Category: Uncategorized

Maxwell, John C. – The Difference Maker: Making Your Attitude Your Greatest Asset, 2006. Full of clichés, short, and dull. Why did I read the whole thing? D

Brock, Betty – No Flying in the House, 1970. OK kids’ fantasy which I’ve picked up many times & finally read. C+.

It was my 43rd birthday yesterday and I’m working on a 101 Goals in 1001 Days project, one section of which is daily goals to strive for. One goal is logging books immediately after I read them, since otherwise they pile up and I still never “catch up.”

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1946. Prompted by seeing The Golden Compass, which which I see many parallels even though Pullman vociferously denounces Lewis and tries to set himself up as the opposite. Mark Studdock has no redeeming qualities at all, at least until 2/3 of the way through the book. It’s a flawed book but still I come back to it quite frequently. B

Heckel, Paul – The Elements of Friendly Software Design. 1991. B. I can see why this was revolutionary at the time, but it’s rather tedious now. Also, I find Heckel’s afterword on fighting for his patent rights bothersome. He’s the poster child for how the patent system can be abused (he manages to rationalize going after IBM instead of the company he believes infringed Zoomracks’ patent, basically because they are bigger.) Lots of interesting views of antique software and hardware. The weirdest is Viewdex’s technique of “scrolling” by rotating out not just the leftmost characters, but sometimes the leftmost vowels, so you go from NAME=Heckel, Paul to NM=Heckel, Paul to Hckl, Paul. Nice photo of the Sharp Model 500, a “portable computer that will fit in your briefcase” (I remember the weight of those “portables”) which includes a printer and “is typical of the high-end portable computers that QuickView software will run on.” Better than any of his own thoughts was this passage he quotes from Wilbur Wright:

No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false that it
possesses some elements of truth… After I get hold of a truth I hate to lose
it again, and I like to sift all the truth out before I give up an
error.

Montgomery, L.M
Anne of Green Gables – 1908 – A. I like the other books but none can touch this one.
Anne of Avonlea – 1909. B. Anne’s much less interesting once she grows up, so Montgomery has to bring in Davy to cause mischief (early example of the Cousin Oliver phenomenon).
Anne of the Island – 1915. B
Anne of Windy Poplars – 1936. B
Anne’s House of Dreams – 1922. B+
Chronicles of Avonlea – 1912. A- Montgomery does very well with short stories.
Further Chronicles of Avonlea – 1920. A-

Scott, Sir Walter
Ivanhoe – 1819 – B-. I’d never been able to get into any Scott but once I made it past page 50 it got better. Now I understand Knight’s Castle by Edward Eager better—Rowena is kind of a pill.

Nancy Mitford is one of my perennial favorites, especially The Blessing, which I first read as a teenager and still consider one of the funniest novels ever. I’m not a huge fan of Jessica Mitford, the other sister famous for writing, but Nancy’s autobiographical novels (Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love) make the family fascinating. I very much enjoyed this group biography, but alas, I read it early in 2006 (or even 2005?) and now no longer remember much of it. I had marked two amusing passages, though:

Nancy told of asking her nephew Stoker, when he was two and a half, “‘Can you talk?’ He answered, ‘Not yet.'”

Bob Treuhaft (Jessica’s American husband) was baffled by a telephone operator in England and handed the phone to his wife.

“What is the matter?” [Jessica] asked him. “She’s saying perfectly plainly that the number is Steeple Bumstead 267.” “That’s what I thought she said,” Bob answered miserably, “but I thought she was pulling my leg.”

I used to joke that if I had a blog, each post would start or end with “this might be my last post ever.” I think I’d better start doing that!

Balliett, Blue
Chasing Vermeer – 2004. Very good although not as brilliantly wonderful as I’d anticipated. It made me feel old not to have the energy to try solving all the puzzles and ciphers myself. That’s what Wikipedia is for… A

