2011 books

As I did, last year, I'm posting a list of books read/listened to this year.

It's been a rather dark reading year, but very good for the most part. My best reads for the year ranged from depressing to horrifying, including Revolutionary Road, Invisible Man, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Girl Who Kicked A Hornet's Nest. I don't know why the list was so down -- I wasn't looking for downers. But I enjoyed it, anyway. Mostly. When I wasn't crying.

* = Recommended

X = Stay away!

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Mark Twain (I'd put this as a *, but it may not be for everybody)
• How to Read and Understand Poetry, Part 2 (audiobook): Willard Spiegelman, via The Teaching Company
• The Year of the Flood (audiobook): Margaret Atwood - followup to Oryx and Crake -- there's one of them downers!
• Our Kind of Traitor (audiobook): John le Carre - I've loved a lot of le Carre's books, but this wasn't one of my favorites. Of course, an OK le Carre is better than a lot of other things.
• The Island Beneath the Sea (audiobook): Isabel Allende (I'm tempted to put this as an X...I liked a lot about it, but it kind of crashed-and-burned at the end, and was mediocre in many ways elsewhere...pity...I generally like Allende.)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge: Thomas Hardy -- and another downer
• The Sea Gull: Anton Chekhov -- and another downer
• * Revolutionary Road (audiobook): Richard Yates -- I'm putting this as a *, though it may not be for everyone...it's very dark
• Burning Bright (audiobook): Tracy Chevalier -- this one was a disappointment -- Blake is such an interesting character, she could have done much more with him in the story.
• Witness: Vicki Weisfeld (Lot of fun -- I was honored to function as an alpha tester -- can't wait for the release!)
• A Tale of Two Cities (audiobook): Charles Dickens -- Gotta love Sydney Carton! Poor Carton!
• The Red Queen (audiobook): Philippa Gregory -- I think I'm about Gregoried out...they're all starting to feel the same.
• * Invisible Man (audiobook): Ralph Ellison -- I'm putting this as a *, but it's sometimes a little difficult read...it's a bit like Henry Miller prose...beautiful, but often hard to follow stream-of-consciousness
• Madame Bovary (audiobook): Gustave Flaubert -- I know it's a classic, but it really didn't do much for me -- there was just nobody I really cared much about in there. And talk about down!
• * The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (audiobook): Stieg Larsson -- Loved it, down and all!
• * Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austen (for only about the 6th time) -- one of the few uppers...that's what I love about Austen...the smart girl always gets the good guy
• On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau -- I guess I'd have to disagree with his arguments for anything much less heinous than slavery. But since slavery was his beef, you have to admire him for his intellectual honesty in following through with them.
• * The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (audiobook): Stieg Larsson -- Loved it, in spite of the downer!
• Emma: Jane Austen -- doesn't hold up as well after multiple readings as P&P or S&S, but at least it was up :-)
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: Mark Twain -- now there's an upper on the virtues of technology! If only it were all that easy!
• * The Rubaiyat: Omar Khayyam
• Dr. Zhivago (audiobook): Boris Pasternak -- I'm not actually quite done with it -- I dragged my heels a bit. This has got to have been one of the most difficult books to follow that I have ever read...I have a feeling the audio didn't help -- pretty poor narrator -- but I think it would have been hard even in print. It's a very interesting book, artistically and historically -- though the history is some of what's really hard to follow. And down we go again!

Started

• The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot: Charles Baxter
• * The Cuckoo's Egg: Clifford Stoll (I'd read this before...it's still one of my alltime favorites...but it's on paper...doesn't follow me around as electronic does)
• Don Quixote: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra -- I enjoyed it at first, but it got very repetitive. Also the translation was lovely in many ways, but I think it probably lost the voice of Sancho Panza who sounded almost as courtly as Don Quixote, rather than bumpkinish which I'm sure would have been there in the Spanish -- this was distracting to me.
• 1984: George Orwell -- just didn't do too much for me - I found it a little cartoonish, which in my mind detracted from its point, unlike Animal Farm, which I reread a couple of years ago, and found absolutely prophetic, despite its deceptively simple fable-like voice.
• Wandering Stars: Sholem Aleichem
• Our Daily Bread: Lauren B. Davis (working on it right now -- fits in perfectly with that downer trend for the year)

And with Sidharta

• Adventures of Tom Sawyer (parts): Mark Twain (I'd put this as a *, but despite the humor and lovely, light voice, it's surprisingly difficult vocabulary for a kid, and it's really hard to explain the all the cultural context and satire)
• * The Phantom Tollbooth: Juster Norton (one of my all time favorite kid books)
• Interworld: Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves (parts -- was probably too advanced for him)
• All sorts of Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson
• Kenny and the Dragon: Tony DiTerlizzi (very sweet)
• Varjak Paw: SF Said (parts -- he finished up, himself)
• Odd and the Frost Giants: Neil Gaiman (parts -- he finished up, himself)
• Harriet the Spy: Louise Fitzhugh (parts -- sadly it didn't do much for him)
• The Lost Hero: Rick Riordan (audiobook we listened to on summer vacation trip)
• The Spiderwick Chronicles and Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles: Tony DiTerlizzi (parts -- he read most of them on his own)
• * The Graveyard Book: Neil Gaiman (part -- he lost interest at some point...pity, it's a fun book)
• The Report Card: Andrew Clements

