setting off a chain of violent events that spiral the country (and IMO, the story) into chaos. Entwined in the situation is Hock Seng, formerly a businessman in Malaysia, who escaped an ethnic purge and is now a "yellow card" immigrant managing the factory, embezzling money to survive in a hostile country, considering how to open the safe that contains the blueprints for the kink springs. And Emiko, the "windup girl", a genetically modified humanoid, designed to be submissive. Windups are legal in Japan but illegal in Thailand, and after she is discarded by her Japanese master on a trip to Thailand, she is kept in a sex club where she is continuously abused, and conflicted between her built-in desire to obey and her emerging desire to escape, though capture would mean death by "mulching". Anderson is introduced to Emiko by the owner of the sex club, after a client mentions Gibson / Gi Bu Sen, who Anderson suspects is the creator of the mysterious fruit. Anderson is smitten by her skin, made smooth by reduced pores that prevent her from sweating and cause her to overheat, and occasionally pays a fee so that he can take her home for the night. Emiko believes Anderson to be her protector, but as part of a business deal Anderson brings the queen's regent to the sex club, introduces him to Emiko, and abandons her to an episode so utterly degrading that she snaps and kills the queen's regent and his bodyguards. This fuels more political violence when Emiko is erroneously assumed to be a military assassin. Many deaths later, things settle into a reconfiguration of political alliances and hints of a future for some of the characters. So this is dystopia, and I guess that I am not cut out to appreciate it. Waaaay too much graphic violence, to an extent that was rather cartoonish or video gamish, and a slog to get through. Am I supposed to feel for Emiko? I would feel for someone so abused in real life, but the idea of future technology used for creating a beautiful submissive sex toy is so tiresomely unoriginal that I was mostly annoyed with the present author for creating a stereotype. Kanya, who initially appears to be peripheral, becomes a key player, with enough interior complexity that I kind of cared what happened. And I kind of cared about Hock Seng. But I didn't care so much that I'd seek another book about this world.

qebo- This is my first visit to your Challenge! I love your book choices! I will read your Windup Girl review, after I finish the book, in a few days.
I also enjoyed Where Men Win Glory. I'm a big fan of Krakauer. If you have a chance, stop by my Challenge. Hope you are having a great weekend.

51 (msf59): I've been reading your challenge thread(s), though apparently I haven't been commenting. You move at quite a rapid clip!

#9: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Greg Mortenson tried and failed to reach the summit of K2, got lost on the way down, and stumbled into the village of Korphe, Pakistan, where the residents cared for him as he recuperated from exposure to the elements. Wanting to reciprocate, and seeing that his expertise as a nurse could go only so far in conditions of poverty and isolation, he asked to see the school, with the idea of sending appropriate supplies from the US. The school, however, was a bare patch of ground. Before there could be books, there had to be a building. He vowed to construct it. Home in the US, he continued to work as a nurse while sleeping in his car and similarly frugal shelters, and dedicated his spare time to to raising funds. When he returned to Pakistan with money in hand, he expected to be on the verge of mission accomplished, but instead he was entangled in unfamiliar local customs and politics. And before there could be a school, there had to be a bridge to transport construction materials across the river. The story is compelling: one person transforms a patch of the world (not to mention his own life), navigating through episodes that convey the complexity and concerns of people about whom we haven't heard a lot that is good in recent years. IMO the book eventually fizzles into too much anecdote and too little direction, but this could be more me than it. I remain interested enough that I want to read the sequel Stones Into Schools, which shifts the focus from Pakistan to Afghanistan. My primary complaint is the paucity of photos, which are all black and white, and mostly of people without context of village or landscape.

#10 Blackout by Connie Willis

After the several serious dark books I've read recently, this was refreshingly light, without feeling frivolous. Light because the main characters are ordinary nice people, the minor characters tend toward stock caricature, and the plot proceeds in a sitcom-ish manner of missed connections and miscommunications (think of a movie in which the two protagonists are destined to meet, but pass each other on opposites sides of a revolving door, one going in and one going out), exacerbated by the device of time travel. But not frivolous because of the detailed description of daily life in England during WWII. The combination is a page-turner of anxiety, tension, frustration, and amusement. The story focuses primarily on three historians from Oxford in the year 2060, who have gone to slightly different spatial and temporal locations in order to observe different aspects of WWII, and are thus intentionally separate from each other, but find themselves stuck without access to the "drop" sites that link to home. I read Doomsday Book last year, and didn't think WWII could compete with the plague, and it doesn't, but it comes closer than I'd expected. I am now eager to read All Clear, and wish I'd followed the advice to have it immediately on hand. Although some strands of the story are resolved, others seem to have been teasers for the next installment.

Blackout and all clear were actually one book, split by the publisher, so the author wasn't intending teasers, simply the second half of the story. Find All Clear SOON-it is even better!

#54: What Roni said!

Well, I think the author intends teasers all along. Not criticizing, it's the style. Brief chapters about other characters and hints about how they might fit into the story, but not yet developed.

#47: This is the only Krakauer book I haven't read...and I plan to after reading your review.

58: Thanks. Curiously, of the relatively few books we share, the most prominent authors are Jon Krakauer and C. S. Lewis.

#11 All Clear by Connie Willis

A continuation of Blackout. I don't have much more to say. The tone was more somber, and the stray snippets were tied into the main story.

A nutso week, seems people have decided it's spring, or close enough, so suddenly evening events have appeared, all clustered together, on top of the full time job and the temporary part time job, and I've fallen behind in reading, with little hope of catching up this month.

Hi. Real life does seem to cut into our reading time. Eleven books thus far this year is quite an accomplishment!

I hope you enjoyed the full story of Blackout and All Clear, and that all became clear in the second book.

63: Yes, I did, and it did. Just the book(s) I needed: a pageturner that got my mind off work.

