Book reviews, 2009

Why Software Sucks -- David S. Platt

Full-of-crap book by an annoying thinks-he-knows-it-all with a bad prose style.  By the way, software generally doesn't suck.  But it's easier to whine than it is to, for example, write good software.

Banana -- Dan Koeppel

Good book on the cultivation and history of bananas.  I hadn't realized that the cultivar of banana everyone eats now -- the Cavendish -- is only widespread because disease wiped out the Gros Michel cultivar, the most popular banana until the fifties, which apparently had a better texture, and was also sweeter, more resistant to temperature, and harder to bruise.  The trouble is that all bananas of one type are genetically identical, so banana diseases spread easily.  Also, the book mentions what may have been the most successful commercial jingle ever -- "never put bananas in the refrigerator".  (Bananas actually last longer if you refrigerate them, so the commercial was an outright lie, but it has its effect to this day.)


Outliers -- Malcolm Gladwell

Well-written book on the general subject of data outliers -- people or events that lie outside plotted data lines.  Mostly dealing with the extent that random chance plays on individual success.  (Why did Jewish immigrants to New York in the early 20th century generally do better financially than Italians?  Because most of the Jews came from cities in eastern Europe, where a majority worked as tailors -- a heavily Jewish trade in eastern Europe -- and it so happened that New York had a large and prosperous  garment industry, so there were jobs ready-made for them; whereas most of the Italians were farmers, and there was no demand for their skills in New York, so they had to turn to poorly-paid unskilled labor.)  Predictably, it was panned by people who skimmed it and declared that the author undervalues hard work and genius, which is the opposite of the truth.

The Mudfog Papers -- Charles Dickens

A collection of sketches Dickens wrote for magazines in the 1830s, poking gentle fun at the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  He shows a collection of head-in-the-clouds gentleman-philosophers reading silly papers with an air of breathless importance in an out-of-the-way town called Mudfog.  (In the first version of Oliver Twist, by the way, the workhouse where Oliver was born was in Mudfog, but Dickens took that out in the print edition to make it less topical.)

Memoirs of a Geisha -- Arthur Golden

I actually thought this was kind of dull.  It's the hard-luck story of a Japanese girl who goes through all kinds of bad things and is eventually sold to a geisha house, where she's beaten and mistreated by cruel teachers and jealous older students.  By the time I was a quarter of the way through it, I thought I had a pretty good sense of how the story was going to go, so when we got to the (needlessly sadistic) scene where the heroine is brutally examined physically by the creepy old woman in charge of geishas, I decided I'd had enough and stopped reading.

The Ghost Map -- Steven Johnson

Good book about the great cholera outbreak in London in 1854, and how the physician John Snow used the outbreak to prove that cholera was spread by contaminated drinking water, disproving the old "miasma" theory -- though unfortunately some of the strongest supporters of the miasma theory were in charge of public health planning, and there was also reluctance to admit openly that the people of London were drinking human waste, so the problem still wasn't solved on a large scale for some decades.  He did succeed in stopping the outbreak by removing the handle of a certain public water pump, thus stopping the neighborhood residents from drinking out of a cesspool.  (Snow is generally considered the father of epidemiology.)


The Final Solution -- Michael Chabon

A novel set in the early years of World War Two, featuring an unnamed ancient retired detective who is obviously meant to be Sherlock Holmes.  It was pretty good; I particularly liked that the detective keeps talking under his breath while he examines things, as if speaking with someone who isn't there...naturally Holmes would have to think out loud to Watson even without Watson around.


A Most Damnable Invention -- Stephen R. Bown

Interesting book about the invention of dynamite and Alfred Nobel's strange will, which it turns out was almost broken in probate several times.  Apparently he was moved to leave his huge fortune to various groups for the purpose of awarding the Nobel prizes (though he didn't consult with any of the groups beforehand) because he was reported dead, and he read a newspaper obituary of himself that called him a "merchant of death".  Also contains a lot of interesting stuff about nitrates, which even now are still primarily mined from islands covered in centuries of bird shit.

Hunger -- Knut Hamsun

A psychological novel, Hamsun's first and (apparently) most autobiographical.  It's the first-person story of an artist, whose name we never learn, as he wanders the streets of Christiana (modern-day Oslo) literally starving to death.  As he grows weaker and weaker from hunger, he begins to lose his grip on rationality, and the book becomes stranger and stranger.  He seems to feel that his art makes him qualitatively different from other people; he says he will always be a "foreigner in life".  He manages to spend the night in jail (he tells the police he has lost his house keys, so they give him a place to sleep), and -- in a wrenching scene -- he foregoes the free breakfast at the police station so they won't suspect he is actually destitute.  In the end he signs onto a merchant ship leaving the harbor, possibly signifying that art for its own sake can't exist in a modern city in 1890.  I liked it.

Don't Get Too Comfortable -- David Rakoff

A book of essays, reasonably well-written, but all following the same format: author joins a group of people -- dieters, long-life enthusiasts, people learning how to survive in the woods -- and then writes an essay making fun of them in a fairly cruel way.  I didn't get the feeling I would enjoy his company.

A Few Seconds of Panic -- Stefan Fatsis

Fatsis' attempt at George Plimpton-style immersion journalism; he gets the Denver Broncos to let him join their training camp as if he were a genuine prospect.  He has to be a kicker, naturally; Plimpton could get by as a would-be NFL quarterback in the fifties, but no ordinary person could survive an NFL camp today as a real player.  It's well-written -- Fatsis has a good eye and a good style -- but it's inevitably a little plastic-feeling, since of course all the players and coaches know perfectly well that Fatsis is there to write a book, and unlike in the fifties, they all have agents and PR guys telling them to be careful of what they say around writers.  So there's a certain lack of genuineness.  I did learn some things I hadn't known, though; for example, NFL teams regularly fill their locker rooms with air mattresses, because after practices the players are too exhausted even to get down the hall to their rooms and just drop on the locker room floor.

The Man Who Knew Too Much -- David Leavitt

Good biography of Alan Turing.  Well-written and interesting, although I thought the author dwelt too much on "Alan Turing, misunderstood homosexual" and not enough on "Alan Turing, daring and unpredictable genius".  This was also the first I've heard of the theory that Turing's death was murder, not suicide.  Turing died after he ate an apple that had been injected with cyanide; the generally accepted explanation, so far as I know, is that he did this out of depression due to his brutal treatment by the British government after his homosexuality became public knowledge.  The author darkly refers to mysterious figures who "silenced" Turing for some reason, though he doesn't say what the reason was or give any evidence.

Songbook -- Nick Hornby

A book of essays in appreciation of certain pop songs -- I didn't get the idea that these were necessarily his favorite songs, just ones that made him think about "what makes a song catchy?" or "what does it mean when we say a song has 'meaning'?"  They were all pretty good, though in fact I had only heard of four or five of the songs he wrote about.  I liked his remark that if we wanted to show an alien race what human culture was all about, we could do worse than play them the riff from Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker".

Incompleteness -- Rebecca Goldstein

Excellent biography of Kurt Godel.  He seems to have been rather a difficult person -- for example, you might see him at dinner and ask him what he was working on, and he might say "I am attempting to prove that the laws of nature are a priori."  There's a conversation-killer for you.  He also seems to have been entirely apolitical -- he never made any public objections to the Nazi regime, and in fact only left Germany because he lost his university position (apparently because he looked Jewish, though he wasn't.)  Despite this he became great friends with Albert Einstein, who in his last years said the only reason he bothered to walk over to Princeton any more was to talk to Godel.

At Your Service -- Ludwig Bemelmans

This seems to be part of a series of short books produced by the government in the thirties, aimed at students soon to be entering the work force, each one describing a certain trade.  This one describes what it's like to work in a hotel, which of course was Bemelmans's main livelihood most of his life.  It's very good -- of course it has the advantage of having been written by a professional writer.  I notice that Bemelmans leaves out his usual sarcastic asides on the obnoxious parts of hotel service, since he's writing for teenagers, but he doesn't whitewash the career either.  Very interesting.

The Black Swan -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I dumped this pretty much right away.  I don't pretend to be an expert on economics, but I know this much: when an author states that all members of some professional group (mathematicians in this case) are not simply mistaken, but engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to perpetuate something they know is fraudulent -- and that only he, the author, is bold and daring enough to proclaim the truth -- then the author is a crank, and I don't need to waste time reading the rest of the book. 

Mosquito -- Andrew Spielman and Michael D'Antonio

Study of mosquito breeding grounds and the spread of malaria.  Interesting but kind of dry.  The authors argue that the long-term effects of DDT -- which they agree is harmful -- would be the lesser of two evils compared to the harm caused by unchecked breeding of malaria-carrying mosquitoes over the same time period.

jPod -- Douglas Coupland

There's a good book in here, but it really needed an editor to cut out about 30% of it.  At first I thought that introducing himself as a character in his own novel was the height of self-indulgence, but then I got to the part where he spends thirty pages listing the digits of pi for no reason.

Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number of Dickens's magazine for 1853.  As usual, the parts Dickens wrote were considerably better than the parts his friends wrote, but overall it was good.

Einstein's Cosmos -- Michio Kaku

Very good biography of Einstein.  I had never realized he was such a ladies' man.  Kaku also offers an interesting explanation of why Einstein became the first, and really the only, celebrity scientist: he was really good-looking.

Raymond Chandler Speaking -- Gardiner and Walker (eds.)

Interesting collection of Chandler's correspondence.  A lot of it deals with the eccentric behavior of his cat, to whom he was much attached, but there's also a good deal of stuff on the philosophy of writing in general and writing mysteries in particular.

Miss Leavitt's Stars -- George Johnson

Biography of Henrietta Leavitt, a Harvard astronomer who worked out the period-to-luminosity relation of Cepheid variables, thus making it possible for Hubble to measure the size of the Universe.  (She was nominated for a Nobel prize in 1926, but died before the voting, so the prize went to someone else.)  Good book.

The Chimes -- Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol was such a success in 1843 that Dickens wrote four more short "Christmas" novellas over the next four years, before giving that idea up and doing the double-size Christmas numbers of his magazine instead. This was the Christmas novella for 1844; not particularly good, I thought, though I liked the character of the foot-messenger "Trotty" Veck.


Baseball and the American Legal Mind -- Waller, Cohen, and Finkelman (eds.)

