May Dewey Challenge (350-399)

The Dewey range for May is 350 to 399.

Quick link to the wiki is here.

350 - 359 Public administration & military science



Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War by Jimmie Briggs (355)
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (355.02)

360 - 369 Social problems & social services



The Year We Disappeared: A Father-Daughter Memoir by Cylin Busby, John Busby (363.2)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (364.1)

370 - 379 Education



I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb (370.82)
A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Suskind (371.08)

380 - 389 Commerce, communications, transport



Hear that Train Whistle Blow! How the Railroad Changed the World by Milton Meltzer (385.09)
Bright Lights, No City: An African Adventure on Bad Roads with a Brother and a Very Weird Business Plan by Max Alexander (381.45)

390 - 399 Customs, etiquette, folklore



The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (394.1)
The People Could Fly: Black American Folk Tales by Virginia Hamilton (398.2)

These are a sample of titles I pulled from my library's shelves. Happy reading!

My choice for this month is Scotland Yard, by Sir Harold Scott (Dewey number 364.120942).

I'm considering several possibilities:
Bosnia's Million Bones by Christian Jennings (364)
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale (364)
Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins by Elizabeth Stone (398)

I am planning to read Something Must Be Done about Prince Edward County by Kristen Green (379.263) for this May DeweyCAT challenge. I may still read it but also Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman (365). Both of these books fit both the Random and Dewey challenges.

Also, if I don't get it read this month, I will need to read my LT ER book, Pistols and Petticoats by Erika Janik (363).

I'm going to look a little closer, but it's funny you mentioned The Year We Disappeared, as that's been on my tbr for a while!

I know that I have something suitable in the social problems area, in the form of crime novels and some historical true crime, but I'll look and see if I have something less obvious.

I'm going to be reading The Island of Lost Maps:A True Story of Cartographic Crime (364) by Miles Harvey. I'll be interested to see how it fits into the "social problems and social services" area.

I'll read Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet. It fits the RandomCAT as well. :)

I'm planning on One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead, which my library has at 395.22.

I am planning on reading Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker.

I'm planning to read:

The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls (362.82092)
The Food of a Younger Land - Mark Kurlansky (394.120973)
Railway Maps of the World- Mark Overden (385.0223)

Finally figured out what I'm going to read - Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. LT doesn't have a Dewey number listed for it but the Library of Congress says that it is 362.17/5.

I've decided on The Caravaggio Conspiracy by Peter Watson 363.232.

I'm starting Missoula by Jon Krakauer with the admission that if I get too angry or upset I may set it aside for something less aggrevating.

>14 mamzel: You might be interested to know that Krakauer's lawyers pled in front of the Montana Supreme Court this week to have further U of M files opened to the public. It's a tough book, but I learned a lot.

I'll probably read several for this challenge. I also read along with various challenges on the 75 ers' group. This month there is a 'Mystery & Mayhem' thread and a thread in honor of mental health month, so my reads will be overlapping.

I've started listening to an audiobook A Stolen Life (364.1) read by the victim and author Jaycee Duggard. It's chilling. Her voice still sounds like she could be 11 and her vocabulary is mostly made up of mostly very simple words. It sounds like the eleven year old Jaycee reading it.

>15 streamsong: I think I have that on my tbr (A Stolen Life).

I discovered that my Horror! Group read of the month fits perfect for the DeweyCAT this month! I'll be reading Deliver Us: Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the Infamous I-45/Texas Killing Fields by Kathryn Casey.

I read Two Old Women, An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival by Velma Wallis, dewey 398.2. A great story that will also work for the GeoCat and Bingo Dog (indigenous people). A wonderful story of the importance of our elders to community and also why we should stay active.

I finished reading Pistols and Petticoats: 175 Years of Lady Detectives in Fact and Fiction by Erika Janik (363.25082), a LT Review Book. This is an interesting book although it covers a lot of ground in less than 200 pages of text. I still need to write the review.

I'm thinking about a re-read of Aesop's Fables. I also pulled out Arabian Nights from my shelves - I thought I had read it a long time ago, but maybe only some of the tales, because it's quite the tome! And I have also pulled out The Virago Book of Fairy Tales - just in a fable/tale mood this month, I guess.

