swynn's 76+ in 2010

(Editing this message with a running list of my readings. The index for each title is a hyperlink pointing to the post where I first mention it.)

1) The Odds / Kathleen George
2) Derai / E. C. Tubb
3) Sandman Slim / Richard Kadrey
4) Remarkable Creatures / Sean B. Carroll
5) The quick / Leigh Ellis
6) NurtureShock / Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
7) Liberty falling / Nevada Barr
8) Tactics of mistake / Gordon Dickson
9) The man who loved books too much / Allison Hoover Bartlett
10) The universe maker / A. E. Van Vogt
11) Symmetry in chaos / Michael Field and Martin Golubitsky
12) I, the divine / Rabih Alameddine
13) Triplanetary / E. E. Smith
14) Spooner / Pete Dexter
15) Tweak / Nic Sheff
16) First lensman / E. E. Smith
17) The drunkard's walk / Leonard Mlodinow
18) Wanting / Richard Flanagan
19) The Anubis gates / Tim Powers
20) Strip search / William Bernhardt
21) At the seventh level / Suzette Haden Elgin
22) Tinkers / Paul Harding
23) Deep south / Nevada Barr
24) The day before tomorrow / Gerard Klein
25) The girl with the dragon tattoo / Stieg Larsson
26) Don't sleep, there are snakes / Daniel L. Everett
27) Oval track and other permutation puzzles / John O. Kiltinen
28) The shack / William P. Young
29) One thousand white women / Jim Fergus
30) From papyrus to hypertext / Christian Vandendorpe
31) To ride Hell's Chasm / Janny Wurts
32) The hanging of Thomas Jeremiah / J. William Harris
33) Galactic patrol / E. E. Smith
34) The astonishing life of Octavian Nothing, traitor to the nation. Vol. 1, The pox party / M. T. Anderson
35) City of thieves / David Benioff
36) Primitive mood / David Moolten
37) Howl's moving castle / Diana Wynne Jones
38) The boat / Nam Le
39) The speed of dark / Elizabeth Moon
40) The affinity bridge / George Mann
41) The housekeeper and the professor / Yoko Ogawa
42) Blood lure / Nevada Barr
43) Eye of the whale / Douglas Carlton Abrams
44) American gods / Neil Gaiman
45) Soulless / Gail Carriger
46) Free for all / Don Borchert
47) Blacklands / Belinda Bauer
48) The astonishing life of Octavian Nothing, traitor to the nation. Vol. 2, The kingdom on the waves / M.T. Anderson
49) The baby blue rip-off / Max Allan Collins
50) Library ethics / Jean Preer
51) The Monty Hall problem / Jason Rosenhouse
52) Dexter by design / Jeff Lindsay
53) Another mother tongue / Judy Grahn
54) Panic / Jeff Abbott
55) Beat the reaper / Josh Bazell
56) Ash / Malinda Lo
57) Toby alone / Timothée de Fombelle
58) Wake up dead / Roger Smith
59) Perdido Street Station / China Miéville
60) The tutor / Peter Abrahams
61) Die 13 1/2 Leben des Käpt'n Blaubär / Walter Moers
62) Radical equations / Robert P. Moses
63) A dead hand / Paul Theroux
64) The chocolate cat caper / JoAnna Carl
65) Big machine / Victor LaValle
66) Mr. Peanut / Adam Ross
67) Hunting season / Nevada Barr
68) Toby and the secrets of the tree / Timothée de Fombelle
69) Der Geschmack von Apfelkernen / Katharina Hagena
70) The empress of Mars / Kage Baker
71) A darkness in my soul / Dean Koontz
72) m-Libraries
73) Ghost story / Peter Straub
74) Geek love / Katherine Dunn
75) Living with books / Helen Haines
76) Murder on the Iditarod Trail / Sue Henry
77) Mr. Shivers / Robert Jackson Bennett
78) The keepers of the house / Shirley Ann Grau
79) The Oxford murders / Guillermo Martinez
80) Await your reply / Dan Chaon
81) Cop hater / Ed McBain
82) Marathon : the ultimate training guide / Hal Higdon
83) Savage run / C.J. Box
84) How the dead dream / Lydia Millet
85) Silver pigs / Lindsey Davis
86) The fixer / Bernard Malamud
87) The mugger / Ed McBain
88) The Arizona Project / Michael F. Wendland
89) A history of algebra / B. L. van der Waerden
90) A bad day for sorry / Sophie Littlefield
91) In other rooms, other wonders / Daniyal Mueenuddin
92) Hazard / Gardiner Harris
93) Scent of the missing / Susannah Charleson
94) Main Street / Sinclair Lewis
95) Maigret meets a milord / Georges Simenon
96) The tales of Beedle the Bard / J. K. Rowling
97) With / Donald Harington
98) The invisible gorilla / Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
99) The pusher / Ed McBain
100) Yellow blue tibia / Adam Roberts
101) The calculus wars / Jason Socrates Bardi
102) The fall / Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
103) The con man / Ed McBain
104) The afterlife / Gary Soto
105) Slapboxing with Jesus / Victor LaValle
106) Proofiness / Charles Seife
107) Eleven Days / Donald Harstad
108) The great transformation / Karen Armstrong
109) Killer's choice / Ed McBain
110) Stormwarden / Janny Wurts
111) Rosemary and rue / Seanan McGuire
112) Flashback / Nevada Barr


I have visited 17 countries (7.55%) in my reading this year.
Create your own visited map of The World


visited 24 states (48%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

76) Murder on the Iditarod Trail / Sue Henry

Someone is killing mushers on the Iditarod Trail Race. Alaska State Trooper Alex Jensen and musher Jessie Arnold investigate. And fall in love. Mostly they fall in love. As an Iditarod travelogue with mystery-ish interludes it ain't half bad, but as a mystery it ain't much.

On the other hand it won a couple of "Best First Novel" awards (Anthony, Macavity) so somebody liked it better than I did.

Congrats!

Found you again, NML!

Congrats on 75 and you nailed me with Haines' book -- sounds irresistible!

starred!

Welcome everyone to the new digs.

77) Mr. Shivers / Robert Jackson Bennett

Connelly leaves his wife and employment in Depression-era America to track down the drifter who killed his daughter. He meets up with others who share the same vendetta, tracking the serial killer across Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. As they follow him through Hoovervilles, railroad cars, and ghost towns, they hear stories about their quarry that make them wonder whether it's just a man they're chasing.

Depression and drought have turned mid-America into a lawless wasteland, and the narrative feels less historical than post-apocalypse. It's an atmosphere I'm not sure I've encountered before, and it's appropriately spooky.

The author's webiste describes the book as "horror-ish, literary-ish." "Horror-ish" definitely matches. I'm not sure what "literary-ish" means, but the prose is smooth and economical. The website also quotes a truckload of glowing reviews, but don't expect it to be your "candidate for book of the year" (as "Booksquawk" would have it). "Mr. Shivers" is a bit too episodic, it often reminded me of scenes from other horror fiction, and the ending is too conventional. Still it's a quick and effective read, worth a look and recommended for fans of "horror-ish" genres.

#7: Well, I can skip that one since I do not read horror or "horror-ish" either.

#8: Probably a good choice, Stasia. There's also some gory violence. It's tame for the genre, but I know that's not your cup of anything.

Hang around though: my next one is excellent.

78) The Keepers of the House / Shirley Ann Grau

This is a good one. It's a generational saga about an Alabama family, told with one voice from three different perspectives: William Howland, a gentleman farmer who married for love and was widowed young; Margaret Carmichael, the young Black/Cherokee woman William hires to keep his house and takes into his bed; and Abigail Tolland, William's granddaughter.

Most descriptions you'll find of this book focus on its handling of race, but what grabs you first is Grau's command of setting and her command of the language she employs to invoke it:

November evenings are quiet and still and dry. The frost-stripped trees and the bleached grasses glisten and shine in the small light. In the winter-emptied fields granite outcroppings gleam white and stark. The bones of the earth, old people call them. In the deepest fold of the land--to the southwest where the sun went down solid and red not long ago--the Providence River reflects a little grey light. The river is small this time of year, drought-shrunken. It turns back the sky, dully, like an old mirror.