This was really an excuse to reprint an excellent article from a law review in the seventies, "The Common-Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule" (its author died last year and that article headlined his obituary -- "William Stevens, 60, wrote Infield Fly Law Review note").  I really liked the article, which argues that the infield fly rule, whose purpose is to prevent a blatantly unfair act, grows out of the same common-law roots as statutes intended to enforce "fair play" in civil and business dealings; but the rest of the book was really filler, the only really interesting thing being a copy of the Universal Player Contract, the agreement that all baseball players have to sign.

Anathem -- Neal Stephenson

I liked this a lot.  I have to give chutzpah points to Stephenson, who apparently wanted to write a long book on Platonic philosophy, but figured no one would read it, so he wrote it anyway but cast it as an exciting science fiction story.  There's even a character based on Wittgenstein (who is of course an antagonist, because Stephenson is a mathematician and all mathematicians dislike Wittgenstein, for good reason.)  For the record, I agree with Plato that the properties of numbers are inherent in the numbers and are not dependent on human observation.  Three was a prime number before humanity existed, and it will still be a prime number after humanity is gone.

The Georgian Star -- Michael D. Lemonick

Pretty good book about how the Herschels (brother and sister) made great improvements in telescope lenses and discovered the planet Uranus (which, in a splendid display of ass-kissing, they originally named Georgium Sidus, the Georgian Star, to suck up to King George III.)  No one outside England went along with it -- a European conference renamed it, though English astronomers stubbornly kept using Georgium Sidus for over seventy years before giving in, coincidentally when there finally wasn't a George on the throne.  The Herschels gained a lot of recognition out of it -- the first people to discover a new planet in literally thousands of years -- and Caroline Herschel was hired as assistant to the Astronomer Royal, thus making her, as far as is known, the first paid female professional scientist.

Going Deep -- Gary Smith

A collection of long essays from Sports Illustrated, some better than others.  They're all heavy going -- Smith only writes about tragic figures and disasters.  Also he writes sympathetically about people I don't really have a lot of sympathy for -- like George O'Leary, for example, a football coach who ran high school and then college programs with an iron fist, and who would literally turn purple with rage when screaming at students who had lied about something, like making up excuses why they missed practice; he was hired as the head coach at Notre Dame, but was then fired a few days later when Notre Dame realized that his whole resume was full of lies -- he had falsely claimed to possess a master's degree, for example, and also falsely claimed to have lettered in football in college (he actually never appeared in a game.)  Okay, so America is the land of second chances, and I'm fine with him resurrecting his career after the very public shaming.  But I'm not fine with him whining about how what he did wasn't so bad, and I don't feel sorry for him.

The Graveyard Book -- Neil Gaiman

Excellent story about a lost baby raised in a graveyard -- essentially it's a re-telling of The Jungle Books, only with the baby raised by ghosts and vampires instead of wolves and bears.  Really good.

Conquering Gotham -- Jill Jonnes

Very interesting and well-written book on the building of Penn Station and the huge engineering problem of running trains across the river to Manhattan Island, made much worse by infighting in the New York government, with an entrenched corrupt machine battling a series of reform governors.  Good read.

Obsessive Genius -- Barbara Goldsmith

Interesting biography of Marie Curie.  She was one of several daughters of a Polish couple, and her father had to teach his daughters at home in secret, because their mother was against their being educated (she thought it would hurt their chances of finding husbands.)  She had to leave Warsaw to go to the Sorbonne in Paris because there was no way for a woman to earn a degree in science in Poland.  (Naturally, after she became famous, Poland suddenly decided to claim her, and you will now find writers insisting she be called "Sklodowska-Curie".)  She remains the only person to win two unshared Nobel prizes.  I hadn't realized that both she and her husband died of radiation poisoning.  In fact the author mentioned that even now, in order to examine the Curies' papers and notebooks, you have to wear a radiation suit.

The Cricket on the Hearth -- Charles Dickens

The Christmas novella for 1845.  It's a fairy tale, and was the most popular of his novellas at the time, though it's not as widely read today; some people attribute this to its sentimentality, but I think it's more because there are no really memorable  characters.

The Monk in the Garden -- Robin Marantz Henig

Good biography of Gregor Mendel and his work on genetics.  He seems to have been an entirely inoffensive and easy-going sort of person, happier working with his peas than he later was when he became an abbott and had to spend all his time on  administration.  The author agrees with Fisher's conclusions that Mendel's experimental results are somewhat implausibly close to the ideal value; not that Mendel was faking anything, but it's likely that once his early experiments with a small sample size showed an approximate 3 to 1 ratio, he may have started looking for that ratio in his larger experiments -- an example of confirmation bias.  Doesn't invalidate his results, though.

Eleanor Rigby -- Douglas Coupland

Awful novel told in the first person by an unpleasant narrator, whose two favorite pastimes are 1) whining in a self-pitying way about being overweight and unattractive, and 2) constantly denying that she is self-pitying.  I hated it.

A Force of Nature -- Richard Reeves

Very readable biography of Ernest Rutherford, focusing on his work on X-rays and the structure of the atom.  He was an excellent teacher as well as a researcher; many of his students became famous scientists themselves.  He also displayed the amazing carelessness typical of physicists at that time; for example, he carried around a vial of radium in his jacket pocket.  (At one time he poured some of it out for an experiment at Rutgers, using a rolled-up piece of paper as a funnel; Rutgers used that piece of paper as their sole source of radioactivity for the next sixty years.)

Brotherhood of the Bomb -- Gregg Herken

Account of the scientists at Los Alamos and the complicated structure of the bomb project.  Gets into a lot of stuff about Oppenheimer's background and the extensive security problems he represented.  (Consider that Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist in his thirties who had to oversee applied scientists who were older and more experienced than he was; he had no administrative experience whatever; he had no mechanical aptitude and was helpless with the simplest machine; he was a leftist and all his friends were Communists; and oh yeah, when he was a grad student he had a breakdown and tried to murder his graduate advisor.  The lesson: Oppenheimer was really good at talking himself out of trouble.)  The writing is okay but kind of dense.

Someone Like You -- Roald Dahl

A collection of suspense and horror stories, some of them really good.

Truman -- David McCullough

Superb book, probably the best thing he's written, which is saying a lot.  The book draws a warts-and-all picture of Truman, not trying to hide any of his shortcomings, which only makes you admire him more.  Also, talk about being shoved in at the deep end -- Truman was a career politician, who came from an established Democratic city machine, who only became Vice-President because he had no enemies and the party couldn't agree on anyone else; Roosevelt never relied on him or really told him anything -- he never even knew about the bomb until after he became President.  McCullough's main point, I think, is that Truman made a lot of decisions that were very unpopular at the time, but which in retrospect were clearly correct.  He stood by them, too.  McCullough also shows how Truman benefited from the support of tremendously capable friends, such as Dean Acheson and George Marshall (who Truman thought was the greatest man of his time.)  He also made enemies, notably Joe McCarthy and Douglas MacArthur, both of whom he defeated largely through the support of the Army.  (Truman had served as a foot soldier himself.)  McCullough also tells the sad and disappointing story of how Eisenhower -- another of Truman's heroes -- treated Truman very badly, both when Truman was President and afterwards.  This is really one of the best books I've ever read.

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean -- Edward Kritzler

This sounded interesting, but in fact it was pretty dull and incoherent.  There weren't really any Jewish pirates, or not so's you'd notice.  This is really a poorly organized book about the Jewish diaspora, using the fact that there was a very minor buccaneer named Simon Palache who later became a rabbi to give it a catchy title; the book really has almost nothing to do with piracy.  It's also poorly written.

Coyote v. Acme -- Ian Frazier

A collection of comic pieces, some of them pretty funny, though none as good as the famous title piece.

Habeas Corpus -- Jill McDonough

A book of poems on the subject of various felons convicted to death.  I did the research for a lot of these, back when I was working at Harvard as her research assistant and looking up all kinds of stuff on old death-penalty cases as far back as Cotton Mather's time.  That was a fun job.

Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1863.  It features the very worst of Dickens' cutesy little children, but that's more than made up for by Mrs. Lirriper and her lodger, Major Jackman (and particularly the policeman who remains stolidly unmoved when Mrs. Lirriper reports in a panic that the little boy has wandered off: "We mostly find, mum, as people ain't over-anxious to have what I may call second-hand children; you'll get him back, mum.")  The non-Dickens parts are only so-so, but the rest of it is very good.

Statistical Treatment of Experimental Data -- Hugh D. Young

I'm afraid the fact that I read this book for pleasure only confirms that I am an irremediable nerd, but I liked it.  A concise and comprehensible introduction to statistical methods and how to turn data into meaningful results.

Bicycle -- David V. Herlihy

Pretty good history of the bicycle, which was originally called a "velocipede".  The first velocipedes were made of cast iron and weighed over eighty pounds and had no chain (the pedals were in the center of the front wheel) and the tires were made of wood banded with steel -- they were popularly known as "boneshakers".  Imagine showing up to a triathlon with one of those.

Archimedes' Revenge -- Paul Hoffman

A general-interest book on various mathematical problems.  The title refers to a problem posed by Archimedes when Eratosthenes proposed a method of reckoning very large numbers that was superior to Archimedes' method.  To get back at his friend for being outdone, Archimedes challenged him to solve an enormously complicated problem involving polynomial equations with several unknowns, which moreover had to fit certain specified conditions.  (The answer is a number 247,000 digits long.)

Sketches By Boz -- Charles Dickens

Dickens' first published work, printed under his pen name "Boz"; generally light-hearted essays, though with some signs of the urge to social reform that would become so prominent later.  These sketches were what got him invited to write a longer series based on illustrations by the artist Robert Seymour;  however, Seymour killed himself after only completing a few illustrations, and Dickens took over as the sole creator, expanding the idea and eventually turning it into the Pickwick Papers.

House -- Tracy Kidder

An account of the building of a new residential house in Amherst in the early eighties.  Kidder tries to tell the story from the points of view of both the builders and the clients, though to my mind he doesn't succeed.  I am of course inclined to take the builders' side anyway, but even so the clients struck me as pretty awful people -- the wife a doctor who proudly tells how she goes to town meetings to yell and make a commotion (she thinks loud arguments are healthy); the husband an attorney who spends the whole job trying to work out how not to pay the builders.  If it had been me, I would have walked out when the couple sneeringly said that the builder's professional integrity was a show meant to put down the clients -- that's assuming I dealt with them at all, since it's my experience that doctors and lawyers make the worst clients.  I was not a bit surprised when the husband openly told the builder he wouldn't pay the final installment, since he knew the builder couldn't afford to sue him for it.  Sounded like a nice house, though.

