qebo's 2011 books (2)

THREAD #1 (January - June)

July

(click the # for details)

#31: Matrices and Transformations by Anthony Pettofrezzo -- (Jul 3)
#32: Alvin's Secret Code by Clifford Hicks -- (Jul 3)
#33: 1491 by Charles Mann -- (Jul 9)
#34: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins -- (Jul 16)
#35: Body Work by Sarah Paretsky -- (Jul 18)
#36: Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich -- (Jul 23)
#37: A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer -- (Jul 24)

August

(click the # for details)

#38: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot -- (Aug 6)
#39: Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman -- (Aug 13)
#40: Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks -- (Aug 16)
#41: New Yorker - March 2011 (4 issues) -- (Aug 17)
#42: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi -- (Aug 20)
#43: New Yorker - April 2011 (4 issues) -- (Aug 24)
#44: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand -- (Aug 31)

New Yorker: March 7 - May 9 (10 issues)

September

(click the # for details)

#45: The River of Doubt by Candice Millard -- (Sep 5)
#46: New Yorker - May 2011 (5 issues) -- (Sep 8)
#47: The Man Who Found Time by Jack Repcheck -- (Sep 11)
#48: In the Land of Invisible Women by Qanta Ahmed -- (Sep 16)
#49: New Yorker - June 2011 (3 issues) -- (Sep 18)
#50: Scientific American - January 2011 -- (Sep 18)
#51: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie -- (Sep 18)
#52: New Yorker - July 2011 (3 issues) -- (Sep 30)
#53: Children of God by Mary Doria Russell -- (Sep 30)

New Yorker: May 16 - July 25 (9 issues)
Scientific American: January 2011

October

(click the # for details)

#54: Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz -- (Oct 5)
#55: The Lost City of Z by David Grann -- (Oct 10)
#56: Scientific American - February 2011 -- (Oct 14)
#57: New Yorker - August 2011 (4 issues) -- (Oct 18)
#58: A Chosen Faith by John Buehrens and Forrest Church -- (Oct 26)
#59: Scientific American - March 2011 -- (Oct 30)
#60: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee -- (Oct 31)

New Yorker: August 1 - September 12 (6 issues)
Scientific American: February & March 2011

November

(click the # for details)

#61: New Yorker - September 2011 (4 issues) -- (Nov 3)
#62: Night Watch by Stephen Kendrick -- (Nov 6)
#63: Scientific American - April 2011 -- (Nov 8)
#64: Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier -- (Nov 11)
#65: Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler -- (Nov 13)
#66: Scientific American - May 2011 -- (Nov 22)
#67: New Yorker - October 2011 (5 issues) -- (Nov 26)
#68: Life Ascending by Nick Lane -- (Nov 27)
#69: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett -- (Nov 30)

New Yorker: September 19 - October 31 (7 issues)
Scientific American: April & May 2011

December

(click the # for details)

#70: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks -- (Dec 5)
#71: Among Others by Jo Walton -- (Dec 15)
#72: New Yorker - November 2011 (4 issues) -- (Dec 16)
#73: Scientific American - June 2011 -- (Dec 22)
#74: New Yorker - December 2011 (3 issues) -- (Dec 28)
#75: The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson -- (Dec 29)

New Yorker: November 7 - December 26 (7 issues)
Scientific American: June 2011

#31: Matrices and Transformations by Anthony Pettofrezzo

I don't recall where, when, or why I acquired this book, but I now feel vindication for my reference library, because this book was exactly what I needed when I was perusing my shelves in hopes of an uncluttered answer to a question in my job (what's the question? um, well, my boss is a tad paranoid about even remotely proprietary information). The relevant section is near the end of the book, but linear algebra was awhile ago, so I began at the beginning. I did just a smattering of the exercises as reassurance that I more or less got the gist, and I won't claim full understanding of every theorem, and a test would be alarming, but I read through to the end without skipping, and I am applying what I learned to an actual legitimate real life problem, so dammit I'm going to count this as a "read" book. It's quite a nice book, 111 pages coherently and concisely focused on exactly what the title says. What is a transformation? It is a rule for getting an object from here to there. Examples: rotation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_%28geometry%29), reflection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_%28mathematics%29), translation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_%28geometry%29, scaling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaling_%28geometry%29).

>8 qebo:: well it's nice when the reference library comes in handy, isn't it?

If you read it all the way through, then it definitely counts!!

#32: Alvin's Secret Code by Clifford Hicks

At the opposite end of the mental effort spectrum from the previous book... After rereading The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet I wondered about other childhood favorites. I became obsessed with ciphers as a result of reading this book at age 9 or 10. I didn't remember the story, but I memorized the frequency table, 40+ years ago, and I'll probably be reciting it in my dotage with Alzheimer's. The story seems not especially memorable: Alvin and his friend Shoie happen upon an encoded message in the gutter while walking home from school. Convinced they're on the trail of a nefarious plot, they seek decoding assistance from Mr Link, former WWII spy. Mr Link bursts their bubble, but begins to teach them (and Alvin's little sister The Pest who is tagging along) about codes and ciphers. Fortunately for the kids and their newly acquired skills, a real mystery appears: Miss Fenwick is seeking the treasure stolen from her multiple-greats grandfather during the Civil War. And so is "Mr Smith". A critical moment occurs in the library, where the kids encounter "Mr Smith" attempting to decipher the message that tells where the treasure is buried... At the end of the book is an appendix, with more information about ciphers. This I recall is what grabbed me.

9: So many of my books will never count as read...
10: So I don't have to do the exercises?

Hi qebo! I hope you add your review to Alvin's Secret Code. Not only is your review thumb-worthy, but there are only two brief reviews posted, and I like yours better. It sounds like a good book for my daughter in a couple of years.

13: Oh, and there's a cringey bit about slavery, which probably seemed benign when the book was written in 1963, and that didn't register with me as a kid circa 1968.

"cringey bit" == I like that phrase.

Happy Holiday Weekend to you!

Yes 'cringey bit' is very apt. I hate encountering those in a book I loved as a child or adolescent.

Statistics for the 1st half of the year:

# books : 30
# fiction / non-fiction : 11 / 19
# owned : 29 (1 owned temporarily and given away so not cataloged)
# old / new : 6 / 24
# female / male authors : 8 / 20 (1 / 1 multiple books by same author)

No real surprises. I'm on track for 60 books this year, returning to a lost habit of reading for a chunk of time morning and evening rather than clicking at the computer. 1 non-fiction per week is a goal to aspire to, but sometimes I need a break. The old vs new stat is a little disturbing; "old" had been languishing for over a year, and they were fine books, so I really should peruse my shelves more often.

I really should peruse my shelves more often too, but the local library's shelves are so much more interesting!

I admire that nearly all the books you've read are ones you actually own. I'm actively trying to read books I acquired before this year, but not doing as well with that as I'd hoped.

19: Alas, most of them are books I bought recently, and my buying is way ahead of my reading.

I finished 1491 a week ago, and The God Delusion today. Need to write reviews for both. Today I copied the reviews I've written for 75er threads, in 2009 and 2011, into the official review field for each book. Still have tons to do: set a baseline of previously read books for the Dewey Decimal challenge, tag and collectionize several dozen books entered recently, fix authors for books entered when I joined LT, add CK for my authors...

#33: Placeholder for 1491. It's engaging and detailed, and I want to get my facts straight before I plop a review onto the internet.

And a month later...

I read this book over a month ago, and writing a review has become more difficult with the passage of time, especially as the initial hesitation was my inability to do it justice without refreshing my memory. The bibliography for this book runs to nearly 60 pages, which suggests the detail it encompasses. The author is a journalist, not anthropologist or archaeologist, but he talked and traveled with many of their ilk. His interest was sparked by a chance trip to Mayan ruins while researching a science article, and he got serious about writing a book after comparing what he'd learned in the years since to the cursory descriptions in his son's school textbooks. The thesis is American Indians (the choice of terminology is explained) as agents of their own destinies, with technological, cultural, and political successes and errors -- interacting with the land, each other, and European explorers and colonists. Not exactly revolutionary, but an effort to counter romanticized notions. Also, as the title implies, an effort to reconstruct conditions before Europeans arrived. The trouble is that by time Indian societies were documented by Europeans, things had already changed significantly. The book is divided into three sections, thematic rather than chronological or geographical, which can be a bit confusing, but maps appear as needed, at the appropriate scale for orientation. The first section is about the numbers. How many people were in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus? Early explorers described large villages on the shores of rivers, but later attempts to find these villages failed. Imagined? Exaggerated? Quite possibly not, and population estimates, while still in dispute, have been rising. Smallpox was devastating, and traveled faster than the explorers. The second section is about duration. When did people arrive in the Americas? 15,000ish years ago across Beringia (Bering Strait land bridge) remains plausible, but specifics require geological and paleontological support, which isn't simple, and there is scattered evidence of earlier occupation that doesn't fit but can't be dismissed. The third section is about gardening, and is, in my opinion, the most enlightening. What was seen by Europeans as pristine wilderness, was often actually managed: irrigated, burned, and farmed. It was not only maize (whose development from wild teosinte to domesticated crop is not obvious). A chapter about the Amazon transforms the region from sparse hunter/gathers in a jungle to dense villages surrounded by fertilized soil and orchards. (Incidentally, Theodore Roosevelt's great-granddaughter Anna Roosevelt is an archeologist whose work is contributing to the revision: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302302.... The writing is engaging and informative, thorough and honorable about what is known, what is speculation, what is controversial. Sadly, every detailed description is a reminder of how much was lost inadvertently or destroyed deliberately.

#34: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins wants me to declare myself "atheist" rather than "agnostic". And he wants me to stop using the word "god" in an abstract god-doesn't-play-dice manner. Because he wants religion to go away. I think religion has been changing since the dawn of humanity, and maybe before, and will continue to change, and if I don't get to make up my very own personal definitions of words, I do get to choose among words with imprecise definitions. So. I am agnostic, not in the sense of straddling the fence at the halfway point of a continuum between disbelief and belief (in a magical entity that cares about me), but in the sense that in any effort to think about things rationally, at some depth I hit a murkiness that makes my head hurt. Will science reveal all? Maybe. It's got a pretty good track record. Or maybe not. I don't know. And "god" is a rather nice shorthand for the complexity and mystery and vastness of a universe in which I am a mere transient speck. Though I may also refer to "gods", because the world often seems more compatible with a bunch of flawed squabbling entities who are messing with us. But this book was not written for me. It was written primarily for people who want to extricate themselves from the more ubiquitous forms of religion in western society. With this narrow scope kept in mind, I found the book more entertaining than I'd expected, because I do actually share many of his views, I just don't share so much his aversion to the entire enterprise. (I never had to extricate myself from anything. The closest my family got to organized religion was a brief stint with the Unitarians when I was in elementary school.) And I enjoy his sense of humor. So 100 pages in, after ranting about appeasers (who would seem to include me), he gets into specifics about what he opposes. The core of it is that god is not scientifically necessary. Darwin's insight was profound. Complexity can arise from simplicity. There is no need for an infinite regress with god as prime cause or external creator. (His refutation of Intelligent Design is relatively brief. It's done better elsewhere. Why Intelligent Design Fails gets at the pseudo-science without bashing religion. Finding Darwin's God reconceptualizes god in a manner compatible with biological evolution, though it takes liberties with physics.) As for god the elegant unifying One behind it all, such a god must be internally complex and is therefore an "explanation" that requires further explanation. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and concepts from his profession not surprisingly contribute significantly his model of the universe as a whole. It's a fine and important and deeply satisfying model. I like it too. Any religion that outright clashes with this model is in trouble in the modern world, and its adherents will have to reconcile themselves somehow. I think that the result may be more interesting religions. Dawkins thinks that with this feature of religion discarded, nothing remains. He seems genuinely baffled why anyone with a sophisticated understanding of science would retain ties to a religious congregation, sees this as politeness or nostalgia. OK, so now I'm two pages into my five pages of notes... A chapter is dedicated to the origins of religion from an evolutionary perspective. In essence, we are naturally dualistic and teleological; we distinguish between matter and mind, we confuse cause and purpose. Quick intuitive thinking about different aspects of the environment has survival value. From this, we manufactured other stuff. There's more, but I'm skipping ahead. Are people good because of religion? Mark Hauser presents a series of scenarios (a runaway train is headed toward five people but it could be diverted onto a track that has only one person in its way... a runaway train is headed toward five people but one person thrown onto the track would stop it...) and asks people to choose the morally acceptable course of action. With an internet survey, modification of the questions to suit a South American tribe, and a formal study comparing atheists and theists, there is no statistically significant difference between the moral intuitions of each group (most of us will divert the train and accept the collateral damage, but won't deliberately throw someone onto the track). And these are intuitions; people have trouble justifying their actions logically. "Studies show..." may not be a terribly compelling argument for an aspiring extricant. More to the point is a chapter on The "Good" Book, the supposed source of Christian morality. Dawkins begins it with mention of theologians whose views are "unrecognizable" as standard Christianity. He's OK with these people. He finds discussions with them interesting and productive. (See for example: http://notsofriendlyhumanist.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/dawkins-and-holloway/, http://www.stcuthbertscolinton.org.uk/wordweb/conversation.htm) Then he launches into amusing versions of apalling bible stories, whose characters, whether regarded literally or metaphorically, are no way no how good role models for modern society. Or any society. So, he concludes, modern morality does not come from the bible. And it is true that the bible encountered cold, without context, is not a complete guide. But to people who care about it (and admittedly I'm not one of them), it is not encountered cold; it is encountered through centuries and layers of interpretations. Some of which are more nuanced than others. We did, somehow, manage to get here from there, in all our bumbling messy humanity. I have problems with exactly the same people that Dawkins has problems with. I'm less convinced that the solution is to ditch Christianity, or Islam, or whatever, in their various entireties. (And I quite like Judaism in its liberal manifestations.) However, again, I can afford an anthropological perspective because nobody in my personal or professional life has ever much cared about my beliefs, so I am not writhing in guilt or fearful of being shunned. Dawkins is concerned about people who don't have this luxury. If my opinion about religion wasn't significantly changed by this book, my opinion about Dawkins rose.