And with Annapurna

• Johnny Tremain: Esther Forbes (as a young adult I was totally obsessed with her extremely off-beat A Mirror for Witches)
• To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee (parts -- she read most of it herself for school; I LOVE this book, though it was a little hard for Annapurna to get -- I think kids now look for a lot of action, and it's a challenge slowing down to Lee's subtlety and pace of a 1930's southern town. Or maybe it demands more than teenage maturity. I'm not sure.)

French Phish

I got my very first phishing email in French this morning.

Bet you can figure it out what it says, even if you don't know French :-)

But spam's such a great way to improve my technical vocab in other languages. What a horrible way to say "user": "utilisateur". It just doesn't roll off the tongue.

Staying motivated

Annapurna pointed out a nice link. 33 Ways to Stay Creative.

Fortune cookie du jour

"Be a Winner."

Glad we cleared that up. Next, I expect I'll get one that says "Buy Low, Sell High."

And the cookie was stale, too. Maybe that was the problem. Do fortunes go bad after a while?

Dawn's ULTIMATE fortune

Yesterday I got the ultimate fortune cookie for me. All others will be downhill from now on.

It read

Your ability to find the silly in the serious will take you far.

I wish.

Of course, in my case, it probably means..."far, far away from civilization".

Too stupid for democracy?

I was driving home from dropping my mother off at the train station on Jan. 2, and turned on WPRB, to hear this operatic voice singing something about "every four or five years they play a little game, saying 'You can pick your leader, take your choice". You know I was going to tune in, then! Turns out the piece was "Too Stupid for Democracy" by Eileen McGann. It's quite amusing...take a listen, if you haven't, already.

I only recently discovered WPRB, while station surfing in my car...they have some good stuff. As does WKCR (to which I have a sentimental attachment).

Great way to start off the new year!

Brain power

Annapurna informed me the other day that the human brain runs on about 15W. I couldn't believe that so I looked around a bit. Seems like 15's a little bit of an underestimate, but only a little. Most sources I could find (and I will be the first to admit that I have not done a thorough investigation...I really couldn't find any super-trustworthy sources, like say NIH/NIMH/NLM) say that the brain operates on 20-40W of power. That's kind of like the lightbulb in your fridge or oven.

Now I understand why the human species is, on the whole, rather dim-witted.

Curioser and curioser...

Now here's a colorful character: evolutionary/genetic biologist and general purpose radical JBS Haldane.

While trying to attribute a different quote that turned out to be his, I ran across the following, which I thought was quite in line with my previous posting:

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Turns out he's got quite a few other zingers. The one I was looking for was the one quoted often by Sapolsky (who, though not quite so zinger-prone, himself, nevertheless provides some incredibly entertaining science writing): I'd lay down my life to save two brothers or eight cousins.

I'll have to pick up a real biography.

Wonder what they're cooking up nowadays

Lauren Weinstein has apparently been converting his old videotapes to digital, and is posting some curiosities. Here's one about the 1970's predictions for the waves of the future. It's funny to hear the oooh-aaah tone in which they discuss the distant possibility of things we take for granted today, but it's also surprising how much of the impact of our technology they were able to anticipate.

Kind of makes me wonder what wild and impossible thing someone's working on today that we'll be absolutely dependent on in 30 years. My prediction track record is not good. I remember the first time I heard someone talking about protein secondary structure prediction from amino-acid sequence. My reaction was, "Nah...it's much more complicated than that. They'll never get it to work." And when Ellen bought her first PC, she whined "I know it will be obsolete as soon as I get it out of the store." I was just starting grad school at the time, and thought I knew plenty about computers. Chortled I: "Obsolete??? With 20 meg of hard drive??? You couldn't fill that much memory if you sat down to write from now through the rest of your life."

Fortune cookie wisdom

OK...you may have guessed it by now...I like fortune cookies.

There were some good ones today.

I got one that read "Do it because you love it." All "between the sheets" jokes aside, I do try to live this. Or maybe I should say, I try to live a transposed version of it: "Because you love it, do it." It is important to make time for the stuff you love. Of course, this also means that my house isn't quite as clean as it would be if I loved cleaning.

Annapurna read her fortune, and immediately groaned, "oh, that's bad!" Then she cracked up. It read "Be broke, be wealthy, but don't accept mediocity". And, no, that's not my typo.

My contribution to the Halloween Spirit

For your amusement (or my own) I posted a picture puzzle to allstarpuzzles.com

It's pretty tough :-)