Bragan reads ALL THE BOOKS in 2013

Well, OK, "all the books" is more than a little optimistic. Even "all the unread books I own" is beyond unrealistic, I'm afraid. I went a little crazy with the book-buying in 2012. OK, OK, I went frighteningly crazy with the book-buying in 2012. So given the state of my shelves right now, I could read a book a day, while buying nothing, and still not make it 2/3 of the way through the TBR stacks. But that also means that said TBR stacks hold an embarrassment of riches: so many shiny, exciting unread books that I just want to read all of them at once, right now. Which means that I am very much looking forward to a fun, thought-provoking, and productive year of reading! I hope you'll join me for it. I promise 2013 will be every bit as eclectic as 2012.

Your reading is nothing if not eclectic, and you come up with the most curious books to read. I will enjoy following your reading again this year!

Thanks! I have many curious books still waiting on the Pile. :)

Love your introductory declaration - a great way to start your reading year!

Thanks! I hope it will be a start to a great year of reading.

A large and varied TBR is vital for a healthy life. I count it as my contribution toward surviving the zombie apocalypse.

>6 RidgewayGirl: LOL!

Hee! I have often thought very much the same thing. I believe that will also serve nicely as my justification for all those zombie books currently sitting on the TBR pile. One day, they may be useful as research!

I like the title!

I'm in line for Janet Reitman's Inside Scientology at the library but I saw an article about another Scientology book that will be published and thought of you -

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/books/scientology-fascinates-the-author-lawren...

Hmm, sounds like it could be interesting.

Eclectic and unpredictable. Looking forward to see what books show up on your thread.

So am I!

"I have many curious books still waiting on the Pile."

Just finished a book set in 14th century England and now I have a mental picture of a medieval magician revealing literary pickled mermaids to the astonished crowd (I'll be the scruffy one sitting on an upturned bucket, eyes like saucers). Read on!

Hee! I wouldn't be at all surprised if I have books with pickled mermaids of one sort or another in them on the Pile somewhere. :)

(Alas, the first book of the year is taking a little longer than I was expecting, but, oh, I am hoping for some nice reading time tonight.)

Here we go! The first book finished for the year!

1. Cold Days by Jim Butcher



The latest installment in the Dresden Files series sees wise-cracking wizard Harry Dresden back from the mostly-dead, installed in a new job he's not exactly thrilled about, and once again caught up in dealing with a nasty, complicated supernatural threat.

I do think this series is starting to suffer just a little bit from a couple of problems natural to long-running series like this. One is that it's perhaps getting a little top-heavy under the weight of its own continuity, which is particularly difficult for someone like me who doesn't necessarily find it easy to remember everything that happened in previous volumes. The other is that Harry's now come through so many impossible situations that it's harder to generate real suspense as to whether he'll be able to handle yet another one, even if he is now fighting in a higher weight class, so to speak. I think those two things together are probably the reason I was a little slow to get into the plot of this one, although, as usual, by the end everything came together in an interesting and exciting way, complete with some significant developments to be explored in future novels, and left me feeling happy enough and eager to read the next one. And Harry in is fine form though much of this story; despite all the changes he's been through, he's still his entertainingly smart-alecky, pop-culture-spouting, never-knows-when-to-quit self, this time with full sidekick accompaniment again, which was very welcome. (Although don't tell any of his friends I called them sidekicks, okay?) That, in itself, would be enough to make this fun, whatever creeping issues the series may or may not have.

Rating: 4/5

And, hard on its heels, the second!

2. Aetheric Mechanics: A Graphic Novella by Warren Ellis



It's 1907, and Great Britain is at war with the country of Ruritania, and losing badly, despite their space-going battleships. Meanwhile, two people who are almost but not quite Holmes and Watson investigate murders committed by a strange, flickering figure who seems to be kidnapping scientists... It's a very slight little story, and rather silly, but the twist at the end is entertaining, and the very detailed black-and-white artwork is nice.

Rating: 3.5/5

More interesting stuff! The one in #16 sounds like fun.

By the way, my aunt's now reading and loving Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. She says it's a "hoot." :)

#16 does indeed sound like a Curious Book from the Pile.

It is certainly a curious book! And fun, or at least cute, in ways I can't really talk about without spoilers.

And, avidmom, I'm so glad to hear your aunt is not disappointed in Major Pettigrew! It is, indeed, a hoot. Among other things. :)

Tonight the phone rang. My aunt called me just to tell me that she had finally finished Major Pettigrew and said she thought it was one of the best books she had ever read! No small praise coming from her. :)

Yay!!! I'm going to cheerfully steal some credit for that. :)

A friend of mine also just read it after hearing me praise it and said she loved it too. Apparently it's a book you can not go wrong recommending!

3. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll



Sean Carroll explains how evolution works on the DNA level by looking at various specific examples, such as the way the genes that code for light-sensitive pigments have evolved to give animals different kinds of color vision. And he does an excellent job of it, too. He gives enough detail to make things clear without ever overwhelming the reader, and the examples he uses don't just illustrate his points well, but are also fascinating in their own right. This book definitely did for me what science writing ideally should do: it both taught me things I didn't know about the topic and made me feel excited about it. When you look at evolution this way, it's amazing and beautiful how well it all fits together, and how much sense it all makes!

The last two chapters, about evolution deniers and the impact of human activity on the environment, and thus the evolution, of other creatures feel a little tacked-on, and aren't really long enough to do full justice to either subject, but they do at least make some points worth making, so I can't fault Carroll for including them.

Rating: 4.5/5

4. The House With a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs



Young Lewis goes to live with his uncle, who turns out to be a wizard. Which is fine with Lewis, although the mysterious clock that keeps ticking away somewhere in the walls of his house but can never be located is a little disconcerting. And when Lewis, trying to impress a friend, brags that he can do magic, too, and offers to demonstrate by raising the dead, things start to get really creepy.

This book was given to me by a friend who, upon discovering that I had not read any Bellairs in my childhood (and only a couple of random things by him as an adult), decided that this could not be allowed to stand. And how right he was! I started out with this one feeling very sorry that I hadn't read it as a kid, because I would surely have loved it then, but somewhere in the middle adult me stopped thinking about how much kid me would have enjoyed it and just started enjoying it in her own right. It's delightfully spooky, with some nice touches of humor, and the Edward Gorey illustrations are a pleasant bonus. Definitely recommended for younger readers, and at least some older ones.

Rating: 4/5

Clocks in the wall? Raising the dead! That does sound creepy! I think both my kid-self and adult-self (hard to tell the difference sometimes) would both like it.

My kid self and adult self definitely have a very large area of overlap! And, yes, the spooky atmosphere is just great.

Eclectic as promised. I'm interested in Carroll's book on DNA level evolution.

I do recommend that one if you're interested in the subject. There are certain aspects of things that it doesn't get into -- there's not much detail on the actual mechanisms of DNA copying and mutation -- but basic ideas that it covers, it covers really well.

5. And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer



I was so prepared to hate this book. A sequel to Douglas Adams' classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series seemed to me like an ill-advised idea to begin with, a clear attempt to cash in on a dead man's legacy. And the choice of Eoin Colfer to write it only cemented that opinion, as I'd read the first two of Colfer's Artemis Fowl novels, and they utterly failed to impress me. In fact, not only was I prepared to hate this thing, I actually got all stupidly self-righteous about my refusal to read it. And then a well-meaning friend bought me a copy for my birthday, thus giving me the opportunity to keep my stupid self-righteousness -- hey, I didn't choose to read the thing, I had to in order to be polite! -- while also being able to satisfy my undeniable curiosity about it.

Well, surprise, surprise. It's not awful! It is, however, uneven. The humor, in particular, is highly variable. Most of the novel is at least somewhat amusing, and some of it is really very clever and funny, but there are definite lulls, including moments where Colfer seems to be trying just a little too hard to capture Adams' style and instead ends up with something that feels derivative or forced. Also, he seems to think that goofy made-up alien words and bad-pun names are intrinsically hilarious and automatically make everything funnier. Not only is he wrong about that, but he just doesn't have anywhere near the facility with that kind of thing that Adams did.

The plot is very, very silly, which is as it should be. I have slightly mixed feelings about the characters, though. Colfer does a really fun Zaphod, and his Ford is pretty good, too, but Arthur tends to fade into the background a little too much. And I find what he does with Trillian mildly annoying, although it's been long enough since I read the last couple of Hitchhiker's books that I couldn't say for sure whether her characterization is consistent or not.

Bottom line: Once I got over the "They let who write what?!" factor and tried to just take it on its own merits, it was a reasonably entertaining story. Definitely not Douglas Adams. But not awful, either.

Rating: 3.5/5

6. What Would MacGyver Do?: True Stories of Improvised Genius in Everyday Life edited by Brendan Vaughan



A collection of short real-life stories from people who came up with creative, on-the-fly solutions to problems in their everyday lives. Or at least, that's what it's supposed to be. The stated goal of the book is to include all kinds of nifty improvised problem-solving, not just the traditional MacGyver-esque paper-clips-and-duct-tape stuff. Which is fine, and there are a few tales here of clever saves in social situations. But a surprising number of these anecdotes just don't seem to qualify at all. I'm sorry, but, really, "I arrived at the airport and realized I forgot my passport, so I called a friend and had him bring it to me" in no way counts as a brilliantly innovative solution, no matter how tight the timing may have been. And a few of these are actually stories of stupidity and failure, like not managing to capture a mouse with homemade traps, or accidentally burning down a construction site. Which was kind of disappointing. It also didn't help that quite a few of the authors came across as unsympathetic people trying to accomplish morally suspect things, such as covering up infidelity, or lying their way into a job. Fortunately, though, in among all of that there were a number of feats that ol' Mac himself would have been proud of, such as fixing a car's clutch with a knitting needle, building an air conditioner with $24 worth of parts, and improvising a spacer for an asthmatic's inhaler. Those stories were generally not written with quite the same attempt to be colorful or amusing as many of the iffier ones, but they were the ones whose protagonists' quick thinking and know-how made me feel genuinely impressed and envious.

Rating: an unenthusiastic 3/5

That's too bad there were so few good stories; I'm sure they're out there. The premise had such promise.

an intriguing list, can't wait to see what else is buried on the shelves.

>31 avaland:: It was all bad, by any means, but, yeah, you could have put together a much better collection on that topic, I think.

>32 yolana:: Everything is buried on my shelves! I've got some Stephen King and some more SF coming up -- light vacation reading.

Some good reviews lately.

I don't think I'll read the Colfer - still have a couple of the actual Hitchhiker books to finish - but your review was really entertaining.

And yeah, the MacGyver book sounds disappointing. I've never actually seen the show but The Simpsons referenced it occasionally and I kind of loved those silly MacGruber skits on SNL. Too bad that what could have been a fun book was blah. Although if the people covered up infidelity and lied to get a job using duct tape and paper clips, that could have been amusing.

Thanks!

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't even all that impressed with the last two Hitchhiker books Adams wrote. Which maybe also helped keep my expectations low for Colfer's attempt at it.