Blyton, Enid
Island of Adventure – 1944. I still have a tiny bit of sentimental attachment to some Blyton (particularly the Famous Five, because one of them is a real dog; also the Noddy illustrations, especially his cute little car), but boy is she lousy. Interesting to notice how repetitive and heavy-handed the description is; I guess that’s one of the things that makes it easy to read before one is particularly quick to pick up cues. She must have liked animals, because Kiki the cockatoo is the most memorable character (“Wipe your feet! Shut the door”), followed by Dinah with the ungovernable temper and Lucy-Ann the timid goody two-shoes. OK, for cardboard characters they sometimes are refreshingly realistic. Blyton also shows some inner-life-of-adults that explains why they get sick of the rambunctious kids. But wait… I think of Kiki as a cockatoo because she has a crest and that’s how she’s illustrated, but the text calls her a scarlet and grey parrot. Is there such a parrot, with a crest that it can “work up and down”? I haven’t been able to confirm that. C+

Cabot, Meg
All-American Girl – 2002. Recommended by my “little” sister (who’s now 15!) Very funny and very absorbing, and even the stereotypical characters (like Sam’s sister Lucy) turn out to have hidden depths. A

Christopher, John
The White Mountains – 1967; The City of Gold and Lead – 1967; The Pool of Fire – 1968. A classic trilogy whose images have stayed with me since I first read them, despite being mostly lifted from War of the Worlds crossed with Brave New World. A-

Collins, Wilkie
The Moonstone – 1868. Ground-breaking mystery and very amusing and enthralling, but I’d forgotten how weak the solution is. Believability was never Collins’s strength. A-

Daisey, Mike
21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com – 2002. Daisey was experiencing all the worst aspects of Amazon when people still bought that they were Different and a Noble Place to Work. He wittily deconstructs the simple capitalistic greed that led smart people to work crazy hours fulfilling warehouse orders. Very well-written to boot. A

Dickens, Charles
A Christmas Carol: In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas – 1843. I re-read this frequently anyway, but most recently after finally catching the Cider Mill’s version with Bill Gorman and Claus Evans. A+

Francis, Dick
I’ve been on a Francis kick in the course of which I’m finally giving up on some titles (I used to be a completist but have outgrown him to a certain extent).
Banker – 1982. A leisurely pace for a change. B
Flying Finish – 1966. Better/more plot than some, and one of the few really interesting lead characters, aristocrat-with-a-blue-collar-job Henry Grey. B+

Fredericks, Mariah
Crunch Time – 2006. Good YA about SAT prep; very Breakfast Club but also well-written. B+

Hoban, Russell
The Mouse and His Child – 1967. One of my very favorite books ever. It impressed me strongly as a kid and I still re-read it at least once a year, finding more each time. A perfect novel in so many, many ways. I am lucky to have an original, signed copy given to me by a FOF of Hoban’s; the inscription reads “FOR SHIRLEY AND ALFRED./WITH/BEST WISHES/FOR GOOD LUCK/ALL THE WAY/FROM HERE/TO/THE LAST VISIBLE DOG/FROM/Russ & Lil.” Am I a lucky duck or what? I think they gave it to me because I was a child and they thought it was a kid’s book. But it is so very much more. A+++

Jenkins, Emily
Toys Go Out: Being the Adventures of a Knowledgeable Stingray, A Toughy Little Buffalo, and Someone Called Plastic – 2006. Very cute talking-toy story with more-than-usually-distinctive characters. A-

LeGuin, Ursula
The Dispossessed – 1974. Brilliant, thought-provoking, touching, but now that I’m older Anarres seems excessively rough on families in a way I didn’t notice before. A+

Shute, Nevil
Beyond the Black Stump – 1966. Fascinating and devastating view of American society through the eyes of a young Australian girl. B+
The Breaking Wave – 1955. One of the saddest of his novels, though I had forgotten that it still has a hopeful ending. B+
The Chequer Board – 1947. Very advanced in anti-racism for its time; it’s depressing that moving to Australia seems to have set Shute back so far. A-
The Far Country – 1952. Shut doesn’t normally do very well with characters outside his stolid Anglo-Australian types, but the exiled doctor Carl Zlinter is an exception. Shute’s rhapsodies about how healthy it is to eat pounds of meat and dozens of eggs (comparing the Australian diet to England’s rationing) are unintentionally amusing, especially because there is quite a bit of medical setting. He also manages to make himself look foolish by taking a swipe at modern art:

The artist had modeled his style upon that of a short-sighted and eccentric old gentleman called Cézanne, who had been able to draw once but had got tired of it; this smoothed the path of his disciples a good deal.

