tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35268763478950132742024-03-13T19:56:57.484-04:00It Dawned On MeDawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.comBlogger116125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-60536399291893933592023-12-26T18:30:00.007-05:002023-12-31T13:39:04.859-05:002023 Books<p><span style="font-family: arial;">It's been a while since I've posted my reading list, but I decided I like remembering what I've read when, so I'm gonna try starting it up again now.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">As I'm typing up this list, I'm noticing that there are quite a few re-reads this year, mostly because I felt a need at the time for something that was uplifting or hopeful. Sigh. As in the previous few years, a lot of fantasy, primarily by women authors.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Here's what I've read in 2023. As always, * for recommended, X for avoid.</span></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Normal People - Sally Rooney; enjoyed it, but it felt a little...normal<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco; I enjoyed it a lot. Really interesting to read about the minutiae of Christian doctrine that can lead to wildly different expectations of human behavior, depending on interpretation. But it may not be for everybody.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Chosen and the Beautiful - Nghi Vo; I really enjoyed this re-imagining of The Great Gatsby. It's got the mildest touch of fantasy or possibly magical realism to it. Told from the point of view of Jordan Baker, who turns out, in this rendition, to be Asian, adopted as a small child by a wealthy family. I'll let you imagine where this could go in the context of upper class Roaring 20's society.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald; Had to re-read this to compare with the Chosen and the Beautiful.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Beowulf; I still don't get it.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">*Uprooted and Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik; Greatly enjoyed these YA fantasy stories, subversion of Fairy Tale genre. I'd read Spinning Silver a few years ago, enjoyed it a lot and felt like I needed some upliftment, so re-read it. So glad I did.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Dune - Frank Herbert; Finally got around to reading it for the first time. By rights I ought to have loved it, but I really didn't. I think I found it a little too militaristic or monarchistic or something. Maybe trying too hard for the Lawrence of Arabia vibe? I guess I'm not big on the whole Rightful Lord or Prophesied Savior themes.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">A Long Petal of the Sea - Isabel Allende; Interesting historical read about the relationship between the Spanish Civil War and migration to Chile, but I didn't love the writing, compared with other of her works</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Trust - Hernan Diaz</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Agent Running in the Field - John le Carre; His last novel published during his lifetime. Enjoyed it a lot, though it's pretty standard le Carre fare.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado; I didn't actually get through the whole thing, but I think it deserves a mention - it is epically weird and dark...I didn't have the attention span to finish it at the time I was reading it - it requires a bit of thought.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo; I dunno...it was OK...somehow didn't grab me - I'm not big on murder mysteries, and this was more murder mystery than fantasy for my taste. <br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Light From Uncommon Stars - Ryka Aoki; Read it on the recommendation of Donna Minkowitz - enjoyed it a lot. Very off-beat sci fi featuring a donut-shaped donut stand run by </span><span style="font-family: arial;">refugee aliens and an AI, as well as a pact with...well...it's never explicitly stated who...to provide virtuoso violin students, with a trans girl autodidact virtuoso violinist whose soul hangs in the balance...<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* How to Build a Girl - Caitlin Moran; I read this a number of years ago - It still holds up. Absolutely filthy, but such a hilarious, poignant, cringey coming of age story about a nerdy, socially awkward, working class girl. Let's just say...it's the ultimate in feel good. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">X The Witches - Stacy Schiff; I've always had a bit of a fascination for the Salem witch trials. This is not the book to read about it - seriously hard to follow.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Elizabeth George Speare; Needed to read this to cleanse my palate from The Witches</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Crucible - Arthur Miller; Same</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* Counterfeit - Kirsten Chen; I loved this one - very clever novelized reflection on status, status symbols and imposter syndrome, revolving around the knockoff industry</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Fairest - Gail Carson Levine; She is always good for a feel good experience</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah Maas; It was OK...I wasn't super excited about it...not interested enough to pick up the next in the series. Normally I like the subversion of fairy tales genre (this is essentially the Beauty and the Beast), but it didn't do it for me.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Searching for Sylvie Lee - Jean Kwok (a Hunterite, which I didn't know at the time.) I enjoyed this one a lot</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* The Book Thief - Markus Zusak; Loved this one so much.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* Lord of the Flies - William Golding; Felt so relevant</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* Homeland Elegies - Ayad Akhtar; Such a wonderful, humorous, thought provoking call for tolerance.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan; This one keeps coming up on lists of books recommended for me, but somehow I didn't love it that much - it was ok, but not fabulous</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson; I enjoyed it</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith; also a reliably feel-good author </span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon; what can I say? I'm an Outlander groupie.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Mind's Eye - Oliver Sacks - I think I didn't get through all of it. At some point it felt a little too close to home for my aging body :-)</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">X She Who Became the Sun - Shelley Parker Chan; it was an interesting premise that just didn't end up working for me - sort of an east Asian Yentl with an Ayn Rand vibe. I think you could safely skip this.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Precious - Sapphire - liked it a lot</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker; I'd read it a number of years ago and loved it. Needed some feel good, so read it again. It still works magic.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock - Imogen Hermes Gowar; This one was a bit of a surprise for me but I really enjoyed it</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins; I'd read The Hunger Games a number of years ago, but never read the others. Sooooo dark. Enjoyed them a lot, though I feel like they are intended, among other things as a critique of "coastal elites." </span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* Hench - Natalie Zina Walschots; loved, loved. loved this one. So snarky. Such a great parody of corporate life, and the personality-driven culture of our modern tech companies.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls (who apparently overlapped with me at Barnard) - I enjoyed it. Some things felt very familiar - growing up with parents who really didn't get the concept of parenting.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Down the River unto the Sea - Walter Mosely (who I checked out on the recommendation of Joanne Sutera) - I enjoyed it a lot - very thought provoking</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Comedians - Graham Greene; Very thought provoking novel on life in Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* Olga Dies Dreaming - Xochitl Gonzalez; This one felt sooo familiar in many ways - life as a child of parents with a Cause</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">* Afterlife - Julia Alvarez - a very moving novelized reflection on grief and also living with family drama</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad; I found it interesting</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Enchantress of Numbers - Jennifer Chiaverini; I don't love the writing, but the story of Ada Lovelace is necessarily interesting</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Siddhartha - Herman Hesse; Yes, I finally got around to reading it. I'm sorry, but it feels like it was written by a guy who is very proud of his Big Thoughts.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">The Good Earth - Pearl Buck; Enjoyed it. I was required to read it the summer before 7th grade - can't imagine what was going on in the teachers' heads.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser; This is another one that I was required to read in 8th grade - can't imagine what was going on in the teachers' heads. What a downer.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata; enjoyed it... so cringey...neurodivergent woman's reflections on neurotypical people's ways of trying to "fix" her...with a little help from an incel</span></li><li><span style="font-family: arial;">Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin; Just started this at the end of the year. Jury's still out on whether I'm going to finish it - it's so...shopping listy. I'm not seeing any structure or organization to it. It's like a stream of consciousness. Many of the things that wash up in <u>Darwin's</u> stream of consciousness are necessarily going to be interesting, but really, the format doesn't help me understand much.<br /></span></li></ul>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-32635871033755521022018-10-03T05:44:00.003-04:002019-01-20T17:47:57.351-05:002018 books<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As I did <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2018/01/2017-books.html">last year</a>, I'm posting the list of books I read this year, partly as a memory aid, partly to share with my friends one view into who I am and what I like. I'm pretty sure I'm missing a few that I read, as I wasn't very disciplined about tracking them, but...</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This was (unintentionally) a very refugee/war conditions reading year, including items such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Midnight's Children, The Muralist, Rob Roy, Remains of the Day. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hard to say what my favorites were...several I really enjoyed. I think I'd have to go with a couple of the chick-lits: The Woman Who Stole My Life and Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Though I also really enjoyed Rob Roy and Remains of the Day. And Midnight's Children.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /> * = Recommended<br />X = Stay away</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Woman Who Stole My Life (audiobook): Marian Keyes - completed from last year...loved it </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Girl With a Pearl Earring: Tracy Chevalier - I did not love this as much as Remarkable Creatures </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/730/730-h/730-h.htm">Oliver Twist</a>: Charles Dickens </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (audiobook): Arundhati Roy </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/orczy/scarlet-pimpernel/">The Scarlet Pimpernel</a>: Baroness Emmuska Orczy </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Flowers in the Attic: VC Andrews </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Midnight's Children (audiobook): Salman Rushdie - liked it a lot, but may not be for everyone </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Remains of the Day: Kazuo Ishiguro - greatly enjoyed this </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (audiobook): Maria Semple - kind of the story I used to fantasize about writing - lots of snark, especially about annoying school parents, but also a meditation on depression. I was also flabbergasted to find out that Maria Semple was apparently my college classmate. I'm certain I didn't know her. </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Rob Roy (audiobook): Walter Scott - just loved it. I <u>love</u> Di Vernon. </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From Doon With Death (audiobook): Ruth Rendell - interesting and daring choice of murderer and motive, considering the times in which it was published </span></span></li>
<li> <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/brontea/wildfell_hall">The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:</a> Anne Bronte - I somehow ran across the movie with the <i>very</i> talented Rupert Greaves (who played an almost diametrically opposite role in The Forsyte Saga), and decided I needed to re-read the book. It's interesting to see a Victorian portrayal of an abusive relationship. Those Brontes sure weren't afraid to probe the ugly.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Muralist (audiobook): B.A. Shapiro - I loved Shapiro's The Art Forger, so decided to try this one, as well. I enjoyed it - it had some very interesting perspective on history and art analysis. What was particularly fascinating about it was its portrayal of the plight of Jewish people in Europe in the lead-up to WWII, in which people became increasingly desperate to leave, in the face of more and more closing doors. Though it was written in 2015, it could not be more relevant to today's refugee crisis, and the Trump administration's refusal to admit individuals fleeing from horrific conditions. From a writing point of view I might quibble with it in that I found it a little saccharine towards the end and I did not find the portrayal of mental illness very compelling. </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">*The Cuckoo's Egg: Clifford Stoll - I lent this to a friend, and upon return I decided to re-read it. I still love it. </span></span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Started:<br /> </span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gods Without Men: Hari Kunzru </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Telegraph Avenue (audiobook): Michael Chabon (completed in the new year) </span></span></li>
</ul>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-4575856314377247772018-01-07T14:39:00.002-05:002018-01-07T14:48:14.158-05:002017 Books<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As I did <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3526876347895013274#editor/target=post;postID=1283593748028637647;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=postname">last year</a>, I'm posting the list of books I read this year, partly as a memory aid, partly to share with my friends one view into who I am and what I like. The year started off fabulously with the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful The Jinni and the Golem and How to Build a Girl. Quite a few coming of age books this year...not sure why...just turned out that way. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* = Recommended</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">X = Stay away</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span>
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Jinni and the Golem: Helene Wecker (audiobook). Think I'd like to give it 3 *'s, though * on my reviews is generally binary - you get one or you don't. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On the immigrant
experience in early 20th century New York, from the points of view of a
jinni and a golem, who, by their natures are outsiders to the community
