Ian Darke: "His forty-third goal for the US, he won't score many more important."
John Harkes: "No, he won't."

      

(modified 29JUN10)

I'm constantly looking for new music to listen to and talk about. As you can see by checking out lists from years past almost anything is fair game, so suggest something, or better yet, e-mail me something. (Book discussion begins not quite halfway down the page.)

• Sleigh Bells - "Kids." It shouldn't work: One guy running hyper-processed drums and guitars and samples over waffle-stomp beats, and one girl singing in monotone? Are you kidding me? BUT IT SO WORKS FOR ME!! Maybe it's the weird power-drill sample at the beginning, or the high-hat rat-a-tatting on the 64ths. Or the weird spoken-word samples peppering the mix. All of the above . (A live version with slightly more understandable lyrics...)
• Anjulie - "Boom." Very Amy Winehouse, very noir, with a chorus you'll catch yourself singing at the weirdest times. (Me? Walking to the car after a visit to Home Depot.) Found at Aurgasm.us.
• The New Pornographers - "Moves." Shades of "It All Comes Out In The Wash" by Self, but with what sure sound like cellos instead of guitars driving the main riff. With a tasty little piano counting off the 16ths! Found at www.fluxblog.org.
• Fab Samperi - "In The River." VERY catchy beat under what sounds like synthesized banjo, harmonica, and bass. (With vocals that sound like they were recorded a half-century before the instruments, this song would be right at home on Clothesline Revival's wonderful album Long Gone!) Found at Aurgasm.us.
• Not Drowning, Waving - "Crazy Birds." From the early 90s. Bongos, piano, some guitar, quirky Aussie lyrics and VERY tight drums. This has been a lifetime top-ten since I first heard it 15+ years ago. (There's no youtube of it but iTunes has it, which I only know because I long ago lost the CD and had to buy the song again!)
• Crystal Bowersox - "(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman" This lady wins; I called it the moment I heard her nail the "....so alive..." line. (Update 21MAY10. It's down to Crystal and Lee. I still think Crystal is better, but they're both so good, and it's clear the judges favor Lee, so no surprise—or disappointment, really—if Lee wins. I would pre-order a Crystal Bowersox double album without having heard a note, she's that remarkable.)
• Chris Mansell - "Welcome to Lunar Industries" Here's a case where a simple theme song—better yet, just a theme within that song—makes an already amazing movie even better. (Cool trivia: Mansell was in Pop Will Eat Itself.)
• Magnetic Fields - "You Must Be Out Of Your Mind."
  "You think you can leave the past behind,
  You think you can simply press rewind..."
  Gets better every time I hear it.
• Owl City - "Fireflies." Irresistible synth-intro leads to breathy singing about fireflies and hugs from ladybugs. I know, ACK, right? Well, not so fast. I listen to nearly all kinds of music and always have; from James Taylor, to XTC, to George Strait, to Surkin, to Amy Grant, to Animusic, to Marilyn Manson... and this era's version of bubblegum pop as well. You'll see the following sentence in at least three other places on these pages: I've always been a sucker for good pop song. As for the Owl City v. Postal Service war (which is taking on "East Coast v. West Coast" proportions) let this posting be my lone salvo.
• Sing Orpheus - "Lullaby." Slow, brooding. Mazzy Star meets the Red House Painters.
  * 2009* (recent first: Dec - Jan)

• Enya - "Trains and Winter Rains" Heard this as muzak in Home Depot, of all places.
• Colorpulse (feat. Carl Sagan & Stephen Hawking) - "A Glorious Dawn". People never cease to amaze and impress me. This time, someone ran some well-spliced clips from Sagan's landmark Cosmos series through an auto-tune and voila: Sagan sings perfectly in key. But in addition to the top-notch editing, Mr. Colorpulse here wrote and arranged the music the composition, which is amazing in its own right. Go to his webpage, DL some tunes (or the video itself), have a listen, and donate a buck or two! (NOTE: For a near-studio-quality version of the song, look for the remastered version by Cherimoya Eihn; It sounds much better an the audio track of the movie.)
• Beyonce - "Put A Ring On It". Just now getting around to this, which I realize puts me WAY behind the cool curve, but still; Catchy is catchy, and this song is what the word was invented to describe. (And the video? Sweet muscular JESUS! I could give you a moment by moment breakdown of why I love it!)
• Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez - "Batuque". The Ovation network showed Spalding Gray's "Swimming To Cambodia" the other day, after which they ran a 5 minute concert clip of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (all of whom were replete in "team jackets" of Venezuela's red-yellow-blue, unlike this clip where they're all in suits and dresses) led by Gustavo Dudamel, performing this piece. Hard to believe I'd never heard this nor even heard of it. There are two versions of the piece on YouTube, both a bit slower than Dudamel's verson. John Neschling & the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra from 2008, and Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, from 1958.
• Tavash Graham - "In My Soul". Just caught a snippet of it at the end of Rachel Getting Married (but iTunes isn't selling the soundtrack songs a la carte, and I don't want the whole album...)
• Dave Matthews Band - "Seven," and "Squirm," and "Why I Am," and "Baby Blue". I am not a Dave Matthews fanatic, but their new album is just SICK. "Seven" is a favorite since I've always been a sucker for unconvetional time signatures, and being written "in 7" definitely qualifies (7/4 or 7/8 depending on your quarters or eighths. For more on this see Jethro Tull's "Living In The Past" for an example of 5/4, or far less conventionally, Sting's "I Hung My Head" is written in friggin' 9/4.) "Baby Blue," for all its other remarkability, exists for me simply as the intro acoustic guitar lick; Can't get it out of my head! "Squirm" puts the omnipresent 5-4-1 chord progression into a bridge and makes is sound downright regal.
• Playing For Change - "Stand By Me (Song Around The World". An unforgettable version of Ben E. King's classic, performed primarily by a few New Orleans street musicians, but helped out by two dozen or so musicians (not counting the choir!) recording their tracks in a dozen or so different countries.
• Bo Burnham. Teenage YouTube commedian who's faster, far more clever, and has a sharper sense of comic timing than most comics twice his age. He made his name with out-of-nowhere youtube movies recorded in his bedroom; now he's got a Comedy Central special, albums on iTunes, a DVD for sale.
• Tim Minchin - "Some Pople Have It Worse Than Me." The first time you hear this you wn't gt mst f it. GO BACK AND LISTEN AGAIN: it really is that good. He's screamingly fast, tack sharp, and far far funnier than your average Aussie. (Which is saying something because as the world's non-Aussies—or anyone who just checked out the Archetecture In Helsinki video—have long known, Aussies are funny!) Don't believe me? Try this one, and, again, listen closely.
• Architecture in Helsinki - That Beep. They're Aussies, and they remind me a LOT of The Other Ones, some other Aussies, from the 80's. Unconventional instrumentation abounds but this is still ridiculously catchy!
• Lightning Head - "NPG". Unquestionably the jazziest thing on this page. Lots of delicious horns, but the thing that caught my ear was the bass, which does yeoman's work in the front half of the tune but is rewarded by establishing its own melody in the 2nd half. From their EP "Afrobeat," I found it hiding about a half-hour into a 45 minute mix file called "Fukstronaut Mix part 1" on Aurgasm.us.
  * 2008* (recent first: Dec - Jan)

• The Ting Tings - "That's Not My Name." The best one-guy-and-one-girl band since the White Stripes. (Maybe—maybe—better than Timbuk 3, but probably not as good as the Carpenters...which isn't saying much since the Carpenters, in their time, were un-friggin-conscious. And Miss Katie there is pretty dad-gum easy on the eyes, as they say.
• Koushik - "Lying In The Sun." The Association meets Wall Of Voodoo, meets My Bloody Valentine, meets some-really-good-scratch-DJ...what the hell else am I hearing in here...horns, a bunch of incidental non-musical sounds, some VERY tight drums that wander into and out of the mix. Hooky, poppy; extremely hard to resist. (Found at Puritan Blister and Spinner.)
• DJ Schmolli - "M.I.A.Wanted Dead Or Alive." A mashup between Bon Jovi and Mia. (Found at Puritan Blister.)
• The Asteroids Galaxy Tour - "Around The Bend." Teenage (sounding) girls singing lazily, musicians playing a fraction of a second behind the beat, yet it's a tight groove somehow. (Check out the Unabomber on drums.)
• Pink Spiders - "Gimme Chemicals." Hair bands are alive and well! Even if the Pink Spiders don't have long locks they sound like they should, and I mean that in a postive way: this is, at its heart, good old fashioned crunchy whomp rock, but with a new millenium edge. (...whatever THAT means...)
• Cheetah Girls - "Fuego." No apologies folks; catchy pop is catchy pop, and this is catchy sh*t!!
• Beta Band - "She's The One" and "Needles In My Eyes." I get a lot of cool songs from the TV show House. "Needles" is one such song, which then led me to "She's The One."
• Cold War Kids - "Hang Me Out To Dry". What could be simpler? Eight bars of octaves in G, then eight bars of octaves in E. I was hunting for a Halloween costume and this was blating on the system; Turns out one of the employees has it bad for CWK and is getting the word out. As, now, am I.
• Harvey Danger - "Little Round Mirrors". Recommended by a fellow DFW & Evan Dara fan. In fine Ben Folds fashion this treat starts with simple three-chord, major-mode piano, then after a minute adds what sounds a lot to my ears like french horn (Beatles-ish!) and builds to a remarkable finish that's both plaintive and frantic. Sure I like the Soul Coughings and XTCs and TMBGs, as well as the butt-kicking AC/DCs and Van Halens, and sure, I have also been known to worship artsy-fartsy "Warm Leatherette" kinds of things, and a lot of rap, and classical, and even (though not often) some jazz....but there's something to be said for a simple, pretty, pop song. Whatever else they're listening to a thousand years form now, this sort of thing will still be part of it.
• Clothesline Revival. Long Gone. Conrad Praetzel and Robert Powell have taken old a capella americana recordings—in some cases almost 70 years old—and undergirded them with modern musical foundations: drums, bass, acoustic and electric guitars, and a host of other instrumentation, to say nothing of the chord progressions, created with no cue save for the voices. IF YOU GO TO THEIR WEB SITE THEY HAVE OVER HALF OF THIS ALBUM AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD, in addition to several cuts from previous albums. (Seriously: Go, check it out. You'll be stunned at the quality of the arrangements these guys conjure from a single vocal track, but also, like me, you might be surprised that the melodies you find yourself humming days later are none other than those ancient vocals!)
• Bruce Hornsby. "Preacher In The Ring, Pt.2" I loved his Harbor Lights album when it first came out in 1993 (still do), so why have I waited this long to snag a copy of Hot House and Spirit Trail, released in '95 and '98, respectively?
• Mushroomhead. "Simple Survival." Surfing the other day, happened on this guy's MySpace, and this song played in the background. Very tight, aggressive AND melodic; I'm on it.
• Beth Hart. "Just A Little Hole." She must get this endlessly: she sounds like Janis Joplin. She might even be annoyed by it, is how often I'm guessing she hears it, but I'm telling you, with the piano? ...add a dash of Tori Amos? Beth Hart is the real friggin' deal folks. This song I love isn't on youtube, but a song I really really like, that she's more well known for, "LA Song" is.
• Krayzie Bone. "Heated Heavy." From 1999. (Better late than never, eh?) It's a minor miracle that I heard the song at all. Someone on my David Foster Wallace mailing list mentioned that Patton Oswalt had read DFW's quite cool Kenyon Univ. commencement speech prior to delivering his own (Oswalt's) commencement address at his former high school. I linked to Oswalt's blog about this, which featured a cool painting of Oswalt's face, by someone named Jason Rudolphpena. There's also a link to a youtube of Rudolphpena doing the painting. Surfing off that youtube I came across this youtube of Rudolphpena painting another famous face. And the background music, was, of course...
• Flo-Rida feat. T-Pain. "Low." Much as I like hip-hop, I REALLY like it when they throw a little melody or harmony on top of the rhymes. (FWIW... I like the Travis Barker mix of "Crank Dat Soulja-Boy," I'm not quite as wild about the Travis version of "Low.")
• The Wreckers. "Leave The Pieces." Classic modern country: low and lovely:
  "There's nothing you can do or say
  You're gonna break my heart anyway
  Just leave the pieces when you go."
• Mike Doughty. "Navigating By The Stars At Night," "Nectarine." Couple tasty nuggets from Golden Delicious, MD's latest CD. (MD's MySpace.)
• Pigeonhed. "Battle Flag [Lo-Fidelity Allstars Remix]" Imagine my surprise when this sucker came up on shuffle and almost knocked me on my can. "This puppy gets 4 stars," I thought and went to wheel the rating in; what? I ALREADY RATED IT 4 STARS!! Holy crap, how could I have forgotten a 4 star song!! (iTunes says I DLed it from Stypod (R.I.P.) in June 2006; Almost two years!)
• Gary Numan. "Walking With Shadows." If you like (or liked) "Cars" back in (when the hell was it) 1980, you like (or liked) Techno. Techno gets slammed a lot these days, and often rightly so I happen to think, but not in all cases and especially not in the case of Gary Numan. He infuses more melody than is expected in the typical techno song, hence he's an all-time favorite of mine PERIOD. (Not just, say, "my all time favorite techno guy.") This one lopes though its opening with lowered brow and a scowl, but the dam bursts at about 1m 15s and you're awash in synths and vocals processed up the wazoo. The melody is catchy as is the light piano well back in the mix.
• Lucky Boys Confusion. "Bossman." This is from a TV commercial for—if you can believe it—Trident chewing gum. It has what will probably turn out to the the most infectious chorus you'll hear all year. ("Here come the bossman callin' (callin'!)/ Here come the man right now (right now!)
• Yael Naim. "New Soul." This is from a TV commercial for Apple's MacAir laptop. Quirky but melodic. (Think Joanna Newsom with a slight Hebrew accent.)
• Landon Pigg. "CoffeeShop." This is from a TV commercial for diamonds, and is as pretty as pretty can be, I must say.
• Stars of Track And Field. "Movies of Antarctca." Spotted this on Sirius, Left Of Center. Simple melody with pretty harmonies, and a lot of torque as it progresses, which is nice.
• Houseclouds. "Liars" Who can resist a video with kittens AND a lilting falsetto? (Although the shirtless bohemian unblinkingly staring right at you does creep you (or at least me) out. (Found 16min 12sec into "marathonpacks midterm mix Vol. II" or seen on YouTube.)
  * 2007 * (recent first: Dec - Jan)

