Reading list


I used to have a complete list of everything I'd read for the last 7 years.
The file was so big that it took minutes to load in my browser, though there
were no graphics. Then it got destroyed, and by the time I noticed the problem
several weeks later, all the backups at my ISP were zero-length, too.
Ah, well. Impermanence, as the Buddhists would say. I'll take this as a
lesson in non-attachment, losing those reviews of hundreds of books.
It was my favorite web page...

Later: A friendly soul sent me a link to the wayback machine, and I
retrieved the old list. You can find it HERE

In the interest of full disclosure, and on the off-chance that anyone actually cares,
the reading list here is incomplete. Sometimes I forget to record what I read.
Also, I didn't finish every book listed here. So don't take this too seriously.
Also, when I remember a book I once read, I sometimes add it here.




General nonfiction.

Absolutely American. A Rolling Stone reporter spends four years following West Pointers through the U. S. Military Academy.

Adrift: seventy-six days lost at sea. Steven Callahan. Sailing solo round the world, his ship is rammed by a while in the middle of the night and he ends up drifting clear across the Atlantic on an inflatable raft. No one else had ever survived more than a month alone in these circumstances.

The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. Jean-Denis Bredin. Didn't get much of this read, but what I did get through was top-notch storytelling and research. Well worth it, if I didn't have a dozen other books to get through, and too many other projects already going on...

Afghanistan's Endless War. Larry P. Goodson. The title sums it up, though it was written before we invaded the place. Pity the people of Afghanistan; their suffering goes on and on. For an earlier and different view, read "Under A Sickle Moon", though it's dated now. Also "Taliban: militant Islam, oil, and fundamentalism in Central Asia" (see below).

Arsenals of Folly. Richard Rhodes. A friend of mine who knew Rhodes once remarked that he threw in everything he could. This book is proof that she was right. Purportedly about the nuclear arms race, it wanders far afield, beginning with Chernobyl.

The Art of Deception. Kevin Mitnick. Highly repetitive stories about social engineering, badly written. The guy has a huge ego, too.

American Dynasty. Kevin Phillips. Family biography of the Bushes.

Argumentation, Parts I and II. 12 CDs containing 24 lectures a little more than half an hour each. "The study of effective reasoning", and it's partly that, but it's also the art of effective disputation.

Ataturk. Patrick Kinross. Didn't get past the career in the Army prior to WWI.

Autobiography of a Face. Lucy Grealy. Memoir by a woman who had cancer of the jaw as a young girl, and her struggles medical and personal.

Baghdad Burning. Riverbend. If I didn't have to wade through too many ham-fisted asides, I'd finish the book, because it's full of interesting details about the struggle to live through the occupation and the insurgency. But it's too much work sorting the wheat from the chaff.

The Barn at the End of the World. Mary Rose O'Reilley. Ex-Catholic Quaker Buddhist shepherd. Recommended by a friend because I'm an ex-Catholic Buddhist who belongs to a Quaker Meeting. But this was not for me -- there's an annoying emphasis on the "spiritual", a word I've never understood. But the stuff about the sheep was interesting. They're a lot of work, and a lot of weird, interesting things go wrong with them... I read every word, and I was glad to be done with it at the end.

Before the Dawn. Nicholas Wade. As with much other writing about evolution, most of this is unfounded speculation (writers on evolution often remind me of medieval theologians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, because there's no way of testing their speculations to find out whether they're accurate, and other hypotheses would be just as good). Regardless, though, there's lots interesting info here. If you read it, skip the treatment of religion. Like much of the rest of the book, it's reductionist.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance. Atul Gawande. Chapters on polio outbreaks, the treatment of wounded soldiers in Iraq, cystic fibrosis patients, and so on. Thoughtful, practical, and accessible.

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer. Eric Hansen. Short pieces, less essays than mini-memoirs.

Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green. Johnny Rico. 26-year-old with 2 masters' degrees signs up for the infantry and goes to Afghanistan. Whatever you expect, this book will differ.

The Book that Changed My Life. Edited by Diane Osen. Short pieces by good writers.