62: 75 books has never been a realistic goal, and I'll actually be pleased if I make it to 50, and I have two other books (non-fiction) in progress. And I don't want to get into a competition, because it detracts from the pleasure of reading at a comfortable pace. Still... Oh my, I tune out for a few days and return to such a proliferation of posts!

As you know, this group is not about the actual number read, but about the enjoyment of reading and talking about it with others who enjoy it. We aren't very competitive, really!

I'm so glad you did end up enjoying the whole thing. I couldn't tell by your comments in message 60. It was one of my top reads for last year--I had trouble putting it down.

65: Yeah, sorry. I finished the book late last night, and I had to work this afternoon, and I wasn't in a reviewing sort of mood this morning.

I still have to read Doomsday Book, but I'll definitely kick it up the list.

67 (swynn): Both Doomsday Book and Blackout begin with irritating bits, set in the year 2060, in which, despite the theoretical and technological advancement of time travel, apparently cell phones and the internet have ceased to exist, and communication fails because a crucial person left the office moments ago, or a handwritten phone message is illegible. Let it go, and continue reading.

#12: Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

Oh my. This is an affecting book precisely because it is about the mundane lives of six people, with mention of but without dwelling upon history or statistics (a section at the end recommends books and other sources of such information). The author is a journalist who was in South Korea for several years, with limited access to North Korea, so instead she interviewed people who had defected. You might think such people were exceptionally aware and political and enterprising, but some had been true believers, and defection seems more a response to loss, of family and social position, exacerbated by the exhaustion of famine and economic collapse. Far more compelling than statistics are descriptions of people foraging for bark and grass, salvaging grains of corn from sewage, grinding corn husks to make them barely digestible. The teacher watched her students starve. The doctor watched her patients starve. Parents fed their children first, but then the parents died first, and the orphaned children wandered the train station. How belief that there is "nothing to envy" in the outside world can be sustained under these conditions is nearly incomprehensible, but radios and TVs are crippled to receive only state programming, work includes daily ideological sessions and authority is tied to ideological adherence, travelers must carry documents granting official permission, and every neighborhood has assigned monitors who report suspicious activity. North Koreans have difficulty adjusting to South Korea in part because of an aversion to the casual chitchat that signals friendliness and maintains social connections. In North Korea, a slip that implies criticism is dangerous. A family who owned a TV, a rare luxury, kept the apartment door open so neighbors could drop in to watch. During an upbeat segment about a boot factory, the father commented that if it is producing so many boots, why can't he get any for his children. A neighbor must have reported him, the family never discovered who, because he was hauled in for interrogation, and only his reputation saved him from prison. Safer not to talk at all, and maybe not to think either. On an encouraging note, however, as the central distribution system of food, and electricity, ceased to function, entrepreneurial activity arose. People stopped tending the communal farms, but they began tending personal plots of vegetables to barter or sell, and to a limited extent the markets that appeared in and around abandoned industrial buildings were tolerated in order to prevent outright revolt. Of interest, and maybe obvious but I hadn't known, South Korea has a procedure for integrating defectors into society, which includes money and training in modern technology. This is possible because the numbers are not (yet) overwhelming, but concern exists, and South Korea has been studying examples such as Germany in preparation.

#13: Pyongyang by Guy Delisle

This is the first graphic format book I've ever read, and I zipped through the text in an evening, but I expect to revisit the drawings. After I lend it to my 13 year old nephew, who has developed a fascination with North Korea. I'm not really sure how to go about reading/viewing such a book, suspect that I've missed things. I think some of the episodes registered in my mind only because I so recently read Nothing to Envy, which details the "real" background behind the Pyongyang presentation to foreigners, and makes this book seem so much more creepy.

Someone else who had enjoyed Blackout and All Clear - I really must get to them soon...

I'm so glad I stopped by! I'm a casual runner and I loved the McDougall book and I have very slowly and cautiously changed my running style starting last April. I won't go into boring detail but by adding very small increments and never pushing too hard I think I'm making progress and I love the way it feels not to flomp down on my heel; it just feels right . The hardest thing, I'm guessing, is to make the change slowly because it feels so good. Vibrams don't work so well for most seasons in Vermont as you would get frostbite, but I do like wearing them around in the summer, they feel marvelous, barefoot without the pain of thorns and pebbles.

72: Hi, sibyx, I'm glad you stopped by! I've been switching between standard running shoes and transition shoes (low heel but not "barefoot") for a month or so, and now neither feels quite right, so I dunno, but I'll keep experimenting...

The biggest change is that I no longer tense up in my upper body -- one day I realized, sort of felt, where that place was, landing without impact -- I also feel that my overall balance is better, that if I mis-step I have a better chance to recover, if you mis-step with heel-strike I think it reduces options, more apt to fall back or sideways or whatever.

74: Hmm. One of my running companions mentioned recently that my back is straighter, I'm not hunched over so much. Alas, I'm not running any faster.

If anything, right now, I run slower, but I know I could run much longer - I don't care about speed luckily.

#75: If you tend to be a heel-striker, try landing more on front half of your foot. I noticed when I quit heel-striking so much, I shaved a lot of time off!

77: Yeah, that's what I've been doing. So now I'm neither here nor there, it seems.

#14: This Body of Death by Elizabeth George

11 days since I finished book #13? Shame. I have two non-fiction books in progress, midway or more through, but I happened upon this in the grocery store and bought it for its undemanding nature, a break from long workdays. 950 pages, which is maybe more of a break than I really needed. I've read the previous books in the series, so it's a comfortable set of characters. Now back to work.

The next running book I have in my pile is The Chi of Running -- I try to read something vaguely inspiring to get me going in the spring. So I hope to pick that up soon.

#15: Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows

I picked up this book after several mentions by James Fallows (the author's husband) on his blog. I suspect it is more meaningful to someone who has spent time in China. To me, it was scattered snippets, loosely tied together by a common theme of linguistic oddities that illuminate the culture. Each brief chapter was a bit amusing and a bit intriguing... and then it ended. I wished, maybe, for a different sort of book, more of a memoir, more depth, more continuity. The snippets suggest a rare level of immersion and access, an affection for the country and difficulties adjusting, that could have made for compelling reading.