• Fleetwood Mac/The Rockets/Stevie Ray Vaughan. "Oh Well." I've heard this song forever but never paid enough attention to know even the name of it. (It's the "Can't help about the shape I'm in/I can't sing, I ain't pretty and my legs are thin/Don't ask me what I think of you/I might not give the answer that you want me to" oldie.) As much of a leap past Fleetwood Mac's take as The Rockets' take is, is how far past the Rockets' version is SRV's. (The foregoing being my latest entry in the "Most Awkward Sentence" contest.)
• Leo Kottke & Mike Gordon. "Sweet Emotion." No shit! An acoustic version of Aerosmith's balls-out classic. Would you believe me if I said it's better in some ways? Not many, all praise to TylerPerry of course, but it's still damned decent! The harmonies—and everything else, come to think of it— being sung an octave low is one of many nice touches.
• Tomoyasu Hotei. "Battle Without Honor Or Humanity." It's the tight-as-a-drum rock interlude from Kill Bill (When O-ren Ishii and entourage enter the restaurant in slow motion. This version, much to my surprise, is acoustic, with piano and a humming choir taking the electric guitar melody. (AND HEY. Is this song called "Battle Without Honor Or Humilty" or "Flip Sting"? I've seen both in reliable sources.)
• Super Furry Animals. "Baby Ate My Eightball." BLISSPOP IS DEAD. Long Live All The Other Blogs. Bliss was where I found this little treat.
• Shawn Colvin & Mary Chapin Carpenter/Jill Sissel/Greg Brown. "One Cool Remove." It's Brown's song, but Colvin & Carpenter all but own it in Colvin's album Cover Girl. A song lovely and yes, cool enough to make me want to spend the time and learn to sing and play guitar.
• St. Vincent. "Paris Is Burning," "Your Lips Are Red," and "Now. Now." A few spots down see "Jesus Saves, I Spend." Here's more of that. Quirky yet hummable, I'm down like a car with four flat tires.
• Mike Doughty. "The Girl In The Blue Dress." His last album, Haughty Melodic, is hands down my favorite album of the last five years. Golden Delicious is his next album, due out Feb. 19, 08 AND I CAN'T WAIT. Two tracks from GD are on his MySpace. This is one, and a tasty, full-band remake of "27 Jennifers" is the other.
• Saliva. "Ladies and Gentlemen." I'm hearing this thing ALL OVER television these days. I somehow missed Saliva when they broke big so it's nice to catch up with this one. In a couple parts it reminds me of—of all things—AC/DC's "Given The Dog A Bone."
• Brad Paisley. "Letter To Me." OK, kinda glurgy, but I'm a sucker for a good tearjerker and always have been.
• My Chemical Romance. "Teenagers." Good old rock-n-roll! (And yes, I am a middle school teacher so no, teeangers don't much scare me at all, if you must know, but what a tight tune....all together now!)
• Rodney Carrington. "Show Them To Me." If you love your country...
• Ben Gleib. "Eternal Youth." Spoken poetry. Check it out.
• St. Vincent. "Jesus Saves, I Spend." Quirky and cute and structurally non-traditional and melodic and a little crunchy and even a little silly (is that a duck? A smurf? What *IS* that thing?) But either way: love at first listen for me and this tune. Found at http://www.marathonpacks.com/.
• Sleater-Kinney. One Beat (album) A ways down I mentioned a song from One Beat called "Oh" and how it was the first and only SK song I liked. On a whim I looked for and found a dirt cheap copy of One Beat and have been REALLY digging almost every single song on it. Call The Doctor arrives in about a week; what's my summer without a serious music jones? OK, I waited until August...so?
• Animusic. "Starship Groove." Couple guys wrote some funky midi-music to trigger some homemade CGI musical instruments, and the results are fascinating. Some of the music ends up sounding rather Yanni-ish, but this one—written in hard-to-find 7/4 time—has been etched into my brain, not just visually but musically. Go here and DL a file that demos the first 3 minutes of the video. http://www.animusic.com/downloads.html
• Boards Of Canada. "Chromakey Dreamcoat." I've heard this band's name often but never any song of their's that I liked. No longer. This weirdly played (or is it sampled?) instrumental has a haunting edge to it that I didn't even notice the first few times I previewed it. Then my daughter said "Can you put that one on my iPod dad?" and I suddenly noticed it. Found at Silence Is A Rhythm Too: http://siart.blogspot.com/.
• Pizzacato Five. "Baby Love Child." Is this an oldie? I haven't heard anything from P5 in several years. Found at Silence Is A Rhythm Too: http://siart.blogspot.com/.
• Dizzee Rascal. "Wanna Be (Ft. Lily Allen)." Really British, as in the rapper's accent is full and unmistakable. Ths song has a special significance for me since the main sample is from the song "So Ya Wanna Be A Boxer" from the 1976 Alan Parker movie Bugsy Malone (remember? Where prepubescent Scott Baio playes a kiddie gangster and Jodie Foster, a kiddie speakeasy singer? HBO ran that sucker non-stop back then and I watched it every single time!). The movie is loaded with memorable Paul Williams songs; "Bad Guys (We Coulda Been Anything That We Wanted To Be)" and "Bad Guys/You Give a Little Love (And It All Comes Back To You)" are but two others. I have all three on mp3...email me if you'd like a copy.) Found at Silence Is A Rhythm Too: http://siart.blogspot.com/.
• Mute Math. "Typical". A buddy sent the YouTube link to this song's video and it was love at first sight and sound. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this is video is unforgettable: The entire thing was shot in reverse, yet all the played notes, and sung words, and especially the struck drums and cymbals appear to be hit perfectly. These suckers must have put some SERIOUS time into studying their own song well enough that they could actually play it in reverse. (I have seen the "forwards version" of this backwards video and as a guitarist I can tell you that it doesn't sound like the guitarists have nearly as tough a time learning their backwards parts as did that poor drummer.) As for the song: The chiming guitars that lead off are recoded in some sort of expanded stereo that makes them sound incredibly rich. It also sounds like it's played in drop-D...there's a low D that undercuts the intro contributing mightily to the aforementioned richnes. Maybe the bassist is helping out. And the name of who they remind me of (strongly) is escaping to the air around my head, but I'll repost the minute I remember.
• New Young Pony Club. "Hiding On The Staircase" and "Ice Cream". "Ice Cream" is the "I can give you what. You. Want./I can make your heart. Beat. Short." song from the Intel processor commercial. That led me to their MySpace where "Hiding" was available for listening. I think "Hiding On The Staircase" was also in Fluxblog recently too.
• North Atlantic Explorers. "When My Ship Comes In" Not the whole thing. The first 1:55 is dreamy cool whip that reminded me of what gets played in churches sometimes while people are filing into the pews. After that emerges a simple piano melody underlaid by simple drums and overlaid with a simple vocal. (And big ups for the Vasco De Gama reference!) Found at Some Velevet Blog: http://somevelvetblog.blogspot.com/
• Surkin. "Kiss and Fly (Tacteel remix)" Not the whole thing. The first minute and a half is a heavy techno/dance, but then after 88 seconds a soft soaring techno texture descends...very soothing to my ears. Drums come in after a minute and a half or so. Found at BLISS's March 07 list: blisspop.com/playlist.html. (NOTE, 7-1-07: That first techno/dance section that I glossed over a second ago is really starting to grow on me. And I don't know who the hell Tacteel is—French techno artist?—but he's my hero because I recently heard the album/studio/non-remix version of this and while imminently danceable, nothing that I love in the remix is present. "Wha happened?") (7-5-07. The only words here are: "Whoa, gotta kiss and fly." My 12 year old sings it: "Why-y would I kiss a fly.")
• YACHT. "See A Penny." This was buried in the middle of an hour-long mix a buddy of mine posted to MetaFilter. The mix is called "Music by Friends for the Radio in France," and this song is one of many memorable tunes in the mix. The combo of the trippy little keyboard lick and atonal harmonies (contradiction?) and then that fake crunchy guitar?? fa-BOINGGG!! (I think you can still DL the mix here. 84 MB.)
• Camille. "Jolie Bruine" Not....quite as good as "Ta Douler," (4-22-07: I don't say this any more....I'm liking "Jolie Bruine" more each time I hear it these days) but this one is still pretty dern catchy in its own right. It starts out slowly with a long fade in, the only accompaniment being the droning "thread" note that runs behind the album "Le Fil" (whence the album gets it's name, of course.)
• She Wants Revenge. "These Things" SWR is hugely goth, which normally isn't my speed, but this song isn't too extreme, which opens the door for "try anything once" blokes like me to poke my nose in and sniff around. For better or worse it reminds me of Daniel Ash, Peter Murphy, etc. and it's got me good. (And don't ask me why but I've always been a sucker for 'pleasure' as a transitive verb. Literarily AND connotatively, of course.) (Found on some web radio station calling itself The Buzz.)
• Yoko Ono & Le Tigre. "Sisters O Sisters." Finally finally FINALLY! A Yoko Ono song I can say I like!! Granted, her contribution here is rather minimal, but still. Tinkly keyboard textures, bombastic drums, and horns! Found on http://fluxblog.org/.
• Field Music. "A House Is Not A Home." This brings me back to Madness ("Our House, in the middle of our street..") but not just because it's about a house. The beat is sort of a march (a trombone would not be out of place, no kidding) and there is a Beatles song that is knocking on the back of my brain but can't get in...(CURSE THIS AGING BRAIN-O-MINE!) Anyway, if I can ever remember the name of the beatles song I'm thinking of, "A House Is Not A Home" is like a cross between THAT song and "Our House." Found on http://fluxblog.org/.
• Sloan. "Flying High Again/Who Taught You To Live Like That?"Not an Ozzy cover, but a very Sixties-feeling pop tune. Found on http://fluxblog.org/.
• Tom Cochrane. "Beautiful Day." I've had my eye on this guy ever since I first heard "Lunatic Fringe," and while most of the time I don't quite connect with his stuff (he has like ten CDs out) when I do...lookout: "Lunatic Fringe," "Boy Inside The Man," "Life Is A Highway" these are all HUGE lifetime favorites of mine. (And for the record, the Rascal Flatts version isn't different enough from the original to qualify as a bonafide cover, IMHO, despite it's having been the top Country song of the year for 2006.) I found "Beautiful Day" here buried in a documentary about ski bums called (you'll never believe this) Ski Bums. The film is Canadian, as is Mr. C.

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  Other Favorite Songs
  2006-2004 | 2003-2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997

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  Trying out a Goodreads widget...

  

