chexmix: 75 in 2012

Here's my 2012 thread. I only managed to make 61 in 2011 but have hopes of bigger things this year (except that I keep reading doorstops).

1. Herodotus - Histories ****1/2
2. Harrison, Edward Robert - Cosmology *****
3. Leopold, Aldo - A Sand County Almanac
4. Thoreau, Henry David - Selected Journals *****
5. Martin, George R. R. - A Game of Thrones
6. Macintyre, Ben - Operation Mincemeat
7. Pratchett, Terry - The Color of Magic
8. Pratchett, Terry - The Light Fantastic
9. Pickover, Clifford A. - Surfing Through Hyperspace **1/2
10. Pratchett, Terry - Equal Rites
11. Lawrence, D. H. - Sons and Lovers
12. Drummond, Paul - Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators
13. Minsky, Marvin - The Society of Mind
14. Stewart, Ian - Why Beauty is Truth
15. Zirker, J. B. - The Magnetic Universe
16. Pratchett, Terry - Mort
17. Cather, Willa - My Antonia
18. van Brummelen, Glen - The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth
19. Zola, Emile - L'Assommoir ****1/2
20. Rosenberg, Marshall - Nonviolent Communication
21. Carr, J. L. - A Month in the Country
22. van den Bergh, Sidney - Galaxies of the Local Group
23. Glass, Spencer - Mollies: Keeping & Breeding Them in Captivity
24. Reid, T. R. - The Chip
25. Manchester, William - A World Lit Only by Fire
26. Stross, Charles - Iron Sunrise
27. Hargrove, Maddy and Mic - Freshwater Aquariums for Dummies
28. Zola, Emile - The Belly of Paris *****
29. Mill, John Stuart - Autobiography
30. Lucas, Michael W. - Absolute OpenBSD
31. Foulds, Adam - The Quickening Maze
32. Bellow, Saul - Herzog ****
33. Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep ***1/2
34. Segal, Lore - Her First American
35. Singer, Isaac Bashevis - Passions
36. Chapman, Rob - A Very Irregular Head
37. Carlyle, Thomas - Sartor Resartus
38. Defoe, Daniel - A Journal of the Plague Year *****
39. Bradbury, Ray - Dandelion Wine
40. Magee, Bryan - Confessions of a Philosopher
41. Twain, Mark - The Innocents Abroad
42. Waterfield, Robin - The First Philosophers
43. Goldsmith, Oliver - The Vicar of Wakefield
44. Pilgrim, Mark - HTML5: Up and Running
45. Serviss, Garrett P. - Curiosities of the Sky
46. Conrad, Joseph - The Secret Agent
47. MacLeod, Ian R. - The Light Ages
48. Odom, Wendell - Computer Networking First-Step
49. Steinhardt, Paul and Neil Turok - Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang
50. Novak, Maximillian E. - Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions ****
51. Defoe, Daniel - The Storm ***1/2
52. Sobel, Dava - Longitude
53. Kinzer, Stephen - Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds****1/2
54. Kemal, Yashar - The Wind From the Plain
55. Adler, Cyrus - Told in the Coffee House: Turkish Tales
56. Chomsky, Noam - Imperial Ambitions
57. Hizmet, Nakim - Human Landscapes
58. Gore, J. Ellard - Astronomical Curiosities ****1/2
59. Baade, Walter - Evolution of Stars and Galaxies
60. Wardhaugh, Benjamin - How to Read Historical Mathematics
61. Newby, Eric - A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
62. Bryson, Bill - A Walk in the Woods
63. Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia - An Autobiography and Other Recollections
64. Pamuk, Orhan - Istanbul: Memories and the City
65. Wells, David - The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers
66. Glendinning, Chellis - My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization
67. Marshall, Oscar Seth - Journeyman Machinist en Route to the Stars
68. Dudley, Underwood - Mathematical Cranks
69. Robinson, Keith - Spectroscopy: the Key to the Stars
70. Mitchell, David - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
71. Irving, Washington - Knickerbocker's History of New York
72. Dozois, Gardner, ed - The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-First Annual Collection
73. Murakami, Haruki - After the Quake
74. Crowe, Michael J. - A History of Vector Analysis
75. Gogol, Nikolai - Dead Souls
76. Nabokov, Vladimir - Nikolai Gogol
77. Rendell, Ruth - Master of the Moor
78. Allen, Moira - Coping with Sorrow on the Loss of Your Pet
79. Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
80. Martin, Martha Evans - The Friendly Stars

Hello Glenn! I was far from my 75 books, too. Wish you good luck for this year!

