Hilary's Book Blog

• Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World – Edward Humes, 2024. Nature/Enviro selection, quotes TBD.
• The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage – Clifford Stoll, 2005. This was recommended by multiple people (I don’t remember where) and it’s indeed great. Plus it led me to Stoll’s amazing Klein bottle site.
• Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. For a Catherine Project group; quotes TBD.
• Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys, 1966. Great Books, quotes TBD.
• The Night Bookmobile – Audrey Niffeneger, 2008. I was hoping this was another novel like The Time Traveler’s Wife, but it’s a slim graphic novel, almost a picture book. I didn’t like it much but was having trouble putting my finger on exactly why – this Goodreads review did the work for me!
• Billy Budd – Herman Melville, left unfinished in 1891, published in 1924 in a version assembled by his widow; I’d like to read one of the updated versions. Re-read (after many decades) because of Far Out Film watching Beau Travail. A very interesting contrast between the two.
• Romola – George Eliot, 1863. Great Books selection; quotes TBD.
• Little Men – Louisa May Alcott, 1871. Children’s book group selection, re-read but I barely remembered it. What a weird mix of wacko kid behavior/observation and sentimental stories, with what feels like quite a bit of padding (“let’s stop everyone who comes to the schoolroom and make THEM tell a story!”)
• Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes, 1984. For the Massachusetts Center for the Book challenge, “A book found at a Little Free Library, tag sale, or used bookstore.” I picked this up from a free library in an old newspaper kiosk on Main Street because I’ve wanted to read it for a long time. I owned a copy for many years but never actually got around to it, so this felt good, and it’s not long. I wrote: “A wonderful book-length essay on Flaubert in a variety of forms, coated in a tiny bit of fiction – I don’t think it needed to be a novel, but it’s delightful in any case.” I really enjoyed it. Edited to add: Jonathan, who also read this, felt that I was selling it short because I didn’t mention how inventively Barnes plays with forms. (True – I’m often terse in my MCB writeups because I’m trying to get them done.) For example, the three different chronologies for Flaubert’s life: one standard, one focused on losses and love, one in quotes.
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen, 1823. I became addicted to the Trung Le Ngyuen read-along thread and had to re-visit. Then off to the 1995 BBC and 2005 film adaptations, so it turned into a P&P month. Thanks, @Trungles!
• Number One Joy Street – 1923. This first in an anthology series of children’s stories and poetry was in my grandmother’s collection and I remembered it fondly. It came up for smooth reading on Distributed Proofreaders so I was happy to help get it ready for Project Gutenberg. Alas, it doesn’t hold up as well as I hoped. I think as a child I enjoyed the illustrations more than the content.
• How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming – Mike Brown, 2010. An engrossing and enjoyable science memoir about Brown’s discovery of a tenth “planet,” Eris, leading to the demotion of Pluto.

I didn’t finish a book group selection (Second Monday), which is unusual for me. It was The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart, which I had been looking forward to. But it was not funny to me and very long, so I gave up after 150 pages. I still enjoyed the discussion but it didn’t make me regret dropping the book.

• The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James, 1881. I had just read this with Great Books in April, but a group of friends wanted to discuss it further and I ended up reading the whole thing again. I’m glad I did. I only marked a few more quotes which will all go in a post… eventually.
• The Island of the Blue Dolphins – Scott O’Dell, 1960. Multi re-read, for the ABC kidlit splinter group. Quotes TBD.
• The Mountain Lion – Jean Stafford, 1947. Second Monday selection; quotes TBD.
• Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life – E. O. Wilson, 2016. Nature Enviro selection; quotes TBD.
• Flood – Stephen Baxter, 2008. A post-apocalyptic novel where water released from the mantle exacerbates climate change induced sea rise. Interesting, not bad, not great.
• Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since – Walter Scott, 1814. Catherine Project book; quotes TBD.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel – Emmuska Orzczy, 1905. Great Books selections; quotes TBD.
• Psycho – Robert Bloch, 1959. From the list for the Massachusetts Center for the Book challenge, “A book with a sympathetic villain.” I wrote “Interesting to finally read this – I’ve heard so much about it. I knew the twist from talk of the movie (which I also haven’t seen) so that took some of the suspense away. A decent thriller, but not on the level of someone like Ira Levin. I did not find the villain sympathetic, though!”
• En Famille – Hector Malot, 1886. Comfort re-read; I often remember the part set in the spinning mills and Perrine’s island, and forget the very long and harrowing journey it takes to get there.
• Little Lord Fauntleroy – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1885. Another comfort re-read. Now I want to re-read The Blessing for the great parody of a socialist realism play maybe accidentally recapitulating LLF.

