Books That I’ve Read in 2000
“Always
read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it” – P.J.
O’Rourke
Used Books Online:
Mine is
Covered Treasures Bookstore in Monument (covrdtreas@aol.com)
Turn of the Century (Kurt Andersen) – This was fun. I finished it, appropriately, on New Year’s Day.
The Flanders Panel (Perez-Reverte) – I liked it and got acquainted with Bach’s Musical Offering via this book
In the Beginning Was the Command Line (Neal Stephenson) – provoked some thoughts that I’ve made use of
The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson) – this was terrific
Galileo’s Daughter (Dava Sobel) – I liked it; a good read
How We Believe (Shermer) – not as good as Why People Believe Weird Things
Think – A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (Blackburn) – very good and easy to read
Blast From the Past (Kinky Friedman) – jeez Kinky, this is totally off the wall
Longitude (Dava Sobel) – interesting to read and look at the pix but not as good a read as G’s Daughter
Flashpoint (Linda Barnes) – not quite as good as Hardware but close
How WalMart is Destroying America (Quinn) – has some useful info on this topic of contemporary importance
What Are the Odds – Chance in Everyday Life (Orkin) – something more people should know something about
The Nothing That is Zero – A Natural History of Zero (Kaplan) – amazingly well written
The Disheveled Dictionary (Karen Elizabeth Gordon) – a favorite; this is something I open at random and read a page
Mirth of a Nation (Rosen) – some of this is really funny
The Battle for God (Karen Armstrong) – scary; it’s almost as though the trajectory of history is confined to a Moebius strip that may superficially look a little different each time around but never substantially changes
The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover (Kinky Friedman) – this could be the Kingsta’s best
Ludwig Boltzmann (Cercignani) – Boltzmann is of personal and professional interest to me
Better Not Bigger – How to take control of urban growth and improve your community (Eben Fodor) – has some useful info but doesn’t address what may be the most significant point in the growth debate
Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Kingston) – some of this is very weird; every now and then I search (vainly, of course) for the magic trick that’s going to organize and de-clutter my life and house in one easy read; unless aliens invade my house and take care of things, I guess some day I’m just going to have to take the time to do it myself – yuck! As for my life, that’s harder than dealing with my house, which means it may be a lost cause.
The Untouchables (Eliot Ness & Oscar Fraley) – I’ve wanted to read this book for 40 years and finally tracked down a copy on the Web; I couldn’t read it without seeing in my mind’s eye Robert Stack as Eliot Ness
Downsize This! (Michael Moore) – he’s a blue collar P.J. O’Rourke; it goes without saying that he’s somewhat to the left of P.J. too!
Katie.com (Katherine Tarbox) – this is chilling stuff; all parents should read it. Even though I do high tech work, own a software company, and read cyberpunk SF I sometimes think the Unibomber had some good points to make about the role of technology in our lives.
Cold New World – Growing Up in a Harder Country (Wm. Finnegan) [see also the review by Joyce Carol Oates in the NY Review of Books 7/16/98] – I don’t know why I read stuff like this when I’m already depressed by the state of life in the USA. This is very disturbing but very worthwhile reading. Something that I don’t understand is how and when the transition occurs between kids’ (these kids’, my kids’, any kids’) ability to perceive that there are serious things wrong with American culture and life in the USA and their loss of that perception as adults. At some point most people forget about such issues and embrace their lives as consumers, entertainees, owners of the latest SUV, and so on. I know that other people beside Michael Moore and myself think about such things but why doesn’t everyone care? It’s time to move on to some lighter reading!
The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet (Freeman Dyson) – Nice little book. It’s always uplifting to read Dyson. His daughter & son have books out as well but I’ve not yet read them.
Flowers in the Dustbin – The Rise of Rock & Roll 1947-1977 (James Miller) – As someone who has listened to rock & roll pretty much non-stop (only stopping to eat & sleep, to borrow from something G.B. Shaw once said about his pipe smoking) since 1964, I find this book fun to just open at random and read a few pages of.
Refuting Evolution (J. Sarfati) – Now and then one of these creationist tracts comes my way. They’re uniformly awful; this one, however, may take the cake. My extended comments on the book and on the issue of science and religion are posted separately. I never cease to be amazed at the human propensity to engage in wishful thinking and self-delusion; it even becomes institutionalized. If they kept it to themselves it would be innocuous, but they don’t and it’s not.
Beowulf – terrific new translation by Seamus Heaney; a good read.
Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Robert Park) – Park writes the What’s New e-column on the American Physical Society Web site (www.aps.org). This kind of book is always fun to read and this is a modern equivalent of Martin Gardner’s classic Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science. I have to admit that, when I worked for the government (who else has the budget to perpetrate such farces), I was even a participant in one of the episodes, which indeed went from foolishness to fraud, that Park describes toward the end of his book (see Teller’s War by Bill Broad and Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death by Bob Scheer). In about 1985 I saw it for what it was, bailed out, and a few years later, having had enough of government work, went into business for myself.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling) – I’m glad that so many kids like this (& adults too) and doing some reading. I must be weird, though, because 112 pages of it was about all I could take. Although I devour SF I never could get into fantasy. I only got about 100 pages into The Hobbit as well and never did manage to get started on The Ring. That’s life, I guess; there’s too much interesting stuff out there to read to have force myself to read any particular book.
Driving Mr. Albert: A trip across American with Einstein’s Brain (Michael Paterniti) – This is Wonderful! What a trip! Some good laughs too.
The Mile High Club (Kinky Friedman) – This is one of Kinky’s best. It even has some pearls of wisdom in it as Kinky waxes philosophical – a new twist for Kinky Friedman novels.
When We Were Orphans (Kazuo Ishiguro) – For reasons that are difficult to explain I liked this book a lot. Perhaps I need to read it again to figure out why I like it so much. On the other hand, perhaps I won’t like it on the second read.
Spanking Watson (Kinky Friedman) – Yeah, I know that Kinky is politically incorrect and that I probably read too much of this stuff. He makes good reading on airplanes. This one is kind of silly but I still like Kinky and I love Stephanie Dupont.
A Friend of the Earth (T.C. Boyle) – I liked this a lot in some ways but not in other ways. It’s a strange book in many ways. I’ve always had an interest in apocalyptic futurological stories. Although not especially desirable, this future is relatively tame compared to some.
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Hoffman) – This biography of the mathematician Paul Erdos was fun to read. Erdos, whom I once heard give a seminar in about 1976, was, perhaps, as famous for his eccentricities as he was for his mathematics. For more than 20 years he lived out of two suitcases as he crisscrossed the world doing mathematics with various collaborators. I thought about him when, in 1991-92, I traveled the world doing science in Italy, Australia, France, and Northern Ireland.
The Florida and US Supreme Court documents concerning Bush v. Gore (Nov-Dec, 2000) [these are all downloadable from the Web] – I have to admit that I didn’t follow the presidential campaign but found the post-election legal battle to be very exciting. Considering both Gore and Bush to be mediocrities, I voted for Nader as a protest. It seems like most of my voting over the years, when I have even voted, has been in protest. The last Democrat I voted for was Carter in 1976, which may have been a mistake, and I’ve never voted for a Republican and won’t until they eschew the NRA and the Christian right. I never have liked Clinton. I was in Belfast in 1992 when he stated that he had smoked dope but hadn’t inhaled. He must think that we’re dopes. I told David Bates at the time that a statement such at that indicates that Clinton is either incompetent or a liar; in either case I couldn’t vote him. As it turns out, he’s a habitual and compulsive Liar. I voted for Perot as a protest. Anyway, the post-election legal battle was very interesting. It was clearly very partisan all the way to the US Supreme Court (some of them clearly know who their patron is) but I doubt that there was any way of preventing that. I didn’t especially care who won and finally decided that, whoever won, we would all be losers. The fight over the chads seemed to be mostly an exercise in deceiving the public. Anyone who has ever torn a check out of checkbook and had it tear into the check rather than along the perforation should know that perforated pieces of paper are unreliable and are not to be trusted. I think that a time-out should have been called and the entire state of Florida should have been recounted first by machine and then, for those ballots that didn’t register in the machine, by hand using some standard for what constitutes a vote. I’ve thought since the 1960 election that the electoral college is an 18th century anachronism that should be done away with. What is most clear in reading the legal documents is that there is no clear Truth. None of the laws, the various constitutions included, have been written in such a way that they are not subject to interpretation. I wasn’t aware of how pervasive such ambiguity is in the fundamental state and federal laws. It was an interesting month or so.
Killing Time (Caleb Carr) – I think this is the author’s first foray into science fiction. I enjoyed it even though it’s somewhat rough around the edges. It as some good ideas although some of the stuff is really dumb. It, in part, involves time travel, which has been one of my favorite SF topics since reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine when I was in grade school.