Glad to see you back with us again, Glenn!

Hey Glenn -- was thinking of you yesterday when I had to retire the shoes I wore tromping through Paris! They've been resoled a number of times, but finally gave up the ghost.

If you will read applied mathematics tomes, and other heavyweight materials such as that, you won't make it to 75... though your IQ might inflate!

Happy 2012...

Welcome back!

The Powers That Be (my girlfriend) urged me to do as I'd been threatening to do and cut down drastically on the number of things I was simultaneously reading ... if you go to my "Currently Reading" you will see that THERE ARE ONLY THREE BOOKS THERE instead of, oh, 14. =)

Of course, each of the three is a pretty long book, and one (The Princeton Companion to Mathematics) is, well, ridiculous. So we'll see how this all goes.

I am glad that my 'Powers That Be' (my husband) does not make that kind of demand on me. It would probably be grounds for immediate divorce.

1 book down! At least it was a big 'un. Completed during a stay in a yurt in rural New Hampshire. I smell like woodsmoke!

Congratulations on finishing your first book!

Woot! One down, only 74 more to go ;)

My "powers at be" wish I was reading more, instead of less....it gives him more time to play Zelda on our new/old N64 instead of me playing James Bond.

So... what was it???

Btw, if you haven't seen "midnight in Paris", the newish Woody Allen, get the DVD pronto.

It was Herodotus, _Histories_.

Although it is slow going, Harrison's Cosmology is a truly revelatory science read, and I give it extremely high marks. It's unfortunate the author is no longer with us, as this latest edition (2000) could use a refresh. Maybe someone will take it on, and retain Harrison's unique voice.

NB: I would not call it "fully mathematical" but it does not stint on the mathematics, either.

Mistakenly posted this to my 2011 thread:

I am being amazingly transported and ... well, supported ... by reading from Thoreau's Journals. What wonderful material! I may have to break my book-buying ban and spring for the recent NYRB selection, which runs to over 700 pages, or about 10% of the whole.

Hi Glenn! Great that you like Thoreau so much! Unfortunately, I don't know anything by him. What would recommend for a start?

I've just seen that you finished A Game of Thrones. How did you like it? I'm thinking about reading it, but the fact that it's a whole series has prevented that so far. Do I need to read the whole series, or is each volume coherent?

Hi, Kathy!

With Thoreau, I'd start with his most famous work, _Walden_.

I really enjoyed _A Game of Thrones_. Martin is a really good writer. I'm not a big "swords and stuff" fantasy person, so it must have been extremely good for me to have liked it so much.

The first book is pretty self contained, but if you like it I'm sure the ending will leave you wanting to find out what happens next! I don't know about the other volumes, but if they depend at all on Book One I certainly wouldn't want to try them without reading it first ...

Hello Glenn! Yes, I heard that GoT was more about political aspects - that's what made me curious!
Thanks for the tip about Thoreau! It's always difficult to chose the first book of an author you haven't yet read (and haven't heard too much about), but it's a crucial decision, because it can deter you to read any other book by the same author. So, thank you!

OK, may have to consider Game of Thrones... I'm not a big fantasy reader, but... I have started reading Terry Pratchett this year, however!

Ha ... I just picked up Pratchett's first two DiscWorld novels off the free shelf here at work ... along with book four of the Martin series.

Personal tidbit about George R. R. Martin. A damned fine early (1974) Martin story, "A Song for Lya," was in the first science fiction magazine I ever bought: the June, 1974 issue of _Analog_. I kept the magazine both for its "personal historical" value and because that story was in it.

I found Operation Mincemeat surprisingly just-okay, but am enjoying my first Terry Pratchett book enormously. :^)

I think I may be totally addicted to Discworld. :^)

Thoroughly enjoyed my third Discworld novel and am taking a side trip into ... D. H. Lawrence?? Well, what can I say: it (Sons and Lovers) was lying around and I picked it up.