I used to occasionally watch MacGyver back in the day. It was fun, if a it silly. More fun than the book, probably, which, alas, did not involve duct tape or paper clips in the infidelity or the resume fudging. :)

7. Christine by Stephen King



Stephen King's classic horror tale of a sinister red-and-white '58 Plymouth Fury. I read this one while I was starting off on vacation, figuring, hey, Stephen King is traditional reading on airplanes, right? And it did fit the bill just about perfectly, being sufficiently absorbing without being particularly demanding.

I keep mentally comparing it to the miscellaneous assortment of other King novels I've read. It's certainly more intelligent than Cell, which was the last King novel I read on an airplane. There's some interesting thematic stuff about cars and what they represent to teenagers that, while it's not exactly subtle and sort of fades away in favor of more straightforward horror/thriller elements by the end, still adds a little bit of welcome complexity. It's not nearly as creepy as works like It, though, even if the basic premise is a good one for a horror story, cars being the ubiquitous and often deeply important things they are. And while it's a little longer than it probably needs to be, it at least lacks the out-of-control bloat of later King novels, like The Stand.

Anyway. Good vacation book. One of these days, maybe I should see the movie.

Rating: 4/5

Strangely, this is one of the few King books I haven't read. May have something to do with a girl of the same name I had a crush on... which didn't work out. Enticing review.

I dunno, a doomed crush on a girl with that name seems almost appropriate, given the way the car is personified in the book. :)

8. ChronoSpace by Allen Steele



A group of time travelers from the 24th century travels back to observe the Hindenburg disaster, but accidentally alters the timing of the airship's destruction, with, of course, dire consequences to the timeline.

I don't know why it is, these days, that every time I take a vacation I end up bringing a bad time travel novel along with me. But, look, here's another one! Well, OK, this one isn't terrible. But it is dull, which is certainly bad enough. There's nothing terribly innovative in the plot, the writing isn't particularly engaging, and the characters are paper-thin. It's also full of implausibilities, even once you accept the basic time travel premise.

I vaguely remember enjoying Steele's Orbital Decay ages and ages ago, but Coyote, which I read much more recently, did not impress me. I think Allen Steele and I are now pretty much done.

Rating: 2.5/5

9. Inflight Science: A Guide to the World from Your Airplane Window by Brian Clegg



A book meant to accompany you on a plane fight and explain some of the science behind what you're experiencing as you zoom through the skies. It covers most of the stuff you'd expect: the physics of flight, the nature of clouds, why your ears hurt like that, etc., but also works in lots of other scientific topics, from the optics of color to the nuclear processes that make the sun shine.

There really wasn't much of anything here that was new to me, and the writing is very clear and simple, rather than trying to be especially entertaining, so I personally didn't get as much out of it as I might have hoped, but if you're interested in learning some scientific basics while munching down on your little packet of peanuts, it's worth a look.

Rating: 3.5/5

Would this help a flight for someone absolutely terrified of flying or just make you want to parachute out?

I don't know how much it would be likely to help, but it is more reassuring than otherwise. If nothing else, Clegg does make sure to point out that no plane has ever, ever crashed because of turbulence. :)

Wondering if I'm incurious or if just hate being on a plane enough that I can't imagine spending time reading a book about it...but I'll pass on that one.

I loathe air travel, myself (not because I'm a nervous traveler, but just because the whole experience is so tedious and claustrophobic). But I cannot escape, somewhere in the back of my brain, the conviction that any experience is enhanced by having a book about it. :)

I doubt that claim that no airplane has ever crashed of turbulence. Vertical wind shear is a kind of turbulence, and planes have crashed on approach encountering wind shear. Say that that is not typical turbulence, and there are still other examples. A Saturn Hercules got into turbulence, net even very heavy, and the wing fell off or some such; 1.9 g's if I remember correctly initiated a tear in a self perpetuating crack.

I've seen a hurricane hunter Super Constellation return from a mission with much of one wing missing. There is no reason to believe that the rest of the wing couldn't be torn off by a combination of the right conditions including turbulence.

Robert

Hi bragan, nine books so far is good going my friend, i finished book number three this afternoon and book four shouldn't be far away. Regarding your thread title, if only we could read all our books in one year but then what would we do. We need to have something to target even if we add to our target because we can't resist purchasing.

>45 Mr.Durick:: I just looked up the exact quote, and what he actually says is, "no modern airliners have ever been brought down by turbulence."

>46 johnsimpson:: I have enough books now to last me for several years! I've actually been really, really good about not buying any books so far this month -- I've purchased a grand total of one, while I was on vacation -- but more and more and more that I ordered through the mail back in December still keep showing up on my doorstep. I don't know what last year's me was thinking. :)

10. Kim by Rudyard Kipling



Kipling's classic tale of the orphaned son of an Irish soldier growing up on the streets of Colonial India and discovering his natural talent as a spy.

Between the somewhat old-fashioned language and the many, many unfamiliar cultural references, I fear that parts of this may have gone past me a bit, but I enjoyed it a great deal, anyway. There's a wonderfully subtle sense of humor to it, and an equally wonderful sense of the vibrancy and diversity of the Indian landscape and culture. And the sly, savvy Kim is a terrific character, as are many of the people he shares his adventures with.

Rating: I'm calling it 4/4, but the lack of an extra half-star there is probably due more to my insufficiencies than Kipling's.

Makes me want to go grab that copy of Just So Stories! I should put Kim on the wishlist.

I plan to read Kim, well, soonish, so thanks for the positive review!

>49 avidmom:: I do think it's well worth reading. Better than I expected it to be, in fact. I was half-prepared to have to deal with a painfully naive defense of imperialism, but it's really quite a bit more complicated than that.

>50 dmsteyn:: I'll be very interested to see what you think!

Just popped over to see if you had finished the Joyce novel yet.

Alas, I got very, very distracted today, and despite the fact that I had intended to spend a good chunk of the day reading it, I never even actually started it! Tomorrow. I will do lots of reading tomorrow. Unless work interferes. :)

Tomorrow. I will do lots of reading tomorrow. Unless work interferes.
Silly "real" life! Mine has been butting into my reading life too much lately. It's being rather rude. I'm gonna sit it down and give it a good talking to! ;)

Today, I'm afraid it was a combination of work and shiny things on the internet. Or, perhaps less depressingly, shiny people on the internet. I'm very happy everybody I know seems to want to have long e-mail discussions with me, but it is cutting into my reading time!

Anyway, good luck with letting your non-book life know who's boss. Because the books are, of course!

I want a day-to-day list of excuses, Bragan. Glad that you read and enjoyed Kim. I would like to some day.

Hee. Well, I read about 120 pages yesterday, but there were still shiny things on the internet, so that's why it wasn't more. Today it is work. Tomorrow, who knows? :)

For me, that would be a great Sunday.

>54 avidmom: If that works, Avidmom, let us know!
>57 bragan: If you don't finish it, you won't know the TRUTH! Where the h%*l was she for the last 20 years?

>59 avaland:: Oh, I will definitely finish it! Every possible answer is fascinating. :)

Although tomorrow I have a birthday party to go to. Which should be fun, but... SIGH. Where is my time to read?!

The wide variety of books you read is very entertaining. From Stephen King to Rudyard Kipling. Christine is one of my favorite King novels and I also enjoyed the movie.

My CR thread last year was called "Bragan's eclectic mish-mash." I think that's a pretty fair description of my reading! Although, if anything, this year so far has been a bit less eclectic than usual, being especially heavy on the speculative fiction end of things.

I finally found time to finish what seems like it should have been a very quick and compelling read. Stupid work/social functions/shiny things on the internet!

11. Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce



Twenty years ago, at the age of not-quite-sixteen, Tara disappeared in the woods. Now she has reappeared as mysteriously as she vanished, looking a little different but not much older. She claims that she rode off with a man, or a being -- she never uses the word "fairy," but everyone else does -- to some place outside our world, and believes she was gone only six months. Is she telling the literal truth, or is it all some fantasy her mind has manufactured to cope with whatever actually happened? And is she even quite the same person she was when she left?

Personally, I've read enough fantasy that I found her version of events easier to accept than the more psychobabbly explanations, but the story does play around with the ambiguity in some interesting ways. And I think there's something about this novel that's deceptively simple. Taken one way, it's a nicely done little story in which ancient folklore is updated to the modern day in a way that asks what it would be like for someone to have that kind of experience and then come back afterward to the real, mundane, modern world and to real, messy human relationships. But I think there's something deeper under there, too, something a little more elusive, something about what those old stories symbolize and mean. Either way, it was interesting read.

Rating: 4/5

Interesting book, bragan. It reminds me of The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, which I only know from owning, not having read it yet.

It also makes me think of Life of Pi, the movie of which I watched last night with my father. The whole idea of whether some-one is telling the literal truth, or inventing some story to cope with reality, resonates strongly.

I read The Stolen Child years ago, and I've forgotten most of the details of it now, but from what I recall, I think it had a rather different feel to it than this one. Which probably isn't too surprising; this kind of folklore is a very rich vein to mine, and there are all kinds of diverse and interesting things to be done with it. For whatever it's worth, although I see I rated them the same, I may have actually liked The Stolen Child a bit better.

I think the ambiguities and shifting interpretations are much stronger in Life of Pi than in Some Kind of Fairy Tale, but then, they're not really trying to do quite the same thing. I can definitely see the resonances, though, now that you point it out.

Glad to read your review of Some Kind of Fairy Tale - I've wanted to read something by Joyce and someone (avaland?) suggested this one.

Shiny internet things and work have been distracting me as well - some reading did get done but now there's a small backlog of reviews to be written.

>64 bragan: So glad you liked it. The reason I like Graham Joyce is that his stories are always very much anchored in our world and then he inserts the fantastic into it in some way that ultimately tells us more about ourselves and this world (he has always been very good with female characters too). And, as you mention, they tend to be deceptively simple. Joyce was a bit ahead of trend in magical realism that is much more prevalent these days, and because he straddled that interstitial place between mainstream fiction and genre, his books have not always sold that well (of course some are always better than others). I have read him religiously since reading his The Tooth Fairy.

Oh, the shiny, shiny internet. Mainly the way that one interesting article leads me off into a few other directions and then i suddenly have ten tabs open to things that I have to look at.

I'll look out for Some Kind of Fairy Tale.

>67 DieFledermaus:: I also have Joyce's The Silent Land, which I'm looking forward to reading. I seem to recall hearing good things about that one.

>68 avaland:: Thank you, I think that captures it exactly, "very much anchored in our world and then he inserts the fantastic into it in some way that ultimately tells us more about ourselves and this world." At least, that was definitely my experience reading this one. One of the things I liked was very firmly it was anchored in this world. The way the brother's kids constantly were interrupting every time adults tried to have a serious conversation, for instance, seemed to me to acheieve a much higher level of realism than most realistic novels.

And, personally, I've always liked books that straddle genres like that, since long before I ever heard the term "magic realism."

I'm might have to check out The Tooth Fairy

>69 RidgewayGirl:: Oh, yes, the internet is great (or, depending on your point of view, terrible) for that! I also sometimes have to remind myself that just because I can respond to people instantly doesn't mean I necessarily should. Worst of all, I've discovered that since I changed ISPs and got a much faster, more stable connection a few months ago, it's much, much easier for me to waste stupid amounts of time on YouTube without even noticing it.