of immigrant outsiders. An exploration of human values. </span>Coming of age, Golem-style.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ender's Game: Orson Scott Card (audiobook). Meh. Actually I found the ending really interesting, but most of the book kind of too much about the choreography of simulated battles to be very captivating for me. The story is a reflection on genocide, the cultivation of a mentality that can support it, and ultimately the responsibility of a conqueror to enable the re-establishment of the destroyed race. However, given that the story is from the point of view of the instrument of genocide who is made into a sympathetic and tragic character, and given that the story ends without showing us how he settles his dilemma of whether or not to make reparations, I am less than motivated to follow up on other stories in the series. Coming of age, warrior-style.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* How to Build a Girl: Caitlin Moran (audiobook). Can I give this 3 or maybe 4 *'s??? Such a fabulous coming of age book. Absolutely filthy, but so poignant, so hilarious, such a great portrayal of a teenage girl's maturing process as she experiences economic, physical and emotional life challenges. Fathers of girls will probably be a bit squeamish about reading this one. Women will probably nod, even while cringing at some of Johanna-Dolly's choices.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">LaRose: Louise Erdrich (audiobook) - liked it a lot, but may not be for everyone. An accidental shooting of a beloved child by his uncle exposes the stressors (and strengths) within the Native American community and the historical factors leading to those stressors.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/pg-wodehouse/gem-collector/">The Gem Collector</a>: P.G. Wodehouse - meh...I love Wodehouse, but this isn't one of his more entertaining ones, IMHO</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Stieg Larsson (audiobook) - this was an abridged edition...not a good abridgment, I think - this version is not as gripping as I remembered it. Superstar investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist and the super messed up and abused superhacker Lisbeth Salander team up to locate a decades-missing heiress, and uncover a lot of dirty secrets in an industrialist family. Still really want to meet this Mikael Blomqvist guy.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Museum of Extraordinary Things: Alice Hoffman (audiobook) - an interesting story, but the writing is a little disappointing, especially towards the end. Another coming of age story. Some interesting historical perspective of turn of the (20th) century New York</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/MP/index.html">Mansfield Park</a>: Jane Austen - annoying, as always <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2010/05/lovers-vows.html">(as I think I've mentioned previously).</a> Don't ask me why I keep reading it.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Last Nude: Ellis Avery (audiobook) - sort of a coming of age book, though the main character is a little older than what we would normally think of in this genre - definitely the ingenue losing her innocence.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Labyrinth: Kate Mosse (audiobook) - kind of a disappointment - interesting historical setting (Crusaders turning on Cathars in early 13th century Languedoc), and interesting structure (parallel stories of academics doing research about the Cathars in the 2000s and mystics doing stuff in the 1200s), but I found the writing somewhat grating. Also, there is a supernatural element to the story that I found annoying -- I love magical realism, but when you have characters reflecting on how strange things are, you spoil the effect. I had a similar gripe with 1Q84. For the parallel story between academics and historical figures genre, I found Possession by A.S. Byatt a far, far, far better novel.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Gone Girl: Gillian Flynn (audiobook) - quite good...very strange story. Not totally bought in to the ending, but it was an interesting ride. Dysfunctional marriage between two first class narcissists gone very, very dark..hyperintellectual scavenger hunt for an ostensible body. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Swamplandia!: Karen Russell (audiobook) - another very strange story. A family with an alligator wrestling theme park in the Everglades falls apart upon the death of the mother, the star of the show. Without her guidance and glue, each family member follows a different path, putting themselves into great danger, that is only resolved when they find their ways back. Pacing could have been picked up a tiny bit, I think, but overall very well done. Very good voice of a couple of teenagers. To the credit of Russell's writing, there was one scene that was so distressing, I had to listen to it in bits and pieces...took me a couple of days to get through it. I didn't love the readers who did the audio. And another coming of age book.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alif the Unseen (audiobook): G. Willow Wilson - interesting piece. Teenage hackers in an unspecified middle eastern country (modeled on Saudi Arabia, I guess), working with jinnis, mullahs and other progressives to fight oppression by the ruling royalty. The IT aspect was a little grating because the author doesn't seem to have an idea of how you actually do coding, leading to some extremely implausible climactic scenes, but mostly it didn't matter.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Color Purple (audiobook): Alice Walker - read by the author, which was really interesting...can't imagine reading it on paper with all that dialect</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Illegal (audiobook): Lawrence Hill - I like the structure of the story a lot. Kind of turns the stereotype of illegal immigrant as uneducated, skill-less, dispensible/interchangeable human on its head. Details the experience of living outside mainstream culture. Gets a little expository, though. End is a tiny bit treacly.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Daylight Marriage (audiobook): Heidi Pitlor - Somewhat like Gone Girl, but without all the mindfucking. Search for missing wife in somewhat dysfunctional marriage, interspersed with narrative of the wife leading up to her disappearance. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Time Traveler's Wife: Audrey Niffeneger - listened to this a couple of years ago and loved it; then I ran across a $1 copy in the library's fundraising section, or maybe at Shoprite...I forget...I still love it. You know I do because I read it on paper :-). Amazing structure, especially since the narrative skips back and forth in time, as Henry is abruptly yanked back and forth in time. Reflection on memory and predestination, and love and all that sort of thing. What would you do if you knew part of your future? What if your partner knew parts of your future that you don't yet know? Mind blown.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">fledgling: Octavia Butler - Ashamed to say I'd never read Octavia Butler before (in my own defense...I'm not much of a sci-fi reader). I enjoyed this one, but I found it a little problematic...I guess I'd summarize my issues as: a bit heavy on the tell, to the extent that I found the ending unconvincing and unsatisfying. Another coming of age book...if you can accept as an adolescent a 53 year old vampire in a body that appears to be a six year old, having sex with several studs in their 20s as well as a couple of middle-aged women. (Which is, indeed, the premise of the book.) Kind of a Harry Potter purebloods vs mudbloods setup. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* What Every American Should Know About Women's History: Christine A. Lunardini - a fascinating collection of overviews (each about 2 pages) of events or people, starting in colonial US, that had impacts on the modern woman's experience. Very informative, very engaging, great context. Many of the people/events covered I was familiar with, but many I was not, and learned a lot even about those I was already familiar with.</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Started</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/wharton/custom-of-the-country/">The Custom of the Country</a>: Edith Wharton</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation: Lynne Truss - another $1 Shoprite acquisition</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2446/2446-h/2446-h.htm">An Enemy of the People</a>: Henrik Ibsen - I would <u>love</u> to see a production of this</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Moonglow (audiobook): Michael Chabon - I was listening on audio...it just never got around to grabbing me</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lysistrata: Aristophanes - still working on it</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Love in the Time of Cholera: Gabriel Garcia Marquez - still working on it</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Woman Who Stole My Life (audiobook): Marian Keyes - really enjoying it, still working on it</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And with Sidharta</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Richard Feynman - (finished)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Please Don't Eat the Daisies: Jean Kerr - pretty hilarious - kind of a 1950s Hyperbole and a Half, without the graphics and only somewhat as dark</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Cat's Cradle: Kurt Vonnegut (started...he lost interest early, which is a pity)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.huxley.net/bnw/index.html">Brave New World</a>: Aldous Huxley (started...he lost interest early, which is a pity)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Black Like Me: John Howard Griffin - Griffin's innocence or naivete or maybe arrogance of ignorance is fairly stunning...it is incomprehensible to me how a (presumably educated) adult can simply decide, in 1959 Louisiana, over the course of a couple of days to walk away from family and responsibilities and with absolutely no training or preparation or research simply get his skin pigment changed, and hope to have any sort of meaningful experience as a member of a different race. To his credit he seems to have gone in with good intentions and an open mind, and fairly quickly absorbed some nuances. But oh man!...the utter chutzpah!</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Cuckoo's Egg: Clifford Stoll - still working on it</span></li>
</ul>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-7810758903636401012017-11-11T11:10:00.002-05:002017-11-11T11:26:58.687-05:00Suicide prevention or detention? You tell me.<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I'm working through an emergency call I participated in the other night that is kind of bothering me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We got a call for a psych transport. It seems that the patient was on the phone with her therapist and something she said (I don't know exactly what) alarmed the therapist, who called 911, who dispatched the rescue squad and the police. There was some sort of concern that she was a suicide risk, and protocol dictates that suicide risks MUST be taken in for a psychiatric evaluation. (I should note that there was an unrelated suicide in town the day before, so maybe everyone was a bit extra on edge.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Long story short...this particular patient did not strike me as terribly suicidal (but I am not qualified to judge), and emphatically did NOT want to be evaluated. However, under threat of arrest she allowed herself to be taken to the ER. Which she wished to leave, immediately, because she felt she was fine, and she had committed no crime. Except that once at the ER, they have to take a suicide risk seriously, and have to lock her up until they determine that she's actually not a suicide risk. My discomfort comes from my participation in requiring her to follow this process, against her will. I should also note that this patient was pretty close to my age, so perhaps the incident hits a little closer to home than I might like to think.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When we got to her home, the patient was sitting in a chair, part irate, part frustrated, part tearful, being lectured/cajoled by a state cop. (I'm not sure why state cops were called in, instead of local...might be because there was a lot of other cop activity in town earlier...it was a crazy night.) It transpired that the cop was calm but firm that if the patient did not get in the ambulance of her own accord, she would be taken in, in handcuffs. She insisted that there was nothing wrong with her, she did not need to go to the Emergency Room, she did not wish to leave her home (and her dog), she was fine. The cop was adamant about those handcuffs. So she came with us. She was clearly a bit alcohol-impaired, as she stumbled a lot getting out of the house. However, her conversation was perfectly clear and coherent. In the ambulance she claimed that she had only had 2 glasses of wine and nothing else, including no medications, which I don't know if I should believe, given her lack of coordination. The whole time she was cogent and more or less cooperative with us, if a bit whiny (as I would probably have been in a similar situation). She was clearly not happy about being forced to go to the hospital. She talked to her friend and her brother on the ride, and insisted that as soon as she got to the hospital she would be returning to her home.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I am very grateful for the presence of my crewmate. He was kind but very firm in reiterating several times that (1) we were just the messengers and (2) she HAD to go to the ER. I am not certain that I could have been so assured. I tried to reassure her that we were there to support her and make sure that she is safe and well and that at the ER they would probably send her home immediately.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Upon arriving in the ER, our protocol is to (1) provide details about the patient to the intake nurse; (2) obtain a bed for the patient from the ER supervisory nurse; (3) accompany the patient to the bed and help them into it; and (4) officially transfer care by making a report on the patient to their assigned nurse. A patient is the rescue squad's responsibility until we complete step 4.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While we were waiting for step 1 (the intake nurse was MIA for a couple of minutes) the patient made motions to climb off the stretcher and leave the ER. This made me nervous for several reasons, including (a) the stretcher hadn't been lowered, so that in her slightly inebriated state she might have fallen off and hurt herself, and (b) if she runs off without our check-in, it raises all sorts of questions, especially for a suicide risk. So, again, with a little discomfort on my part, we talked to her and calmed her down and encouraged her to sit still and allow herself to get evaluated. Another crew member got a wheelchair and we helped her into that, with the hopes that it would make her feel a little less like a seriously ill person. The intake nurse tried to get her to sign the paperwork that gives consent for treatment (which of course she refused to sign), and tried to put the hospital bracelet on her, which at first she refused, but eventually allowed. The ER staff, at this point, recognized that we had a serious "elopement risk" on our hands (yes, that is the technical term), and they whisked us into the psych wing of the ER (step 2 accelerated), to wait for steps 3 and 4.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The psych wing of the ER is a very special place. Unlike the rest of the ER (where there's pretty free access to everything and patients and family wander at will), you can't get in there without a special badge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You also can't get out without a special badge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And there's no working patient bathroom in there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You want to pee? You WILL be accompanied by a security guard.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When we got her into her assigned room, the patient was, of course, still planning to make her exit. She asked for water (which we are not allowed to provide) and a bathroom (see previous paragraph). She got up and walked to the door of the psych wing. Which, of course, didn't work for her. I think that's when it really hit her. At least that's when it truly hit me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">She asked me to be let out so she could go to the bathroom. Presumably with the intention of sneaking out from there. I could not have helped her with this, even if I felt it right to do so. So a security guard was summoned. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That was the last I saw of her. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even before we left her home, I was reflecting on how I would wish to be treated in a similar situation. And throughout I felt obligated to do what I would not wish done to me. I am reminded of the very short story by William Carlos Williams, <a href="http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html">The Use of Force</a> (an excellent read if you haven't already). I am very comfortable that IF she was actually a suicide risk, we did everything right and acted as compassionately and respectfully and helpfully as anyone could wish. I would not want it on my conscience that I didn't bring someone in, who I could have, and then have that person end up committing suicide. What I am NOT so comfortable about is whether our response was more helpful than harmful to a person who was NOT a suicide risk. It felt to me like the standard definition of a tragedy: everyone does what they are SUPPOSED to do, and yet we get a bad outcome.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I can easily see myself venting about a crappy day to someone. Maybe that person hears something I did not intend. Maybe that person doesn't know me so well. Maybe that person is a little overly sensitive because they've experienced a suicide in their family. Maybe that person is a mental health professional who has liability insurance to consider. Maybe that person is a close friend who doesn't want to take ANY chances with my well-being. But once they make that call, and the police get involved, I am essentially guilty of suicidal thoughts until proven innocent, and will suffer a corresponding loss of autonomy until I can clear myself. Frankly, in the patient's position, I think I'd have been far more enraged and probably far more verbally abusive to anyone within earshot.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have to wonder whether these kind of considerations deter a lot of people who might want and benefit from mental health treatment from getting it. I suspect that people know that once you get flagged for mental health issues, you are at risk for having parts of your autonomy taken away in various low-risk situations, so why allow yourself to get flagged in the first place? And wouldn't having part of your autonomy taken away further undermine your mental health, leading to a downward spiral?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I wish the best for this patient. I fervently hope that she has no suicidal tendencies, and that this incident will be speedily forgotten, and that whatever bad day she was having that triggered these events will not repeat. I hope that she will continue to receive whatever mental health services she needs, from a therapist who will be therapeutic for her.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And mostly I want to know better how to do right for patients in this sort of situation. Which is probably impossible. Without being able to look directly into another person's heart, I don't know that we can ever really know what is the best and safest course of action, even when we have the best intentions. In the absence of perfect knowledge I believe we did the right thing. I just wish I felt more convinced.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-12835937480286376472017-01-01T10:28:00.000-05:002017-01-03T06:57:10.970-05:002016 books<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As I did <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2016/01/2015-books.html">last year</a>, and the previous few before that, I'm posting the books I read last year. More than a couple of doorstops in there. And a lot of strange stories. I think my best reads for the year were: The Forsyte Saga, The Girl in the Garden, The Art Forger, Silver Linings Playbook, Lab Girl, and The Magician's Lie, and with Sidharta, Good Omens.</span></span><br />