Fascinating review! Thank you for sharing not only your thoughts about the book, but your personal views too. Does he talk about people who view religion through a cultural lens? Rational, scientific thinkers who don't take religious writings literally, and yet feel drawn to a religion because of its culture? After Cushla's and now your review, I may have to read the darn book. Was trying to avoid the polemics.

Fascinating review! Thanks for taking the time and thought to do it.

Excellent summary. I'm reading this very slowly on my kindle, and am only at chapter 3. But it's fascinating on many levels. I have no idea how I'll write a review!!

23: Heh. I'd been avoiding it too, but I kept seeing reviews, thoughtful reviews, and there wasn't much I could say in response without reading the thing myself. Grrr. Considering how subjective religion is, it seems necessary to include personal perspective. And no, he doesn't. He realizes that such people exist, but he doesn't comprehend what the attachment might be. I'm not a very groupy person, but I went through a period of attending Quaker meetings, also some Unitarian and Reconstructionist Jewish services, where people are seeking a cultural / spiritual / ethical community. I see this as part of the solution. Dawkins seems to see this as part of the problem. So despite a large overlap of agreement with him, this is where we part company.

24: Thanks!

25: I didn't either. I sat down to write thinking it'd take maybe an hour or so. Three hours later, I was skipping entire chapters to get it over with. Religion is so mushy and difficult to articulate.

#22: Although this is not a book I am going to read, I appreciate your thoughts on it.

Excellent review!!

#22 Thanks for your thoughts qebo. After your review and Cushla's I'm now considering trying the Dawkins book.

#35: Body Work by Sarah Paretsky

Mental escape that doesn't leave me brain dead.

#36: Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich

This book could be described as Japanland meets Dreaming in Chinese, two books I read earlier this year, and it is a category of book that I really enjoy -- a loose memoir of immersion in (rather than traveling through) a foreign culture, with its awkward and often misinterpreted personal interactions and language struggles. The author, at age 45, after surviving breast cancer (about which she wrote a previous book that I now want to read) and losing her job as a magazine editor, decided to learn Hindi. She began with instructors in the US, then applied to a school in India that required a prior two years of study, a qualification that she didn't remotely possess. She was accepted. (She learned later that the school was desperate for students.) This book is about her year in Udaipur, Rajastan, the teachers and other students at the school, the host family ("Though I continued to draw some lines, as on the evening I came home to find the Jains debating how much money I had in the bank. 'No, you misunderstand.' Dad 2 said when I refused to answer. 'We don't want to take your money. We just really, really, really want to know.' he said, as all ten family members nodded emphatically, in unison."), an assortment of other people in the city who became friends, and the language. The language is what ties the book together, though it is not itself presented (Hindi portions of dialogue are translated into English and italicized). The approximately chronological tale is interspersed with linguistic tidbits, as second language acquisition has become quite the topic of study (there's a bibliography). I'd guess the level to be closer to popular magazine than scholarly journal, but that's about where I'm at and not my primary reason for reading the book anyway, so that's OK. A unexpected twist: The author, whose home was New York, arrived in India the first week of September 2001. In October, she was invited to a performance at a school for deaf children. After her impromptu and embarrassingly incongruous talk about her childhood experience with troublesome adenoids ("These are kids who've had to leave their families. I said 'What?' on the playground."), the kids surrounded her with questions, sign language and mime: "Are you OK?" and flying hand airplanes crashing into vertical hand walls. Emotionally stirred ("Because this is the first time in all this time anyone's asked."), she volunteered to help at the school, and although help wasn't necessarily needed, supplies were, so the teacher ("greedy" for his students) found a place for her. Thus sign language, or rather sign languages (not only mutually unintelligible formal languages, but also the pidgins that the kids arrive with, and the version they have created for communication among themselves), enters into the mix, along with Hindi, official language of India but not what everyone speaks, conversations that switch between Hindi and English in an effort to find a balance of mutual miscommunication, the politics of this word from Sanskrit versus that word from Persian. Regarding politics, be prepared for harrowing violence, though mostly described from a distance rather than witnessed directly. A little more clarity in the timeline would've been nice, and there's a mundane incident in the acknowledgements of a type that I wish had been more prominent elsewhere, but these are minor quibbles about an absorbing book.

What an enjoyable review to read! Sounds like a fascinating book.

#31: I went to add that one to the BlackHole only to discover it is already there. Too bad my local library does not have it yet.

#37: A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer

This is a book of essays, each about a specific virus or type of virus. It was funded by the NIH for the World of Viruses project, intended to educate the public about virus research. There is, of course, an associated web site: http://www.worldofviruses.unl.edu/, which has a pretty cool set of images, including some diagrams explaining infection and replication that I wish had been included in this book. The essays are relatively self contained (though occasionally information in an earlier one is helpful in a later one), and brief (10 essays in less than 100 pages). Each is an introductory overview without the usual depth and detail of Carl Zimmer, but still worthwhile, in part because I would trust him to focus on the stuff that matters: here's what you need to know to make sense of news reports. And it's not as if I knew everything already. For example, news to me, though discovered in 1992: the mimivirus, which has the structure of a virus, and the genes of a virus, but it is 100 times too large, the size of bacteria, and disturbed the prior clear-ish distinction between life and not-life. (A quibble: there are lots of typos, and once I began to notice, they became distracting, and contribute to the impression that this book was a side project.)

Hmm, zipping along this month, over my quota with a week to go, though it helps that two books were escapist, and one book could be read for pay during work hours. Could I conceivably get to 75? Still aiming for 60. I want to enjoy reading, not feel pressure. Now if I can just get that review for 1491 written... Should've done it immediately because the information is fading from memory, so now I have to skim to refresh. Which I should, because it's a good book! And I want to retain details.

Dreaming in Hindi and Planet of Viruses both sound fascinating. I like how varied your reading is!

Nice review of Dreaming in Hindi, which I've added to my wish list. I'll take a pass on Planet of Viruses, due to its slight size and numerous typos.

37: Thanks. As a doctor, you are levels above the target audience for the virus book. I, however, am not.

#22 I enjoyed your review of The God Delusion qebo--I will probably get to it eventually. Dreaming in Hindi also sounds very interesting.

Adding A Planet of Viruses to the BlackHole. It sounds interesting.

Adding Dreaming in Hindi to the wishlist. Your review of The God Delusion was excellent--thanks. I recently purchased it and hope to read it soon.

What? Nobody wants to read Matrices and Transformations? Credit for recommending Dreaming in Hindi goes to mckait. More on The God Delusion in my non-fiction thread. LT ratings range from a half star to five stars, and seem heavily dependent on prior beliefs. So it's maybe appropriate that, if I did ratings, I'd give it somewhere in the mid to upper threes: entertaining and thought-provoking but flawed. Thanks for dropping by, and I look forward to reviews of books that I've actually read!

So July is nearly over, and I'm ahead of my quota, so the plan (vulnerable to whims of the moment) is to read three books in August, all currently in progress and all rather tough going: Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman, Embracing Defeat by John Dower, Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, and to participate in the New Yorker magazine readathon.

Rats. If I didn't have so many tomes on my plate for August I would participate in the New Yorker magazine readathon, as I have several stacks of unread issues lying about. I think I'll sign up for the group, and see if I can at least keep up with this month's issues.

#38: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I bought this book because so many other LTers were recommending it, and set it aside for later because I was reading another book. Which happened to mention HeLa cells. So I picked up this book, thinking to skim a bit as an informative digression... and it grabbed my entire reading attention for three days. Henrietta Lacks arrived at Johns Hopkins University hospital in 1951 with a tumor in her cervix. Her arrival happened to coincide with an effort to create a viable line of human cells that could be used for research. A JHU scientist was taking samples of tissue from every patient, and placing pieces in tubes of nutrients. Most cells died immediately. Some cells survived briefly then died. Henrietta Lacks' cells kept going. (A few decades later, the reason for this was discovered.) In an instant, the cells and the person were separated, and took divergent paths. The cells were in hot demand. A cell factory was created to store, reproduce, package, and ship cells to scientists. Though the cells were cancerous, they were human, and could be used to study virus behavior and drug reactions. Many intentions were noble, and many experiments were revealing. (Other experiments were at best cavalier and at times outright despicable, raising ethical issues of informed consent -- e.g. people have a right to refuse to be injected with cancerous cells.) Henrietta Lacks died, horribly painfully. After an initially encouraging response to the standard treatment of the time, the cancer spread and wreaked havoc on her body. Her death wreaked havoc on her family, for whom she had been a social and moral center. The family was uneducated and impoverished. Some had remained on a small plot carved from a Virginia plantation where Lacks ancestors had been slaves (Henrietta's great-grandfather was the son of a former slaveholder) eking out an arduous living as tobacco farmers, others had migrated to a town near Baltimore for jobs in a steel mill. The family was completely unaware that the cells had been taken. By the 1960s, other human cell lines had been created, but a scientist discovered that many had been contaminated, and the suspect (because of a genetic marker) was HeLa. In order to distinguish HeLa cells from other cells, a JHU scientist, who had access to Lacks family medical records, approached the family for blood samples. They supposed that his assistant was testing them for cancer, and awaited the results, which of course never appeared. The scientist and assistant were completely oblivious to their anxieties. By the 1970s, HeLa cells were ubiquitous and famous enough to seep into public consciousness, and a journalist contacted the family for an article. This is when the family became aware that a photograph of, and medical information about, Henrietta Lacks had been published without their permission. The story is told from both sides, scientists and family. It is not a story of perpetrator vs victim, but of mutually incomprehensible worlds. To the scientists, a snip of cancerous tissue was harmless, and meaningless on a personal level. To the family, living reproducing cells were their mother / sister / wife / cousin. They saw the price of a vial of cells, and assumed that the cells had been stolen for profit, of which they had received nothing. They saw the word "clone", sensationalized in headlines, and imagined multiple copies of Henrietta Lacks walking around in the city. They heard about space missions and atomic bombs, and wondered whether she could feel what was happening to her cells. Suspicion and fears were entangled with sometimes bizarre confusions, but were based in such realities as the Tuskegee syphilis study. Some of the family attempted to contact JHU to ask questions, but didn't know who to ask, didn't know how to ask, and felt too intimidated to persist when rebuffed by the bureaucracy of a large institution. Henrietta Lacks' daughter Deborah had been a baby in 1951. She deeply missed her mother, she had many many questions, partially about family history, partially about biology (despite a less than stellar high school education during a period of personal turmoil, she was gradually reading textbooks to understand cells), but a bad experience (a distant relative had nearly conned the family into hiring him to file a lawsuit against JHU) had turned her against outside inquiries, and she refused to speak to the author for a year. When she came around, she came around as a full force participant in the investigation, traipsing hither and yon with "my reporter" to interview family members and access medical records. After a buildup that switches between episodes of the 1950s and the 1970s and the 1990s (each chapter begins with a pointer on a timeline), the chapters with Deborah are the most emotionally compelling. There is an episode in which Deborah and her reporter arrive at the former Hospital for the Negro Insane, where Deborah's sister died as a teenager, and amazingly the records still exist, along with a harrowing photograph. There is an episode in which a JHU scientist, a random scientist 50 years after the fact, who has no connection to the original event but believes that wrongs should be remedied, invites the Lacks family into his laboratory to see HeLa cells under a microscope. I might've preferred a bit more science along with the human story, but there's enough science here for the gist, details are surely available elsewhere, and the human story is gripping.

Wow! Great review! I've had that on my wishlist for awhile, but haven't gotten around to reading it, yet. You whet my appetite again!

Oh I'm so glad you liked this, it does seem like it would be right up your street. I loved it too.

46: Hey, you're still here! I was noticing recently that your thread hadn't been updated in awhile.