>70 bragan: I thought The Silent Land a bit of a departure at the time - because it has a mystery, a puzzle at its heart. At the time I sent him a little note and mentioned this, wondering if he might be moving in a different direction. He responded by saying that he wasn't conscious of moving in that direction, but now that he was thinking about it, his next one (which was Some Kind of Fairy Tale) also had a mystery/puzzle at its center.

I also the stories like this one that is really about 'here' instead of 'there' (we shall each have to make a list of our favorites to share sometime)

Sounds good to me. I like stories with mysteries/puzzles at their hearts, too.

12. The Walking Dead Chronicles: The Official Companion Book by Paul Ruditis



I had very mixed feelings about The Walking Dead TV series at the beginning. I really liked the survival-horror soap opera premise, and I was impressed with the production values, especially the great FX work on the zombie makeup. I also found both the zombies and the post-apocalyptic world they'd created genuinely scary. But my reaction to the characters ranged from mild liking to a strong and frequent desire to punch them in the face, and I thought several aspects of the storytelling could have been handled better than they were. The show's gotten steadily better as it's gone on, though, and I'm now very glad I decided to stick with it. Somewhere in season two, something finally clicked for me, and at this point, I'm completely hooked on it, and have developed considerable emotional investment in at least some of the characters. (OK, mostly Daryl. But he'd be almost enough by himself to make the show worth watching.)

With the series about to return after its mid-season three hiatus, and with me feeling much more charitable towards those early episodes in hindsight, this seemed like a good time to take a little look back with this companion volume, which was published between the first and second seasons. It covers pretty much the territory you'd expect:the development of the show, its comic-book origins, casting and visual effects, and so on. It's decently written, as such things go, with plenty of interesting quotes from various people involved in the making of the series, especially showrunner Frank Darabont and Robert Kirkman, who wrote (and still writes) the original comic. My only real complaint about it, except for some oddly repetitive material in the first couple of chapters, is that it's full of "sidebars" -- often several pages long -- that interrupt the main text, thus necessitating a lot of annoying flipping back and forth. Otherwise, while I wouldn't call it essential reading for fans of the show, it is a generally pleasant little supplement to it. For some definition of the word "pleasant" that includes lots of pictures of flesh-eating corpses, anyway.

Rating: 3.5/5

Hmm, that does sounds "pleasant". I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think the series has ever aired on South African television. A shame, given the psychological, socio-political - Brrrainnnss! Bbbraaiinnss!!!

Oh my, I seem to have been interrupted in my pretentiousness by a flesh-eating horde. Wish me luck...

LOL! Good luck. Pesky zombies, always ruining one's deep thoughts!

I have no idea where the series has aired and where it hasn't, only that it's extremely popular here in the US.

Well, I hope it airs here soon. It sounds horrible (in a good way).

It does start out very uneven, IMO, but is worth sticking with. And although it does the gore and the fright very well, it's actually much more about the characters and the bleak and (both literally and figuratively) humanity-eating world they find themselves in. Which is terrific, if you can get to the point where the characters don't make you want to punch them.

It may be available on DVD where you are even if it doesn't show up on television, but I'm not sure what regions it's actually been released for.

I'm sure I'll be able to get it on DVD, but I'd first like to watch a little before forking out the cash. I read on Wikipedia that the European region DVDs have been censored a little bit.

Fair enough! (I tend to do all my DVD watching via Netflix, myself, so I don't have to pay any extra for anything. Which is handy.)

Probably the European DVDs cut out some of the gore. I always find censorship annoying, but that strikes me as particularly so, as I would not actually call the gore in The Walking Dead gratuitous. When it's there, it's there because it's part of the day-to-day reality the poor bastards on the show have to deal with.

My big "kid" wanted The Walking Dead for his birthday (this is also the kid who convinced me to watch Zombieland!) I caved in and got it for him. (I hate horror and am easily grossed out.) So now we own Season One and Two. And my son brags to his friends, "My mom doesn't want to admit it but she likes it!" I consider myself a fan, albeit a reluctant one.

>74 dmsteyn: dmsteyn, Remember Zombieland Rule #2: "The Double Tap" (to the head) in case you encounter any more zombie hordes. We must all be prepared.

Heh. Reluctant fans are the most fun kind! I still chuckle over how, when I was a teenager, my mother used to sit in the living room and pretend she wasn't watching Doctor Who with my sister and me, except to occasionally make disparaging remarks about how "goofy" it was... only to keep tuning in for it when we weren't there,not to mention occasionally asking questions that proved she'd been paying attention. :)

If you liked Zombieland at all, you might enjoy Shaun of the Dead, which manages to be both a good zombie movie and a good romantic comedy at the same time.

I enjoyed The Silent Land. I've been interested in more by Joyce but don't like fantasy, so Some Kind of Fairy Tale with another mystery/puzzle appeals, thanks!

Shaun of the Dead is fantastic!

>82 detailmuse:: As someone who does like fantasy, I'm probably not the best person to judge, but I think Some Kind of Fairy Tale does not remotely require an appreciation of fantasy to work.

Another Shaun of the Dead fan here. Some Kind of Fairy Tale sounds like a good one.

Shaun of the Dead fans unite! It's the only zombie movie I have on DVD. (Oh, unless you count Re-Animator, I suppose.)

I also have most of the Resident Evil ones. And 28 Days Later (which I haven't seen yet - yes, unfortunately, I have a large TBV of DVDs, but thankfully it's way smaller than mount TBR of books...)

OK, back to the books! Have you read World War Z (and back to movies, just saw the trailer for the movie of World War Z starring Brad Pitt)?

Seriously? The Walking Dead?! oh yeah! I cannot believe I am 64 years old and finally just had to find out what my kids were going on about. Oh my! I was immediately hooked. and yes, Darryl is my man! I just never know what I am going to find on these threads, as a new member I make my way through Club Read! Great thread.

Merrikay

>87 LisaMorr:: 28 Days Later was good, I thought. It features fast-moving, not-exactly-dead zombies, which might offend purists, but I remember finding it genuinely scary. (It's also got a very similar basic premise to The Walking Dead, with a guy waking up from a coma and discovering the zombie apocalypse has happened while he was out.)

I have, indeed, read World War Z, which is also very good, definitely the book to recommend even to people who don't think they like zombie stories. I've seen the trailer for the movie, too, but I am highly dubious about it. Is it just me, or does it look like they've somehow removed everything that made the book unique and interesting?

>88 mkboylan:: Indeed, you never know what you're going to find on Club Read! Especially in my thread. I do believe in keepin' it eclectic. :)

I think Daryl is a lot of people's man. Daryl is the man! If they ever try killing him off, there are going to be riots. :) Which is interesting, because he's one of the characters who was introduced for the TV series, and wasn't in the comics at all.

13. The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson



This is an odd little story collection. Most of the stories in it are, on the face of things, just tiny little captured pieces of ordinary life, usually featuring housewives in domestic settings. Often they start at seemingly random moments and end abruptly with nothing in particular having happened. But running through them all, often very, very subtly, is this vague feeling of quiet desperation, of people -- usually women -- hemmed in by fences of social conformity that they can never quite perceive, reaching vaguely for some sense of personal identity that doesn't quite exist. Taken individually, many of them might seem incomplete or pointless, but as a whole, I think the collection adds up to something more than the sum of its parts. I will admit that, towards the end, I began to feel it had all gone on a bit too long, and my interest began to flag... But then, after putting the book down for some sleep, I picked it up again and read "The Tooth," which I thought encapsulated a lot of the themes of this collection beautifully, followed soon after by the quietly chilling title story, which I think is made much more effective by the context of everything that comes before it, and I was impressed with what Jackson's doing here all over again.

Rating: 4/5

Great review of The Lottery and Other Stories, bragan! As I mentioned, I've read the title story, which must have been much more shocking when it originally appeared.

It's probably also a lot more shocking if you don't know when you start reading it that it's supposed to be shocking. :)

True!

I'm actually a bit worried that it didn't shock me more. It's a horrible thing that happens in the story.

I think I just found my first short story collection. Great review!

>93 dmsteyn:: I'll try not to be too afraid of you. :)

>94 mkboylan:: Thanks! I hope you like it. It is a strange little collection, but I think it's worthwhile.

My son and I were cracking up over this one. Funny 'cause it's true.

LOL! Yes, so true. Zombies are much more exciting than flowers!

Why don't you combine the two?

Ha! Perfect.

14. Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures by Virginia Morell



Virginia Morell interviews various scientists who study the intelligence, social structures, and learning abilities of a wide variety of animals, from ants to chimpanzees. As she points out in the introduction, science for a long time tended to regard animals as mindless, emotionless automatons, but in the last few decades, this has changed significantly. Which does seem like a sensible and positive development. After all, not only is it intuitively obvious to any pet owner that dogs and cats, at least, have some fairly complicated things going on in their brains, but a true understanding of evolution ought to lead us to expect to see important similarities between ourselves and our fellow creatures. Surely the intelligence and emotional sensitivity that we're so proud of can hardly have sprung full-blown from nowhere.

In her descriptions of the experimenters she interviews and their animal subjects, Morell strongly emphasizes this aspect of things, concentrating as much on the scientists' emotional connections and subjective responses to their animals as she does on the science, but fortunately she manages to avoid the major pitfalls that this kind of approach opens up. She never comes across as too over-sentimental or preachy, and she does recognize that projecting our own humanity onto other species and expecting them to be essentially furry little humans is as wrong-headed as regarding them as simple stimulus-and-response machines. And the science she's reporting on is often really interesting, from accounts of ants teaching other ants how to locate a new nesting site, to elephants taking cues for their behavior from their leaders, to dolphins showing signs of being able to recognize themselves in mirrors. If there is a flaw here, it's that Morell does sometimes indulge -- or report enthusiastically as the scientists indulge -- in wild flights of speculation, but it's at least generally clear when a particular idea is the result of careful scientific investigation and when it's the result of speculative imaginings. And it is very clear that this is a field with a lot of room for speculation and for further investigation. It seems we've really only just scratched the surface when it comes to figuring out exactly how the minds of our fellow creatures work, or even how best to go about studying them, which just makes it all the more exciting.

Rating: 4/5

(Note: this was an Early Reviewers book.)

Very interesting review, bragan. I've always been interested in consciousness, animal as well as human, so this sounds exciting. I recently came across this article from The Economist, which I thought you might find interesting:

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21570673-strange-example-co...

It doesn't go into a lot of scientific or philosophical depth on the nature of animal consciousness or anything, but it was an interesting read. As was that little article about the spiders. Thanks for linking to that! Seems like a great example of how animals can continue to surprise us.

15. The Curse of the Blue Figurine by John Bellairs



After his neighbor the eccentric professor tells Johnny a ghost story about a priest who once practiced black magic and now haunts the local church, Johnny kinda-sorta accidentally steals a blue Egyptian figurine from the church's basement. Is it just the harmless trinket it appears to be, or is there a reason why ever since Johnny picked it up, bad things keep happening to the kid who bullies him?

Unlike The House with a Clock in Its Walls, which I read a few weeks ago, this one didn't have quite enough spooky atmosphere and excitement to make me more or less forget that I was reading something clearly aimed at kids. And the ending isn't as good, either; it wraps up the main story a little too abruptly and then tacks on a little too much "here's what just happened" exposition afterward. Still, it's a fun little tale, with a nice mixture of menace and mystery. I probably would have really loved it when I was eight or nine, and it's still fairly enjoyable even now.