<div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* = Recommended</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">X = Stay Away</span></span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finished off * <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4397/4397-h/4397-h.htm" style="color: #223344;">The Forsyte Saga</a>: John Galsworthy - well...just because...I read it only about 2 years ago, but...it's SO well done.</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finished off The Daring Ladies of Lowell: Kate Alcott - Meh - very disappointing. Such a good premise (investigating the murder of a defenseless factory girl), with lots of room for depth...just not realized.</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Witches of Eastwick (audiobook): John Updike</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11231/pg11231.html">Bartleby the Scrivener</a> (audiobook): Herman Melville - I enjoyed this novella a lot. I could tell you more about what I think of it, but I would prefer not to. I enjoyed <a href="http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/bartleby/">this annotated version</a>, as well. </span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Price of Salt (audiobook) (Currently titled Carol, as in the recent film of the same name): Patricia Highsmith - enjoyed it a lot. It is amazing to me that such an open and matter-of-fact description of homosexuality could be published when it was (1952). </span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Invention of Hugo Cabret (audiobook): Brian Selznick - meh</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/113/113-h/113-h.htm">The Secret Garden</a>: Frances Hodgson Burnett</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Wolf Hall (audiobook): Hilary Mantel - a lot like a Philippa Gregory novel only better written, but I'm not sure I get why this is Booker Prize material. Don't get me wrong...I love a good Tudor skullduggery story, and this one was very well done (I enjoyed it a lot), but...I guess I just expect something a little more unusual from a Booker</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">X Some Luck (audiobook): Jane Smiley - major disappointment...I don't know what I'm missing, but I seriously don't get why this was a National Book Award winner. I found the writing fairly awful, full of tell, full of summary, often precious, characters I couldn't care less about, no idea what their issues were, mostly external conflict or fairly pedestrian internal conflict, at best (e.g. annoying, embarrassing relatives, cheating on your perfect girlfriend with your deceased best friend's girlfriend, etc.), with nothing to learn from the resolution of those pedestrian internal conflicts short of "Suck it up" or "Everything's gonna be OK in the end. Because it is." From about disc 2, I was planning to abandon it, but I kept hoping that sometime soon the point was going to be revealed. Foolish me. Even places that ought to have been fraught with tension and self-reflection were passed over with ho-hum resignation. Farm boy's first kill in WWI? No biggie. Eloping with a stranger you met a couple of days ago? See ya later, mom, gotta go! I think a lot of reviewers have responded positively to the book because it portrays the troubles of an "ordinary" family. For me, though, this misses the point. It is the job of the writer to make "ordinary" troubles personal, special, and thereby elevate the ordinary to a greater significance, to inspire some urgency in the reader. It is in this that I feel that Some Luck failed miserably. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I've really enjoyed other work by Jane Smiley</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span>(A Thousand Acres, Moo, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton), so I was a little (OK, a lot) surprised to see this kind of stuff out of her. Though, it's true I also kind of hated Duplicate Keys - don't remember it well enough to remember why.</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Elmer Gantry (audiobook): Sinclair Lewis - While I love the theme of It Can't Happen Here more, I have to admit, I think Elmer Gantry is better written.</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Guide: RK Narayan - strange little story - I always love Narayan's writing</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/NA/index.html">Northanger Abbey</a>: Jane Austen - every year's gotta have at least one</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Fuenteovejuna: Lope de Vega - I read this years and years ago, I think for my 11th grade Spanish class or else for my college Theater History class, and loved it. I still love it. But I don't remember clueing in at that time that this was a sort of homage to Ferdinand and Isabella (in opposition to Alfonso of Portugal)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Three Soldiers (audiobook): John Dos Passos - a little disappointing. It may be an anti-war book, but it's no Johnny Got His Gun. More about the petty humiliations of the military hierarchy than about the carnage and destruction.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Celestina: Fernando de Rojas</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Never Go Back (audiobook): Lee Child</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Trickster of Seville: Tirso de Molina (Can you tell, yet, that I've got an anthology of Spanish Gold Age plays?)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Girl in the Garden (audiobook): Kamala Nair</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Silver Linings Playbook (audiobook): Matthew Quick </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Tender Is the Night (audiobook): F. Scott Fitzgerald</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Pilgrim's Progress (audiobook): John Bunyan - because...well...I'd never read it...now I'm done, and don't have to any more. I always knew that Little Women (which was one of my formative reads from childhood) made references to this one, but the extent of the connection became much clearer after I read this.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ragtime: E.L. Doctorow - there goes <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">one of those strange stories</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">To a God Unknown (audiobook): John Steinbeck - another very strange little story</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* The Art Forger (audiobook): B.A. Shapiro - such a great story. Very interesting from a technical standpoint, but also a very compelling narrative.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/lovfrend.html">Love and Freindship</a>: Jane Austen - because there's a new movie...haven't seen it, though. Can't begin imagine what they could possibly put in it...the piece is so utterly silly...clearly something Austen cooked up on a dare or to make her siblings double over with laughter....how goofy can you go? </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (audiobook): Charles Yu - I enjoyed this a lot...thought provoking reflection on getting stuck in the past, couched as experimentation in time travel. I think it needed a little more editing (a bit too much on the tell/summary end of things - gets a bit expository at places, but...well...I liked it anyway) - yet another strange one</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Citizen Creek (audiobook): Lalita Tademy - interesting historical story, gets a bit mawkish at times...a little disappointing.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Lab Girl: Hope Jahren - wonderful memoir of the life scientific. Jahren is...how to characterize her?...a botanist? a geologist? (you wouldn't think one would get confused about the boundary between those, now would you? but that's who she is!) She weaves a narrative that uses human experience to illuminate botany and botany to illuminate human experience and shows some of the truly crazy and/or beautiful things a passion for science can lead to</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Straight Jacket and Tie: Eugene Stein - I picked it up based on a
reference to "the dark side of Planet Debbie" by David Brooks (regarding
our...um...unfortunate...GOP primary process in this year's
festivities)...when I looked at the reviews, it sounded hilarious. It
was OK...not fabulous, though I have to say, one thing I liked about it
was how recognizable it was...apart from the bits about the green aliens
and the young gay/bi man struggling with his identity, much was
incredibly familiar. Set in the Bronx and Upper West Side of NYC in a
liberal Jewish family with mental health issues, and with a cube-worker
office shtick, it could have been about my own friends and family. And yet, very strange.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hallucinations (audiobook): Oliver Sacks - Liked it a lot, though not as much as some of his other work. Very thought-provoking, as always, but with a bit of a shopping-list feel. I prefer his other works that are in-depth pieces on specific individuals, like pieces in <i>An Anthropologist On Mars</i>. </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/Persuasion/index.html">Persuasion</a>: Jane Austen - Because...well...I couldn't help myself. Like I said. Every year's got to have two and a half, at least.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Caleb's Crossing (audiobook): Geraldine Brooks - liked it a lot, though Jennifer Ehle's narration was a little disappointing...I mean...considering it is Jennifer Ehle. Kind of surreal listening to her with a full-on American accent.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/pg-wodehouse/mike-and-psmith/">* Mike and Psmith</a>: P.G. Wodehouse - my election<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> night comforter<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> - I don't get all the cricket referen<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ces, but...<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">it kind of doesn't matter</span></span></span></span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> * The Magician's Lie (audiobook): Greer MacAllester - it is a testament
to the quality of MacAllester's storytelling that I had to stop
listening at a few points in the story and resume several days later
(after several failed attempts at resuming) because I found some of the
scenes so disturbing.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Started</span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It Can't Happen Here: Sinclair Lewis - so prescient</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Practical Magic (audiobook): Alice Hoffman</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Well Ain't Dry Yet: Belinda Anderson - Some lovely little stories here...I've enjoyed it a lot, but it may not be for everyone. I particularly admire her portrayal of women from across a broad spectrum of age and class, giving them all distinct voices - still working on it</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/agatha_christie/secret_adversary">The Secret Adversary</a>: Agatha Christie - never read her before...she's been on my queue since this spring when I was treated to a performance of The Mousetrap, and the intro for the show mentioned that much of her work was intended to make some kind of social point. I hadn't realized how much like Wodehouse she sounds - I'm still working on this one</span></span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And with Sidharta:</span></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* <a href="http://craphound.com/ftw/Cory_Doctorow_-_For_the_Win.htm">For the Win</a>: Cory Doctorow - (continued) Annapurna loved this when she was about the same age...I read it a while ago and loved it. Figured Sidharta's about ready. Fabulous intro to economics for the young adult crowd. But Sidharta lost steam and abandoned it about 2/3 through :-(</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Candide: Voltaire - ooohh!!! Burn! He liked it a lot.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">* Good Omens: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - I read it previously and loved it. He loved it, too. <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Talk about strange.</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck - he was very moved by this one</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Animal Farm: George Orwell - he enjoyed this one a lot; made a lot of connections to the World History class he took last year</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What Do <u>You</u> Care What Other People Think?: Richard Feynman (started - still working on it)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Once and Future King: T.H. White (started - still working on it)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As always, lots of Calvin and Hobbes, though rather diminshed from years past</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A bunch of Peanuts books--Sidharta discovered Charlie Brown this year</span></span></li>
</ul>
</div>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-46926991598161951032016-01-03T12:50:00.000-05:002016-01-03T12:59:14.764-05:002015 Books<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I did <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2014/12/2014-books.html">last year</a>, and the previous few before that, I'm posting the books I read last year. More than a couple of doorstops in there. Couple of disappointments but mostly a reasonably good year. I think the most enjoyable of the year were <i>The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay</i>, <i>Water for Elephants </i>and <i>The Good Luck of Right Now. </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* = Recommended</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">X = Stay Away</span><br />
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A Game of Thrones (Audiobook): George R.R. Martin - liked it better than I thought I would, based on the opening. I have to give it to Martin, he does have a respectful treatment of women and children, making them active, complex, full human beings and key players in the machinations of court life, present in realistic numbers, rather than as mere tokens. I hated the zombie-based plot line, and am not thrilled at the prospect of a dragon-based.plot line that is hinted at as a teaser for the next volume. I recognize the need for a formidable external enemy that might serve to temporarily re-unite the warring families, but in my opinion, resorting to supernatural forces weakens, not strengthens a plot about very human rivalries. I might or might not work myself up to reading the next volume. If I do, it will probably be because of interest in Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow and possibly Arya and Bran Stark. I don't really find any of the others very compelling. I take a rather dim view, in general, of stories where characters are clearly on the side of "good" or "evil" and I find most of the characters in here a bit too cartoonish that way. Tyrion and Jon have divided enough loyalties that my interest in them is piqued. I may try to get the video of the series...I think my interest might be sustained a bit better in movie mode.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/Emma/index.html">Emma</a>: Jane Austen - I enjoyed this more than I have in the past (Emma is not one of my favorite Austens.) I found it a bit more forgivable, this time, though I continue to be disappointed with the overly elitist ending for poor Harriet.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/SandS/index.html">Sense and Sensibility</a>: Jane Austen (most of it) - what can I say? Comfort food.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3825/3825-h/3825-h.htm">Pygmalion</a>: George Bernard Shaw</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1952/1952-h/1952-h.htm">The Yellow Wallpaper</a>: Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured, Tenth Edition (most of it): American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1Q84 (Audiobook): Haruki Murakami - kind of interesting. Could have stood a bit of pruning, IMHO - a fair amount of redundancy and tell stuff. And you kind of spoil the magical realism effect when your characters reflect on how weird things are getting for them.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Snuff (Audiobook): Terry Pratchett. Enjoyed it a lot. Not quite * material. I love Pratchett's theme of tolerance that wends its way throughout his work.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1097/1097-h/1097-h.htm">Mrs. Warren's Profession</a>: George Bernard Shaw</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Audiobook): Michael Chabon - loved this. Started a little slow, but it really pulled me in. I started it a bit reluctantly, not expecting to like it a lot, as I'm not much of a comic book enthusiast.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Possession (Audiobook): A.S. Byatt - Enjoyed it a lot, but I won't put it as a *, as it may not be for everybody. I have to be entertained by the digs at academe, which<br />some of you may understand :-) </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/967/967-h/967-h.htm">The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby</a> (A</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">udiobook): Charles Dickens - Liked it better when I read it years ago. A little disappointing this time round.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">100 Years of Solitude (Audiobook): Gabriel Garcia Marquez</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Water for Elephants (Audiobook): Sara Gruen - really enjoyed it</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The White Tiger: Aravind Adiga - you know I liked it because I actually read the whole thing on paper. (This is my second read of it...it still holds up, even knowing the punchline.)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">X <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/524/524-h/524-h.htm">Ann Veronica</a> (Audiobook): H.G.Wells - big disappointment...I normally like HG Wells a LOT, but this one...sigh. I kept waiting for him to get to the point, and then...he neatly missed it. There was so much potential in the premise.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Good Luck of Right Now (Audiobook): Matthew Quick - not the sort of book that you'd (I'd) expect me to like - full of spiritual themes. But really the voice was so wonderful, characters so real, and the story and structure so good, that all-in-all it was one of the best reads I had this year. Now I'll have to go read Silver Linings Playbook (I liked the movie a lot). The narrator of this one is a totally different voice/character than the protagonist of the Silver Linings Playbook movie, but I can see the connection in terms of the delicate and nuanced handling of emotionally damaged characters.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Death Comes to Pemberley: PD James - kind of a serious disappointment. The premise and the historical fiction aspect were interesting, but I found the writing distractingly bad. I liked the movie/miniseries, though, which I saw before I read the book. Kept waiting for the character motivations/plot twists of the movie to appear in the book, which they didn't. I say good job to the screen writers - they added a depth to the work that was entirely missing in the text.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oedipus Rex: Sophocles</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime: Mark Haddon - read it to discuss with Sidharta (who had strong negative reactions to it), as he was required to read it over the summer. He found the narrator overly stereotyped and was confused/annoyed by the lack of consistency between the narrator's behavior and his words (I had to remind him about unreliable narrators). By a curious coincidence, it so happened that I was reading The Good Luck of Right Now at the same time, and while it isn't for the same audience, the narrators are very similar in some ways. I liked The Good Luck of Right now much, much better.