I'm a bit surprised at how much I'm liking Sons and Lovers. I recall having to read The Rainbow in college and not really responding to it well: as I recall I found it overwrought and kinda murky. For a long time I've said I preferred Lawrence's poetry to his novels.

#24: I have that one waiting on my shelves, but I couldn't convince myself to read it. I'll come back to see if the enthusiasm is long-lasting. Maybe I can find the motivation to read it.

I suppose if you had to force me to re-read something by Lawrence it would be Sons and Lovers, but I'm still recovering from OD-ing on his prose at the age of 17, several decades (ahem) ago.

If you're gonna be addicted, might as well be discworld... I'm just starting #3 of the Watch books -- I'll read those first and then go find some more. Nice to find a series that I can't exhaust in a month!!

A large part of Sons and Lovers is ... uh, good stuff, but now that I am 3/4 of the way in it has lurched solidly into overwrought territory. DHL suuuure likes to write about how people "hate" one another, even though they are "in love" (or are they? it's so hard to tell with Lawrence ... often it's difficult to know what, exactly, his characters are talking about!). Mah ghod, does he throw the word "hate" around. "Hate"? Really?

Many of his rhapsodic descriptions of flowers and landscape, though, are truly exquisite. I'll give him that.

Stewart's Why Beauty is Truth is a fun read, but unless I am being obtuse it doesn't -- for large stretches, anyway -- have explicitly to do with the concept of symmetry. I'm a tad confused by this.

There's loads of good in the book, but I might have given it a different subtitle ...

UPDATE: now that I've finished it, I can say that Stewart does manage to pull things together by the end. Overall, though, I wish he'd been more willing to include equations because this book, like Hawking's A Brief History of Time, in my mind succumbed to the fact that while metaphors can sometimes give you the flavor of something, a steady diet of them applied to math/physics matters -- with an attendant reluctance to include actual mathematics -- leads to a bit of murkiness. Stewart's metaphors did not always work for me; however, maybe a second read would clarify some things. I'm getting used to thinking that I just might not be smart enough.

It might be time to break out some of the great LongPoems of my youth again ... it's been ages since I read Williams' Paterson, for example. The Dream Songs is another favorite, though by now I've gone through it multiple times & I might be a bit fragile for it at the moment.

You need to read Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton -- there's a chunk in it about using stars to inspire a sense of perspective and awe among us secular folks! (Hint: the library will have this... :-) )

Stars? Who can even *see* those any more? :(

Sorry. I'm in a mood.

On another Discworld book. Death is a main character. It's very funny.

Wow. Willa Cather. Wow.

I need to come up with a good (read "generally / widely palatable but not necessarily unchallenging") book for my work book club, 300 pages or less, and I am having a devil of a time deciding.

At one point I had provisionally decided on Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, but I don't know any more.

I've decided on The Quickening Maze for my book group. From the reviews I imagine some will not like it, but I've got to stop trying to please everyone.

Very much -- cough -- enjoying L'Assommoir, though the translator's decision to go with "Cockneyish" for the street slang took a bit of getting used to ....

I am having a really good time reading a real-honest-to-gosh astronomy text -- van den Bergh's Galaxies of the Local Group. Makes me want to dig in again, get out and do some observing. I'm reminded that my main trouble with amateur astronomy was -- as has been the case with EVERYTHING I have assayed -- the other people doing it. So maybe I just need to get out and do it alone.

Ironically, it gets lonely ... @_@

At this rate, I'll about match my count for last year. I find myself contemplating the length of books I want to read. Feels odd.

Crazily enough I don't plan to read any books this weekend ... instead, I'm going to play catchup with my magazines, with which I am woefully behind: Asimov's Science Fiction, Science News and The New York Review of Science Fiction.

Have a good weekend, everyone. I'm supposed to go on a hike tomorrow in Western MA. We'll see. I started suffering bouts of vertigo last Sunday and, while it hasn't been as bad since it has not entirely disappeared, either. So much for being in a damned body.

(Why does my 'link' to NYRSF go to Well's The War of the Worlds ...?)

Hello, self!