  Reading (as of: 25JUN10)
  Current Reading	The Passage	Justin Cronin	A ten pound novel as a gift for Father's Day... aboout vampires, no less: perhaps the balsiest gift call my wife has ever made, and yet, 200+ pages in, it's terrific! Stay tuned...
  	The Greatest Show On Earth	Richard Dawkins	Dawkins has written many books on the effects and results of evolution, assuming he could convince staunch history-deniers of evolution's value. Here, he does something others have done but that he has not...maps out exactly why evolution should be regarded as fact. Dawkins explains exactly what it is we observe that leads us to conclude, beyond any doubt at all, that complex life on this planet is descended from simpler, older forms. That, unquestionably, all life on earth is related...we as humans are not only cousins to other primates such as monkeys and apes, but cousins—albeit far more distant cousins—to plants, to even bacteria, even fungi, and even viruses: all of it.
  	The Baroque Cycle Vol. II: The Confusion	Neal Stephenson	Volume II consists of Book 4 (The Bonanza) & Book 5 (The Juncto) which are set during the same period and whose chapters have been interleaved (con-fused) to preserve chronology.
  Recent
  	Running With Scissors	Augusten Burroughs	One of the very few books I've started sight unseen; it was a buck at a yard sale, had some nice blurbs from trusted sources, AND it's a memoir (which genre I know I'm not supposed to like but Lord help me I do) so boom. Devoured the first sixty pages in one sitting, laughing loudly and often. How can a nightmarish childhood at the hands of insane parents be so funny? (I guess how could it NOT?)
  	A Naked Singularity	Sergio De La Pava	10JAN10. Well! January isn't even half over and I think I've already found my favorite book of 2010. I'm precisely 1/6 the way through A Naked Singularity and it has shoved all my other reading to the back burner. I'm having as much fun reading this as I had reading Infinte Jest, and/or Gold Bug Variations, and/or The Lost Scrapbook*. An assload of fun, in other words. (*De La Pava's novel reminds me of Dara's in another way. It's self-published and out-of-nowhere and surprisingly, astronomically good despite. I can't believe it's De La Pava's first novel, and it kills me how hard he will have to work to get a wider audience for it, if he's even able to do that at all.) 27JAN10. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS BOOK. At its heart is the story of Casi, a disenchanted but successful young NYC public defender who is being courted into thievery by a devious (if not downright demonic) coworker named Dane. Dane learned about a multi-million dollar drug deal involving one of Casi's clients, and Dane thinks it's time he and Casi stopped being spectators in life's rich pageant and started "being the change they wish to see" in...themselves. A Naked Singularity is almost 700 pages but it reads much quicker since it holds the reader's interest in a variety of ways; It's very funny (from the silly name mispronunciations in an otherwise serious trial, to an elaborate biblical allegory at a ritzy theme hotel, to the interactions of Casi's extended family...something I'll wager the author shares with his protagonist, judging by the number of De La Pavas thanked in the acknowledgments), action-packed (the heist scenes were light-speed page-turners), very educational (NY legal system...dominant boxers of the 1980s... a Colombian recipe that sounds delicious...with obscure cultural name-drops ranging from "Three's Company," to Nietzsche, to the tragedies of Luis Colosio and Andres Escobar, to that horrfying viral video of the lady darting in front of the speeding locomotive, etc.), erudite (my code for "it has many words I had to look up"), mercilessly heart-rending (the forlorn series of letters between Jalen Kingg, a pathetic, mentally retarded death-row prisoner and Casi, Kingg's latest attorney), completely detail-obsessed at some points (Casi's caseload is laid out over dozens of pages early in the book, to say nothing of how much we learn about boxer Wilfred Benitez) and ridiculously absurd at others (the Clerical Confessions HBO show, or the Monty Python-ish contempt and "C.O.C.K." hearings near the end of the novel), with a tantalizing bit of in medias res to keep pomo-geeks like me happy (while also taking meta-ironic aim at cleverness-for-it's-own-sake...p496), and is topped off with a wicked little plot twist at the end that I SO did not see coming and that I re-read three times, muttering "I'll be damned..." each time. For a couple weeks A Naked Singularity was a huge part of my life; I looked forward to waking up to it, I thought about it while I was at work, and I couldn't wait to come home to it at the end of the day. How does one recommend a book more strongly than that? By creating a web page for it. Is how.
  	War Dances	Sherman Alexie	I'd heard of Alexie but never read anything by him until his piece "War Dances" in the New Yorker this summer. It's the title piece in this collection (duh-hoy) and easily the most memorable, although "Breaking and Entering" is up there too. The collection features six or seven short stories, each separated by three smaller things like poems, or Q&A pieces.
  	A Life Decoded	J. Craig Venter	This generation's The Double Helix. The story of a huge scientific discovery, complete with all the scheming and backstabbing. Unlike James Watson's 1968 memoir, A Life Decoded is also its author's full autobiography.
  	Wobegon Boy	Garrison Keillor	I could listen to his guy read biscuit recipes. His own novel though? Not too bad!
  	On The Road	Jack Kerouac	I took a shot at this maybe ten years ago and got perhaps halfway though it before stopped caring. Took another shot maybe five years ago and didn't get as far. Now I have it on audio and we'll see how far we go...
  	The Man Who Loved China	Simon Winchester	On audio: The story of Joseph Needham, author the seminal Science And Technology In China series.
  	Pnin	Vladimir Nabokov	A delicious little character study from history's greatest ESL student. Heartrending and heartwarming.
  	1776	David McCullough	Audiobook: I cannot get over how good this guy is. And ever since Ken Burn's The Civil War I much prefer to hear McCullough reading his own words. (I'm trying to lose some weight, walking 90 minutes a day. Audiobooks make the time pass pleasantly, but listening to McCullough makes the time all but evaporate.) Mid-August, 2009 Loved this! Like most Americans I got the overview of the revolution and most fo the headlines in grade school, but just in the for of a bolus uf unconnected images in my memory. For instance I had no CLUE.... .... How close the British came to ending the revolution early and decisively. * ... How often and how thoroughly BLIND LUCK saved the American side: aggressive British officers not being aggressive, fog rolling in at just the right time and for just the right duration, rain storms squelching battles that surely would have been won by the British...remarkable. ... How badly George Washington erred on several occasions; and how indecisive he was in specific situations that demanded decisiveness. Again, remarkable. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- *If you've ever wondered why Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas was so crucial, check it out: The Americans had chased the Brits out of Boston Harbor in the spring, but after that it was basically four or five consecutive losses for the Americans, some staggering, and by the end of 1776 the Brits had Philadelphia (the capital, remember) in their sights. American morale was in tatters, the army was down to something like 2,000 (2,000!) AND on New Year's Day the soldiers' contracts were up so if they wanted to they could just leave, something that most of them--after getting spanked and retreating all throughout the summer and fall--had been aching to do for months. So here you have a situation where the Americans are essentially a week away from losing their army and the war....and Adams and Jefferson and Washington and the other Adams and all the other founding fathers from being executed as traitors to the Crown. But then, Washinton crosses the Delaware and attacks not even a British fort or base, but a single regiment of Hessians simply riding out the winter at Trenton. Of course he wins--the Hessian numbers are small--but it rescues the entire American effort because word spreads through the colonies and morale spikes, and most of the soldiers who were ready to take off for home on New Years Day re-enlist! It was like a Hail Mary at the end of the game, and the rest, as they say, is history.
  	Sweet and Vicious	David Schickler	From the man who brought you Kissing In Manhattan. A tasty slice of midwestern lovers-on-the-run romance. Reminds me of Denis Johnson's "Angels" (though I read THAT so long ago I could be way off base with that impression) and Bonnie and Clyde.
  	God Is Not Great	Christopher Hitchens	I'm almost positive I would never read this had I not found a copy of the audiobook at the library; I can listen to Hitchens more easily than I can read him, strangely. (On philosophical subjects, Richard Dawkins can be strident of course, but Hitchens can be snide and snotty: not my idea of entertaining reading.) Turns out Hitchens is not as arrogant as usual here, just laying out the information as he has gleaned it (from what I assume would be an extensive bibliography, not included in the audiobook.) The snide comment or two gets through, but when you consider what he's learned about organized religion and the claims they've made throughout history, and what they've done and continue to do in God's name, it's a wonder he can maintain any sense of fairness and decorum at all.
  	Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader	McCaffery / Hemmingson	I've been curious about Vollmann ever since DFW name-dropped him in his phenomenal cruise ship piece "Shipping Out" (later to be rechristened as the title piece of his miraculously good non-fiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) and I tend to enjoy anthologies with the word reader in the title; A chance encounter with The John McPhee Reader launched me on a wicked McPhee kick that's never really ended (see my page devoted to McPhee...).
  	Angels & Demons	Dan Brown	DaVinci Code was a quick fun read. I heard from a reliable source that this was a bit better. Indeed it was. [I had the same problems with A&D that I had with The DaVinci Code: supposedly intelligent characters put ridculously elaborate clues together as the clock ticks, but in other scenes they can't recognize screamingly obvious clues that an 8th grader could spot. (Like whether a word is written backwards, etc.) ]
  	The Diamond Age	Neal Stephenson	A breather (if you can call a 500 page novel a breather) before moving on to Stephenson's Baroque Cycle Vol. II, The Confusion. And incredibly dense story of future tribalism combined with nanotechnology run amok.
  	The Baroque Cycle Vol. I, Book III: Odalisque	Neal Stephenson	If Book One: Quicksilver, was primarily about Daniel, and Book Two: King of the Vagabonds was primarily about Jack, Book Three, being titled Odalisque, must be about Eliza. Indeed, she has gone from nearly being executed in a Turkish harem, to a financial impressario who plays European finance like a board game, uses Kings like pawns, and obtains title and position with astonishing political and social alacrity. It's astonishes me how good Stephenson is thoughout all these books. The Confusion (Baroque Cycle Vol. 2, containing Books 4 & 5) is widely regarded to be better than Volume 1, but I'm holding off a bit. The Diamond Age, Stephenson's post-Snow Crash story of a world consumed by nanotechnology (or so I'd describe it after 130+ pages) has my attention for at least the next week.
  	William Smith and the Map That Changed the World	Simon Winchester	Audiobook. I love that he's reading his own words here. (Winchester could read a friggin' SOFTWARE MANUAL and it would be engaging.) The first map of what exists UNDER England and Wales was created by one guy in the early 1800s. ONE GUY launches modern geology.
  	The Baroque Cycle Vol. I, Book II: King Of The Vagabonds	Neal Stephenson	I know; pretty ballsy to state that I'm reading entire 2700 page Cycle. I just finished Quicksilver and enjoyed it tremendously. I would say as much as Cryptonomicon, but in a very different way. Both are tremendously educational, but I have to tip my cap to Quciksilver...how else would I EVER learn this much about 17th century Europe and enjoy the process. 02JUL09. Daniel Waterhouse leads off in Quicksilver, Jack Shaftoe comes to the fore in King of the Vagabonds, and now Eliza is rapidly gaining connections and position in western European society in Odalisque.
  	Moby Dick	Herman Melville	As one who claims to enjoy not just books but literature, how precisely have I made it to age 43 not having read this? 6-7-08. Sat up straight, inhaled deeply and started this sucker at long last, and the news I have to report is that there's no news at all: ALL YOU'VE HEARD IS TRUE; there's a reason Moby-Dick is on all sorts of Best Of All Time lists. That bit about the pulpit having a friggin ROPE LADDER? Are you kidding me? AND the preacher pulls up the rope ladder after climbing into the pulpit? Holy crap, what was Melville jonesing on? And Ishmael completely abandoning almost all of his prejudices against "pagan cannibals," growing to feel genuine affection for Queequeg? Masterful. (What a treat, when I really want to like a book, and have wanted to like it for a long time, and then it's better than I was expecting it to be. They're just now boarding the Pequod and I can't wait to read more.) 7-18-08. Back into it and relishing every page. Melville apes Shakespeare with stage directions...an interesting choice, and I'm not minding it. 8-15-08. I'm reading several books concurrently (as you can see) but still loving this one above all. Occasionally—but only occasionally—Melville's language can feel archaic for obvious reasons, but most of the time his prose is smooth and soothing; It really is a pleasure to read. He has a penchant for comparing newly observed phenomena (Ahab's intractible nature, the process of whaling, etc.) with life in general and the human condition; I'm sure it would get annoying in the hands of a lesser writer, but here it's endearing. 4-26-09. Finally finished this after several interruptions (my ADD manifests itself in almost every facet of my life and reading is no exception). If you've ever thought of reading this, get to it. But beware: there's a devious little surprise lying in wait near the end. Not the obvious final confrontation between man and whale, but just prior. A utterly heartwrenching moment between Ahab and Starbuck...
  	Anathem	Neal Stephenson	I was halfway through Stephenson's King Of The Vagabonds (which I'm enjoying TREMENDOUSLY...Jack had just used a homemade bomb to feed an entire peasant village!) when months of curiosity—and a Books-a-Million Christmas gift card burning a hole in my pocket—finally got the best of me. If I can resist doing up a web page for this [I did] I might finish it before summer [again, I did.] If my OCD kicks in it could take me through the summer. I'm not plowing through ANYTHING as fast as I burned through Cyrptonomicon again. By not giving my brain any downtime (I was reading any waking moment that I wasn't at work or asleep—and taking copious notes—and molding them into something remotely presentable) I actually made myself sick. 4-18-09. So I lied. Got about 100 pages in per day and devoured this monster over spring break. Dig it: a world where the monks in monasteries are not the hyper-religious scholars but the high-end philosophers & scientists who have been banished by society for thousands of years of work that led to A-bombs, genetic enginering abuse, etc. + they, the monks, can be yanked from the monasteries by society when society isn't smart enough to solve this big problem or that + one of those problems turns out to be an alien invasion + the monks have to dump their robes and don space suits = 1000 pages of yee haa!
  	The Baroque Cycle Vol. I, Book I: Quicksilver	Neal Stephenson	I'm not sure I've ever seen a writer do what Neal Stephenson has done/is doing with his career. His name is well-made with Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, but The Baroque Cycle shows an artistic maturation that is geometric, not merely arithmetic. Quicksilver was so entertaining while also being terrifically educational. My only regret is that, even with a breakneck reading pace, it will still take forever and a day to enjoy all of this. (And Anathem awaits beyond the horizon too!)
  	The Partly Cloudy Patriot	Sarah Vowell	Audio, in the car, between bits of Simon Winchester. And as with Winchester's book, I prefer to hear the book rendered in the author's imperfect but utterly engaging voice. Here' she's talking about Gettysburg, politics, her own silly life, etc.
  	Neuromancer	William Gibson	Cryptonomicon had me jonesing for cyberpunk. This has Blade Runner and especially The Matrix written all over it (or vice versa) (or vices versas) (whatever). Gibson's style is bare-bones; you have to fill in a lot of gaps and it's a lot of fun seeing if your imagination matches Gibson's. Most of the time mine can't hold a candle. Luckily there's a lot of help online: 1. Chapter notes at Rochester wiki 2. Dean Taciuch's notes 3. Paul Brians' study guide. 4. Good ol' Wikipedia.
  	Cryptonomicon	Neal Stephenson	This thing is a monster, but I've wanted it ever since finishing Snow Crash. Finding a paperback copy for $2 was a very happy accident. (Now...I'd like to pick it up soon, but Confederacy of Dunces just came today. Stay tuned.) 1-11-08 AND...I found a nice copy of Moby Dick, a book I've been admonishing myself for reaching the age of 43 not having read. 1-24-09. Alright, I haven't finished Moby Dick yet, and don't care. I know I'm loving it and I'm not in the least worried that I won't finish it! BUT...phenomenal reviews of Stephenson's recently released Anathem steered me toward the Baroque Cycle, none of which I owned at that moment, and toward Cryptonomicon, which I did, and which has been on my short list since finishing Snow Crash a few years back, as I said. It didn't take long (two pages?) to remember that Stephenson's style is one of the things I enjoyed about Snow Crash, and it wasn't much longer after that that I committed...not only to all 1130 small-font pages of Cryptonomicon, but to all 2800 pages of the seven Baroque Cycle novels, AND THEN to Anathem which I think is pushing a thousand pages itself! We'll see. When I embarked on my five month Richard Powers binge I was pretty sure I wouldn't honor that long term committment and somehow I did. (It won't happen if the writing isn't good, but then you won't make that kind of committement to writing that isn't good.) 2-11-09. A day or two from wrapping this puppy up, if you can believe it. (Averaging about 40 pages a day AND doing chapter thumbnails as I go...look for a Cryptonomicon page on this site, possibly this weekend.) 2-14-09. Good God... I may never recover from reading this unforgettable book! It takes its place along side Infinite Jest and Gold Bug Variations as one of my lifetime favorites.