>79 qebo:: 950 pages seems a little long for a series mystery ... does she pull it off?

>81 qebo:: Too bad about that one.

82: Yeah, actually, the mystery didn't seem too long as a book, just too long for my purposes. And Dreaming in Chinese is an evocative book, I just don't have the appropriate background. I'll lend it to my sister in law, who lived in Taiwan for a year and also happened to cross paths with James and Deborah Fallows when she was visiting a friend in China (she reports that they are as pleasant and charming in person as they seem to be in print).

ETA: Well, turns out that my sister in law recently got the book from her friend in China, and it is signed by the author. She hasn't yet read it, but says that skimming the chapter titles brought back memories.

#78 Then give it some time. I was beyond slow for about the first 5 years. Out of nowhere, I got a lot faster (and am still slow compared to most, but a vast improvement for myself). Have you read Hal Higdon's Run Fast?

I am very behind on the threads, having been away for a bit, but I hope to keep up with you the rest of the year.

#16: The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart

This is a useful book, not exactly a compelling page-turner, but maybe better for its straightforward unemotive style.

More soonish... Brain is fried from 60 hour work weeks...

And nearly a month later, with not the freshest of memories...
As the author describes it: "The future actions we might take are not my subject. This book is a history of how we came to understand our present situation." He traces strands of inquiry that go back to the 1800s: why did ice ages occur? how is the industrial revolution affecting the atmosphere? There are things that cause warming and things that cause cooling and complex interactions and feedback loops that don't make for a one-size-fits-all description of the future. Components of a global system have been gradually discovered, understood from data collection and experimentation, and incorporated into increasingly complex computer models that go back to the 1950s. A handy time line notes the significant developments. The political prominence of the issue arose after much wrangling among scientists about what was too murky and uncertain for presentation, or too alarmingly plausible to remain confined to technical journals. This is not a book for computer geekery about the models. It is about the major players, the broad trends, the difficulties of individuals in a small slice of time struggling to comprehend eons on a global scale. I am, after reading this book, more appreciative of the effort involved.

#17 The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

I read this for the April TIOLI Tag Mirror -- the bold tag was Newbery Medal, and I happened to have the book because it was recommended by an acquaintance a few years ago, but I hadn't yet read it. 6 families are persuaded to move into Sunset Towers (which "faced east and had no towers"), and 16 people (family members and employees) are summoned to the reading of Samuel Westing's will, which presents the game and promises a fortune to the winner. The 16 people are divided into 8 pairs, and each pair is given an envelope of clues. "It's not what you have, it's what you don't have that counts." states the will, shortly before they are dispersed to solve the puzzle. Do they share? Well, not for awhile. And when they do, it's only one layer... I was initially a bit irritated by the quirkiness of the characters, but nuances emerged. The pairs were by design, not random, and the interactions change life trajectories.

#87: Oooh, The Westing Game was one of my absolute all-time favorites when I was a kid. Must have read it at least a dozen times. You're making me want to make it a baker's dozen...

88: I got caught up in the puzzle, and in wanting things to turn out well for some of the characters.

My absolute all-time favorite when I was a kid was Harriet the Spy. Maybe 25 years since I last read it, but I have it on a shelf...

Count me in as a Harriet the Spy fan too!

Me three!

#18: H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O'Brian

Comments someday... Clearly my "soonish" of above is stretching the definition of the wordish.

And two weeks later...
This was a group read that I joined because I've heard rave reviews of the series from people I respect. My reaction was less ravey. This book is third in the series, chosen because the story is more compelling than the previous two. The trouble for me was, with only a very basic sketch of the previous books, the various emotional entanglements of this book didn't resonate, and thus didn't pull me into the story. I quite liked Stephen Maturin, surgeon, for his scientific mind, curiosity about the natural world, and sense of humor. But then... a duel? WTF? There was a stint in India, which I enjoyed -- Elephanta Island, I've been there! The rest, roaming around the ocean with occasional battles, well, I probably should not skip over the battle scenes, but I do the same in movies -- I can't follow the hyperactivity so I tune out. The group read fizzled, with little discussion to flesh out the story or the characters. In sum, something of a disappointment, and yet, with enough interesting bits that I'm inclined to try Master and Commander.

#19: The Koreans by Michael Breen

Adding to the backlog... Apparently reading a couple hundred pages is easier than writing a review...

And a week later...
Nothing to Envy got me interested in learning more about Korea, and this book was recommend by the author, so I got it despite the subtitle (Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies), which has an offputting tinge of The Aliens have Landed! It was, actually, quite interesting to read. The author is a journalist who lived in Seoul for fifteen years. The book has four major sections: society, history, economy, politics, all of which are interspersed with personal anecdotes conveyed with mingled exasperation and humor and affection, in a style that is not exactly PC, and that sometimes compares Korean people and institutions unfavorably with ideals rather than realities of British counterparts. And yet, this can be a useful perspective on another culture, with one model of how things should be encountering another. Maybe I noticed this aspect more because as an American I might not have seen things in quite the author's way. So, grain of salt, not the definitive last word, and a tad sketchy in the history section, but still well worth reading.

93, qebo, that made my day! Just laughing and commiserating with you!

An aspiration for tomorrow is to catch up on reviews before I forget the books completely, so I can begin May free of burdens... Countrylife, you have a seriously organized thread!

qebo, I was so proud of myself last month, when I finally got caught up on my reviews and started being able to review and post, finally keeping things in order. It actually got easy, there for awhile, while hubby was working out of state. Now, I'm behind again. I can read, but as far as reviews go, I can't string two thoughts together while he's in the house 24-7. Non-readers just don't understand the LT fixation!

:-) My trouble is a full time job on weekdays plus a part time job on weekends. So I somehow manage to do the things that are "escape", but not the things that feel more like an obligation.