Wild and Outside -- Stefan Fatsis

An account of how baseball's minor leagues flourished briefly during the strike of '94-'95, and the founding of the Can-Am league, which still exists, though in a different form; minor-league baseball always operates on the very edge of financial failure.

A Brief History of Time -- Stephen Hawking

Introduction to cosmology for the general reader.  Kind of bangs the drum for his own theory of black holes, but that's understandable.  Not bad.

Generation X -- Douglas Coupland

Hoo boy is this dated.  Kind of amazing that this book -- a collection of tiresome stories about a half-dozen useless assholes who sit around a crappy trailer in the desert whining about stuff -- was once culturally relevant.  Hey, that's what happens when you try to be topical.

Sun of Suns -- Karl Schroeder

Very good science-fiction adventure story set in a sort of free-floating version of a Dyson sphere: a staggeringly huge volume of space enclosed in an opaque sphere made of buckminster-fullerene.  The entire sphere is filled with air, and the people inside live in free fall, clustered around asteroids and city-stations, warmed and lit by artificial fusion-furnace "suns", all derived from the great Sun of Suns at the center of the sphere.  It's an action story involving pirates, war, and revenge, well-written, and set against its really interesting backdrop in a very skillful way.  I liked it a lot.

Nostromo -- Joseph Conrad

A pretty good novel set in a fictional Latin American state that is in a constant state of civil unrest, and the attempts of various people --all for self-serving reasons -- to establish stability.  Has a typically depressing Conrad theme of showing that no one is really honest.  Very interesting aside, though, where Conrad -- a Pole writing in Britain in 1904 -- predicts that the United States will eventually become the master and arbiter of the world whether it wants to or not.

A Pickpocket's Tale -- Timothy Gilfoyle

A book about the well-documented career of a real-life nineteenth-century minor criminal.  Contains a lot of interesting stuff about the Victorian-era underworld in the USA, and the way the justice system worked then, but it's kind of heavy going because the writing isn't very good.

Showstopper -- G. Pascal Zachary

Fairly interesting book about the project that created Windows NT.  Kind of marred by the fact that the writer has a serious crush on the NT project lead, who struck me as kind of an asshole -- not that that's at all uncommon among project leads in big companies.  There were unintentionally funny bits where, for instance, the author would admiringly say of the project lead that he wasn't arrogant, and then one page later quote him as saying "my professors in college were stupid, there was nothing they could teach me."  Actually I thought the higher-level stuff, with Bill Gates quietly deciding to abandon OS/2 compatibility -- and the shocked outrage of the IBM guys when they figured out that Gates was cutting them loose -- was more interesting than the "look how this iron-willed tough guy herds his programmers by screaming and hitting walls" stuff.  Things I didn't know: apparently Bill Gates has trouble keeping still, and tends to rock back and forth all the time no matter what he's doing.  Also, in the nineties there was a sort of generally understood rule at Microsoft that if a guy burned himself out doing some big important thing for the company, then they'd carry him while he recovered, even if he spent a year doing nothing but sitting in his office playing Minesweeper.  I wonder if that's still true, with Gates retired.  I kind of doubt it.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets -- Stephen Crane

Depressing novella about a girl born into poverty and her futile attempts to escape it.  I admired it but didn't enjoy it.

Naturalist -- Edward O. Wilson

Autobiography of the great expert on ants and author of Sociobiology, the book which led to, as he points out, his being the only American scientist of the late 20th century to be physically attacked at a symposium for his ideas.  (For this I lay a lot of the blame on Stephen Jay Gould, whom I admire in many ways but who showed disgusting moral cowardice when Sociobiology came out.)  Wilson mentions that he was always interested in nature, but was led towards studying insects because of a childhood fishing accident that left him nearsighted, so he had to study things he could see close up.

Fiddlers -- Ed McBain

One of McBain's police procedurals.  They're all more or less the same, so if you like one you'll like the others.

Sketches of Young Gentlemen -- charles Dickens

Some more of Dickens' juvenalia, a series of satirical sketches of early Victorian men about town.

A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage -- Mark Twain

One of Twain's aborted projects: he wanted to supply a number of writers with some story elements and an opening page, and have them all write their own variants of the same story.  (On his list were William Dean Howells and Henry James, which may show that he wasn't really serious about the project, since there would really be no chance either of them would participate.)  In the end nobody else went along with it, so the only story that got written was Twain's own version, which is a kind of over-the-top surreal mystery that involves a foreigner being dropped out of a balloon in the middle of a cow field.  Not his best work, but still interesting.

The Last Fish Tale -- Mark Kurlansky

History of the fishing port of Gloucester.  Well-written, but a real downer, since of course it's all about the death of the port-fishing industry and the way of life that went along with it.

American Shaolin -- Matthew Polly

Funny autobiographical story of a 22-year-old who dropped out of college in the eighties and went to China, where he spent three years or so studying kung fu at the Shaolin Temple (this was before the temple cleaned itself up and reinvented itself as a tourist attraction with travelling road shows -- it was kind of a pit back then, and most people even in China hadn't heard of it.)  He intersperses descriptions of the very difficult kung fu training with sketches of how hard it was for a foreigner to get along in rural China, even though he spoke Chinese.  It's all very interesting, and comes to a sort of double climax when he succeeds both martially (his teachers send him out to fight a kung fu student from another school) and socially (he brings down the house at a banquet by telling a dirty joke in Chinese.)  There's also a great bit when he gets kind of proud of himself for being able to "eat bitter" (a Chinese phrase for enduring very, very hard training) including iron-arm training (which involves smashing your arms constantly until you can no longer feel pain there, and so can use your arm like an iron bar)...until he meets a guy who does iron penis training.  (Seriously.)  All the better when the guy offers to teach it to him, and he has to give up and say, "Master, I cannot eat that much bitter."

The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 11: Parliamentary Debates 1741-2

This was the second and last year of Johnson's "reporting" the debates in Parliament (in fact he only knew who had argued on each side, and the gist of what was said; he made the speeches up himself.)  Most of these debates are from the House of Lords, and (in his church-and-state way) Johnson makes them free of the acrimony of the Commons, having the Lords deliver profound and earnest speeches with great dignity.  Interestingly, he gives weighty arguments to both sides, so you can't really tell where Johnson himself stood on any issue -- except one, the debate on increasing the number of licenses to distill spirituous liquors, for which Johnson gives all the morality to the "Nay" side and makes the "Yea" side lean on a threadbare excuse of raising revenue.  The whole thing is a model of excellent English prose.

It Can't Happen Here -- Sinclair Lewis

Very good novel from the thirties, describing the rise of a Fascist dictatorship in the United States with depressing believability.  

David Balfour -- Robert Louis Stevenson

The sequel to Kidnapped, picking up only a few minutes after the first one left off; in this one David leaves Scotland for the Netherlands to go to college, and through circumstance becomes responsible for a young woman whose guardians have abandoned her; it turns out that the woman's father is an exiled rebel, and a worthless creep, too, which causes some complications.  Plus Stevenson picks up some plot threads that were really resolved in the previous book but had to be brought back to give this one more substance.  It's not bad, but has nothing like the excitement of the chase through the heather in the first one.

A Mathematician's Apology -- G.H. Hardy

Hardy's autobigraphy, and a pretty good picture of how someone can be drawn to pure mathematics.  Contains Hardy's famous line that most higher mathematics is, in practical terms, entirely useless; this has generally been accepted too easily, in  my opinion, since I interpret that as Hardy weakly trying to convince himself that he and his fellow mathematicians bore no responsibility for the development of the bomb.  Also the whole thing is in a minor key, really, since Hardy was very depressed at the time he wrote it and attempted suicide soon afterwards.

The Victorian Internet -- Tom Standage

Enjoyable book on the early days of the telegraph and telephone network, and the very strong resemblance between the "on-line" culture of the 19th century to the one that sprang up around the Internet.

The Compleat Angler -- Izaak Walton

A mid-17th century book on the pleasure of fishing.  Not so much a how-to as an appreciation of a civilized way to spend a pleasant afternoon doing nothing.  Shows you how popular fishing is that this book has gone through over five hundred editions since the 1600s and has never been out of print.

No! In Thunder -- Leslie Fiedler

A book of essays of social criticism, kind of strident and self-regarding; nothing very original or interesting.

The Unfinished Game -- Keith Devlin

Good book about the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat that began probability theory.  Pascal was considering the question: two players are playing a game for money.  They are interrupted before the game is finished.  How should the stakes be divided?  Their answer was to work out the probability, given the current state of the game, of each side winning.  So if player A had a 60% chance of winning at the point the game was interrupted, then player A should get 60% of the pot.  Well laid-out.

A Perfect Red -- Amy Butler Greenfield

Interesting book on the scarlet dye made from the cochineal beetle, which feeds on one and only one kind of cactus in Latin America, and the great lengths the Spanish went to to prevent people from finding out how to cultivate the beetle and thus break their monopoly.  Good read.

The Nothing That Is -- Robert Kaplan

Short history of the concept of zero.  Pretty well written.

Heat -- Bill Buford

This was really two books: Buford's account of working in the kitchen of celebrity chef and professional jerk Mario Batali, and his account of working as an apprentice butcher in Tuscany.  The second part is far more interesting.  (About Batali, I think an early anecdote in the book sums him up, and I have this to say about it: anybody who came as a guest of a guest into my house, famous chef or not, who started criticizing my kitchen and calling me a moron because I cook things differently to the way he does it, would go out my door ass over teakettle.)

The Riemann Hypothesis -- Karl Sabbagh

I'm surprised that so esoteric a subject as the Riemann hypothesis -- which holds that all non-trivial zeroes produced by the Riemann zeta function lie on a certain critical line where the real part of the complex number is 1/2 -- could be explained so clearly in a book for a general audience, but the author pulled it off.  If you could prove the Riemann hypothesis, it would settle some things about the distribution of prime numbers, which would have important consequences in both pure number theory and in applied cryptography (which relies heavily on primes.)  Nobody's managed it in 151 years and counting, though.

Uncentering the Earth -- William T. Vollmann

Biography of Copernicus, naturally dealing mostly with his heliocentric theory.  I didn't really like the writing style.

Past Time -- Jules Tygiel

A collection of historical essays on the unchanging game of baseball seen in the changing context of American historical development.  I didn't think any of them were all that interesting.