Stross' Iron Sunrise was good, as all the books of his I've read have been, but it felt ... familiar somehow.

Plus there were some rather irritating continuity errors. A good read, but not a great one.

I had to temporarily replace The Manga Guide to Calculus with a Perl programming book, since I had a Perl-related meltdown at work yesterday & I am feeling the pressure of being a not-quite-smart-enough employee. =(

Am reading Zola's The Belly of Paris. Even in translation, he is remarkable. :^)

UPDATE: I must add that the Oxford Classics translation by Brian Nelson is extremely good (I say this, of course, _sans_ the ability to read the original).

Who else mentioned The Manga Guide to Calculus?... not many candidates... ah, yes, swynn / Ninja Math Librarian.

I am feeling the pressure of being a not-quite-smart-enough employee.
Been there. :-)

I have the great (mis)fortune of working amidst a bunch of geniuses/genii. :^/

I had actually started to read John Muir's The Story of my Boyhood and Youth on my Kindle, but ran into a serious problem with the Gutenberg transcription. I checked other formats on Gutenberg and all were the same. Disappointing.

45: (mis)fortune
Indeed, a mixed blessing.

Here you are! I'm reading the first Discworld novel now, but not enjoying it as much as I did the "Watch" novels.

Didn't much relish The Quickening Maze, I confess. Well written, but not my cuppa tea.

I'm on such a Zola kick! It's fun!

Oh, and I reported that error in the Muir text to Gutenberg ... and they fixed it ... and thanked me.

Go, me.

Rah, rah!!!

Only you could go on a Zola kick. Well, you and Ilana (Smiler69); you should go & visit her threads.

The Belly of Paris was pretty magnificent. Not a complicated plot, by any means, but the setting and descriptions and many of the set pieces are beyond belief. Great parable of the Fat and the Thin.

I am trying to revive this group, if anyone is interested:

http://www.librarything.com/groups/madonzola

My posts are dull as dishwater, but there they are.

Wrote a quick email to Brian Nelson, translator of The Belly of Paris, to thank him for a wonderful job. He wrote back. Karma point for me.

It's interesting -- we get excited when we hear from authors, but unless they are all horribly blase, they are probably just as excited to hear from us... Just a thought after being at BookExpo, where one of the books I snagged was the next by a historical fiction author who wrote a fab novel set in Renaissance Italy -- and then promptly disappeared from the radar for 20 years!! He was so thrilled when I told him I had loved Duchess of Milan. Malice of Fortune is going straight to the top of my to-read pile (though I doubt it's the kind of fare you really want to read...)

Oh that's really great! :^)

It seems I've been making a habit lately of emailing authors when I have something nice to say about their work, or have a question (in Nelson's case, I asked if knew whether Oxford World Classics planned on making _all_ the Zola translations available for Kindle ... he said he'd ask). The response has always been positive.

This is one way in which the exponential increase of ease-in-communication in the past couple of decades has made a _positive_ difference in my life (as opposed to, say, the difference the cell phone has made).

Call it Sleep is good, but ... somehow I am less than overwhelmed. It seems a bit overwrought and labored (at times).

UPDATE: It picks up considerably as one goes. I think I was a bit thrown by all the dialect -- I'm used to it now.

For my work book club next month, we are reading Dandelion Wine. I am guardedly excited: I read this in my early teens and thought it was wonderful ... my fear is that the book's appeal will be largely limited to readers of, well, around that age.

I recall that it evokes the feeling of the Midwest eerily well, which also makes me wonder whether those who didn't grow up in the Midwest can appreciate it.

Her First American, by the way, is an excellent novel: superbly observed and executed. Its characters made me ache, in the best way, and like living people they broke my heart.

Looking forward to reading Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher. I very much liked his The Philosophy of Schopenhauer when I read it in grad school ... and I rather like the notion of a philosopher's memoir.

I have known plenty of people (and apparently Richard Feynman was of this ilk) who believe that philosophy is a lot of navel-gazing, and is good for nothing. I have never been able to go there, myself.

Isaac Bashevis Singer is tha bomb. Over and out.

I am pressing ever further into French for Reading. This is the book I used to help satisfy the language requirement of my Ph.D. program back in the late 80s. At the time, it was a 20 year old book: now it's over twice as old -- and still great! I call it great because it works and is not boring.