47: If only I could stick to a plan... but I've now returned to the book that was in progress. I so wish I had time to read all the books that people recommend here. I just read your review, which mentions son/brother Zakkariyya, and your description of Deborah as "a rock, and yet so fragile" is perfect -- I was in awe of her gently effective defusing of his anger.

stopping by to wave hello

#45: Another reminder to bump that up my list. Thanks for the review!

#45 I had decided not to read Henrietta Lacks, but after reading your review, I've changed my mind. Thanks!

Nice review of Henrietta Lacks; I'm glad that you also enjoyed it.

I also enjoyed Henrietta Lacks. Great review!

I'm really not sticking to the August plan. I did finish Reinventing the Sacred, flagged a bunch of pages with mini post-its in hopes this will speed up the reviewing process, which I haven't yet attempted. Didn't think the two hefty history books were suitable for four days of train trek and friend visitation -- on the plus side I'd be a captive audience, but I have been known to resort to staring out the window if I can't concentrate (even better is tracking the train location on the phone). So instead, Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, which was perfect for the situation, seriously immersive without requiring feats of memory. I'm about 2/3 done. Now, alas, I need to get back to work...

I hope you had a pleasant trip. We leave tomorrow, and I am madly running errands (and escaping onto LT when I'm too stressed). I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts on Nine Parts of Desire. I found it quite different from her fiction. Reinventing the Sacred looks interesting from a quick glance. I have the mini post-its were for good sections, not bad. :-)

56: Yes, the good sections. Or where he says explicitly this is a central idea. I'm off to your thread to wish you a great trip!

I really need to get to Nine Parts of Desire one of these days. *sigh*

Catching up and adding my appreciation for your review of The God Delusion. I really must get hold of a copy of that myself, as yours and Cushla's thoughtful comments and the following conversations have made me much more interested in it.

59: Thanks. I'll be curious to see what you think of it.

Finally wrote the review for 1491, which has been oppressively hanging over me for a month. (Not the book! The book is good. Writing is excruciating.) Now three reviews to go... I finished Nine Parts of Desire early last week, was inspired to read Persepolis, which I finished yesterday. Have been plugging away at the New Yorker, amazing how much can be accomplished in little bits at scattered moments. Hoping to extend to Scientific American in September (hmm, does this count as a series? Now, ahead of my quota and with a luxurious 10 days remaining in August, I'm back to the dense and hefty Embracing Defeat. I've set Battle Cry of Freedom aside. I really want to read it, but I can't do it justice at the moment.

Thumbed up your review of 1491, and added it to the Someday Swamp. Sounds interesting!

Thanks! And now there's 1493, about the ecological and political consequences of (re)connecting the two halves of the world.

Now with a considerably less luxurious three days remaining in August, I've dropped the plan to finish Embracing Defeat this month. I'm about halfway through, and at most I can manage about 50 pages per day. It's enlightening and engagingly written, more so than I'd initially expected, but it's dense, and I reached a point of information overload, so I picked up Unbroken to continue the WWII/Japan theme. I've read reviews, and will probably share some of the reservations, but at the moment I'm utterly hooked, and finishing this one by the end of August will not be a problem.

I've made no progress whatsoever in writing reviews. I have hopes for Labor Day weekend.

>64 qebo:: I understand being utterly hooked ... I was, too. Even with my reservations!

#63: Thanks for the heads up about 1493. I read 1491 a couple of years ago, but did not know about the follow up book.

#39: Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman

I read The God Delusion, and grumped that Richard Dawkins has a limited concept of God (which he actually kind of realizes, but that's not his point, or something). Then I read A Planet of Viruses, which is so-so for a production by Carl Zimmer, but its final chapter raises the question of whether not-life and life are neatly separated, or belong on a continuum of increasing complexity. What better way to get at both these issues, simultaneously, which is exactly how I think they ought to be gotten at, than to read Stuart Kauffman, who conveniently had been languishing on a shelf for some time. Well, that was two months ago, but the book has been difficult to review, because it is a both dense and rambling, scientifically grounded and philosophically speculative. A glossary would've been nice, both for scientific terminology and for concepts that are discussed around and about and continuously, but not succinctly defined for reference. Kauffman refutes a reductionist perspective, of "fundamental entities and their interactions" or "particles in motion", with "only facts" and "no place for value". Yet humans "are agents, able to act in our own behalf", and this applies not only to humans but to all of life. Biology cannot be reduced to physics. (He mentions Robert Laughlin, who argues in A Different Universe that physics can't be reduced to physics either.) So, how did the universe get from there to here? In a chapter on the origin of life, Kauffman describes (with diagrams!) his theory of "collectively autocatalytic sets", which is not reducible to physics because it "is organizational, ...it rests on mathematics and general properties of molecules, and not on the specific molecular embodiment." In essence, toss the right combination of molecules together, and from a haphazard pool, they will cluster into sets in which each molecule in the set is formed by reactions of other molecules in the set. (The right combination is not an easy matter, and a quick search yields examples of current research:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=137302 and
http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/exobiology/projects/a-self-assembling-collectively-... Here the concept of "adjacent possible" appears. Some of the molecules may react to form other molecules that were not in the original pool. That's it, and no more is necessary, because the new molecules extend the possibilities, etc, ad infinitum. From such a beginning can emerge a "minimal molecular autonomous agent", "the simplest system to which we might be willing to apply teleological language". What are the properties of such a system? A bacterium is far too complex. Alas, a simple system is beyond my comprehension at the moment, but it is presented in a diagram (I like diagrams, and books with diagrams make me happy), and includes "exergonic breakdowns" and "endergonic synthesis" and many arrows and symbols, and is followed by a chapter on work cycles. Next is the question of how different cell types can arise from the same set of chromosomes. François Jacob and Jaques Monod proposed in 1963 that regulatory genes could be the key. A diagram demonstrates an idealized network (which can be simulated on a computer) of "genes" with on/off states, and a table of state transitions and state cycles or attractors. A hypothesis, supported by experimental evidence, is that attractors correspond to a cell types. Phew -- halfway through the book, and the tough stuff is done. Well, not done, but it departs from decades of research and expertise, and enters a fuzzier realm of ideas: the economy, and consciousness. The universe is "non-ergodic", it does not visit all possible states, but rather "is on a trajectory that will never repeat". This entirely natural process is creative, and it is God. Kauffman is maybe a tad too optimistic that science & religion conflicts are thus resolved. I've skipped, um, a lot. I recommend this book to anyone who is drawn to this sort of thing, as I am.

#40: Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks, before she became a novelist, was a journalist, assigned to the Middle East in the late 1980s to early 1990s (this book was published in 1995). Her husband Tony Horowitz accompanied her, fashioned himself as a freelance journalist, and immediately jumped into adventures: tracking smugglers with the camel corps in Egypt, crewing on a supply boat in the Persian Gulf. She was forbidden. Eventually, she realized that the one thing she could do that he could not was talk to women. This book is anecdotes from those years, encounters and observations and conversations, wherever she happened to be. The result is scattered and impressionistic, informative in a general sense because of the variety within a region that we tend to lump together. She begins with the veil. "At first, I had naively assumed that hijab would at least free women from the tyranny of the beauty industry." she writes, but this is not the case, because a distinction is made between public and private, and, as one woman tells her, "Islam encourages us to be beautiful for our husbands." She watches an Eritrean doctor perform a gruesome operation to repair consequences of genital mutilation, a cultural practice that was there before Christianity and Islam, and was tolerated by both; a key to eradication is education, so women can read the Koran and see that it commands no such thing. She accompanies a western educated Saudi friend to visit his uncle, a Wahhabi imam who meets with the men of his village every Friday after prayers. He has never before spoken to a woman outside his family. How can he counsel the women then? "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course." says her friend. "But what if their husband is their problem?" she asks. This possibility had not occurred to either man. She wrangles and invitation to the Islamic Women's Games, where a father is allowed to see his daughter run in competition for the first time, thanks to "the world's first track suit-hijab". She learns to belly dance in Egypt, and in protest of fundamentalist calls for a ban on this ancient tradition, searches for "a venue modest enough to match my talents", where the manager accepts her into the show for an evening. These are revealing glimpses, with no single simple conclusion. Some women renounce their former lives and take on the veil. Some women negotiate space for themselves within the constraints. Some women press for political and social changes. Now several weeks after reading, I do not retain any especially profound or pronounced memories, but I am appreciative of the reminder to look below the surface.

#42: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

I was immediately hooked on the first page of this graphic memoir, with a frame of little girls in the schoolyard playing with the veils they were suddenly directed to wear: jumping a veil-rope, playing horse and rider with veil-reins, becoming the "monster of darkness" with veil draped over head. Marjane Satrapi was 10 years old in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran. Her parents were politically engaged, opposed to the Shah, and equally opposed to an Islamic republic. Sheltered from participation in dangerous demonstrations, confused by what she was told at school versus what she heard at home, Marji was disappointed that her father had not been heroically imprisoned. Other kids had heroes in their families. Then her uncle appeared, released from prison after 30 years. Then her uncle disappeared again. Then Iraq invaded Iran... Marji's parents are in fact amazing, and it must've taken enormous dedication to provide a buffer of sanity and safety and normalcy for their only child. The story is told through the eyes of a child, observing incomprehensible and frightening events, and the graphic format is appropriate -- imagery replaces explanation. An episode: Borders were reopened, and Marji's parents rushed to get passports and arrange a trip to Turkey sans child. The child, oblivious, requested gifts, strictly forbidden gifts, artifacts of secular decadance: posters of Kim Wilde and Iron Maiden. Four pages go by, as the parents stroll through Istanbul carrying the rolled-up posters, discuss how to smuggle them through customs, return to the hotel where some options are rejected (hide them in the suitcase lining? they'll be ruined by fold marks), as the mother removes the lining of the father's overcoat and sews it back on with the posters pressed between layers, as the parents return to Iran and produce a denim jacket and sneakers and the child demands "what about my posters?", as the posters are revealed. With a family like this, it is not surprising that Marji was too outspoken for school, and she was expelled. Her parents were simultaneously proud and afraid. In 1984, they sent her to Austria, to live with her mother's friend. Thus begins the next section, where Marji is a teenager, finding her way between cultures with little guidance or support, reassuring her parents on the phone that everything is fine. Marji is flawed: brave and selfish, principled and petty, real. The pictures are scenes, into which you can place yourself and wonder: under the same circumstances, would I be any better?

#44: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Louis Zamperini was a wild boy, tamed by his older brother Pete, who channeled his energy into running with focus on the mile. Well before the age at which distance runners reach their peak, Zamperini made it to the 1936 Olympics, where he stole a "Do Not Disturb" sign from Jesse Owens, and was summoned to meet Hitler. He was considered a prime candidate to achieve a sub-4 minute mile. World War II intervened. Zamperini was sent to Hawaii, and assigned as a bombardier on a B-24. A specific B-24, because each plane had its own idiosyncrasies . The crew and the machine had to work together. The pilot was Russell Allen Phillips, a contrasting personality, quiet and calm and steady, who became a close friend. Intense and hazardous training occupied months, and then... the plane was destroyed in battle. The crew was shifted to another B-24, which had technically passed inspection but exhibited worrying behavior, and sent to search for another plane that had gone missing over the Pacific Ocean. The worrying was justified. The plane developed mechanical difficulties and crashed. Zamperini and Phillips and the only other survivor emerged to consciousness somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, with no land in sight, and pitiful emergency supplies. They had string and hooks but no bait until they learned to wring the necks of the occasional passing albatross. The sharks stole the bait and bit through the strings. The sharks circled, round and round and round, and the men supposed an implicit deal: the sharks were waiting in the water, but the men were safe as long as they remained in the raft. Until a shark broke the rules: it leapt out of the water and across the raft and attacked. The third survivor faded and eventually died. As concerned about mental sanity as physical endurance, Zamperini and Phillips quizzed each other, and described recipes when they could not eat. They signaled to planes overhead, but the only one that noticed was Japanese, and it responded by firing bullets that punctured the raft. The presence of planes suggested their location, so they calculated where and when their raft would reach land. They were correct. But they were not rescued. They became prisoners of war, in a system designed to break spirits. The story is told in spare detail, gathered from interviews and newspapers and government documents, step by excruciating step, with minimal foreshadowing, always in the painful pageturning present. The resilience and improvisation of the men are inspiring of awe. Too inspiring? I share the reservation of some other reviewers that the contrast between American nobility and Japanese depravity is too extreme. War tales are not known for their strict adherence to the messy and unheroic facts, and it's surely not the most savory members of society who end up as prison guards. (I am also reading Embracing Defeat, which is vastly more nuanced.) Louis Zamperini returned from the war a damaged man, and descended into alcoholic flailing, with no clear or sustained direction. The woman he met and married nearly divorced him. And then he encountered Billy Graham, became a committed Christian, and made a career of inspirational speaking. For anyone put off by this, it is not not not a major part of the book, and by the time it occurs you will not begrudge this man anything, but also it is not irrelevant to the presentation of events. There are glimpses of kind actions by Japanese guards, and glimpses of honorable actions by Japanese citizens, but understandably what the POWs most remember was the horror, and what they most wanted was home. So sprinkle some grains of salt, and read other perspectives for balance, but don't dismiss this one.