Jacquard's Web -- James Essinger

Very good book on the Jacquard loom, the forerunner of all algorithm-controlled machines.  The punch-card system that controlled the loom -- and was later adapted to adding machines for the US census, made by the company that later became IBM -- remained more or less unchanged until the purely mechanical punch cards were replaced by magnetic tape in the 1970s.  In fact even today many data-entry terminals -- like the DOS prompt -- have an 80-character limit because the original IBM punch card from the 19th century was eighty punch-boxes wide.  Good book.

Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1864.  Mrs. Lirriper and Major Jackman were so popular that they got brought back for a second year.  Includes another dreadful poem by one of Dickens' friends, but otherwise pretty good.

The Varieties of Religious Experience -- William James

Really interesting book.  It was originally a set of lectures James gave at a Scottish university in 1902.  I was most struck by his contention that all religious institutions are essentially an attempt to put a rational framework around a founder's mystical experience; that genuine religious experience is by definition irrational.  This goes along with his idea that the value of a religious experience should not lie in how "true" it is -- since that is something that cannot be rationally measured -- but in how effective it is at giving people a better, fuller life.  A lot of the book revolves around his contrast of the "healthy mind" -- a person with a sense of the general goodness of life (his example is Walt Whitman) -- with the "sick soul", a person who sees evil in all things.  James thought that the only real cure for a sick soul was to undergo a powerful mystical experience.  

Sewer, Gas, & Electric -- Matt Ruff

I enjoyed this book a lot.  I might hesitate to recommend it, though, since you'd only really fully appreciate it if you've read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, which is a thousand pages of sophomore philosophy written in comic-book-level dialogue, and you've probably got better things to do.  It's very funny though, a bizarre, surreal science-fiction story with some cool what-ifs and their consequences: for example, a company produces a line of lifelike android servants -- and a wealthy South Carolina woman orders 300 of them, all specified to be black, to work on her estate.  Not something I would have foreseen.  (I also liked the scene where the hero has a near-death experience, and has a vision of the afterlife where she sees Abbie Hoffman doing penance by trying to teach Ayn Rand to have a sense of humor.)

The Short Stories of Saki

A collection of all Saki's short stories, written between 1900 and 1915 or so.  Often clever and funny, but the majority center around a young man named Clovis (or one named Reginald, who's basically the same person), who represents a particular type of character very popular in English fiction around then -- a world-weary, superior, wealthy man in his twenties, who finds everyone tiresome and is bored with everything under the sun except causing trouble and embarrassment to other people, which is his favorite pastime and for which he has endless energy and patience.  A man who wouldn't cross the street to help anyone else, but who is perfectly willing, even eager, to sit up all night in a cold and uncomfortable barnyard in order to play a minor nasty practical joke.  A hateful sort of person, in other words, and someone I soon get sick of.


Finding George Orwell in Burma -- Emma Larkin

Written by a journalist who used a fake name so she wouldn't be barred from returning to the country, this is a very good book on contemporary Burma, using the framing device of touring the places Orwell was stationed during his five years as an officer of the British colonial police, and where he wrote Burmese Days.  A lot of it is a depressing look at the brutal military oligarchy that controls the country now, which is bad enough that it makes people nostalgic for colonialism ("The British sucked our blood -- but the generals bite us to the bone!")  Larkin also changed the names of the people who talked to her, to protect them from reprisals; the Burmese who can get copies of Orwell's books still read them, and call him "the Prophet", since they say Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are thoroughly accurate descriptions of the military regime.  

Grand Avenues -- Scott W. Berg

Very interesting book on the city planning of Washington DC, which was essentially the work of one man, Major Pierre l'Enfant, a French artist and architect who fought in the Revolution (he came along with Lafayette.)  After seven years in the Colonial Army, during which he became friends with George Washington (in fact he was one of the Society of the Cincinnati), he spent some years designing buildings in New York and Philadelphia before Washington hired him to lay out a design for the new capital.  He came up with an ambitious design in less than a year -- a cosmopolitan federal city, with broad avenues, open sight lines, and a deliberate sense of grandeur.  He was strongly opposed all along by Thomas Jefferson, who objected to the high style of the design, and who wanted a much smaller, humbler capital city, in line with his own bucolic vision of America.  Washington supported l'Enfant, and though he had terrible people skills and eventually had to resign due to bitter infighting, in the end it was his plan that was used -- even the Capitol Building and the White House are as he designed them; he even specified their locations.  His 1790 city plan is still recognizable as modern DC.  Good story.

Micrographia -- Robert Hooke

Hooke was one of the early members of the Royal Society, and an amazing polymath (someone called him "the last man who knew everything there was to know.")  He's kind of unfairly forgotten now because he and Isaac Newton hated each other.  Among many, many other things, he was England's first microscope-maker, grinding finer and finer lenses to see the microscopic world, and producing incredibly finely detailed drawings of fleas and microorganisms.  (He must also have been one of the best draftsmen who ever lived.)  This is a rather loosely organized book on, more or less, "Here's a bunch of fascinating stuff I saw under my microscope, and here's a bunch of drawings I did of them."  Really interesting.

The Black Hole War -- Leonard Susskind

A pretty interesting book on the development of cosmological theory over the last thirty years.  Not really all that well written.  Susskind, a cosmologist himself, is obviously obsessed with Stephen Hawking, who is mentioned on almost every page; and he's lacking enough in perspective to give his book its foolishly grandiloquent title (a much more accurate title would have been something like "A long-running academic dispute about gravity involving five or six people".)  Susskind also presents his case with the strong implication, not only that he's right (only to be expected) but that everyone now admits he's right (which is not true, from what I understand) and that this is an enormously consequential thing (in fact, probably fewer than a hundred people really care about this problem.)  Also, the book's structure falls apart as it goes on; Susskind rather resembles a lecturer who suddenly realizes he only has fifteen minutes left and crams all the rest of his presentation in at top speed, not caring that he's losing the audience.  The last part of the book is a not very comprehensible discussion of string theory, where he clumsily introduces new terms in every paragraph and rushes on pell-mell, leaving the reader awash in a sea of unexplained jargon. 

My Favourite Year -- Nick Hornby (ed.)

Collection of essays by various British writers on their most vivid sports-related memories.  Most of them were pretty good.

A Beautiful Mind -- Sylvia Nasar

Well-written biography of the mathematician John Nash.  It's a very interesting story, but marred because Nash clearly did not participate (no interview with him is listed in the sources) and so the author is simply guessing at what Nash's internal state was.  When I read a biography I prefer not to see such constant use of words like "presumably", "probably", "must have", and "we can guess".  It's still a good read, though.  Apparently during the decades of Nash's madness, he mainly sort of hung around Princeton, where he was treated kindly, which is nice to know -- people even went around copying down the math he would scribble on the blackboards, though most of it was nonsense.  Freeman Dyson recalls him sitting by himself in Fine Hall every day, though he usually didn't answer if you spoke to him.  

The Annie Marble in Germany -- C.S. Forester

A year after the trip in France he described in an earlier book, Forester and his wife took their small boat on a summer trip up and down the rivers of Germany, in the mid-twenties.  Although Forester was fluent in French, he did not speak much German, so this trip was rather less social than the previous one.  He also wasn't keen on German food, which seemed to consist entirely of sausage.  (The strength of cultural differences: I can't imagine ever longing for mutton.)  Nothing particularly consequential happened, but it sounded like a pleasant trip.

Escape From Hell -- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

A sequel to their excellent book Inferno.  An example of two general principles: you can't write a sequel forty years after you write the original; and you can't write a sequel to a bildungsroman.  It was terrible.  It also contained some self-revealing stuff; for example, they put Carl Sagan in Hell, in the circle with the false prophets, because in the sixties he voiced concern about global cooling, while in the nineties he voiced concern about global warming.  To Niven and Pournelle, this means Sagan was only spouting whatever he thought would get him headlines.  It is clearly alien to them that someone might simply look at the evidence and change his mind.  

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself

I know I've had this book since high school, but if I've read it before I don't remember it.  It's extremely well-written and eloquent; it tells the story of Douglass' life as a slave in the 1820s and 1830s before his escape to the North in the 1840s.  He deliberately doesn't say how he escaped, of course.  I was most struck by how desperate he and other slaves were to learn to read.  He relates how his owner's wife taught him the alphabet when he was eleven or twelve years old, and how he heard his owner tell her to stop, because reading would make him dissatisfied and desire freedom.  This made him determined to learn to read, which he did by studying with educated white children (he notes that white children were generally very friendly with black children, and only became hostile to blacks when they got older.)  Naturally education did in fact make him dissatisfied.  

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin -- David Quammen

A very good biographical sketch of Darwin, really dealing only with the twenty years between his return from the voyage of the Beagle and the publication of On the Origin of Species.  It's very engaging and presents Darwin as a person I probably would have enjoyed talking to (Quammen recounts how Darwin's young son, on visiting a friend's house, asked in the most natural way "And where does your father work on his barnacles?")  Most of it shows the course of Darwin rather painfully being convinced by his own evidence.  In one of his notebooks there is an early entry that reads, "But Man, wonderful Man, is an exception."  Below it is a later entry reading "No, he is no exception."  Well told.

Girlfriend in A Coma -- Douglas Coupland

This wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either.  I just never got into it -- I didn't really get why it has two different first-person narrators, one of whom is a ghost; I didn't really get what was going on with the ghost, e.g., why was he hanging around watching five or six of his high-school classmates instead of going on to the afterlife or whatever; why he didn't start appearing to them until he did; what was going on with the world-wide plague that turned out not to be real (or something); I just found the whole thing unsatisfying.

The 13th Element -- John Emsley

Excellent book on the natural history of phosphorus.  (Phosphorus is actually element 15, but it was the thirteenth element to be discovered and named, thus the title.  I'm sure Emsley has to answer a lot of mail about that.)  There's a very good section on the history of match-making, and the different sorts of phosphorus used in match heads, and how it was hard to get people to abandon tinder-boxes because the early matches were expensive and didn't work very well.  He provides a great picture of the match factories in England, and the terrible conditions that led to the match-worker strike, which was the main thing that ended child labor in England.  He also discusses chemical fertilizers, explaining that unlike the other four essential elements for life (oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen) phosphorus does not circulate in the atmosphere or by water; it only moves from soil to plants and back to the soil, either by the plants falling and rotting, or by the plants getting eaten and returned as waste.  The phosphorus cycle is so inefficient that without chemical fertilization, large-scale farming (without which humanity could not exist) would be impossible.  Good read.