One of my goals: to read Zola in the original French.

Thomas Carlyle. Sartor Resartus. Aggressively strange little book!

Lately I have found myself grateful for the riches to be found for free at gutenberg.org: the Kindle-formatted texts there could keep one busy for some time! Of course one has to put up with the occasional mistakes in transcription ... but there are typos, too, in printed editions.

I am mostly keeping to English-language works, since a lot of the translations available at Gutenberg of works in other languages are quite old and have been justly superseded (e.g. Vizetelly's translations of Zola).

A rainy July 4th morning. I am reading.

As I feared, re-reading Dandelion Wine has something of the rattling of cornstalks in winter wind to it: I find myself more conscious of the wizard and his wand than susceptible to his spells ...

And Bradbury is a wizard, have no doubt. I think in his heart of hearts he was always a fantasist and never, truly, that much-maligned thing: a science fiction author. I think this is true chiefly because Bradbury the poet feels, as Keats did before him, that science has a tendency to "unweave the rainbow" and dispel the mystery that poets like Bradbury and Keats cherish.

Great god ... A Journal of the Plague Year! Defoe is astonishing. I remember reading Moll Flanders in college for a course in the comic novel, but don't recall that I liked it very much. DD was probably too subtle for me then, too "normal." But now I want more, more, more.

Hi Glenn! There's some interesting reading you have done! The Belly of Paris, Call it Sleep, A Journal of the Plague Year - all on my to-read-list!

One of my goals: to read Zola in the original French.
Oh, I have got a similar goal. Someday I want to read Les Misérables in French. Until so far I have just achieved a quarter of the book... But I guess that now I will have more time and patience to read books by French authors in their original language.

who believe that philosophy is a lot of navel-gazing, and is good for nothing
I think people who are saying something like that haven't really delt with philosophical writing. I think you need to know the rules to be able to enjoy it. It's similiar to a football game - personally I think it's boring and useless, but maybe if I would care about the rules, I could understand what it gives to so many people.
I don't want to say that everything philosophers say is precious, but they can give you a great insight in the mechanics of human life (Take e.g. Albert Camus or Michel Foucault!).

Am not sure about reading the memoirs of a philosopher, just because philosophy makes my head spin, so....

Anyway, just a wave. too hot here to think. Cat demanding Greenies (that would be Cassie) and there are none in the house. Reading very light stuff compared to you!

Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher is really, really good -- particularly in his discussions of various great philosophers and the philosophical problems that have haunted him over the years.

There is substantial material about his life, but somehow this felt ... displayed at a remove, somehow, as though through plexiglass. Maybe it was the slightly arch British thing. Magee mentions sex quite often, but doesn't go so far as to tell about any of his love affairs (though he does say they were great). It's not that I have a prurient interest in such stuff, but as a "Confessions" the book occasionally feels a bit bloodless. Magee's real passion, not surprisingly, is for philosophy (and music, particularly Wagner).

I just picked up Earl Shorris' The Life and Times of Mexico. A long one. I have a love of Mexico that deepens every time I go there.

I am at 40 books so far in the early part of July, so I seem to be on track. :^)

Totally OT:

Can I just hide out in books until this stupid election is over?

> 67: It's probably because of being pummeled by ads for "Les Miz," but I've just not felt any pull toward Victor Hugo. I'm sure it's my loss ...

Zola though ...

My secret is that I want to learn French well enough to allow me to live there one day. I'm not terribly fond of the country of my birth any more.

> 68 Suz, I am nothing if not ambitious. Rationally I know that it is impossible I will ever read/know everything worth reading/knowing. But I press on ...

One day I will re-read The Faerie Queene !

#71: My secret is that I want to learn French well enough to allow me to live there one day.
Been there, done that - only for one year, but it was fantastic. And usually the best way to learn a language is living in the country.

Is there a new movie adaptation of Les misérables coming out? But I understand it very well - I'm not very eager to read stuff that's too much hyped as well. But the movie version with Gerard Depardieu is recommendable.

No, I meant the Broadway musical. I don't like musicals. :^)

I think I need to read more science and math, over all.