More than race, the book is about the land, the people who inhabit it, and the dwellings they fashion. The homes are themselves characters, as richly detailed as the landscape. There's William Howland's country mansion, with a stairway railing still burned from a home invasion generations before. There's Margaret Carmichael's childhood home, built without a permanent foundation so that it can float free on spring floods then be cleaned and reinhabited when the waters recede. There's the sprawling home of Abigail's cousins, with so many ad-hoc wings and connected outbuildings that no adult realises how one extremity offers an excellent view of the bedroom window of a local prostitute. (Or if an adult did know, he must have assumed no children would ever discover it. Foolish adult: children discover everything.)

And yes, race is a central theme. But Grau understands that race isn't simple: this is no antiracist morality tale. It's journalistic rather than sermonizing, an observer's account of the tangled web of racism in the American South. Race is more a product of human imagination than any physical phenomenon, and as such it can affect us in baffling, self-defeating, and infuriating ways. These effects culminate in a political scandal, when Abigail's husband, an up-and-coming politician, is laid low by a secret that seems no secret at all. Nevertheless, the scandal leads to violence against the Howland family, toward an emotionally satisfying, emotionally exhausting climax.

This is currently wrestling with Paul Harding's "Tinkers" for status of Best Book of My Year. More prestigiously, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1965. I recommend it very highly.

I am reading Tinkers right now, Stephen, and really enjoying it. I will definitely have to look for the Grau book too..

79) The Oxford murders / Guillermo Martinez

Thanks to Susan for recommending this smart and tightly planned mystery. Plus ... math!

#13 I enjoyed that one too when I read it a few years ago!

#13: I need to read that one! Thanks for the recommendation, NML.

80) Await your reply / Dan Chaon

I read this for a RL reading group. It's an intricate thriller which weaves together three stories: one about a young man who drops out of college to help his uncle run a complicated identity theft business; another about a high schooler who runs away with her history teacher; and the third about a man looking for his twin who disappeared years before. It all works nicely and should make for a good discussion, though it did drag a bit toward the middle as Chaon worked more on developing themes (in particular the mutability of identity) than on developing plot. Recommended.

#80: I have had that one in the BlackHole for a while now. My local library still does not have it, but I just found out it is available for the Nook. Thanks for the reminder, Stephen.

Stasia, if you decide to read it I hope you like it.

I've just returned from our book discussion, and I'm afraid it was not well-liked in the group. The main complaint seemed to be that it was difficult to understand: the stories didn't tie together well, the narration was achronological, and you never knew what was going on.

Another reader felt that the characters were flat and the story was clichéd.

Another felt that the characters were unlikeable.

Most of these charges are somewhat true. The narration is convoluted, and there aren't any sympathetic characters, with one possible exception-- and he's the least interesting of the lot. However, I found it a tantalizing challenge to find how the three stories related to one another, like a mystery in which the criminal is the plot itself. I did not find it clichéd; on the contrary, I enjoyed the way the author would occasionally deploy and explode a cliché in order to baffle the reader's expectations.

But in consideration of the group's comments, I'll adjust my "recommended" to "recommended for readers who enjoy narrative tricks and who don't need likeable characters."

TIOLI update. I'll finish at least one more for September, Ed McBain's Cop Hater for challenge #2. I don't expect I'll finish Tommy Jaud's Vollidiot for the "controversial book" challenge #12, since I am not finding it the riotous romp that fans insist it is. Maybe it's a German thing.

Here are my thoughts for possible October reads, which I'll update as more occur to me. It's for my own reference but I welcome nudges.

Challenge #1: Read a Book by an Author with a Long Last Name
A history of algebra / B.L. van der Waerden
The windup girl / Paolo Bacigalupi
The broken lands / Fred Saberhagen
Harbinger / Jack Skillingstead

Challenge #2: Read a book that's Not Quite Horror
Die Verwandlung / Franz Kafka

Challenge #3: Read the book that Won the Pulitzer Prize the Year You Were Born
Exploration and empire / William H. Goetzmann
The fixer / Bernard Malamud
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain / Justin Kaplan
The problem of slavery in Western culture / David Brion Davis

Challenge #4: Read an "old-fashioned type of story"

Challenge #5: Read a book published in 1970
Ringworld / Larry Niven
Physics for poets / Robert March
Mr. Sammler's planet / Saul Bellow

Challenge #6: Read a book by an author that died in 2010
In the Garden of Iden / Kage Baker
Mathematics, magic, and mystery / Martin Gardner

Challenge #7: Read a book released in the 21st Century
The invisible gorilla / Christopher Chabris
Savage run / C.J. Box
The infinities / John Banville
The book of William / Paul Collins

Challenge #8: Read a book about police work
The mugger / Ed McBain

Challenge #9: Read a book whose title has only single-syllable words.
Norse Code / Greg van Eekhout
Soul of the age / Jonathan Bate
We can build you / Philip K. Dick
How the dead dream / Lydia Millet

Challenge #10: Read a book set in Prague or containing a golem
The unbearable lightness of being / Milan Kundera

Challenge #11: Read a book about sex
The evolution of desire / David M. Buss
Kamasutra / Vatsyayana

Challenge #12: Read a book with a song reference
Matters mathematical / Herstein & Kaplansky ("I am the very model of a modern major-general")

Challenge #13: Read a book Stasia recommended and having a title starting with a letter from A to L.
Crossing to safety / Wallace Stegner (This will let me fill in Wisconsin on my "States visited" map.)

Challenge #14: Read a book that has been previously read by at least two readers for TIOLI.

Challenge #15: Read a Book with a Superlative in the Title
The strangest man / Graham Farmelo

Well, I could probably help make suggestions for Challenge 13 at least :)

81) Cop hater / Ed McBain

Someone is killing cops in the 87th Precinct. Detectives Steve Carella and Hank Bush investigate. It's pulpy, rough around the edges, and hasn't aged very well, but it was fun and fast and I didn't see the ending coming until just before it was there. I'll probably read another couple in the series to see if they grow on me.

I read a reprint edition which includes an introduction by the author reminiscing over this first book in what became a long-running and popular series. He comments on his choice to make a series of police procedurals:

... it seemed to me that a good series character would be a cop, even though I knew next to nothing about cops at the time. I knew for certain, though, that any other character dealing with murder was unconvincing. If you came home late at night and found your wife murdered in the bed you shared, you didn't call a private eye, and you didn't call a little old lady with knitting needles, and if you called your lawyer it was to ask what you should say when you called the police. In fiction, there is always a quantum jump to be made when anyone but a police detective is investigating a murder.

#21: I have never read any books in McBain's 87th Precinct series. One of these days I will get around to them I am sure.

Stasia,

It was my first too. The series was one my father liked, but he made it clear that it was Not For Children. We were a family of readers, and always checking out the jacket copy on each other's current reads. I remember picking up one of Dad's 87th Precinct books and being told, "That one's a little wild for you, son." So I couldn't read it growing up and of course I had to read it sooner or later.

Turns out "sooner or later" was later. The series has been on my mind for decades but other forbidden books have had higher priority. It's only recently that mysteries & thrillers have captured my attention (this is not the only way I'm becoming more like my father), so TIOLI challenge #2 was just the prompt to pick up this naughty series.

Dad was right: it's not exactly for children. There's no explicit sex or extreme violence, but there are prostitutes and drug dealers and naked people. If Dad only knew some of the things I was already reading at the time (but prudently did not leave lying around for jacket-copy inspection) ...

#23: I have heard that McBain's series is a little more 'hard-boiled' than what I normally read, although I have always been an avid mystery/thriller reader, but I would like to try it just to see if I like it.

Love the story about your dad! My mother and I used to do the same thing - check to see if we were interested in the other's books. Now, I do it with my daughter Catey.

82) The Year's Best Horror Stories. No. 1 / edited by Richard Davis

I just missed the deadline to count this for the September TIOLI, and it doesn't seem to fit any of the October ones.

Ah, well. This is a collection of horror stories published in 1969 and 1970. Most of the stories are okay, a couple were pretty effective, but there's nothing really great here. They're mostly workmanlike executions of tried-and-true themes: comeuppance and vulnerable women and the dangers of remote locations.

