75 Books Challenge for jhale

I just found this group, so my first post will be catching up with what I've already started and what I've already finished this year.

Completed:
An Edible History of Humanity
This book is a quite interesting read on how the history of food has shaped the history of the world. At times I think he stretches a bit, but the book was a very enjoyable read.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
I decided to read the complete series this year in order to have some idea of what my kids are reading. My oldest son has read them all three or four times and my younger kids are starting to read them. The first book here was cute and enjoyable and very much for children. It lacks any sort of depth that typifies classic children's literature.

Currently Reading:
One Year Alone with God: 366 Devotions on the Names of God
Reading one entry a day as intended, so I'll mark this complete 12/31.

The Handmaid's Tale

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight

SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled

I'm off to a decent start. Two completed and five more in progress. As you can probably guess, I never seem to be able to read one book at a time.

Welcome! That first one looks interesting.

Oh, good to hear about An Edible History of Humanity! I picked that one up at the Borders closing sale last year.

Welcome to the group, Jason!

I have read three books now.

I finished The Handmaid's Tale last night. I have mixed feelings on this one. While it was very well written, I find it hard to believe that Ms. Atwood is not a kook. At times, it showed through too much and overall tended to ruin the reading experience. I think I will give her one more try.

I began reading The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories by Rudyard Kipling today. I intend to read more Kipling this year as I really enjoy his writing.

When I joined this group I had not really stopped to think about the pace that would be required to read 75 books in a year. I probably won't make it because I tend to read longer books and I won't alter what I'm reading to meet some arbitrary goal. That said, I think it will be fun to try and to track what I've read for the year.

Four down.

I finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets today. I cannot say much good about this one. It lacked all of the charm of the first book.

I began reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I'm starting to doubt I can make it through these.

I began reading Salt: A World History yesterday.

Welcome to the group! You may find that your reading pace magically increases because of all the good book recommendations you'll find here.

Are you really determined to continue with the Harry Potter books despite not liking them? I'd say you've given them a fair chance. At the very least, maybe you could take a break from them for a while.

I'm about half way through the third one now, and I'm enjoying it a bit more. As I said in my initial post, I'm reading them mainly because my kids have spent so much time reading them, and I'm not familiar with them at all. I also have a life long problem of finishing something I've started reading, even when I hate it. I would never have finished Joyce's Ulysses otherwise.

If I stop reading them, I probably would not pick them back up. It's also the reason I read so many books simultaneously. It helps.

Five down.

I finished Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight today. This is a fantastic book. This was the third of the Library of America compilations of this sort I've read, the others being their book on baseball and their book on sailing. They have all been very good and I highly recommend them.

I've began reading The Great American Novel by Philip Roth

Six down.

I finished The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories today. I really enjoyed this one. Three of the stories I had read elsewhere, but enjoyed re-reading them. The Man Who Would Be King was the best of the lot and was made into a great movie with Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Seven down.

I finished Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban today. I liked it better than the second book.

I started Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Eight down.

I finished SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled today. There probably are not very many tech people in this group but I try to read 5-6 technical books a year being a Database Administrator / Programmer. In case there are any SQL people reading this, this is a very good Intermediate level SQL Server book full of tips. I've been working as a DBA for a long time and I was still able to pick up several good pointers in this book. It is well worth the money.

I also began Coming Apart: The State of White America today. It's very interesting so far.

Nine down.

I finished The Information Diet today. I received it yesterday as part of the LT Early Reviewers program and as always when I receive one of these, I read it right away.

My review is here. In short I did not like the book. This is the third book I have received from the Early Reviewers program and the first one I did not like.

I began reading Real-world Functional Programming this morning. I'm not sure if I'll make it through. I've tried reading a few other functional programming books in the past and not made it to the end.

Ten down.

I finished Coming Apart: The State of White America last night. As always, Mr. Murray writes a compelling, fascinating, and depressing book. Here is Ross Douthat's take on the book, with which I mostly agree.

That one popped onto my wishlist last week. I'm hoping to get to it soon.

Eleven down. Twelve down.

I finished two books today. One good, one pretty terrible.

First the good. I finished Salt: A World History. It started out a bit scattered and was driving me crazy trying to read it, but either it became a little more structured as it went on, or I just got used to it. In the end, I'm glad I stuck with it. I learned a lot of interesting facts in this book.

Now the bad. I finished The Great American Novel also. Philip Roth is either hit or miss for me - mostly miss. This one took me a long time to get through because it was just not very good. The humor started out funny but grew tiresome very quickly. For anyone wanting to read Roth, I would recommend Nemesis.

