January 2017
- Better than Before – Gretchen Rubin, 2015
- The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance – Laurie Garrett, 1994 – Nature and Environment Book Club book
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov, 1955 (Second Monday book club, and a re-read)
- The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money – Carl Richards,
2012 - Folklore and Legends of Rochester: The Mystery of Hoodoo Corner & Other Tales – Michael Keene, 2011
- Inside Job – Connie Willis, 2005
- Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934); To You, Mr. Chips (1938) – James Hilton (re-read of GMC for the umpteenth time; TYMC first and probably last time)
- The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope, 1875 – Forbes Great Books group book
- Oms en série – Stefan Wuhl, 1957
- Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything – Barbara Ehrenreich, 2014
- Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy, 1895 – Forbes Great Books group book (had read it as a teenager)
- People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks, 2008
February 2017
- The Wave – Susan Casey, 2010 – Nature and Environment Book Club book. The most disappointing choice so far. The actual wave stuff was great; the Laird Hamilton fangirling, not so much.
- Catch-22 – Joseph Heller, 1961 – Forbes Great Books group book
- Maia – Richard Adams, 1984 (umpteenth re-read)
- The End of Your Life Book Club – Will Schwalbe, 2012
- One of the Frank Burly detective books by John Swartzwelder. I can’t remember which one; probably The Time Machine Did It (2004). I skimmed a few others—Jonathan requested them through ILL. The author wrote a bunch of Simpsons episodes and it’s that kind of humor, only even more absurdist and ridiculous.
March 2017
- Heritage of the Star – Sylvia Engdahl, 1973 (umpteenth re-read)
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus – Charles Mann, 2005 – Nature and Environment Book Club book
- Pompeii – Robert Harris, 2003 (Second Monday book group)
- “Ethics and Temporality: when are moral propositions true?” Peter Caws, in H. Dyke, Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, 2003. – I went through a phase, or rather a habit I tried to pick up but didn’t for long, of reading one of my father’s essays a week so I could talk to him about them. We didn’t end up doing that, but I jotted down some notes; for this one, the question whether the axioms “slavery is wrong” and “13 is a prime number” were true at the time of dinosaurs, of Socrates, and now
- “Being Educated Any Time (But Especially in 1984)” Peter Caws, GW Forum, 1984 – the state of vs process of education; direct vs indirect knowledge (but what about skill practice as in math?)
- I, Claudius – Robert Graves, 1934 – Forbes Great Books group book. Too relevant to today, shudder!
- Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality – John Horgan, 2003
- “Why Should There Be Only Something — Why Not Much Rather Everything?” Peter Caws, undated talk – Knowing that vs knowing why. Quote from Peter Medawar: “research is the art of the soluble.” Philosophy tackling problems beyond our competence, but “philosophy is the art of the intelligible.” “The best evidence that there never was Nothing is that there is now Something.”–alternative to Something rather than supplement. Enlightenment comes from studying the limiters/negative controllers rather than origins and causes.
April 2017
- The Telling (2000), Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) – Ursula Le Guin (re-reads)
- Snowdrops – A.D. Miller, 2010 (Second Monday book group)
- “Learning to say ‘I’: the subject as patient and agent” – Peter Caws, 1994 – “obscurity of the normal surrounded with the clarity of the anomalous”
- Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? – Alan Weisman, 2013 – Nature and Environment Book Club book
- Lock In – John Scalzi, 2014
- Circus of Dr. Lao – Charles Finney, 1935