I like your 'placeholder' idea. My thread is littered with out-of-reading-order posts. Lately I haven't even been posting unless I have the review ready to post in order. If I ever get organized, this might work for me, too.

I'm hoping that with one tedious step done, the placeholders will inspire me to actually write the reviews before I forget the books.

My apologies, I'd somehow lost track of yr. thread -- so I've been reading your wonderful reviews. Dawkins drives me quietly mad in his utter and complete 'faith' in the power of science to reveal all. I'm an agnostic too -- exactly because I feel too small to be one to make any definite pronouncements about anything -- that aside -- I loved yr. review, esp as now I feel quite confident I know all I need to and don't need to read the book!

1491 has to be heaved on the wishlist, as does the Lacks. Both are at my library, which is a good thing!

Saved! Have already read Nine Parts of Desire, and Persepolis and Unbroken, both of which I loved. No new books to add to the teetering pile... this time.

I really need to get to Nine Parts of Desire one of these days.

Didn't I vow awhile back never to get myself into this predicament again, with reading a month ahead of writing reviews? 2 done, 2 to go. I keep hoping it'll get easier, but instead the more I read the more I want to remember, and I have to triage and summarize in order to move on. Writing computer programs is sooo much easier than writing paragraphs...

Thanks everyone for dropping by! lindsacl, countrylife, sibyx, labfs39: you are some of my reviewer role models. Any tips for making the process less painful?

What a wonderful compliment, thank you! Where my reviews are concerned, I'm just OCD enough that I have to "cleanse my brain" before I can get into my next book. I don't always write the review right away, but I do try to write it within a couple days of finishing. The down side of this is that sometimes my reviews aren't as well thought out as I'd like them to be -- they are just something to cross off my list. But I also know that if I allowed reviews to pile up I'd end up not writing them.

What she says.

Another trick is to make a list of things to consider: plot, character, pace, theme -- whatever aspects of a novel that matter the most to you.... (For me it is character, character character, with a bit of place thrown in, I love to be truly grounded in wherever the novel is happening.) I try to stop and let it come to me what was special (or not) about the book.... what the writer did the best.

I also don't review anything that has more than 5-10 reviews already unless I just HAVE to. In those cases, I just write up a little summary/reaction on my thread and leave it at that. However, if there are NO reviews, I have to write one.

And thank you!

77,78: Thanks for the replies! I aspire to review immediately after reading, but often the reading occurs in late evening, work occurs the next day, and then reviewing is... more work. I'm currently feeling obligated to review regardless of the number already there, it's my 2011 resolution, though I too sometimes make a token gesture just to cross the damn thing off the list. Maybe it's time to assess what it is that I'm trying to accomplish.

Anyway, it's 7pm, I'm not going to finish all 4 reviews this weekend, but I did finish 3. Unfortunately, I'm about 25 pages away from the end of another book...

*sigh* I'm five books behind, not counting the YA I read with my daughter or the one I read for a group read here on LT. I've decided not to do those. But the others were so good, I want to write reviews of them, but that means less time for reading Three Day Road which is also very good. *sigh*

I finished The River of Doubt, so now I'm 2 reviews behind. Grrr...

So... it's good, details forthcoming. But... two peeves:
(1) Had: "had been", "had had", the things are everywhere, 1000s of them. Distracting.
(2) Was it not possible to provide a decent map? Locations and geographical features are mentioned in text but not marked on the map of South America that shows the full route including lecture circuit, and the drawing that Roosevelt made has print so tiny that I needed to peer through a magnifying glass.

How sweet, qebo! 'Fraid, though, that I'll have to learn along with you. I seem to create my own pain when it comes to reviews. I'm behind-er than you! And all because I decided I wanted to write a little something to help me remember what I thought about my books. On my own thread, I'm up to Book Number 100 in my reading list at the beginning of my thread, but only up to Number 73 (from my June reads!) at the review end of my thread. I really need to start doing what lindsacl said and "cross off my list". Really - they don't have to be perfect, they just need to be a record.

I also like what sibyx said. My own notes are probably a lot more rough than that, though. On one side of my notepaper, I jot down the page number (with a place indicator so I can find it again) and one word of the phrase that I want to remember, and on the other side, I take my character, setting, time period and other notes. When finished, I add a few 'thoughts' at the end. Then I go back through my notes with the book at hand and type up my captured phrases and other information. I use a template, so that part doesn't take very long at all, and then library books can be returned faster. I also find that really useful for CK. Now that hubs is back to work after a long unemployment, I am starting to catch back up on creating actual reviews from my notes. But when he was home, I seemed to be unable to string two words together at the computer, what with all the interruptions.

>81 qebo:: I didn't notice all the "had"s, but I too wished for a better map -- or even better, maps -- when I read it earlier this year.

I definitely agree about the bigger, more detailed maps...

By the way, Candice Millard is going to be at the National Book Fest on the first day. She's one of the reasons I want to go that day!

Maps are good. Hubster is reading River of Doubt right now.

77,78,80,82: Sigh. Y'all are saying it's WORK to write reviews. I suppose I should feel reassured that reviews are not instantly and spontaneously flowing forth from your keyboards. I've been putting mini post-its on pages as I read, but now that I've done this for several books I'm realizing that I end up with lots of post-its, and they fall to different categories: statements of themes or goals, interesting information, significant episodes, succinct quotes, etc. Way more than is necessary for an LT review, and way more than I care to record for posterity. Still, I'm not sure this can be avoided, because I don't know up front what will turn out to be repetitive or superseded.

77: I also know that if I allowed reviews to pile up I'd end up not writing them Yup. If I fail to write one, then it nags at me and I don't want to skip it to review the next book, and that's when the backlog begins.
78: whatever aspects of a novel that matter the most to you Mine are mostly non-fiction, and maybe I could jot a few notes before I begin reading about why I chose this book and what I'm hoping to get from it.
80: I want to write reviews of them, but that means less time for reading Yeah, this is the fundamental problem.
82: I use a template Good idea. You often include a lengthy quote, which is really helpful for getting a sense of the style.

Smiling - because you just wrote a review of all the posts about your query, including your thoughts of them!

It is to be hoped all these ideas will help streamline the process?

I identify so much with the reviewing problem - trying to learn something from all these ideas too.

Oh, you have my full sympathy on the reviewing problem, qebo! (I am 3 months and maybe 50 books behind on my own thread.)

For me--the problem comes down to this.
1. I prefer reading to writing reviews (don't we all?), so given a choice, at any given moment I'd read.
2. I like to think about a book for at least a day or so to collect my thoughts (unless it's a book which inspires no thoughts, in which case why review it at all), so I miss that window of immediacy.
3. Once that time has passed, it's very likely I've finished another book, so there is already the makings of a backlog.

To deal with the backlog, I have taken to commenting on books in batches--dashing them off three or four at a time at least gives me the illusion I'm catching up. I am thinking that maybe some discipline around posting book comments once a week might help.

90: Oh, you so exactly describe the problem!

Noting for the record... Scanning unread blog posts today I saw this review of 1493, and I'm linking also to the review of 1491 because it includes responses to a request for similar books.

http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/08/1491_by_charles_c_mann.php
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/08/1493_uncovering_the_new_world.php

So yesterday I finished the January 2011 Scientific American, and today I will finish the June 6 New Yorker and The Man Who Found Time, and I must must must deal with the disarray in my back yard today, a combination of wind/rain destruction and happy weeds, so the chance of catching up with reviews is approximately zilch.

I just finished a couple of days of bringing order to my backyard and garden --and I am stiff and sore. Good luck!

93: Well, with some assistance from the kid next door (for a small fee), I spruced up the section that is visible to the neighbors, and did a round of coarse weeding in the remainder. It's endless. The little weeds will be big weeds by next weekend.

I feel for you! We had an unusually large garden in the Phila -- for a city garden -- and it was a tremendous amount of work. Here, I am mostly letting nature do its thing..... we barely mow..... I have all my flowers in pots. I am working on a couple of beds for things, they are covered in plastic and cardboard with a fat layer of mulch on top -- I'm leaving it for a year and a half. I plant to put in more raspberries, cultivated ones, and a lot a lot a lot of hostas of different kinds, a plant I have come to adore -- one of the beds is quite shady. They are also quite good at holding their own once they mature! I'm all for that!

I'm gradually getting rid of the grass that occupied the entire yard when I moved in, and replacing it with beds surrounded by mulch over landscape cloth (http://www.librarything.com/topic/120345#2821974). It's way easier to control. The grass needs constant tending; a week of rain and it's too much for my ancient manual reel mower. Half the yard is now covered by plastic tarps, awaiting a stretch of time and decent weather to be converted into... something. SqueakyChu recommended the book Bringing Nature Home, which I bought but have yet to read, and I should do so before I plant anything else.

Our property had landscape cloth over the entire acre, but now, 11 years later, the cloth is disintegrating and is more hindrance than help. Ironically some trees and shrubs don't seem to be getting enough water through the cloth, yet weeds are sprouting right through it. Go figure. Plus when we want to plant something new, we have to dig, then cut through the cloth with scissors, and then dig again. So, I guess I'm torn about the cloth. Maybe we got a inferior type, or perhaps it just needs to be replaced. Not likely to happen any time soon. :-)

I would love to see photos of your finished beds.

97: I'm not on the 10 year plan. I'm barely on the 1 year plan. I figure the landscape cloth won't last forever, but it's just strips tacked along the sides, with a couple inches of mulch spread on top, relatively easy to replace in patches, and my yard is much smaller than yours. Its purpose in life is keep the weeds from sprouting long enough that I can attend to other things. Yeah, weeds are irrepressible. I get them growing under the edges of the tarp, and through holes, extending outward until they find light. A few specific types I've come to recognize immediately, at an inch tall, but seems each year there's a different type that takes over.

It's amazing how resilient weeds are, isn't it? Sort of like bacteria that can live in volcanoes and super-bugs that shrug off antibiotics. Our yard is a mess this year. With my hip surgery, I'm not supposed to bend over, so weeding just kills me. I can't help but do it sometimes, but I pay for it.

#45: The River of Doubt by Candice Millard

Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive ("Bull Moose") party in 1912, after the Republican nomination went to incumbent president William Howard Taft. In a four-way election, Democrat Woodrow Wilson won. Roosevelt, not one to lounge around the house brooding, accepted an invitation to lecture in Argentina, and appended an excursion in the Amazon River basin with his son Kermit, employed as a bank manager in Buenos Aires. The route was planned, several tons of supplies were collected and shipped, the team was recruited, Roosevelt completed the lecture circuit and arrived in Brazil to meet the minister of foreign affairs. A guide had been promised: Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, commander of the Strategic Telegraph Commission, who accepted the assignment on the condition that it was sufficiently scientific. Roosevelt was of similar mind, and the American Museum of Natural History was already providing funding and two naturalists, but maybe the proposed excursion along beaten paths was too tame. A suggestion was made, sufficiently scientific and sufficiently challenging to engage the enthusiasm of both Rondon and Roosevelt: how about exploring the River of Doubt from its recently discovered source, to determine where it merged with the Amazon? Thus begins a harrowing adventure in a tropical rainforest, with all the creepy crawly (and swimmy and fliey) critters one might wish for (while home on a comfortable chair with a purring cat and a cup of coffee), the requisite relentless rain, despair and defiance and disease, and an anguished dash toward some semblance of civilization to save the former president from death. The men who had planned the original route and selected the equipment and food were not up to the demands of the revised trip, and were cut in its early stages. The provisions were not intended for brutal conditions. Starvation was a real possibility; sections on the flora and fauna and evolution of a seemingly abundant rainforest explain why. Candido Rondon emerges as quite the interesting and admirable character, a member of the Positivist Church of Brazil, founder of the Indian Protection Bureau, whose primary commandment was "Die if you must, but never kill." "Rondon's success in the Amazon had depended on this dictum. It was the only reason the Indians had ever dared to trust him." And it was not necessarily compatible with the attitude of Roosevelt, veteran of the Dakota Territories. Rondon wanted to pause for careful surveying. Roosevelt wanted to keep moving. Kermit worked well with the camaradas, but was moody and disinclined to obey instructions. Both Roosevelts brought books, but they didn't care for each other's books. All the makings of a compelling tale of human flaws and heroism and the elements of nature. This book rises to the occasion.

An excerpt: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4986859.