>15 streamsong: That is interesting to know. It's good that he lends his weight and research to the cause. It's really like putting his money where his mouth is!

The Dugard story was popular in my library for a while since teens eat up abuse stories and also because it took place practically in our backyard. I haven't read it and will be interested in what you think of it.

>16 LibraryCin: >21 mamzel: A Stolen Life is actually pretty brutal. I'm listening to Jaycee Dugard read it. She has a high, childlike voice and a very simple vocabulary (her schooling stopped when she was 11). It sounds like a child relating the horrible acts done to her. I may have to abandon it.

Luckily, I have several more on my physical TBR pile that will fit this classification if I do.

>22 streamsong: I wonder if the audio makes it harder to listen to than it might be to read?

>23 LibraryCin: I think you're absolutely right, although it's also pretty graphic. :-(

I finished C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man (370.1) about education and moral relativism. It wasn't the easiest read, but it gave me a lot to think about, and I can definitely recommend it.

Powerful read - Missoula by Jon Krakauer.

>26 mamzel: I read that months ago and I'm still thinking about it.

COMPLETED In Dog We Trust, the protagonist of which is a convicted hacker who is out on parole.

I finished a fiction book which I think will fit for this month, Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart, an historical mystery about the woman who would become the first female sheriff in the US.

I just finished Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery (364.1) by Robert Kolker. This was an riveting book about the murders of five young women, all of whom worked as prostitutes through Craig's List, who were killed on Long Island and found in shallow graves along the roadside.

I read Jaycee Dugard's A Stolen Life: A Memoir which fits this months DeweyCAT (364). It is graphic and rough reading in the beginning, but after that she only refers to things in a general way and there are no more graphic details. For people who can't take reading the book I recommend checking out the website and YouTube channel for the foundation she and her family started. Links to both are here: http://thejaycfoundation.org/ and https://www.youtube.com/user/TheJAYCFoundation. I have a review of the book on my thread here https://www.librarything.com/topic/204813#5577001.

What we talk about when we talk about the tube : the District line by John Lanchester (385 or 388) was a big surprise - for such a slim little book! Well-written, interesting, entertaining. What more can you ask?

>32 VivienneR: That sounds really neat!

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Anyone looking to get a head start on June's DeweyCAT can find it here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/223380

I found something unexpectedly nice on my shelves for the Dewey CAT, about etiquette: Manners for women. It had me giggling several times, other stuff she mentions is still valid today. And I loved Lord Charles Beresford's telegraphic reply to an invitation politely to be declined: "Sorry to be unable to accept. Lie follows by post."

edited for touchstone

I've finished The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey about a man who stole many maps from famous libraries and then sold them.

I've finished two more books for this month's challenge: Humanist Educational Treatises edited by Craig W. Kallendorf (370.112), a collection of four fifteenth century essays on education, and Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay, a murder mystery set at a fictional Oxford women's college.

i read Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics. An interesting discussion of eugenics and abortion blended with personal stories of mothers who chose not to abort even on the recommendation of their doctors. Aside from the Pro-choice/Pro-life issue, I found it fascinating that a common factor in every story was the number of random, unrelated people, including medical professionals and counselors who felt fine about making vocal judgments about another woman's choice to keep a baby that might be disabled or ill. Kind of reminded me about how often total strangers would touch my pregnant belly and how totally offensive it was. It seems like people often lose their usual restraint or respect for boundaries when it comes to pregnancy and babies. Or is it my imagination? The saddest thing about the stories that women shared in the book was that often they had someone ask them if they hadn't known the baby would have a defect before it was born, so they could "do something about it." Whether or not you agree with the sentiment, why on earth would you say that to someone? I would never.

The Year We Disappeared / Cylin Busby and John Busby
4 stars

In 1979, Cylin was 9-years old. Her father, John, was police officer in a town in Massachusetts. He was shot in the face and survived, but – even though he was certain who was behind it – the police seemed to not be pursuing it. John believed the person behind the shooting was a local well-known criminal, Raymond Meyer, who also had connections at the police department and was known to be untouchable. Even so, some of the officers, including John, still tried to bring Ray to justice for various crimes.