Kindling – 1938. For some reason I remember this as a James Hilton novel; I think there’s one with a similar plot. I wouldn’t have known how autobiographical this was had I not finally read Slide Rule; it’s an interesting defense of overstating a company’s financial prospects to shareholders, for the sake of the employees’ livelihoods. B+
Landfall – 1940. B+
Lonely Road – 1932. B-
Most Secret – 1945. Very grim. B
No Highway – 1948. The closest to Shute’s real life, it seems like. A
Pastoral – 1944. B
Pied Piper – 1942. B
The Rainbow and the Rose – 1958. B
Round the Bend – 1951. A+
Slide Rule – 1954. Gets off to an incredibly dull start—Shute seems just as boring as his characters, with the added disadvantage of not being involved in a plot—but picks up in the fascinating story of the rival dirigibles commissioned by the English government, one with the private sector (Shute’s company) and one with the public sector. That story is not primarily about Shute, simply told by him, and that’s why it’s interesting. B
So Disdained – 1928. B-
A Town Like Alice – 1950. A
What Happened to the Corbetts – 1939. Minor. B-

Niven, Larry, and Jerry Pournelle
The Mote in God’s Eye – 1974. Niven and Pournelle excelled at combining a huge disaster-movie style cast of stereotypes with intriguing SF, and this is one of their best. A-

Uttley, Alison
The Sam Pig Storybook – 1965/1971. Are these stories so perfect partly because they are colored by familiarity and memory? I feel like I grew up along with the four little pigs, nurtured by Brock the badger. A+
A Traveler in Time – 1939. Psychologically-realistic time travel/historical fiction. A

Bester, Alfred
The Stars My Destination – 1956. I read this once before, at the height of my love of SF, but I don’t think I entirely followed the plot. The concept of jaunting changing so many aspects of society stuck with me, though. I’m glad to have re-read it but probably won’t again. B

Francis, Dick
Decider – 1993. One of the few (maybe only?) where the hero has children. Believable relationships, not-great plot with too many crazy/bad aristocrats. B

King, Stephen
The Dead Zone – 1979. King’s best ever, I think; much more SF than horror, which is probably a big part of why I like it so much. A
Firestarter – 1980. B+
The Stand – 1990. Why oh why did a basically smart guy like King decide to “update” a classic book in such a careless way? Can you even update a book set in the present without re-writing it? Why did I get rid of my original edition? It’s better and shorter. I was going to write something about how this is really fantasy because it’s about building something new, whereas horror is about dealing with a threat… or something. Alas, another essay half-written in my head that will probably never see the light of day. Original: A Update: B

Kipling, Rudyard
Just So Stories – 1902. B

Microcosmic Tales: 100 Wondrous Science Fiction Short-Short Stories – selected by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander – 1980. I used to love SF short-shorts, but they’ve shrunk on me, plus these are a little sub-par. Gone from the collection! C+

Pollan, Michael
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals – 2006. Brilliant, fascinating, first-person and research reporting at its best. Everyone should read this. Mind-altering and life-changing. A+

Rivoli, Pietra
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade – 2005. Fascinating and thought-provoking, though the author’s argument is not particularly clear (yay free trade, but sweatshops are still a problem). Most interesting chapter is about the used-clothing trade in Africa. B+

Sevilla, Charles M.
Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History – 1992. Pretty funny and mostly convincingly true (therefore a little depressing as well). B

The Last Picture Show, Larry McMurtry, 1966. Because of the Brokeback Mountain book club. B
Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously – Julie Powell – 2005. Fantastic. I want to read the whole blog. A-
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – David Sedaris – 2004. He’s funnier when reading his essays aloud than he is on the page. B+
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts About Being a Woman – Nora Ephron – 2006. I couldn’t put it down but it didn’t last—like potato chips. B

Our new neighbor Mark lent me this book—he met Dave Stamboulis in Thailand and keeps in touch with him. I love stories like this, but they’re not always well-told so I was wary. Mark indicated that Dave had published the book himself, and although it looked very pro on the outside, when I flipped through it I noticed that it ended abruptly in the middle of a sentence on page 342—the last section was missing (not ripped out, but mis-bound). I see from Amazon that it’s supposed to have 355 pages. But all my doubts were put to rest when I started reading, and now I really want to get my hands on those missing 13 pages!