Double Whammy by Robert Bloch. A dishonorable carnival barker gets his comeuppance.

The Sister City by Brian Lumley. Okay Lovecraft pastiche.

When Morning Comes by Elizabeth Fancett. A pro-choice politician gets his comeuppance.

Prey by Richard Matheson. A vulnerable young woman is terrorized by a Zuni fetish doll. This one was adapted as part of the made-for-TV anthology film, Trilogy of Terror.

Winter by Kit Reed. A couple of old maids living a remote rural home have a surprise guest for the winter. This is one of the better ones.

Lucifer by E.C. Tubb. A morgue attendant steals a ring from a body. The ring gives him the power to turn back time. This doesn't even belong in this book: it is science fiction and not horror at all, even if he does get his comeuppance.

I Wonder What He Wanted by Eddie C. Bertin. A vulnerable young wife discovers she is not alone in her new home, not even after her husband leaves for work.

Problem Child by Peter Oldale. A vulnerable young mother deals with her baby's blossoming telekinetic power.

The Scar by Ramsey Campbell. A man tries to warn his brother-in-law about a doppelganger. This was one of the better ones.

Warp by Ralph Norton. A rich eccentric invites an old friend to his remote mansion, where he shows the friend a device that rotates objects through unexpected dimensions. This reminded me of Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House," which is a better story.

The Hate by Terri E. Pinckard. A vulnerable young wife is terrorized by a malicious and amorphous force.

The Quiet Game by Celia Fremlin. A vulnerable young mother is tormented by elderly neighbors who can't stand the noise of her children.

After Nightfall by David Riley. A folklorist goes to a remote village whose inhabitants always set a plate of food on the doorstep before locking the door at night. You can probably write the rest yourself.

Death's Door by Robert McNear. A sports reporter goes to a remote island in the Great Lakes to write a story about a high school championship and hears a morbid story about the last team the island had in the championship. Oh, bonus: before the story's over there is a vulnerable girl and somebody gets his comeuppance.

#25: I will definitely be giving that one a pass. Horror just is not my thing :)

Stasia,

Good choice. There's nothing terribly gruesome here, but there's very little memorable either -- certainly nothing worth making an exception. And the whole "terrorized ingenue" motif wears thin pretty fast.

(Looking through the October TIOLI list again, it's obvious that I can count this one, under challenge #15 as a book with a superlative in its title. This is the earliest in the month I've ever scored a TIOLI. Hooray!)

Congratulations on leap frogging up TIOLI already!

82) Marathon : the ultimate training guide / Hal Higdon

I plan to run my first marathon next spring, and I'm glad I read this first. It has convinced me to adjust my training plans in ways that will probably help me avoid injury. (Rather embarrassingly, some of Higdon's advice coincides with my wife's. Ouch.) Higdon has been a magazine writer & editor most of his life and has mastered a chatty, fluid voice that makes the reading not only informative but entertaining.

It's not supposed to be great literature, and it's not. I'll complain about redundancies and occasional clumsy errors -- like referring to the Heart of America Marathon in "Columbus, Missouri" (it's Columbia), or writing "anecdote" when he means "antidote." But really the handful of errors can be ignored. As for the redundancies, I'll probably be dipping back into this book over the next few months, reading a chapter at a time, and it won't bother me then when Higdon repeats a story from a previous chapter. That's probably how the book was meant to be read anyway.

Also: this week I started and abandoned John Banville's The Infinities. I just couldn't get into the self-conscious, New-Yorker-y prose. Probably my mood wasn't right. Certainly there was less math than I'd hoped for. Maybe it'll spark my imagination some other time, but not this year.

Stephen, thank you for your mention of Helen Haines' Living with Books. I had a great time with it! The BlackHole has grown again by leaps and bounds.

Glad you liked it, Stasia!

I've been mostly away from LT for about a week, so I missed out on the conversations you started on your own thread about Living with Books. But I was very interested to read through other LTers' responses.

#31: I made copies of the lists of suggestions that Haines included. A lot of good reading there that will keep me going for years to come!

Sean, I've just caught up on here. Which marathon are you going to do? I was signed up to do Chicago in 2002 (had achilles trouble, and didn't get there, and then fizzled out) and I really liked Hal Higdon's running website. I have one of his books somewhere. My other bible was ... um what is his name...the guy who does the NY Road Runners Club training... Bob Glover's The Runner's Handbook a great book that got me through 3 half marathons with not much speed but lots of inspiration. (I am now back at about 5 km's on a good day...one day, sigh.) Good luck!!

I registered for the St. Louis Marathon, which will be next April. This should give me plenty of time to prepare, and on a schedule that Hal Higdon would approve of.

I only started running this last spring. Since April I've run at least one 5k every month, and used a 12-week training course I found on Marathonrookie.com to prepare for a half marathon, which I ran last week under two hours. It occurred to me that if I could only train to maintain that pace twice as long I could run a 4:00 marathon. And once the idea was there I had to give it a try.

I'll definitely check out Bob Glover's book. Thanks for the recommendation!

Under 2 hours is great! I never managed that. Slow and steady like the tortoise...well not so steady really, just slow!

Have you found mapmyrun.com? It's very cool (and free, for the basic stuff).

The main thing is finishing, right? That's what I tell myself, but in the runs I wind up watching the runner in front of me and thinking I can pass him. Which is weird, because I've never been very competitive about anything. Who knew it was in me?

I have used mapmyrun.com, and agree about its coolness. I've used it to plan all of my long runs, as I don't have one of those hi-tech wristwatches that calculate my mileage using GPS. Not yet, anyway. But I admit to lusting for one.

83) Savage Run / C.J. Box

Someone is killing environmentalists. Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett investigates.

This is the second in the series, after Open Season which I read last year and enjoyed very much. This one is more a wilderness thriller and less a mystery than the first book, and it's spoiled by a series of unlikely coincidences leading up to the climax. Still, it's fun enough to keep reading the series.

I have gotten off track in reading that series, which seems to happen to me quite frequently :)

84) How the dead dream / Lydia Millet

T. is a young man whose best friends are dead presidents, and he has an early and natural talent for acquiring them. But as he grows his idealistic notions about human enterprise are challenged, and his attempts at human relationships are frustrated. Eventually he turns to endangered animals for companionship, breaking into zoos and wildlife refuges at night in order to sleep near them.

This one has been on my shelf for several months. I enjoyed reading it but I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Certainly it's a satire on America's culture of privilege and entitlement; it also explores themes of loneliness and ennui, and of our relationships with each other and with the planet. But the author sends out so many mixed signals that it's hard to tell whether she's trying to make a point or trying to make a joke. Whatever her intent, she writes well, and I'll recommend it to readers more refined than I. Personally, I'm going to have to let it settle for a little while.

#39: That one sounds intriguing. I will have to see if I can find a copy. Thanks for the recommendation, Stephen.

85) Silver pigs / Lindsey Davis

Earlier this year Genny recommended Davis's Alexandria as an historical mystery exploring issues of library ethics. It sounded intriguing, but when I read a little more about the Marcus Didius Falco series I decided to start from the beginning.

Several other LTers have recently been reading others in the series, and I don't have anything to add except to say that I too enjoyed this first volume, and will be reading more. Imagine Humphrey Bogart in a toga and you're almost there. Imagine it working, and you've got the idea.

#41: Arrgg!! Why does my local library not have that one?

ETA: Ha! PBS has a copy available, so I will have it shortly. (I hope)

86) The fixer / Bernard Malamud

I picked this up for the "birth year Pulitzer" TIOLI challenge, and by the time I figured out that I'd picked the wrong year's winner ("The fixer" won in 1967, I was born in 1968) I was hooked.

Yakov Bok is a "fixer" or handyman in early-20th-century Tsarist Russia. He's also a Jew in the wrong place at a very wrong time. When a boy is found stabbed to death, the government's prosecutor settles on Yakov as the killer, deciding he is part of a Jewish conspiracy to kill Christian children for secret Jewish rituals. The prosecutor has false witnesses and "expert" testimony, but he doesn't have any evidence. So he imprisons the fixer under inhumane conditions to convince Yakov to sign a confession.