Thirteen down.

I finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire today. It wasn't bad. I'm going to withhold further comment on the Harry Potter books until I've finished reading all of them.

I began reading two books today - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. I'm excited about the Bill James book and it's getting me in the mood for baseball season. I've been looking at this book on the store shelf for several years now and I finally picked it up to read it. It is phenomenal so far.

Have you seen our Spring Training group read thread? It's here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/132629

No, I had not. Thanks.

I've started reading two more books over the last couple of days:

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Windows Powershell in Action

I put down the functional programming book I was reading. I didn't have the energy for that right now and started the Powershell book in its place.

Fourteen down.

I finished Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time today. It was very good. My only quibble with it is that I would have liked some diagrams and technical information which it completely lacked, but I believe this was done on purpose to keep it a casual read.

I also started two more books today - World in the balance : the historic quest for an absolute system of measurement and Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength.

Fifteen down.

I finished World in the balance: the historic quest for an absolute system of measurement. It was quite a disappointment reading this after the Longitude book. They had similar aims, but this one did not succeed.

I abandoned reading Powershell In Action. It was a decent book but it was not quite what I expected. I was looking for something to help me get started and I found it to be more of a reference.

I began reading Think Stats instead. I've completed the first chapter. I am using it the opposite of its intended use. The goal of the book is to teach statistics to Python programmers. I know the statistics covered in this book quite well, so I'm using it to learn Python instead. So far I've found it to be far more interesting than any Python book I've tried to read.

Sixteen down.

Occasionally I get in the mood to read something completely frivolous. Yesterday I read I rant, therefore I am and quite enjoyed it.

Seventeen down.

I finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

I started Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Eighteen down.

I finished Think Stats. It was pretty good - probably better when used in conjunction with the course it

I started Dive into Python.

Nineteen and Twenty down.

I finished Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Willpower was quite an interesting book. A little silly on its celebrity focus, but full of good information.

I started Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I plan on trying to blow through this one this week so I can be done with them.

21 read.

I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this weekend. By the time I had finished the last book, I no longer felt like these were a complete waste of time. I spent too much time reading them, but I suppose for the look I can get on one of my kids faces by throwing out an obscure Harry Potter reference (they don't know I read them), it was almost worth the time.

There is a reasonable amount of good in these books. I don't feel like my kids are getting bad lessons, manners or habits from them, unlike they do from other books that now pass as children's literature. I must say that I am surprised they are as popular as they are and that she has made a fortune from them.

On a side note, I have started watching the movie adaptations and they are truly dreadful. They make the books look good in comparison.

22 read.

I finished Dive into Python this morning.

It is a pretty good introduction to Python about the right level if you have programmed in other languages.

I began reading When I Was A Child I Read Books and Turing's Cathedral today.

I saw Turing's Cathedral in the bookstore this weekend. How is it?

So far, I am really enjoying Turing's Cathedral. I'm a computer programmer and love the subject of the history of computers. It's really well written and keeps my interest anyway.

23 read.

I've been out of town - Internet and television free for a while. I did read The Great Stagnation while I was away. Mr. Cowen makes an excellent argument. I hope he is wrong.

24 and 25 read.

I finished When I Was a Child I Read Books and Getting Things Done.

I was ultimately disappointed in the new book of essays by Marilynne Robinson. The only essay in the book really worth reading is the title essay. I received the first hint something was wrong with this book when she engaged in a juvenile moral relativism reminiscent of the abhorrent Butter Battle Book when she defended Stalin's reaction to the U.S. and the U.K.'s provocations. I'm not even going to bother typing a rebuttal to what she wrote. As the book wore on, she continued to drop partisan non-sequiturs denouncing partisanship. It eventually grew so tiresome, it ruined the book and any good that might have come out of it.

I can only judge Getting Things Done one way, he did not convince me to try the methodology.

Edit: I neglected to mention that I love the fiction of Marilynne Robinson. She is one of the very few modern novelists I will read.

I began three new books this week.

Windows Internals
The power of habit (Excellent so far)
In pursuit of the unknown : 17 equations that changed the world

26 and 27 read.

I finished In pursuit of the unknown : 17 equations that changed the world and Turing's Cathedral.

In pursuit of the unknown was just OK. It was mildly interesting.

Regarding Turing's Cathedral, the history aspect of the book was great. Dyson touches on many fields in recounting the history including mathematics, astronomy, and weather in addition to the history of early computing. However, where the book goes wrong is near the end when he tries to tie computing into Biology. Dyson is not the first to do this and his attempt, like most of the others, is laughably silly at best (such as when he claims the era when computers are now controlling humans) and morally reprehensible at worst (such as when he writes that it would be logically and morally superior for souls to find a home in computers). He writes of applications and virtual machines as "digital life forms" that can reproduce. This is the stuff of science fiction and it there it should remain. This is a small part of the book, and if you can ignore it, there is much to recommend in this history.