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The All Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion (Audiobook): Fannie Flag - sweet, but kind of predictable. Some interesting historical detail on the WASPs - WWII women's flying unit.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Reamde (Audiobook): Neal Stephenson - the premise was so interesting (using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming">gold farming</a> to solve computationally difficult problems, and using this for economic benefit), but this was pretty much dropped in favor of more action, which was kind of disappointing to me</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Americanah (Audiobook): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - lovely reading</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Stones from the River (Audiobook): Ursula Hegi - reading was a little annoying, interesting perspective on life in Germany from WWI on, including a feel for life in the days leading up to WWII and the holocaust, which felt eerily like modern US.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Started:</span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1608/1608-h/1608-h.htm">Camille</a>: Alexandre Dumas</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1399/1399-h/1399-h.htm">Anna Karenina</a>: Leo Tolstoy - I loved it a lot when I was in grad school, rather less this time. I'm just not finding much there in Anna. I understand and sympathize with her inner conflict, but I don't find her an interesting enough person independent of her unpleasant social situation to warrant all this drama. Kitty and Dolly seem to be deeper thinkers than she is. I still love Levin, though I'm a little more irritated with his landowner perspective than I think I was the first time round. But Tolstoy is still the Boss in my book for his creation of living, breathing, mixed up characters who change moods on a dime.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4397/4397-h/4397-h.htm">The Forsyte Saga</a>: John Galsworthy - well...just because...I read it only about 2 years ago, but...it's so well done...still working on it - I'm about 2/3 of the way through.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Rashi's Daughters - Book 1: Joheved: Maggie Anton - interesting premise, kind of annoying writing; some interesting historical details of life in Medieval France</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Daring Ladies of Lowell (Audiobook): Kate Alcott - annoying reading and writing; trying to like it - it's got some interesting historical context of the life of mill workers in the 1830s, but there's a lot of stuff that feels tone-deaf about social mores in those times, not to mention annoyingly anachronistic turn of phrase. Still working on it</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Logicomix: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou - because who <i>wouldn't </i>like a graphic novel with the founders of computational logic, like Cantor, Russell, Godel, Hilbert, etc. as characters? </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3743/3743-h/3743-h.htm">Age of Reason</a>: Thomas Paine - reading with Annapurna - <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2008/01/were-not-in-age-of-reason.html">I just love it</a>! </span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And with Sidharta:</span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/102/102-h/102-h.htm">The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Willson</a>: Mark Twain (most of it...he finished it off, himself)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1257/1257-h/1257-h.htm">The Three Musketeers</a>: Alexandre Dumas - well, actually, not the version I'm linking to, but rather the Children's Illustrated Library edition I read as a kid...I think it's just a little too racy, and slightly misogynist for him in the original...as I found out to my shock a few years ago when I read the grownup version, myself. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Pl.+Men.+1">The Menaechmi</a>: Plautus - actually we read a much more modern translation than the one I'm linking to, which uses a much more modern voice. I read this in college and loved it. I figured it was just the right level of goofy slapstick that would appeal to Sidharta. Next stop: The Comedy of Errors :-) Or maybe Lysistrata.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm">Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</a> and <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm">Through the Looking-Glass</a>: Lewis Carroll - actually we read from The Annotated Alice that I bought for Kumar many years ago, which includes some very interesting text by Martin Gardner (most of which Sidharta wanted nothing to do with :-)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Watership Down: Richard Adams (started) - I read this when I was a bit younger than Sidharta and loved, loved, loved it.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://craphound.com/ftw/Cory_Doctorow_-_For_the_Win.htm">For the Win</a>: Cory Doctorow (started - still working on it) - Annapurna loved this when she was about the same age...I read it a while ago and loved it. Figured Sidharta's about ready.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-44141982073876694152014-12-31T12:02:00.001-05:002014-12-31T12:07:36.151-05:002014 books<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I did <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2014/01/2013-books.html">last year</a>, and the previous few before that, I'm posting the books I read this year. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All in all, not a bad year. I think my favorite reads were: The Forsyte Saga; Running with Scissors; The Ocean at the End of the Lane; and I, Claudius.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's been a year with a lot of historical fiction - not premeditated, just turned out that way. And a lot of conspiracy theories (including the TV series of The Borgias and I, Claudius :-)).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And a few doorstops.</span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
It's also been a year with a lot of stories with extremely irritating logical leaps. Nothing bothers me so much, I think, as a story where characters jump to unfounded conclusions that are critical to to the plot. It makes me want to put the book down. Or scream at the author/editor, "Do your homework." In some cases I've been able to resist the temptation to drop the book; in others...well...maybe not. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* = Recommended</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">X = Stay Away</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Thief (Audiobook): Fuminori Nakamura - interesting, but felt a little contrived. There go some of those unfounded conclusions.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4397/4397-h/4397-h.htm#link2H_4_0044">The Forsyte Saga</a>: John Galsworthy - I saw the lovely 2002 miniseries last year (or was it 2 years ago???), and decided to try reading it. Interestingly, the series changed the structure a bit from the book, but was mostly pretty faithful. I feel like they changed the end, though, at least the feeling at the end, which I found more edgy in the text version. Liked it a lot, but I won't put it as a *, as I think it might be a bit much for most who have not seen the series and don't enjoy reading doorstops. I think I would have gotten even more out of it if my knowledge of late 19th/early 20th Century British history were more extensive - I think the story is, among other things, intended as a commentary on Britain's role in a world where colonialism made less and less sense. There's a bit of a 100 Years of Solitude feel, with all the repeated names :-) Talk about doorstops.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Geographer's Library (Audiobook): Jon Fasman - Da Vinci Code lite, and making less sense, if you can believe that. Interesting, but not fabulous. I can't quite figure out why I was willing to finish this one, but couldn't bring myself to finish The Technologists. Many of the same complaints apply to both. Perhaps it was the clueless charm of the main main character (in contrast to the lack of personality of the too-many characters in The Technologists), and the visible, well-defined bad-guy (s?) (in contrast to what I presume was a bad guy who never actually appeared in the portion of the book I read, and whose motives were unspecified). Lot of unfounded conclusions. And in many places that it tries to be mysterious, it succeeds mainly in being confusing.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx">The Call of Cthulhu</a>: H.P. Lovecraft - I'd never read Lovecraft before. Didn't do much for me. Horror, schmorror. I think maybe it was too much cast as hearsay to be really creepy. You just can't get that direct access to the reader's limbic system when you're describing stuff that someone else witnessed. Plus the leaps of logic various characters make just don't make sense. I'd have dropped it if it weren't so short and it didn't have such a reputation. I don't understand all the praise the story has gotten and the -sorry- Cthulhu cult it's given rise to. Give me Mary Shelley any day. I kind of prefer the <a href="http://io9.com/5847879/what-if-dr-seuss-wrote-the-call-of-cthulhu">What if Dr. Seuss wrote The Call of Cthulhu?</a> version.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Monkey Mind (Audiobook): Daniel Smith - entertaining and somewhat comforting, but not terribly informative, memoir on the theme of anxiety</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Five by Fitzgerald (Audiobook): F. Scott Fitzgerald - I particularly liked "Bernice Bobs Her Hair". Enjoyed Benjamin Button, but didn't quite get the point.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Poisoner's Handbook (Audiobook): Deborah Blum - I enjoyed it a lot, but it was a bit too rambly for me to * it. I found the audio narrator a bit annoying, as well (though I've heard worse).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Be Different (Audiobook): John Elder Robison - lots of nice insights into living with Asperger's</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (Audiobook): Temple Grandin and Richard Panek - I'd put this as a *, but it's a bit uneven. I think writers might do well to read it, or at least parts of it, as it has many interesting insights on sensory perception, which I suspect would be useful to think about whether or not you have a character on the autism spectrum.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Audiobook): Neil Gaiman - strange little book. I'm not entirely sure who the intended audience is - it mostly reads like something for a tween, but it's got a little bit that might be a bit inappropro, as we say in my house, for the tween crowd. Just a little. Mostly written from the point of view of a 7 year old boy. Very creepy and intense at times. Lovely sensory detail. I definitely want a black kitten with a white splotch on one ear, now. Lovely audio by Gaiman.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Art Thief (Audiobook): Noah Charney - entertaining, informative about art history and art theft (at least to someone like me who is not very informed about the art world). Characters are a bit annoyingly cartoonish. And I am so dissatisfied with the end that I am almost tempted to put this as an X, but after all, the story was fun and it piqued my curiosity about several famous paintings. Talk about logical leaps! The final resolution made no sense, in the context of the rest of the story and was way too convoluted - I think I still don't understand exactly what happened or if it could have happened that way. It's like the author was trying to be really clever by giving a total surprise ending that turned the whole story into a farce. I like a good farce, but then I want to know I'm reading one, all along. I thought about picking up a paper copy, to go back and look and see if there were more clues and I just missed them, but I decided I just didn't care about the story enough to go through the effort. That's a place I never want my readers to be. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Running With Scissors (Audiobook): Augusten Burroughs - narrated by Burroughs. Thought I'd try this, having heard a bit about his life, after reading John Elder Robison's memoir (they are brothers). I'd put this as a *, but it may not be for everyone. I liked it a lot. He does a great job of capturing the voice of himself as a kid, as contrasted with himself as an adolescent, as contrasted with himself as a young man. He also does a great job at capturing the sort of surreal frame of mind that allows us to accept horrors we experience. I definitely recommend this one for some of my friends who are working on memoir.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/Persuasion/">Persuasion</a>: Jane Austen - what year is complete without one of them?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/940/940-h/940-h.htm">Last of the Mohicans</a> (Audiobook): James Fenimore Cooper. Less than superb narration, though I have to say that with its flowery language this must have been an extremely difficult book to narrate. I like Cooper's attempts to capture the voice and language/imagery used by native Americans (I have no idea how authentic it is, though). And I have to admire the fact that a white guy in his times was sympathetic enough to native Americans to invest the time to learn about them and the nuances of their politics, and was willing to portray (at least some of them) as good and honorable and intelligent, full human beings. I found the text difficult to follow - not sure how much of this was due to trying to keep up with the audio vs my ignorance of history (or both) vs my ignorance of the politics between various native American nations. It was interesting, though.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Last Runaway (Audiobook): Tracy Chevalier - a little disappointing, though not as much as Burning Bright. It felt a bit contrived and mawkish. The protagonist, Honor Bright (I kid you not), a displaced British Quaker in antebellum rural Oberlin just gets too lucky all along. Sure she faces difficulties, including the attentions of a drunken, horny bounty hunter of runaway slaves who loves her because she reminds him of his saintly deceased mother, and sure she makes difficult and dangerous choices (run away with the bounty hunter? (he's kinda cute) or stick with the nice husband with the annoying mother?), but she never really has to deal with the consequences of these choices because everybody just loves her and forgives her for pretty much every social transgression she commits.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Bell Jar (Audiobook): Sylvia Plath. I was fascinated by this as a teenager (not sure why), so I thought I'd give it a try again. As an adult, I appreciate it for its palpable portrayal of the logic of depression. As a reader, you can see that the narrator's thought process is messed up, and yet everything makes perfect sense. It was also interesting in a historic sense. It was written only about 50 years ago, but our attitudes are so different nowadays, compared to the social norms portrayed in the story. Everything from Freudian analysis (the narrator's poor mother was distraught at a psychiatrist asking about her child's toilet training - who'd ask that today?) to availability of birth control (she mentions that it was illegal for her to obtain it, as an unmarried woman) to homosexuality (which seems to be the main reason for institutionalization of a couple of her ward-mates). Not to mention some of the other more obvious social shifts, such as the expectation of a woman's virginity at marriage. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An Edgar Allen Poe collection (Audiobook): Edgar Allen Poe - I've never really been much of a Poe fan, but these recordings made it palatable. I enjoyed The Cask of Amontillado and The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether (though this latter was a bit predictable). It occurred to me, as I was listening to the collection, that I couldn't think of any earlier literary examples of unreliable, mentally ill/wantonly evil narrators like those in Poe's stories. Perhaps this is one of the things that makes Poe special.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1251/1251-h/1251-h.htm">Le Morte D'Arthur</a> - Volume I: Sir Thomas Malory - talk about doorstop... I've kind of always hated the Arthur stories (except The Once and Future King, the first section of which I was asked to read in 6th grade, and enjoyed). I still kind of hate them, they're so macho and meaningless, for the most part - guys whacking (and killing) each other just because. But surprisingly, I was able to get through the whole of Volume I, though I was kicking myself for keeping up with it. And by the time I got to the end, I was mad that it ended where it did...I wanna know what happens to Tristram and La Beale Isoud. Oh, well...I guess I'll just have to start Volume II...sometime.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm">Pride and Prejudice</a>: Jane Austen - because...well...I finished Volume I of Le Morte D'Arthur, and was travelling and not really in a position to download something else...and it was on my Kindle, as well as my smartphone...and...well...do I really need an excuse for reading P&P again? </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Noel Coward Collection (Audiobook): Excellent performances of Blithe Spirit; Design for Living; Fallen Angels; Hay Fever; Present Laughter; and Private Lives. I enjoyed the wit and banter, and appreciated the willingness to address (1920's) taboo subjects, but found the plays fairly misogynistic.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I, Claudius (Audiobook): Robert Graves - enjoyed it a lot...I tend to like these royal skullduggery stories, in case you hadn't guessed. Get my conspiracy theories and history lesson in one tasty packet. I would have found the audio narrator's didactic performance annoying for almost any other book, but I think it worked for Claudius' voice, who, at least according to Graves' text, was rather didactic, himself. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Hamlet (Audiobook): William Faulkner - enjoyed it, but it was a strange kind of piece. Kind of hard to follow (surprise, surprise!) I listened to several parts several times over, and even went back to the text, and still wasn't sure what happened. I hope to re-read it some day, but I'm not hopeful that I'll really figure out what was intended. I'm not sure if the issue is that I'm not familiar with small town southern life of the 1930's or if it's just a Faulkner thing, or both. I understand that it is considered good form for a writer to leave a lot to the reader to infer, so they feel clever, but I dunno...this one left a little too much for me to infer, and I just feel dumb :-) </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Claudius the God (Audiobook): Robert Graves - I enjoyed I, Claudius so much (the book and the TV series) that I went on for the next volume. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/121/121-h/121-h.htm">Northanger Abbey</a>: Jane Austen -- just because. Catherine Morland still doesn't do much for me, though I don't find her as annoying as Fanny Price. I am still trying to understand what makes the difference between these two and Austen's other heroines. I think part of it comes down to their very ordinariness. There's nothing wrong with ordinary, but an author needs to draw out the extraordinary in the every day. Her other heroines, while being absolutely representative of their social class, and so, quite ordinary, nevertheless show intellectual superiority that allows them to reflect on their situations in ways that make them interesting. I guess that I just don't see that in Catherine. I suppose it's there for Fanny, but well...maybe it's a little too much.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cloud Atlas (Audiobook): David Mitchell. Partially historic fiction, I guess. Past and future. Interesting, but I found it a bit annoying in places. I felt like some of the voices called too much attention to themselves, especially in the future settings. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42704/42704-h/42704-h.htm">Salome</a>: Oscar Wilde - there gores more of that historical fiction</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6688/6688-h/6688-h.htm">The Mill on the Floss</a> (Audiobook): George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) - Can't totally put my finger on why I really enjoyed it. It was very predictable, heavy on the tell, heavy on the preachy, heavy on the melodrama, but still I really enjoyed it. I think it's that the character of Maggie is drawn so nicely, especially as a child, and the conflicts between her inner and outer worlds seem so clear. The only thing I didn't find sufficiently justified (and it was a serious distraction for me) was Maggie's obsession with Stephen. It's easy to see what might have fascinated him about her, but I just didn't feel what she saw in him. Which kind of ruined the tension for me. It would have been so easy to give him a little extra depth, but it just wasn't there. Oddly, the story is, in some ways, very parallel to the Forsyte Saga I started the year with (nice bookends for the year) but I found Irene's infatuation with Bosinney much more compelling and believable.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Started:</span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Technologists (Audiobook): Matthew Pearl - I tried to like this, really, I did. Cutthroat rivalry between stodgy old Harvard and the young, hungry MIT; fight to the death of science against head-in-the-sand tradition and entrenched interests; forward looking acceptance of women and lower class access to education vs snooty blue-blood privilege. What could be bad? I tried to like it, if for nothing else, for the sake of the young <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Swallow_Richards">Ellen Swallow Richards</a>, first woman at MIT, founding mother of <a href="http://www.aauw.org/">AAUW</a>, who is a character in the book. But the prose and the narration were both really annoying, not to mention the highly implausible plot. So, contrary to my usual MO, I decided to cut my losses early. The straw that broke the camel's back was <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N6/technologists.html">the review on the MIT website</a>, which I initially assumed would be positive, simply for the book's plug of MIT. Once I read the review, I decided that the misleading view on history the book provided would outweigh any benefits of reading it. For Ellen Richards. In fairness, though, I will not give it an X, as I think I only read about a quarter.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/vicente-blasco-ibanez/enemies-of-women/">The Enemies of Women:</a> Vicente Blasco Ibanez - just wasn't interesting enough to keep going...it's hard to get really interested in a spoiled rich kid who hits hard times and is forced to live like a mid-level executive, rather than like a captain of the universe</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://archive.org/stream/ost-english-camusalbert-thestranger/CamusAlbert-TheStranger_djvu.txt">The Stranger</a>: Albert Camus</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/215/215-h/215-h.htm">The Call of the Wild</a>: Jack London</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Josephus: Leon Feuchtwanger - more on that ancient Roman history - still working on it</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Game of Thrones (Audiobook): George R.R.Martin - just started it as of the end of the year. Not sure if I'm gonna be able to stick with it. I kind of hate it, so far, and that's saying something for a person who loves stories of royal skullduggery. I think I find the characters rather cartoonish. Also rather too much tell - not much for me to think about, wonder about. Give me Philippa Gregory or Robert Graves, any day.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And with Sidharta:</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Holes: Louis Sachar</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lots of Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: John Boyne - I didn't read the whole thing (he finished it himself - he told me the gist of the end, and it sounded extremely depressing, so I'm not motivated to finish it off. I can't handle stories where bad stuff happens to kids.) But it's got an excellent voice of a child.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Great Brain: John D. Fitzgerald </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* More Adventures of the Great Brain: John D. Fitzgerald - one of my childhood favorites </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm">A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court</a>: Mark Twain - parts of it...he read parts on his own...he's turning out to be quite the Mark Twain enthusiast, isn't he :-)? What exquisite taste! I read this with him at the same time I was reading Le Morte D'Arthur (coincidence), and I appreciated it on a totally different level than I had when I read it earlier. Twain's satire on the Malory work is very amusing...he has many of the same complaints that I do :-)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(started) The Little Prince: Antoine de Saint-Exupery</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(started) Something New: P.G. Wodehouse...I figured since he's such a Mark Twain fan, he'd enjoy Wodehouse, as well. He hasn't bitten, so far.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Haroun and the Sea of Stories: Salman Rushdie - one of my all time favorite kid books (still working on it with him)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* WTF, Evolution?!: A Theory of Unintelligible Design: Mara Grunbaum - Hilarious compilation of all sorts of things Evolution has gotten wrong over the ages. In case you didn't know it...Evolution is basically a sort of poor stoner shnook who's clearly in over his head. You can see similar items on the <a href="http://wtfevolution.tumblr.com/">WTF, Evolution?! tumblr</a>. I think my favorite is the carnivorous potatoes.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Hyperbole and a Half: Allie Brosh -- hilarious collection of essays/cartoons about bumbling through life. With depression. And insane dogs. And ridiculous, painful childhood memories.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-45627466121793949662014-02-02T19:21:00.001-05:002014-02-02T19:21:55.910-05:00ForesightSo I'm reading <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4397/4397-h/4397-h.htm#link2HCH0046">The Forsyte Saga</a> just now. Lovely little piece. But that's not what I want to talk about.<br />
<br />
In a single paragraph, Galsworthy uses both the word Bismillah and Nirvana. And Jumping Jesus.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For Jolly was forming himself unconsciously on a set whose motto was:<br />'We defy you to bore us. Life isn't half long enough, and we're going to talk faster and more crisply, do more and know more, and dwell less on any subject than you can possibly imagine. We are "the best"—made of wire and whipcord.' And Val was unconsciously forming himself on a set whose motto was: 'We defy you to interest or excite us. We have had every sensation, or if we haven't, we pretend we have. We are so exhausted with living that no hours are too small for us. We will lose our shirts with equanimity. We have flown fast and are past everything. All is cigarette smoke. Bismillah!' Competitive spirit, bone-deep in the English, was obliging those two young Forsytes to have ideals; and at the close of a century ideals are mixed. The aristocracy had already in the main adopted the 'jumping-Jesus' principle; though here and there one like Crum—who was an 'honourable'—stood starkly languid for that gambler's Nirvana which had been the summum bonum of the old 'dandies' and of 'the mashers' in the eighties. And round Crum were still gathered a forlorn hope of blue-bloods with a plutocratic following.</blockquote>
I had always assumed that Bismillah in the English-speaking public consciousness was a by-product of Bohemian Rhapsody and Freddy Mercury's Indian background (though I admit I don't know if the concept of Bismillah is relevant to Parsis). And Nirvana...well...I guess I'd assumed it had made its way into the modern English speaking world via the Hare Krishna folks in the 60s. Seems like, at least among the educated, they were out there a bit earlier.Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-61665180018349146492014-01-01T20:32:00.001-05:002014-01-01T20:40:57.155-05:002013 books<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I did <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2013/01/2012-books.html">last year</a>, and the previous few before that, I'm posting the books I read this year. Lot of good stuff this year, as well as a few fairly awful phone books that I can't quite explain why I felt compelled to plow through.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* = Recommended</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">X = Stay Away</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Please Look After Mom (Audiobook): Kyungsook Shin - This one was very interesting, structurally, if a bit melodramatic and... ummm... yearning for a return to... well... the closest character to "Mom" that I can think of is O-Lan from The Good Earth. Kind of Harriet Lerner meets Pearl Buck in Korea.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best of Jack London Short Stories (Audiobook): Jack London - What can I say? It's Jack London. Each story has a different reader, and the quality varies considerably. I enjoyed many of them</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/SandS/index.html">Sense and Sensibility</a>: Jane Austen</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">*The Prisoner of Heaven (Audiobook): Carlos Ruiz Zafon</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Several short stories by <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/">Saki</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins - started it with Sidharta who quickly got bored (I don't know why - I think he just went in prejudiced against it)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">X Freedom (Audiobook): Jonathan Franzen - Oy...Really??? Another one of those "Why didn't I just give up at page 75, as I wanted to, rather than wade through the other 500 pages?" So much tell. So much summary. So few interesting people. (Not that he doesn't tell us how interesting they are. To each other.) Lots of melodrama. Lots of exposition on the politics of ecological conservation that would make a perfectly pleasing essay but draggy fiction. I seriously don't understand all the positive reviews it got - is this a case of I'm dumb, or the reviewer has no clothes? I'll accept either answer, so long as you explain it to me.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count: Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons (<a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2013/03/review-of-broken-ballots-will-your-vote.html">My review here</a>)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/leroux/phantom_opera/">The Phantom of the Opera</a>: Gaston Leroux -- Fluff, but I enjoyed it a lot Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera Ghost.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* A Kiss Before Dying (Audiobook): Ira Levin</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Audiobook): Rebecca Skloot - fascinating history of one of the most ubiquitous tools in modern biology, the HeLa cell, originated from Henrietta Lacks' tumor, circa 1950. Skloot weaves the story of Henrietta and her family with the history of tissue culture and the breathtaking discoveries that have been enabled by these "immortal" cells, while raising many profound and intertwined ethical questions about the use and economics of human tissue, access to medical care and informed consent</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/maugham/of-human-bondage/">Of Human Bondage</a> (Audiobook): W. Somerset Maugham - I can't totally put my finger on why I liked this one and hated Freedom. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Emperor of All Maladies (Audiobook): Siddhartha Mukherjee - some interesting underscoring of themes from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, but more sciency and less human-interesty. Lot of good history of science and illustration of the culture of scientific investigation.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7849/pg7849.html">The Trial</a> (Audiobook): Franz Kafka - gosh, how much it sounded like things that are reported in the news</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/140/140-h/140-h.htm">The Jungle</a> (Audiobook): Upton Sinclair</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller - surprisingly, I'd never read this before. Very strange little piece, with very interesting technique in portraying simultaneous internal and external dialogue of a single character, without the use of monologue.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Romancing Miss Bronte (Audiobook): Juliet Gael - I'd like to put this as an X...the writing is fairly annoying, but the story is somewhat interesting.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">X <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40619/40619-h/40619-h.htm">Camilla</a>: Fanny Burney - I liked Cecilia a lot, but I think you could safely skip Camilla. While the plots of both are driven by social conventions of that period and their heroines' internal conflicts are not very relevant to a modern audience, somehow I felt it less in Cecilia. Camilla felt much more contrived and repetitive - same three or four gags repeated over and over. Evelina falls somewhere in the middle for me - also irrelevant and contrived, but more natural (and shorter) than Camilla.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lolita (Audiobook): Vladimir Nabokov - narrated by Jeremy Irons...oh, what a narration!</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Carrie (Audiobook): Stephen King - disappointing narration by Sissy Spacek</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Scat: Carl Hiassen - not with Sidharta, but inspired by Sidharta - as always with Hiassen, a sweet book about nutty characters motivated by environmental issues, appropriate for the PG-13 crowd.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/lwfan10h.htm">Lady Windermere's Fan</a>: Oscar Wilde</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/854/pg854.html">A Woman of No Importance</a>: Oscar Wilde - Silly Oscar! Thinking Americans are so sensible and meritocratic!</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Pickwick Papers(Audiobook): Charles Dickens - I started reading this a number of years ago and found it rather insufferable - decided to try again. I think I'd still think it was fairly insufferable if it weren't for the excellent narration. So obsessed with sex, for a Victorian novel :-)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And this year I'm going to claim the equivalent of at least one novel in the form of short stories and excerpts of works by members of my very talented writing group and Sharpening the Quill writers' workshop. I'm sure it's been at least 150-200K words.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Started</span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Teaching Company's course Peloponnesian War (Audiobook): Kenneth Harl</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Catching Fire: Suzanne Collins</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Remix: Lawrence Lessig - interesting book...just suffered from being a paper copy</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">House of the Spirits: Isabel Allende - physical copy got taken away from me in the middle, by Annapurna, who was reading it for school</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=works/MTDP10362.xml;style=work;brand=mtp">The Autobiography of Mark Twain - Volume 1</a> (Audiobook): Mark Twain - I had to drop off after about disk 7 (of about 20)...apparently one of Mark Twain's reservations about writing an autobiography was that he was afraid he wouldn't be able to bring himself to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. "Any journal that is intended for publication – even in 100 years' time – is probably in some way compromised. The only person I can think of who got close to an unexpurgated truth is Samuel Pepys, and that's because his diaries were never meant to be read." Well...all I can say is...he was right, at least in his own case. The bits I read were pretty self-aggrandizing, veiled in a false modesty. Also, it seems that Twain made many attempts at autobiography, which the editors have tried to compile in a single authoritative collection, liberally doused with their commentary. The end result, in my opinion, is a choppy, unreadable mish-mosh that is more like a PhD thesis than autobiography. It's got a lot of Twain's entertaining writing, but it's no Huck Finn. And it bothers me that I can't even tell if I actually got to "the" autobiography, or if everything I was listening to was introductory/related text. I think I didn't get to the main corpus, but I can't be sure. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30486/30486-h/30486-h.htm">Shirley</a>: Charlotte Bronte - still working on it - it's no Jane Eyre, but there's some interesting historical context</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Reason I Jump: Naoki Higashida/translation by David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame - sweet book by a 13 year old autistic boy, explaining his thought process, and a plea for patience and understanding</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/159/159-h/159-h.htm">The Island of Dr. Moreau</a>: H.G. Wells - read this mostly at the gym :-) Gonna have to read it with Sidharta, next :-D</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Angel's Game (audiobook): Carlos Ruiz Zafon - I think this is going to be a *: lovely writing, metafiction, tormented author as protagonist - what could be bad? It came before The Prisoner of Heaven, but it doesn't seem to matter that I read them out of order, though I am having some maddening moments trying to remember details from the other one.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And with Sidharta:</span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Pinhoe Egg: Diana Wynne Jones (started)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Pilgrims of Rayne (Book 8 of the Bobby Pendragon series): D.J. Machale (Parts - he read a bunch of it himself and then got Bobby Pendragoned out, I think)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lots of Calvin & Hobbes (no year would be complete without this)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some Grimm's Fairy Tales</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Flush: Carl Hiassen (part - he finished it himself)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hoot: Carl Hiassen (part - he finished it himself)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9330/9330-h/9330-h.htm">Biography of a Grizzly</a>: Ernest Seton-Thompson</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Things Not Seen: Andrew Clements (started...he got bored...I don't know why...seems like a great story)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1837/1837-h/1837-h.htm">The Prince and the Pauper</a>: Mark Twain - I was very surprised he allowed us to finish this one, but he really seemed to enjoy it.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm">Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</a>: Lewis Caroll (started)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32325/32325-h/32325-h.htm">The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</a>: Mark Twain (Can't believe we got through this, but he loved it. What can I say? He's a man of good literary taste.)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/74/74-h/74-h.htm">The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</a>: Mark Twain (started - still working on it.)</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-39547776439932221402013-09-19T09:52:00.000-04:002013-09-19T10:12:45.629-04:00When I'm right, I'm rightThe punchline of a shaggy dog story that tormented my childhood was "<a href="http://pokerworks.com/blogs/doctordadpoker/2009/06/03/patience-jackass-patience/">Patience, jackass, patience</a>." Words I continue to aspire to live by.<br />