Most of the book follows Yakov's deterioration in prison. It's not pleasant: Yakov's predicament is relentless and bleak, and as a character he's not a particularly sympathetic. That said, he does come to some understanding of his place in the world, and of history's victims, which makes for some interesting internal dialog. The writing is as simple and clear and the narrative as inevitable as a classic folktale. It's not for everybody I expect, but as a claustophobic and pensive story of suffering and history it's recommended.

#43: I need to re-read that one! Thanks for the reminder, Stephen.

Stasia, have you read any of Malamud's other works? The only other one I recognize is "The Natural," and I'm not a fan of the film version so it has never appealed to me much.

87) The mugger / Ed McBain

A polite mugger assaults women, takes their purses, then as he parts he graciously bows and says, "Clifford thanks you, madam." The bulls of the 87th Precinct investigate.

It's fast, fun, and forgettable, and it fits TIOLI challenge number 8: Read a book about police work.

#45: Stephen, I have not read anything of Malamud's other than The Natural and The Fixer. Sorry.

88) 2268672::The Arizona Project / Michael F. Wendland

On June 2, 1976 Don Bolles, a reporter for the Phoenix newspaper Arizona Republic was assassinated via car bomb downtown in broad daylight.

Soon afterward a local hood started bragging about how he'd done the hit, but that he'd get away with it thanks to powerful connections. He had good reason to think so. What he & his employers hadn't counted on was Bolles's circle of friends and connections. Bolles had recently helped organize an organization of investigative reporters and editors, which took on Bolles's murder as its first cooperative project. Some the nation's best reporters descended on Phoenix, not only to investigate the murder but also to finish the story that got Bolles killed.

It sounds inspiring but the details are sordid. The reporters discover widespread drug smuggling, human smuggling, fraud, prostitution, mob connections, thuggery, and general nastiness. And that doesn't even count the crooks. Corruption is everywhere, from Phoenix cops to federal Border Patrol agents to favorite son Barry Goldwater (though his guilt is mostly by association and not always convincing). Honestly, the corruption is so far-reaching that I sometimes wondered whether the author wasn't painting Arizona a color more lurid than it deserved. Balanced or not, it's interesting and infuriating and recommended to anyone who enjoys muckraking journalism.
___

WARNING: POLITICAL RANT FOLLOWS
Just I was finishing this book, feeling comfortably superior to Arizonan political smarminess, I got a telephone call, one of those seasonal calls, telling me to vote for experience or something and blah blah blah. The caller spoke so quickly I couldn't follow what she was saying, but she seemed generally supportive of the named candidate-- even though she couldn't pronounce the name correctly, dropping two syllables and slurring the rest.

The candidate happens to be one I have voted for, so I called the campaign's headquarters to let them know that the phone banks weren't giving them their money's worth.

Turns out that the call actually comes from a group opposed to the candidate, trying to spread the impression that supporters are inarticulate airheads who can't even pronounce the candidate's name. Worse, another call going around is supposed to give the impression that the candidate's supporters are inarticulate African-American "welfare queens." (Honestly, will the eighties never pack up and go home?) That call appears on caller ID as coming from our local ambulance district.

My superior feeling is gone.

"Isn't that illegal?" I asked.

"Of course it is," said the guy at the campaign headquarters. "And we've filed a complaint. But what can you do?"

"Good question," I said, "What can I do?"

As political rootcellars go, I know this is pretty small potatoes. Still, I'm going to campaign headquarters tomorrow to help put labels on campaign materials. I hate campaign materials regardless of the source, so I'm pretty mad at the worthless clump of rotting tea leaves that make me feel obliged. But what can I do? If I don't do something it'll feel like ... Arizona, circa 1976.

Hey, put this in the review section for the book so I can thumb it up!

Done.

I thumbed it as well, Stephen! Thanks for posting the review.

Jim & Stasia, thanks for the thumbs!

TIOLI update. This weekend I plan to pour some energy into A history of algebra
in hopes of completing it by Monday for Challenge #1. It's slow going, though, and I don't think I'll get to any more challenges for the month.

Here are my thoughts for possible November reads, which I'll update as more occur to me. It's for my own reference but I welcome nudges.

1. Alphabetical order
In other rooms, other wonders / Daniyal Mueenuddin
The knife of never letting go / Patrick Ness

2. Read a Book Translated from the French
Babylon babies / Maurice Dantec
Maigret and the enigmatic Lett / Georges Simenon

3. Read a Book Whose Title Includes the Letter Z
The bodacious Ozarks / Charles Morrow Wilson
Hazard / Gardiner Harris
The thermodynamics of pizza / Harold Morowitz
Bozo sapiens / Ellen & Michael Kaplan
Ernst Zermelo / Heinz-Dieter Ebinghaus

4. Read a Book Written by a Nobel Laureate
Main Street / Sinclair Lewis
Hamlet / William Faulkner

5. Read a Book About the World of Harry Potter
The tales of Beedle the bard / J.K. Rowling

6. Read a Book with Four Letters or Less in the Title
Jem / Frederik Pohl
Room / Emma Donoghue
Dred / Harriet Beecher Stowe
With / Donald Harington

7. Remembrance.
The 900 days / Harrison Salisbury
Churchill's wizards / Nicholas Rankin
Night / Edgar Hilsenrath

8. Second Lives.
Set theory and the continuum hypothesis / Paul J. Cohen

9. Read a Book Recommended by Stasia, L-Z.
The lacuna / Barbara Kingsolver
Matterhorn / Karl Marlantes
The postmistress / Sarah Blake
Oblomov / Ivan Gonchorov
New York burning / Jill Lepore

10. Read a Book About History, Fiction or Nonfiction
The calculus wars / Jason Bardi

11. Sadie Hawkins Challenge
Flashback / Nevada Barr
A bad day for pretty / Sophie Littlefield

12. Book by an author whose first name ends with the same letter their last name starts with.
Shadow tag / Louise Erdrich
The revolution business / Charles Stross
The education of a British-protected child / Chinua Achebe
The thing around your neck / Chimimanda Adiche
The buried book / David Damrosch
New York burning / Jill Lepore
My abandonment / Peter Rock
Fordlandia / Greg Grandin

13: Paradiso e Inferno.
On my way to paradise / Dave Wolverton
Under heaven / Guy Gavriel Kay
Stairway to heaven / Peter Levenda
Halfway to heaven / Mark Obmascik
Hell / Yasutaka Tsutsui

14: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao / Junot Diaz

15. The Add-a-Little-Color-To-Your-Reading Challenge.
The red tree / Caitlin Kiernan
Death of a red heroine / Qiu Xialong
Blue fingers / Cheryl Whitesel
Yellow blue tibia / Adam Roberts

16. 21st Century Challenge redux: Read a book published after 2005 and has 5 or more words in the title.
A bad day for sorry / Sophie Littlefield
The sweetness at the bottom of the pie / Alan Bradley
The girl with glass feet / Ali Shaw
The forest of hands and teeth / Carrie Ryan
St. Lucy's home for girls raised by wolves / Karen Russell
I know I am but what are you / Samantha Bee
The information revolution and world politics / Elizabeth Hanson

17. Time-traveling from your armchair.
Doomsday book / Connie Willis

89) A history of algebra / B. L. van der Waerden

Bluntly, this one was out of my league. The author assumes a pretty high level of knowledge of algebra, with the curious effect that he spends more time describing the straightforward and intuitive arguments of the Greeks and Arabs than he does the more esoteric work of Elie Cartan and Emmy Noether. (Don't ask; I can't answer.)

So I really can't recommend the book one way or the other. From the perspective of a reader just outside the author's intended audience, nice things include extensive bibliographical notes, a beautifully terse style, and the sense of authority that comes from reading a history by someone who helped make it: van der Waerden's textbook Modern Algebra is arguably the first on the subject. Despite the difficulties, it did what I was hoping it would do: it put some ideas in a larger perspectives, and gave me some guidance on how to proceed.

#54: I bow down to you getting through that one, Ninja Math Librarian!