Rating: 3.5/5

16. America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't by Stephen Colbert



Stephen Colbert holds forth in his inimitable satiric fashion on such topics as jobs, food, healthcare, why America is the most perfect place on Earth, how America is desperately in need of fixing, how to raise election funds via spam e-mail, and why the stock market crisis was all the fault of poor people.

I enjoyed Colbert's first book, but I found this one more consistently funny. It's very much in the same tone as Stephen uses on The Colbert Report; I could easily hear his voice in every line, and frequent hilarious footnotes make the whole thing feel kind of like a book-length "The Word" segment. If you enjoy the TV show, you'll almost certainly enjoy this. Plus, it comes with 3D glasses!

Rating: 4/5

>104 bragan: YES! XD "The Word" is my favorite part of that show. :)
This is definitelyon the wish list.

"The Word" is awesome!

I also love "The Word", although "Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger" can also be great. As are the interviews.

Basically, it's all pretty great. :)

17. The Resurrectionist by E.B. Hudspeth



The first part of this book consists of a biography of fictional Victorian doctor Spencer Black, who started his medical career helping his surgeon father dig up corpses for dissection, and ended it as a mad scientist obsessed with the idea that humans somehow evolved from various mythological creatures and that those creatures' traits could be encouraged to resurface. It's a moderately clever conceit, especially in its use of journal excerpts, letters, and illustrated notes, but the execution is decidedly imperfect. There's something about the voice just seems slightly off, in ways that aren't entirely easy to pin down. The story does get more compelling, however, as the doctor gets crazier and creepier, and in the end, it turns into a decent enough little horror story, if a rather less exciting one than it could have been.

All of that, however, seems to exist mainly as set-up and context for the art that makes up the bulk of the book and features anatomical diagrams of fantastical animals purportedly drawn by Dr. Black himself. And here, as a reviewer, I run into major problems, since the ARC version that I received for review was missing the majority of the artwork. In fact, over a third of the entire book was nothing but blank pages! Quite what the publisher was thinking, sending it out in this shape, I don't know. But, needless to say, I can't review things I haven't seen. I can say that what illustrations I saw were well-drawn and very detailed, and fairly interesting, in a macabre sort of way. I would hope that the rest of them would be of the same quality, but I have no way of knowing. Nor can I evaluate what kind of cumulative effect they might have on a reader. If I'd been able to keep flipping through page after page of these diagrams, would I have found myself increasingly fascinated, or would I have quickly started to get bored? I have absolutely no idea. Which also means that I honestly cannot say whether I'd recommend the book or not... Although, really, that might be difficult to answer even if I did have the entire thing available. It's an odd little book, but probably not quite as gloriously odd as it wants to be.

Rating: I cannot rate this one, due to insufficient data.

How pointless! Sounds like the sales people who run the ER-type programmes hadn't been talking to the people actually involved with the book......

Somebody sure seems to have dropped the ball somewhere! I actually kind of hope it's that the book wasn't ready as fast as the PR department expected, and not that somebody actually thought that was a perfectly fine thing to send out for review.

18. Holmes and Watson by June Thomson



A "fictional biography" of the great detective duo, based on the "facts" presented in the canon of Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, augmented by various speculations proposed by the author and others.

Several years ago, I read W.S. Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, which was a similar sort of exercise, and while I appreciated the thought and enthusiasm that went into that work, I found it kind of tedious to get through, largely because it featured a weird combination of dwelling on details that only a truly obsessive Holmes fan would care about and endless recaps of stories you'd expect said obsessive Holmes fans to already know. Thomson, I think, does rather better on this score. She generally avoids the recap thing, reasoning that even if her readers aren't familiar with the stories, they'd probably rather read Doyle's versions than hers, and yet she still manages to produce something that's a lot more accessible to casual Holmes fans like yours truly.

Mind you, some of the topics she covers are a lot more interesting than others. I found her frequent return to the question of the stories' chronology and her attempts to resolve its contradictions, for instance, rather dull, even though she thoughtfully confines most of the really fiddly arguments on the subject to an appendix, which I admit to mostly skipping. And some of her Freudian-influenced speculations about Holmes' childhood had me rolling my eyes a bit. On the other hand, I was much more engaged by some of her other discussions, including the historical context of what Watson's training as an army doctor would have entailed and what action he might have seen in Afghanistan; a detailed account of events before and after Holmes' supposed death at Reichenbach Falls, complete with some thoughts about what might have been going on in his mind at the time; an argument defending Watson against accusations that he was a bad doctor who thought nothing of abandoning his patients to go chasing after Holmes; and, of course, the inevitable speculation on the identity of Watson's second wife.

Thomson's main focus is supposedly on the characters of Holmes and Watson and the friendship between them, and, given that, I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more of an attempt to get deeper into their psyches (although given the weird Freudian stuff at the beginning, maybe I should be glad of that). Still, overall, I'd say it's worth a look for the Holmes enthusiast.

Rating: 3.5/5

Sounds interesting. Have you seen the BBCs "Sherlock?" My favorite TV version of Sherlock yet.

I have! And, I'll be honest, I thought a modern-day adaptation of Holmes sounded like a ridiculous idea, but I'm damned if they didn't make it work. I'm enjoying it a lot. I just wish it would come out faster!

I'm enjoying Elementary, myself.

>115 RidgewayGirl:: That, I haven't seen. I've heard some mixed things about it, and I'm always leery about American versions of British shows, but several people I know have told me they're really liking it, so I'm thinking maybe I ought to check it out one of these days.

>115 RidgewayGirl: me, too! I do like the Cumberbatch version also, but I consider "Elementary" a better modern interpretation/adaptation (no cute curly hair and long coats). Ah, people dislike modern interpretations of Shakespeare also.

Elementary has a great cast, and the quirkiness is really enjoyable. Definitely a modern take, not an imitation.

Wasn't "House" already a modern take on Sherlock Holmes?

>117 avaland:: I like Cumberbatch's coat. :)

>119 dmsteyn:: Well, it was definitely inspired by it! But a little less directly.

And I liked that show, too. Most of the time, anyway.

19. The Hour Before Morning by Arwen Spicer



An SF novel about three people locked in a cell together, all of them guilty of rebellion against the imperialistic galactic culture that has conquered their planets, and all awaiting execution. There's Jenchae, a resistance leader and a powerful telepath; Elek, who suffers from fits of blind rage and is guilty of murders so brutal his fellow resistance members turned him over to the authorities themselves; and Meravyn, who was arrested while buying time for her defector husband to escape, and is trying hard not to resent him for it.

The first thing I should say about this book is that I happen to know the author, and she gave me a copy of it to review, so I'm probably not completely unbiased about it. Having said that, though, it's hard to know quite what to say next... It's a bit of an odd novel, because, it seems to me, its weaknesses are also really its strengths. To begin with, it's a very talky story, with not a whole lot in the way of narrative drive. Mostly, the characters sit in their cell and reflect on bits and pieces of their own and each other's pasts. And while all of those backstories are decent and interesting, none of them is extraordinarily gripping... and yet, somehow, the overall effect is surprisingly compelling. I'm not entirely sure why, although some subtle dialog and a nicely nuanced view of the problems of colonialism surely help.

And then there's the world-building. There's a lot of it, and sometimes it's handled gracefully, and sometimes it's not. Early in the book, especially, it's a little difficult to keep track of all the alien names and to puzzle out the politics and the cultural references, and the sometimes obtrusive "translator's notes" don't necessarily help. But I did appreciate the consistent attempt to give all these cultures individuality and depth, and even if the way it's handled is a bit uneven, I much prefer it to the all-too-common approach in SF of taking the author's own culture, slapping a thin disguise on it, and calling it alien. In particular, I very much appreciate that all these characters have their own cultural references and idioms and metaphors that aren't just our own with a few strange futuristic terms substituted in.

Finally, there's the character of Elek. I don't think the nature of his fits of rage or the means by which they might or might not be controlled ever entirely convinced me, and yet, in the end, I found his character arc surprisingly satisfying. I'm not entirely sure how that works, but I'm not knocking it.

Rating: I am having tremendous difficulty rating this one. OK, it's a book towards which I have some mixed responses, but which I found very interesting and ultimately worth reading. Ordinarily, I think I'd call that 3.5/5 stars. But, man, books which do things that seem like they shouldn't work but do make them work impress me, so maybe I should rate it a notch higher for that. Or maybe I'm just trying to talk myself into rating it higher, because I know the author and I know she'll be reading my review. Or maybe...

Ah, screw it. I liked the thing. 4/5.

I think you handled that well, bragan. Sounds like an interesting take on the prisoner's dilemma.

I was going to say that I don't know that the prisoner's dilemma is particularly relevant, but in a very abstract way, maybe it is. No one in the book was offered any choices by their captors, but there was something of a question as to whether the prisoners would cooperate and help each other, emotionally if in no other way, or end up at each other's throats. Or both.

Interesting. I just mentioned it because the scenario seems to fit the dilemma quite closely (but I obviously haven't read the book, so what do I know?).

Ah, screw it. I liked the thing.

Best. Review. Ever.

LOL! Mind you, I'm still second-guessing myself on the rating. But I'm not going to change it. :)

Speaking of ideas that shouldn't work but do... Or, for that matter, about Valentine's Day and zombies going together, an idea dmsteyn expressed in graphical (and graphic) form earlier in this thread:

20. Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion



R is a zombie. Well, he's pretty sure his name used to start with an R, at least. Most of his identity is gone, but he does still retain a sense of self-awareness. More than most, anyway. But he does very little with it except wonder if there's much point to all this standing around and groaning, until one day he eats the brain of a boy who loves a girl... and he begins to change.

I decided to read this now because I've seen trailers for the movie, and thought it looked like a lot of fun, but I'd heard the book was even better and figured I ought to read it first. I'm not sure, though, that "fun" is the first word that comes to mind to describe this. It is fun, I suppose; there's a lot of dark, wry humor to be found here. But it's also well-written and poignant and deeply metaphorical, and by the time I was just a few pages in, I was feeling completely blown away by it. Unfortunately, the second half of the book felt more uneven and less satisfying to me than the first half, but considering that the first half had me exclaiming, "Whoa, this is fantastic!", that's probably not as big a criticism as it might be.

Even though I don't share the sentimenet, I can totally understand why so many people are now heartily sick of zombies and their current pop culture over-exposure. But I think this book is proof of the fact that there's life left in the zombie idea yet. So to speak.

Rating: a perhaps slightly generous 4.5/5

there's life left in the zombie idea yet.
LOL!

I must confess, that turn of phrase amused me, too. :)

But have they had sparkly zombies yet? If not, someone needs to get on that right away.

I need to get that Colbert book - thanks for the reminder.

>127 bragan: Well, Valentine's Day didn't turn out so great over here...

In any case, nice review of Warm Bodies. One for the wishlist.

>130 DieFledermaus:: I have not yet encountered sparkly zombies, thankfully.

>131 dmsteyn:: Not having kept up with world news lately, I just had to look up what happened over there on Valentine's Day. Man, there's nothing like a high-profile murder to put a damper on a holiday...

131 Saddest Valentine's Day ever!

I'm with 125, Bragan, best ever.