<br />
As <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2013/08/more-hypotheses-about-snowdens.html">I predicted</a> (alas, over a month ago...I have been very negligent lately), NSA has, indeed, been <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/739772/NSA_Monitored_Global_Financial_Transactions_Report_Says?source=rss_all&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cio%2Ffeed%2Farticles+%28CIO.com+Feed+-+Articles%29">collecting credit card data</a>, through a program called...wait for it..."Follow the Money" capturing data in a system called "Tracfin". It was just a matter of time and patience until such a system was uncovered. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
According to one presentation, the NSA sought to access Visa transactions for customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In a statement, Visa said it was not aware of unauthorized access to its network.....The NSA's Tracfin data also contained information from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. SWIFT, a cooperative owned by around 8,000 financial institutions, runs a messaging service that enables worldwide financial transactions between banks.</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/edward-snowden-reveals-follow-money-tracfin-secret-nsa-surveillance-program-monitors-international">This one was so bad</a> that even GCHQ balked: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Snowden also revealed documents from GCHQ that showed that the UK intelligence agency had misgivings about the NSA’s Follow the Money program. The GCHQ questioned the legality of monitoring bulk data of personal financial information that didn’t necessarily pertain to national <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/edward-snowden-reveals-follow-money-tracfin-secret-nsa-surveillance-program-monitors-international#">security risks</a>.</blockquote>
Apparently "Der Spiegel reported that SWIFT was a target of spying by the NSA's "tailored access operations" division" The tailored access operations division, as I understand it, is responsible for the "good" kind of surveillance - more technically challenging, more labor intensive, more expensive, and therefore much more targeted at individuals we actually have some reason for suspecting. I predict that there will be further revelations of systems bulk collecting credit card data, outside of the scope of TAO.<br />
<br />
I will continue to hope for vindication in <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2013/06/snowdens-next-step.html">my earlier prediction</a> that Snowden will produce evidence of misuse of collected information to the detriment of American security. So far, the <a href="http://princetoninfo.com/index.php?option=com_us1more&Itemid=6&key=7-24-13support">speculated</a>, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/LOVEINT-The-Scariest-Thing-About-NSA-Analysts-4766655.php">documented </a>and <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nsapickuplines&src=typd">derided </a>misuse has been limited to...um...horny agents.<br />
<br />Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-11888488780477795962013-08-01T15:33:00.002-04:002013-08-01T22:29:59.285-04:00More hypotheses about Snowden's informationWell, so far, <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2013/06/snowdens-next-step.html">my last prediction about where the Snowden leaks might lead</a> hasn't come to pass. But undaunted, I forge ahead with new predictions.<br />
<br />
So far, the information that's been released only relates to phone and internet traffic data. That's all very well and good for the NSA, but I am astounded that as yet there has been no talk of credit card information. I cannot imagine that purchases by targeted individuals would not be of interest. In a certain sense, the purchases themselves are metadata (where, when, how much spent, etc.) I also imagine the "content" would be of interest, as well -- what is the target purchasing? Fertilizer? Pressure cookers? One way plane tickets? Contributions to political candidates? And it's not like that information isn't available -- all those marketing analytics spyware thingies and databases are already out there, and the NSA would just have to make some secret deal with those companies (nah!) to access that sort of data. But we haven't heard about it, so far. I have to assume (a) that Glenn Greewald just hasn't released those documents yet or (b) Snowden was only supporting telecom-based systems, and there are different staff who support the credit card data systems used by NSA.<br />
<br />
I predict we will eventually hear about the NSA groping masses of credit card data.<br />
<br />Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-56453277455733350932013-07-21T16:04:00.002-04:002013-07-21T16:15:03.684-04:00Ice cream maker recipes<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Last year, Sidharta talked me into getting an ice cream maker. We had some good success, but didn't really push the envelope. This year we took it up a notch.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We've had fantastic success, so far, with Raspberry Sorbet, Peach Sorbet and Papaya Ice Cream. If you have an ice cream maker...you can try the below. If you don't: get one! It's pretty cheap, and there's just no comparison. The annoying part is finding space in the freezer for the bowl.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Black Raspberry Sorbet </b>- I was stupid enough not to write the recipe down, but I got it off the internet, so I trust to finding it again. It's mostly a question of finding the right ratio of raspberries to sugar and water. And removing the seeds (a major pain, but worth it). I don't think I put anything else in, though I thought about some cardamom. It goes wonderfully with a little chocolate ice cream.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Peach Sorbet - my own recipe:</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- 10 smallish-medium peaches - very ripe, on the verge of overripe</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- 1 stick of cinnamon</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- 3/4 cup simple syrup (made from equal parts sugar and water)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- juice from 1/2 lime</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- strawberry chunks (optional)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I made the simple syrup by using 3/4 cup sugar and 3/4 cup water and boiling with the cinnamon stick. I used 3/4 cup of the resulting syrup.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I peeled the peaches, chopped them to remove the pits and threw them in the blender to puree them. Then threw in the syrup and lime juice and blended some more. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This batter should probably be chilled (but I don't remember if I did or not).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then into the ice cream maker. When it's done you can throw in some pieces of strawberry for texture. I threw them in the ice cream maker when it wasn't quite done, and the strawberries got slightly mashed into the sorbet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don't know exactly how much this produced but probably around 3 cups.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Papaya Ice Cream - my own recipe (warning, hi fat special):</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I decided I wanted papaya ice cream while I was out shopping for fruits and vegetables and saw some nice papayas. So I bought a papaya and some cream, but had no idea of what was needed. When I got home I searched the internet for recipes and found surprisingly few, so I made it up.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Papaya - 2 cups of puree - I don't know how to tell you how much to buy - I bought one of the large Mexican papayas that was probably about 2 pounds and used maybe about 1/3 of it. I know I used 2 cups of puree</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- 1/2 cup sugar</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- 2 tablespoons unsweetened finely grated coconut</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- zest of about 1/2 lime</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- 2 cups heavy cream</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- chocolate chips (optional)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I pureed the papaya first, and then added the sugar and coconut and lime in the blender and then added the cream. And blended until it was nice and even. Again, it should probably be chilled, but I didn't. Straight into the ice cream maker. It makes a lovely color.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Again...not sure how much this made, especially after extensive sampling, but I'll guess around 3 or 4 cups.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I threw some chocolate chips into part of the ice cream, and kept some without. I like it both ways, though you can never really taste chocolate chips well in ice cream.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think a bit of cardamom would be nice here, too, instead of chocolate chips. I didn't try it. And I saw some recipes on the internet that involved use of a can of coconut milk which I didn't have, but they sounded nice.</span>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-15392316807571540902013-06-27T14:40:00.001-04:002013-06-27T14:48:57.159-04:00The origin of evil genius<div class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I guess I always assumed that the term "evil genius" was a Batman or James Bond kind of term, a reflection of the deranged excesses of 20th Century greed and technology. Perhaps in the cartoon usage it is. But I ran across a much older use of this phrase.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am currently reading (make that slogging through) <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40619/40619-h/40619-h.htm">Camilla </a>by Fanny Burney. In it, the sweet young heroine, Camilla, in love with the wealthy, but apparently indifferent Edgar Mandelbert, is trying to fend off the advances of the wealthy and somewhat annoying Sir Sedley Clarendel, who is being egged on in his suit by their mutual friend Mrs. Arlbery.</span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">'O, Mrs. Arlbery!' she cried, 'lend me, I beseech you, some aid, and spare me, in pity, your raillery! Sir Sedley, I fear, greatly mistakes me; set him right, I conjure you....' </span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">'Me, my dear? and do you think if some happy fatality is at work at this moment to force you to your good, I will come forth, like your evil genius, to counteract its operations?'</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wiktionary provides this sense as its first <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/evil_genius">definition of evil genius</a>: The spirit each person is believed to have in attendance, according to certain religious or mythological traditions, which tries to negatively influence him, and is opposed by one's good genius; loosely, someone who is a bad influence. </span>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-37587548600573182882013-06-11T09:50:00.001-04:002013-06-11T11:57:23.370-04:00Snowden's next step?Wanna know how the Snowden story can get more interesting than it already is?<br />
<br />
Mr. Snowden has enumerated the vast breadth of secret intelligence data that he had access to as a systems administrator. No surprises there. Systems administrators are inherently the most trusted of insiders, and in general, take their trust extremely seriously. A sysadmin is kind of like your gynecologist...you want your GYN to check you thoroughly for the purposes of keeping your privates healthy, but you kind of have to take it on faith that they don't have hidden cameras in the examination room taking pictures of your privates to post on Women-I-Have-Seen.com. <br />
<br />
But that's where the analogy ends.<br />
<br />
Because a sysadmin also has access to a second kind of information that may be even more interesting in this case. That would be the forensic metadata.<br />
<br />
Yup. Just as the NSA appears to have been collecting metadata about you (who you called, when you called, and possibly where you were physically calling from), so any system worth its salt will log information about who accessed it, what they accessed, when they accessed it and where they accessed it from. This is an important fraud and abuse prevention feature, especially in systems that maintain highly sensitive data. For example, if your medical insurance records got posted on a public website, you'd want some way to go back to your provider and demand accountability about how your records got there. You'd want them to be able to track down the person who accessed your records and fire them. Along with giving you a $27 million settlement.<br />
<br />
Normal system users aren't interested in the logging information. They just want to get at the main information that the system manages (in Snowden's case, the actual surveillance information). An intelligence analyst normally doesn't care what subject the guy in the next cubicle is tracking, just get me information about my subject. <br />
<br />
Snowden, however, as part of his sysadmin job, would have been expected to assist with forensic examinations of system logs if fraud or misuse were ever suspected (or if they wanted to nail some analyst for any reason). So he would almost certainly have had access to all sorts of log metadata (and systems for analyzing the metadata) about which analysts accessed what when.<br />
<br />
Now if things at NSA are anything like they were at State during Bradley Manning's time, I think we can reasonably expect that WAY, WAY more people have access to more sensitive data than they should. Which means that it's quite likely that Snowden's not the only one leaking information. He's just the only one to come out and talk about it in the public interest.<br />
<br />
Now, if he really wanted to muddy the waters and confuse the people who are inclined to call him a traitor, here's what he'd do. <br />
<br />
Before he left, he would examine the log files and identify a few bad actors who had clearly accessed information they could have no work-related reason for accessing. Things like analyst Jimmy Jones, (assigned to the Africa desk) downloading a report on the calling history of the US ambassador to Russia (which happens to include numerous calls to his Chinese mistress, who lives in Thailand). And Jimmy's access of reports on several prominent US businessmen who have been trying to set up businesses in Russia. And Jimmy's access of data on members of Pussy Riot. Suddenly, it's starting to look like maybe Jimmy's helping out some Russian contacts, even though he's supposed to be focusing on the Congo.<br />
<br />
If Snowden is smart (and he seems to be a bright young man, capable of thinking more than one move ahead), he will have assembled a certain number of cases like this. He will hand the documentation about these cases (log files, analysis of them, etc.) to Glenn Greenwald & Co. The journalists will then publish a sanitized version of them (removing names of targets, etc.), clearly demonstrating that this data is being actively used to harm American interests, while not showing any demonstrable benefit in hunting terrorists. They will also send the unsanitized analysis to trusted members of the NSA/intelligence community, so they can take action on the rogue elements. If there is anyone un-corrupt enough to do so.<br />
<br />
If it's potentially so easy for random analysts to access stuff they shouldn't, you might wonder what is to stop any analyst from accessing the records of Kim Kardashian or Sergey Brin or Obama or the annoying neighbor next door. Since I am not privy to the technical details of the NSA systems, I cannot answer that with any certainty, but I can guess at some of the controls.<br />
<br />
First of all, even though the analysts are not interested in viewing the log metadata, they are almost certainly aware of its existence. They know, better than anyone, that Big Brother is watching, and if they are caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they will get in trouble, possibly to the extent of jail time. There may even be the equivalent of a burglar alarm built in to the systems, such that if an analyst does something naughty, an alarm goes off somewhere, and somebody investigates what's going on and fires/prosecutes the analyst who's peeking at stuff they shouldn't be. <br />