I tell myself it's good to have time to think about them before writing a review. Yep. That's it.

I got as far as adding some of your books to my wishlist for the tag mirror challenge, by the way, but I didn't already have any on my tbr list, and April has been rather hectic... Ah, well. It was fun anyway :)

98: Hi, nice to hear from you. Yeah, it's easy to get overbooked... The book I found for the TIOLI tag mirror challenge I'd been wanting to read anyway, and it was a kid's book so took only a few braindead evenings. Sorry my library doesn't tend toward light reading, but I'm glad to add to your wishlist!

Hah! Did it. Three reviews in one morning. Not the greatest, but good enough. I am now ready for May.

For anyone in my not-so-wide audience who may be interested: I created a non-fiction challenge group: http://www.librarything.com/groups/nonfictionchallenge.

#20: Anthill by E.O.Wilson

I doubt that I would have read this book by another author, but this author knows his stuff, and I was curious about the fictionalized ant colony. 100 pages in, and as yet no ants, my interest was waning. Raff Cody grows up in small town Alabama near the Nokobee tract, a wilderness of lake and swamp and woods, owned by a family whose members have dispersed to other states. An only child of parents from different cultural strata and consequent friction with regard to his upbringing, he explores the tract on his own and via the local Boy Scouts, encouraged by a visiting ecology professor from Florida State University. When his uncle offers to pay his college tuition on the condition that he continue on to law school, to FSU he proceeds. There, the professor presiding over the "bug bash" channels his tales about ants into a thesis. This becomes the Ant Chronicles, which the two professors revise for publication. The Ant Chronicles occupy about 75 pages, the story of several colonies that expanded and fought and faded over several years, told as an ant-scale drama. The entire book is worth reading for just this section (which could also stand alone), and I learned things, but I wanted to see more of the scientific observation process. So much of the ant activity happens underground, and so much of the ant communication happens with chemicals. I kept wondering how did he know? How much of this was direct observation, and how much of it came from reference books? Not E.O. Wilson, who I'm sure has done the relevant research, but the college kid of the novel. After college, Raff endures the culture shock of Harvard to get a law degree, returns to Alabama, and maneuvers his way into a job as legal counsel for a prominent developer rumored to have its eye on the Nokobee tract, waiting for its owners to sell. Several years later, the transaction occurs as expected, and Raff is in a position to negotiate a plan to preserve the Nokobee tract while also maximizing profit for his employer. Oh, and meanwhile there is a weird encounter with a local fundamentalist and his henchman. The legal drama occurs in a meeting between Raff, the company CEO, and the CFO who believes that God gave people dominion over nature. It seems rather contrived, but also a sincere effort to portray and reconcile conflicting forces. E.O. Wilson should not quit his day job, but kudos to him for stretching his repertoire. Now I want to read Naturalist.

Very behind on threads again, and not a prayer of catching up.

If you do read Naturalist, I will be interested in seeing what you think. I have had it in the BlackHole for a while now.

It was great to meet you today! I hope your train ride home is going smoothly :-)

Us too! We had a great time at the meet up. I hope your trip went well.

104,105: Thanks! The meetup was fun, and I'm glad I made the trek. Returned home about 11pm and resisted the impulse to turn on the computer.

Pictures! Where are the pictures?

pictures start here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/112641#2697219

Finally found your thread! Starred!!

It was so nice to get to meet you this past weekend. Yay to Jim for arranging such a fun Meet-up, eh?

109: Yes, I'm rather obscure in this group. I don't read rapidly enough to keep my thread up toward the top, and I'm not very chatty. Which doesn't mean that I don't care! Time is limited. The meetup was fun (I don't know lots of people whose idea of a good time is bookstore hopping), and yay to everyone who arranged and/or participated. Thanks for introducing me to BookCrossing!

Thanks for introducing me to BookCrossing!

You're welcome. I hope you find it fun.

Slow-moving threads are some of the best ones; at least there's some hope of keeping up!

I'm looking forward to more LT bookstore-hopping outings in the future :)

#21: The Genetic Strand by Edward Ball

I read author's earlier book Slaves in the Family several years ago, and had high hopes for this one as a continuation of the genealogical detective story entwined with history. And indeed the style is similar, but on the whole this book was a disappointment. The strength of Slaves in the Family, as I recall, was the moral difficulty of coming to terms with the underbelly of a prominent plantation family. This book has no such core. The author acquired a desk that had been in an ancestral home from the early 1800s onward. In a hidden drawer, he discovered packets of hair, labeled with names a dates, that had come from scattered members of the family, during the era before photography when locks of hair were a common memento. He set about getting the DNA tested. (A bit of information: hair contains only mitochondrial DNA.) The story meanders through family anecdotes, conversations with living relatives who contributed DNA to the project, and conversations with scientists involved in various aspects of DNA testing. What he discovered was... not so much. And I thought not worth an entire book, though the book could be considered more about the process and the sometimes exaggerated claims of DNA testing companies. Some of the earlier results were later shown to be dubious or false. The author blames science. Or he blames the cultural glorification of science and the equation of science with truth. But he met actual scientists! And they were like real people! They were emotional and humorous! They even had arguments with each other! The combination of mild antagonism and stereotypes isn't central, but it runs all through the book, and it irritated me enough that I was occasionally more eye-rolling than sympathetic.

#113: Sounds like one to miss! Sorry it turned out to be such a bad read. I hope the next one is much better.

qebo/110: You're front and center on my screen!

When you posted that, though, it reminded me to go back and look at that old thread, "How do you deal with the massive number of threads in this group?" So, I just had to put in my two-cents worth there. But the bottom line is that everyone I'm really interested in following is right there on my visible screen.

114: But Slaves in the Family is compelling, and The Genetic Strand isn't bad, it's just lightly interesting and pales in comparison. So I'd definitely read more books by the same author.