>133 mkboylan:: Thank you. I just hope the author appreciates it. :)

21. The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships by Clifford Nass, with Corina Yen



Clifford Nass has done a lot of consultant work on computer interfaces and how people respond to them, and in the course of this career, he came to the realization that people react to computers very much the same way they react to other people, so that if, for instance, a computer does something that would be considered rude coming from a human being, that makes people like the computer less. Eventually he realized that this could also be turned around: if people respond to computers the way they respond to other people, we can perhaps learn some things about human social interactions by conducting psychological experiments using computers. So in this book, he talks about various experiments that he and others have performed, what he thinks they mean, and how that knowledge can be applied. (E.g., he learned that people interacting with a computer in a driving simulator performed better and liked the computer more if its tone of voice matched their own mood. So he concludes that trying to motivate a sad person by being relentlessly cheerful at them is probably counter-productive.)

Some of these experiments are really interesting, and some of the thoughts Nass has about them seem both insightful and useful. But, as is often the case with this kind of thing, his conclusions often are often much stronger and more sweeping than the actual evidence seems to warrant. I'm also dubious about some of his basic claims about psychology, especially in his chapter on personality. And I'm not just saying that because he labels introverts like me as "submissive" and "cold," although that certainly didn't help endear him to me. In fact, it made me seriously wonder why on earth I should be listening to detailed advice on how to handle social interactions from a guy who clearly doesn't even have a clue when he's insulting people. Also, the rather creepily cold-blooded emphasis on how to manipulate people in corporate settings makes me think that I am really, really not the target audience for this book, despite my interest in both psychology and computers. And I am devoutly glad that I don't work for a company that subscribes to his painfully rah-rah ideas about "team-building."

To be honest, I think I would have been much more interested in how human social instincts need to be taken into account in software design. Maybe I should have read his previous books, instead, although considering how much he managed to rub me the wrong way with this one, I think I'll pass.

Rating: 2.5/5

I enjoyed reading this review. It's a pity, as the book sounded like it was going to be interesting. I hope I'm not the only person to have thought of Marvin the paranoid android at the end of your first para!

Great review bragan:)

As someone that had spent the last 13 years in front of computers, I usually look at this kind of books with suspicion - a computer today is not different from a machine in a factory 30 years ago (except that you can use computers for communication...). And sounds like this book is not for me...

>136 wandering_star:: Yeah, it sounded to me like it was going to be interesting, too! And parts of it were interesting, but in general, it was just so not what I was hoping for.

(And I hadn't thought of Marvin, but I totally am now!)

>137 AnnieMod:: Well, the differences are all in what you program them to do, I suppose. I don't doubt there's some legit research there, but... Yeah, not really the book for me, either. I am interested in how people relate to computers, but much less so in getting advice on sneaky strategies for getting people to like me so I can make them work harder and sell them stuff. :)

:) Well - people that would do such a research probably won't sell books... and most people are more interested in "how to get rich/famous/better conencted" books than in legit research anyway....

Yes. it had a definite "let's aim to sell this to people who read corporate self-help books!" vibe to it. I guess there's quite a market for those...

What a great review! Nass clearly doesn't know introverts. Somebody's gonna hack him for that comment!

I actually think the book sounds interesting. It might help to identify strategies employers are using to take advantage of you. It's more difficult to manipulate someone who is aware of the game.

>141 mkboylan:: What's really funny is that I can't help thinking that maybe I'm illustrating one of his points for him, because one of his conclusions is that we feel more affinity for people who have similar personality types to us, and he is very definitely an extrovert, which is probably part of what rubs me the wrong way about him. But, yes, despite all the research he's done, he does still give the impression of just not "getting" introverts at all. Several times while reading the book, I kept longingly thinking of Susan Caine's Quiet and wishing I were reading her instead.

>142 fuzzy_patters:: How much it might actually help, I don't know, but I suppose it couldn't hurt! Although being aware of it might just make it more annoying...

Maybe I'm putting to much weight on the introverted-reader stereotype, but insulting introverts in a book does seem counterproductive.

Even aside from the readers-as-introverts stereotype, insulting anybody in a book that's supposedly offering expert advice on how to get people to respond well to you is beyond ironic.

22. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian



The first book in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, about life in the British navy in the early 19th century.

I have to confess, I found this one slow going, particularly the first half of the novel. Our introduction to the characters and the setting is slow and drawn-out and features a lot of exposition, much of which might almost as well have been written in a foreign language, as far as I'm concerned. Despite having made it through the entire Horatio Hornblower series, I still do not remotely speak nautical-ese. And though Forester had a remarkable talent for writing in such a way that I could follow all the action even without understanding most of the terminology, O'Brian seems to foolishly trust that I'll pick it up as I go along. So it was often a bit of a struggle. Still, there are things here that I really like. I like the way O'Brian refuses to romanticize shipboard life without ever getting too grim. I like the sense of humor, which ranges from the dry to the bawdy, and tends to pop up at surprising moments. And I like the combination of the bluff, beefy, not overly educated man of action Captain Aubrey and the introverted, intellectual, entirely-too-obsessed-with-birds Dr. Maturin, which is, or at least has the potential to be, a delightful odd couple friendship.

Overall, I find myself responding to this book almost exactly the way I often respond to the pilot episode of a well-regarded TV series. There's too much awkward set-up to get through for things to feel satisfying, and I'm not yet sufficiently invested in the characters to feel properly engaged. But I can see the potential for something really worthwhile. So, despite my difficulties, I fully intend to keep going with this series. Which is good, I suppose, as I already own several of the later books.

Rating: a generous 3.5/5

23. Simon's Cat in Kitten Chaos by Simon Tofield



The third volume of cartoons featuring YouTube's most famous animated cat, this time joined by a cute but pesky kitten. As usual, they manage to bring some big smiles to my face. Often smiles of rueful recognition, as I know all too well what kind of insanity a new kitten can bring to an already cat-filled house, and Simon Tofield captures that wonderfully. Overall, I liked this one better than the last volume, as there is somewhat less romping around the great outdoors with other, somewhat over-anthropomorphized animals and more of cats just being (slightly exaggerated) cats.

Rating: 4/5

Have you seen the film of Master & Commander? It's one of my favourites, not at all the empty-headed swashbuckling that I had expected before watching it. I think it's got interesting things to say about how being true to yourself will always be what works best for you, whatever the nature of that self is. But I heard that a lot of that did not come from the books, but from the director, and I've never been particularly keen to get into a series which is so long...

I have, ages ago, and I remember quite enjoying it, though I don't remember any of the details. I gather it was based on one of the later books in the series, but how closely or loosely, I don't know.

Master and Commander was pushed on me by a family member...but I resisted (so far). Interesting to see your reaction which makes it seem a little fun, if a bit of work.

Maybe more work than fun, if I'm honest, although the fun moments may have seemed all the more fun because of it. And it did seem to me like the series as a whole holds real promise. I'm hoping that pans out.

24. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs



Jacob's grandfather is full of fantastic stories about the rural island off the coast of Wales that he was sent to as a refugee during WWII, of the weird and remarkable children he lived with there, and of monsters that have haunted him ever since. Jacob hasn't believed any of it since he was a little kid, but when his grandfather is killed by a creature that only Jacob can see, he decides to travel to Wales in search of the truth.

This novel is illustrated with lots of strange and often creepy old photographs, which are integrated into the story. It's interesting and kind of fun at first, but quickly starts to seem gimmicky, and knowing that the story was written around the photos gives the whole thing a slightly awkward contrived feel. And, while the beginning is intriguing, I don't think the rest of the book quite lived up to its potential. The people-with-strange-abilities-live-among-us premise feels over-familiar, and the story doesn't come to any kind of a satisfying ending -- presumably because it's meant to be the first in a series, something I wish I'd known going in. It's not a bad book, by any means, if you're in the mood for a little light, YA-ish fantasy. But I strongly suspect that a month from now, the only thing I'm going to remember about it is the photograph gimmick. I doubt I'll bother continuing on with the series.

Rating: 3.5/5

For a brief moment, between finishing paragraph and starting paragraph two, I thought you were on to something pretty good. Too bad it doesn't work.

It... kind of works, just not nearly as well as I was hoping it would.

Hi bragan, your doing really well on the reading front this year my friend, i am exactly halfway behind you but at the same stage last year i was five behind where i am this year. Hope you are well and keep on reading.

Thanks! The TBR pile is still pretty overwhelming, but at least I've actually done much better this month with buying fewer books than I read. (Of course, I'll have to do that for a long, long time if I'm going to make up for everything I acquired last month, but I'm trying not to think too hard about that.)

25. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost & Gail Steketee



The authors discuss the lives and histories of various compulsive hoarders that Dr. Frost, a psychologist, has worked with, as well as the possible causes of hoarding and which therapeutic approaches might actually have a chance of helping hoarders with their often life-crippling obsessions.

What struck me most about this book was how familiar so much of the psychology involved in hoarding felt to me. I mean, you look at people whose houses are so filled with random garbage that they can't open their windows and have to navigate around on tiny little goat trails through massive piles of stuff, and you find yourself thinking, how could anyone live like this? What could possibly be going on in their minds? Well, this book shows us what's going on in their minds, and it's not necessarily all that different from what goes on in any of our minds when it comes to how we relate to our possessions. For instance, Frost describes patients of his trying to sort through their belongings and decide what to discard, and their reasoning for keeping things often sounds surprisingly sane, if a little pack ratty. Oh, this magazine had an interesting-looking article in it that I haven't had the chance to read yet. These clothes don't fit my kids any more, but I might know someone who could use them. There's an interesting story behind this knick-knack, and that one reminds me of the really nice time I had the day I bought it. And, hey, you never know when random bits and bobs might come in useful; a stray pen cap could always double for a lost counter in a board game. Perfectly rational, mostly, except that these folks feel that way about everything. Seriously, everything. And while many of them have problems, such as severe OCD, that I can maybe understand intellectually but don't entirely "get", many aspects of the complex psychology involved in hoarding are surprisingly familiar traits that I've observed in myself and people close to me, even things that all of us are likely to feel from time to time. A sense of security in being surrounded by your own things. Buying things to make a bad mood feel better. A perfectionist streak that tells you that if you can't organize everything perfectly you shouldn't even try. Problems making decisions about what's worth spending time and energy on. A fear of being wasteful, or of missing out on an opportunity. Ordinary motivations, mainly, just... wildly out of control.

It's all utterly fascinating, if also a little scary, in a "there but for fortune go I" kind of a way. (Seriously, I can easily see how my own book-buying habit is different more in scale than in kind from the sort of compulsion that causes people to fill their entire homes with old newspapers.) And this book does a wonderful job of making people with this terribly stigmatized problem feel understandable and sympathetic and human. It may also be a good starting point for people who have, or have family members with a hoarding problem, and includes some resources for those who need them.

It's also made me really want to go home and clean out my closet.

Rating: 4.5/5

As I was reading your review I thought 'fascinating, but scary' and there you are saying the same thing in your last paragraph. I am not sure if I could read this as it might be a bit too recognisable! I often feel that the main thing stopping me from being a lunatic hoarder is that fact that because of my job I tend to move every few years, and the whole packing process is a really good incentive to dump out the sort of things which otherwise live and multiply in the backs of cupboards.