#47: The Man Who Found Time by Jack Repcheck

This is a short book, not much over 200 pages, whose purpose is to make James Hutton (1726-1797) known to the general public. In this it is successful; I had not previously heard of the man. The author is an editor, not a geologist, and it shows; the book reads very much as a secondary source, with information from here and there pieced together. It includes exactly one map, of the UK, with most of the mentioned locations marked, enough to get by, but it is utterly lacking in illustrations of geological features (though it does have a glossary), so the interested but ignorant layperson such as myself must resort to google, which is annoying. The personal information is extracted primarily from a biography of James Hutton by his friend John Playfair, and alas not a great deal is known. Also alas, James Hutton wrote his magnum opus as he was dying and in significant pain, and it is apparently less coherent than he was in real life, and fell into obscurity. His work was rediscovered decades later by Charles Lyell, who gave him credit, but who became the famous one, an influence on Charles Darwin. This book is not profound, but it is useful. It presents a sketch of political and intellectual developments during the Scottish Enlightenment. James Hutton lived in and near Edinburgh, and overlapped with David Hume and Adam Smith and James Watt, and Joseph Black, an unfamiliar name to me, but he was a physician and scientist, and social liaison for the others. James Hutton was up against two forces: biblical chronologies, and Abraham Werner's theory of earth formation. A chapter is dedicated to biblical chronologies. At the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, the emperor Constantine was so impressed by the systematic chronology of Eusebius, who had compiled it from multiple sources, that he ordered it to be published and circulated. This served as the basis for subsequent chronologies, all of which predicted the Second Coming of Jesus Christ not too far in the future when the earth would be 6000 years old. Bishop Ussher, whose chronology got into the King James Bible, was toward the end of a long line. Geology then, was a matter of fitting reality into this chronology, and where there was conflict, traditional interpretation of scripture won. Abraham Werner was a generation younger than James Hutton, but a published mineralogist and professor, so in a position of influence. His theory was a synthesis of others, essentially a hot earth gradually cooled by a universal ocean that had evaporated to reveal land; he deliberately did not specify age. Succinctly, James Hutton entered the University of Edinburgh at age 14 (not unusual), studied medicine there and elsewhere, partnered in a chemical factory that generated an income for the rest of his life, inherited land not far from Edinburgh and became a farmer, returned to Edinburgh and joined a committee to construct a canal. At the university, he was influenced by professor Colin Maclaurin, who had worked with Isaac Newton and was intent on spreading the scientific method. As a farmer, he was technologically inventive, and had ample opportunity to observe and extrapolate from natural processes, notably that erosion of surfaces and composition of rocks form a cycle. John Playfair wrote: "They were neither of them, even at that time, entirely new propositions, though in the conduct of the investigation, and in the use made of them, a great deal of originality was displayed." With this as the essential insight, James Hutton searched for supporting evidence, refined his theory, and presented it to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785. He realized that the earth must be far older than generally supposed, but had no means of determining how old. This is the gist, fleshed out with investigative excursions around Scotland and England and Wales, other prominent theories, subsequent discoveries, and current status. I am insufficiently educated in the basics to absorb many details, so for me the relative brevity of the book was just about right, and despite the flaws I would recommend it.

#48: In the Land of Invisible Women by Qanta Ahmed

An LTer had recommended this as a companion to The Nine Parts of Desire. It's a usefully overlapping perspective, about a decade later and focused on a single country, Saudi Arabia.

Qanta Ahmed, after several years in New York studying and practicing medicine, was denied a visa to remain. Lacking an alternative plan, she accepted a temporary position in a Saudi Arabian hospital, expecting adventure but also familiarity; her parents had immigrated from Pakistan to the UK, and she had been raised Muslim. The time frame is notable; she arrived a year or two before 9/11, and departed shortly after.

The hospital is under the auspices of the government, and sheltered from the Men in Brown, the Muttaween of the League of Promotion of Virtue and Eradication of Vice, who patrol the streets and are empowered to arrest anyone who disobeys or disregards rigid religious rules. (The Muttaween arose in the late 1970s after the Iranian revolution, but continue an historical pattern of collusion between "clerical forces and an impotent monarchy".) Not fully sheltered though. The CEO gets harassed for hiring women. There is a frightening episode in a restaurant, where hospital staff and visiting doctors have gathered in a carefully arranged private room, and the Muttaween, probably tipped off by a hospital assistant, barge in to discover men and unveiled women, shockingly eating together, and what if they also discover that one of the visiting doctors is Jewish but had been advised to declare himself Christian in order to enter the country. And the Muttaween are an extreme case of pervasive attitudes that are not absent within the hospital. After 9/11 especially, Qanta is appalled at the animosity toward the US and Jews that had been occasional seepage but now burst forth, prompting an admonishing memo from the CEO.

Much is made of the strict separation of men and women, and the power imbalance. This may be the most glaring and troubling aspect of the culture to a foreigner, and it is exhaustingly difficult for a woman to navigate. Examples appear throughout the book. The "visceral misogyny" is "juxtaposed with the intensely tender relations between the men themselves", who kiss and intertwine hands in greeting. Homosexuality, however, is punishable by death. Women are described, by other women, as manipulative, a necessity when direct assertion is forbidden. Women with careers often have supportive fathers or husbands, who must grant official permission for education and travel, but family honor requires that such lenience be hidden. Wealthy women take trips to London for hymen reconstruction. The most common reason for breast implants is a husband who wants a second wife. Women blossom where they can. At a wedding, with women in a closed room, jewelry abounded and "the amount of exposed flesh was unbelievable". A woman with nail polish can't cleanse properly for prayer, but can't pray while menstruating, so that's when the nail polish appears. The ubiquity of electronic communication has breached traditional barriers. On the minus side, car windows are tinted to protect women from the gaze of men, but predatory or desperate men send messages to random women via Bluetooth connections. On the plus side, men and woman who cannot be seen together in public can meet online. Muttaween raid florists on Valentine's day. In the comparatively progressive hospital, Qanta and a senior administrator, one of the relatively few men who treated her as an equal, interacted in a purely professional manner, though she was smitten (oddly noting his designer shirts years after the fact) and he may have been similarly inclined. There could be absolutely no hint, even in private conversation. The imbalance affects men too. Car accidents are alarmingly common, a consequence of "lost boys" drunk and speeding. The object of her affections is not entirely devoid of this behavior.

Qanta stresses repeatedly that such cultural distortions are not inherent to Islam, but misinterpretation of a more egalitarian spirit, and she backs this claim with bits of historical context. She embraces opportunities for immersion, and though her medical practice becomes aware of complexities and sees much to admire. She had not planned a Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, but was encouraged by colleagues because an employer cannot turn down the request. A modernized process of reserving tickets is amusingly tacked onto an ancient tradition, remarkably well organized considering the number of participants, an intense microcosm of international variety. She is horrified and protests when a boy who was stabbed by a knife is kept alive artificially, but comprehends when another doctor explains that the family of the boy who attacked has appealed to the king for leniency, negotiations with the family of the victim are occurring behind the scenes, and efforts will be in vain if the boy dies and a harsh legal process is triggered before a decision has been made. She is impressed by the calmness and acceptance of patients and their families, who appreciate her care even when it is not successful, and attributes this to an Islamic emphasis on patient endurance of ordeals. I would've been interested in more medical tales, suppose that with a continuous flurry of activity and issues of confidentiality, few incidents are notable and most cannot be published.

The writing can be awkward, maybe trying too hard with strings of evocative adjectives, but either she eventually settled into comfort or I got used to it and ceased to notice. This is not necessarily the definitive experience, but it is one worth reading.

Sigh. 4 reviews behind heading into the weekend. Plus the January 2011 Scientific American that I finished last weekend and haven't yet summarized.

Oh, and I bought a color Nook this evening... (And three more books while I was passing through B&N.)

I'm looking forward to seeing what you thought of River of Doubt. I got my hubby to read it, and after he got into it, he enjoyed it quite a lot.

I'm 8 reviews behind. :-( I'm hoping to make some serious inroads this weekend.

Wow, quite an evening at B&N! I'll be curious to know how you like the Nook. I still haven't made the leap to an e-book reader. I'm such a Luddite.

Is that your first e-reader? I'm going to get one later this fall.

Good luck with your reviewing plans for the weekend!

99: Pretty much by definition, weeds overtake the wimpy plants that require cultivation. Weeding is absurdly strenuous, squatting and pulling; I can't imagine trying it with hip trouble.
105: Yup. I've observed two varieties owned by other people: a Nook purchased for the color, and a Kindle purchased for the battery life. I want color, and I don't have a great need for battery life. Also, I am grateful to B&N for providing an actual bricks & mortar store in this small city, so I want to support it.
106: It's 5pm, a day with several scattered obligations not yet over, and I've reported on... one New Yorker.

Another New Yorker and a Scientific American summarized, one review though not the one I'd planned to start with, and now it's 7pm and I'd rather be reading than writing.

Oh, and I started and finished another book today. This was unintentional. In theory I was on a book moratorium for the weekend. Which meant, in practice, that I didn't read any of the books in the official TBR stack.

#51: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie is scheduled to speak at the National Book Festival, where I'll be next weekend. I've seen him on video, but hadn't read any of his books. I'll make a tedious mess of any review I try to write, so instead... http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/06/09/why-the-best-kids-books-are-written-in...: "And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed."

And it's funny too.

Busy weekend in Washington DC, for the LT meetup at the National Book Festival, where I saw parts of talks by Sylvia Nasar and Candice Millard, and in non-LT time went to the Spy Museum and the Holocaust Museum. Both museums are excellent, a few hour walkthrough is both information and emotion overload and still not enough to do justice, and the museum shops have an extremely tempting selection of books, of which I bought 0, because I was traipsing around the city on foot carrying all my worldly possessions.

What fun, I have yet to be at a 'real' LT meet-up!

#90 Yes, that is exactly the problem I have with reviewing too.

#111 Sounds like a great weekend - and I admire your self-restraint in not buying any of those books, though having to carry what you've bought all day does give pause for thought.

#53: Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

I read The Sparrow a few months ago, and despite some reservations, cared enough about the characters and the world to read the sequel. At the end of The Sparrow, the year is 2060, and Emilio Sandoz has been transported back to Earth and the Jesuits, disgraced by the retrieval mission's report of the circumstances in which he was found, physically and psychologically barely hanging on, betrayed by the Jana'ata trader Supaari who exchanged him for personal gain to the Jana'ata "third" Hlavin Kitheri, composer of pornographic poetry and music. Emilio Sandoz was the only survivor of the crew sent to explore the planet Rakhat upon its discovery in 2019. The last of the others had died when the predator carnivorous Jana'ata culled a village of the prey vegetarian Runa who, emulating the explorers, had shifted from gathering to gardening and changed the ecological balance. Or so it seemed. We learn early in the sequel that AI analyst Sofia Mendes survived, and Supaari's actions arose from good intentions but limited understanding of the foreigners and of the political aspirations of Hlavin Kitheri. The book alternates between Earth in the 2060s, where Emilio remains among the Jesuits, and Rakhat in from the 2040s onward (Earth-relative), where Sofia and Supaari and the next generation, her son Isaac and his daughter Ha'anala, join forces with Runa in a utopian band of exiles, and Hlavin Kitheri rises to power and breaks free of Jana'ata traditions. The Jesuits plan another mission to Rahkhat and assemble a crew. Emilio refuses to be enlisted, exits the priesthood, meets a woman and decides to marry, but agrees to teach Rakhat languages to the crew. Of course the story needs Emilio on Rakhat, and he is gotten there by a combination of rationale and villainy that doesn't quite ring true. The crew includes several men (no women) who ought to be interesting, but are never fully realized as characters. The trip between Earth and Rakhat occupies 17 years Earth time, but only a year from the perspective of the travelers. So when the spaceship lands on Rakhat in the 2070s (Earth-relative), Sophia is an old woman who has experienced decades of social transformation on Rakhat, and Emilio is a middle aged man only a few years removed from complete upheaval of his life. Accordingly, more attention is devoted to Rakhat, its cultures and its political rifts and alliances. Again not fully realized, too many characters with not always enough depth. And there was maybe too rapid a wrapup at the end. Still, engaging, with thought provoking ideas, and I'd definitely read other books by this author.

> 111

I was traipsing around the city on foot carrying all my worldly possessions.

...and she flatly refused to accept any more books that I was trying to foist off onto her! :)

115: So when you advised people to travel light, you were hoping there'd be space left over for bookcrossing? :-)

The whole point of travelling light is to have more room for books!

> 116

So when you advised people to travel light, you were hoping there'd be space left over for bookcrossing? :-)

Absolutely! That was my hidden agenda. :)

118: Good thing I didn't mention the backpack I had rolled up in my shoulder bag.

> 119

What?!!!!!!! Now you tell me...

Trying to free myself for a new month and new season... Wrote one review yesterday and one review today -- Reinventing the Sacred, which has been sitting on my desk nagging for a month and a half. Phew! Wrapped up magazines for September and began threads for October -- http://www.librarything.com/groups/newyorkermagazinesup. Read half of Confederates in the Attic, which is humorously and seriously enlightening. This leaves me two reviews and half a magazine behind where I'd hoped to be.

And I prepped window trim for painting, someday, if the sun ever appears so I can see what I'm doing.

It is a very particular sort of freedom, finishing all of your pending books/reviews. It frees you up to read half of some different books, or put off writing some different reviews :-)

Katherine! You should come to Boston!