115: My process of sifting through the threads was similar to yours, and took about two weeks in early January. Since then I've made changes in both directions, starring the previously xed and vice versa. I make an effort to respond and reciprocate when people visit my thread, but I'm not a "hey, I'm here!" sort of person. I occasionally go hunting for an individual thread because of a comment on a group thread (simple, thanks to the wiki page). I regularly read some threads for the reviews and comments even though the books are outside my range and I have nothing to add to the discussion. I don't think you and I overlap much at all in reading tastes, but I appreciate your systematic approach and I recognize you from RSI, so you're starred.

I intend to read Slaves in the Family at some point. I will just give The Genetic Strand a pass.

A challenge for myself: 60 books for the year is a realistic goal. I'll be right on target with 25 for 5 months if I finish the 4 books (all non-fiction) in progress, some of which have been in progress for weeks or months, set aside for shiny new acquisitions. About 700 pages remaining all together. Seems feasible, doesn't it?

Sure, go for it !! Plus, think how good you'll feel when you finish books that have been in progress for a while !

What Laura said!

#22 Naturalist by E. O. Wilson

This represents 225 of the 700 pages mentioned in post 118... Quick summary: fantastic. This book has been on my shelf (or in a box) for a decade or so. Inspired me to page through The Ants, another book I've had for ages, a hefty thing that is probably beyond my capacity to read with comprehension, but the photos and drawings are gorgeous. More soonish...

And fairly soonish...
I've had this book for ages, seem to have picked it up while browsing in the discount section of B&N, but never got around to reading it. I recently read Anthill, and though I wasn't wild about the book as a whole, the embedded section about ants made it worthwhile, and I was curious how much of the story came from the Wilson's life. The answer is a fair amount -- it's set in the Alabama / Florida region of his childhood and in universities he's familiar with, he too was involved in the Boy Scouts, and then there are the ants. Naturalist however, is more detailed and less contrived -- there is no need to manufacture a dramatic story, because reality is quite interesting enough. This is a person who is infinitely curious and interactive. He describes how, as a kid, he learned to catch different types of animals by observing their behavior -- lizards, poisonous snakes, flies. ("My most memorable accomplishment in my freshman year (of high school) was to capture twenty houseflies during one hour of class, a personal record, and lay them in rows for the next student to find. The teacher found these trophies instead, and had the grace to compliment me on my feat next day in front of the class. I had developed a new technique for catching flies, and I now pass it on to you." A half page of instruction and explanation follows.) He describes the process of removing ant organs using needles and watchmaker tools, crushing and smearing each into a chemical trail, in order to understand how ants communicate the location of food. When Wilson decided to become a world expert on ants in the 1940s, biology was focused on organisms (botany, entomology, zoology). By 1960, it had changed, "sliced crosswise, according to levels of biological organization" (molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem). In the mid 1950s, James Watson arrived at Harvard, and a battle for the future ensued. ("When he was a young man, in the 1950s and 1960s, I found him the most unpleasant human being I had ever met. ... Watson, having risen to historic fame at an early age, became the Caligula of biology. He was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to be taken seriously. And unfortunately, he did so, with a casual and brutal offhandedness.") Watson and Wilson were on opposite ends of the spectrum, and Watson was not one to suppose that other people too might be doing necessary and important work. This episode occupies a mere chapter, so may pervade the book far less than it did the dozen years in the Harvard biology department. A controversy that gets more attention is sociobiology. I only vaguely recall the uproar at the time, the mid to late 1970s, and I'm now interested in reading Wilson's book Sociobiology, which I suspect will seem more dated than disturbing. As he describes it here, his error was to speculatively extend his observations and theories about the evolution of animal social systems into a single chapter on humans, oblivious to political implications, which evoked strenuous opposition from Stephen Jay Gould among others. There's not much about his personal life. He was an only child, his parents divorced when he was in elementary school and he was shuffled around as they reconstructed their lives, and about as much as he says about his immediate family is that he promised his wife to avoid airplanes until their daughter was grown, so on his frequent trips from MA to FL he took the train instead. I'm not doing justice to the tone of the book, which is more gracious than my excerpts suggest, and much more about nature and experiments and people he has collaborated with and admires. Highly recommended.

Good review of The Genetic Strand (I even went looking to thumb it, but you didn't post it on the work page). It sounds like a book to skip, though.

I'm also a bit behind schedule for the year, but I'm hoping to finish up some long-in-progress books in the near future too.

122: Maybe someday I'll dump 100 reviews onto LT... I'm reviewing for the exercise of it, and because even a single anecdote triggers memories later, but I'm hesitant to be official -- what if I've misinterpreted, misrepresented, etc. I don't want to spend a huge amount of time double checking and refining. Some people in the Non-Fiction Challenge aspire to increase the non-fiction reviews, which I think is a goal worth supporting and emulating, I just haven't quite got there.

Personally, I can't say I'm too worried about making a mistake. I figure reviews on the whole are more useful than not, even if they aren't perfect. I think LT will benefit from your 100 reviews one day :)

Of course, I would also love to have review comments, so that the review could be the start of a discussion rather than a final proclamation....

I agree that it could be useful, for both reviewers and for LT as a whole, to center discussion around reviews. I'd prefer for each review to allow/disallow comments. Some people actively want discussion and don't have a good place for it now; talk threads are scattered and ephemeral. OTOH, it can be daunting enough to post a review in public without also feeling responsible for monitoring the comments.

Yeah, I agree that it would be nice if we could enable it on a per-review basis. I would definitely have been tempted to wait a week or so for the mob to die down before enabling comments on my review of the pedophile book, for one.

Heh. I hadn't seen that thread. Stopped watching Book Talk awhile back. Too much clutter.

#121: I need to read that one. Thanks for the recommendation, qebo.

> 124

Of course, I would also love to have review comments, so that the review could be the start of a discussion rather than a final proclamation....

...and, of course, I have to peep up in this thread to say "Rah! Rah Rah!" for Zoe's suggestion of comments on reviews (as if that hasn't been brought up before...).

