October 2015 - Theme

I'm pretty late getting this one up folks. I have been busy with 'birthday' season at my house.

Once again I will put up the list from the wiki. Please feel free to add any other suggestions you would like considered. Also, I haven't looked into the HistoryCAT option for this month so if somebody could post that please.

Biblical fiction
Civil wars
Communications (letters/telegraph/telephone/pony express)
Doorstopper - over 700 pages
Entertainment/recreation
Featherweight - under 200 pages
Industry
Italy
Local/state/regional history
Multiple authors
One word title
Poverty
Red Scare/Mccarthyism
Slavery/human trafficking
Tricksters
Urbanization
War

I like the multiple authors suggestion, so I'll put that one forward as I bought A Day of Fire which would be perfect.

October HistoryCAT theme is science & technology. Other suggestions:
Halloween
trade/industry

All good options, but pathetically, just because of my own over-commitment, I'd still be voting to match the HistoryCAT theme.

I, too, will prefer to match the HistoryCat theme of science and technology as I am going to be concentrating on completing my Category Challenge in October.

Sorry everybody, it took me a while to get that vote up. As we are a bit behind I am going to start up the November thread too (before I forget).

I'll give it a couple more days.

Ok, Science and Technology is the choice for October.

Sounds good. I'm going for medical science with The anatomy of deception, with tags of medicine, forensics and anatomists. And maybe Around the World in Eighty Days with science fiction about technological wonders.

I voted for Science and Technology since I've got a practice of voting for HistCAT for the benefits of its participants (which I'm not amongst). I was trying to figure out just what I was going to read, because I really do want to ROOTS this thing and get to some of my unread (or read so many years ago) rather than looking to get anything new into my backlog.

So I did a tagmash on technology, fiction (because that's me primarily, fiction), and I was pleasantly surprised at what I've got to look forward to:

Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods and The PowerBook
Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
Lawrence Durrell, Tunc and Nunquam (rereads, but it's been decades....)

I deliberately chose fiction that isn't really too sci-fi in nature since I think that may be a bit off-topic, though I may be being unnecessarily strict with myself. Some of these may be sci-fi, but they've got a definite "technology" theme running through them.

ETA: And I think I may have Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (and possibly also Brave New World Revisited) around somewhere, but if so, I'm not sure where. If I come across it by accident, I can give them a reread (again, after many decades) as well.

I'm planning on The Railway Viaduct by Edward Marston.

I have a copy of An Imperfect Lens by Anne Roiphe on my Kindle, it's a story featuring Louis Thuillier, a French Biologist who comes to Alexandria in 1883 inorder to locate the microbe that causes Cholera.

For October, I'll be reading Victorian Internet... by Tom Standage , a history of the development of the telegraph in the Nineteenth Century.

I'm thinking of reading Code to Zero because it deals with the Space Race during the Cold War. I'm not sure if it's science/technology heavy enough though.

I really don't have much idea of what I'm going to read for this month. The only book that immediately jumps to my mind is the next book in Stuart Clark's series about scientists, The Sky's Dark Labyrinth trilogy. I'll have to see what I can get my hands on at the library.

I'll be reading The Technologists and The Prestige.

I loved The Technologists!

Has anybody read The Invention of Everything Else? I'm thinking of reading that one for this month.

I ended up reading The Sensorium of God, the second book in The Sky's Dark Labyrinth series. It was almost biographical fiction style of writing featuring Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton. An absolutely perfect choice for this month's theme. Set in the 1700's and against a backdrop of constantly changing monarchs and politics.

I enjoy being a member of Reading Through Time because I am encouraged to tackle topics I might not normally choose to tackle if left to my own devices. For me, one of those topics is Science and Technology. Thank you, Reading Through Time, for getting me to pick up Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. I enjoyed this story of the invention, spread and then decline of the telegraph, the difference it made in the nineteenth century world and the parallels with today's Internet. This nonfiction book was written in a nice, straightforward manner and included an index and bibliography, which I always appreciate.

>20 countrylife: I'm loving it too. About halfway through.

Science & Technology ... Lawrence Durrell's Tunc fits broadly within that theme and would probably also fit within a theme of Trade & Industry. It's actually a dystopian novel (the first in the Revolt of Aphrodite dyad), dealing with an inventor who is seduced into contracting his life away to "the firm," which is a bit like Kafka's Castle, incomprehensible and inescapable.

The second book of the dyad, Nunquam, as I understand it, may be a bit of a Stepford Wives kind of production. I'll probably try to get to it in the next week or two, just for the sake of completeness.

I read these two novels (along with the Alexandria Quartet and The Dark Labyrinth back in the mid-70s, for a graduate course on the Modern British Novel taught by Neil Brennan at Villanova University. I quite liked The Dark Labyrinth (which seemed a bit of a take on Inferno and Purgatorio) but didn't care for either of the dyad or the quartet. I still haven't changed my mind, but I'll still give Tunc 3½*** for a book that you should like if it's kind of book you'd care for.

ETA: ... but I wish I'd read Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon instead.

I read a couple of things that fit this month's theme. The Railway Viaduct is the 3rd book in Edward Marston's Railway Detective series, about the early years of the railways. It includes lots of details about engineering (as in railway design and construction). I liked the first book in the series, but it's gone downhill from there. I don't think I'll be continuing with the series.

I also listened to The Explorers Club, a play about a scientific society in Victorian London facing the question of accepting its first female member. The humor was too juvenile for my taste, but I enjoyed the 20-25 minute interview with Eileen Pollack that was included at the end of the recording. She reminisced about her undergraduate studies at Yale, when she was one of two female physics majors.

My October read was The Anatomy of Deception by Lawrence Goldstone, a murder mystery using early forensics.