<br />
HOWEVER, there are a couple of problems with relying on this. Think about getting an alarm system installed in your house. ADT charges a fair amount for their alarm monitoring services. And they don't respond to every alarm. If your alarm goes off and it looks like you opened your door without turning off the system, they don't bother. An alarm system has two choices: make sure to react to all the naughty accesses, but in the process also react to many, many things that look like they might be naughty but are actually legitimate OR don't bother unless you're fairly sure that the access is naughty, but potentially miss a bunch that look like they might be legitimate but are actually naughty. Similarly, in NSA's system, the vast majority of accesses would be legitimate. Sometimes an analyst may raise an alert as they legitimately access data for an unusual connection to their case. Less often (we hope) they may raise an alert as they access data about their annoying neighbor. The question is...who's going to respond to all the alerts (mostly false alarms) generated by hundreds or thousands of analysts working for the NSA? System logs work much better AFTER an abuse has been discovered, and you need to track down/document whodunit. They don't prevent the abuse (except by fear), and they don't work at all if nobody looks at them much. Which a rogue analyst would also know.<br />
<br />
This country is frankly not in the mood to address this issue. Americans want to catch all the bad guys (terrorists <u>and</u> people abusing the intelligence systems), but don't want to pay for the effort.<br />
<br />
We are told there are more bombshells to come. I predict that revelations of data misuse or that sort of thing will be included.<br />
<br />Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-61085647625894124732013-06-07T13:28:00.002-04:002013-06-07T15:24:08.056-04:00The first person to march to a different drummer<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've always been a fan of Frost's poem "<a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-road-not-taken/">The Road Not Taken</a>." It suggests an approach to life that I aspire to:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,<br />I took the one less traveled by,<br />And that has made all the difference.</i></span></blockquote>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A traveler down that road would undoubtedly be marching to her own drumbeat. And as I recently discovered, that image comes to us, courtesy of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism">Transcendentalist</a> Henry David <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoreau">Thoreau</a>. I'm no authority on Thoreau, but from what I know of him, I'd have to guess that this quote from <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm">Walden</a> probably expresses his quintessence:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So Sidharta! I like an extended version of that passage, as well:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?"</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Food for thought in our <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_Nowhere">Race to Nowhere</a> culture.</span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-44280402498283590022013-03-23T15:57:00.002-04:002013-06-07T12:55:47.342-04:00Review of "Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count"<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“<a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo13383590.html">Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?</a>,” by <a href="http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/service.html">Douglas W. Jones </a>and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3VuGZzdK8">Barbara Simons</a>, is a tour de force review of the history and current state of voting technology security. The authors (who were key players in security reviews of a number of electronic voting systems, as well as in voting technology policy discussions at the local and national level) provide us with unique insights into the technical, procedural, policy, and even political difficulties of assuring election integrity. <br /><br />The central challenge in voting systems, from a security perspective, is the absolute requirement for ballot secrecy (to prevent coercion or vote-buying) while ensuring that all eligible voters are allowed to vote, but no more than once per election. The notion of an eligible voter implies some sort of authentication system, while secrecy demands that in spite of authentication, ballots not be linkable to individual voters. Requirements for massive scalability, efficient vote tabulation, usability, accessibility for voters with a range of disabilities, ballots containing multiple races, and cost-effectiveness impose additional complexity on voting systems. This book explores how technology has attempted to achieve these conflicting goals, and how the complexity has often created vulnerabilities that threaten election integrity, which in turn, has required technology to evolve.<br /><br />“Broken Ballots” documents a large number of case studies of security concerns on a variety of electronic voting technologies, including Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) and Internet-based systems. An entire chapter is devoted to the missteps of Diebold, “the poster child of much that is wrong with DREs”, including overt partisanship suggesting vote rigging, hiding poor coding and deployment practices behind a screen of “trade secrecy”, circumventing the voting software Independent Testing Authority and certification process, use of programmers who had previously been convicted of computer-based fraud, and harassment of independent researchers who disclosed the existence of vulnerabilities. Another chapter is devoted to risks associated with Internet voting, quite similar to those characteristic of e-commerce, including server-based attacks, client-side malware, phishing, counterfeit sites, man-in-the-middle attacks, DDoS, the loss of ballot secrecy (a risk specific to voting). <br /><br />Lest we be tempted to return to simpler times before touch screens and the Internet, the authors provide a fascinating history of voting technologies and attacks on them, from voice vote to ballot boxes to punch cards. (Who knew that lever voting machines were susceptible to jammed gears?) <br /><br />The authors describe the challenges associated with developing meaningful voting standards and critique a number of failed attempts (such as the 2002 Help America Vote Act and several of its revisions.) They leave us with a number of concrete recommendations for improving the integrity and transparency of elections, including:<br />• Development of uniform election standards (technological as well as procedural requirements)<br />• Technological support for audits and mandatory post-election audits<br />• Greater vendor accountability<br />• Revamping voter enfranchisement laws<br />• Explicitly forbidding Internet (as well as fax and phone) voting until significant security breakthroughs have been achieved<br /><br />“Broken Ballots” should be largely accessible to a non-technical audience, but those with IT experience will respond more viscerally to the cringe-worthy practices it documents. The CISSP will appreciate the thoroughness of the analysis, as it touches on practically every domain of the CBK, from physical security to secure coding practices to governance. The case studies it cites are primarily (though not exclusively) US-based, but the principles these illustrate are universal. It is not a quick read, and at times feels a bit shopping-listy, but it is well-worth working through it, and should be of interest to every adult citizen of any country that conducts elections.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>This review appears on the ISC2 book review section.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-74800027961755139082013-03-11T11:40:00.001-04:002013-03-11T11:42:09.822-04:00Inquiring minds want to know<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So don't ask me why...really don't...I have no idea...but I was struck this morning by the similarity between the words "require" and "quiero" (Spanish for "I want"). Perhaps I've been working on requirements too much lately. In any case, what is a requirement, after all, but something I want?<br /><br />In such intriguing cases, I generally resort to my handy dandy Random House College Dictionary (acquired when I was in Grad School) which often provides helpful etymological information. Paydirt!<br /><br />Unsurprisingly, Require, Acquire, Inquire, Query, Quest, Question all originate from the Latin quaerere, to seek, ask.<br /><br />That's as distinguished from Quarry, which, according to Merriam Webster Online (now that I've put away my dictionary) is derived from the French cuir (skin, hide), which, itself, is derived from the Latin corium (which also gives us Excoriate). Which is weird because if you'd asked me, I'd have said that a lot of hunters seek quarry. In fact one of the definitions that Merriam Webster offers for quarry is "one that is sought or pursued." And then there's the stone quarry, which is totally unrelated and comes from the Latin quadrus meaning square (as in a square block of stone).<br /><br />Who gets to decide the official etymology, anyway?</span>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-31563343932736421342013-01-18T15:46:00.000-05:002013-01-18T18:38:28.672-05:00Look before you click - or Phish SpottingAs a public service, I thought I'd provide a little forensic analysis of an incident I experienced yesterday. The punchline is: when in doubt about the legitimacy of a web site, try a <a href="http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp">whois search</a>.<br />
<br />
Annapurna was very excited yesterday evening at receiving an email that purported to be from the school of her choice, encouraging her to request admission info from them. <br />
<br />
Now, let me say from the start, that I think that said school would be very wise to encourage her to apply, and I think it not unlikely that it will in time be brought to its senses and will ultimately send her a supplication to grace it with an application and a $50 application fee.<br />
<br />
But that may not be what she got yesterday.<br />
<br />
No. This was a college admissions <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing">phishing email</a>. It said,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Based on your achievements thus far, I invite you now to request our viewbook<u> [with a link to...well...you'll hear more about that later]</u>, <b><link admissions="admissions" faux="faux" of="of" office="office" s="s" school="school" to="to" website="website"></link></b> Within its pages you will discover the countless ways our dynamic campus in [city of School of Choice] <schoool location="location">can educate, invigorate and inspire you.</schoool></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Sincerely,</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<name dean="dean" of="of"><real dean="dean" name="name" of="of">[Real name of Dean]</real></name> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<name dean="dean" of="of"><real dean="dean" name="name" of="of">Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid</real></name> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<name dean="dean" of="of">P.S. We also offer one of the most generous need-based financial aid programs in the country. </name>We received your contact information from the Student Search Service of the College Board. </blockquote>
Flattering, no? Who could resist clicking on that magic link? And if you did, you'd see a page that looked like something the School-of-Choice might put together, complete with school colors, logos, links to legitimate pages at School-of-Choice, etc. <br />
<br />
Here's how I got in this story.<br />
<br />
I had heard Annapurna going on for a while about the invitation, but I didn't pay much attention. She's gotten enough legitimate solicitations for applications that in my books this one was no biggie. It was when she started pestering me about "Should I put your email or Dad's?" that I started to tune in. I was like, "What? What do they want <u>MY </u>email for???" My spam detector was buzzing.<br />
<ul>
<li>Dawn's Helpful Hint (DHH) #1: <b>when a site that already has YOUR email and has <b>already t</b>aken the liberty of establishing a relationship with <u>you</u>, they probably don't have any legitimate reason to be asking for <u>anyone </u>else's email address or contact info </b>UNLESS you are in some very, very official process (like an actual college application or providing death benefits information). Whenever you get a request for someone else's info, your scam detector should go off. <u> Before you supply the information ALWAYS think very carefully...does this site REALLY need this? Really? Why??? And would that person get upset if I gave out their information?</u></li>
</ul>
Further investigation showed that the link went to something that looked like it might be related to School-of-Choice, but wasn't quite right. Let's pretend that the URL for School-of-Choice is http://www.soc.edu. This thing went to http://www.soc-admin.org.<br />
<ul>
<li>DHH #2: <b>universities almost always use a .edu </b>If you see something purporting to be from a university but doesn't end in .edu...be suspicious. </li>
<li>DHH #3: <b>when in doubt about whether a web page is associated with a large organization like a university or a bank, try to get there from the home page of the organization. </b>In this case, we went to http://www.soc.edu, and of course the normal admissions pages we got to from there had nothing to do with http://www.soc-admin.org.</li>
</ul>
<div>
And here's the piece de resistance:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>DHH #4: <b>You can always get some pretty interesting information about who really owns the site by performing a WHOIS search. </b><a href="http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp">Network Solutions</a> provides a reasonable one. For example, if you do a <a href="http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/mtsd.us">whois search on mtsd.us</a>, you will find</li>
<li><pre style="background-color: white; color: #333333; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; width: 550px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Registrant Name: Thomas DeSisto
Registrant Organization: Montgomery Township Board of Education
Registrant Address1: 1014 RT. 601
Registrant City: Skillman
Registrant State/Province: NJ
Registrant Postal Code: 08558
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +1.6094667182</span></pre>
</li>
</ul>
Looks pretty legit for Montgomery, no? But when we did that whois search on that soc-admin.org, we found it was registered by one Royall and Company in Virginia. Nowhere near School-of-Choice. Not surprisingly, when we combed through Annapurna's email for the assorted solicitations she has received over the past few months, many, many of them contained links to websites registered by that very same Royall and Company. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So why does Royall and Company want to pretend to be assorted gourmet universities? I don't know. I'm not Royall and Company. Their web site indicates that they do direct marketing for student recruitment. So maybe I'm being too cynical and these universities really have hired Royall to reach out to students who fit some profile or other. Or maybe they want to sell mom and dad's email address to banks looking to make student loans. Or both. I can't tell. </div>
Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-475587212260612013-01-12T12:11:00.001-05:002013-01-12T12:15:05.115-05:00US Statistics<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are some really interesting statistics at <a href="http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/">Ranking America</a>. This site provides a number of graphics illustrating how the US compares with a number of other countries on <a href="http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/how-does-the-united-states-rank-in/">assorted categories</a>. The US does rather poorly on many indices of health and wellbeing, compared to other developed countries.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some of the more telling: US ranks:</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">33rd out of 34 selected countries (Europe + Japan + US) in <a href="http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/the-us-ranks-33rd-in-acceptance-of-evolution/">acceptance of evolution</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2nd out of 35 selected countries in <a href="http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/2012/10/05/the-u-s-ranks-2nd-in-child-poverty-2/">child poverty</a> behind only Romania</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">12th out of 12 countries in <a href="http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/the-u-s-ranks-12th-in-age-of-first-sex-education/">introduction of sex education</a> </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Abominable in <a href="http://rankingamerica.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/chart-of-arts-fundingxlsx.jpg">arts funding</a>: $0.44 per capita, as compared with, say, middle-of-the-pack Northern Ireland, which spent $13.62 in 2005</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And one I am certain you have often wondered about: 2nd in <a href="http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/the-u-s-ranks-2nd-in-asses/">imports of asses</a>, with 28.1% of the world's ass total imports (second only to Yemen). </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I really like two things about this site</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) It provides simple graphics (generally bar charts) to show relative rankings</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) It provides sources for the statistics it is using.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some of the graphics are a tiny bit confusing or misleading, where they show the US relationship to the top 10 (even though the US isn't actually in the top 10, and they don't tell you what position the US actually has.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-63803368881330030812013-01-08T12:31:00.000-05:002013-01-09T06:59:22.827-05:00Total Information Awareness...Take 2<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oy...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Check out this Wall Street Journal (of all sources!) <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324478304578171623040640006-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwMzExNDMyWj.html">article </a>on how <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office">Total Information Awareness</a> is being resuscitated:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them.</span></span></blockquote>