  	Twilight	Stephanie Meyer	Certain titles become cultural imperatives. Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, and you can't teach in a public school today, as I do, without seeing one of the four current iterations of Meyer's Twilight series flowing up and down the hallway in most female hands. An exaggeration perhaps, but in fact, in my five classes, perhaps two copies of the book will be visible on desktops at any moment. Counting the perhaps one or two more copies lurking in backpacks, you're talking about perhaps 3 of 25 students reading them. Extrapolate to a student body of 2200 and you have over 250 kids reading the books (to say nothing of the ones who've already read) which might not be Harry Potter numbers, but for all I know it might be, and either way it's not bad at all in a time of Wii, Xbox, and 500 TV channels. 1-2-09. Not bad! It ain't JK Rowling but all things considered, I enjoyed it. (The things considered? As I mentioned about Rowling when discussing Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix, Meyer has not met an adverb she doesn't like. And there was a point about halfway though where, if Bella said ONE MORE THING about how beautiful Edward is and how she didn't deserve him, I would have flung the book into a wall. Luckily she seemed to take a cold shower just in time.)
  	Outliers	Malcolm Gladwell	Well-paced, well thought out, brief, and terribly, terribly insightful. (I'll never be able to enjoy summer vacation again!)
  	The Ancestors Tale	Richard Dawkins	What am I going to do? My reading list, as you can see, is quite long. I cannot be starting new books, and I CERTAINLY can't be starting ten-pounders like this one....BUT IT'S SO DAMNED GOOD! Dawkins isn't afraid to get too techinical, which I like because often I can follow him, he's that good of an elucidator. The story is of a journey taken by a time-traveler travelling BACK in time at great speed, meeting up with all the branches in his evolutionary tree (first we hook up with chimps, then other primates, then other mammals, etc.) Sooner or later a representative of all our ancestors will be walking with us as we walk further and further back in time. The narrative is patterned after Chaucer. (The Chimpanzee's tale, The Blue Whale's Tale, etc. Although the Blue Whale's nearest relative is the hippopotamus of course, not us, but Dawkins occasionally digresses for fascinating little side trips like that.) 7-27-07. Started this again, but was quickly derailed by Harry Potter 7 (see below). 9-7-07. Back into it! 1-11-08. Back out of it! :-) Sep 08. BACK IN! I'm teaching biology now, I need to get this puppy under my belt (along with The Selfish Gene of course.)
  	On Beauty	Zadie Smith	Audiobook, via iPod, on midday, hour-long summer walks (i. e. work-out walks). As with all audiobooks, the quality of the voice talent weighs heavily on the quality of the experience—an added dimension that can enhance or detract from the writing itself. As such, this reader, Peter Francis James...Good GOD Magnum...completely convincing as: upper-crusty academic 50-something white male Brit (Howard), AND gangsta wanna-be black male teenager (Levi), AND disaffected black teenage female (Zora), AND Esther Rolle-ish, maybe Nell Carter-ish black matriarch (Kiki) AND rapper Carl, and at least a dozen other Hatians and Brits and New Englanders...the mind reels at a performance talent matched here only by Zadie Smith's writing talent. The first paragraph of Chapter 4: When it comes to weather, New Englanders are delusional. In his ten years on the east coast Howard has lost count of the time some loon from Massachusetts had heard his accent, looked at him pitiably, and said something like "Cold over there huh?" Howard's feeling was, look. Let's get a few things straight here. England is not warmer than New England in July or August, that's true. Probably not in June either. But it is warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May. That is, in every month when warmth matters. In England, letterboxes do not jam with snow. Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble. It is not necessary to pick up a shovel in order to unearth your rubbish bins. This is because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody.' 24SEP08. Fantastic! And it shocks and pleases me to read that David Foster Wallace was her favorite writer. You'd never know it to read either of the two books of hers I've enjoyed (White Teeth being the other. Which see, well down this page.)
  	Next	Michael Crichton	In the bargain bin at friggin' Food Lion, of all places. Not only is the story engaging, Crichton appends an extensive recommended reading list, and since I'm teaching genetics and genomics (among other biological subjects) I couldn't have found this at a better time (though of course Melville gets pushed back yet again, through no fault of his own.)
  	The Easy Chain	Evan Dara	Sure enough, I FINALLY curl up with Moby-Dick, and this sucker comes out! (It won't be here for a few days, but the moment it arrives I shall dive in. His first book is a stunner, one of my all time favorites (as you can read below and can see on my page devoted to it.) 6-16-08. It's here, I'm getting started. See the top of this page for current comments. 6-26-08. Done. If I can ever get my head around this, I may give it its own page...
  	In Persuasion Nation	George Saunders	Huge fan of his for a LONG time. Loved CivilWarLand, loved Pastoralia. The last story in this book is called "CommComm" and is, as I have said more than once and elsewhere on this site, one of my favorite stories of all time. And it's online!
  	The Brief And Frightening Reign of Phil	George Saunders	Bought a canister of blank DVDs frm Amazon and needed a few extra bucks to reach the hallowed $25 tally, earning free shipping. I keep about three dozen books in the Save For Later part of my Amazon shopping cart for just such occasions: if the "New/Amazon.com" price is less than $4 over the cheapest Used/Marketplace price ($4 being the cost of shipping in Marketplace) then I can buy a new copy from Amazon. TBAFROP was the only book whose Used price was still close to the new price. (At the time of purchase; The Used price has come way down since then.) ANYWAY....the book itself is a political allegory. You will not find Pastoralia- or CivilWarLand-grade laughs here, but you'll find a few. More importantly, you'll find Saunders's withering commentary on the basic human tendency to separate others into "Us's" and "Them's", and on the—usually concomitant—basic human tendency to follow blindly leaders who describe the Thems in ways soothing to Us. (It MIGHT take you 60-90 minutes to read these 130 small, wide-margined, nearly double-spaced, occasionally illustrated pages. If you're a Saunders fan, I think it's worth it.
  	The Discomfort Zone	Jonathan Franzen	He read the first chapter at the Miami Book Fair and CSPAN filmed him earlier this year and I ripped it to mp3. I've enjoyed the mp3 enough times that I committed to a print copy. I listened and read along. Franzen's reading is far more evocative than his text alone (which might seem obvious, but many writers' voices do not do their own words justice, I've noticed.) This makes me wonder what sorts of nuance am I not getting from, really, ANY writer, when I hear his/her words with my brain voice and not their reading voice. [I first noticed this in SJ Perelman's hilarious Raymond Chandler spoof, "Farewell My Lovely Appetizer" which was published in The New Yorker in 1944 (Dec 16, p but which I first encountered via Selected Shorts, where it was read HILARIOUSLY by James Naughton. (Not an exaggeration. My "Farewell" mp3 is one of the handful—of my dozen thousand—that I like so well I could listen to it immediately after listening to it.)]
  	The Braindead Megaphone	George Saunders	One of my favorite fiction writers (Pastoralia and CivilWarLand In Bad Decline are hilarious, as mentioned in the Broom Of The System comment below) turns his pen to commentary and reportage. I still prefer his fiction but this was engagingly poignant and hard to put down.
  	How To Be Alone	Jonathan Franzen	All SORTS of good stuff in here. His tiff with Oprah ("Meet Me In St. Louis"), a long piece ("Why Bother?" usually referred to as the Harper's Essay) where he questions the relevancy of the novel as an artform; another long piece about corruption and whistleblowers in the the Chicago Post Office ("Lost In The Mail." This is a fantastic article, I must say); another terrific article on prisons in Colorado ("Control Units").
  	A Confederacy of Dunces	John Kennedy Toole	A friend recently raved about how much fun she was having with this and promised to give me her copy as soon as she finished with it. Well screw waiting, said me, when I can get used books for a song online! 1-18-08. About 3/4 through this and enjoying it. Very silly, great fun, although the valve thing is getting beaten to death, along with the worldview thing.
  	The Periodic Kingdom	P. W. Atkins	Irresistably slim at 149 pages, and a brilliantly conceived survey of the periodic table of the elements, presented as if it (the table) were a kingdom and the elements are regions. Various 3D maps of the "kingdom" (elevations based upon atomic diameter, another based upon atomic mass, another based on ionization energies, etc.) show, clearly, how these characteristics of the elements are interrlated. The analogy is fascinatingly apt in some instances; when it rains in the region of potassium, the drops of water explode on impact with the terrain, pointing up the extreme reactivity of potassium and water. Atkins's writing style can feel slightly stilted at times. (How many times need one use the word consanguinity, and in sentences like this? "Complexity can effloresce from subtly different consanguinity." This is a bit rich for a book putatively aimed at a general reader.) Still, I teach basic chemisty, yet I'm gaining new insights about the table in general and several elements in particular. For a science geek like me, the book is quite fun.
  	The Broom Of The System	David Foster Wallace	My 2nd trip through this novel, Wallace's (if legend has it correctly) 1985 senior thesis at Amherst College. I'd forgotten just how much fun this guy was when he was young. Not to suggest I don't enjoy his recent stuff, definitely I do. But these days it's his non-fiction I tend to reach for. Back in the mid-80s DFW was just NUTS: characters named Candy Mandible, Judith Prietht...a publishing house named Frequent & Vigorous...a desert installed in the heart of Ohio...a cold-blooded great-grandmother (literally, not figuratively: her room must be kept at 98.6 or she goes hypothermic) named Lenore Beadsman, the same name as her great-granddaughter, the book's protagonist....and I'm not even to page 80 yet. (Did I mention the precocious cockatiel named Vlad the Impaler?) Wallace remains on a short list of favorite authors that not only are erudite, but have a real sense of play that I find irresistible: (Pynchon, specifically in Crying Of Lot 49), George Saunders (both Pastoralia and CivilWarLand In Bad Decline are RIOTS); David Schickler (not just "The Smoker" but the rest of Kissing In Manhattan as well...see below), I'll add to this list, I'm sure.
  	Flight Of Passage	Rinker Buck	Back in 1966, Rinker and his brother Kern (15 & 17 respectively) flew a rebuilt Piper Cub from New Jersey to California in 7 days (6 days flying, one day off in El Paso). It's on many lists of great flying stories, so knowing how much I loved West With The Night (Beryl Markham) and both Biplane and Stranger To The Ground (Richard Bach) I took a shot. Two chapters in and I'm enjoying it. Stay tuned. 8-3-07. Very entertaining! With relative ease, Buck alternates between sounding like the introspective 45 year old he was when he wrote it to the brash 15 year old he was at the time of the flight. And for the record, I was able to discern that the flight took place from Saturday, July 2, 1966, when they departed Basking Ridge, NJ, to Friday, July 8, 1966, when they arrived in southern California. Buck never states these dates in his narrative—in fact he appears to go out of his way not to mention the Fourth of July on the 4th of July!—but gives three or four clues for those such as myself who enjoy light detective work. Also intersting, I thought: the UPI wire report reproduced at the start of Chapter 16 (p. 239 in my edition) has several facts screwed up, clearly the info came from Tom Buck (the boys' father) in advance of the actual events. I also was amused to read in one of the reprinted newspaper clippings in Chapter 19 (pp. 294-295) that Tom told the "Reporter At Large" (Finston) that his crash in 1945 was a military crash...while Rinker writes on p. 186 that dad's crash, in 1946 actually, was clearly not a military excursion. Another reprinted clipping retains two handwritten asterisks highlighting a) more of Dad's exaggeration (he never saw combat) and b) Dad mentioning the nonexistent waterbag, which is a recurring comedic issue thoughout the narrative.
  	Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows	J. K. Rowling	All you've heard is true: best of the seven...amazing, if not downright inspirational. By the end of this book I was yelling at it, talking to it...crying. (Yes, Abigail Mae, I said crying. I think reviewer Tina Jordan put it best: "I wasn't just riveted, I was overcome.") Funny, sad, action-packed, romantic, mysterious...it's just an amazing achievement, the best of the series, I think I already said, because as much as I enjoy postmodernism and other "pomo tricks," (as visitors to this site well know by now) there really is something to be said for good old fashioned resolution. And on THAT count, trust me, this book delivers like Domino's. (The word closure bobs in this book's wake, and will as long as people are reading these books, which I can all but guarantee will be for hundreds of years. At least.) Other random thoughts: Like all six of its predecessors, at right around the 2/3 mark Deathly Hallows goes from being a good story to being a can't-put-it-down page-turner • Like the recently released Order of the Phoenix movie, Deathly Hallows has no Quidditch in it whatsoever, but you do need to know about Quidditch to understand some details • A gadget that we haven't seen since—if I'm not mistaken—Book One, Chapter One, reappears in a crucial role. (I'm mistaken: it shows up in Order of the Phoenix too, but only momentarily.) A few images from the book that are already seared into my memory: (MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW. Highlight the following white area to view the hidden text) Prof. McGonnagall leading a platoon of charmed desks down a corridor against the Death Eaters! She actually yells charge! Didn't expect Tonks to die, and certainly not both she and Lupin. (I guess Teddy, like Harry, orphaned as an infant at the hands of Lord Voldemort, can be the star of the next series!) Near the novel's (if not the series's) climax, Molly Weasley (yes, that's Momma Weasley!) going completely Ellen Ripley on Bellatrix Lestrange, calling her a bitch at the top of her lungs before blasting her into oblivion! Then Voldemort casting off McGonnagal, Shacklebolt and Slughorn (a Slytherin!) to round on Molly for instant revenge... ...Then Harry's big reveal when he throws off the Invisibility Cloak and intercedes on Molly's behalf. (I half expected him to say "Not so fast, Voldemort!") In the midst of the Battle of Hogwarts, Hermione planting one on Ron for showing compassion to the Hogwarts kitchen elves. At first I thought, 'well of course she's just happy to see this side of Ron...' but then they both kept at it. Funny! Fred. (sigh...) OK, SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME: Dumbledore had the Elder Wand, and Snape killed Dumbledore, and Voldemort killed Snape...so why didn't the Elder Wand respond to Voldemort? How did the wand pass into the ownership of Draco? Who did Draco kill? (Got my answer: In Half-Blood Prince, Draco disarmed Dumbledore—separated Dumbledore from the Elder Wand—moments before Snape killed him. THAT moment, and not when Snape killed him, is when the Elder Wand chose Draco.)
  	Kissing In Manhattan	David Schickler	Yet another gem I got for a SONG at the local library's book sale. This curious cross between a novel and a short story collection includes Schickler's hilarious debut piece, "The Smoker," which was published in the The New Yorker (June 19, 2000) and changed his life almost literally overnight. I was happy to see that "The Smoker" is not a one-off from Schickler...that the wit and humor on display in "The Smoker" pervades the entire book. (I was also thrilled to read that Schickler is a big fan of CivilWarLand In Bad Decline by George Saunders, since the last—in fact the only— time I've laughed aloud this much while reading was when I was reading Saunders.) I didn't know that the eleven stories were connected in any way (though it's hinted at plainly in the jacket notes. Duh.) and this made for a surreal experince as I randomly selected stories to read. Character names kept reappearing, not to mention the enigmatic apartment building named The Preemption which is the only "character" that seems to appear in all the stories (I've read five of the eleven).
  	Blink	Malcolm Gladwell	When you approach someone you know but haven't seen in a while, and whom you address by name, you can tell within millliseconds that they don't remember you even if they are good at covering the fact. This book talks about that sort of instantaneous judgement...the little ways you asses a situation instantly and, most of the time, correctly. (Holy crap, you MUST take a look at this short talk by Gladwell, not only for his engaging story about marketing phenomena...BUT FOR THAT HAIR. I can't come up with a single person to compare Gladwell to, hair-wise. It must be seen to be believed.)
  	Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers.	Mary Roach	Thorough and fascinating study of what happens to human bodies that have been: donated to science buried exhumed (illegally, last century) used in auto crash impact studies in plane crashes shot crucified decapitated cannibalized composted (both ecologically and traditionally) plastinated Roach realizes the absurdity inherent in working on dead people (some things you just can't NOT joke about) while also stressing how essential such work is today; how much we've come to depend upon it.