123: Oh, it's sooo tempting. But I was just there visiting friends in August, and I'd want 2-3 days there to justify the travel, and it's expensive... I'm paying attention to the meetup thread, but I dunno.

Dooooo itttttttt

I'm glad you are still going to try more Mary Doria Russell, despite not loving Children of God. It's my least favorite of her books, and I've read them all. I'm a huge fan of her diversity of settings and characters. She also just wrote in her newsletter about how disappointing sequels can be. She specifically talks about Children of God. You can probably find it on her website.

And here's the link: http://www.marydoriarussell.net/blog/

126: Thanks for the link. She's an interesting person, and I admire her goals for The Sparrow and Children of God. I'm not much of a novel reader, and I don't have a visceral connection to the religious themes, so I'm not the ideal audience. I consider this my problem, not hers, so I'll keep trying.

125: I've checked transportation and hotel options, and it's not seeming feasible. Expensive, and also I'd have to take days off from work, and I'm a contractor so I don't get vacation pay. And I used to live there so it's not an adventure, and I did the nostalgia trip two months ago. :-( and not a definite no, but I'm doubtful.

Review done for The River of Doubt, but not yet done for In the Land of Invisible Women, both September books. And already in October I've read Confederates in the Attic, and The Lost City of Z is zipping along. And tomorrow does not count as a holiday and I must must must paint my window trim on this rare sunny weekend.

I've decided to count New Yorker and Scientific American as books, at 1 month = 1 book, so 3-5 issues for New Yorker and 1 issue for Scientific American. Rationale: sibyx is counting New Yorker at 4 issues = 1 book (I find counting by the month easier and it averages out w/ long months and double issues and such), Scientific American is significantly more dense, and magazines require as much reading effort as some books (even though I typically skip the artsy articles in the New Yorker, and I read some articles in Scientific American with more attention than others). Also I have a challenge-like goal of getting caught up with both, otherwise there's not much point in renewing the subscriptions, and this would make me sad. So, 75 is now seeming feasible.

Yes, I realize this is all in my own head, and doesn't really matter. :-)

If I had a subscription to The New Yorker, I never get any book reading done. More power to you!

Yes, I realize this is all in my own head, and doesn't really matter.

Haha!

#54: Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horowitz

In 1965, at age 6, Tony Horwitz was introduced to the Civil War by his great-grandfather, an immigrant from Russia. Fascinated by photographs and exotic names, he painted murals on his bedroom walls, tending to side in adolescence with the "anarchic James Dean-ish" rebels. Leaping forward 35 years, he had become a journalist, traveled around the world, returned to the US with his wife, bought a house in Virginia. Where, one day, he found himself on the periphery of a Civil War battle being filmed for TV. Offering coffee, he got to talking with the soldiers, who were not professional actors, but amateur reenactors. Thus begins this quirky serious anecdotal insightful entertaining disturbing trek through southern states, where he chats with Shelby Foote, guardians of battlefields, directors of heritage organizations, proprieters of artifact museums, residents of a tiny town in the aftermath of a racially charged murder, eliciting attitudes of grievance and pride, polarization and reconciliation, legends, facts, "selective versions of events". The "hardcore" reenactors value authenticity in clothing, food, dirt, and discomfort, in contrast to the despised "farbs" who apply fake blood. I maybe could've done with less of them, and less of the Civil Wargasm buddy-travel compressing many sites into few days, but the continuous strand of obsession with an unfinished war ties the episodes together.

#55: The Lost City of Z by David Grann

British explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared in the Amazon jungle in 1925 while searching for Z, his cryptic reference to a city of lore; he believed that it existed, and he believed that he had determined its location. American journalist David Grann came across references to Perry Fawcett and Z while researching a magazine article nearly 80 years later, and was intrigued. Chapters alternate between explorer and decidedly-not-explorer as each approaches his destination.

The story begins with the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830 to fill blank spaces on maps, key to conquering the world advancing science. As an RGS member put it: "Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men." The RGS took in such people, and trained them. Fawcett graduated from explorer school in 1901. Several years later, after stints in relatively comfortable conditions, he was sent to the Amazon, where several countries were engaged in boundary disputes over access to rubber trees, and had asked the RGS to map and mediate. Multiple expeditions followed as Fawcett proved more resilient than most, and more relentless, returning home to his wife and children in between but remaining only briefly. Taught to view the Amazon natives as inferior savages, he was impressed by their health and ample supply of food, in contrast to his diseased and hungry crew. He recorded snippets of language in his journal, collected legends of densely populated and complex cities, studied reports of early explorers, and focused on one lost city that he called Z. And then World War I intervened, the rubber boom in the Amazon collapsed with the creation of plantations in Asia, and funding dwindled. In 1925, he finally arranged a source of funding and set out toward Z with his son, leaving instructions that he should not be rescued if he did not reappear. If he couldn't do it, then nobody could.

Grann was far from the first to go after Fawcett. Others had tried and failed. Some had lived to tell the tale, and some had not. Gann read RGS records and Exploration Fawcett, the other son's compilation of Fawcett's reports. He researched previous efforts to trace Fawcett's route. He found a granddaughter, and asked her about Dead Horse Camp, end point of a previously explored route, plausible entry point to Z, and specified by coordinates in Exploration Fawcett. "Well you must be careful with those," she said. "He wrote them to throw people off the trail. They were a blind." And with this crucial bit of caution, Gann went forth into the Amazon.

The Amazon is, IMO, best explored vicariously, in a cozy chair with a purring cat and a cup of coffee. I have no wish whatsoever to set foot in it. But it is a place that can't be beat by fiction. This is a page turner of unearthed history and intense curiosity and phenomenal people. Also, unusually, the maps are pretty good.

#58: A Chosen Faith by John Buehrens and Forrest Church

In triage mode now... two months later... Have decided not to review this one.

LT funk. Reading, but not writing.

I'm not-so-patiently awaiting your thoughts and/or review of The Lost City of Z :-)

134: It's 3rd in the line of backlogged reviews... It's good! Read it! Somewhere in there is a quote to the effect that explorers are not the best people with whom to build a society. Percy Fawcett would go to the Amazon and almost die, take a brief respite with his wife and children, and return to the Amazon, where eventually he disappeared. I read this and The River of Doubt and 1491, overlapping perspectives on the Amazon, no one stands out as best. A fascinating place, though I can't see myself going there; I have this thing about maggots squirming under my skin...

Ew gross! Let's just live there vicariously through other people, and the Amazonia exhibit at the National Zoo :-)

I think you are right -- one month should equal one book -- in my own sloppy way that is exactly what I was thinking, in fact, forgetting about these double issues and five issue months and so on......

I concur about Z -- just read it!

Want:
www.ted.com/talks/beatrice_coron_stories_cut_from_paper.html
http://www.beatricecoron.com/book.html
http://www.beatricecoron.com/Booklist.html

For the record, I really liked 1491. I found it full of interesting information. There were plenty of intelligent people around the world other than the white European ones who write almost all of the history books in English. The advanced farming and crop maximizing was most illuminating. One of my questions that I want answered is, 'Where did corn come from?' There isn't a good answer for that, nor for wheat, peas and beans, all from South America. And the banana/plantain, which requires manual fertilization. I doubt monkeys just climbed up there and magically waved some pollen around in the wild. Honestly though, who the heck knows...

Who the heck knows? These are interesting questions, and evidence comes from archaeology (what is found when and where), and biology (how can the changes occur). From your friendly neighborhood Google:

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/23/corn_domesticated_8700_years_...
http://www.news.wisc.edu/19804
http://archaeology.about.com/b/2009/03/24/earliest-corn-domestication.htm
Maize was domesticated in Mexico / Central America.

http://www.newhallmill.org.uk/wht-evol.htm
Wheat was domesticated in Eurasia.

http://bananas.bioversityinternational.org/files/files/pdf/publications/focusen_...
http://www.approvedarticles.com/Article/The-History-And-Evolution-Of-Banana-Hybr...
http://www.getjamaica.com/Jamaican%20Food%20-%20Jamaican%20Bananas.asp
Bananas were domesticated in Southeast Asia, but the type we know best occurred in Jamaica.

Great links!

Nation Geo, which is usually a little too fluffy, has a very good update this month on the research done on 'the Ice Man' -- I'm thinking of it because they now know he had just had a nice big dinner before he died (arrow to big artery near shoulder). Also this incredible Celtic treasure trove dug up recently in some farmer's field. That was more fluffy - but the pics are really the story.

Following up on bananas in Jamaica, and to fill the space until I get around to reviewing books... Harry Belafonte in two versions, with and without Muppets (LT doesn't allow embedding):

http://youtu.be/Euc9MMRtuSg (with)
http://youtu.be/xIUmvLBU6p0 (without)

Oh, WITH Muppets, please!

Everything is better with Muppets

I should have been more clear, as usual. I'm fairly familiar with the research you posted but my point should have been this. Who should get the credit for doing some very valuable domestication? Well, the natives are the obvious choice and it is summed up in the article on maize, the third one from about.com

"Further, the discovery of domestic corn and squash in Paleoindian/Early Archaic settings suggests that we need to seriously rethink our ideas of what a "typical" hunter-gatherer lifestyle is. The notion that hunter-gatherers only collect or at most tend to stands of crops is clearly no longer viable with this discovery. "

That's what my question really referred to, how much more credit should those natives get for being smart and practical farmers? I say a lot, although there is always the Atlantis theory lurking about, that great monkey-wrench of history and archaeology. The banana articles were interesting as, well. One of them explained that the root was used as a potato type of vegetable and the seeded fruits came along later, which might explain much in reference to the manual pollination. Millenia of manually transferring bulbs around might do something like that.

Also, I retract the wheat part. Past-my-bedtime error.

#60: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Placeholder.

On target for reading. Backlog of 5 books and 2 magazines for reviewing. Sigh.

I'm sighing along with you, qebo! My last 5 reads, plus 3 older placeholders (I borrowed your idea!).

145: The people who did the work. :-) Is anyone saying different?

148: Misery loves company... Thanks for dropping by!

Got the 2 issues of Scientific American documented. Now for the 5 books...

I'm now caught up, but nothing to add :)

#142 Loved Belafonte and the Muppets! Sympathy with the review backlog, as noted on my thread - and at least the reading is on target.

Hello and many thanks for the insightful links.

152: Hello and thanks for dropping by.

#62: Night Watch by Stephen Kendrick

I have this book because friends recommended it to me several years ago; it was written by the minister of their church. I read it because I was perusing my shelves for something... short, and this is a bit over 250 pages.

It is 1902, and representatives of the world's religions are gathered for a secret conference in London, hosted by the priest of an Anglican church with guest rooms. On Christmas afternoon, the priest is murdered, his body is mutilated, and the church is surrounded by pristine snow, indicating that the murderer remains within, and must be one of the representatives or one of the servants. This is an internationally sensitive matter. Mycroft Holmes summons Sherlock Holmes, who is under pressure to solve the case immediately, while the suspects are confined to the building. Dr Watson documents the events. And it happens that Father Brown is a young man accompanying the Catholic priest as translator.

There is a bit of precedent: the World's Parliament of Religions, convened for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Which, in contrast, was public.

The entire investigation takes place overnight, as each suspect is interviewed, and a web of past connections is gradually revealed. And rather an excess of other deaths occur.

Well, my fault for choosing a short book: the story is... sparse. The author says several times almost directly "I won't bore you with the details". I was maybe expecting more interplay of religions. Characters are sketched: tall/short, fat/thin, smiling/frowning, a smattering of symbolic artifacts. Midway through my strongest emotion was mild curiosity about whodunnit. Meh.

Thanks for the warning!

#64: Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

The time is early 1800s, the place is Lyme Regis on the southern coast of England. Jane Austen makes a cameo appearance in this historical novel. Mary Anning contributes to her family by finding, preparing, and selling fossils ("curies"), a role that becomes more essential when her cabinetmaker father dies. Elizabeth Philpot and her two sisters arrive in Lyme Regis after their brother marries and no longer has the funds to support them in London. Mary and Elizabeth (who is 20 years older) bond over the fossils, walking miles together along the beach, exploring and searching. Here the novel is absorbingly meditative and descriptive. Chapters alternate their voices: Mary who must work so her family can scrape by, Elizabeth in diminished circumstances but with the luxury of leisure, Mary affiliated with a Congregationalist church, Elizabeth affiliated with an Anglican church, both women social oddities. Mary's interest in fossils has a pragmatic aspect, but she is a keen observer of similarities and differences and connections, and is careful to preserve exactly what was found. Elizabeth's interest in fossils is more academic, and she introduces the importance of documenting the surroundings. This is an era of geological and paleontological discoveries, when scientists were questioning the assumption of a static world created by God 6000 years ago. The idea that a creature might go extinct was shocking. The quiet and relatively isolated existence expands when Mary and her brother discover the fossil of a "crocodile" that does not look like any creature known to exist, and it is purchased and displayed in London. Lyme Regis becomes a destination for scientists and collectors. Into the lives of Mary and Elizabeth arrive two men: Reverend William Buckland and Lietenant-Colonel Thomas Birch. Here the novel becomes troubling. The history and science and religion are fascinating, but apparently not fascinating enough; instead of further immersion into concerns of the time, we are drawn into romance and drama. Manufactured romance and drama. Mary and Elizabeth are single women, and traipsing about in the company of men is cause for gossip. Buckland is portrayed as a gentleman, kind and respectful, though too caught up in abstractions to notice social convention or the attention of women. Birch is portrayed as a cad. He was, however, an actual person. And there was an actual event: he auctioned his fossil collection to raise money for the Anning family. Filling in the gaps, and apparently contrary to evidence, the novel concocts a tale of romance and jealousy, and presents the auction as repentance for exploitation. There was no need. The women were impressive on their own intellectual merits.