Thanks, Stasia, but bows are neither necessary nor deserved. That thing that looks like a crown is just a series lumps: some rascal attempted to force the book's content physically through my thick skull when it was not absorbed the proper way. I don't remember who it was and unfortunately he escaped just as my wife was saying, "Stephen, why are you hitting yourself with that book?"

Alas, I'm afraid I'm going to have to learn it the old-fashioned way: read the material over and over until familiarity resembles understanding.

#56: I tried reading one of Carl Gauss' books, Disquisitiones arithmeticae, a couple of years ago and could not even begin to understand it, so respect anyone who even attempts to read anything on math!

Edited for clarification

You get props from me from having attempted it. I made it about a third of the way through before getting lost and letting my attention be captured by some shinier thing. Someday I'll return to it, and next time I'll get a little farther.

#58: I think it is way beyond my poor mathematical skills, so I will never return to it. I was not a very good math student (although I really loved algebra), but I have come to appreciate the intracacies of the subject more as I have gotten older.

A bit of brain candy to follow van der Waerden:

90) A bad day for sorry / Sophie Littlefield

I'm not sure what to call this: "redneck chick-lit noir," maybe? The only complaint I have is that the dialect is a little overdone sometimes. I get that we're in the Ozarks ... I don't need constant cues cribbed from the Beverly Hilbillies. Other than that's it's fast, fun and has a sequel, which I will probably read.

Update on #48, political rant, etc.

Turns out the call I was ranting about really was from the campaign it claimed to represent. True, the opposing party was making odious (and illegal) robo-calls the same day, so there may have been some confusion when I reported the problem. But the call I got was legit. It really was an inarticulate airhead who couldn't even pronounce her candidate's name.

There are no words for how glad I am that it's all over.

Any bets on how long before we start getting calls for the 2012 campaign?

#61: Any bets on how long before we start getting calls for the 2012 campaign?

Bite your tongue! I do not even want to think about it.

91) In other rooms, other wonders / Daniyal Mueenuddin

A collection of interrelated short stories about frustrated hopes among the extended household of a Pakistani landowner. Recommended.

#63: I already have that one in the BlackHole. I just need to get my hands on a copy. Glad you enjoyed it!

Am catching up - I really enjoyed In Other Rooms,
Other Wonders too and am glad you liked it.

The algebra sounds tempting - well, the intro does. I've done a fair bit of linear algebra (not to grad level though - about junior year level) but that's all. I suspect I would start it and not finish it... but I always like reading your maths book reviews!

Great list of TIOLI books. Looking forward to seeing what you pick for category 7 especially.

Cushla,

Thanks for stopping by! I read #89 partly because I took a first course in Algebraic Structures, which covered basics of group theory and an introduction to field theory. I enjoyed the course, but a lot of the material just didn't seem well-motivated to me.

"Okay," I kept saying, "I see that you can define such and such a structure, but why would you bother?"

And whenever I happened to say that out loud, the professor would say, "You'll see later."

I hoped that the history would put some of these ideas into perspective. And it did, even if I didn't always understand the application, and if someone were to ask me I too would probably say, "You'll see later."

I'm glad the math reviews are appealing. I've read a lot less math than I'd have liked this year, and I plan to bump up it up next year.

For number 7 I'm leaning toward Hilsenrath's "Night." Of course, every month I run out of time before I run out of TIOLIs ...

92) Hazard / Gardiner Harris

In an East Kentucky coal mine, workers accidentally cut into an old excavation which had filled with water over the years. Nine men die in the flood. MSHA agent Will Murphy investigates. The investigation is complicated by several facts: the mine in question is owned by Will's brother; nobody really wants Will to investigate; and the one miner willing to talk honestly about the accident is Amos Blevins, who has disappeared into the Kentucky backwoods under suspicion of murder. The narrative switches back and forth between Will's and Amos's points of view. Will's investigation slowly uncovers a dangerous conspiracy, while Amos's flight from the law gives us a victim's-eye view of the attempted cover-up.

It's an okay thriller with an interesting cast. The plot stumbles a couple of times: one essential plot point depends on supernatural revelation, and another has a hero step unwittingly into an obvious trap. Still, it's entertaining enough to keep through to the end.

Also, the author is a journalist who used to work Eastern Kentucky for the Louisville Courier-Journal: coal mines were his beat. Mining accidents are no surprise if mines are regulated in anything like the manner Harris describes. It's only surprising they don't happen more often.

#67: I will give that one a shot. Thanks, Stephen.

93) Scent of the Missing / Susannah Charleson

This story about the training of a search-and-rescue dog was bedtime reading with my son, and was absolutely perfect for that purpose. Thanks to Faith (Dk_Phoenix) for the recommendation.

#69: I wondered why the title of that one sounded familiar. I must have added it to the BlackHole when Faith recommended it.

Off-topic, but a colleague sent me this link today, and it really torques me off. Check out this piece (I think it's supposed to be humorous somehow) on ridiculous math courses in liberal arts colleges. I'd like to know when New York magazine joined the brigade of proud know-nothings who sneer at complicated stuff they don't understand. Are they courting Rupert Murdoch?

We open with an image of Foxy Nerd Girl at a blackboard, trying to work out some sciencey integral thing. Foxy nerd girl is sad because math is hard. Foxy Nerd Girl wishes she had taken a fluff math course. New York magazine helps Foxy Nerd Girl by listing the top 10 fluff math courses in liberal arts colleges.

Boy, do they ever start out bad.

Topology is fluff? Are you kidding me? You see that sciencey integral thing that makes Foxy Nerd Girl so sad? That's just a little applied real analysis. It's a piece of cake. But suppose you want to take the ideas of real analysis and apply them in some other context. You can do that, but you have to learn Topology first. Come to think of it, you can't even learn real analysis anymore without some rudimentary topology. Including Topology in this list is a hint that the authors' mastery of mathematics pretty much ends at counting backwards from 10.

Boy, do they ever get worse.

A introduction to probability and statistics (Mathematics of Chance) that criticizes examples drawn from current periodicals is a fluff course? But the authors might be right: it's a 100 level course so it's meant for freshmen and non-majors like the students who plan to spend their lives writing fluff pieces for New York magazine.

Boy, does it never get any better.

It ridicules number theory, mangling the course description to change "the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, ... " into: "the natural numbers 1, 2, and 3." I will no longer poke fun at the authors' ability to count backward from ten. That is after all a remarkable skill for persons who cannot count forward past 3.

It ridicules mathematical modeling which let me tell you is some seriously difficult stuff.

It ridicules mathematical origami. Apparently the authors think it's all about getting college credit for folding paper cranes. Did they not read the course description in their own article? Do "spherical geometry" and "Gaussian curvature" make Foxy Nerd Girl giggle?

I will give them credit for one thing, though: the authors Jessica Pressler, Rachel Stein, Emily Watkins, Janelle Zera and Aviva Shen have done a fantastic job promoting the stereotype that girls can't do math. Thanks, girls. I think I'll go cry now.

#71: Stephen, I hope you send your entire post to the editors of New York magazine.

Done. I may be overreacting, but the tenor of comments on the page encourages me that perhaps they'll get an earfull over this one.

Another question ... why are five authors getting a byline for an article that consists mostly of paragraphs copied from course catalogs? Altogether there are 43 original words in the entire article (not counting fumbled quotes). This works out to 8.6 words and less than two-thirds of a sentence per author. And they say topology's easy.

#73: I am glad to hear that you sent on your comments and I hope the editors take yours as well as the other comments seriously.

Stephen, I am no mathematician and failed miserably to comprehend basic probability and statistics as an undergraduate (in part because the course was taught by an limited English-speaking foreign grad student?), but will bless to my dying day Professor Ed Wike and his book, Data analysis: a statistical primer for psychology students By Edward L. Wike. Thanks to him, in grad school I became able to carry out by hand (as computers were just coming into being and all data still had to be punched in on cards--for research we were using them, but for class--by hand!) and actually comprehend the logic of a mixed design ANOVA, after which non-parametric statistics was a breeze. I must admit, I never quite mastered regression analysis or calculus. As a psychologist using psychometrics, however, I fortunately did not need them.