  	Blood Meridian	Cormac McCarthy	This has been on my list for years now. Both David Foster Wallace and Harold Bloom—two writers who could not be more different—both worship this thing, so why not gve it a whirl? 6-30-07. Upon finishing this phenomenal story I immediately did some research. It turns out that most of this barbaric novel is based on true events. If so....hell, if so then I'm speechless; I was pretty naive about just how uncivilized civilized humans can be. At times (at many times) I was reading the book with jaws agape. The violence flashes like lightning and just as quickly is done, the reader left attempting to digest what happened. (Often I couldn't even tell what happened. McCarthy used so many arcane terms, I had to read at the computer so I could google unknown words. A quick flip through my well-marked copy reveals an average of something like two unfamiliar terms per page. One page had six.)
  	Something Happened	Joseph Heller	When the publisher who fought for (and essentially discovered) Catch-22 says this one is better, you pay attention. This has been on my not-so-short list since seeing Robert Gottlieb rave about it in The Stone Reader. 5-13-07. I'm weird. I had Call It Sleep in my hands, open and reading. But I set it aside for The Stones of Summer, which I was enjoying with minor reservations, then my Richard Powers Half-Year commenced and nothing else mattered until I'd digested every word he'd written. Now I'm done, and what book do I pick up? Stones? Call It Sleep? Neither. I pick up this sucker of course. I told you, I'm weird. (Who knows; Maybe, like the others, THIS one will be a victim of circumstance and be deferred through no fault of its own...ain't life grand?) 6-12-07. Now, I'm not going to say "Nothing happened," (as some infamous reviewer wrote long ago) but this book just did not work very well for me as entertainment. Much of it has to do with the repulsiveness of the protagonist. I did not feel good when he felt good and I did not feel bad when he felt bad. The opposite was true, in fact. It felt too much like work as well. This is the kind of book I should have put down after 200 pages or so, something I can NEVER DO. I guess I was holding out for a more satisfying resolution. Or, really, any resolution.
  	Eon	Greg Bear	I brought several "literature" books with me on a recent trip to Kissimmee/Disney, and at the last minute threw this into my bag. Whaddaya know, ended up digging into this hard and fast. I completely loved Darwin's Radio, Blood Music and Moving Mars so why not? So far so good...the asteroid Juno was inhabited by humans in like 2500 AD or so, but far down the line they learned time travel and the asteroid—60 miles wide and 180 miles long and essentially hollowed out, containing several cities—has come back from the future to help us deal with the nuclear havoc we've wreaked upon our planet. I'm about halfway through at this point. 5-13-07. Bear is amazing. At no time when I'm reading him do I feel all the things I feel when reading other science fiction (namely, at least once saying to the writer: "OK, dude, you're trying too hard here..."). At the end of Eon, Bear gives us a four part epilog that is is satisfying in the same way the preceding main story was: Incredibly and WILDLY imagined and extremely well written. I would read the previously mentioned three books before reading this again (which is meant far more as a statement about them than about Eon, believe me) but I'd read anything by Bear before anything by any other Sci Fi writer save for perhaps Asimov.
  	The Immortal Game	David Shenk	The book illucidates—move by move—the famous 1851 pickup game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky (two chess giants of the day) while also presenting minutae about the game, its history, it's practitioners. I chose to read through the game analysis chapters first...they alternate with the history chapters. (The game has been famous since the moment it ended—less than an hour after it started—and rightly so. Anderssen hands over his two Rooks and Queen, completely numbing Keiseritsky to the subtle murder he's committing with his Knights and Bishop.)
  	Permanent Midnight	Jerry Stahl	The friend who offhandedly recommended The Queen's Gambit has been also (but NOT AT ALL offhandedly) trying to get me to read this for years, going so far as to buy me a copy recently. I'm 2/3 through it and all I can do is wonder why I enjoy not only this story but all stories of heroin addiction. The Naked Lunch, Trainspotting, Jesus' Son, Pulp Fiction... the list goes on (I'll be renting Requiem For A Dream soon, instantaneously recommended to me by a coworker upon my confession of my morbid fascination), and I end up in tears reading and seeing what these people do to themselves and the people around them. It's a shattering experience as a reader/movie-goer; what on earth must it be like to experience this madness firsthand? (I'm happy to confine that to my imagination, of course.) 3-7-07. What does one say after reading something like this? I've written five or six thoughts here but I keep deleting them; Nothing comes close to describing this book, save perhaps for a heavyweight punch to the solar plexus. This one will be with me for quite awhile.
  	The Echo Maker	Richard Powers	I've heard of people buying up all of one author's work and reading it all [1] and I never understood it. Boy do I now. The past five months have been one amazing story after another, a string of great reads....each one I couldn't wait to come home to after work, that I looked for excuses to escape with. The Echo Maker is no exception. (It's not feeling like one of his best, but that's not really saying anything since Powers has yet to write a bad book. Besides, I just passed the 2/3 mark this morning and who knows WHAT lies in wait in the final third! The jaw-dropping moment that makes Plowing The Dark great doesn't happen until very near the end, though of course The Gold Bug Variations was and is great from start to finish. As I once read, there's something almost monumental about GBV.) Point is, The Echo Maker is not only a rich, mulitvalent experience, it's shaping up to be a sort of mystery. Dare I say a whodunnit? [1] Mark Moskowitz talks about it in his terrific documentary The Stone Reader which, if you love to read, you should see. 3-4-07 OK. Having read each of the following once, and eight of the nine since August, here's how I'm ranking Power's books, in order of "Desire To Reread:" Gold Bug Variations Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance Galatea 2.2 Plowing The Dark Echo Maker Time Of Our Singing Gain Operation Wandering Soul Prisoner's Dilemma
  	The Time Of Our Singing	Richard Powers	Who would have thunk, back in September (see Prisoner's Dilemma, about six rungs down) when I expressed my pipe dream of devouring Richard Powers's entire body of work, that I would actually be able to stay focussed enough to do it, with my A.D.D. A**? 2-3-07. Finished this mini-monster last night, a few strokes after midnight, and by now, saying "WOW, HOLY SH**, THAT WAS AMAZING" after closing the back cover of a Powers novel is just not saying anything anymore because it has happened almost every single time. So this time, I'll say: Even if The Echo Maker sucks canal water (and of course it doesn't) he would deserve that National Book award, or seven. In Time Of Our Singing, We follow several characters in one multiracial American family from birth to death...and that's about all I'll attempt to share in this limited space aside from also stressing that the book is vast, and complicated, and because it's an exhaustive retelling of a unique but surely not uncommon African-American experience, I often forgot I was reading a writer who's writing prior to this book was certainly not anti-diversity, but not terribly diverse. (I can't recall any black characters—not so much as a figurant—in any of his prior work. Not that multiculturalism is a requirement for good writing: the fact remains that there are countless places in this country where there are few if any black people, and I don't see why stories set there are less valid than ones set in any of the countless places where there are few if any white people, or a 50-50 mix. And really, no one said they are, so I'm sort of talking to myself here I guess.) Anyway. My only caveats, and there're two: 1) occasionally Powers overdoes his emphasis: "She closed the door, ending every story ever written..." or some such. Luckily this only happens once every dozen pages or so, so I'll cut him slack. 2) The aging of the voices. Characters at 20 are verbally indistinct from characters at 50. Powers drops a lot of cultural refernces that one can use to establish and maintain chronology—which I like, not only for continuity's sake, but for the fun of actually looking stuff up—but Jonah and Joey's conversations in 1992 sound and feel the same as their exchanges in the early 60s.
  	Plowing The Dark	Richard Powers	My Powers project is making me antsy...I'm liking almost everything I'm reading from him (including THIS!) but I REALLY want to check out his new one, The Echo Maker, which recently won a National Book Award. (Operation Wandering Soul was nominated in 1993 but lost to The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx...another book I loved.) It's a test of my discipline to read this and then the huge Time of Our Singing (and read them well, taking notes and looking stuff up on Google, the way I usually read a book...not just blasting though it), and only THEN tackling The Echo Maker. As I've mentioned, no one is more surprised than I that I've stuck to this program! It doesn't hurt at all that I've almost completely connected with almost all of Powers's work: this is no chore. 12-26-06. Of the six Powers novels I've finished since August, this one is takes it's place with Galatea 2.2 as a lifetime favorite. Don't get me wrong, I loved all these books, and do indeed recommend them all for various reasons, but Plowing the Dark has a subtle twist at the end that lifts it above the others, and in a way, above The Gold Bug Variations. I'm not going to spoil it, but two pages before the end of this 400+ page novel—that is in essentially two unrelated, interlaced novels—Powers brings the two stories together in a way that, for me at least, was utterly and magnificently jawdropping. On to The Time Of Our Singing!
  	Gain	Richard Powers	Against all odds, and with, so far, only one diversion (the delectable Chess Artist, inhaled in about 4 days, last month) I appear to be holding true to my goal of reading all of Richard Powers's books consecutively (excepting of course The Gold Bug Variations, WHICH I STILL LOVE, TWO YEARS AFTER READING IT.) Gain is two stories wrapped around each other, that never overlap and barely intersect, like the two snakes in a cadeucus. One story is the 160 year saga of the Clare Chemical Company, (a la Procter & Gamble, Dow, etc. P&G is occasionally cited in the novel as Clare's main competition) which begins in 1830 when a gentleman named Clare and his sons haul some of their homemade soap to a customer on the other side of Boston. The shipping cost them more than their received payment, but the soap was such a hit that the company took off and never looked back, growing and diversifying, reacting to changes in the country's politics and economy (Civil War, myriad depressions and recessions) over the next century and a half. The other story concerns Chicago-area real-estate agent Laura Bodey and her bout with ovarian cancer. The barest of intersections in the two stories occurs near the end when it appears that Clare's chemicals are the cause of Laura's cancer. This novel reminded me of Evan Dara's The Lost Scrapbook quickly and often. In fact I would not at all be surprised to learn that Powers had been influenced by Dara's novel.
  	The Chess Artist	JC Hallman	Taking a break from my Powers obsession to nurture my ongoing love affair with chess (begun ostensibly with my first reading of David Foster Wallace's (still) amazing essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" but which was pulled into mercilessly tight focus two years ago with my first—and immediately upon completing it, second—reading of Walter Tevis's fanstastic chess novel The Queen's Gambit.)
  	Operation Wandering Soul	Richard Powers	One of the character's in Galatea 2.2 that I liked (Diane) really disliked Operation Wandering Soul. Color me curious to see why Powers would have one of his characters hate one of his books (and hate was indeed the word Diane/Powers used.) 12-23-06. I'm halfway through Plowing The Dark, and of the six Powers novels I've read, only Operation Wandering Soul here left me scratching my head. Undoubtedly virtuosic, but there is a plot twist at the end which facilitates the ultimately positive message of the book. If you miss that twist—and I did—this book will seem, well, hopeless. And even if true, that's OK, we can't all have a happy ending
  	Prisoner's Dilemma	Richard Powers	Powers's second book. Number nine comes out next month, and I've decided that I'm going to work my way from his first (the just completed Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance) to the most recent (the as yet unreleased #9, The Echo Maker.) By the time I finish this, then gobble up #4 (Operation Wandering Soul. #3 is Gold Bug Variations which I read a couple years ago) then devour #6 (Gain. #5 is Galatea 2.2 which I read just last month and which pretty much started this mania) then #7 (Plowing The Dark) then #8 (The Time Of Our Singing) then Echo Maker, it should be time to pick out my summer reading next June! With my wandering eye and short attention span, I seriously doubt I'll be able to stay focussed over six books. We'll see.
  	Three Framers On Their Way To A Dance	Richard Powers	Loved Powers's The Gold Bug Variations in a huge way, Galatea 2.2 was both similar to—and different enough from—GBV not to disappoint. So now I'm starting at the beginning with Mr. Powers. The story goes (as explained in the half-autobiography, half-Pygmalion fable ) Powers was working in computers (DP?) in Boston and one day, in a museum, turned a corner and saw August Sander's famous eve-of-WWI photo of the eponymous three farmers. Eight books later (I think his 9th is soon to be released) he's one of the country's most respected fiction writers, and—better yet—rapidly nearing the top of my love list.
  	Life Interrupted	Spalding Gray (audio)	This poor bastard. I worshipped him from fairly early on, coddling and protecting a VHS recording of an HBO broadcast of his Terrors of Pleasure monologue for over 16 years before converting it to DVD last month. It dawned on me during one of his monologues (I don't know which one it was, Monster In A Box, maybe Gray's Anatomy...whichever one in which he was uncontrollably barking) that this guy, loveable genius though he might be, was one seriously screwed up puppy. And then, even though he was with one woman for, what, a couple decades? He finds love with someone else, settles down and starts a family, and life is suddenly good. And he thinks "How am I going to write any more monologues when I have no more crises in my life?" Within a day of expressing that thought while visiting friends in Ireland, he is involved in a horrific car crash that doesn't quite take his life, but screws him up so badly that he instantly had many more crises worth writing about. But the wreck wasn't what drove him to suicide in the end. The wreck was merely the first domino to fall, with other dominoes representing his inability to reclaim the Long Island house he immediately regretted selling, being a master storyteller but by chance not being in NYC on 9-11-01 and missing the story of a lifetime, and of course, to borrow his own words (from his phenomenal breakout performance Swimming To Cambodia) "...other things...we will never know about." Sam Shephard is reading this final monologue, and while I always have liked Shephard in the past and do definitely like listening to him read here, there are so many phrases that are characteristically Gray—I can hear Spalding saying them so differently than Shephard does, pausing for effect here, milking it for the laugh there...I'm happy to have it, but it's just not the same. (Sigh.)   <:'-(
  	Body and Soul	Frank Conroy	And the pinball bounces again...I have three Richard Powers novels enroute—overdue actually—and good ol' Dow Mossman splayed out on my dining room table with plenty o' notes and scribblins, and on a fluke I go and and dive into this that's been on my shelf three years, a beautiful hardcover copy that I got from the local library for like $5, and then grew to hate the jagged right side edges of the pages and later actually sanded the jagged edges of the pages off of, to make the right side of the book (the open side, opposite of the spine) smooth and "flip-able" or "thumb-able." >;-) Aug 31, 2006. There's actually a word for this type of book, a book that follows a character from youth to adulthood: bildungsroman. It's an unweildy word, in my opinion, though I've seen it in several places before, and in fact it was one of those words I'd had to look up five or ten times and never absorbed the meaning of. But the shoe fits like a...like a....(no.) But it does! I LOVED THIS, in no small part because it reminded me so much of Walter Tevis's book The Queens Gambit (scroll down a ways). The kid's a poor prodigy piano player. Mommy drinks, no dad, kid lucks into a kindly music teacher who, luckily, has ALL SORTS of connections (actually, this kid lucks into a LOT of sh** that I came simply to refer to as "narrative lube," which descriptor you'd think would sort of have to disqualify a book from being good, and maybe it does. But I still loved this. I came to care quite a bit about what happened to almost every character in the book. Even some unsavory ones.)
  	Galatea 2.2	Richard Powers	My attention, w/r/t books, is more and more like a pinball, glancing off this bumper, then resting in that little bucket seat only for a second until it gets bopped back into play. I FINALLY sat down with Stones of Summer after FINALLY sitting down with Call it Sleep...and then happened across a $4 copy of this. As you can see if you scroll down a year or two, I loved Powers's The Gold Bug Variations more, almost, than my own sweet pulse and have been scheming a re-read ever since finishing it. This will do for now; half the page count, and it is freakishly meta in a way I've never seen meta done before: The book features Powers himself as the protagonist in obviously fictional construct (teaching a computer program to think, more or less) but the construct is embedded in a narrative that, with not much research, proves to be Powers's own literary history. His first four novels—Galatea 2.2 is his fifth—are alluded to then later dicussed outright in this novel as they are written and released. Powers even offers witheringly honest reactions to some reviews of his first four. AND...in the case of good old GBV, a fair amount of explication is provided, with (joy!) my beloved Jan O'Deigh (GBV heroine) making a cameo! So of course I love it.