I am actually thinking I may need to read less and do more ordinary things, like organize my life. Sigh. And no, I'll never read Spenser... of that, at least, I'm fairly certain!!

Aw, shoot, Spenser is not to be missed! I agree with C. S. Lewis' statement in his (wonderful) volume of the Oxford History of English Literature (I heavily paraphrase) that "against the tidal flow of Spenser, even Shakespeare seems like tinsel against moonlight."

My 51st birthday tomorrow.

Um, huzzah?

Oh absolutely, huzzah!

Better than 61, no? And better than 46, 47, etc, if I recollects correctly??

Spenser is hard work...

... hard work is FUN!! :D

My but that Mark Twain is funny. My, my. :^)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!

Thank you! :^)

I couldn't find a cake with that many candles, so... :)

It IS a lot of candles! How the heck did I wind up here?

I hope you had a nice birthday - are there any literary presents worth mentioning?

Well, no. Not yet, anyway. There's gonna be a small belated celebration next weekend, and I happen to know there are some packages from Amazon involved ... but these days, that doesn't necessarily mean books.

I picked up The Secret Agent (from Gutenberg, on Kindle -- gosh, I am loving Gutenberg!) for my work Book Club, but have put it down again because the meeting's weeks away and it is a short book (also a favorite of mine ... with one of my favorite sentences ever).

So I think I'll pick up something else, something I have hard copy of, in the interest of whittling down the ever-growing piles hereabouts. But ... what?

UPDATE OF THRILLS: I wandered around my bookshelves and nothing leaped out at me. Guess I will go to the gym.

I decided on The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod.

It seems to be quite beautifully written.

#89: Guess I will go to the gym.
I hoped to read something about a bookshop, what a disappointment. But the gym isn't such a bad alternative... will go there tomorrow.
And I know that: Shelves overflowing with books, but nothing to read.

#90: Your choice looks very intriguing. Looking forward to your opinion.

> 91 Well, it is steampunk or steampunk-like, and I don't much care for that whole ... realm ... but so far I like the book. So it must be doing something right. :^)

If it is steampunk, it is somehow not very, well, very punky. It's more elegant than punky.

Writing is quite good but the book -- as so many books I read these days -- seems to have missed a final proofread. So many typos!

There is a quite frankly horrifying and heartbreaking sequence where the narrator's mother morphs into a monstrosity and ultimately commits suicide. That bit alone makes the novel worthwhile, but I really think MacLeod is a fine writer.

For no good reason, I have thrown in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. It seems pleasant and relatively uncomplicated.

Turns out it was one weird little book.

I know this is hardly a "standard" place to post about such things, but ... my girlfriend has asked for a "relationship hiatus." So I will probably be reading even more than previously, now.

Sigh. Life. My life.

I am currently finishing up an astronomy book from around 1909. I love the old style of writing popular science: so enthusiastic, even to the point of purple prose.

Plus it is striking how wrong we were about so many things!

Some things never change. Other things always do.

Back to Conrad's The Secret Agent. It hardly seems possible that I wasn't sure I liked Conrad when I first encountered him. This was the book that made me a "fan" -- if that's the right word. But I'd forgotten how very good it was, and is.

The riches at Gutenberg are really outstanding.

The single caveat I have is that if one is monolingual, as I am, non-English works are typically only available in translations that have long been superseded (and with good reason). This is not always the case: I believe the Dryden/Clough translation of Plutarch's Lives is still well-regarded ... plus there are the occasional wonderful oddities, like Pope's Homer. But if you are looking for good, contemporary translations of, say, the novels of Zola, it's best to look elsewhere.

So, does anyone know any good "breakup books"?

... and I don't mean anything religious or numbing-self-help-pabulum-y, I mean something substantive and, well, substantive.

Maybe I should start reading Plato or Aristotle or something.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

So, to answer my own question in 99, Tom Jones has turned out to be a good breakup book, simply because it is funny.

My reading is very Western white male centric. I should work on that.

I am now enrolled in a course at Swinburne Astronomy Online. I'm really incredibly excited. The class starts next week. My time for reading will, I expect, be somewhat curtailed ... we'll see if I can still get to 75 books this year.

Made it to 50! And it's September 1. :^)

Try Plato. His cave will offer an interesting counterpart to the stars...