Articles – all by Peter Caws

Continuing my digitizing:

• “Reform and Revolution,” in Philosophy & Political Action (1972). How should philosophers engage with politics? He’s able to critique Friedrich Engels’ analogy, which compares political revolution to steam building up, because he understands the physics of steam:
  • “What makes it look so dramatic in teakettles, for example, is that the change takes place at the bottom where all the available space is already occupied by water, so that the steam has to bubble to the top. As an analogy for re­pressed change this is not bad, but it is not a mass phenome­non—a very small amount of water will make a very large bubble of steam—and there is nothing inherent in the change from water to steam that would sustain the revolutionary analogy.”
  • “unending war, deepening poverty, increasing alienation, worsening pollution, and so on” – plus ça change
• “Aspects of Hempel’s Philosophy of Science” – Review of Metaphysics, Vol 20 No 4 (1967)
  • “The case of little Johnny and the measles (p. 177), as an illustration of statistical explanation, is followed by the case of little Tommy and the measles (p. 237), so that one is grateful for the variety provided (p. 301) by little Henry and the mumps. (In [Philosophy of Natural Science] it is little Jim and the measles again, p. 58.)”

• Les cigares du pharon – Hergé, 1934. Not my favorite Tintin, but a good one – a comfort re-read.
• Astérix en Corse – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1973. Another comfort re-read; this one is a favorite from the Astérix and Obelix series (number 20). I think I learned from this book that people could get very angry but still calm down – the image of Octarinetabellatchitchix furiously nose-to-nose with Obelix and then saying essentially “I like you, kid” stuck with me.
• This Book Made Me Think of You – Libby Page, 2026. Ask a Manager commentariat rec, a charming rom-com set in a bookstore. I wanted to compile all the books mentioned in order to look some of them up, and thank goodness Page already did that.
• The Left Leg – Phoebe Atwood Taylor writing as Alice Tilton, 1940. Massachusetts Center for the Book‘s May challenge is “A book set in Massachusetts,” and coincidentally Jonathan had just recommended this Leonidas Witherall mystery. Alas it has very little state content, and although I found bits mildly amusing (like the annoying young woman they call “the Scarlet Wimpernel,” the take-charge Topsey Beaton, and the recurring joke that everyone calls Witherall “Bill” or “Shakespeare” because he looks so much like the playwright), it didn’t grab me. I wrote “A mildly-amusing mystery, indeed set in Massachusetts but without much local color.” I did look up one thing: “Stop-before-Entering streets” which as far as I can tell (see “Stop and Go”, top of page 4 in this Andover newspaper) was an early way of describing a street that has a stop sign at an intersection where cross traffic does not stop.
• James – Percival Everett, 2024. Re-read, this time for Second Monday. Quotes TBD.
• How to Become Mentally Superior – Henry M. Le Chatelier, 1926. Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders smooth reading.
• A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon – Kevin Fedarko, 2024. Nature/Enviro; quotes TBD.
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962 (tr. Ralph Parker). Great Books; quotes TBD.
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë, 1947. Re-read, this time for Amherst Book Group. Quotes TBD.
• Still Running: The Art of Meditation in Motion – Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, 2020. An interesting cross-over of running and meditation. I enjoyed it, and I’d like to try some of the excercises (like running while focusing on the breath, and stopping whenever you lose focus), but it didn’t blow me away.

Articles – all by Peter Caws

Papers by my dad that I’ve been digitizing – focusing on the ones from which his philosophical aphorisms were drawn.

• “The Case of the Athenian Stranger: Philosophy and World Citizenship” – Teaching Philosophy 8:2, April 1985. A great one!
• “The Ontology of Criticism” – Semiotext(e) 1:3, Spring 1975.
  • Lévi-Strauss, in his report to the Smithsonian Institution on the tribes of the Upper Xingu River, describes a magic use of certain tobaccos for what the natives called “seeing-smoking,” the inducing of a narcotic state in which they received messages, warnings, and visions; “the natives, he says, interpret reading as a sort of seeing-smoking.”
  • syntagma
• “Critical Innocence and Straight Reading” – New Literary History V:XVII, Autumn 1985.
  • polysemy
  • gavagai
  • “the possibility of literature is the most spectacular gift of language”
• “Instruction and Inquiry” – Daedalus, Fall 1974.
  • Re universities: “tak­ing in a homogeneous age group and putting them in courses by twenties or thirties can only be regarded as a form of lunacy. Students in universities are usually educated by accident, and this might be institutionalized by trying to make the uni­versity a higher-order analogy of the ‘biological soup’ out of which the earliest forms of life are supposed to have developed.”
• “Science, Computers, and the Complexity of Nature“, Philosophy of Science, v. 30, 2 April 1963.

