Books That I’ve Read in 2003
“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
Race Across America: the Agonies & Glories of the World’s Longest & Cruelest Bicycle Race (Michael Shermer) – This is out of print but I tracked down a copy on ABE (see above). Enjoyable read. I may have missed the window for doing this kind of thing. We’ll see, though; I’d like to try it.
Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe (Anthony Arthur) – This is wonderful! The literary battles between C.P. Snow & F.R. Leavis over Snow’s “Two Cultures”, Lillian Hellman & Mary McCarthy, and les enfants terribles Truman Capote & Gore Vidal are fun to read about. Well done!
The Dispossessed (Ursula K. LeGuin) – I first read this in 1980. It’s a wonderful book. The protagonist, Shevek, is a physicist. J Good science fiction ages well, as this one has. Shevek is from the Anarres, the moon of Urras, which is a planet circling Tau Ceti. Shevek’s society on Anarres is anarchic, which appeals to me, especially given the nature of 21st century American culture.
“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” (Richard P. Feynman) – These are wonderful! I read them when they were published in the 1980s but pulled them out again for another read after the Columbia disaster. I began with Feynman’s discussion in the second book of the Challenger investigation (see also Edward Tufte’s outstanding discussion of this in Visual Explanations) but one thing led to another and I ended up rereading both books. That tends to happen frequently.
So Long and Thanks For All The Fish and Mostly Harmless (Douglas Adams) – I recently reread The Hitchhiker’s Guide Trilogy (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, & Life, the Universe, and Everything) when I had taken them off the shelf to look up some statements about probability. But then, since I hadn’t read books four and five of the “Trilogy” I picked them up from the local bookstore and read them as well. (I also have the BBC video from the early 1980s.) I think these things are wonderful. Sometimes they’re just funny, sometimes they’re profound, and sometimes they’re just crazy. I’ll pick up Salmon of Doubt, which was published after Adams’ death, when it comes out in paperback.
Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) – This just came out. It’s not quite the same far out surreal cyberpunk stuff that Neuromancer and Idoru were. It’s, well, it’s much more real. It’s extremely well written. I liked it a lot. It was hard to put down. Indeed, even at 356 pages, I put it down only a couple of times.
Baudolino (Umberto Eco) – I got bogged down in the middle of this (lots of detail) and read a few other books while working my way through it. But I finally got engaged again and whipped off the last 200 pages in one night. Curious book but I ended up liking it a lot. The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum remain my favorites, however.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig) – This was a hot item in the mid-1970s but I had never read it. I hadn’t really even thought much about it until a friend lent it to me recently. There are many gems scattered among the pages and pages and metaphysical baloney. In The Disposed Shevek says of economics that “it bores him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.” I have the same feelings about metaphysics and theology as well. But there are some important observations made in Zen that, in addition to the main thread of the story, make it, nevertheless, worthwhile read. I found myself relating to the narrator of the story who does a lot of thinking and reflecting while riding the motorcycle. I do much the same and, indeed, do some of my best creative thinking while riding my bicycle. I often make notes of my thoughts by leaving voice mail messages on my cell phone when I’m riding so that I can write them down later.
The Dimwit’s Dictionary (Robert Hartwell Fiske) – This is for anyone who enjoys language. Fiske is the editor and publisher of The Vocabula Review (www.vocabula.com). This is fun to have available while writing. I try to eschew the clichés, moribund metaphors, torpid terms, and so on that Fiske skewers in his book but am nevertheless amazed at how difficult it is to communicate without them. I’ve been thinking of writing an essay wherein every sentence contains one of what Fiske calls “dimwitticisms”.
Endurance: Shackletons’s Incredible Voyage (Alfred Lansing) – This is an amazing story. It’s the tale of the survival of Ernest Shackelton and his crew from the Endurance for more than a year on the Antarctic ice. Simply incredible. The story ranks up there with Richard Byrd’s Alone, Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, and Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider. A terrific read. Fiction couldn’t improve on this.
The Culture of Fear (Barry Glassner) – A good discussion of why Americans fear some things even if the probabilities are sometimes vanishingly small. Misconceptions and misperceptions of probability and odds by the general public is a subject that interests me. It’s a subject that’s not addressed in public education but should be.