There is a recent biography of Mary Anning: The Fossil Hunter by Shelley Emiling.
Lyme Regis has a museum: http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/.

>156 qebo:: I've had that one in the Someday Swamp for awhile. Sorry to hear it was so disappointing; I think I'll let it swim around a little longer.

#65: Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler

I read this book because the author is local, and I know rather less about the Amish than maybe I should.

The memoir is written in sparse style: I did this, I felt that, in chronological order, from the author's birth into an Old Order Amish community in Ontario, through his multiple departures from this and other Amish communities in Iowa and Indiana, during his mid teens to mid twenties. As one might expect from a defector, it is not a particularly flattering portrait; the often romanticized simplicity and austerity and stoicism are molded by constant criticism for the slightest deviation from the rules. And there are lots of rules, about dress and hair and transportation and dating, rules devised by the bishop of each community so somewhat variant (e.g. whether or not a buggy may have rubber wheels, whether a bicycle is an acceptable means of transportation, whether dating couples may meet every four weeks or every two weeks). Not much is said about religion in a spiritual sense until a transformative episode toward the end; again what is emphasized is its role in enforcing the rules. It is of course difficult to know how much of one person's experience and perception are unique to him, or his family, or his small part of the world, and the author makes no pretense of providing historical or sociological context. Still, the matter-of-fact description gives glimpses of mundane life, with unexpected details such as technological improvements in buggies, or the procedure for choosing preachers by lottery. Rules can be a prison, and rules can be a comfort. Freedom can be lonely, and excommunication and eternal damnation are not easily shrugged off. The yo-yo of exits and returns are a bit exasperating to watch, but there was no middle ground. Ira Wagler is now about 50, and this memoir ends at age 26, when he officially left the Amish forever. So I'm curious how he ended up in Lancaster PA, home of the "blueblood" Amish.

An excerpt:
The Amish have one of the strongest and most efficient support structures in existence. When tragedy strikes, the community rallies around and provides whatever physical and financial support is needed, as it did for us. But the system is also lacking in at least one very important aspect. It offers no real way to cope with the emotional aftereffects of tragic events, especially unexpected ones. This is not a criticism, merely an observation. It's just the way it is. Communication is sparse or nonexistent. Feelings are quashed. One is expected to accept and bear one's burdens in silence. And one does.

Now 6 reviews behind, but 75 books/magazines feasible if I choose wisely... I'll be relieved when the year is over.

Don't pick up any door stoppers and you'll make it!

Hi! Just found and rambled thru your thread here and all the great reviews... so many are for my TBR books. And though I realize how dangerous this can be, I'm starring your thread. I may lurk more than comment - but your thoughts are quite interesting and I don't want to miss them :)

Hey, ten books--easy! Like Lucy says, no door stoppers. Have some fun.

But I _like_ door stoppers... :-(

Or..... even a graphical novel? I'm finally getting around to Asterios Polyp.... even if you stop to study the pictures it simply doesn't take that long. I need to read some things like this to balance the time spent on P&C -- like you -- I am attracted to doorstoppers.

Read something with lots of pictures :-)

I have Radioactive... It's gorgeous.

AND... an amazingly informative story!

I have Remarkable Creatures in my TBR pile - I'm sorry to hear there are unnecessary ingredients of romance etc added to the tale. Have you read others of Chevalier? I was interested to see how she handled this one because her other books (at least, the ones I've read) mainly take a work of art as a starting point and weave a story out of the known and unknown people involved in its creation; this one clearly has a different starting point.

168: I haven't read other books by Chevalier. I rather doubt that I will; I chose this one because of the science aspect. On the plus side, it got me thinking that I'd like to visit Lyme Regis.

SantaThing is here! I hope to participate, but I need to add... eyeballing the piles... dozens... of books to my catalog so I don't get duplicates.

You should do what I do: manually add the title and author ASAP, and then go back and add all the other information when you have more time.

I have a TBD collection for quick entries that need consideration re proper collection and tags. Sadly, I tend to acquire books in clumps, and I might grab one or two to read immediately, and not want to bother entering the others at the moment, and then my TBR pile gets unwieldy so I return some of its books to a pile of mostly-new books, but then I don't remember which were entered and which were not... It is quite pathetic really...

I'm thinking of doing the Santa Thing this year - have not participated before.
Is it good? Should I? Should I?

Yes, you should! I have not participated in previous years either. It's a nice idea, and especially nice of the LT staff to do all the coordination. Last year there was a glitch because for various reasons beyond anyone's control there were delays in the mail system, and lots of books arrived quite late. So accept that it's for fun and things may go wrong, and maybe you'll get a new book from a random stranger by Christmas.

ok... you twisted my arm *hehehe*
Gotta try it at least once! ;-)

I belong to a smaller group here that does a secret santa kind of gift exchange and last year I enjoyed the whole thing with the gusto of a child, I have to admit!

>176 sibylline:: and you were my Santa, which was wonderful!!!

Books languished in random piles for months... and all it took was one holiday morning to get them cataloged and tagged; imperfectly, but for the first time ever I have 0 books in the TBD collection. Now, alas, I must cook.

Just catching up on threads while someone else is doing most of the cooking. (I have been helping as needed, though!) Growing Up Amish is fairly high on my wish list, so I'll look forward to reading your thoughts on it. No pressure, though. I've been several weeks behind on reviews since the end of August and only recently managed to pull myself out of that hole.

>178 qebo: Hooray!!

#178 Congratulations!

#68: Life Ascending by Nick Lane

This is a fascinating account of ten crucial developments of evolution, from the perspective of a biochemist, beginning with the origin of life and ending with death. It is information dense but chatty, nicely organized with a succinct 25 or so pages per chapter. I can't really do justice in a review. A decent summary would occupy pages, and I'd need to reread and research to be sure I got it right. Don't let this deter you. My background is possibly at the level of biology 101, awhile ago, and the explanations were perfectly coherent. It is not necessary to grasp and remember every biochemical detail; it is enough to realize that micro biochemical reactions and changes underlie macro features of organisms. Each of the ten developments, including some that would appear to be oddly out of place, such as consciousness, is traced back to molecules that appeared early in evolution. Alas, one criticism, my frequent complaint: Oh why why why don't books include more diagrams?

Because the origin of life is, well, completely cool, and because the first chapter is about disequilibrium at the interface between hydrothermal vents and the ocean, a Wikipedia link, with diagrams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent.

An excerpt:
"Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretense to be popular, but it's more engaging if seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemisty without giving in to some sort of randy anthopomorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges; repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there. My point is that thermodynamics makes the world go round."

I do not want to go back to work tomorrow.

Me too...

me three! I was off all last week. One could get used to that.

Condolences to all you harding working souls!
One day you will retire and be even busier - no pay though.

btw - I want more maps and diagrams in books too!

I just read Mister Pip and was frustrated not to find a map. Us visual-spatial people need our pictures!

#69: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Vogel CEO Mr. Fox sends pharmacologist Marina Singh to the Amazon, to find secretive doctor Annick Swenson who is supposed to be developing a fertility drug but has been fending off intrusive questions, and to determine how colleague Anders Eckman died. I read this because of the Amazon, and because the author has been recommended. Sluggish for the first 1/3, with characters kind of wafting around. How did Mr. Fox get to be CEO? The story picks up with the appearance of Dr. Swenson, who has a voice and an agenda, and an ethical code that is not altogether conventional. Adventures in the Amazon in the early 2000s pale in comparison to adventures in the Amazon in the early 1900s. Luggage w/ cell phones had to be lost twice to reduce communication. Travel took mere hours or maybe a day. The bugs were merely annoying. Truth easily trumps fiction; The Lost City of Z and The River of Doubt are more compelling in terms of characters, setting, informative detail. Still, I got to caring what happened to people. Apparently partially modeled on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which I haven't read, so I surely missed references.

H of D for the Nook is $0.99. Well, this will improve my education in classics.

Heart of Darkness is awesome. I read it in high school and loved it.

Saturday field trip:



Nice to have a Nook in a van without lights.

Great photo! I was there during the summer and wished that the weather had been cooler. The house isn't air conditioned, and between the low ceilings and the number of people on the tour, it got pretty warm inside! I remember being interested in looking at the books on the bookshelves.

I have to go see Fallingwater sometime.....

I wonder if the Wright/Fallingwater (and others) library is on LT?

I can't think -- what does the D stand for in TBD?

I wonder if the Wright/Fallingwater (and others) library is on LT?
Heh. I wondered exactly the same thing as I was looking at the books in the house. Alas, no interior photography allowed.
what does the D stand for in TBD?
Not one thing: done, decided, determined, ...

Am catching up on here at last, and adding Life Ascending to my WL. I haven't read Remarkable Creatures - it seemed to be everywhere in NZ when it came out and the hype put me off - and might look for the biography of Mary Anning instead. When I was about 8 I had a really short book about her (I remember learning what a paleontologist was!) and it really captured my imagination.

No Wright library on here yet -- I'm not sure there are any architect's libraries here, although I didn't specifically check that.

#70: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

The plague, 1665-1666. An English village of a few hundred people seals itself off from the outside world. This did actually happen, and some of the fictional people have real counterparts. Might've been better to read the Afterward first, for context. More later, someday, if I get caught up with reviews... I liked the quietness of village life. The twists and leaps of the ending were a tad... much... though a sequel could be interesting.

Added a few weeks later...

In 1665, an English village quarantines itself to contain the plague, in exchange for supplies from a nearby earl. The story is based on the real village of Eyam, and to some extent on real people and events. It is narrated by Anna Firth, widow of a miner who died in an accident, housekeeper to the rectory of Michael Mompellion and his wife Elinor, and to the estate of the Bradford family. The story begins toward the end, when daughter Elizabeth Bradford returns to the village and Michael Mompellion refuses to see her, so we know immediately that Anna's children died, Elinor died, and the Bradfords abandoned the village. And then it unfolds from the beginning. A tailor, George Viccars, arrives in the village, arranges room and board with Anna, receives a box of fabric from London, forms it into clothes for his customers, and dies, the first victim of the plague. As he is dying and delirious, he instructs Anna to burn the fabric and the clothes, but customers get word of his death and insist on taking what they have paid for, ignoring her warnings. The plague spreads, the villagers panic, herbalists Mem and Anys Gowdie are accused as witches, a brutal violent incident shows that things are out of control, and the rector announces a plan for quarantine, arguing that the villagers are better off staying home with a certainty of food and support, than fleeing to other places where they will be shunned as plague carriers. Most agree. The Bradfords get out. Anna's father is an abusive drunkard, and her marriage to a miner was an escape. Her husband was kind but not an intellect, and her world remained limited. Elinor is from a high social class and educated accordangly. The women bond as Elinor teaches Anna to read, as they learn together to provide nursing and medical care to the villagers, as Elinor confides that her life has not been as free of trouble as it may seem. Anna becomes increasingly competent and confident. By the time the quarantine is lifted, she can see well beyond the edges of the village.

I would recommend this book, though I was not wowed by it. I was drawn to the few but well realized characters and relationships, to the flow of mundane village life, to the details of herbs and mining (it is evident that the author did research). Some twists at the end seemed a tad... abruptly tacked on. I think now that the problem was not with the end itself, but with a general lack of integration throughout, episodes in which a previously unmentioned character appeared then disappeared, illustrative and interesting but not interwoven with the whole. Also some bits seemed too modern, for example a map of plague cases, and a comment that maybe it's nature not God. Anna sometimes seemed too aware for her parochial surroundings, but Geraldine Brooks notes in the Afterward that Anna was based on extraordinary people with humble origins she'd interviewed in her journalism career. If there were a sequel, I'd set right out to read it.

191: Frank Lloyd Wright didn't approve of tall people, and he designed for how things ought to be. :-)

>196 qebo: Aw, I liked the ending. I would have been disappointed if it had turned out in the obvious predictable way.

>196 qebo:: I'm with you on the ending!