I thought this was very good. Frustrating about the corruption in the police department and not being able to do anything about Ray for so many different offenses. The viewpoint went back and forth between Cylin and John, so you could read about the happenings from each person's perspective.

Fiction is more of a judgement call for the DeweyCAT, but I'm going to consider this a "social problems" -type read. If nonfiction, I suspect it would fit here best of all the Dewey numbers.

To Kill a Mockingbird / Harper Lee
3.5 stars

Scout and Jem are sister and brother, growing up in Alabama in the 1930s. Their father is a (white) lawyer, who is representing a black man who was accused of raping and beating a white girl. The kids, while mostly living their own lives, do sometimes hear about the “nigger-loving” father.

I read this in high school and remember it being one of the books I read for English class that I liked. This time around, I'm reading it for my book club. Overall, I'm rating it 3.5 stars (good). For much of it, though, I would have rated it 3 stars (ok). But the trial was the most interesting part (and it's the one part I remember from my first read of the book all those years ago) and it brought the rating up for me (would have been 4 stars just for the trial itself!).

After reading Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion: An Old Fable Renovated, I was inspired to read the Aesop story which led to reading (rereading?) Aesop's Fables which is Dewey 398 (folklore). So I will have a book for this CAT after all!

I finished Deliver Us: Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the Infamous I-45/Texas Killing Fields by Kathryn Casey. It was a really well researched and written book. There are well over 20 victims spread out across more than 3 decades. Not all of the cases are related but there are some that are linked. It's is horrifying to me because it happened so very close to home. I remember when I first moved to Houston in 1994 and the killings William Reece is accused of began happening in 1997. So scary. This book was published last year, prior to Reece finally admitting he killed Jessica Cain and leading authorities to her body and the body of another victim, Kelli Cox from North Texas. He certainly isn't the only who committed these horrible murders but I'm glad some of these girls can finally be laid to rest.

I read Choosing Civility: Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct by P. M. Forni. (DDC 395) Mr. Forni presents good and useful advice about dealing with others in a civilized fashion, but it did get a bit preachy. He could have used more humor to get his points across, and less "don'ts." I was hoping for more positive ways to be kind and courteous. Still, we could all use to be reminded of these rules of civility every so often.

I finished Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet, a memoir of a savant on the autism disorder spectrum. (DDC 362) Very interesting and fascinating! Also fits this month's RandomCAT.

I finished and reviewed The Lady in the Blue Cloak: Legends from the Texas Missions by Eric A. Kimmel & Susan Guevara (DDC 398), my first ever CAT-trick.

I finished Divine Collision by Jim Gash. It is a true story of criminal justice system in Uganda and a program out of Pepperdine to work with Uganda to improve the system. It is new, 2016, and not yet given a Dewey number here at LT but I hunted around and the Library in Rochester, MN has it filed as 364.36 so I will add to the Wiki.

I finished Bosnia's Million Bones by Christian Jennings (364.15).

>45 Kristelh: I hope to get to that one soon! I downloaded the audio a couple of weeks ago when it was available from Sync.

>46 cbl_tn:, I got mine from Sync, too. It's good.

I don't think I posted that I finished The Slave Across The Street. It was a ver compelling, sad and scary look at modern day human-trafficking.

I read Aesop's Fables for this month - mostly a re-read, but a few of the fables were new. Yesterday I started Arabian Nights, which I won't finish this month (674 pages, not including the notes - and this edition only includes 65 of the most popular of the 273 tales that Scheherezade told). Both fit Dewey 398.

I didn't manage any nonfictions this month, but I think these fit for the fiction version:

Hothouse Flower, Margot Berwin (Mexican rainforest folklore)
Talking God, Tony Hillerman (Navajo customs and folklore)
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Timothy Egan (American Indian customs)

I finished That Lonely Section of Hell: The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away by Lori Shenher (364). Shenher was a detective involved in the investigation of serial killer Robert Picton and relates how systemic problems in the Vancouver police force led to unforgivable delays, years in which he continued murdering women, until his eventual arrest.

I am a bit behind with my challenge reading. I have now finished my May DeweyCAT read, World War Women: Canadian Women and Total War Stacey Barker (Dewey 355.0082). Overall, a quick read that I can highly recommend as a starting point to learning more about Canadian women's contributions to the war effort.