The Human Use of Human Beings -- Norbert Wiener

This is an examination of how social structures operate by means of communication and feedback, and what parts of the organization of society can be run by machines.  (He includes both non-human machines, like computers, and "human machines", by which he means corporations and bureaucracies, which are human entities but have no humanity.)  It's really interesting.  Dad remembers Wiener at MIT; there was a well-known story of his tendency to finish a conversation and then ask "Do you remember which way I was going when we started talking?"  One little thing that struck me was that in a discussion of player pianos he mentions that there is a sort of person who, seeing a player piano, would take it apart just to see how it worked; Wiener does not consider this a fit pastime for an adult, which I think is a very strange attitude for an MIT professor.  (Dad points out, by the way, that Kurt Vonnegut must have read this book right before he wrote Player Piano, which Dad considers his only good book.)

The Sermons of John Donne

Brilliant.  Donne was sort of the equivalent of a rock star in the seventeenth century; crowds stood dozens deep outside the church to hear these sermons, which are poetic and profound.

The Spartacus War -- Barry Strauss

Interesting re-creation of the Servile War of the 70s BC, when the slaves of Italy rose up against the citizen class, led by a gladiator named Spartacus.  The war lasted almost three years, and not a lot is known about the middle part of it, so Strauss has to do a lot of guesswork on the progress of the campaign.  One problem is that Spartacus left no record -- he probably couldn't write -- and everything we know about him comes from Roman writers, none of whom ever met him.  That's why there's no answer to the biggest puzzle about the Servile War: when the slaves had defeated two Roman armies, looted most of northern Italy, and made it all the way to the Alps, why didn't they continue on out of Italy to freedom?  Why did they turn around and re-enter Italy, thrashing around in a campaign that had no real objective, which could only lead (as it did) to their eventual defeat?  Strauss' belief is that Spartacus simply couldn't control the slave army; the army, flushed with victory, probably wanted to continue the war and defeat Rome altogether, and didn't want to run away into unknown territory.  Rather than give up his place as general (not to mention that doing so might have gotten him killed), Spartacus turned back with the rest of the army.  Strauss makes the point, by the way, that despite modern revisionism, there is no evidence that Spartacus and his army made any attempt to abolish slavery as an institution, or even disapproved of it, beyond not wanting to be slaves themselves. 

Stuff -- Ivan Amato

Interesting book on materials science.  It's a little dry, and written with a kind of relentless optimism that I find a bit wearing, but it's worth reading.

Barchester Towers -- Anthony Trollope

The second of Trollope's "Barsetshire" novels.  Trollope hated reform and reformers (he always had mean-spirited things to say about Dickens) and in his novels, where all change is always change for the worse, he presents reformers as nasty, venal, selfish, and repellent.  He outdoes himself in this case with the disgusting clergyman Mr. Slope, and the awful Mrs. Proudie (the new Bishop's wife), a pair of arrivistes who scheme to break up the good old order of Barsetshire for their own aggrandizement.  It makes for a good story, but Trollope pushes his auctorial habit of speaking directly to the reader (where he says things like, "Don't worry, she isn't going to end up marrying him") to an exceptionally annoying pitch in this one.  The major subplot revolves around a ridiculous misunderstanding that could be resolved instantly if a woman would only ask an obvious question of almost anyone.  Trollope hammers at this, constantly saying "If only she had asked X about Y!" until you want to puke, and finally adding in an aside, "The reader is probably asking himself 'Well, why doesn't she just ask?'  The answer is, if she did I would have no plot."  I have to agree with Henry James that this is a very clumsy device that damages the narrative integrity of the book.

The Hungry Ocean -- Linda Greenlaw

Pretty good book on running a commercial New England fishing boat, told by a long-time captain.  worth reading.

A Race Like No Other -- Liz Robbins

Sort of a loosely organized collection of "here's a bunch of human-interest stories about people running the New York Marathon".  I guess the writer didn't want the book to be too episodic, so she presented the stories concurrently, moving back and forth from one runner to another.  That didn't work for me because none of the stories were really related; it gave the book kind of a "one from column A, one from column B" feeling.  Also I got to the end and felt like saying "So what?"

Godel's Theorem -- Torkel Franzen

Pretty accessible book on Godel's first incompleteness theorem, concentrating mostly on what Godel's theorem does not prove -- namely, it does not prove the existence of the soul, or of a divine plan, or that humans will always be superior to computers, or any one of a number of other things to which people with no interest in or understanding of number theory have tried to apply it.

The Pickwick Papers -- Charles Dickens

Dickens' first book.  It began as a series of sketches for a magazine, but, as they say, the tale grew in the telling.  Flaubert enjoyed it but complained that the plot was weak; in fact it doesn't really have a plot at all.  The book is really just a series of unlikely episodes meant to show Mr. Pickwick and his friends being silly.  Dickens evidently decided this conceit couldn't be kept up that long, so he introduced Mr. Pickwick's servant Sam Weller, who really makes the story; and Mr. Pickwick himself undergoes a kind of surprising character change, going from being a self-centered, head-in-the-clouds, rather foolish person to being a much wiser, more dignified, more good-hearted man, without any evident reason.  (Dickens defended this by saying that when you meet someone new you see his eccentricities first and his better qualities later, an inspired piece of justification.)

Happy Days -- H.L. Mencken

The first volume of Mencken's autobiography, dealing with his childhood in and around Baltimore.  I have a hard time picturing old sour mouth as a happy kid, but that's how he remembered it.

The Uncommercial Traveller -- Charles Dickens

Essays on various subjects written for magazines in Dickens' later life.  Sometimes the writing is more interesting than the subject.  I did notice that in describing a visit to a hotel in the late 1860s, he mentions that there was soy sauce on the table with the other condiments, and clearly did not find this unusual.  I wouldn't have expected that.

The Essential John Nash -- Harold Kuhn & Sylvia Nasar (eds.)

A collection of Nash's mathematical papers, showing the wide range of his interests; most people who produce pure number theory do not also do important work in analytical geometry and the algebra of manifolds -- and none of these were what he won the Nobel Prize for (that was his work on game theory.)  In fact until the movie made him famous, many academics just thought his work was done by several mathematicians who were all coincidentally named John Nash.

The Compleat Strategyst -- J. D. Williams

A primer on game theory produced by the RAND group in the fifties, after von Neumann but before Nash's work was generally known.  A little condescending, but not bad.

The Big Apple Mysteries -- Isaac Asimov & Martin Harry Greenberg (eds.)

A collection of mystery stories set in New York City.  Some of them were very good.  There was even an excellent locked-room mystery, and I had really thought that trope was mined out, so that was a nice surprise.

Inadmissible Evidence -- John Osborne

A sort of psychological play in which an attorney, in a dream, defends himself against a spiritual prosecution.  I wasn't that caught up in it.

Speak, Memory -- Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov's autobiography, dealing mostly with his younger days.  I had known his father was a prominent reformist politician, but I hadn't known he was actually assassinated by the Bolsheviks.  He gives a very interesting description of his synesthesia, a trait his mother and his son shared with him -- he perceived letters and combinations of letters as having color, which he said was the root of his love of wordplay.  This explains rather a lot about his writing.

The Hidden Life of Dogs -- Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

The author lived in Cambridge (Mass) with five or six dogs at various times, and since she didn't believe in leashes the dogs spent a lot of their time roaming around the city.  Sometimes she would follow them at a distance to see what they did and how they acted when they weren't in their own territory.  It's fairly interesting, with some insight on the character of dogs.  I couldn't really get into it since I strongly disagree with her premise, explicitly stated, that the best way to relate to dogs is to anthropomorphize them.  Also, I was not emotionally in sympathy with the book either, since as a general rule I don't like people who really, really love animals (because in my experience that sort of person hates humans.)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society -- Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

A very, very good epistolary novel, set just after the war, centered around a correspondence between a London magazine writer and a group of book lovers on the recently-liberated Guernsey Island.  Deals with life under the German occupation and the effect reading good books can have on your life.  I loved it.

A Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football -- Paul Zimmerman

Dr. Z's primer on football, position by position, written in 1970.  The game's changed a lot since then, and his chapter on quarterbacks is particularly dated, but it's still worth reading.

Dead Certainties -- Simon Schama

An interesting fictionalized history, concerned with two deaths: the death of General Wolfe at the capture of Quebec (the book includes a fold-out plate of the famous West painting) and the death of George Parkman, who was murdered by a doctor named Webster (who owed him money) in 1849.  The title is a pun, since Schama is mainly concerned to ask, how sure can we be of what really happened?  In the Parkman case, for example, Webster definitely faced an unfair trial (and when his lawyers appealed, the judge who had heard the case was also the judge who heard the appeal, and, unsurprisingly, denied it) but on the other hand, Webster confessed afterwards.  The book does require some independent research, since it is, after all, fiction, and Schama invented some parts of it for dramatic effect.

The Mayor of Casterbridge -- Thomas Hardy

A very well-written book.  Really more of a character study than a novel.  It's a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, following a penniless hay-worker named Henchard who, in a fit of alcoholic rage, auctions off his wife and baby daughter at a country fair (this happens in the early 1820s, so that was still sort of quasi-legal -- Henchard, when he sobers up, acknowledges he did a bad thing, but it wasn't actually a crime.)  Shocked at himself, Henchard swears off drinking and rises to become the mayor of the town of Casterbridge before his wife returns.  I find him a very interesting character.  He's completely honest in most ways -- when his business fails through bad luck (customers defaulted on large debts they owed him) and poor judgement (he risked what he had left on grain speculation and guessed wrong about the weather) he blames no one, bankrupts himself to pay the debts, and uncomplainingly goes back to hay-work; when he finds himself alone with his hated rival and has a perfect chance to kill him and make it look like an accident, he instead declares his feud openly and challenges the rival to a fight (he even literally ties one hand behind his back to make the fight fair!)  On the other hand, when he discovers that the girl he thought was his daughter is actually the child of another man, he goes to great lengths to keep her from finding out the truth, even telling her that the real father is dead.  It was a really good story.  I liked it a lot.

Twice-Told Tales -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne's second book and first success.  It's a collection of mostly very good short stories, written in much better prose than his first effort of ten years earlier.  It was after reading this book that Poe called Hawthorne one of the few geniuses of American literary men.