And<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;">The agency's best-known product is a database called TIDE, which stands for the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. TIDE contains more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror links. Some names are known or suspected terrorists; others are terrorists' friends and families; still more are people with some loose affiliation to a terrorist.</span> </blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yeah, that means you, you <a href="http://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-report-shows-widespread-pentagon-surveillance-peace-activists">threat to national security peace activists</a>. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Facebook and Pinterest posts not included. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet.</span><br />
<br />Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-78777116150175775432013-01-02T10:16:00.001-05:002013-01-02T11:23:55.865-05:002012 books<div style="background-color: #ffbbe8; font-style: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I did, for <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2011/12/2011-books.html">2011</a>, I'm posting a list of books read/listened to in 2012. Reasonably good year. Couple of groaners that I felt obligated to finish, in spite of my better judgment.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: #ffbbe8;">
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* = Recommended</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">X = Stay away! - No absolute musts, this year, so I've indicated groaners with an "Oy"</span></div>
<div>
<ul style="font-style: normal;">
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/pg-wodehouse/mike-and-psmith/">Mike and Psmith</a>: P. G. Wodehouse (I'm tempted to put this as a *, but it's such fluff :-))</span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/bierce/175/">An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge</a>: Ambrose Bierce</span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/death-of-ivan-ilych/">Death of Ivan Ilych</a>: Leo Tolstoy</span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">* The Greatest Show on Earth (audiobook, narrated by the man, himself): Richard Dawkins (I'm putting this as a * -- it's pretty accessible, but at times it gets a little technical -- stick with it, though.) I think I still prefer Sapolsky for writing style, and coverage of a lot of the same kinds of concepts.</span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/Persuasion/index.html">Persuasion</a>: Jane Austen (what would a reading year be without an Austen?) </span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">The Life of Pi (audiobook): Yann Martel - didn't get it - can someone please explain it to me?</span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/MP/">Mansfield Park</a>: Jane Austen (Mostly because <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2012/03/better-than-mansfield-park.html">I saw the 1999 movie</a> and was like...really??? She didn't write <i>that...</i>did she?) </span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">* Last Man in Tower (audiobook): Arvind Adiga </span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">* Plugged (audiobook): Eoin Colfer - may not be for everyone...a bit heavy on the violence, but darkly charming</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Nation (audiobook): Terry Pratchett</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><span style="line-height: normal;">The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (audiobook): David Mitchell</span> </span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">The Complete Stories of Dorothy Parker (audiobook): Dorothy Parker</span></span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: normal;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/elizabeth_gaskell/wives_daughters/">Wives and Daughters</a>: Elizabeth Gaskell (This was a re-read, mostly because I discovered the lovely BBC miniseries based on it, by Andrew Davies, the same screenwriter as did my very favorite Pride and Prejudice production - it's almost as good, though nothing can ever compare, really.)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Between the Assassinations (audiobook): Aravind Adiga</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next (audiobook): Michael Crichton - Oy...</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fairest (audiobook): Gail Carson Levine - think I liked Ella Enchanted better, but this was good, too.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200991h.html">Mrs. Dalloway</a> (audiobook): Virginia Woolf - very strange, though I enjoyed it - never really saw a woman writing stream of consciousness like that</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/return-of-the-native/">Return of the Native</a> (audiobook): Thomas Hardy</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/george_eliot/daniel-deronda/">Daniel Deronda</a>: Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot) - kind of Oy</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pillars of the Earth (audiobook): Ken Follett - Oy...but now I'm really, really comfortable with the difference between a transept and a chancel and a nave. Also clerestory.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6753/pg6753.html">Psmith in the City</a>: <span style="line-height: 18px;">P. G. Wodehouse</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/786/pg786.html" style="line-height: normal;">Hard Times</a><span style="line-height: normal;"> </span><span style="line-height: normal;">(audiobook)</span><span style="line-height: normal;">: Charles Dickens - Oy</span></span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Girl Who Played With Fire (audiobook): Stieg Larsson - bit of a disappointment...I loved the other two, and it was a mistake to read them out of order, but honestly, I think this one could probably be dropped completely or have at least 30% excised. Still hoping to meet this Blomqvist guy.</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Kitchen God's Wife: Amy Tan (inspired by Annapurna, who read it for an English project) It is a testament to how much I enjoyed the story that I was willing to read it on paper. Helped that I had an upstairs copy and a downstairs one, courtesy of a donation of a spare copy from my mother :-)</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* The Time Traveler's Wife <span style="color: #222222; line-height: 15.962963104248047px;">(audiobook)</span>: <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 15.981481552124023px;">Audrey Niffenegger - I'm putting this as a *, but it's kind of chick lit, though writers will find it an interesting study, as well - lot of structural and point of view technical challenges handled nicely here. Actually, I'm not done with it yet, but I'm close enough that I'll claim victory.</span></span></span></span></span></li>
</ul>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Started:</span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fixing my Gaze: Susan R. Barry</span></li>
<li style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/melville/mobydick/">Moby Dick</a>: Herman Melville</span></li>
<li style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm">Little Brother</a>: Cory Doctorow</span></li>
<li style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Assorted essays from The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2011 edition) -- some quite good.</span></li>
<li style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Interpreter of Maladies: Jhumpa Lahiri (inspired by Annapurna, who read it for English class)</span></li>
<li style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo13383590.html">Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count</a>: Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons</span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Harry Potter 4 - with Annapurna and Sidharta - parts</span></li>
<li style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald (inspired by Annapurna, who read it for English class)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/defoe/moll_flanders/" style="line-height: 15.981481552124023px;">Moll Flanders</a><span style="color: #222222; line-height: 15.981481552124023px;">: Daniel Defoe - still working on it</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222; line-height: 15.981481552124023px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudrarakshasa">Rakshasa's Ring</a>: Visakhadatta - still working on it - I read it years ago and loved it...talk about royal skullduggery...it's like Philippa Gregory on steroids</span></span></li>
</ul>
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<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">And with Sidharta:</span></div>
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<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/spyri/heidi/">Heidi</a>: Johanna Spyri -- surprisingly, he really enjoyed it, though he got bored and abandoned it after 80%</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Lots of Calvin and Hobbes, as always</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Lots of his 1000 page tome on Mammals (aka <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8869.html">The Princeton Encyclopedia of Mammals</a> which I got a couple of years ago in a lucky purchase on sale for $20 on one of the outdoors tables at Labyrinth. It normally goes for about $40...ask me why I know that :-)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Lots of Asterix</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Children's abridged version of Time Machine: H.G. Wells -- he wanted to read it a second time after we finished it - he had read parts of it himself, and wanted to hear it again</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Some Grimm's Fairy Tales and Yellow Fairy Book</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Son of Neptune: Rick Riordan (parts - he read most, himself)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Hobbit: J.R.R. Tolkien (part - I think the language got a little highfalutin for him)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Robin Hood: (As retold by Roger Lancelyn Green) - one of my all time favorite children's books</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And a good chunk of Harry Potter 4 with Annapurna and Sidharta.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And I feel I also deserve credit for having read a couple of additional 1000 page novels by virtue of having watched the Forsyte Saga (seasons 1 and 2), Downton Abbey (seasons 1 and 2) and the Wives and Daughters series :-) Also a couple of excellent Coursera classes (especially Alex Halderman's <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/digitaldemocracy">Securing Digital Democracy</a>)</span></div>
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Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-57765784155174038912012-05-14T13:27:00.001-04:002012-05-14T13:33:32.664-04:00Like a Bat Out of Hell<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No, I am not a Meat Loaf fan. To tell the truth (shhh...don't tell anyone)...I don't think I've ever heard anything by Meat Loaf. Well, I take it back...I did watch Rocky Horror Picture Show...once...many years ago...many, many years ago. Maybe I would be a Meat Loaf fan if I tried.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I digress.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I had always assumed that the expression " bat out of hell" originated with Meat Loaf's song of the same name. I was, therefore, surprised to run across it in one of Dorothy Parker's short stories from a 1932 edition of Harper's Bazaar, "Dusk Before Fireworks". In it, a young woman, jealous of another woman, says to her putative boyfriend, "She'll shoot out of Greenwich like a bat out of hell, if she thinks there's a chance of seeing you." </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The </span><a href="http://www.word-detective.com/122099.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Word Detective tells us</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> that this expression first appeared in print in 1921, but does not provide a source. </span><a href="http://www.wordwizard.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6622" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wordwizard says</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> it was used in the novel </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Three Soldiers</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> by John Dos Passos, and supposedly it started up in WW I. The </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Out_of_Hell" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wiki page on Meat Loaf's song</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> mentions a reference to a bat coming out of hell in Aristophanes' The Birds, so that takes it back a little further. Kind of like that </span><a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2010/10/another-one-bites-dust.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Homer reference to biting dust</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just thought you ought to know.</span><br />
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<br />Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-81764539365034696222012-03-15T13:20:00.003-04:002012-03-15T13:25:06.597-04:00You code, girl!<div>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Borg">Anita Borg</a> Institute has published a list of <a href="http://anitaborg.org/news/profiles-of-technical-women/famous-women-in-computer-science/">famous women computer scientists</a>. It's pretty impressive.</div><div><br /></div>Gotta love my systers!<div><br /></div>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-15120545354755174522012-03-10T18:08:00.007-05:002012-03-10T18:46:45.853-05:00Better than Mansfield Park<span >I just finished watching the 1999 version of Mansfield Park. (I started watching it on Netflix and then they did a weird bait and switch on me, and decided it was no longer available as a Watch Now option. But the movie was so intriguing that I had to get it out of the library.)</span><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >Now, I think <a href="http://it-dawned-on-me.blogspot.com/2010/05/lovers-vows.html">I've mentioned previously</a>, that I kind of hate Mansfield Park. I'm very sorry to say such a thing about an Austen piece, but so it is. What I hate most about it is that Fanny is such a prissy, passive, mousy, helpless thing, unlike most of her other heroines. So I was roped in by the movie on seeing an utterly different sort of creature, a girl with imagination, wit, and spirit.</span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >Unfortunately, despite the inspiring take on Fanny and fabulous acting by all, I found the movie a little annoying. It took huge liberties with the plot and characterizations, which would have been fine, had the script been stronger. Since I kept comparing it to the book, it's a little hard for me to say, but I think the plot would not quite stand on its own. </span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >I found it particularly hilarious that on the DVD cover, it says, "For everyone who loved 'Emma' and 'Sense & Sensibility' comes the story Jane Austen loved best." I am 99.9% certain that Jane would have disapproved of this movie. </span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >Inspired by the film, I'm re-reading<a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/MP/index.html"> the book</a>, and I still dislike it. However, I did notice that it <a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/MP/chapter19.htm">used the phrase "life of the party,"</a> which I would have guessed to be of much more recent origin.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 100%; " ><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 100%; " >So regardless of its faults, on balance, I still think I like the movie better than the book. Which is something I can rarely say.</span></div>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526876347895013274.post-50827147829453935292012-03-08T12:02:00.006-05:002012-03-09T19:12:00.232-05:00Contraception Costs<div><span style="font-size: 100%; "><span>Rush's obscene comments are based either on a profound ignorance of how most woman-based <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_control">contraception </a>works, or on a profound cynicism about the American public's ignorance of how it works. Or (since we're talking about Rush, here) both.</span></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>I'm a computer scientist, so let me put it in computer science terms.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 100%; "><span>Cost of the most popular <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_contraceptive">male-based contraceptives</a> (i.e. condoms): O(n), where n is the number of sexual encounters. (Withdrawal not included.)</span></span></div><div><span><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/100-1-000-wide-price-range-birth-control-082754485.html">Cost of most female-based contraceptives</a> (e.g. pill, IUD): O(1), with a large constant.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>For non-computer scientists: to oversimplify somewhat, a function f(n) is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation">O(n)</a> if it is roughly proportional to n. In other words, as you increase n, you also increase f(n). A function f(n) is O(1) if it really doesn't matter how big n gets, it's always the same value. A good example of an O(n) function might be cost-of-gas-per-week as a function of number of miles driven. As the number of miles goes up, so does the amount I'm paying for gas (assuming prices don't drop). An example of an O(1) function: price-per-gallon as a function of the number of miles driven. It really doesn't matter how many miles I'm driving -- the cost per gallon remains the same. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Which brings me back to Rush. He thought he was being so clever with accusing Ms. Fluke of having so much sex that she couldn't afford to pay for it. Whereas for most forms of birth control <u>that are fully in a woman's control</u> (and I think that last bit <u>is</u> significant), it really doesn't matter whether you're getting it once an hour or (as primly as Rush or Rick could desire) conceding it once a year...the cost is the same. And it's jolly expensive, even for once a year. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Which is in stark contrast to the most popular male method: pay per use, and a fraction of the cost of the dinner/movie that precedes its use.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Why is that?</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we're having this national conversation about who pays for birth control. Who wants to pay more to let women have control? </span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><br /></div>Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05122596761219552361noreply@blogger.com0