Good luck with the closet-cleaning!

Oh my, sounds like something a little too close to home. I need to clean my closets, and maybe read the book. :)

LOL at made you feel like cleaning out your closet!

My grandfather was a hoarder - so much so that when he died, his cousin, who owned a backhoe, came out and buried all the stuff on the property. Dug a big hole, ran over it to smush it all down, and then repeat .... The only time my grandfather actually got mad at me was when I was about to throw a piece of string away. "Hey, what are you doing? I could use that." My grandmother made him contain his hoarding to the garage, though. Thankfully! Geeez! We all blamed it on his growing up dirt poor during the Great Depression.

>158 wandering_star:: What kind of gets me about my own response is that except for the books -- which, admittedly, is a very big exception -- I don't really have the makings of "a lunatic hoarder." Yeah, I've got a lot of junk in my shed and closets, but I'm not particularly attached to any of it, and my living space is actually remarkably uncluttered. Heck, even my books are neatly organized. I also don't have some of the traits that the authors talk about as being common to hoarders, such as a strong association between vision and memory that leads to the feeling that everything needs to be kept in sight so it doesn't get forgotten. And yet, reading this book just made it ridiculously easy to imagine what it would be like to find myself going down that path. I don't think it's entirely due to the natural hypochondria that always seems to accompany reading about a mental or physical disorder, either. So much of it really does seem rooted in normal, understandable reactions to things, and even some the more dysfunctional aspects are disturbingly familiar, because they're the same things I experience with my book-buying, only with all sense of control or perspective stripped away.

The authors of the book don't necessarily address this directly, but to me there's a real fascination to the idea that the borderline between normal, adaptive responses and life-ruining pathology is a complicated and fuzzy one. It's an interesting insight into how our brains work, but at the same time it leaves me marveling at the fact that any of us manage to be sane at all. The thought that all it takes is a couple of knobs in your brain twisted a little to the left, and maybe the right environmental triggers... It's a pretty disturbing thought.

>159 NanaCC:: Of course, for people who are mildly prone to clutter, it's possible that reading the book might have exactly the opposite effect. You might find yourself feeling relieved that, hey, at least you're not that bad!

>160 mkboylan:: I think I've got about ten pairs of sneakers in there that either don't quite fit properly or are just about worn out, but, you know, they're still wearable. I keep thinking that I should keep them, just in case something happens to my current shoes, or maybe to do yardwork in. And I can't decide which of them would be best for that, so I've just kept them all. This... is total hoarder logic. Which is now making me nervous. I think I'm going to throw all of them out.

>161 avidmom:: It sounds like your grandfather was a classic case. I'd say your grandmother was lucky she got him to confine it like that, though. Apparently some families are capable of working out that kind of accommodation, and some really aren't.

Interestingly, the book talks about how many hoarders' families do blame it on things like "growing up dirt poor during the Great Depression," and traditionally psychologists have tended to accept that, but Frost doesn't believe that's actually the explanation, or at least not the root cause. He's seen quite a few hoarders who grew up well-to-do or even wealthy, and never experienced any material deprivation at all. As with so many things, it seems like it's a complicated combination of brain wiring and experiences, interacting in ways that aren't really understood yet.

And, gosh, I'm really rambling about this, aren't I? You can tell how much it interested me!

It is such a fascinating topic. I'm not sure I want to read a book about it, though! We're in the process of going through everything in preparation for a move, and its amazing the stuff that just got put in the spare room closet.

wandering_star, my mom has a saying: Three moves is as good as a fire, and I have to concurr. I can't imagine the stuff we'd never get rid of if we didn't move now and again. With the exception of the books, it's my SO who likes to keep things -- throwing things out or even donating them to Goodwill feels wasteful to him. Hence the VCR and old, boxy computer monitor in that closet.

>163 RidgewayGirl:: I remember being astonished by the stuff I found in my closet the last time I moved. For one thing, apparently every year I lived there, I bought a new roll of Christmas wrapping paper, only to have it get buried in the depths of the closet and forgotten about, so that I'd have go and and buy more the next year. I don't think I'm ever going to need to buy wrapping paper again in my life.

Ha! Last year I found gorgeous initialed velvet Christmas stockings on clearance and found enough for everyone. This year, they could not be found (we'd already put away the Christmas stuff when I'd bought these and so I put them somewhere very obvious and logical) so we used our usual mis-matched stockings.

Oh, the dreaded "putting things somewhere very obvious and logical!" I still haven't found the last item I did that with.

It's almost a tradition in my family that someone will receive a Christmas present from me in July, that I just found in a closet.

Inside Animal Hoarding is a great book. There are two sections, one written by a journalist and the other by a psychotherapist so it's fascinating to trace the trigger.

There's a fascinating chapter in Stuff about animal hoarding, which includes a bizarre, stranger-than-fiction story about a patient who inherited her psychotherapist's own cat-hoarding problem.

I can't see much harm in hoarding.

bragan you say at the start of your review that hoaders can have life-crippling obsessions, which may be true for some people, but surely this is extreme cases only

The most life crippling thing to hoard is probably money.

Well, the definition of hoarding as a disorder is when it gets to the point where it causes you serious problems. People who just have messy houses and like to keep lots of odds and ends don't really qualify, and aren't the folks the book focuses on. We're talking about people who fill their houses to the point where they're in serious danger of being crushed by falling debris or being unable to escape in case of a fire, or, in the case of people who hoard food debris or animals, may be living in incredibly unsanitary conditions. And even aside from physical safety issues, the people described in the book often lose spouses or alienate children who can't cope with their problems, bankrupt themselves buying things they don't actually need, have trouble maintaining normal social relationships because they feel unable to ever invite anyone into their homes, and experience incredibly high levels of distress and anxiety when they try to throw out so much as a piece of junk mail. It's actually pretty heartbreaking, and it's apparently surprisingly common.

Yes DSM states that a disorder must be interfering with your life in order to be diagnosed. If you hoard like crazy, but are safe and it isn't interfering with your life, you don't get the diagnosis. BUT, what if you are married to someone with OCD and therefore they can't handle it, THEN who gets the diagnosis?, the hoarder or the OCD person? Oh my I am so easily entertained, aren't I? I crack myself up.

Is there a minimalist OCD? My BIL and SIL once got into a roaring, public fight about his hoarding, which is really minimal, but she likes things spare. Minimalists, don't marry people who like to keep things! Also, book lovers. She finds our shelves in the living room appalling.

Ha! But of course they always DO marry each other! I think it is very open minded of you to waste your library space by having a living room in it.

One of my old texts said that the messy/neat thing is SO genetically related that it is almost impossible to change. I'm such a slob and my husband SUCH a neat freak. My daughter says she inherited both so she drives HERSELF crazy!

I think it is very open minded of you to waste your library space by having a living room in it.
Indeed! :)

>171 mkboylan:: Interestingly enough, the book mentions the case of young twin sisters who shared a room, one of whom had hoarding tendencies and one of whom had the kind of OCD that means everything has to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right angle. Apparently, they were able to live with a setup where each sister indulged her own compulsion right up to the invisible line separating the two halves of the room. That might have been a very interesting room to set foot in.

>172 RidgewayGirl:: I am so not an expert on OCD, but I gather it can come in all kinds of forms and levels of severity, so, hey... maybe.

And, yeah, even among people who don't qualify as pathological, clutterers and minimalists trying to live together can be difficult. I'm no minimalist, by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like for most of my stuff to have a place and to be there, and my ex-boyfriend, back in my long-ago cohabiting days, used to drive me bananas, because he'd leave these huge stacks of papers everywhere and get terribly upset if I tried to move them.

At least we were both fine with the bookshelves. That relationship would undoubtedly have ended a lot sooner, otherwise. :)

>173 mkboylan: I think it is very open minded of you to waste your library space by having a living room in it.

LOL! Yes, indeed!

One of my old texts said that the messy/neat thing is SO genetically related that it is almost impossible to change

Based on my anecdotal experience, I find that easy to believe. Except that perhaps it may change between childhood and adulthood. I remember living in levels of mess as a kid that would drive me crazy today.

26. Anonymous Rex by Eric Garcia



Vincent Rubio is a private detective whose life and career have been on the skids ever since his partner died in what everybody but Vincent believes was a random car accident. He's given one last chance to redeem himself by conducting a supposedly simple arson investigation which, inevitably, leads back to the case his partner was working when he died.

Oh, and also, Vincent is a dinosaur. Don't look so surprised. Something like 10% of the population are in fact dinosaurs -- or, rather, their descendents -- living among us secretly, disguised as humans. Really.

This is, of course, a ludicrous premise. The plot is pretty ludicrous, too, and I didn't find it especially compelling as a mystery, despite all its twists and turns. The narrative voice is fun, though, making this a breezy, mildly amusing take-off on the hardboiled detective genre. I don't really think it's quite strong enough, or quite funny enough, to fully justify the silliness of the idea, but assuming you can muster up the necessary suspension of disbelief, it's not bad as light and fluffy read.

Rating: 3.5/5

Something like 10% of the population are in fact dinosaurs -- or, rather, their descendents -- living among us secretly, disguised as humans.

I've always suspected this, and David Icke confirms it (well, sort of).

This does sound a little silly, but silly ideas sometimes work surprisingly well.

Ah, yes, I found myself thinking about David Icke several times while reading that book. I can't help but wonder if he was the inspiration for it. There's certainly enough bizarre conspiracy going on in the story!

Silly ideas sometimes do work surprisingly well, and I'm always extra impressed when a writer takes an obviously silly idea and makes it work. This one... only partly works, I think, but considering how very silly it is, even that is something.

Enjoyed reading your review of Stuff. I do think I have some of those tendencies though not to a pathological level. Some of my coworkers like to watch that hoarding show and once they showed me a clip of a mother and daughter whose house was so filled with stuff that they had to make tunnels to go from room to room or outside.

>177 bragan: I remember when that book came out. One of my co-workers at the bookstore thought it was a hoot. He also read the Bill Fitzhugh humorous crime novels that begin with Pest Control (exterminator mistaken for an assassin).

>180 DieFledermaus:: I haven't seen the hoarding show, but I have heard about it. Seems a bit... not quite right... to me to put people's psychological disorders on display for the entertainment of the viewing public. Although I suppose it could be more respectful and educational than I'm imagining it to be.

>171 mkboylan:: Pest Control sounds entertaining, or at least the premise does. That one might end up on my wishlist.

Great stuff on Stuff and great conversation you sparked off afterward. Hoped you kept one ratty pair of sneaker around.

to me there's a real fascination to the idea that the borderline between normal, adaptive responses and life-ruining pathology is a complicated and fuzzy one - would make an interesting study. Also, it seems to be the source of endless great fiction.

I still haven't cleaned out my closet. Maybe today. But, yes, hanging on to one pair of ratty old sneakers seems reasonable. I think all those jeans I no longer fit into may have to go, though. :)

What's wrong with burrowing tunnels in our stuff?! How could I move around otherwise? *processing sadly in her "special place" made of encyclopedias and curiously interesting pieces of cardboard which may or may not one day find a perfect use*

Well, as long as they don't collapse on you... There have actually been cases of people dying under collapsed piles of stuff, which I find a truly terrifying thought.