On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems -- Kurt Godel

This is the text of Godel's first incompleteness theorem, published in 1931, where he introduced "Godel numbers" and the "Godel sentence" in his ingenious proof that, for any mathematical system powerful enough to perform basic arithmetic, if the system is consistent (that is, if you cannot use the axioms and theorems of the system to prove contradictory things) then it cannot be complete (that is, there must be at least one statement that cannot be determined, by the axioms and theorems of the system, to be either true or false.)  This is actually a statement about the system, a meta-statement.  Godel's theorem showed that you can't use axiomatic set theory to defeat the problem of infinite recursion, because the theorem applies to any system.  So if you say, "We have Statement A, which cannot be decided in System X; so we'll add Statement A as an axiom of System X.  Now X is complete", what you find is that by adding A to X you now have a new system -- X+A -- and by the theorem, that new system must also contain at least one undecidable statement.  And so on infinitely.  It's an unusual proof in a lot of ways, not least because a good deal of it is in prose.

The Road to Samarcand -- Patrick O'Brian

Splendid adventure novel set in the thirties, with a motley band of English and Irish sailors, scholars, and soldiers of fortune (plus one teenager, who of course is the hero) having to find their way, mostly on foot, through the Asian steppes and the mountains of Tibet.  Excellent reading.  I was not able to suspend my disbelief on one point: with the party crossing terrible mountains on empty stomachs -- to the point where they're collapsing from weakness and hunger -- there just isn't any way they wouldn't have killed the hero's dog and eaten it.

The Minority Report
Second Variety

-- Philip K. Dick

Two volumes of science fiction short stories written in the fifties.  Most of them are very good, although there's a certain sameness to them -- Dick was schizophrenic, and, I suppose unsurprisingly, his stories are all about "what is real and what isn't, and how can we tell?"  I also notice that every single one is set in a post-nuclear-war wasteland, which Dick apparently considered so inevitable he just assumed it as an axiom.

The Tumult and the Shouting -- Grantland Rice

Rice's retrospective on his sports writing career.  There's a lot of purple prose in here, and a good deal of Rice's awful poetry, now justly forgotten except for the doggerel about "not if you won or lost, but how you played the game".  Still, it's interesting, as a period piece if nothing else, and it has a certain earnestness and sincerity to it.  I get the impression he was a decent guy.

For All the Tea in China -- Sarah Rose

Well-written book about Robert Fortune, one of those eccentric Victorian gentleman-adventurers who littered the nineteenth century.  He went on a years-long industrial-espionage trip to China (disguised as a Mandarin!) to spy out all the details of the process of making tea, and to steal enough tea plants and seeds to grow tea outside of China (this was the origin of the Indian tea industry.)  When he went, English scientists didn't even know if black tea and green tea came from the same plant (they do; the difference is in the treatment of the leaves after they're picked.)  You can make either green or black tea from any tea plant, but some varieties make better black and some make better green.  It turns out that India is pretty much entirely devoted to black tea just because some East India Company underling mishandled the green-tea varietals that Fortune sent and they didn't survive.  Very good  reading.  

A Song in Stone -- Walter H. Hunt

Fantasy story about a BBC TV host who mysteriously finds himself living as one of the Knights Templar in the fourteenth century.  As I suppose is inevitable in a knight fantasy, he winds up involved with the Holy Grail.  The writing is okay, but overall I would say the book is neither good nor bad.

Reflections on the Revolution in France -- Edmund Burke

Burke's screed on the French Revolution, which he opposed violently.  He had previously supported American independence, but he regarded the two as fundamentally different: in his view the Americans were really fighting to maintain the independence that had existed de facto for decades, and more importantly, they were not proposing any real social change.  Whereas the French were engaged in a revolution in the strictest sense -- they were overturning every facet of society, not just the form of government but everything -- abolishing monarchy, abolishing nobility, abolishing the Church, abolishing the principle of subordination.  It was this last that seems to me to be what Burke most strongly objected to, although he mainly bases his essay on the divine right of kings (for such an intelligent man, he engages in some surprisingly stupid rationalizations about that, where he tries to both deny the right of the people to overthrow a king and at the same time stress the legitimacy of the Hanoverian dynasty -- which only held the British throne because the previous dynasty was overthrown by the people.)  The heart of the essay is Burke's argument that abstract "rights" do not exist, and that subordination, where every man rules his inferiors and looks up to his betters, is the natural state of mankind.  It's such a hagiography of kings that Burke's enemies claimed he had been bribed to write it, but I think Burke didn't speak far beyond his own mind; he was in his sixties, after all, and by then was tending to the unreasoning conservatism of the old.

The Crack in the Lens -- Steve Hockensmith

The fourth of his books about the Amlingmeyer brothers, a pair of 1890s Montana cowpokes inspired to become private detectives after reading the Sherlock Holmes stories in Strand Magazine.  It's funny and well-written, but unlike the first three books I thought it felt a little formulaic -- the brothers stop in a small Texas town that happens to be where the love of the older brother's life was murdered (and really, shouldn't we have heard about this woman before, if she was so important?) and naturally there happens to be another recent murder tied up with the former one, and so on.  There was also a place where the narrative was spoiled by what I might call meta-knowledge: at one point our heroes have captured a bad guy and are smacking him around to get information.  The older brother heats up a pair of shears in the fire as a threat.  That's where I said to myself, "Okay, the author is making the point that this guy is so obsessed with catching the murderer that he's willing to torture this bad guy, but in this kind of story you can't have a scene where the hero tortures somebody, so the only way out of this is for the hero to be just about to do it but be delayed by his brother arguing about it, whereupon the Bystander We're Not Identifying With will seize the shears and get to it; that way the hero gets the information but keeps his hands clean."  Which of course was exactly what happened.  Good writing shouldn't make you look behind the curtain to that extent.

Max Carrados Mysteries -- Ernest Bramah

Mystery short stories from the teens and twenties, about the blind detective Max Carrados, who draws masterful deductions from hearing descriptions of cases.  Not bad, but not particularly memorable.

A Distant Mirror -- Barbara W. Tuchman

An excellent book, in which Tuchman makes a really good case that the fourteenth century was the very worst time in European history. 

Why Black People Tend to Shout -- Ralph Wiley

Most of this hasn't stayed with me, though I do remember that I found it off-putting that Wiley kept saying "black people this" and "black people that" as though they were all one homogeneous club.  I also did not find persuasive Wiley's argument that Joe Morgan was a better second baseman than Rogers Hornsby because "I saw Morgan play and he was the best!"  

Scat -- Carl Hiaasen

A pretty good young-adult book about some high-school kids who change their opinion about their mean and scary teacher when they find out about the lengths she'll go to to save the life of an endangered Florida panther cub.  There's a good sub-plot about our hero dealing with his badly-wounded father's return from Iraq.  I liked it.

The Trojan War -- Barry Strauss

More a work of reconstruction than history.  Strauss is working almost entirely without evidence, so it's really a what-might-have-happened story, with some digressions about "how much reliance can we place on the accuracy of Homer's details?"  (Strauss' answer: probably a lot.)

The Pine Barrens -- John McPhee

Good book on both the natural history of the great Pine Barrens of New Jersey and the culture of the inhabitants.  The Barrens are about a million and a half acres of pine forest; when McPhee was writing there was a big push to develop the area (which would mean levelling the forest and building a city and an airport on the land.)  As it turned out that didn't happen, partly because the sandy soil under the trees absorbs so much rain water that it's the main source for recharging the aquifer that provides both Philadelphia and New York with drinking water. 

The Deportees -- Roddy Doyle

Short stories written in the last eight or nine years, most of them very good.  The title piece is the best, sort of a twenty-years-later sequel to his 1986 novel The Commitments.  A lot of it is about Irish "identity", a question that never used to arise when Doyle was young, but which came rather to the forefront in the nineties when thousands of Nigerians emigrated to Ireland; Doyle says that the influx of blacks brought out a lot of racism in the Irish, which he found surprising and painful.  A lot of the book is about that.

 The Well of the Saints -- John Millington Synge

A pretty good play from the turn of the 20th century about a blind beggar who has his sight restored by water from a holy well; once he has his sight he becomes dissatisfied and consequently disliked.  Worth reading just for the lovely way the Irish peasants talk (though the Irish papers wanted to have Synge's plays banned for that very reason.)

Identity Theft -- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction short stories, some better than others.  The title story is the best, a hard-boiled private detective story set on Mars, where wealthy people have their personalities downloaded into non-aging android bodies; a man comes to our hero complaining that he thinks someone made a second copy of his personality and is using it for criminal purposes.  Interesting problem.  The solution was pretty clever, too.

Einstein Defiant -- Edmund Blair Bolles

Very good book about the battle of ideas between Einstein and Bohr about, essentially, whether knowledge is a priori.  Einstein (and like-minded people) believed that the purpose of scientific inquiry is to discover and understand the nature of the Universe; Bohr (and his followers) believed that purpose of scientific inquiry is to provide formulae that lead to useful mathematical results, and that understanding the Universe is neither possible nor desirable.  The title comes from the fact that Bohr apparently had tremendous force of personality, and Einstein was one of the very few people who could maintain an opposing stance while Bohr hammered at him.

Reprinted Pieces -- Charles Dickens

Magazine pieces from Dickens's later life.  Some very interesting articles on nineteenth-century police work, including an account of Dickens doing the Victorian equivalent of a ride-along with the police on a night stake-out on the Thames.  Good reading.

The James Boys -- Richard Liebmann-Smith

This was much better in concept than execution.  The conceit is that  Frank James, Jesse James, William James, and Henry James were all brothers.  That could have been a great story but it wasn't.  For one thing, the author is overly concerned to show he's done his homework, so he quotes his sources too often -- like, whenever he  describes one of the Jameses, he always says "as so-and-so said in a letter to so-and-so," which gets tiring after a while and also breaks up the narrative flow.  There's a terrific scene where Henry James is kidnapped off a train during a robbery -- but all the comedy of seeing Henry James riding a mustang with a gang of robbers is kind of spoiled by having five in-line citations in the middle of it.  The author also would have been better off just saying Frank and Jesse were illegitimate half-brothers or something, instead of making them Henry and William's real-life younger brothers in disguise; not least because there's no explanation of how the younger Jameses -- fervent abolitionists who were volunteers in the Union  -- became the James Gang, famous Confederate sympathizers.  Also it's not well-written; the prose drags.  It was a great idea, but I wish someone else had had it.

Marsbound -- Joe Haldeman

Science-fiction novel about colonizing Mars.  I didn't think it was very interesting.  I also thought the bad guy -- an authority figure who goes unreasonably far out of her way to make trouble for the teenage protagonist for no reason that is ever explained -- was kind of cardboard.  And the book didn't end so much as stop, though of course that's normal for Haldeman.