28 read.

I can't believe I'm ahead of schedule.

I finished The power of habit. It is an excellent book. It covers near the same territory as Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength, but is a much better book.

I also started reading The Great Gatsby and Working at the Ballpark.

29 read.

I finished The Great Gatsby. What a fantastic novel. I've read four other Fitzgerald books and never saw any hint that he was capable of this level of writing.

I started reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I'm not sure I will be able to finish this. I try to read one new modern author (post WWII) a year and I've had good luck in recent years (Mark Helprin and Cormac McCarthy), but I'm not impressed at all with Franzen. I'm having a really hard time figuring out the glowing reviews on this one.

I also started reading The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation. It is quite good so far.

30 read.

I finished Windows Internals today. Not for the casual Windows guy, but full of useful information about the OS. It gets better with every edition.

31 read.

I finished Chess is Child's Play. Highly recommended to teach kids to play chess. I posted a review on the book page.

32 read.

I finished The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation. It is a very well written history of Bell Labs contributions to electronics and computers.

I started In pursuit of the traveling salesman : mathematics at the limits of computation and Programming Entity Framework.

33, 34, and 35 read.

I've been so busy, I have not had time to post any updates in the last two weeks.

I finished The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. What a fantastic baseball book. The best I've ever read.

I also finished Working at the Ballpark. This is a nice collection of interviews with nearly every job you can think of in professional baseball, even the hot dog vendors and ticket scalpers. There are some great stories in here.

And finally, I finished Freedom. This was a painful book to read. The ending almost, and that's a big almost, made it worth reading. I probably need my head examined, but I've started reading The Corrections. Something makes me think this one is going to be even more of a slog.

I also began reading The Best American Mystery Stories 2011, A Clockwork Orange, and The Counterlife.

Nice stuff! Working at the Ballpark sounds like a good one.

36 read.

I finished A Clockwork Orange. I tried to read this when I was much younger and quickly grew frustrated at the language used by the narrator. I've had many people tell me over the years if you just stick with it, it gets easy to understand before long. They were right. Not only is this a fantastic novel, the language actually enhances it once you get used to it. I found myself experiencing an unusual intellectual engagement while reading this book.

37 and 38 read.

I finished reading The Best American Mystery Stories 2011. These were quite bland and uninteresting - nothing special here.

I also finished The Counterlife. I was starting to question why I own and read so many Philip Roth books and then I read this one which is quite good. Each of the five long chapters changes the history from the previous chapters slightly so that alternate events are presented as one interconnected story. In the hands of a lesser novelist, this would have been an awful book to read. I especially enjoyed the chapter where Roth imagines what would happen to his notes and writings after his death.

I began reading Freedom's Forge and Coders at Work, both of which are very good so far.

Coders at Work sounds interesting. I'll keep an eye out for it!

I'm half way through it and it is excellent (if you're a programmer).

39 and 40 read.

I finished Freedom's Forge and The Corrections.

I'll start with The Corrections. I must say I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked this novel. I read Freedom a few weeks ago, and it was so bad I almost could not finish it. The Corrections on the other hand shows Franzen has the potential to be a very good novelist. I have not read anything else of his, and at the moment I don't plan to. The Corrections excels at every thing that Franzen tried to do in Freedom, but failed at. After reading The Corrections I was left wondering whether the dysfunctional family is his shtick, or whether he tried to follow up the success of The Corrections by writing the same type of novel. I hope to see something good from him in the future.

Freedom's Forge is a fantastic history of American business retooling for WWII and helped to turn the tide of the war. If you've never read anything by Arthur Herman, you should. He competes with Paul Johnson for my favourite historian. His To Rule The Waves is probably his best work, but Freedom's Forge is a close second. As Andrew Roberts said of this book, only a writer of Herman's calibre could make a story of Industrial production exciting.

I started reading Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet and The Wings of the Dove.

41, 42, and 43 read.

I finished Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, The Wings of the Dove, and Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World.

In order of best to worst (and they were all mediocre at best):

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World was the second Michael Lewis book I have read. While only slightly less entertaining than Moneyball, I couldn't help but feel that while most of the information in the book was accurate, on some minor points Lewis was pulling the reader's leg. It is worth reading, but really there wasn't much in here I have not read elsewhere.