• The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year – Margaret Renkl, 2023. Nature Enviro selection; quotes TBD.
• Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? – Lizzi Damilola Blackburn, 2022. Second Monday selection. I didn’t pull quotes exactly, but I did mark Nigerian foods to look up, so I’ll probably do a post.
• Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger Longer – Margaret Webb, 2014. I’m running the NY Marathon again this fall and checking out more running books. This one was music to my ears since I am old and have always been slow. I enjoyed Webb’s adventures and interviews, and it was a bit inspiring, but I didn’t learn anything much new.
• Exhalation: Stories – Ted Chiang, 2019. Massachusetts Center for the Book April challenge, “A short story or essay collection.” I wrote: “Nine great, thought-provoking stories, all loosely science fiction but very different in style, subject, and length. Chiang is a master of the form.” I loved most of these, but the one that sticks with me the most is “The Great Silence,” which was originally written for a video installation. It’s just as strong on its own.
• I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion – Brendan Leonard, 2021. Another browse selection from the Forbes running shelves. Eh, I like the idea of his graphics, but it’s better on Instagram, and even on Instagram I enjoy this kind of thing more.
• My Dog’s the World’s Best Dog – Suzy Becker, 1995. Dollar book from Raven, a cute 10-minute read and I love the sentiment, but nothing special. Back out it goes!
• The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James, 1881. Great Books selection, quotes TBD. I know I read it once before but didn’t remember a thing. Fantastic, even though in general I don’t love James.
• The Mote in God’s Eye – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 1974. Re-read again, for similar reasons to why I turned to it in 2022, but this time not just climate change…
• The Twenty-One Balloons – William Pène du Bois, 1947. Children’s splinter group selection; quotes pulled, TBD.

Short story

• “The First Full Thought of Her Life” – Deb Olin Unferth (published in her collection Wait Till you See Me Dance, 2017). A great Story Club selection that sparked an equally wonderful discussion in the comments.

Article

• “Scientific Method,” Peter Caws, entry in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Paul Edwards, 1967) – one of my dad’s papers I’ve been digitizing and uploading.
  • “‘Scientific method,’ if it has any univocal meaning, means the right mixture of observation and experiment on the one side, and theory construction on the other. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the proportions should be equal. … this should give pause to contemporary practitioners of sciences in which the data are piling up without any sign of fundamental theoretical clarification.”
  • “[Bacon said] the true scientist is like the bee, which goes to nature for its raw material but works it into a new product, rather than like the empiricist ant, which merely collects, or the rationalist spider, which merely spins out its own substance—but in his own work antlike qualities predominated.”

• Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks – Marcia Bjornerud, 2024. Fantastic! Nature/Enviro selections; quotes TBD.
• Wandering Stars – Tommy Orange, 2024. Second Monday; quotes TBD.
• Lucifer’s Hammer – Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, 1977. Multiple re-read.
• Bambi: A Life in the Woods – Felix Salten (tr. Whittaker Chambers), 1922. Children’s book slow read group selection. I read this many times growing up but probably hadn’t in a few decades. Quotes TBD.
• Passing – Nell Larsen, 1929. Great Books selection; quotes TBD.
• The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt, 2013. Mass Center for the Book monthly challenge: “A book featuring an unlikely friendship.” I wrote “Vivid writing, great characters – I really enjoyed this even though it could have been half the length.” I’d heard about this for so long and I’m glad I finally read it. On to The Secret History at some point!
• Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes – 2017, edited by Martin Edwards. Jonathan checked this out and passed it on to me. I enjoyed it but don’t remember much; genre short stories are often like potato chips and don’t stick with me.
• An Enchanted Garden: Fairy Stories – Mrs. Molesworth, 1892. I’m writing a fairy story so browsed my e-reader and found this book I had never read. Not bad but not great.
• Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up – Dave Barry, 2025. Most of the humor I’d read in his columns and books, but the autobiography was quite charming. I didn’t know he had been in bands from college on – no wonder he kept the Rock Bottom Remainders rocking!

No re-reads this month – that’s a little unusual but welcome!