  	Speak, Memory	Vladimir Nabokov	Started this several years ago. It was great* and getting better but I got sidetracked (as is my wont). I finally bumped it to the top of my list. *And by great I don't mean really good. I mean, every paragraph has at least one moment that inspires awe at the simple mastery of the language. And all this from a writer for whom English is a second language. (Check that. Third language. He was born in Russia, but around his aristocratic household French seems to have been the preferred language. ) 7-30-06. I started this in 2000. I read a chapter or two last summer, but it's now about time I gave this amazing book the attention it more than deserves. 8-6-06 What a lovely, lovely book. I'm always amazed when I know I'll reread a book, despite having so many unread books on my list. I had to create a page for this one.
  	Coming Into The Country	John McPhee	A detailed look at three regions of Alaska....Northwest Alaska, in "The Encircled River," Urban Alaska (Anchorage & Juneau) in "What They Were Hunting For," and the upper Yukon, near the Canadian border, in "Coming Into The Country". If you've ever wondered if, in this day and age, people live in the woods and hunt and fish to feed themselves and avoid almost all traces of civilization, the answer is "read this book," and "yes." If you've ever wondered if YOU could, the answer is "read this book," and "you probably can't."
  	Heirs Of General Practice	John McPhee	An examination of "family medicine" and "general practice" in Maine. Both sides of the Specialization debate are presented, but it's mighty hard to argue against a good old family doctor for a community located in the middle of nowhere.
  	Abandon Ship!	Richard Newcombe, Peter Maas	The movie Jaws. The three of them are going after the shark. Quint, Brody and Hooper are in the belly of the boat at night, drinking, having a few laughs, trading stories about scars. Quint shaves everyone's buzz when he points out that one of HIS scars was obtained during the torpedoing of the USS Indianapolis, July 30, 1945, and subsequent 4 days in the water while no help came and survivors were ravaged by sharks. It's a famous moment in a famous movie based on an actual event. This book reveals excruciating details about the torpedo attack, the sinking, the survivors adrift on the Pacific at the mercy of the sun and the sharks. it also reveals INFURIATING details about a ridiculous kangaroo court martial which drove the ship's surviving captain to commit suicide, and details about the worthless bags of **** that set him up and allowed the poor bastard to take the fall. The book was originally published in 1958. My version has a fascinating afterward by Peter Maas, with recently discovered details about how the Navy brass knew the Indianapolis was sailing straight toward enemy subs but withheld that knowledge, allowed the captain to think he was in safe waters, then had the GALL to court-martial him for NOT sailing in a defensive manner: THE ONLY CAPTAIN OF A SUNKEN SHIP TO BE COURT-MARTIALED IN WWII.
  	The Control Of Nature	John McPhee	The New Yorker re-ran the first third of this book after Katrina battered and soaked Louisiana. The first third, which originally ran in the late 80s, concerns human efforts to control the Mississippi River. The second third of the book concerns man's effort to control the lava flows off the southern coast of Iceland. The final third concerns man's effort to control the not-so-gradual disintegration of the San Gabriel mountains in southern California. As always, McPhee is a model of simplicity and literary efficiency that could easily be described as virtuosic. Writers who can make complex technical and scientific concepts easy to understand are exceedingly hard to find, and while McPhee is getting on in years (born in 1931) the world is lucky that he got very good very early in his life and that he is prolific; we have at least 30 books by him.
  The Chocolate War	Robert Cormier	A book for teens that a colleague recommended highly. (Since I also work with teens, maybe it's about time I read something written for them!)
  Longitude	Dava Sobel	I've read this book twice now, and I still love it. It's brief (my first reading was in one sitting) and one gets the sense that some serious editing was done. The interpersonal drama between Victorian academics and Noblemen seems like it could have made this book 500 pages long at least, but Dava Sobel keeps the narrative humming. As in James Watson's "The Double Helix," the high science is presented in such an engaging manner that it could almost be called a page-turner! PREMISE: Before the mid-1700s, mariners, even high-level naval officers, were dying at sea because they were getting lost. Sailors could easily tell their latitude by the elevation of the sun and stars, but finding one's LONGITUDE, on the surface of a sphere that rotates at 1000 miles per hour at the equator, demands precision timekeeping, and they simply did not have the necessary precision in a portable timekeeper. Sure, on clear days and nights they could use the relative positions of the sun, moon and stars, but these methods required extremely complicated calculations, and took HOURS. (Forget about cloudy days and nights, as well as times when the deck is pitching and rolling, as in a storm.) So the British government offered what today would be over $10 million to the person who could design a clock with the accuracy AND portability required for oceanic navigation (i.e. a clock that neither loses nor gains more than 3 seconds per day. At the time clocks were off by as much as a couple minutes per day.) Long story short: a non-scientist named John Harrison designed a heavy (50+ pounds) but accurate clock, but was conspired against by the powers that be (scientists) who thought clocks were a "gimmick." The story is about the 5 clocks he made, how accurate they are, and especially who conspired against him and how. (And his son. This is a story that compasses decades.)
  Freakonomics	Steven leavitt & Stephen Dubner	This was a VERY quick and very interesting read, and reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point strongly and often.
  Zazie And The Metro	Raymond Queneau	Had never heard of Queneau but for a single mention in Evan Dara's novel The Lost Scrapbook. Just started this. 1-26-06. What the hell? A trippy romp around Paris, and then the cops open up with machine guns?? And who gives a sh** about Zazie? By the end I couldn't have cared less what happened to her, I was far more interestied in Marceline and Charles, or "Unkoo" Gabriel. Which is OK since Zazie is actually a supporting role in the story.
  Adventures of a No Name Actor	Marco Perella	Christmas gift...one or two chapters in and liking it. FUNNY because he doesn't BS. If big stars act like assholes Perella says so, and names names, which is even funnier. 1-1-06. This is HILARIOUS! Every story has made me laugh out loud. I also like how it seems clear this writer/actor could write "heavier" stuff if he wanted to.
  CivilWarLand In Bad Decline	George Saunders	He had a story published recently in The New Yorker called "CommComm" that quickly entered my top five favorite short stories of all time. I'll bet this book was written around the same time; It has a similar feel and many similar themes, and is very good as well (though I've read only two of its nine or ten stories.) 12-30-05. Holy crap! I had no idea abject hopelessness could be so damned funny!!
  The Lost Scrapbook	Evan Dara	This was my second time through this amazing novel. No one seems to know who Evan Dara is or what else he/she has written. Many feel the name is a pseudonym. Don't know, don't care. Love it. Love it so much in fact I took closer notes this time through and created a web page for it. (I'm also in the process of indexing it, but that will take several months.) (6-10-06. Gave that up shortly after I wrote this, but I might pick it up again someday.) The book itself annoys some readers since it takes over 300 pages to get to the point. It's a series of scenes and conversations, the beginnings and endings of which bleed into one another: impressions of various individuals and relationships in the fictional Missouri town of Isaura. The book has no chapters, and the narrative only breaks in two places. (With two or three blank pages in both places, strangely.) If you stick with it, there's a point—about 2/3 to 3/4 the way into the book where the disjointed scenes begin slowly to coalesce. You don't really notice it happening, which is cool, but it dawns on you that many of the people you heard from during the first part of the book are getting sick in Isaura. And the photographic film company that essentially owns the town (a la Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY) is denying any responsibility, though one of their chemical waste pipes did burst near an elementary school. For financial reasons much of the town is ready to accept any- and everything the company says, turning against town "activists" who distrust the company. But after a while the truth grows undeniable...
  White Teeth	Zadie Smith	A friend loaned me this novel a year ago, and I started it then but got distracted by other reading. Happy to see it again. 11-20-05. A terrific read. It's basically a story of two guys who fought together in WWII, then moved to England and lived near each other and raised families. It's painted across the mulitcultural scapes of North London: Pakistanis, Indians, Jamaicans, Brits, etc. The thing about Smith's writing...and Heaven help me I KNOW this will come across disrespectfully but I mean it in with highest respect: Sometimes she reads like a female writer and sometimes she reads like a male writer. It's a pleasant surprise, it produces startling effects, and it's definitely entertaining.
  Ghost Rider	Neal Peart	Rush's drummer. His daughter was killed in a car wreck in August, 1997, and his wife died of cancer ten months later. He quits Rush for awhile and hops on his motorcycle and doesn't get off it for almost a year. This has a real "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" feel to it, for several obvious reasons, but a big difference is the sense that Peart is easing away from madness as the trip unfolds, whereas Robert Pirsig slid into it. 9-25-05. OK here's another difference: Pirsig doesn't come across as a shmuck in several places. A couple times I almost set the book aside in annoyance and almost in disgust. Now yes, Peart just lost his wife and daughter, but the anti-Americanism seeps off the page (not that it isn't warranted, at times) and the sneering way he refers to one young lady—who had the audacity to change her mind about him—only as "that woman". Eeek. (Ever since Clinton, that phrase has struck a nerve with me.) And his friend gets busted for drugs, a problem the friend has had before (this is the "third strike," it's conspicuously underemphasized) and it's admitted and acknowledged openly...yet this incarceration is repeatedly referred to as an "injustice." (Although, on second thought, if Peart and friend are railing against the mere fact that drugs are illegal, then OK, I guess I understand the use of "injustice." It didn't really feel that way when I was reading it. It felt like they were whining that the guy had been caught, which, don't do the crime, and all that.)
  Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince	J. K. Rowling	Halfway through it and enjoying it at least as much as the first five HP books.Everyone's getting older, kids cuss now ("Damn!") Rowling even drops an irate "slut" into the mix, so to speak. Sluts?? MY DAUGHTER WILL NOT READ THIS SATANIC SCRIPTURE!! :-) Harry's become such a well-rounded character (popping off at Dumbledore even!), it's gets easier and easier to put up with the relatively minor things that bug me about Rowling's style (See Order of the Phoenix comments way down this page.)
  Gold Bug Variations	Richard Powers	A mid-50's scientist was on the verge of real discovery in the realms of DNA research, and nothing happened. Decades later a librarian wants to know why. Where'd he go? What happened? If you liked "Gravity's Rainbow" you might want to give this a look. It has what I'll go ahead and call a Pynchonian level of technical discussion. Power's voice is hard work, but after awhile I found it growing on me. Rich characterization, imagery, and arcane references galore. Many appear to be included to aid with chronology...the book is non-linear. Not to a fault, but almost. 7-14-05. Took this book on a recent trip to Australia/New Zealand. 14 hour plane flights, 4 hour bus rides...I'd finish it in no time right? Wrong. I never cracked it once for all the iPod listening. 7-29-05. Just finished, and the question that keeps turing over in my mind is: so, why CAN'T this be my favorite book of all time? I think it might be. It's got music (and lots of it), it's got science (just a little more than I could get my head around—not a bad thing), it's got aching romance (I've discovered I have a bit of a taste for romance here as I plow into my 40s), it's got suspense and puzzles and art and trivia, to say nothing of just being wonderfully erudite and well-written and DIFFICULT. [The really good books that I've gotten lost in have been books that rewarded study (i.e. Googling on unknown words or references), and note-taking, and character lists. Like the good old Queen's Gambit back in November, I might have found myself doing an instant reread, were it not for this puppy's 600 page count. (I got a Harry Potter waiting in the wings, Jackson.) ]
  How The Mind Works	Steven Pinker	This is the big one. I've had my eye on it for some time. Finally bit the bullet, but of course it's 600 pages, AND I'm pretty well committed to "Speak, Memory." We'll see. 5/2/04. I'm liking this a LOT. Pinker, like Carl Sagan, and John McPhee, and Robert Wolke (my favorite science writers) has an ability with the language that makes him at least as good a writer as he is a scientist. No small compliment when you realize that Pinker's credentials as a cognitive science researcher are, from what I can tell, unmatched by any other popular science writer. He has an ease with the language that makes a dense page of text something to look forward to (Several successive pages having no images and few paragraph breaks can be intimidating, even to we avid readers) and like the three popularizers mentioned previously, Pinker can be very funny.
  Bobby Fischer Goes To War	David Edmonds and John Eidinow	I love chess, and it has always killed me that Bobby Fischer is such an incorrigible prick. Reading what took place before, during and after the 1972 Reykjavik World Championships, it's a wonder they took place at all. Fischer had to have every little detail HIS WAY. Ridiculous demands that for the most part were catered to. Combine this childish behavior with the racking paranoia of the Russians...like I said, How did this take place? (Chess books aren't supposed to be this engaging!)
  The Tipping Point	Malcolm Gladwell	When and why does "word of mouth" start kicking in after a movie is released? Why do some ideas become fashionable to many people and other ideas remain localized, or unknown? Why is Kevin Bacon the poster child for networking and well-connectedness when there are almost 700 other actors who are better connected in Hollywood? How could 40 or 50 kids in New York, simply by wearing hush puppies, revive the popularity of the shoes on a national scale? The book is ostensibly about human connections, and ideas that "stick," But to ME it screams chaos theory: a social variation on—or version of—the fabled "Butterfly Effect."
  The Da Vinci Code	Dan Brown	Took me long enough, right? :-) As you can see on this page, I don't usually seek out bestsellers. This one, though, has become something of a cultural imperative, and it was on sale, so what the hay. Is it good? It is a good pulp thriller. Is it fun? Yes indeed. Is it well-written? Even considering that Brown isn't striving to be Hemingway, my answer to this question is still only: More or less. It IS well-paced. Brown can titrate the suspense in just the right doses to make this a WICKED page-turner. (e.g. It's 2 AM and I really should go to bed since, you know, work tomorrow. But the chapters are tantalizingly short, and almost every single one ends with a teaser for the next chapter! Bastard! ["They opened the box and couldn't believe what they saw!!" End of chapter. LOL Subtlety is NOT one of Brown's strong suits.] So I kept saying "Oh, another three pages, what could it hurt?" Hyeah. Say that enough times and you're up another hour.) All the discussion of artwork and religion and ritual had me clamoring for Google, checking everything out, which is my idea of a good time, and for that I'm grateful to Brown. (It also doesn't hurt that I took my first—and perhaps only—trip to Europe last summer and spent several hours at many of the story's locations, especially the Vatican and the Louvre.) But The Da Vinci Code is far from perfect, and it most certainly isn't genius, contrary to the opinion of one of the jacket blurbs. In a book purporting to reinstate the primacy of the sacred feminine, why the hell couldn't Sophie be the Indiana Jones character and Langdon be the 2nd fiddle? (I know: Brown is a 40 year old white male teacher...he'll be spending more time writing in the voice of his main characeter so it helps if his main character is similar to him.) Most characters are one-dimensional. Early on it seemed that every word out of Cpt. Fache's mouth, every expression that crossed his face, was unquestionably malevolent. (Hey, the guy's name is "angry" in French. What am I expecting, right? As I said, Brown lacks subtlety.) But by far my biggest complaint: There were a few times in this book where a couple main characters who are supposed to be well-educated experts are SO brainless that I was actually cussing them audibly: "YOU IDIOTS! HELLO?? YOU CALL YOURSELF A CRYPTOLOGIST? YOU CALL YOURSELF A SYMBOLOGIST?? WAKE THE HELL UP!! A couple of examples"[the following paragraph will spoil it if you haven't read the book and want to. To see the text, highlight the following blank space, it's white text.] 1. Langdon and Sophie in the bank vault. "Oh no!! He gave us the key, but Grand-pere never gave us a ten-digit access code for the safe deposit box!!" somehow forgetting that they'd just spent HOURS poring over a ten-digit code he had given them. Friggin' idiots. I'm yelling at them...actually yelling: "The Fibonacci sequence? HELLO?" then two pages later one of them says "Hey, uh, maybe it's the Fibonacci sequence..." Or later: 2. Langdon and Teabing are utterly BAFFLED by four lines of script. "I recognize no words, not even any letters." I'm yelling "What the hell? GET A MIRROR IDIOTS! HELLO!" On the next page Sophie—to her credit, but she IS a cryptologist—takes one look and says "Hey, use a mirror..." [Honestly, it felt like I was watching Die-Hard, where the fat beat cop is giving the police chief clues and the chief ignores him. Then magically the chief has the same idea.]