129: And as if my thread has enough prominence in the world to make it happen. :-)

#23: You Are Here by Colin Ellard

This represents 250 of the 700 pages mentioned in post 118... (So for the folks keeping count, I now have 3 days to read the remaining 225 pages.) Quick summary: meh. More soonish...

And soonish, though briefly...
This book was recommended by one of my running companions when we were disoriented on a trail. It's nicely organized, one section with chapters on increasingly sophisticated methods of navigation (targets, landmarks, routes, maps), another section with chapters on decreasingly personal/familiar space (home, work, city, cyberspace), a pleasant book to read, but never rises to a level of significance. My sole takeaway is that our minds map space as nodes and connections more than geometrically. The final chapters heavily reference Christopher Alexander, Bill Hillier, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, whose books are classics for a reason.

#24 The Emerald Planet by David Beerling

This represents 100 of the 700 pages mentioned in post 118. (2 days and 125 pages remain...) Quick summary: Usefully organized, lots of information, and yet nothing that especially stands out as enlightening. More soonish...

And soonish...

This book was recommended by Steven Johnson in The Invention of Air. I was not as drawn into it as I'd expected to be, but part of the trouble is that I'd set myself a deadline. A chart maps each chapter onto the time frame it covers, and it's a handy thing that I kept marked for reference. I have not memorized the geologic eras. Each chapter begins with a paragraph summary, and covers a major issue, such as why were plants and animals so big 300 million years ago, or how did the polar forests of 150 million years ago cope with extreme durations of sunlight and darkness, supported by lots of detail about explorers and scientists who made progress in answering the question. A continuous theme is that understanding climate, and the contributions and reactions of plants to it, at any time in the past, helps with understanding how to model it in the present. This is all useful and interesting, and impressive even, to see how many people over how many decades are involved in chipping away at a problem, and yet... I found it to be rather tedious going -- too many names and dates and bits and pieces that detracted from essentials.

Keep going! You can do it!
(thought you needed a little cheerleading for motivation ...)

133: Thanks! Thing is, these are all interesting subjects, which is why I started the books, but the styles aren't grabbing me. Based on the books that I've started and finished meanwhile, seems that what I want is informative storytelling.

Stopping by to wave hi.

135: Hi! I just dropped by your new thread.

#25: Chaos: A Very Short Introduction by Leonard Smith

Goal achieved. My four in-progress books all completed by the end of May. Now to review them...

I'm not sure this one truly counts as read. If read is each sentence from cover to cover, then yes. I read is comprehended well enough to pass a test, then no. The trouble isn't with the book itself, but that it didn't quite suit my purposes, which is why it languished for several months. Though my attention was caught on occasion, so maybe when I scan section headings for a review I'll realize that I got more than I'm aware of now.

>137 qebo:: goal achieved -- congratulations! What a sense of accomplishment. I decided to do that with just one book over the holiday weekend, and am so pleased with myself for doing so. I can only imagine the lovely sense of completion with four. Now you can start more books!!!

Congrats! I hope I can manage the same sort of thing for June.

138,139: Thanks! I have two lined up, one non-fiction and one fiction. Now if I can manage to restrain myself and not start any others until these are done...

The problem is that there are just so many good books. I can't wait until I'm done one to start the next!

I loved The Naturalist -- his love of his subject infused it! I don't feel the same way about ants, certainly. And I loved his thought that because of his one eye, he focussed on small close-up things that he could see well, and, bingo! Ants.

142: I'm OK with ants (well, I say this as a resident of the northeastern US where winter keeps the critters at a tolerable size), but I'd draw the line well before the poisonous snakes of his childhood. I find this sort of autobiography / biography compelling -- learn something about the subject, with a personal engagement.

Now the goal is to get all completed books reviewed this weekend. And to not get myself into this predicament again. So I'm skimping.

#26: The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick

This book was a gift from my boss, so it moved to the top of the queue. It's an entertaining description of London in the 1660s, with plague and fire and the founding of the Royal Society, and a sketch of scientific developments leading to Newton. So: Kepler and elliptical orbits, Galileo and falling objects, Descartes and the coordinate system, Leibniz and calculus, Newton and calculus and gravity. The math is minimal, basic, and presented mostly in diagrams. The story is more about the conceptual barriers and breakthroughs, the essential observations and experiments, the historical context, and the personalities. It's nicely told and a useful overview.

Oh, that sounds like fun.

I've put The Clockwork Universe straight onto my wishlist - sounds excellent. If you like history of science books, have you looked at God's Philosophers? I read it earlier this year and enjoyed it.

God's Philosophers (grr, let's see if the touchstone sticks). No, wasn't aware of it, and now of course I must read it. Thanks.

And a bit later...
Cushla, I pulled up your old thread to see your comments on God's Philosophers, and you link to Charles Freeman's criticism (
http://newhumanist.org.uk/2416/why-gods-philosophers-did-not-deserve-to-be-short..., which along with being useful in itself, mentions another intriguing book: Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili (described on Amazon as a British-Iraqi physicist). And now I must exit Amazon, because I'm seeing an endless path of "customers who bought this book also bought..." Sadly, my eyes are bigger than my brain.

#26: I was just looking at The Clockwork Universe online this morning wondering if it is worth the read. (I am finishing up Peter Ackroyd's Newton at the moment.) I am glad to see that you liked the book.

149: Heh. I'd seen your mention of Peter Akroyd's Newton recently, and was wondering whether I wanted to delve more deeply.

#150: Ackroyd's Newton is in his 'Brief Lives' series and that is part of the book's problem - its brevity. I would like to find something more in depth on Newton.

151: According to the author of the book I just read, the best biography of Newton is Never At Rest by Richard Westfall. At 900+ pages it may have the opposite problem, but I'll bet you're up to the challenge.

Never at Rest does have a very impressive rating, though with not very many raters.

#152: I will see if the local library has a copy. Thanks for the mention, qebo!