Little Dorrit -- Charles Dickens

One of Dickens' later novels, the story of a young girl raised in the Marshalsea Prison, where her worthless father is imprisoned for debt.  It's excellently written, but I thought the structure of the second half of the book could have been better; I prefer reading about the good characters, but the bad characters get too much screen time at their expense.  If nothing else, the book is great for its wonderful description of the Circumlocution Office -- whose function is to prevent anything from being done -- and the Barnacle family, who have built great careers on the recognition that the whole function of the British Empire is to provide salaried positions for the Barnacles.  Good book.

Thirty Phone Booths to Boston -- Don Kardong

A collection of articles written for running magazines between '79-'81 by a marathoner.  They're not bad, and it's interesting to see what the running world was like then (right after Rocky started the jogging fad) but I can't get away from the writer's blindness on the topic of training.  He was a serious competitor and ran in the '76 Olympics and stuff; but on the one hand he breezily dismisses the importance of diet -- remarking proudly that he lives on beer and Froot Loops, and scorning nutritionists as know-nothing faddists -- and also mentions that he doesn't train rigorously, or use a coach, or take preparation very seriously, and oh yeah, he makes a point of never drinking anything during a run.  And on the other hand, he laments that for some unaccountable reason, after fifteen miles or so he always cramps up and vomits, and sometimes completely crashes and can't finish.  He considers this a complete mystery.

Unknown Quantity -- John Derbyshire

Well-written history of algebra.  The author did a very good job making everything accessible up until the 1960s or so, when he had to admit that by that time most fields of algebra had become so specialized that even most professional mathematicians couldn't understand them.  I can't fault him for that; I mean, you try explaining what motivistic cohomology is.

The Great Train Robbery -- Michael Crichton

Terrific fictionalized history of the first known theft from a moving train (technically it was a burglary, not a robbery -- the thief got in and out without having to confront anyone -- but I suppose "The Great Train Burglary" wouldn't look as cool.)  The book sticks reasonably close to the facts, cleaning up the order of events and sensationalizing some of them to make a better story.  A fun read.

The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide -- Robert H. Frank

A good book on macroeconomics, mostly discussing various approaches to the "status problem": a great deal of discretionary spending goes toward raising one's own status, but because status is not absolute but rather measured against other people's status, any gains you make are obviated when other people also raise their status, so the outcome is that everyone spends a lot of money and no one gains anything.  A good analogy is seating at a stadium: everyone has a good seat and a good view, until someone stands up to get a better view, which makes people around that person stand up, until in the end everyone is standing, which means everyone has exactly as good a view as before, but now no one gets to sit down, so it's a net loss for everyone.

The Artist and the Mathematician -- Amir D. Aczel

Interesting biography of the greatest mathematician who never existed, "Nicolas Bourbaki", who was actually a pseudonym used by a group of French mathematicians in the middle of the 20th century.  (They took the whole thing really seriously, going as far as printing invitations to Bourbaki's daughter's wedding, for example.)  They had a powerful effect on formal rigor; unfortunately they also indirectly led to the New Math, which confused two generations of school children before being justly abandoned.  Several of the members of the Bourbaki Club were pretty seriously strange people; it's entertaining reading.

Pascal's Wager -- James A. Connor

Very interesting biography of Pascal, written by a Jesuit.  Doesn't deal much with his mathematical achievements, concentrating more on the Provincial Letters and Pensées, and his conversion to radical Jansenism.  Naturally, since the author is a Jesuit and Pascal more or less dedicated his life to opposing the Jesuits, the book has a bit of a "why Pascal was wrong about everything" flavor to it; but it's surprisingly sympathetic even so.  I did get the feeling that Pascal must have been a rather pitiable person, if he was so strongly drawn to the Augustinian doctrine that the Earth is a moral wasteland and men are inherently worthless wretches who will be deservedly cast down when the Judgement comes.  (Of course, Pascal would be filled with outraged contempt at my own Thomist belief that people are basically decent and God's attitude towards us is loving rather than wrathful, so I suppose we're even.)

Unseen Academicals -- Terry Pratchett

This was very entertaining, but structurally unsatisfying; it was really a collection of sub-plots without a main plot to hang them on.  There were also a number of strong supporting characters, but no protagonist.  Despite that, there's a lot of good writing in it -- I liked the soccer scenes even though I'm not at all interested in soccer -- and I particularly liked the crab bucket metaphor.

Juliet, Naked -- Nick Hornby

This is rather an example of a typical late-20th-century novel archetype: a spouse coming to realize, after years of marriage, that his/her partner is stupid and worthless and they've never had anything in common.  The catalyzing agent, in this case, is an album; a reclusive Salinger-type musician, who has been out of sight since his big album twenty years ago, releases the  pre-production tapes of that same album (sort of like when Springsteen released his demo tape of "Born in the USA", which was a slow acoustic piece that sounded nothing at all like the final version.)  Our heroine's husband -- an obsessive fan of that musician -- goes bonkers over it, which leads in a roundabout way to the end of their crappy marriage.  Hornby gets a good deal of mileage out of making fun of the obsessive fans and the bordering-on-creepy web site where they bicker over insane minutia; I'm guessing he's writing from experience with his own fringe-type fans.

The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet -- Arturo Perez-Reverte

The fifth novel of el Capitan Alatriste.  This one is a little less of a mood piece and more of a character study than the others were.  It looks at the culture of machismo that was the strength and weakness of Imperial Spain: Alatriste is carrying on an affair with a famed actress; when he finds that the same actress has begun an affair with the King of Spain, he will not do the prudent thing and leave the field -- not because he really loves the actress, which he doesn't, but because he cannot be seen to back down, not by his peers, not by his ward Inigo, and especially not by himself.  Good read.

The Professional -- Robert B. Parker

Sorry to say it now that he's dead, but this was complete crap.

Rubicon -- Tom Holland

Good account of the people and events leading up to the Roman civil war of the fifties and forties BC.  Really did a good job of bringing out the point that none of the people involved really understood that they were bringing down the Republic.  It all seems inevitable to us looking back, but Caesar probably really thought he could make himself Dictator (a constitutional office, after all) and still maintain the traditional forms of government; Pompey probably really thought the Senate could put down Caesar and still keep the support of the people.  In hindsight, it seems Caesar wanted to have it both ways: to break the power of the Senate, but still maintain it to give himself legitimacy.  While the Senate was too concerned with preserving its privileges to take any really forceful action, which is why the generals grew so powerful in the first place.  In the end the only winner was Augustus, who (being a lot younger than all the others) was the only one willing to throw aside all tradition and precedent and establish a reign based on pure power behind a false front of populism.  It was well told.

SuperFreakonomics -- Steven R. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Their second book on contrarian economics.  It was pretty good.  I liked the point they made in the chapter on unconventional ideas about global warming: some media figure, probably Al Gore, said something like "We don't even know enough to curb our CO2 emissions," and the authors point out (correctly, I think) that of course we know enough to stop emitting CO2; we just don't want to.  So it might be better to come up with a more active plan than pestering people to reform when we know they're not going to.

The Enormous Room -- E.E. Cummings

An autobiographical novel of Cummings' experience in World War One, when he and a friend were the only two college men in a truck company in France; the two of them openly despised their fellow-soldiers and also their commander, and when the friend was arrested (because his letters home contained some sentiments that, in wartime, might have been called subversive) Cummings was arrested too, though never charged with anything, and held prisoner for several months.  He draws the whole experience as a conscious parallel with A Pilgrim's Progress, and his descriptions of the prison and prison life (and especially of his fellow-prisoners) are excellent.  Of course it was written after the fact, and I think I can be forgiven for doubting that Cummings, when facing his interrogators, was quite as happily defiant and devil-may-care as he represents.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors -- Roddy Doyle

Depressing novel about an Irish working-class woman with an abusive husband, no-good kids, and bad relations with her parents and siblings.  I stopped reading halfway through since I couldn't see any point to the book other than "Look how miserable I am!"

Mind Wide Open -- Steven Johnson

A book about brain-mapping and thinking about thinking.  I've liked other books by Johnson, but I found this one dry and uninteresting.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood -- Charles Dickens

Dickens's last book; he died when he was just about halfway through (I've seen the manuscript at his house in London; the writing literally trails off the page where he collapsed in mid-word.)  I liked it a lot.  There's a great deal of argument, naturally, about what would have happened; my own feeling is that Drood doesn't seem like the sort of person who deserves murdering in a Dickensian story, so I suspect that when his uncle strangled him, he (the uncle) was so strongly under the influence of opium that he didn't realize he hadn't finished the job, and Drood later recovered and fled.  Probably the mysterious stranger Dick Datchery is Drood in disguise (it being an understood truth of Victorian fiction that all disguises are impenetrable.)  I'm sorry it was never finished.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian -- Sherman Alexie

Autobiographical novel about growing up on a reservation in Washington and going to a white school.  There's a powerful scene when the hero is excited for his first day of high school, until he opens his new math book to see his mother's name written inside the cover and realizes the text is forty years old.  This causes a sort of mini-breakdown, which he comes out of with the depressing realization that the only way out of ending up like his relatives, almost all of whom have died from alcohol, is to leave the reservation, which means  attending the white people's high school twenty miles away.  Since there's no bus to the reservation, and his father is good-hearted but unreliable (because of booze) he has to hitch-hike (and sometimes walk) back and forth to the high school.  Of course he's not well received at the white school, while his friends on the reservation regard him as a traitor and stop talking to him.  It's a good story.

The Mummy Congress -- Heather Pringle

Good book about mummies and the people who study them.  It turns out it's actually hard to get a grant to study mummies, even though mummies are unfailingly the most popular exhibits at museums, so mummy people have rather a hard time of it.  They have to travel around, often at their own expense, to archaeological digs and try to get at the mummies the archaeologists dig up (which are usually just tossed aside) before something happens to them.  I hadn't known that a lot of mummies come from Chile, where the high altiplano preserves them.  (Did you know there are whole ancient cities in the mountains there that are almost four miles above sea level?  And people lived there?  I can't imagine.)

Christian Science -- Mark Twain

Mark Twain's opinion of faith healing and Christian Science generally.  His conclusions: faith-healing, whatever name you want to put on it, often works very well (the Christian Scientists insist that what they do is different from other forms of psychosomatic treatment, though no difference is apparent to anyone else.)  He castigates the Church for being money-hungry and for creating a dictatorial power structure falsely elevating Mary Baker Eddy to divine status.  He also spends about a quarter of the book studying her textbook (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures) with her letters and autobiography, and concludes that they were not written by the same person.