  Snow Crash	Neal Stephenson	I've had this on my short list for a long while. I actually went to Borders, fresh xmas gift cards in hand, looking for Snow Crash above all others, but it's still selling decently and was not to be had. On Amazon used copies have not dipped below $7 or $8. So, until I find a copy I want, I shall, perhaps fittingly, given the story, read a virus-laden internet copy. [Text files don't have viruses per se, but misspellings and missing lines and paragraphs are sort of textual ills, and I dub them thus.] 2-8-05. OK I don't know what the hell the story was with Amazon the other day, but just last night I found like 8 million paperback copies of Snow Crash for pennies each. So that will get here in a week... 2-23-05. Not bad! A little flimsy in some spots and careless in others (*I* remembered about YT's dentata, but she didn't? And what the hell happened to Sushi K?) but VERY imaginative and funny too.
  Searching For Bobby Fischer	Fred Waitzkin	The movie has long since been memorized by all in my house save for my wife. My daughters and I love watching it still, 10 years after it came out. It's about time I went to the horse's mouth. 2-8-05. At least as good as the movie, and—as is almost always the case with books that also are movies—probably better, if for no other reason than the details about Russian and American grandmasters, and of course the lengthy chapter at the end about Fischer himself. (OF NOTE: in the movie, Josh beats the cocky kid at the end. This is a dramatization of the 1986 Primary Nationals, held in Charlotte, and in the actual event Josh did win the championship, but not that last game, as he did in the movie. In reality Josh and Jeff Sarwer played to the bone: two kings left alone on the board. Jeff and Josh both ended up with 6 wins and a draw, but because Josh began the tournament as the top seed, he played tougher opponents and was declared the tournament champion.)
  The Lovely Bones	Alice Sebold	My Mom, a librarian, strongly recommended this to me, and I'm enjoying it, even though I thought it was [hard swallow] an Oprah book. And you know something? It IS an Oprah book: sort of like the literary equivalent of what a lot of people call a chick flick. But you know something else? It's terrific. The older I get, the more willing I am to check out a chick flick—I really liked "Love Actually," for instance—and with my very long reading list it will take a lot more to bump an Oprah book to the front of my list, but at least it's not unthinkable, which it probably was as recently as say five years ago. Which tells you nothing about the book and too much about me. THE BOOK, at long last, is about a 14 year old girl who is brutally murdered and finds herself in heaven. The narrative consists of her observations from heaven (and occasional flashbacks) as she sees the effect her death has on her family, friends, and most interesting of all as far as I'm concerned, her murderer. I also like that since we're reading the thoughts of a dead girl who now can see and hear everything, it's written in what I guess you'd call "first person omnicient." (You've probably heard about the ending...yes it's weak, but frankly I'm cutting Ms. Sebold some slack; Like her protagonist, Sebold was horrifically sexually assaulted. Years later she spotted the guy and reported him to the cops, who promptly—and thankfully—locked his ass up! Happy endings—or as happy as an ending to a story that starts like that has any right to be—do occur sometimes.)
  A Short History Of Nearly Everything	Bill Bryson	Yet another fantastically written science popularization. This book is for those who wonder how it is we know the really big things we know about the universe, written with humor and detail. A rare example of an educational page-turner.
  The Queen's Gambit	Walter Tevis	When you have friends that recommend books like this to you, the world is indeed a nice place to be. I love chess the way that only we who are doomed to suck at it forever can love it, and THIS BOOK IS FOR ME. It's the story of a young girl who finds she can visualize entire games in her head and thus has, forever at her disposal, a "board" on which to run combinations and follow lines. And she starts kicking the ever-loving sh** out of everyone in sight, dashing masters against the rocks and grinding state champions under her heel. And then she gets even better. Her nearly catastrophic bout with booze feels inserted and frankly is one of the novel's few weak spots, but screw that, this book is too much fun to bitch about. If you know not only what the phrase "Mate in nineteen" means, but what it implies, do yourself a favor and give this book a look. 12-1-04. I've read books twice, but never before have I read a book and liked it well enough to reread it immediately. First time for everything I guess. 5-14-06. I'm still on the chess kick that began when I read this a year and a half ago (now have over 15 books in my "chess library," read a few pages, or play a game every day) so it's fair to say this book changed my life.
  Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix	JK Rowling	I'm 2/3 the way through this and so far Goblet of Fire is still my favorite. BUT, Rowling has finished strong in each of the first four books, so #5 here may end up alongside #4 on my short list. (I must say it for the 10,000th time: her dialog attribution dives me up the damned WALL!! AGH! Rowling has never met an adverb she didn't like!! " ' Look out' said Ron warningly..." " 'I'm tired' said Hermione docilely..." And while Harry's character is being fleshed out nicely (blowing up at his friends, worrying about girls, pouting when things go wrong, i.e. being a normal teenager), Malfoy is still a "maddeningly" one-dimensional character as are most of the villians. THAT SAID, this is an 870 page book that I'm going to finish inside of a week: so much fun! 10-17-04: All done and WHEW! Another amazing story. I do have two minor beefs, but they will spoil it if you haven't read the book and want to. To see them, highlight the following blank space, it's white text. 1. There's no WAY they let Marietta into the first DA meeting (p. 395). She "doesn't want to be there," and her DAD WORKS FOR THE MINISTRY!! Very weak. 2. And there's no way Harry forgets about the "communicator" Sirius gave him on page 523. Harry had been ACHING to be in contact with Sirius early in the book, and in the later chapters contact became a life-and-death issue.
  Jarhead	Anthony Swofford	This account of the first Gulf War (1991) is rude early and often. No honest book about the USMC wouldn't be. I've just started this and makes for quick and eager reading. Afterward: I enjoyed this A LOT, but I must warn any hard-core marines (because hard-core marines FLOCK to my site...) ...this may not be the book for you. Swofford has literary skill (and ambition) and sometimes he tries a little too hard to display that. (How many times do we need to hear that you read Homer over there?)
  Moving Mars	Greg Bear	AUDACIOUS. Greg Bear realizes one possible reality of 200 years from now. The politics and culture behind the civilization that came after the ones from Earth and Moon that colonized Mars. The Moon, the Earth and Mars all exist in a loose federation called "The Triple." Folks from Mars in the late 2100s are something like the way we Americans view the Brits today: polite, unaggressive, perhaps to a fault. (Well, not perhaps.) Unfortunately for them they are also way behind the ever-aggressive Earth technologically. Until...a small band of Martians make a scientific discovery that tips the scales and upsets all sorts of balances. The story is told as a 1st person memoir of a major player in the politics of the time, Casseia Majumdar. (She's at least as memorable a heroine as Oedipa Maas of T. Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49.")
  Blood Music	Greg Bear	My wife gave me Darwin's Radio after hearing one review, and it has turned out to be inside my top 5 favorite books of all time, and is probably tied with Carl Sagan's Contact as my favorite Sci-Fi novel. OK that was three years ago. So why am I JUST NOW getting to my second Greg Bear book? Who gives a rat's ass, this was AMAZING. It's from 1985, but it's something like the next level beyond cyber-punk. Think of how The Matrix is reality turned inside out...Blood Music is reality reconstituted. In other words, in The Matrix, there is the alternate universe we all are being fed by the machines. But there's still that dingy gray underpinning: The Desert Of The Real. In Blood Music reality's tablecloth is unceremoniously yanked from under the flatware, leaving only a handful of humans left standing, looking around, going "What...the...hell? And then...the table is yanked. A fantastic page turner, with all the good hard science I crave.
  My Losing Season	Pat Conroy	Our library not only loans books but sells them, cheap. Used of course, but my standards for a book's physical condition are well below what the library sets for books it will put up for sale, so I often make out like a bandit. Hardcover copy of this book in great shape? $2. The font is almost too small (is "eye strain" one or two words?), but, as ever, Conroy's writing is fluid, and he possesses a love for the game of basketball, and particularly his former teammates, that seeps off the page.
  Into Thin Air	Jon Krakauer	It's been a long time since I realized I would read this book someday. I've had many chances to buy it, but finding a copy for $1 was the tipping point, and this occurred last Thursday (3/11/04). I read a few pages initially, but REALLY curled up with it yesterday (13MAR04), finishing off the final 270 pages over the course of the day. Like The Perfect Storm, another famous adventure book, Into Thin Air, is mighty quick reading. After finsihing the book I went online and discovered Anatoli Boukreev's response to the book, as well as Krakauer's response to Boukreev. (In the book Boukreev was supposed to be looking after paying customers and wasn't doing that especially well according to Krakauer. It all gets complicated because this took place high up on Mt. Everest, in the middle of the night, in the middle of what was basically a hurricane, and well above 25,000 feet, where there is 1/3 the normal amount of oxygen in the air and one's brain rapidly turns to bean dip.)
  Everything And More: A Compact History Of Infinity	David Foster Wallace	He's trying to elucidate the work of Georg Cantor, mathematician who didn't discover infinity, of course, but who proved that there is more than one infinity, and that they are different sizes. I can't really say that Wallace completely succeeds, but I'm a big fan of his "hyper-colloquial-then-hyper-erudite" style so it was quite fun for me. AND I did regain an appreciation for a lot of the calculus that I couldn't handle at age 20.
  Thirst	Ken Kalfus	This one fell in one sitting. It's not too long, a terrific collection of intriguing short fiction.
  A Fan's Notes	Frederick Exley	If your life is not working out the way you thought it would, I recommend you do what Exley did and write something like this. An eye-opening (and occasionally uproarious) look at addiction, ambition, and depression. (I was inspired to read this after seeing "The Stone Reader" last summer. There are at least a half dozen books discussed in that movie that I have sworn to read. I'll try to make a note when I manage to do it.)
  Roger's Version	John Updike	Read meany poems and a story or two by Updike, but this is my first Updike novel. A buddy of mine who is a big Updike fan recommended that he and I do a parallel reading. As I understand it, it's about a theology professor who must deal with a student who is attempting to use computers to prove the existence of God.
  Annals of the Former World	John McPhee	Since I began teaching 8th grade science last year [this was written in 2002, fyi] (and since 8th grade science in my state is largely earth science) [or was, until 2005, now there's almost no Earth Sci in it] I've been looking for someone who can do for geology what Carl Sagan did for evolution and of course, astronomy. Somehow I didn't know that McPhee, a long time favorite, had written five volumes on the subject, and they all could be had within one hardback cover. Great fun, this! (Sure it's a lot of work, but the best books are. And this is one of the best you'll find. It won a Pulitzer in 1998 for general non-fiction.)
  On My Proverbial Nightstand At The Moment (And Has Been For Some Time, But I Still Read It From Time To Time And Thus Refuse To Put It Back On The Shelf)	The Stones of Summer	Dow Mossman	I had to drive to Chapel Hill to see The Stone Reader two years ago. It is a movie that (pardon me) changed my life; it changed the way I think about books, and writers, and reading. I came home and immediately ordered copies of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep and Joseph Heller's Something Happened but not The Stones of Summer. Now it's two years later, I have the Stone Reader DVD, which motivated me to order a copy of The Stones of Summer. BUT...Two days ago I finally picked up Call It Sleep forgetting completely that The Stones of Summer was on its way from Amazon. Now Call It Sleep is back on the shelf and I'm combing through SoS quite deliberately. I can already tell the book will have its own page on this site. Overwhelmed by the above mentioned Richard Powers litany, so this got set aside...but it was set aside by many people who went on to enjoy it tremendously, so maybe this hiatus is required....
  	DOUBT	Jennifer Michael Hecht	An easy to read reportage of one of the least well-reported philosophical standpoints.
  Soon Perhaps	Reading Like A Writer	Francine Prose	How-To-Write books carry more weight with me when written by well-published (and preferrable well-known) writers. Stephen King's On Writing is at the top of the list, but the more I read this the closer to the top it moves. (The woman's name is Prose, for chrissakes.)
  	Guns, Germs & Steel	Jaren Diamond	I never finished Collapse* but enjoyed it while I was reading it, and this primise of this book is too good to pass up and can be summed up in a simple question: Of the 5 habitable continents (correctly counting Eurasia as one) why was it the western end of Eurasia that gave rise to the most influential societies on Earth? Why did Europeans conquer North Americand and Aouth Americans instead of vice versa? Science has long shown us that biologically and intellectually all races are essentially identical, so what was it about Europeans that allowed them to invent guns before other societies; allowed them to be resistant to the diseases that they unwittingly used to exterminate 95% of their enemies; allowed them to invent metal weapons first? The answer, as elucidated by Diamond, is both head-smackingly simple and excruciatingly complex, and—provided Stephenson or Vollmann doen't lure me away**—I'll devour this in less than a week. *the first half of Collapse covers societies that acturally collapsed, which is what I was interested in, and the latter half discusses societies that have NOT collapsed, so I drifted... 20JUL09 **...and Stephenson did... (sigh)
  	My System	Aron Nimzowitsch	I'm a tactical junkie, but it's long past time I studied strategy in a serious way. Much of what I've read about My System (including this edition's intro by Yasser Seirawan, one of my favorite chess writers...this edition being the 1991 "21st Century" overhaul by Lou Hays) talks about how difficult your first trip through it can be. Nimzo's ideas may not seem to make sense, you're warned. And I'm seeing this, but really, anytime you can tag along as one of the greatest players in history walks you through game after game and position after position—including 50 of his own complete games with meticulous analysis—life is still sweet.
  	Sway	Ori & Rom Brafman	In the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Tipping Point or Blink. Perhaps not quite as polished, but still a very informative and fun stundy of why we as humans simply cannot help but to act irrationally far more frequently than we'd ever admit.
  	Collapse	Jared Diamond	Why are the monolithic stone heads essentially all that's left of the once thriving civilization on Easter island? (Hint: Don't cut down all your trees.) Sep 08: Had to set it aside. It's terrific but, alas, numerous personal and professional impingencies...well, impinge, you see.
  		Thomas Pynchon	What am I, nuts? Do I not have five books in progress already? Haven't I read this twice already? Am I really this impulsive? 24SEP08. After two chapters, back to the shelf with you...
  	Beloved	Toni Morrison	I'm not inherently attracted to Morrison's work, but how many "Best Of All Time" lists that I respect will have to include this before I tackle it? None more (says Nigel) since I started it this morning. After a page and a half though, I can already tell this will be a TON of work. (As a fan of D.F. Wallace, and T. Pynchon, this is not a bad thing for me.) (4-22-07: I made the mistake of looking up all sorts of articles about this book, I was enjoying it so much, then some spoilers got through and ruined it for me. I'll finish someday, no question, but not before the newness of this "spoilage" wears off.)
  	V.	Thomas Pynchon	Christmas gift....this has been on my "to read" list for some time. Two or three pages in and it already feels like Gravity's Rainbow (i.e. difficult) which I knew it would, but a higher level of committment will be required to fully enjoy this thing. We'll see if I can muster it while all the other Christmas presents and activities beckon for attention.
  	Call It Sleep	Henry Roth	It's been on my short list for several years now. On numerous "Best Of All Time" lists.
  	Portnoy's Complaint	Phillip Roth	My better half found a tattered copy in a buck-apiece sale at the local library. She's not terribly literarily minded, so spying this in her considerable haul was a nice surprise.
  	The Blank Slate	Pinker	See Words & Rules comment two rungs below...
  	The Blind Watchmaker	Dawkins, Richard	Consensus recommendation.
  	Words & Rules	Pinker, Steven	Have yet to read an unengaging book by Pinker. He's a superb writer...this one is quite overdue.
  	The Recognitions	William Gaddis	Consensus recommendation.
  	Atlas Shrugged	Ayn Rand	Had it on my list for two reasons. 1. I loved The Fountainhead which I read 20 years ago. 2. It's on numerous highly regarded "Best Of All Time" lists. I really should at least take a look.
  	The Bible Companion	Isaac Asimov	I've picked this up numerous times as a reference. (It can be a sort of Cliff's Notes for both New Testament and Old.)
  	Complications	Atul Gawande	Have sampled bits of this in The New Yorker and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
  	Chemistry Explained	Robert Wolke	A text book with a sense of humor. Chemistry is a weak spot in both my science knowledge and my interest. Wolke makes you love whatever he's writing about.
  	Mason & Dixon	Thomas Pynchon	Often recommended, occasionally vociferously so. Esp. by my partner in Blood Meridian lust, Harold Bloom.
  	Great Books	David Denby	Got halfway through it in 1999, was loving it, got distracted.
  	J R	William Gaddis	Consensus recommendation.
  	Speedboat	Renata Adler	Started it, put it down. Want to pick it up.
  	A Frolic Of His Own	William Gaddis	Have taken two shots at this...
  	Gold Bug Variations	Richard Powers	Read it already. It's in my top three all time favorite novels, no shit. I've been pondering a reread forever, it seems like.