The Next Big Thing is Really Small (J. Uldrich and D. Newberry) – I should have known better: this is a book written for the business community about nanotechnology. Business books tend to be terribly written and this one may “take the cake” (a moribund metaphor – see Fiske above). It approaches being the essay that I mentioned writing in my review above: every other sentence is a cliché of some sort. The writing is simply awful. Uldrich is a venture capitalist and may be expected and even allowed to claim ignorance but Newberry claims to be a physicist. She should know better. Anyway, the idea was to learn a little about nanotechnology and, I guess, I learned a little. It was, however, at the expense of my teeth, which I gnashed throughout the entire, fortunately short, book. If he were dead, Fiske would “turn over in his grave” (moribund metaphor) reading this book but, since he isn’t dead, he would “have a conniption fit” (yet another moribund metaphor) were he to read this book. I could continue in this vein but “you get the picture” (my final moribund metaphor).
Deus lo Volt! (Evan S. Connell) – This is a novel that is a “chronicle of the crusades”. It reads differently from the great histories of the crusades (books by Robert Payne, Karen Armstrong, and James Reston, Jr.). The brutality is much more graphic in a novel such as this than it is in a non-fiction history. This was a brutal time, not that our own time isn’t brutal. Connell is, however, a good writer.
The Sinister Pig (Tony Hillerman) – Another Chee and Leaphorn mystery. They’re always a good read. This may be the best one since The Fallen Man.
The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before (Umberto Eco) – I’ve read each of these before. I was looking for something in each and ended up re-reading them. The first is a truly great book that has achieved fame. The second, which is Eco’s third novel, is frustrating at times. I like it least of Eco’s four novels.
Isaac Newton (James Gleick) – Gleick is a terrific science writer, Chaos, which is well known, being his first book. Genius and Faster are two other good books by him. This biography of Newton, which isn’t the tome that Richard Westfall’s Never at Rest is, is a good read. It goes well with Philp Kerr’s novel of Newton, Dark Matter and, curiously, with Dan Brown’s new novel (see below) The Da Vinci Code.
The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) – This is very complex, making it too difficult to summarize (basically, I’m too lazy), but what a terrific novel!
Sophie’s World (Jostein Gaarder) – This is actually a novel about the history of philosophy, which she pulls off amazing well (considering that it’s basically a lecture) with an interesting philosophical twist.
Neuromancer (William Gibson) – I first read this in 1991 although it was published in 1984, of all the propitious dates. It deservedly won the Hugo, Nebula, and P.K. Dick awards for science fiction. It’s the original cyberpunk novel. I was interested in seeing how it has aged, which it has done very well. I was amazed to find some things that I had completely forgotten about such as the use of the term “The Matrix” to describe the evolved Internet of the future. It turns out that the move The Matrix drew heavily from the Neuromancer. This is still an amazing novel after two decades. As I mentioned above, Pattern Recognition is, in many ways, a new direction for Gibson.
The Cat Who Brought Down the House (Lilian Jackson Braun) – This is the latest in the “Cat Who” books. I buy them for my mother but have read the first dozen or so in a row myself and then have read them sporadically since. They’re fun and quick to read. I like the main character Jim Qwilleran and some of the other characters and the cats are okay, but I don’t like Polly, Qwilleran’s girlfriend. I gnash my teeth when she appears (one of my former wives was offended that I didn’t like Polly, as though I didn’t have a right to my own likes and dislikes). These take place either in the UP of Michigan (Braun lives in MI) or in northern Minnesota in a locale such as Ely, perhaps.
Dark Matter (Philip Kerr) – The subtitle is the “Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton”. This is also on last year’s reading list but, having read Gleick’s biography of Newton (see above), I decided to reread this and compare notes with Gleick and with Richard Westfall’s authoritative biography of Newton Never at Rest, which I read when it came out in 1980 and, of course, still possess. Of course there’s the connection to the Templars as well, which gives it a commonality with The Da Vinci Code and with Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which is one my favorite novels of all time as it has many layers and great depth.