Suz,

Well, I am rather fond of caves!

The Storm was intriguing, but not even in the same universe as A Journal of the Plague Year.

Maybe it's time to pick up another Pratchett. I need a laugh. Of course one-time gf Paula gifted me A Walk in the Woods, which could be fun. The one Bill Bryson book I've read (The Lost Continent, his first, I think) made me laugh out loud.

Crescent and Star is really superb. I am considering a trip to Turkey next year and am taking background books out of the library. This one was a real find: succinct, very well-written and seems to be the product of a very substantial background in the country. I recommend it highly.

EDIT: this extraordinary book is only marred slightly by what I think is kind of a gimmicky ending. Great stuff.

My personal lit. jury is still sort of out on Yashar Kemal. The Wind From the Plain often has (for me) that is-this-a-mediocre-translation, do-people-really-talk-like-this feeling about it. At other times, wonderful. It's also overwrought, or seems so to my too-cool-for-thou Western eyes. There's a lot of yelling, and muttering, and rending of garments. But maybe it is, in its way, true to life. I'm willing to finish out the trilogy and perhaps then I will have a firmer opinion.

So I have drawn abreast of my 2011 total. Woo hoo!! All I have to do is read 14 books in approximately 2 1/2 months and I'll make it.

Congratulations on your milestone!

Hi Glenn! I haven't been here for a long time. Congratulations on reaching your milestone. I haven't yet given up hope to reach my 75 this year, too - but I still have 17 books to go.

I'm you found the right breakup book (#100) that helped you. Even though I'm not in the situation you were in August, I might take a look at Tom Jones, because "simply funny" is always good.

Have you already worked at your reading habits (#101)? I noticed a similiar habit, because I love authors e.g. John Irving, Ian McEwan or Paul Auster. I would like to read more female authors and I'm always looking for Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and African writers.

How is/was your Astronomy Online course? It might be a dumb question, but... what exactly are you learning there? Mapping stars, looking for constellations?

This summer someone recommended Pratchett, but I'm not sure, I'll like it. Which one of his books would you recommend? Maybe my library owns it...

Crescent and Star sounds great. This goes definitely on my wishlist.

Have a nice weekend!

5 to go! and I have a whole month!

You are doing better than I... I'm hopeless behind on my 12 in 12 challenge!

That's great, Glenn! I still have to read 9 books. And I'm afraid that it won't be easy, because Christmas time is the busiest time of the year in my job. I'm already curious what you're going to choose as your final fives.

Suz,

But haven't you read like almost 400 books or something?? :^)

Kathy,

I started Gogol's Dead Souls this morning for my workplace book club. That's likely to be one. A lot of the other things I'm reading right now are behemoths, with the exception of A History of Vector Analysis which will go slowly for different reasons (though it's great stuff).

Sidling up to the end of 2012. I have exited both Facebook and Google+, so this is really my last "social networking" outlet. It's nice that it is focused -- on something I love!

I don't feel like holidays. My cats, who are both quite old, have been very sick, and I am overwhelmed by my job though still grateful I am there at all.

What would I do without you, books?

Lead a more mobile life, I think sometimes. ;^)

Hi Glenn!

Stopping with Facebooks and Google+ is a wise decision for sure. I'm still on Facebook, but only because I have to manage my company's site. All these sites are so time-consuming and sometimes I wish I could cut down my time spent on the Internet in general. Maybe that's something for a new year's resolution. :)

I think I know what you mean. In general I love my job, but at the moment it gets a bit too much. Christmas time is the most important season in my business in general - moreover we're understaffed. This weekend was the first time that I was in a quite holiday-like mood: It has been snowing all week long and today my family met because of a birthday. And after that I had the possibility to hide myself away behind high stacks of books. Mobility is soo overrated. ;)

Is there so much going on at your working place? Is it very stressfull?
I hope you're cats are ok, again.

Have a nice weekend!

P.S. Oh my, Gogol - another name on my list of shame (authors I haven't read a book of yet). And A History of Vector Analysis - that sounds... well, exciting. ;) Good to hear that you like it.

It looks like I won't be able to make the book club meeting this week, but will continue with Dead Souls anyhow.