>196 qebo: I was disappointed in the book as well. I felt as though Anna were a 20th c. person trying to be passed off as a native. She knew too much about too many things to feel authentic. IMO

I wasn't really disappointed. I enjoyed reading it, though I didn't think it was great. I'm super behind on reviews, and not saying much isn't a judgement; it's a lack of sufficient time. Episodes with various villagers were sometimes too abrupt; suddenly this person or this situation appeared, and I would've preferred more interweaving. And the thinking seemed too modern, e.g. a comment about maybe it's nature not God, and a map drawn of the plague cases, and the abusive father had been abused himself. Geraldine Brooks notes in the Afterward that Anna was based on extraordinary people she'd interviewed in her journalism career who had come from humble beginnings, and this made me reassess Anna a bit. I'd read a sequel. Do any of you know examples of historical fiction that manage to get inside the heads of people of the time?

#71: Among Others by Jo Walton

Identical twins Morwenna and Morganna Phelps conduct a magic ritual, per instructions from the fairies, to save the world from their mother, a witch. Not quite 5 years later, one twin has been killed in an unspecified accident, the other has a painful crippled leg from the same accident, and has been passed through an institution to her father, who abandoned the family when she was an infant, and whose three indistinguishable sisters arrange to send her on to boarding school. We see the world though her diary, from late 1979 to early 1980, when she is 15 years old.

I appreciated most the ambiguity. The diary allows for 1st person (and unverified) POV, day-to-day events that convey atmosphere and character, and brief mentions in passing that hint at importance but don't explain. As in much of real life, there is no overarching dramatic plot. There is boarding school, which Mori describes as just what one would expect from reading Enid Blyton. There is family, occasional almost genealogical sketches of ancestry, and with all its dysfunctional aspects, people to whom she is extremely attached. There are books, mostly science fiction, and two librarians, in the school and in the town, who gradually befriend her. There is magic. Maybe. Magic always has "plausible deniability" -- nothing happens with it that could not have happened without. Is this an SF world? Is this our world with an SF imagination? Are the witches real or metaphorical? Can anyone else see the fairies? When Mori summons a karass by magic, the town librarian introduces her to a weekly meeting of avid science fiction readers. Did it always exist? Does she truly belong, or did she manipulate behavior? And yet, the ambiguity is not an unstable border between reality and fantasy. Mori's observations and philosophical considerations are filtered by the science fiction she reads, but she navigates, awkwardly and critically and naively and astutely, in a world of actual people.

I loved this book (and I should note that I loved it even though I've read only a few of the science fiction books referred to). I rarely read books twice, but this one I might.

Lobbed the Walton onto the wishlist, even without yr. review!

203: Lotsa other reviews to go on. You'll probably appreciate it even more, because of the references to SF books I haven't read.

I'm getting pushed and pulled from all sides re end of year stuff... After next week, a little time to breathe...

72 done, 3 to go: December New Yorkers (3 issues), June Scientific American, a book not yet decided.

GO QEBO!

Woo hoo! You can do it!

Hurray! You're so close!

73 done. 1 magazine, 1 book, and a lotta reviewing to go... Tomorrow is my last work day for the year.

Hey, you are going to make it easily! YOu might even hit 80.

Go, Katherine! You're almost there...

I won't hit 80. Strange and shocking as it may seem, I actually have other things to do in my week off.

YAY Vacation week! YAY almost 75!
:)

I hope some of the other things are relaxing and fun.

Well, there's Christmas, and then there's Boxing Day in NY, and then the plan is to confuse the cats move the cat food and litter box downstairs and convert the room into a cozy library, which will involve cleaning, painting, preparing the floor for refinishing. I want merely to get started. Could be awhile before it's done.

We have a room we want to convert to a library too. Currently it is the "junk room". Keep us posted on how it goes.

The room was carpeted when I bought the house. I removed the carpet, and underneath was... linoleum. I removed the linoleum, and underneath was... a residue of papery sticky stuff. The original wood floor will look great refinished, I've had most of the rest of the house done, but the refinishers won't scrape the residue and it'll ruin their sanders, so I have to do it myself. Which is feasible, I scraped smaller areas for refinishing elsewhere, but it requires muscle power and chemicals. So... two years later... it's still covered in plastic. Meanwhile, it was a convenient location for cat supplies when my old wobbly cat had trouble navigating stairs, but he died a year ago...

Merry Christmas, qebo!

The meet-up looks like fun! The scraping project sounds like work, but the good kind, with a lot of reward at the end. Two words that I love, cozy and library. Before and after shots for us??

219: Well that brightens up the thread!

(An unexpected visitor this afternoon was nice, but as a consequence I'm working this evening and a tad frazzled and not making proper holiday rounds to the threads...)

Merry Christmas, Katherine!

Happy holidays, Katherine!

Have a great time at the NYC meet-up and spread my holiday greetings to that group up north!

Merry Christmas, Katherine!

(My apologies on misspelling your name up to now.)

mistletoe smooches!

Wishing you all the very best Katherine!

Merry Christmas, Katherine! I look forward to meeting you in person on Monday.

Happy holidays!

Thanks all! I'll do thread rounds tomorrow... I've had about 15 minutes for LT today.

Merry Christmas Katherine!

We're here at the same time, so I'm popping in real time! Have a lovely day!

Going round the threads this morning... Hope I've gotten to everyone I've interacted with this year...


Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, Katherine! Can't wait to meet you tomorrow. ;-)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, Katherine!

Merry Christmas, Katherine! Have fun at the meet-up tomorrow, and make sure to take some photos. :-)

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, Katherine.

I look forward to seeing you around next year and am thining about joining the NF group (once I catch up on this year's book comments.)

It was delightful to meet you face to face yesterday! Did you get to the Met?

I'm mulling your stated use of your e-reader. I've got to do something before my apartment sinks or I become one of the Collier brothers. Or win the lottery and get a bigger place!

238: I did. A whopping hour and a half among the crowds. Arrived home a bit before midnight, and I'm just getting my act together here, posted photos on the meetup thread a few minutes ago. It was great to meet you too!

It was great meeting you yesterday. I hope we get to meet up more often in 2012..... in NYC or other locations near you.

I forgot to ask you yesterday if the non-fiction group you started is going to be concentrated on science or if it's aimed at covering all non-fiction books?

240: Take a look at the threads... http://www.librarything.com/groups/nonfictionchallenge. I started it last spring after (a) tediously skimming every 75er thread for evidence of non-fiction reading, and (b) seeing a few comments somewhere (I don't recall where) to the effect that that non-fiction gets lost in a sea of literature on LT and it'd be nice to have more discussion. I have a science streak, but I was pleasantly surprised at the eclectic non-fiction interests that appeared: history, theology, crafts. Now that kidzdoc/Darryl has started a narrative non-fiction thread, and recruited several other 75ers to the cause, who knows what directions may be taken. I want to focus on American history this year, because I am woefully ignorant.

I have to sit on my hands to prevent myself from posting on your new thread. Those big, bold "Do not touch" signs make it so tempting ;-)

Yeah, me too.

LOL! I'm not sure how many placeholders I want and interspersion of comments will irritate my sense of order forever... And then LT wouldn't let me add posts. I kept clicking and refreshing. I was worried that suddenly a dozen posts would show up and what would I do with all of them. Maybe I'll relax the rules when I feel reasonably organized.

But meanwhile I'm still here in 2011 trying to finish 75 books...

Am finally catching up on here - for ten minutes. I haven't seen your new thread yet but promise not to post on it till we're meant to! Am off to look at the meet-up thread for pics.

I hope to have more NF to post on my thread over in the NF Challenge group in 2012.

245: I hope to have more NF to post on my thread over in the NF Challenge group in 2012.
You've had quite a year of discombobulation.
I have no such excuse. I hit information overload and got behind in reviews, so I've been negligent in my own group.

I'm also very tempted by the bold "do not post!" notices ;)

I do think one placeholder for your book list will be enough, as long as you're just touchstoning titles and not authors as well. I have a vague sense that a post can handle about 100 touchstones before problems arise, and of course I'll also be pestering Tim to fix the problems, if he ever gets back to doing things. I blame SantaThing for derailing all the good progress, even though Jeremy says that December is just a busy month.

247: Yeah, I think I'll go with a single list. I separated by month in 2011 when touchstones were going all wonky. I'm still not ready to deal with 2012 though. :-) Two and a half days remaining in 2011, and then that's it, whatever isn't done won't get done...

SantaThing arrived today! I had requested American history...
No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Also it is snowing. Are the weather gods telling me that I don't have to run 4 miles?

Congratulations on your SantaThing haul, Katherine. I've read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and it gave me so much information I didn't know about this iconic man. You're in for a treat.

Yes, you don't have to run 4 miles if it's snowing! :-) The weather gods are telling you to stay indoors and read.

Upon further consideration, I interpreted the weather gods to be easing me into winter and suggesting caution. 4 miles done. It's always worse in anticipation than retrospect.

Ah, Katherine -
You sound like my daughter who will run in anything. The only time I expect to run is if someone yells "Fire!" Still, I'm thinking it must have been beauteous running in the snow???

Your SantaThing books sound good - hope you enjoy them! :)

#75: The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

The year is 2021, and Scott Warden is an American computer programmer, recently unemployed and not especially ambitious to be otherwise, living with his wife and daughter in Thailand, when the first Chronolith appears, several hundred feet tall and composed of a mysterious icy blue substance, announcing the victorious Kuin 20 years in the future. Spontaneously joining his unsavory friend Hitch Paley on a motorcycle to see it, he doesn't bother to inform his wife Janice, so she cannot find him when daughter Kaitlin suddenly develops a fever and ear infection and has to be taken to the hospital. What was to be a few hours becomes a few days as everyone in the vicinity is interrogated. By the time Scott returns, Janice has had it with his irresponsibility, and has taken Katilin, recovering but nearly deaf, back to Minneapolis. Thus Scott is entangled in the tau turbulence. Several years go by, Scott too is back in Minneapolis, employed and again unemployed, when his former teacher Sue Chopra, a mathematician investigating tau turbulence, offers him a job. Why now? Because she recognized his name on a government list, she is obsessed, and she is sure that he is necessary to the cause. Meanwhile, Chronoliths have been appearing around the world, always with dates 20 years in the future, and the anxious anticipation is expressed in economic and political turmoil. Who or what is Kuin? Speculation is of a warlord somewhere in Asia, who to be so powerful and technologically advanced in 20 years... in 10 years... in 2 years... must exist and be plotting now. Kuinist political movements form, the now teenage Kaitlin disappears with a cultish youth group to witness the arrival of a Chronolith in Mexico, Scott meets the parents of its members and in particular Ashlee Mills, mother of its psychopathic leader Adam. Sue Chopra and her team of analysts have learned how to predict the arrival date and location. The next question is... can an arrival be prevented?

I'm not much for stories of world domination, and I was a touch doubtful about this book, but it gets to be quite a page turner with ordinary people caught up in paradoxical feedback loops, centered on Scott's concern for his family. There are neat analogies: "Trying to figure out the genesis of a Chronolith is like trying to unravel a sweater before it's been knitted.", and Minkowski ice, a 4-dimensional cube of freezing from the bottom up, solid is past, liquid is future, Chronolith is hot needle inserted into the ice. Do Chronoliths represent victory in battles yet to occur? Or are Chronoliths weapons that causes society to crumble? Would they have the same effect without dates and expectations? It is somewhat of an assumption that the dates are honest.

I will be looking for more books by this author.

OK, so I've been holding out. I finished reading book #75 yesterday morning, but I wanted to make progress on reviews before I announced it. So, flawed but good enough reviews of recent fiction done, scroll up if you care, still have three non-fiction reviews to go, and a day remaining in the year.

Congrats on 75!

75 YAY! And caught up on NYers!!!!!!! You are really in the catbird seat!

Congrats!

Congratulations on hitting the 75 mark and for doing the four miles in the snow yesterday.

Congratulations!

Thanks all! My job today is the three remaining reviews... Plus other stuff...

Way to go! Congratulations on hitting 75 and finishing your reviews too!

Yay, congratulations!

75!!?? Hooray!!

Thanks everyone! I'm not sure I'll ever do it again... The reading's OK. The reviewing, not so much.

Nora, also... you expressed impatience re The Lost City of Z, um, a couple months ago. I wrote the review today.

Two reviews to go...

Congratulations, Katherine! See you in the 2012 group.

>264 qebo: Well I still haven't started reading it, so you're way ahead :-)

The reading's OK. The reviewing, not so much.

Maybe next year you can just share thoughts about a book, as little or as much as you wish, but not do official "reviews". I too sometimes feel pressure to write reviews when I would rather be reading. Or conversely, reading and letting the reviews pile up, but feeling guilty about it.

Happy New Year!

The trouble is that I although I feel an obligation to LT, and also wish for a bit of conversation, I also review so I'll remember and understand what's in the book. Some books are to pass the time, but for serious books there doesn't seem much point in reading if I don't retain, so reviewing is a pass through again, now that I know what's important and what's merely tangential or clutter, and it's useful but not speedy.

Anyway, I'm still two reviews behind, for two science books that deserve considered reviews: The Emperor of Maladies and Life Ascending. They'll have to wait until next year.

A happy 2012 to all! I am now here.