If you're going to hoard something, though, encyclopedias seem to me like the best possible choice. :)

27. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn



Nick and Amy's marriage has had some... difficulties. And then, on their fifth anniversary, Amy goes missing from their home, amid what the police usually call "signs of a struggle." Is she dead? Did Nick do it? What exactly is it that neither the police nor the reader are being told?

This one's been pretty hugely hyped, and for once, I think it's basically justified. It's a well-written, extremely readable novel with a lot of twists and turns, some cleverly unreliable narration, and a fascinatingly messed-up central relationship. I know a lot of people have disliked the ending, but it did work for me, in its own way. Exactly what way that is, though, or pretty much anything else about this book, I can't say for fear of spoilers. And this definitely isn't one you want to be spoiled for, so I'll just leave it there.

Rating: 4.5/5

Glad to see your thoughts about Gone Girl. I am on vacation and that is next up on my list.

I hope you like it as much as I did!

Not sure I can do this one bragan...

It's definitely not for everybody. There's lots of nastiness in it, and some very unlikable characters, and the messed-up relationship is very messed-up. It's one of those books that you almost don't want to say you "enjoyed." But I did.

>Three moves is as good as a fire
Basement floods work well, too! I do a household purge about once a year now and it feels terrific. Last time, I donated half a dozen winter coats that I still love but don’t wear; it made me happy to turn them from useless to people-warming. On the other hand, I have strong recollections of some of my childhood and young-adult clothing (Love, Loss and What I Wore, anyone?) and wish they’d been saved just as mementos.

I've decided that every behavior is on a continuum, where the edges of that center "normal" part get very fuzzy (and "normal" itself changes so much over time).

I started Gone Girl and was distracted away. So glad to see your rating, I must get back to it.

Hi bragan, looking forward to reading Gone Girl and enjoyed your review. I see your reading is going well my friend.

>192 detailmuse:: I still have some t-shirts I got in high school that I wear occasionally. They are now old enough to vote. Hey'll they're old enough to drink.

I think you're more or less right on the "continuum" thing. And, of course, whether some particular behavior is a problem or not can depend as much on the circumstances as on the behavior.

>193 johnsimpson:: I've still got way, way too many books on the TBR Pile, but I'm feeling good about the progress I've been making through it lately. And I've only bought one book so far this month! Hope you're having equal success tackling yours!

Very enticing review of Gone Girl, I'll have to move it up on the list.

Also, love the way you have aged your clothing. Some of my shirts are just starting the eigth grade, i hope to see them through their driving test at least.

I'll be interested to see what any of you folks who are planning on reading Gone Girl think of it.

I just started it, so far so good.

Enjoying the conversation about hoarding. I'm not a hoarder myself, but my husband is kind of. We have stacks of journals and magazines which are not just old enough to drink, but old enough to have a mother-in-law, still wrapped in their plastic covers. I used to really get all worked up about it, but stopped when I realised that the oldest unread book acquisition I have is even older than his oldest unread magazine, and when I realised my unread pile was outpacing the growth of his at a galloping rate.

>197 NanaCC:: Yay! Hope it continues not to disappoint.

>198 deebee1:: Oh, god, yes, I think the oldest book on my TBR Pile dates to about 1989. I'm not sure quite where it all got so out of control. :)

So far, I am enjoying Gone Girl. Normally, this would be a one or two sitting book, but vacation with a four and six year old is not letting that happen.

I'm impressed if you can get any reading at all done under those circumstances!

28. Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson



Now, this is exactly what a biography should be. It's through, lucid, and well-organized, and covers the personal, scientific, and political aspects of Einstein's life in a balanced and interesting fashion. It's well-written, featuring some pleasingly apt turns of phrase, but, commendably, Isaacson never lets his own voice overwhelm that of his subject. The scientific concepts behind Einstein's work are well-presented, too, in a way that carefully avoids any of the all-too-common popular misinterpretations but shouldn't prove too overwhelming for the layman. And, of course, it's about a brilliant and fascinating man.

Definitely recommended if a biography of Einstein is something you feel even remotely interested in reading.

Rating: 4.5/5

>202 bragan: That sounds interesting. I like the picture, I'm so used to seeing that other one.

>203 avidmom:: There is at least one somewhat more famous picture of him in the book. Also, quite a few photos from when he was younger, before the crazy hair. :)

29. Complete Zombies vs Robots by Chris Ryall & Ashley Wood



OK, the basic idea behind this graphic novel is that mad scientists accidentally bring a zombie plague back from the future (or maybe the past?), which wipes out humanity, leaving our robotic replacements behind to fight the shambling undead remnants of their creators. I am sure that it would be possible to create a serious, thoughtful, internally consistent story based on this weirdly intriguing premise. This... is not that story. I'm not entirely sure what this is, but it's full of pulpy action and nonsensical plot twists, and eventually, for some reason, there are Amazons. It's actually pretty entertaining, in a WTFish sort of way, with lots of fun, dark humor, but ultimately it's a bit too all over the place to feel satisfying. And the messy, murky artwork, as well as not being much to my taste, often made the action annoyingly difficult to follow. I don't remotely regret the hour and a half I spent reading it, but I can't quite imagine recommending it to anybody else.

Rating: 3.5/5

30. The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn by John Bellairs



A kids' book from 1978 about a 13-year-old boy who finds a clue to a treasure hunt hidden in his local library. It's funny: I hadn't realized this when I acquired the book, but I definitely read this when I was a kid. I remembered almost none of the details, but one particular plot element was immediately and utterly familiar as soon as I started. It's always kind of a weird sensation when that happens.

Unfortunately, unlike the other two Bellairs books I read recently, this one didn't really have that much appeal to me as an adult reader. There's way too much exposition, in that simplistic kidlit kind of style; the villain's a little too cartoony; the major plot clue that the main character overlooks for most of the novel seemed far too obvious to sophisticated-adult me; and it lacks the pleasant creepiness of The House With a Clock in Its Walls and The Curse of the Blue Figurine. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad kids' book, though. Clearly it made some kind of impression on me as a young reader, if I'm able to remember anything at all about it decades later. Although it does feel pretty dated now, so modern kids might or might not agree.

Rating: 3/5

It's always kind of a weird sensation when that happens.
Cool. I don't think it's ever happened to me.

I love following your incredibly varied and eclectic reading!

It's happened to me a few times in my life, sometimes with books I didn't remember I remembered from childhood, and sometimes with books I'd forgotten reading as an adult. It's an interestingly odd sort of deja vu feeling.

And thanks! It's just going to keep being eclectic from here, too... I've got all kinds of odd things waiting for me to read them.

My advice to you bragan is to lay off the zombies and keep reading the Einstein, you know it makes sense. Thanks for the recommendation of Einstein: his life and Universe.

I have both more zombies and more Einstein on my TBR Pile. I think varying back and forth between them might actually be just the right pattern of relaxation and stimulation for my brain. :)

31. The Vacuum Cleaner: A History by Carroll Gantz



I requested this book from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program because I found myself thinking, "OK, that has got to be more interesting than it looks!" And I was sort of right. It turns out there's some interesting historical trivia about vacuum cleaners, and the story of the vacuum as it's presented here does touch on all kinds of broader topics: the profound changes wrought on society by the industrial revolution, historical and modern attitudes towards housework, the evolution of industrial design, and so on. Except, well... this really isn't fundamentally a book about any of those thing It's a book about the history of vacuum cleaners. A very, very thorough book about the history of vacuum cleaners. Which, if you're passionate about the topic of vacuum cleaners -- and apparently some people are -- is no doubt a wonderful thing. But I'm afraid my own interest in the subject is rather more casual and limited, and I often found myself skimming quickly over long lists of vacuum cleaner designs or changes to the corporate structures of vacuum cleaner companies and wondering what on earth I was doing reading a book about vacuum cleaners in the first place.

Rating: How to even rate this one? It's not the book's fault that I am not as much of a fan of vacuum cleaners as it is. Well, not much, anyway. Let's call it 3/5.

I HATE vacuum cleaners -- luckily I have a husband who will do the dirty deed. ;-)

There are a bunch of these books now; histories of ordinary objects. Topics that would make an interesting extended article, but not quite up to the rigors of supporting an entire book.

>212 janeajones:: Vacuuming is actually one of those household tasks I don't mind too much. It's relatively simple and easy, and it improves the look of my carpets enough that it allows me to bask in a sense of control over my environment without actually expending too much effort.

All of which, it turns out, does not actually translate into me being fascinated by the machine itself.

>213 RidgewayGirl:: "The history of an ordinary object" seemed to me like it could be a really interesting topic. The one other book-length treatment of such that I've read, though, was Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf, and I have a much greater personal interest in bookshelves than I do in vacuums. I think that made kind of a lot of difference.

32. The 1984 World's Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim



Like the 1983 volume, which I read a few months ago, this anthology is a decidedly mixed bag. I'm coming to the conclusion that either the editor of this series has rather different standards than I do for what constitutes the world's best stories, or else the 1980s were a worse decade for science fiction than I remember them being. Which is entirely possible; I was 13 in 1984, and didn't exactly have highly developed tastes. Still, there's just enough good stuff here to make it worth a look.

Some brief comments on the individual stories:

"Blood Music" by Greg Bear: A scientist injects himself with intelligent microbes that begin to change him from the inside. It's an interesting, if massively implausible, idea, and the story's ending has some impact, but it's marred by way too much clunky technobabble at the beginning and a storyline that feels far too compressed. Bear later expanded it into a novel, which I read a few years ago. I remember thinking that, while also massively implausible, it was considerably more entertaining than the other novels of his I'd read. That's not necessarily saying all that much, though. Greg Bear is one of those authors whose stuff I keep thinking I should like and then inevitably feel disappointed by.

"Potential" by Isaac Asimov: A pair of scientists investigate a teenage boy who possesses a gene sequence that might make him telepathic. More clunky dialog here, and a not terribly successful twist ending. Definitely not one of Asimov's more memorable stories.

"Knight of Shallows" by Rand B. Lee: A man is sent into parallel realities to track down a version of himself who is murdering other versions of himself. Now, this one I liked. It's a weird and messy little story, but it's interesting, and it makes the parallel worlds concept feel fresher than it really is -- or was, even in 1984.

"Spending A Day at the Lottery Fair" by Frederik Pohl: A nicely chilling little story about a future in which America has introduced a novel form of population control that's fun for all the family... until it's not.

"In the Face of My Enemy" by Joseph H. Delany: A woman who supposedly has some kind of professional skills, but exhibits absolutely no competence or personality whatsoever sets out on some kind of planetary survey with her assigned bodyguard, a virile manly man, who is also immortal and has special superhuman abilities, and knows everything about everything, and solves all the planet's mysteries at a glance while she looks on admiringly, constantly asks him what they should do next, and, at one point, breaks down sobbing. I swear, I had to check the cover of the book again to make sure I hadn't picked up The 1944 Annual World's Best SF by accident.

"The Nanny" by Thomas Wylde: The last survivor of humanity is headed for Alpha Centauri with a cargo of human genetic material, but something goes wrong on the way. A decently written, slightly dark take on a familiar idea with a an effective ending that's marred a bit by the fact that the last adult survivor of humanity too often comes across as an idiot who has trouble remembering what he's even supposed to be doing.

