For those who are new ... we discuss books. I list what I'm reading, and people comment with what they're reading. Sometimes I post a special edition on a particular genre or topic.
Just the usual diary this week.
cfk has Bookflurries on Wednesday nights, with links to lots of other diaries about books and reading on daily Kos.
sarahnity has Books by kossacks on Tuesdays.
Just finished
Stone's Fall by Iain Pears. In this novel, mostly set about 100 years ago, a very rich man has fallen from a window in London and died. His death is mysterious, his will is more mysterious, and his widow may be the most mysterious of all. The widow hires a newspaper reporter, and this novel is about what happens next. Pears writes really well, but somehow this wasn't holding my interest, so I've given up on it.
Samurai William the Englishman who opened Japan by Giles Milton. This is the story of the guy who was the basis for James Clavell's Shogun. That's the problem .... this is history, Shogun was a novel. But, even within that, Clavell gave us much more of a feel of the two cultures involved than Milton does. If you are very interested in the history of this period, then this book is for you. But, while it's a good book and well-written, mostly what it made me want to do is go read Shogun again.
Samurai William made me want to reread Shogun by James Clavell, I did, and I wasn't disappointed. One of the great novels, it's the story of the first Englishman to go to Japan, in the 17th century. Clavell packs this huge novel (1100+ pages) and the pages fly. There's an adventure story, a love story, a war; it's suspenseful too. And it does, I think, a great job of illuminating the culture of Japan at the time, contrasting it with Europe of the time, and portraying both with their warts.
Now reading
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. As noted above, we will be reading this in Let's Read a Book Together on Sunday. This is an attempt to answer the question: Why do the Eurasians and their descendants have all the stuff, while the people of the Americas, Africa, and Australia have very little?
Year's Best Science Fiction by Gardner Dozois. In my opinion, the best of the annual anthologies. I am going through this slowly, but I want to finish it before next summer!
Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris. All about cognitive dissonance and how we justify our own actions. Excellent book about how we all fool ourselves and how memory works (and doesn't). A lot of information on cognitive dissonance and other topics, very clearly presented.
The annotated Alan Turing by Charles Petzold. This is a brilliant idea. Petzold has taken Alan Turing's classic paper on computability and provided extensive, paragraph by paragraph commentary on it, making it comprehensible for a lot more people (like me). This sort of thing should be done more often.
Grimspace by Ann Aguirre. This is the start of an SF series about Sirantha Jax, a woman who carries the rare J-gene that lets her use 'grimspace' which allows faster than light travel and the exploration of the universe. At one level, this is space adventure - battles are fought, lives lost, risks taken, sex is engaged in - and at that level it's a complete success. At another level, all the main characters are at the edge of what 'human' is - I won't spoil it by giving details - and Aguirre seems to be trying to say something about what it means to be human. At this level, I think, it's a partial success. I have high hopes for the series
The Pursuit of Glory: Five revolutions that made modern Europe: 1648 - 1815 by Tim Blanning. To quote the NY Times Book Review: "History writing at its glorious best". Blanning is a highly knowledgeable guide to this period, but, more than that, he has a talent for pointing out the odd fact and making it fit into a bigger picture. He makes observations that strike you as obvious - once you've read them - and draws you into the narrative. Anyone with interest in this period should read this book
Finding our Tonguues: Mothers, infants and the evolution of language by Dean Falk. Wonderfully written and engaging, this is scholarly writing at its best. Speech - and language generally - is the quintessential human activity. While there are arguments about whether other primates can really learn a language, or how much language some other species have, there's no doubt that no animal uses language to the extent that we do. How did this happen?
And some technical books for work.