Dave rode his bike all around the world, 7 years and 40,000 kilometers. He brings the reader right along with him, through experiences harsh and disgusting, beautiful and heart-warming. The chapters on China and Central Asia especially made me grateful to Dave for describing it so vividly (he is very candid about toilet conditons) that I don’t have to feel tempted to do it myself! He writes very well, both in describing the scenery and people and in reflecting on the nature of travel and the modern world. During his adventures he lives and works in various cities for extended periods, falls in love, gets married, travels with his wife, breaks up, and continues on the road. He meets farmers, artists, policemen, hoteliers, and lots of inquisitive children, most of whom ask for pens (you can read Chapter 5, where the “hello pen” greeting first comes up, here on Dave’s site for the book). There are a few wonderful pictures in the center section of this book, although it would be nice if they were in the order of his travels. (Many more are on his site.) Periodic maps help keep track of the journey. I especially enjoyed the epigraphs which head each chapter, quotes on travel which highlight its fascinations and contradictions. What particularly stands out are the contrasts between different countries: not only the food, lodging, and road conditions, but also the general tenor of people’s reactions to Dave, their happiness and frustrations, and the pace at which they lead their lives. Surprise, surprise—the US doesn’t come off particularly well.

It was particularly coincidental to hear about this book. I had recently ordered one on the exact same topic for the library, Tim Travis’ The Road that Has No End, after stumbling across the Travis’ website. I’ve started reading that book and while it’s also fascinating, by contrast with Stamboulis’ the writing is subpar. Dave may have self-financed publication of Odysseus’ Last Stand, but he does credit an editor and it was clearly carefully proofread, which makes a huge difference to a picky porcupine like me!

I didn’t realize this was Shute’s last book; it’s one of the best, with a decent plot and wonderful descriptions of machining. Epigraph: “An engineer is a man who can do for five bob what any bloody fool can do for a quid.” Keith Stewart, miniature machinist, goes on a quest to retrieve a legacy for his niece, and one of the main ways he wins people over is by showing them a tiny working four-cycle engine he’s designed and built. In my favorite scene he makes a set of metal eggs to comfort his grieving niece:

“We could do a silvery egg in steel, or a yellow egg if we heated a steel egg a bit, or a blue egg if we heated a steel egg quite a lot, or a grey egg if we case-hardened it. Or we could make a coppery-colored egg if we made it out of copper.”

Shute’s characters often sound incredibly stupid and dull when they talk—instead of using narrative license to improve dialogue, he makes it as bald and dopey as possible. Keith’s wife, Katie, although by her actions revealed as nurturing and sensible, comes across as intellectually limited. The novel is also marred by Shute’s unconscious racism and anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, he’s kind to his characters and his readers—somebody on the Nevil Shute site pointed out that in his later books there are no enemies, or even unhelpful people—all the conflict is situational. It’s a feel-good read with a very satisfactory ending.

Re-read — third or fourth, probably first read in the mid-80s to early 90s. I came to Shute not by way of On the Beach (his most famous book, not one of my favorites) or even A Town Like Alice (made into a popular TV miniseries, and is one of my favorites) but through my dad’s love for Round the Bend, which I first read as a teenager.

For almost a year I wrestled with the horrible Blogger/FTP-to-my-own-server “001 java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out” issue off and on (the wrestling was off and on; the problem was continuous). Clearly something changed overnight and the Blogger people were no help, but I do think I got myself all mixed around and MAYBE at some point it was related to my archives path… at any rate I have SFTP working as of yesterday and I’m not looking back. (I even went to the trouble of installing WordPress but have to merge the three blogs, or at least the two active ones, plus having to publish everything to Blogspot, including all the many posts I had in draft at that point, was the final hump I didn’t muster the energy to get over. And I like Blogger’s interface very much. It’s unfortunate that it’s the worst of both worlds, as I mentioned here.)

At any rate, I didn’t do the book blog thing for a long time and have just caught up with bare-bones listings (probably quite a few things fell between the cracks as well). Part of it was doing reviews for The Bridge (Binghamton’s independent media quarterly, which doesn’t have a web presence yet, alas), which killed a lot of my motivation to do it on my own. Writing briefly for Blogcritics did that too, unfortunately. But I guess it’s worth continuing for my own sake. I’ve thought about reserving “real” reviews for just some new-to-me books, and quirkier notes for re-reads… we’ll see. Right now I’m on a Nevil Shute kick and only one behind!