I share your outrage at the mediocrity of the article above and am glad you are sending them your comments.

ETA and most of those courses actually sound interesting and useful. Even if the ones investigating the math underpinnings in various literature will be of more interest to the English or Lit major than the mathematician, there is definitely a logic and reasonable rationale for exploring them.

Roni,

Wike's Data analysis is now in the Someday Swamp. Statistics is a weak spot for me, and I'm happy to find books that help make sense of it.

94) Main Street / Sinclair Lewis

I picked this one for the Nobel TIOLI challenge #4. It's sort of comedy of manners set in early 20th century small-town Minnesota -- or, as the book repeatedly claims, small-town anywhere, USA. Carol Kennicott is a young, intelligent, and idealistic woman who comes to Gopher Prairie as the bride of a local physician. She comes with notions of bringing high culture and refined taste to the prairie town. The prairie town is not much interested.

I don't think time has been especially kind to the book. It's quite good -- the writing is witty, the characters are vivid, and the story plays out as it inevitably and mercilessly must -- but it never really leaves the early 1900s. It's an erstwhile candidate for Great American Novel become another period piece.

Still, as a period piece it's an especially insightful and entertaining one, and is recommended.

Sean, I'm meant to be eating breakfast and drying my hair and getting the kids ready for school, but I was livid when I saw your post above. (You know I used to teach maths and stats, right? I will send you some recs for stats books!) I would *love* to have had the resources to teach a case study stats course using current periodicals.

The authors make themselvse look pretty thick (dense in NZ speak) by writing this rubbish. Especially #10 - nobody could be doing that course without a lot of math already.

Cushla,

Yes, #10 is a bafflement: how in the world can anybody think Topology is a fluff course? The only explanation I can imagine is that the authors had never heard of the subject, and the course description struck them as simple and frivolous with its questions like "Does it have a hole?" and "Is it compact?" It never occurs to the authors that "Does it have a hole?" might be a surprisingly subtle question that occasionally requires a reclusive eccentric Russian genius to answer.

I look forward to your stats recommendations.

95) Maigret meets a milord / Georges Simenon

This is an omnibus volume collecting three early novels featuring Paris detective Maigret. According to Wikipedia and LT, these are numbers 4, 2, and 1 in the series.

Maigret meets a milord. Originally published as "La charretiere de la 'Providence'," and also published in English as "Lock 14." The wife of an English colonel turns up dead in a stable near a canal. Her husband is passing through the canal on a private yacht with his traveling companion and mistress.

Maigret and the hundred gibbets. Originally published as "Le pendu de Saint-Pholien," and also published in English as "The Crime of Monsieur Maigret." Maigret trails a man en route from Paris to Bremen, more out of curiosity than duty because the man behaves oddly but not illegally. By way of experiment, Maigret secretly exchanges the man's luggage with a suitcase full of newspapers. When the man discovers his luggage has been lost, he pulls out a gun and turns it on himself.

Maigret and the enigmatic Lett. Originally published as "Pietr-le-Letton." Interpol warns Maigret about the arrival in Paris of international con man "Peter the Lett." Maigret meets the Lett's train at the station, and sees a man matching Interpol's description disembarking. Just as he is about to make an arrest, a body is discovered on the train -- also matching Interpol's description.

96) The tales of Beedle the Bard / J. K. Rowling

I see that masking slight content with wide margins, large type and double-spacing is a strategy not unique to American college students.

I have not read any of the Maigret books. I will get to them eventually I am sure.

I have enjoyed the Maigret stories I've read, but that hasn't been many and not recently.

Loved your remark about Beedle the Bard. :-)

These are my first Maigret novels, but I read several of the short stories back in college. My French professor was a fan, and assigned some of them for classes.

The thing I liked about the stories was how there was always some human drama behind the cases Maigret investigated-- in one case we read, the apparent crime was actually no crime at all, just the efforts of a lonely man trying to hide his perfectly legal and rather dull secret life from his controlling spouse.

So the level of adventure is pretty low, and Maigret rarely uncovers dangerous criminal conspiracies. It's usually something about loneliness and longing, like Chekhov tales hung on the structure of a mystery novel. I was happy to see that these novels followed a similar pattern.

That's not to say they're great literature, and some of the writing hasn't aged well. For instance, one chapter in Maigret and the enigmatic Lett begins: "Every race has its own smell, loathed by other races." Painful. Flaws and all, though, Simenon's human stories are more memorable than the average whodunit.

Laura,

If I'd bought the book expecting a ... well, a book ... I'd have been incensed. But I've no business complaining: I checked it out from the library. For a few hours, anyway -- I think I spent more time transporting it than reading it.

But I should add that I understand the book is basically a charity project for Rowling, with all proceeds benefiting a foundation for disadvantaged children. I really can't criticize that, and don't want to. May they prosper.

About the Rowling - Agreed
And for fans, sometimes even slight information is still fun and exciting to have so I don't begrudge the book or the project for it to benefit the foundation. I just loved the way you remarked about it.

About Maigret - I think the Louise Penny books with Inspector Gamache remind me of Maigret for those reasons.

Hm. I'm really going to have to start that Three Pines series someday.

Yes, you are!

97) With / Donald Harington

Robin Kerr is a seven-year-old girl, abducted by a retired state trooper who takes her to a remote Ozarks cabin with plans to make her his bride. Things don't work out as planned, and their new life has barely begun when Robin is left alone to fend for herself in the wilderness.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. The story is told from a variety of viewpoints, including, Robin, her abductor, her numerous pets, and a sort of ghost who inhabits the remote homestead. The variety of voices and the layered narration they provide is intriguing and occasionally brilliant. But there are also numerous false notes, overly precious passages, and the denouement drags on about thirty pages too long. Also the ending is a bit too happy -- and not just the ending, the whole thing is a bit pollyannish, and the preoccupation with May-December (erm, maybe February-December) romance gets a bit creepy.

The balance, though, is positive. I'd never heard of Donald Harington before this book, but it's one of many he set in the small Ozarks town of Stay More, and I will look for others.

#87: I think I will give that one a pass. I do not think I can deal with the February-December romance creepiness.

#88: Good choice. The series might be good, but if so this isn't the best place to start.

I will share one passage, from a chapter told from the viewpoint of Robin's pet bobcat Robert:

"The dogs thought that because the Queen loved them and provided them with a home and took good care of them and petted them, she must be God. Robert knew that since she loved him and provided him with a home and took good care of him and petted him, he was God."

I'm more a dog person myself -- can't stand the competition.

First, watch this YouTube video. It's nice and short, just under a minute and a half.

Now the title of my #98 needs no explanation. The authors are the cognitive psychologists who created the video for an experiment in selective attention. About half of the subjects in their experiment did not see the gorilla upon their first viewing.

98) The Invisible Gorilla / Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

Chabris & Simons use their "invisible gorilla" experiment as a springboard for a discussion of ways our intuition deceives us. They discuss six "illusions": attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, causality, and potential. These things are illusory because popular wisdom about them is wrong.

For example, you'd think that the average person would notice a gorilla walking through a basketball game, especially when he/she is paying close attention. But you'd be wrong. Even when you're paying close attention, you tend to see things you expect to see. And things get even when worse when you try to distribute your attention by "multitasking": the authors cite studies showing that driving and talking on the phone is a bad idea -- and it doesn't matter a bit whether you have a handheld or "hands-free" device.

The authors go on to discuss how vivid memories are no more accurate than other memories, how confidence and competence are not necessarily related, and how the better you think you know something the more likely it is you're wrong. For every one of their claims they describe clever experiments documenting the phenomenon. They also identify how our faulty intuition leads to practical consequences and suggest ways to tell when it misleads us.

The book is readable and informative and persuasive. Maybe it's occasionally too cute, but it made me question what I thought I knew, so its mission is accomplished. Recommended.

#90: I have heard of the 'invisible gorilla' experiment before, but did not realize that a book had been written about it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, NML. I will look for it.

99) The Pusher / Ed McBain

A low-level drug dealer is found dead of a heroin overdose, his body clumsily posed and accessorized to look like a suicide by hanging. The bulls of 87th Precinct investigate, and things get complicated when an anonymous caller implicates the son of Lieutenant Peter Byrnes.