I've added The Clockwork Universe to the ever expanding tbr pile.

Happy Saturday to you.

A happy Saturday to you also. I've actually accomplished things -- got exactly where I should be in the book of the week, and finished painting the staircase trim, on the to-do list for for two years. Now for weeding the back yard...

Good for you! You did indeed accomplish a lot!

#27: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

I need time to process this before I can comment... Meanwhile, escaping with a lighter book.

Two weeks later...

WARNING: spoilers!

Jimmy Quinn is an employee of the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico, whose job is to analyze radio signals for the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence. In a leap of intuition, he discovers music in a signal from the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, and tells his friends: AI analyst Sofia Mendes, engineer George Edwards, doctor Anne Edwards, Jesuit priest and linguist Emilio Sandoz. Immediately they speculate about a possible expedition to discover the source of the music. The Jesuit order funds the expedition, with several other Jesuits added to round out the expertise of the crew. Along with a bit of backstory on the characters, the book alternates between moving forward from the moment of discovery in 2019 (the book was published in 1996, so has both excessive optimism and oversights about technological developments) through the voyage to and exploration of the planet Rakhat, and the year 2060, when Emilio Sandoz returns to Earth, alone, physically and mentally barely hanging on, and disgraced by a report sent by the retrieval mission (whose crew then disappeared) describing the degraded circumstances in which he was found, and his brutal behavior, which is at odds with anything we've otherwise seen about this supremely and intensely moral man. Tension builds as the pages turn, 100, 200, ... the voyage succeeds, the initial contact with the rural Runa society holds nothing worse than irritations and curiosities and the mysterious death of a peripheral character, and yet it is known from the beginning that something terrible occurred. The urban Jana'ata society remains at a distance until the trader Supaari wonders about the source of exotic fashions and substances that have apperared in his city, and invites the crew for a visit and a secret tour. The relationship between the Runa and the Jana'ata is trade. And...? Biologically, their appearance is similar, yet with notable differences. The same species, or not? Where is the music? We don't know until the end. The crew had practiced Handel's Messiah in order to communicate, but the Runa fear music. Emilio learns the language quickly, but some concepts don't register as significant clues until too late. I have quibbles: the main characters are all quite appealing, with personal foibles but no serious flaws. Emilio is wrestling with questions about God's nature and God's expectations, but the other characters are not, so provide a protective buffer against full immersion in his mind. There is an emphasis on his celibacy, and how it affects the various romantic fantasies and entanglements among the group of friends, which is relevant to the ultimate revelation, in a way that struck me as peculiar, intended maybe to have more shock value than it actually did. When the main characters die, they do so quickly and mostly off camera, so despite sadness at their demise, I never really felt a full impact. Still, this is a compelling story, with interesting ideas, and I am eager to read the sequel.

#28: The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron

The Clockwork Universe has a section on Tycho Brahe, which triggered a memory about the Mushroom Planet books and namesake Tyco Bass. Hmm, do these books still exist? I read them in the late 1960s... And indeed they do. This is the first book of the series. My memory magnifies its formative impact maybe more than it deserves, but I can see the appeal. Tyco Bass, mushroom farmer and astronomer, has discovered the planet where, he believes, his people originated. And where, he intuits, his people are in trouble. He places an ad in the newspaper for a rocket made by 2 boys. David and Chuck construct a rocket from scrap materials during their vacation from school. With permission of David's parents and Chuck's grandfather, an engine invented by Tyco Bass, and mascot hen Mrs Pennyfeather, the boys fly to the planet Basidium-X. Tyco Bass' calculations allow them precisely two hours to save its inhabitants.

OK, so an ulterior motive might've been to read a book in a single day, and bank extra time for other books... but I was actually legitimately curious too.

Heh, that has to be one of the more ridiculous-sounding books that I've heard of. For some reason's it's given me an urge to reread The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks....

#159: I read that one for the first time just last year and rather enjoyed it.

160: Maybe my perception is distorted by nostalgia, but it didn't strike me as much less plausible than The Sparrow :-)
161: Now I'm wondering about other significant books of my childhood. I've just ordered Alvin's Secret Code.

I think it was the hen that really made it seem over-the-top :)

163: The hen was crucial to the story. Does this make it seem more or less over-the-top? :-)

Difficult question. I'll have to think about it :)

Love this discussion! Important to ponder the imponderables!

#29: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

WARNING: spoilers!