  ---

  OLDIE OF THE DAY
  (or Sennight, or Fortnight, or However Damn Often I Feel Like Changing It Which is Admittedly Almost Anything But Daily)
  
  
  
  • "You're What You Want To Be" - Cruel Story of Youth. Shades of Honeymoon Suite, this sucker is inside my top 10 air guitar songs. Not for the solo* but for that intro chord whomp that all but rips your you-know-whats off.
    
    *(which solo is in the "Oh Sherrie," melodic soloing style; Unquestionably lovely, to be sure, but doesn't lend itself to "Satch Boogie"-level air guitarring.)
    
    
  • "Godzilla" by Blue Oyster Cult. From the 1977 album Spectres. That car commercial has put this sucker back into my brain. And unmistakable chord progression, topped by a screeching, stretched note soaked in reverb: to me it sounds like that bent note is echoing through Tokyo's concrete canyons as the big lizard "wades through the buildings toward the center of town." I also like that little half-time show with the "zilla! -zilla! -zilla!" echo thing, and the guy speaking Japanese over the loudspeaker. (I'd forgotten just how much fun the song is to play too!)
    
    And in the category of "I've Heard It A Zillion Times But Never Heard That Part Before:" at the end where they repeat line "History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men," if you listen closely you can hear harmonies start layering in, and the very last time they run through it (at 3min 33sec on my version) a VERY high harmony jumps in that almost sounds like some little kid.
  
  
  

  

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