The Wings of the Dove was my latest attempt to like a Henry James book. I have read several of his books and with the exception of The Turn of the Screw, I really have not enjoyed any of them. When I see a Henry James quote, even a lengthy citation of a paragraph or two, I always think what beautiful prose he writes. But when I sit down to read an entire work of his, I almost always lose interest. I enjoy other fiction from the same era, so that's not the issue. I've never been able to figure out why I don't like his writing.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet was the most promising of the bunch when I first started reading it, but the more I read of this book, the less I liked it. The big problem for me was that although I believe the author is in his mid 30's, he writes as though he is in his mid teens. There was about 20 pages of interesting content surrounded by unrelated, scatter-brained musings and anecdotes between the covers of this one.

I started reading Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy is Wrong and The Marrow of Tradition.

44 and 45 read.

I finished reading Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy is Wrong and The Tyranny of Cliches.

Unintended Consequences was one of the best books I have read so far this year. Mr. Conard gets it exactly right and lays out his arguments in a very logical fashion.

I really like Jonah Goldberg. This is the first book of his I have read, but I have been reading him in National Review for years. This is a good book, however the people who would benefit most from reading this book won't read it. I really prefer Jonah's short magazine pieces to this book. It is there that his wit shines through.

46, 47, and 48 read.

I finished The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills, Coders at Work, and The Marrow of Tradition.

In order of my enjoyment:

Coders at Work is a fantastic look at some very bright computer programmers. It has a limited audience however as only programmers will understand the in-depth interviews and topics covered.

I received The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills as part of the Library Thing Early Reviewers program. It is an OK book at best. It would make a good graduation present as it seems to be most appropriate for that age. Older adults will find most, if not everything in this book to be common sense.

The Marrow of Tradition does not read well today. It is full of one-dimensional characters and cliches that are worn and were probably worn at the time this was written. It is about the post Civil War south and about the difficulty of removing the entrenched racism. Well intentioned, but very dull.

I started reading Lolita, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, and Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society.

49 read.

I finished Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society. It is a well written book by a very smart man. In it he calls for more experimentation in Social Sciences (which I agree completely with) and government. I'm not so sure his ideas for government would ever really work and I think the Social Sciences are too politicized to have any effective peer review of experimental data. I enjoyed the book though.

50 read.

I finished Lolita. I have never read a book that made me more uncomfortable. It was wonderfully written and a fascinating novel, but very hard to read.

I started reading The Aeneid and The Good Earth.

51 read.

I finished reading How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I recommend it highly.

52 and 53 read.

I finished The Good Earth and Programming Entity Framework.

I read The Good Earth when I was in high school (many years ago). I still remember finishing it and I couldn't wait to get the sequels from the library as it ended in a somewhat indeterminate state. I grew up in a small town and the library did not have the followup books, so I was not able to read them. There were no bookstores in town either.

I loved the book then. Reading it now was like the experience of seeing The Dukes of Hazzard or Fantasy Island as an adult. I have no idea why I liked it. It is written in bland, mediocre language - about what I would expect of the average college literature student. It is not much of a novel, it is more of a cultural tour, and the culture being an ugly barbaric one makes it worse. The fact that it won a Pulitzer Prize and Buck won the Nobel prize is laughable.

Programming Entity Framework is the Entity Framework book to read if you need to use EF.

I started reading The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, Dandelion Wine, and Sql for Smarties.

54 and 55 read.

I finished The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun and Dandelion Wine.

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is a very interesting book, and a good one for what it is. First, it must be noted that there is no evidence Tolkien ever intended this for publication. Second, this is not an attempt by Tolkien at beautiful poetry, it is his attempt to replicate and ancient poetic form which no longer exists - one that aims to "punch the reader in the nose." It becomes a little tedious after a while, but is well worth reading.

I am a big Ray Bradbury fan. Dandelion Wine may be my least favorite of his books. I know what he is aiming at, but it doesn't work for me. A few of the individual stories are good, but overall, this book is just OK.

I started reading The Pragmatic Programmer.

56 read.

I finished Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society. It was disappointing. The book was not written by, but edited by Bill Bryson. It's my own fault for not noticing this when I purchased it. The bigger problem is the title is misleading. It's not a history of the Royal Society at all. It's a collection of generally uninteresting and completely unrelated essays about science.

I started reading The Story of the Scrolls: The miraculous discovery and true significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls and A Game of Thrones.

57 read.

I finished The Aeneid. I enjoyed it quite a bit, even though I liked The Iliad and The Odyssey better. I'm surprised I made it to this age without having read it before.

58 read.