"The Leaves of October" by Don Sakers: An alien tree attempts to make contact with humans who have trouble realizing it's sentient. I like the attempt to portray an alien POV, but there's a tiny bit too much of a not-all-that-subtle New Agey eco-hippie flavor here for my taste.

"As Time Goes By" by Tanith Lee: A well-written and interestingly ambiguous tale of a space pirate, a beautiful woman, and a time travel paradox... maybe. I'm not sure quite what to make of this, in the end, but it was an intriguing, atmospheric read.

"The Harvest of Wolves" by Mary Gentle: This one's just a brief little nugget of near-future dystopia. Depressingly, it feels at least as relevant today as it was in the eighties, possibly more so, and there's a nice little sting to the ending, but there's really not very much story meat on its social-commentary bones.

"Homefaring" by Robert Silverberg: A man's consciousness travels forward some unspecified but immense period of time, and he finds himself sharing a body with a sentient lobster. This probably sounds ridiculous, but for my money it's by far the best story in the book, or at least the most engrossing. It's smoothly and intelligently written, and does a good job of conjuring up that sense of wonder and awakened curiosity that SF at its best does so well. And for all that he's sharing a brain with lobster, the main character is the most believably human of any to be found here.

Rating: 3/5

Usually, your books interest me. This is a good review, but I have never been able to warm up to Science Fiction. I will pass.

I've always been a big fan of the genre. It's so very diverse that I suspect even people who don't think they like it might well be able to find stuff in it that they like if they knew where to look... But that particular anthology is probably not the best place to go looking. :)

Enjoyed your review of The 1984 annual: The world's best SF although sorry to hear it was largely disappointing. SF does lend itself to short story writing and I love picking over the old anthologies when I come across them.

It comes to show again that tastes are different - Blood Music is one of my favorite stories by Bear (and I much prefer the story to the novel). But then - I generally like his style

>218 baswood:: So do I. SF has produced some extraordinarily fine short stories, both widely recognized and heavily anthologized ones and more than a few hidden, under-rated gems, and old anthologies can be great places to find both of those. Of course, most anthologies are at least somewhat uneven, if only because reader and editor seldom have exactly identical tastes. I think, really, that I wouldn't find the unevenness of these ones nearly as disappointing if it weren't for the rather grandiose "world's best" claim in the title.

>219 AnnieMod:: I really don't know quite what it is with me and Bear, and why it is we consistently fail to click.

>220 bragan:

These are effectively the Year's best of the per-Dozois era (well... they have a few years running at the same time but...) - despite the name of the series (like the World Series in some sports...), Wollheim was doing year's best with these volumes. And some years simply don't have too many gems.

>222 AnnieMod:: Of course, in a case like this, you're always limited by what's actually been produced in any given year. I have to say, though, that from what I've read of both series -- which is admittedly kind of a random sampling -- I think Dozois' tastes are in general closer to mine than Wollheim's.

I am not sure it is just the taste - the SF in the nineties had taken a very sharp turn and the variety of stories had highly expanded. But if you feel like real comparison, get the volumes from both of them for the same year - I suspect Dozois will still win - Wollheim is mostly old school (and that's what he picks... as funny as this can sound for SF). Which does not mean that a lot of these stories hold very well together 20-30 years later. And that's part of the problem - technology skyrocketed... and a lot of the old SF just could not see so much ahead. I've always thought that an author in the 90s and in the 21st century has a much greater chance of hitting a real prediction than anyone else before that. Not that some of the authors did not make pretty good stuff in the 80s and before but generally.

And there is possibly something else - I grew up on the SF from the 80s and earlier (whatever had been published back home). Back in the 90s they still made sense and worked. But after all the SF and real stories from the last decades, I still like the old stories... but they do sound a lot more dated.

It's actually kind of interesting reading these 80s anthologies, because there does feel like a real mix of very old school kind of stories and ones that feel a lot more modern. And while I love a lot of classic SF -- I grew up reading Asimov -- it's the old school-type ones that generally feel the clunkiest and most disappointing; even when the more modern-feeling ones aren't perfect, they're generally at least more interesting. In that context, the more old-fashioned plot-oriented, technobabble-laden, plain-prose stories feel rather stale (in a way they wouldn't have, perhaps, in an anthology published a couple of decades earlier), and their inclusion feels more like looking backward with a slightly misplaced nostalgia, rather than embracing the best of the new. But, of course, it's probably a lot easier for me to judge like that from my perspective thirty years in the future.

33. Doctor Who: The Visual Dictionary by Neil Corry, Jacqueline Rayner, Andrew Darling, Kerrie Dougherty, David John and Simon Beechcroft



A visual companion to the new Doctor Who series, up through the end of the Eleventh Doctor's first season. The brief chunks of text aren't particularly impressive, even given that they're undoubtedly written to be accessible to children, but visually it's pretty spiffy. I wouldn't exactly call it a must-have reference for the Who fan, although I suppose folks who do costuming might find it useful. But it is fun to browse through, and it certainly reminds me just how much I love this ridiculous, wacky, wonderful show.

Rating: 3.5/5

I love Doctor Who, but have never been tempted into fan-zine territory. Big excitement in the UK the new Doctor Who season starts on Easter Saturday.

We're getting it here in the US on BBC America the same day!

I'm looking forward to Saturday too!

I want to find out what's up with this Clara person. :)

I also cannot wait for Dr Who on Saturday and the Royal Mail here are releasing a set of commemorative stamps featuring all eleven incarnations of the Doctor.

Very cool! Nice to know your post office has good taste in television!

Yes we do get some good commemorative stamps from the Royal Mail, just a shame that the everyday stamps are so boring unlike most of the rest of the world.

Loved your reviews of the short stories, particularly "In the Face of My Enemy"! Also interested in Annie's comments. Dozois started editing the Year's Best the same year he started editing Asimov's Science Fiction, so he had more influence over what type of short fiction was being published (and therefore available for inclusion in the anthologies) at about the same time that he was creating the anthologies. I'm curious how much his taste influenced the changes in SF over the time period being discussed. (Full disclosure: I've been the head of editorial for Dell Magazines, which publishes Asimov's, since 1997 or so, but I am not a big reader of SF and really couldn't say myself how much influence Dozois had over the genre as a whole.)

>234 cabegley:: That's an interesting question, really. It's not difficult to imagine he had some significant influence. The SF short story market, it seems to me, has always been small enough for one person, certainly for one editor, to make a real difference. But it would take someone with a far more detailed knowledge of the history of the genre than I to say exactly how much and what.

>234 cabegley:

The answer is probably "a lot". These were the years where you either make it in the magazines or don't get published at all. And I had read issues from pretty much any era of Asimov's... and I can almost always guess the editor. Plus Dozois's anthologies were what formed the idea of the non-magazine crowd for the SF short fiction through the years.

Look at the other big magazines - Analog has a very different editorial voice (and always had); F&SF has its own. The new ones (mostly online) are also recognizable - in a lot of cases I can say which magazine a certain story came from - not because they are formulaic but because all of the magazines are finding their voices that make them different. Asimov's is the milder - Analog stories are almost non-foundable in the rest of the magazines

Pretty much the same can be said in the other Dells by the way (the two mystery magazines).

(And here I started again on one of my favorite stories - fiction magazines. Sorry)

>236 AnnieMod:: (And here I started again on one of my favorite stories - fiction magazines. Sorry)

No need to be sorry at all, at least not as far as I'm concerned! It's an interesting topic, really. I had subscriptions to Analog and Asimov's for a while back in the 80s, and F&SF in the 90s, and I certainly do remember all of them having distinct voices, although I'm not sure I could have articulated quite what the differences were, other than that Analog was harder SF and F&SF softer and more "literary."

34. The Postmortal by Drew Magary



A scientist accidentally invents a surprisingly simple "cure for aging," which means that human beings now possess something very close to immortality. This... causes problems. Lot of problems, from the social to the political to the environmental, and none of them will ultimately lead anywhere good.

The possibility of immortality, what it would be like to experience it and what it would mean for the world, is one that science fiction has addressed extensively. I don't know that this book features any genuinely new ideas on the subject, but it did make me think about it more deeply and thoroughly than I had in a very long time, so that, whether it really is or not, it felt to me like a fairly fresh take on things. I think the structure, which uses a sort of blog/diary conceit, helps with that, as it provides a good balance between a global view of events and a more immediate and personal one. At least, it does in the earlier chapters. As the story goes on, jumping several decades forward in time, it seems to lose some of its groundedness and sense of focus, and some of the directions it goes in at the end aren't as satisfying as I might have hoped. Still, I found it worthwhile, overall. And, while there is very little in it that you could point to and call "funny" -- quite the reverse, in fact -- there's a nicely dark, cynical, subtly satiric sense of humor that seems to underlie the entire thing.

Rating: 4/5

Interesting discussion of SF stories, must tell dukedom (he hasn't been on LT much the last few months) as your discussion would interest him. He's the big SF short fiction reader, not I.

He's certainly welcome to drop by and join the conversation!

204 - I may have to get this for those pics alone!

You might like that history of monsters written by an anthro prof - I'll try to remember the name of it. Anyone? It was pretty interesting listening to the interview on NPR - he was actually teaching a course on it - using it as a hook for history. e.g. plague = zombies

Here it is: Medusa's Gaze and Vampire Bite by Matt Kaplan

>241 mkboylan:: Einstein was quite handsome in his youth, apparently!

And I'd seen that book and was kind of interested in it, but I read a really rather negative review of it recently, so now I'm not at all sure.

243 - I haven't read it. Perhaps the NPR interview is enough in itself:

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/26/163712865/medusas-gaze-and-vampires-bite

35. Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits by John D. Barrow



Is it possible, even in principle, to know everything? Is there a limit to the places science can take us, not because there are mystical realms accessible only by mystical means, but because complete comprehensibility just isn't built into the nature of things? Barrow discusses some of the more obvious, scientifically-established limits to what we can know, such as Heinsenberg's Uncertainty Principle (although that actually gets surprisingly little coverage), the fact that the unbreakable speed of light limits how much of the universe we can ever see, and the way Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem tells us there are some mathematical truths that cannot be arrived at mathematically. But much of the book deals with more abstract, even philosophical questions. Is it possible that the universe, despite what physicists like to believe, is so infinitely complicated that the closer we look, the more we'll see, forever? Is the human brain, which, after all, evolved to help us survive and reproduce and has only produced our ability to do math and science as a sort of side effect, even capable of truly understanding the universe? Will human knowledge continue increasing forever, or is the absolute best we can hope for a future in which it takes more and more effort to discover less and less? And so on.

It makes for a somewhat rambling trip through a wide variety of subjects, some of which seem more relevant to the main thrust of the book than others. Some sections are clear and fascinating. Others, I think, are just a bit too dense, while still others feel oddly lacking in substance. Ultimately much of what Barrow has to say is, by its very nature, unsatisfying, because on many of these subjects, all one can really do is pose the question, stare at it for a while, and then shrug and walk away. Far too often we don't even know what it is we don't know. But it is certainly a wide-ranging and thought-provoking journey that Barrow takes us on in the course of contemplating all these unknowns.

Rating: 3.5/5

An interesting question to ponder.

A fascinating but ultimately rather frustrating one, really!

New thread is up for the second quarter of 2013. See you there!