• The Vocation Lectures – Max Weber, 1917-1919 (tr. Rodney Livingstone). My first Catherine Project seminar – I hope to do more. Quotes TBD.
• The Hallmarked Man – Robert Galbraith, 2025. Needed a real editor so badly! But apparently I keep checking these out, even though some of the past ones were so unmemorable that I completely forgot I already read them.
• Orbital – Samantha Harvey, 2023. Second Monday; quotes TBD.
• Raising Hare: A Memoir – Chloe Dalton, 2025. Nature/Enviro; quotes TBD.
• Piranesi – Susanna Clarke, 2020. Massachusetts Center for the Book reading challenge, “A book outside your usual genres or spin the genre wheel.” I wrote “The genre spinner gave me Fantasy, so I finally read this book that’s been on my to-read pile since it came out. I loved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and this didn’t disappoint – truly delightful and absorbing. I regret waiting so long!”
• Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory – Deena Kastor, 2018. The speaker at the Sugarloaf Mountain Athletic Club annual meeting mentioned this book several times, so I checked it out ASAP. I have mixed feelings about reading memoirs of super-fast people, since I’m so slow, but the mindset aspect was pretty good. My favorite part was Kastor following her coach’s advice for getting ready for an evening run: “Sometimes I was so giddy about it that when I climbed into bed for a nap I shouted out loud, ‘This is my job!’ and fell back into a deep slumber.”
• The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene, 1940. Great Books selection; quotes TBD.
• Book Lovers – Emily Henry, 2022. An Ask a Manager commentariat recommendation; I found it quite charming and enjoyed the mocking of the Hallmark small-town tropes. The setting wasn’t very plausible – only one restaurant but a three-story library with automatic doors and multiple meeting rooms – but I was happy to suspend my disbelief.
• Theo of Golden – Allen Levi, 2023. I heard about this huge bestseller in the Washington Post and was intrigued. Not great writing but I found it much more compelling than I expected, despite its flaws.

Short story

“Don’t Look Now” – Daphne Du Maurier, 1971. Far Out Film watched the Nicolas Roeg adaptation, which generated a great discussion. The story is good too but I prefer the film.

Not many books this month – huge work project and Bleak House is super-long!

• Ulysses – James Joyce, 1922. Re-read, with Amherst Book Club; quotes TBD.
• The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro, 1995. Second Monday; quotes TBD.
• Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-Than-Human World – Brandon Keim, 2024. Nature & Environment; quotes TBD.
• Bleak House – Charles Dickens, 1853. Great Books selection, re-read, and also satisfying the Massachusetts Center for the Book January challenge, “a book about or set in winter.” I wrote: “Snowstorm Fern was the perfect time to finish this classic, which climaxes in a carriage-ride through snowy London. It takes a while to build momentum but it’s worth the investment of time to meet memorable characters and one of the first detectives in fiction.” Quotes TBD.
• Moominsummer Madness – Tove Jansson, 1954. For the ABC spin-off childrens’ book group; quotes TBD.

Short stories

• “The Dead” – James Joyce, 1914. We read this after Ulysses; probably my 5th or 6th time. A masterpiece! Then we watched the 1987 John Huston movie, which was a disappointment.

• Lilac Girls – Martha Hall Kelly, 2016. For Second Monday. We all hated it – bad writing, lazy premise, offensive execution. I did look up krowki (sic – the book doesn’t even have Polish diacriticals, though it does French!), Satan from the Seventh Grade, and rice with molasses – probably molasses rice pudding?
• Underland: A Deep Time Journey – Robert Macfarlane, 2019. Nature/Enviro – quotes TBD.
• Excellent Women – Barbara Pym, 1942. Great Books – quotes TBD.
• The Star Beast – Robert Heinlein, 1954. Something prompted me to pick up this old favorite – maybe the conceit of the pet that grows up over centuries and is passed down through the family, but I don’t remember specifically. It’s one of Heinlein’s best juveniles, IMO. Was he consciously using “John Thomas” to be titillating/in-jokey, as in Promise Her Anything? Probably!
• The Big Jones Cookbook: Recipes for Savoring the Heritage of Regional Southern Cooking – Paul Fehribach, 2015. For the Massachusetts Center for the Book monthly challenge, “A cookbook or book about food.” I wrote: “Interesting history of Southern cooking with great-looking recipes – I’m especially intrigued by the roux/boiled milk icing. It was enjoyable to read even if I don’t get around to making any of the dishes!”