I finished The Pragmatic Programmer. I read this book back when it was first published and really enjoyed it and took a lot out of it professionally. It is still quite relevant now.

I started reading How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.

59 and 60 read. Getting closer.

I finished The Story of the Scrolls: The miraculous discovery and true significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls and How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.

The author of The Story of the Scrolls has been very active in the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and has written a very compelling tale of the controversies and disagreements over the scrolls and the producers of the scrolls. I was fairly ignorant of all of this and really enjoyed reading this book.

How to Think Seriously About the Planet is a thought provoking, if not entirely successful book from Roger Scruton. I have read Mr. Scruton's articles for years, but had never read any of his books until now. He makes some good points here - about why Kyoto like treaties will always fail and how the amount of attention Global Warming receives crowds out important and more achievable environmental gains. There are some contradictions in here and at times he goes overboard, but for the most part, this is a well thought out book.

I started reading Rome: An Empire's Story.

61 and 62 read.

I finished Rome: An Empire's Story and Secrets of the Cold War: US Army Europe's Intelligence & Counterintelligence Activities Against the Soviets During the Cold War.

The Rome book was superb. This is the best book on Roman history I have ever read. Mr. Woolf really managed to pack a lot of information in a small number of pages. This is one of the few history books I had trouble putting down.

Secrets of the Cold War was not nearly as good. It was informative, but not written by a skilled writer. It reads more like a case file. I enjoyed it, but it was dry reading at times.

I started reading 99 Novels, Churchill and Seapower and ideas: a history of thought and invention, from fire to freud.

63 and 64 read.

I finished A Game of Thrones and 99 Novels.

I don't read works of popular fiction very often because I seldom enjoy them. A Game of Thrones I quite enjoyed. The first thing that struck me was how Shakespearean this book was. It is not Shakespearean in terms of language, although he did occasionally throw in an archaic English word, but in terms of plot, tone, and characters. This is not great literature, but is an enjoyable read and well written book.

My purchasing of 99 Novels illustrates why I love used book stores. I found this on the shelf for $2 and it is quite the trove of information. I do not read modern novels very often which explains why I have only read 9 of the 99 novels he wrote about, but I'm going to give some of these a try. Mr. Burgess also makes a good case for reading the occasional work of popular fiction in the introduction.

I started reading The Mosquito Coast, which is the first novel I chose from the 99 Novels book.

65 read.

I finished Churchill and Seapower. Highly recommended and you can find my review on the book's page.

I started reading The Mother Tongue.

66, 67, and 68 read.

I'll start with the best. I finished The Mosquito Coast. This novel deals with the absence of civilization in a similar manner as does Lord of the Flies, but with a much more artistic result. This is the best novel I have read this year, with the possible exception of Lolita.

I also finished Thucydides: The Reinvention of History. I have long heard good things about Donald Kagan, but this is the first book of his I have read. I had a hard time getting into this book. I don't think there was anything particularly wrong with it. I think I just was not in the mood for it.

Last, I finished Things Fall Apart. After thinking for years how I would hate Lolita, and then having had the experience of reading it and loving it, I decided to give another book a try that I always assumed I would hate. In this case my assumption had been correct. I could find nothing of value in this novel whatsoever - even the English was ugly.

I started reading The Lower River.

69, 70 and 71 read.

I finished Their Eyes Were Watching God. What a fantastic novel. Highly Recommended.

I finished The Mother Tongue. A fun read if you are interested in linguistics. A little on the dumbed down side, but Bill Bryson is almost always worth reading.

Finally I finished The Lower River. This one was quite a letdown after reading The Mosquito Coast, which I loved. This was quite boring and lacked all of the depth of The Mosquito Coast.

I started reading In Sunlight and in Shadow.

72 read.

I finished In Sunlight and in Shadow. This is a great new novel. It deals with the effects of WWII on America. Very well written.

I started reading A Clash of Kings.

73, 74, and 75 read. Finished.

I finished Introducing Windows Server 2012, One for the Books, and Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers.

I don't have much to say about the Windows Server book. I read it because I have a new server running the OS and thought it would be a good introduction. However, it is mainly marketing fluff.

Our First Revolution is a fantastic history of the Glorious Revolution in England and how it affected the founding of America. I have read histories of the Glorious Revolution before, but this is one of the most fascinating I have read. Michael Barone's political knowledge is invaluable in unraveling a moment in history such as this.

One for the Books is certainly the funniest book I read all year. I'm going to make a post shortly in the Bragging and Backslapping thread with what I have to say about this one.

Congratulations on finishing your 75th book! You've read a nice variety of books this year.

Congrats!