Books That I’ve Read in 2001
“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, Colorado (covrdtreas@aol.com) owned by Mrs. Tommie T. Plank.
Much of what I know I have learned from the New York Review of Books
Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety (Wendy Kaminer) – This is wonderful! It would be certain to upset both Republicans and the New Age crowd if they dared to read something like this. Anything that could accomplish that must be good (come to think of it, Kinky Friedman probably does also).
Hard Time (Sara Paretsky) – This is terrific although I’m not sure that it’s quite as good as Tunnel Vision. Some of the characters are truly frightening. Unfortunately, as I’ve gleaned from my daily reading of newspapers (and, perhaps, from Monument town politics), such people really exist.
The Home Town Advantage (Stacy Mitchell) – A good, but depressing, account of the effects of chain stores upon small towns and their local businesses.
In Code: A Mathematical Journey (Sarah Flannery) – It’s about mathematics and cryptography; I like that kind of thing but it’s, obviously, not for everyone.
Leonardo: The First Scientist (Michael White) – I liked this; I never knew much about da Vinci and have found his life to be very interesting.
Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Musical Mystery Solved (Russell Martin) – This was terrific!
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright) – His book “Three Scientists and Their Gods” was terrific. I’m not sure yet what to make of this; I’ll need to reread parts of it and ruminate on it for a while.
The Annotated Alice (Lewis Carroll with introduction and notes by Martin Gardner) – This is, of course, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with annotations by the mathematician and popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner. This is one of those books that I re-read every few years because it is so delightful. Aspects of Alice’s adventures and the characters involved therein are not unlike our local politics.
Getting the Love You Want (Harville Hendrix) – The subtitle is “A Guide for Couples”; as I’m not part of a couple I read only Part 1, which has to do with how one’s relationship with one’s parents in connected to relationships to others when we become adults. In his words: “…we choose our partners for two basic reasons: (1) they have both the positive and negative qualities of the people who raised us, and (2) they compensate for positive parts of our being that were cut off in childhood.” Hendrix raises some points that deserve much thought.
Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends and Pseudoscience Begins (Wynn and Wiggins) – This is non-technical but very good. Unfortunately most Americans will be off reading pseudoscience trash rather than this.
The Music of the Spheres (Elizabeth Redfern) – It’s a mystery set in London in 1795; very good, I enjoyed it.
Gunman’s Rhapsody (Robert Parker)
Doc Holliday – A Family Portrait (Karen Holliday Tanner)
I read these on a drive from Lincoln, Nebraska to Taos & Santa Fe that took me through Dodge City, Kansas. Gunman’s Rhapsody is a historical novel based on the life of Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. It’s well done; I like that kind of thing. Doc Holliday is, of course, a biography of Doc by a cousin. There’s more known about him than I thought. Other books along these lines are:
John Myers’ Doc Holliday
Bat Masterson’s 1907 profile of Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier
Miller’s & Snell’s classic Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns
Stewart Lake’s famous and, perhaps, dubious Wyatt Earp – Frontier Marshal
Boyer’s equally dubious I Married Wyatt Earp – The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp
The late Frank Water’s highly regarded The Earp Brothers of Tombstone
Allen Barra’s well regarded Inventing Wyatt Earp – His Life and Many Legends
The final two, consistent with the goals of modern historiography, fall somewhat into the category of debunkers. That’s okay, though. As C.L. Sonnichsen points out in his biography of Judge Roy Bean, these people were originals even if some of their exploits have been over embellished with the passage of time and the advent of movies and TV; “It adds to our pleasure to believe that the legends are more or less true, as in Roy’s case [and, I’ll add, in the case of the Earps and Holliday], they are.”
Sherlock in Love (Sena Jeter Naslund) – Appropriately, I read this on the BA flight from Denver to London. Ms. Naslund (the author of the best selling Ahab’s Wife) must be a Sherlockian as she knows the characters and the minutiae so well. I enjoyed this neither despite nor because of the four bottles of airline wine that I consumed in transit, i.e. it was a good read. As usual, Watson is hopelessly lost, although, in the end, he comes up a winner. The character personae are V. Sigerson (the key lies in what V. stands for), Irene Adler J, and, perhaps not amazingly, Mad Ludwig. Albert Einstein, whose brain traveled across the U.S. in the trunk of a car a century later (see Books Read in 2000), plays a cameo role. The holy grails to Sherlockians are, of course, the best story concerning the Giant Rat of Sumatra and the story to end all stories having to do with the death of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle wrote The Death of Sherlock Holmes but, as we all know (don’t we all?), rumours of his death were greatly exaggerated. Perhaps my calling as I approach geezerhood (maybe, like an arithmetic series, I’ll never get there J), should be to write The Ultimate Death of Sherlock Holmes! See also Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, edited by Isaac Asimov (1984) for examples of attempts by various authors to extend the realm of Holmes. “Quick, Watson! The game is afoot!”
The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell) – (not to be confused with The Crow; they’re very different) – This is a pretty awesome book.
Children of God (Mary Doria Russell) – Sequel to The Sparrow
A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.) – This is a classic (1959) of science fiction that, I think, is not unrelated to the two Russell novels.
The Red Box (Rex Stout) – One of the better Nero Wolfe mysteries. This one is a book-on-tape that got me from Limon, Colorado to Columbia, Missouri. Nothing beats books on tape for getting across Kansas.
Steppin’ on a Rainbow (Kinky Friedman) – It’s kinky Friedman, what more can I say?
Ella Minnow Pea (Mark Dunn) – “A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.” It’s about pangrams and the legacy of Nevin Nollop. Wonderful! You need to keep the Oxford English Dictionary (unabridged, i.e. all 20 volumes) handy while reading this.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Salman Rushdie) – lots of fun.
The CEO of the Sofa (P.J. O’Rourke) – Not as good as some of PJO’s books but still adequately cynical.