Interesting etymological note: the villain's nickname is "Gonzo," which turns out to be a corruption of "gunsel." This word was used by Dashiell Hammett in "The Maltese Falcon as a prank. In "The Pusher," "gunsel" is defined as "a guy who's hired to wash somebody."

#92: Interesting history of the word "gunsel," Stephen. Thanks for including the info.

100) Yellow blue tibia / Adam Roberts

It's the late 1940s. The Nazi threat has been defeated and soon the United States will collapse from its own capitalist weight. Josef Stalin gives them five years, tops. After that, Stalin sees he will need an enemy against whom the Soviet Union can unite. To this end he summons a group of science fiction writers to Moscow and orders them to create an "extraterrestrial menace." Just as abruptly as they are summoned, they are disbanded and told to forget they ever met.

For Konstantin Skvorecky that last order is pretty easy, as he spends the next forty years drinking. But then by chance he meets another of the authors, now working for the KGB, who tells him, "It is starting to come true."

From there things just get weird. The story may be coming true, or maybe not. Or some third possibility. (Roberts isn't big on the Law of the Excluded Middle.) In any case, Skvorecky finds himself surrounded by strange characters who either expect him to save the world, or want him dead, or both. Best of the cast is his new best friend Saltykov, a taxi driver with Asperger's syndrome, who is just as unable to understand sarcasm as Skvorecky is capable of nothing else.

The book kept reminding me of the old Beatles' movie, The Yellow Submarine: it doesn't always make a lot of sense, but it often seemed to be saying something, and the dialog is very witty. In an afterword Roberts explains that the book is a comment on the UFO phenomenon, but he's being modest. His real subjects are the reliability of perception and the nature of reality. UFOs are incidental to questions like: To what extent is "reality" an individual experience? To what extent is it shared? To what extent is it pliable? There's also some broad satire of Marxist government and spoofing of Marxist philosophy. It's probably not for all tastes but I found it provocative and funny, and I recommend it.

Sharing this link since others might be interested ....

The last few years I've used Library Journal's "Best Books of ... " as a default TBR list for the following year. I've never completed a list, and certainly not 2009's, largely because of all the recommendations generated by this wonderful group, which kept catching my distractable eye by being so sparkly.

Still, next year I'll probably pick and choose from LJ's Best Books of 2010. More than in any other year, I actually recognize titles on the list (largely thanks to this wonderful group). But still -- of titles I've never heard tell there's still a generous helping, and that really is the joy of such lists.

I read Yellow Blue Tibia earlier this year, and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I kept reading though, and at least I found out the meaning of the title. :)

#95 Thanks for the link to the LJ list - I enjoyed it and like you saw some books I've never heard of. (The last one in the Top 10 on American migration looks interesting to me.)

Because statistics books are SO festive, here are some recs for you.

My 2 favourites for mathematical stats - NOT introductory for most people unless you've done sophomore level calculus - are Introduction to Mathematical Statistics by Robert Hogg and Allen Craig, and a slightly easier one by the same Hogg and somebody or other Tanis. Both these are heavy on examples and maths, but won't give you much good intuition for the main results. For that, you need a good first year undergrad book, and my favourite is a New Zealand one by John Randal and Megan Clark called A First Course in Applied Statistics. (I'm biased - I taught from this book for 4 years, and I am friends with the first author and the second was my favourite prof in college). It is especially good on the Central Limit Theorem, which is crucial and poorly understood (and often poorly taught!). And it's cheap and short too. Otherwise, any of the hefty American undergrad intro books would probably be ok because you have a strong math background.

#96: I agree that it's puzzling most of the time, and even now I'm not quite sure what happened. Still, I laughed most of the way through -- I loved Skvorecky's voice.

#97: Thanks for those recommendations. The Hogg & Craig is in my library, so I will get to it. The Randal & Clark is a little more difficult to find -- according to WorldCat, the only libraries that hold it are in New Zealand & Australia, where it seems to be pretty popular (and no problem at all for you, Cushla). Even used copies are kind of pricey. I'll keep it in the swamp & check for it from time to time.

101) The calculus wars / Jason Socrates Bardi

This was disappointing. It had been in the Swamp for awhile, and I picked it up after reading DirtPriest's cautious recommendation, even though he warned that there is "very little in the way of technical math stuff." The warning is spot-on: in fact there's no math at all. This is mathematical history for people who hate math.

Really, you don't even need to know arithmetic to enjoy the book. And it is enjoyable, in about the same way as an episode of Jerry Springer. It's not particularly enlightening about the calculus, but you do get to see distinguished gentlemen behaving like children while manic fans urge them on.

Unfortunately, as DirtPriest also noted, the book is incompetently edited. The numerous misspellings and grammatical errors distract from the sport.

#99: I think I will pass on that one, NML.

I'm going to skip The Calculus Wars too. No maths at all, not even for people who want it? Weird!

Well, that's it for me then. Off the list it goes...

Stasia, Cushla, and Jim ...

I hate to scare people away from a book that wasn't bad, exactly, but really ... it's rather like telling the story of an idea by describing the people who had it.

I get that it's a popular account, but there's such a thing a too little information. For instance, Bardi kept saying that Newton's and Leibniz's methods were identical except for notation. But not only did he never describe their methods, he couldn't spare a single sentence even to describe the notation.

On the other hand, he did spend three pages on the sordid love affair of a Hanoverian princess. It's diverting, but come on ...

#103: But not only did he never describe their methods, he couldn't spare a single sentence even to describe the notation.

Nope. That in a nutshell would make me crazy.

There may be an audience out there for his book, but it is not me! (OK, now I sound like a maths snob. The truth has come out.)

#105: We can be maths snobs together, Cushla :)

Yeah, one of the things I'd be interested in is the different notations Newton and Liebnitz came up with and why. If that's not there, I'm less interested.

#104-107: My feelings exactly.

102) The Fall / Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

Vampire apocalypse, more action than horror, part two of three. Plenty fun, if you like that sort of thing.

Stephen, Stasia, and Dr N, do you have any GOOD recs for the Newton/Leibniz thing, or other interesting episodes? I love books on the history of math, but have read very few. I remember an analysis textbook that had snippets of famous mathematicians, and it was really cool.

#109: Wish I could help, Cushla, but I cannot think of any. I know that someone in the group read and recommended Boyer's History of Mathematics earlier in the year, but I have not gotten to it yet, so not sure how much of the Newton/Leibniz thing is covered.

Thanks Stasia - it looks interesting, but quite reference-y. I could of course do a tag search, but I rely on recs so much more!

#111: I could of course do a tag search, but I rely on recs so much more!

I understand that completely!

#99 That's disappointing, I picked that one up second hand recently and I was hoping for at least some maths!

#111 I did do a tag search (although I know what you mean about preferring recommendations) and Carl Boyer's The History of the Calculus looked promising. My library has a copy as part of their reserve collection so I've added it to my list of books to take out of the library at some point.

Cushla,

According to Bardi, the standard scholarly account of the dispute is A. Rupert Hall's Philosophers at War.

I've since found Brian E. Blank's review of Bardi's book in Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Blank, a professor of Mathematics at Washington University of St. Louis, nicely summarizes the dispute and provides bibliographical references. He also corrects several errors in Bardi's account, and recommends two biographies of Newton as better popular accounts of the quarrel: Gale Christianson's In the Presence of the Creator and Richard Westfall's Never at Rest.

I wish I'd read Blank's review first. The Westfall biography sounds particularly interesting, and has landed in my Someday Swamp.

#114: My local college library has Never at Rest, so hopefully I can get to it some time next year.

103) The Con Man / Ed McBain

The bulls of the 87th Precinct investigate a street hustler and a lonelyhearts killer. I'm mostly enjoying this series, dated slang and all, but a racist caricature made this one a little uncomfortable.

(SPOILER!)
Also the resolution doesn't quite fit the series' gritty aesthetic, as it has a detective's wife turn amateur sleuth after the detective brings her along to interview a witness. What a date.