I've been 'cleaning' my apt this weekend ... which has of course involved shuffling around the stacks of books.

Are you enjoying the Gogol? Do you recommend?

Smooches to Pez, and a hiss in the direction of Skutch. :-)

Oh, I'm still one book short of 400 this year! Obviously flagging. It has been a v. frenetic year workwise. At least, that's my excuse. It's also been bad for headaches.

I'm still one book short of 400 this year! Obviously flagging.

LOL! For the record, you flagging is record achieving for some of us! .... and I do hope the headaches subside for you, both in frequency and intensity. I don't suffer from headaches but my other half does, as does a colleague of mine and when their headaches are bad, they are BAD!

Suz, seriously.

"Flagging?" Snort.

Gogol is pretty wonderful. I'm reading the Pevear / Volokhonsky translation ... they are of course the current Russian translation superstars. Their Anna Karenina was really good.

Sorry to hear about headaches.

Sweet Pez appreciates the smooches. She's been doing pretty well, considering all she's been through.

Oh, and Kathy, A History of Vector Analysis was AWESOME! ;^)

One to go! Who's it gonna be?

You've gotta make it a Pratchett...

I may get one more Discworld in before the end of the year ... but the next finish will probably be the Gogol. I'm very much digging it. I read it years ago but don't recall liking it _this_ much.

Dee. Oh. En. Ee!!

I did it!

Congrats! :D

Congrats!

Looking over the list -- it was a pretty solid reading year. It was the year of Terry Pratchett, Emile Zola, Daniel Defoe and Nikolai Gogol, as well as the year I really dug into the riches at Project Gutenberg.

On other fronts, with the exception of my having started to take astronomy courses, 2012 has been another dog: my girlfriend dumped me; my cats have gotten old and extremely sick; my job humbles and overwhelms me in equal measures.

At the risk of sounding downbeat -- oh hell, when do I not? -- I no longer wonder on which side of Fortune's bell curve I lie. Oh well. At least I can still read.

Until my vision goes.

Here's to a better, happier year in 2013.

75 -- yeah!!!!

Istanbul in 2013??

Suz,

Well, maybe my vet can afford to go ...

Congratulations on reaching 75!

The fact that Gogol did not finish Dead Souls and, in fact _burned_ the manuscript of Part 2 (though some of it survives) is a major cultural tragedy.

Kind of like Blake abandoning Vala: or, the Four Zoas though I believe I am simply parroting Northrop Frye, there.

All I do is parrot. I have no original thoughts.

I may try to go through all of 2013 without buying myself a single book. I wonder if I can do it? I have so many things on my shelves I need to read.

128: Congrats!
137: A group for this very purpose: http://www.librarything.com/groups/root2013readourownto .

Oh, that's great -- I just joined. :^)

Thank you!

I lost my wonderful cat Pez this morning. I'm devastated. She was such a sweet, funny girl.

Farewell, Ms Pez. She was a lovely butterball of a cat...

She sure was that. :^) There will never be another like her.

*virtual hugs*

I miss my Pez so much. So does her evil orange brother Skutch.

I admit I struggle with the idea of Skutch as having feelings. Destructive instincts, sure. Feelings? But then, he was her evil twin... :-)

Feel for you. I still see Jasper out of the corner of my eye sometimes. It astonishes me that Molly now cuddles up quite readily to Tigger instead (who tolerates her) and seems insistent on spending a lot of time on my lap as well. I think this is cat-speak for "I miss my sibling."

So, next year I must not only read Gogol, but also Zola?? Oh dear... How will I find time for my light & frivolous stuff???

Gogol and Zola ain't light and frivolous? ;^)

Only in your parallel universe, Glenn!

I miss my Pez so much. :(

Tomorrow I pick up Pez's ashes from the vet. Sighs.

Ha -- made it to 80! The next book I finish will be in 2013.

Hi Glenn! 80 books are fantastic - you beat me by two. :) I just want to wish you a happy New Year and all the best for 2013.

P.S. I was really sorry to read about Ms Pez - she was a beautiful cat. I know how hard it is to loose a furry friend and I hope that you feel a little bit better. (I hope that it's not too weird to write something happy and something sad in the same answer...)