It is 1799, and Jacob wishes to marry Anna, but hasn't the appropriate financial means or status, so his prospective father-in-law sets him up with a 5 year post as a clerk on Dejima to establish his future. Dejima is the trading post of the Dutch East Indies Company. It is Japan's sole contact with the outside world, connected to Nagasaki by a bridge with controlled access. Shortly after arriving, Jacob encounters Orita, a midwife who saved the life of the magistrate's newborn son, who is the only female student of the physician Dr Marinus, whose face is disfigured by a burn. Jacob is smitten. Anna has given him license for a liaison ("I know how men overseas behave, and perhaps how they must behave") so long as his heart remains true to her. So in the midst of his business duties, Jacob asks (with comic consequences) Dr Marinus to set up a meeting, and passes a message via the interpreter Uzaemon to ask Orita to be his "Dejima wife". The world of cultural intermingling is detailed and evocatively written. The Dutch businessmen negotiate with the Nagasaki magistracy through many interpreters, whose skills range from inept to subtly manipulative, allowing the author to play with language and convey cultural misunderstandings in the difficulty of translating concepts. The current chief of Dejima assigns Jacob the task of reconciling the accounts of the previous acting chief of Dejima, to determine the specifics of corruption. The official accounts obscure the real situation, in which goods and materials have been pilfered to be sold for personal profit. Through part one of the book, Jacob sees himself as righting wrongs, and Orita remains at a distance, seen only flittingly, but magnified in his mind. And then, a betrayal, and a switch in point of view for part two. Which is, in my opinion, where the book departs from historical novel with acceptably exaggerated characters, and enters the realm of WTF. Orito's father is financially beholden to Enomoto, abbot of the remote Mount Shiranui Shrine. When Orito's father dies, her stepmother exchanges Orito for the debt. Orito is kidnapped and taken to the shrine, where ritualized "engifting" sessions are arranged for the nuns and the monks, and the resulting "gifts" of infants are spirited away. The interpreter Uzaemon until now has had a peripheral role, with one significant action: though clearly intelligent, attentive, and capable, he allowed Jacob's illegal Christian psalter to slip into Dejima, and advised Jacob to hide it. With the shift in focus from Dejima to Nagasaki, we learn that he and Orito wished to marry, but his family forbade him and found him another wife, and he passed Jacob's message to Orito in a noble effort to save her from a worse fate. Because of their mutual connection to Orito, and because Jacob's room was searched and did not yield the psalter, Uzaemon passes a document to Jacob for safekeeping: the shrine's commandments, describing its bizarre and secret rituals, which he received from a mountain herbalist (who had sold medicinal plants to Orito and was aware of the star-crossed romance), who had received it from a defecting monk, who promptly died from a time-delayed poison administered by the shrine doctor. Jacob eventually passes the document to the magistrate, who is in a political position to expose Enomoto. Uzaemon and his sword instructor Shuzai set out on an arduous secret mission to rescue Orito. Meanwhile, Orito is plotting her own escape. This is part two, and at the end is... another betrayal. Then another switch in point of view for part three, to the captain of British ship entering the harbor of Nagasaki, intent on seizing trading rights from the enemy Dutch, adding a third language and a third component to the maneuverings and power struggles. The magistrate has failed to maintain the legally required military force, leaving Nagasaki vulnerable. When battle ensues, and major damage to Nagasaki results, the magistrate commits suicide, and manages to fatally poison Enomoto in the process. The battle and suicide were actual historical events, though modified for the sake of the story. Jacob de Zoet was modeled on an historical person, who wrote a memoir of his years in Dejima. Enomoto and the bizarre creepy shrine cult are figments of the author's imagination. Jacob survives relatively unsullied (he consorts with a prostitute, but she becomes the mother of his responsibly parented and talented son), as does Orito (she conscientiously negotiates a position in the shrine that allows her to care for the other nuns and remain exempt from the engifting sessions). A chance meeting between Jacob and Orito a decade later provides a scene for explanations and wrapping up of loose ends. Jacob remains on Dejima until 1817. How long did Anna wait before she moved on with her life? Apparently this is not a loose end that matters. So... Would I recommend the book? The style is compelling, and I cared about the characters. I have reservations about the portrayal of Europe grounded in reality vs Japan where imagination was given freer (and more detrimental) rein.

Wikipedia articles:
Historical basis of novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thousand_Autumns_of_Jacob_de_Zoet
Dejima: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima
Hendrik Doeff, author of a memoir about his years in Dejima in the early 1800s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Doeff
HMS Phaeton, which attacked Dejima in 1808: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Phaeton_%281782%29

>167 qebo:...
thanks, that's a good summary. Apparently our reaction to the book is similar.

Egad! I'm *so* glad I gave up after book 2. If I'd trudged all that way, I would be homicidal by now.

Great summary. I appreciate that - it's nice to know that some of the book was actually based on history. I had not realized that.

#30: Four Colors Suffice by Robin Wilson

This is a relatively brief (228 pages with lots of illustrations) and coherent history of the 4-color map problem. A map is what you think it is, a surface with boundaries between regions. Other rules: the map may be on a sphere but it may not be on a torus (donut) or other 3D form with a hole, each region is independent (so not a map of the world in which some countries are split into parts that must be the same color), and the boundary is defined as more than a single point (n regions that meet in the center of a pie do not require n colors to be distinct). The problem made its appearance in 1852, when a student asked a professor, who asked a friend... and remained unsolved until 1976. It rose to notoriety because it's a simple question that was difficult to answer, and it was worth tackling because effort on any one problem can yield results that apply to other problems. One strategy was to prove the impossibility of a "minimal criminal": a minimal counterexample with a configuration of regions such that (a) the configuration _cannot_ be colored with 4 colors, but (b) any sub-configuration (the same configuration with one or more regions removed) _can_ be colored with 4 colors. A configuration might be a square (a region surrounded by four others), or a cluster of three pentagons (three regions each surrounded by five others), etc. Various mathematicians over decades contributed proofs regarding specific configurations of increasing complexity, and different methods of determining their properties. The strategy that eventually led to a proof was to find an "unavoidable set" (a set of regions one or more of which _must_ be in any map) of "reducible configurations" (configurations that may not be in a minimal criminal). The proof, by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, consisted of nearly 2000 such configurations verified by a computer program, and was disturbing for its inelegance and non-transparency, to the extent that one math department deemed Appel and Haken a bad influence and barred them from meeting students. The proof has since been streamlined, but not fundamentally changed. The book is nicely presented in chronological order, with concepts succinctly explained and helpfully illustrated, especially in the earlier stages when things were still relatively straightforward. It becomes less clear in the later stages, but this is not the fault of the author, as the details are far too numerous for this sort of publication.

>171 qebo:: That's definitely one for the list. I know one professor who still regards the problem as technically unproven. Thanks for the recommendation!

172: Yeah, the proof as described is rather unsatisfying, more trudge than elegant concepts, but there are some clever ideas and techniques along the way.

>171 qebo: *flees shrieking from terrorsweat PROOFS*

*snerk*

174: Heh. Just wait'll you see the book I'm reading now... Matrices and Transformations. But this one is for my job, so I get paid.

>176 qebo:: Oh my, what a lively work that must be. I notice from the description that proofs of most theorems are included. Just what Richard needs.

THREAD #2 starts now. Maybe premature by 75er standards, but my list has gotten unwieldy, I'll surely need another thread before the end of the year, and midway through is a nicely defined breakpoint.