Looking Around -- Witold Rybczynski

A collection of essays on architecture, including a good defense of the suburban bungalow.  Notes that many architects seem more concerned with grandiose facades than in creating something that real people have to use.  He does show a little too much respect, in my view, for Le Corbusier and I. M. Pei, my two least favorite architects (blowing up everything they ever built would be a major benefit to humanity.)


The Battle of Life -- Charles Dickens

The fourth of the "Christmas" novellas, and the only one without a supernatural element.  I liked it a lot, mainly for the splendid law firm of Snitchey and Craggs (and their wives), some of Dickens' very best minor characters.


My Own Kind of Freedom -- Steven Brust

When I heard that Brust couldn't get his "Firefly" novel published, I just assumed it was because of legal issues with Fox or something.  But when he made it available on the net, I realized that in fact he couldn't get it published because it's really awful.

Rodney Stone -- Arthur Conan Doyle

A boxing novel with some Gothic elements, set during the Peace of Amiens (1802-1804).  Our hero is a country boy, the son of a naval officer, who comes to London under the auspices of his uncle, a famous beau and friend of the Prince Regent.  The plot isn't that complicated; the events of the novel are really just an excuse for the prize-fighting scenes, which are very good.

The Number Sense -- Stanislas Dehaene

Dry but fairly interesting study on how we perceive numbers.  Shows that "lightning calculators" -- those guys who can do enormous sums in their heads almost instantly -- are using the same mental processes as everyone else, just much faster.  (For one thing, the ratio of the time it takes them to do smaller problems to the time to do larger problems is proportionally the same as for ordinary people.)  What I found most interesting is that animals and humans have a measurably different instinctive understanding of numbers.  An animal can tell the difference between, say, two and nine (at least to the extent of understanding that nine is larger than two) but not between eight and nine.  Rats, given the choice between two piles of food, one with (say) three pellets and the other with (say) ten, will always go for the larger pile.  But if you show them two piles that are close in size -- say one has five pellets and the other has seven -- they show no preference.  They can't discern a difference that small.  Human one-year-olds, on the other hand, when shown (say) two piles of candy, one with five pieces and the other with six, will always go for the larger pile.

Bottom of the Ninth -- Michael Shapiro

The story of Branch Rickey's far-sighted attempt to create a third major league, which in his vision would (after a few years of experience) eventually play the other two leagues in a round-robin World Series.  This was his alternative to the planned expansion of the existing major leagues, which he predicted would lessen the excitement of pennant races and create several years of unbalanced and uninteresting baseball (because you would have established teams kicking around the expansion teams.)  He was right on both counts, of course, and the author makes a persuasive case that the owners would have been better off in both the short run and the long run by going along with Rickey's idea; but baseball's owners were (and are) unreasoningly conservative, and when William Shea abandoned Rickey for the promise of a National League franchise (the expansion Mets) the idea came to nothing.  An interesting look at what might have been.

The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain -- Charles Dickens

The last of the "Christmas" novellas, and the only one I didn't like, since I thought the Ghost's bargain was unfair.  It wasn't wrong of Dr. Redlaw to wish he could forget the wrongs other people have done him; the Ghost's punishment is not poetic justice.  


The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven -- Sherman Alexie

Short stories, mainly autobiographical, about growing up on a reservation in Washington.  They're sad but not depressing, somehow.  At one point Alexie read Tolstoy's line from Anna Karenina that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and he said, "That may be true for white people, but for Indians, every unhappy family is unhappy for exactly the same reason: alcohol."

Looking For a Ship -- John McPhee

Very good book about the United States Merchant Marine and the troubles sailors have to go to these days to find a berth, what with the number of ships declining and especially the size of ships' crews declining.  I was astonished to see that McPhee took a voyage on a merchant ship in the early 1990s that went down the East Coast, to the northern part of South America, through the Panama canal, up the West Coast, and back -- and was attacked by pirates four times in that journey alone!  The crew's way of dealing with it was just to hide when the pirates came -- resisting would just get them shot, and there was no way the pirates could carry away a really big part of the cargo anyway.  This is the same reason the pirates aren't suppressed: defending the merchant ships would cost more than the price of the goods lost to piracy, so the merchant companies just let it go.  Amazing.

My Uncle Oswald -- Roald Dahl

Kind of strange book about a ladies' man in the twenties who devises a get-rich scheme involving using a powerful aphrodisiac to obtain sperm samples from famous artists, kings, and writers and sell them to snobby women hoping for special children.  It wasn't very good.

Beautiful Swimmers -- William W. Warner

Very good book on crab fishing in the Chesapeake.  Contains a lot of great stuff on the natural history of the Chesapeake blue crab, and on the process of crabbing.  Did you know they can crab eggs and sell them as "crabiar"?  Excellent book.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc -- Mark Twain

This is a fictionalized biography of Joan of Arc, as told by the narrator, an imaginary childhood friend.  It's not very good.  Twain's usual healthy skepticism seems to have deserted him for once, and he shouts forth his adoration for Joan as only a nineteenth-century man in the throes of hero-worship can.  I mean, by page two I was already sick of hearing about how Joan was the most perfect human being who ever lived, and there were four hundred pages still to go, you know?  I wouldn't recommend it.

Farewell to Io -- Suzanne Palmer

A very good science-fiction novel, mostly set in a city on a mining planet run by a powerful artificial intelligence, whose center of awareness resides in the robot body of a dog (the man who designed it had a weird sense of humor.)  It's well-written and funny, though it might be a bit overburdened by too many characters.

Eureka Man -- Alan Hirshfield

This is kind of two books.  The first half is a biography of Archimedes, but since not enough is known about him to fill a book, the second half is mostly about the book that is now known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, which contains the only copies of several works of Archimedes.  I was surprised to find out that we don't even know if "Archimedes" was his real name; it literally means "Master of Thought", so it might have been a nickname.  I also remember reading, when I was in high school, about how Archimedes' "method of exhaustion" almost anticipated calculus 2000 years before Newton; but those accounts were written before the Palimpsest was discovered, and it's now known that Archimedes used infinity in his calculations in a way almost identical to infinitesimals, so there's no "almost" about it: Archimedes really did invent calculus.  Possibly it didn't survive just because no one had a use for it then.

The Misplaced Legion -- Harry Turtledove

Alternate-history novel where about half of one of Caesar's legions is transported by magic to another world, where they take service as mercenaries under the dominant power.  Turtledove was an academic historian before he was a fantasy writer, and the "alternate world" the Romans have come to is obviously based on eleventh-century eastern Europe; the nation the legionnaires serve is the Byzantine Empire under another name, while its enemies are lightly disguised versions of Persia and Armenia.  It's mainly a battle-piece, and pretty good reading; the story ends at the conclusion of the alternate-world equivalent of the Battle of Manzikert, with the Emperor defeated and our heroes wondering which path to walk since civil war is certain.  I imagine that's what the sequel will cover.

Caviar -- Inga Saffron

Very good natural history of sturgeon and the rise and fall of the caviar industry.  There were large populations of sturgeon in Germany and the United States at one time; they were fine as long as caviar was generally thought of as pig feed, but once it became a luxury food both populations were overfished to extinction.  The author says it's generally agreed that the only thing that kept the Caspian sturgeon from the same fate was the draconian regulation of the Soviets; now that seven different nations border the Caspian (and only Iran makes any effort at fishing it responsibly) the Caspian sturgeon is also on its way out.  The problem is that the sturgeon takes twenty years to grow enough to start producing caviar, and people aren't willing to wait.  In the last ten years, almost all the famous caviar houses have gone out of business for lack of material.  The author expects that sturgeon will be completely extinct in another ten years or so.  She also mentions that if you've eaten caviar since 1995 or so, regardless of what the can said on the label, it almost certainly wasn't sturgeon caviar; it's much more likely that it came from American paddlefish or something similar.  Even luxury airlines who serve "Beluga caviar" to the customers in first class are really giving them paddlefish.

Gentlemen of the Road -- Michael Chabon

An excellent adventure novel set in the tenth century on the western coast of the Black Sea.  The heroes are two soldiers of fortune, a Frankish Jew and an Abyssinian Jew, who become involved in a war for succession to the Khazar throne.  Well-written, exciting, and funny, everything you'd want in an adventure story.  I loved it.

The Fellowship -- John Gribbin

Interesting account of the founding and early years of the Royal Society.  Argues that Newton is more a product of the Society than is generally recognized.  Several of Newton's ideas, including the inverse-square relationship, actually came from Robert Hooke; but Hooke and Newton hated each other, and Newton childishly cut out the parts of his Principia where he gave Hooke credit (you can see in the first drafts where Newton crossed out any mention of Hooke's name.)  Newton was, as the author remarks, "an almost unbelievably strange person", but I am not convinced by Jardine's argument (which the author quotes approvingly) that Newton's remark about "standing on the shoulders of giants" was actually a mean-spirited attack on Hooke (referring to his crooked back and short stature.)  I think it's far more likely that the line means exactly what it says and nothing more.

Godel, Escher, Bach -- Douglas R. Hofstadter

I read this when I was eighteen, but it was right at the outer edge of my comprehension.  Since then I've learned a lot more about math and programming (and listened to more Bach) so I got a great deal more out of it this time.  It's a long discussion of self-referentiality and its application to various subjects -- mathematical systems, language, music, and computer programming, interspersed with clever "dialogues" among various imaginary characters discussing paradoxes (inspired by Lewis Carroll's dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise.)  Finishes up with a long discussion of artificial intelligence.  One thing about the book that stayed the same both times: my friend Ben Thompson described the book to me when I was a freshman, which was why I read it the first time, and I was a bit disappointed to find that Ben's descriptions of the dialogues were better than the actual dialogues.

Home Town -- Tracy Kidder

An account of the city of Northampton, Mass., in the nineties, and how it looks to the people who live on the underside -- the cops, the addicts, the homeless, the people on welfare.  Most of it follows around a townie cop who let the author ride around with him for a year or so.  I liked it, and I didn't think it really had an ax to grind -- no city is going to look good from a cop car at three AM.  On the other hand I took a bit of an exception to Kidder's remark that Northampton's pleasantness is "deceptive".  It isn't.  Northampton really is a genuinely pleasant place; there's no big billboard saying "There are absolutely no problems here, Northampton is basically the Land of Oz!"  I also had to think a bit about how Kidder says in the preface that although Northampton is well-known for having a large lesbian community, there are none in his book; he says that he wasn't going by a checklist, he only wrote about the people he happened to find interesting.  Okay, fair enough.  But then what does that say about Kidder that the people he found interesting were addicts and child molesters?