104) The Afterlife / Gary Soto

This is the latest required reading for my son's English class,with a quiz on Friday. He tends to struggle with retention and comprehension, so we try to keep up with his reading as much as we can. When he'd finished The Afterlife, I asked him about the book and the story he told was so aimless and inane I concluded that he must have missed something. So I read it in order to work through its subtleties with him.

Guess what? The story is just as aimless and inane as he described. A boy is killed for no particular reason, then we follow his ghost as it floats around Fresno doing ... not much.

My son actually liked the book, because he enjoyed the narrator's sarcastic humor. I didn't. Disregarding the book's dubious sense of humor, the best I can say is that it's boring; at worst it feeds the adolescent fantasy of dying just to see how sorry everyone is then. Not recommended for anybody whose age doesn't end in "-teen."

Skipping that one. My age has not ended in -teen for almost 30 years!

Stasia,

Good choice. So much juvenile and young adult fiction is really outstanding that it's easy to be distracted and forget that Sturgeon's Law applies to it just as much as to post-young-adult fiction.

Also, it occurred to me this morning that last night's post was pretty long & rambling. I've edited it down to the meat.

#119: Young adult books are one of my LT discoveries and you are right - there are some truly outstanding books being written for kids and young adults these days. Plus I am discovering some children's books that I missed my first childhood :)

105) Slapboxing with Jesus / Victor LaValle

I'd read LaValle's Big Machine (#65) and liked it very much. Excellent as it was, that supernatural thriller did not prepare me for this collection of powerful, discomforting short stories, mostly about living in New York City poor, powerless, and desperately lonely. Under those conditions characters turn on themselves and their families and friends, doing violence to the only people who can offer the unconditional love they find themselves ashamed to need. Recommended.

#121: That one sounds a bit too dark for me. I think I will give it a pass. Glad you enjoyed it though, Stephen.

Stasia,

They are certainly bleak, and not for every taste. Having seen quite a few people who behave like LaValle's self-defeating characters (and being related to a few), I can't help but think his stories are painfully accurate.

106) Proofiness / Charles Seife

Proofiness. (n) "the art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove something that you know in your heart is true--even when it's not."

Seife is interested in the way journalists, politicians, lawyers and judges deceive us (and at least occasionally themselves) with numbers contrived to support conclusions they have already reached. Seife identifies common deceptions and gives them cutesy names like "causuistry" (confusing causation with correlation), "randumbness" (finding statistical patterns where none exist), and "disestimation" (ignoring the error inherent in any measurement), with examples of each.

I have mixed feelings about the book. Positives include the fact that it details a pervasive problem, and that it is pretty even-handed, detailing deceptions of both Republicans and Democrats. If Seife catches George Bush in a cherry-picking falsehood, he follows with a dishonest exaggeration from Al Gore. (Yes, his examples are almost all from the United States.)

Siefe also offers a simple and mathematically defensible solution to resolving close elections like Bush/Gore and Coleman/Franken: if an election is closer than the error inherent in counting the votes, then treat the election as a tie. For Florida and Minnesota, the legally-prescribed method for resolving a tie is to flip a coin.

On the negative side, there's nothing new here. The only improvement over Darrell Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics" is updated examples. The cute terms don't do much for me, and the most prominent examples -- the mortgage bubble, the coin-toss elections, the O.J. Simpson trial -- have been analyzed over and over so often that I'm frankly a bit tired of them.

Another complaint is that some of the examples he provides don't really fit his definition. For instance, he calls gerrymandering "proofiness," but it's not clear how drawing districts is a "bogus mathematical argument."

Overall, the book is occasionally interesting, but it's disappointing and mostly superfluous. It's not bad exactly, but How to Lie with Statistics and Innumeracy are better.

OK, I will skip Proofiness. I do not even like the title.

107) Eleven days / Donald Harstad

Four Satanists are found murdered and mutilated in rural northeast Iowa. Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman investigates.

It's not bad, but it's not great either. Conversations drag on too long, with every "Yeah," "Okay," and "You bet" carefully recorded. The jargon can get pretty thick but is rarely explained, leaving you to puzzle over lines like: "All cars 10-33 at the comm center. Possible 10-32. We need 10-78!" On the other hand, one assumes the jargon is authentic, since the author is a former police officer.

To this aging northeast Iowa boy, the best part was the location. And for nostalgia I'll read more in the series, but not right away.

Stephen, I do hope you are joining us again in 2011! We need our Ninja Math Librarian!

http://www.librarything.com/groups/75booksin20111

Oh, most definitely. I've become a 75er addict, and I fear withdrawal.

I just thought I'd put off starting a thread until I actually had something to share.

I am glad you will be back! I have not started my new thread over there yet either, so you are not the only one.

108) The great transformation / Karen Armstrong

From about 900 to about 200 BCE, the foundations were laid for today's world religions in the development of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Greek philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. Armstrong gives a history of these developments, and her narrative is fascinating and densely documented. I don't know much about the subject, but the book was recommended by a colleague who does, so I assume her history is solid.

But Armstrong says that her history is no mere "exercise in spiritual archaeology." She argues that the religions of this period represent something brand new in the history of ideas: a sort of universal, peaceful and introspective spirituality that humans had not experienced before and one which we forget now to our detriment. Of this she did not convince me.

We can't assume these ideas were new from their first appearance in the documentary record. We're speculating about philosophical and religious movements over three millennia old, and I think it's a bit bold to say that lack of documentation implies lack of existence. As for how useful these ideas may be to our present conditions, I find Armstrong overly optimistic that religion's benefits can be disentangled from its detriments. I'd like to think she's right, but I don't see much reason for such hope.

But that's just her metanarrative, which you can safely skim. Recommended for the historical content, not so much for the fuzzy feel-good religious apologetics.

And then from the sacred to the McBain ...

109) Killer's choice / Ed McBain

The bulls of the 87th Precinct investigate two murders: first the shooting death of a liquor store clerk, second the death of a cop shoved through a plate glass window. Meanwhile, a new cop transfers from a ritzier precinct and learns the harsher lessons of the 87th.

This was okay, with a couple of false notes: there's a 5-year-old girl with dialog that alternates between painfully precocious and painfully precious; the department seems to spend more resources investigating the clerk's death than the cop's; and (I don't think this is a spoiler but just in case) a killer is identified by a method that seems astoundingly tedious even for a police procedural.

Like the other books in this series, some things have aged nicely and others not so much. For instance, I got a kick out of this simile:

Kling looked as old as Elvis Presley.

I bet that conjured a different image back in 1958.

#129: I have only read one of Armstrong's books, but have meant to get to more of her work. Thanks for the reminder!

110) Stormwarden / Janny Wurts

The badguys plan apocalypse with demons, the goodguys try to stop 'em. It's a fun mix of high fantasy and science fiction. It's the first book in a trilogy but it very courteously closes with a resolution rather than a cliffhanger. Recommended for those who like that sort of thing.

I have not yet read any of Wurts' work. One of these days!

111) Rosemary and Rue / Seanan McGuire

Once upon a time Toby Daye had a more-or-less normal life for a half-fairy young professional. She had a young daughter, an understanding boyfriend, a hopeful future. Then a powerful fairy lord made Toby disappear for fourteen years, and when she returned her life was gone. Since then Toby has just been getting by, avoiding San Francisco's fairy underworld as much as she can. But she can't avoid it any longer: now Toby has been placed under a curse that forces her to investigate the murder of an old friend. Her investigation opens old wounds and incurs new debts.

I know that there is no shortage of post-Buffy urban fantasy series with plucky female heroines fighting and then romancing forces of darkness. I am ignorant about most of them, so I cannot compare others of the type to this series opener. I just know that this one was fun, and I will read more.

112) Flashback / Nevada Barr

Blech. For my taste, this was worst Anna Pigeon novel so far, even worse than "Liberty Falling." If you're a fan of the series, you'll read this sooner or later so I hope you like it more than I did. If not, please (please!) don't start here.

That wraps up my reading for 2010, which was up a bit from last year:
2009: 59 books, 19019 pages
2010: 112 books, 32725 pages
I blame it all on LT. Now I'm off to start my 2011 thread!

Happy New Year, Stephen! (or should I say, Ninja Math Librarian?)

Happy New Year Stephen!