The Boys' Crusade. Paul Fussell. A much-needed corrective to the romantic view of WW II now currently popular.

Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women. Alexa Albert. Medical student goes to Nevada to investigate condom breakage, becomes friends with the prostitutes, and ends by spending a total of seven months in the whorehouse.

The Bush Dyslexicon. Mark Crispin Miller. Just what it sounds like.

By the Sword. Richard Cohen. Interesting book, but I have to wonder how accurate it is. Though I know nothing about European-style fencing, I found simple mistakes unrelated to it: the implication that Harry Truman was from Saint Louis, rather than the opposite side of Missouri; the Nazi Heydrich's name given as Reinhold on page 359 (though the index reference to that page correctly uses Reinhard); a photograph of a German duel supposedly resulting in a beheading, which to my eye is clearly fake. It's always a bother to read a book from which I think I'm learning new material, only to find these little warning signs scattered around. I have to wonder how accurate the rest of the book is.

Candyfreak. Steve Almond. The story of American candy bars, especially the regional and family-made ones that are vanishing. He also writes good short stories.

The Case Against Perfection. Michael Sandel. Harvard professor argues against genetic engineering and the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

The Children's Blizzard. David Laskin? The great blizzard of 1888, still a subject of conversation in the northern Plains of the U.S. The temperature dropped 18 degrees in three minutes, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, during the afternoon. People would be a stone's throw from their houses and couldn't find their way back. Good on the human interest stories, but the explanation of the weather is indecipherable, and there are too many characters to keep straight. If you read this, write the names and identifying characteristics of the people so you don't get confused when the writer begins jumping from one to another.

Choices and Consequences. Dick Schaefer. Advice for parents on housebreaking (training? civilizing?) your children.

The Circus at the End of the World.

The Civil War: a Narrative. Shelby Foote. A master stylist. He writes with a dip pen (the steel version of a quill pen), probably to force himself to think through his sentences carefully before he commits them to paper. But the volume I read took me a long time, and I've never wanted to take the time for the other two. This is one of those trilogies to read when you've retired, or you're taking a peaceful vacation.

The Clash of Civilizations. Samuel P. Huntington. A great book (literally great), but one that took a long time to get through. Important, fundamental insights, but he should probably pay more attention to the effects contemporary cultures have on the inner dynamics of other cultures (e.g., the changes provoked in one culture through media -- one minor example is teenagers in Tehran using cell phones to flirt, since they can't flirt in person). Huntington's view of history and civilizations is sophisticated, and springs from long, deep study and experience. But he treats the cultures of the world as insufficiently dynamic. Also, his disagreements with multiculturalism in the United States at the end of the book come out of left field... The end of the book, in which he conjectures a world war that starts with conflict between China and the U.S., and which widens to draw in Japan, India, Pakistan, Iran, the Mideast, Europe, and Russia, is frightening because it's plausible.

Confidence. Rosabeth Moss Kanter. I tried, once again, to read a business book. As always, I failed, though this time at least I got more than halfway through. This is typical of the sort of gibberish this book, like the others, is filled with: "Rather than continually reorganize, which is disruptive, turnaround leaders augment the organization chart with flexible, sometimes temporary, groups that open relationships in multiple directions." I'm sure this is useful for someone, but every business book I've ever read confirms my observation that business people write without substance, think in cliches, and confuse slogans and jargon with ideas.

The Corporation. Joel Bakan. Book on which the eponymous movie was based. The notion is that corporations have the psychological profile of psychopaths. Rather obvious, really. Though short, the book had little beyond this to say. Would have been stronger at essay length.

Courtesans. Katie Hickman. The lives of five famous kept women of the 19th century. They were the movie stars of their day -- the subjects of endless fascination, gossip, and imitation.

Courtroom 302. Steve Bogira. In the first chapter, the death of a prisoner through the deliberate indifference of jailers to his obvious medical distress is mentioned in passing; it's scarcely a ripple. The judge says his job is to keep things moving. And so on. Of course, most Americans don't care to hear about this sort of thing; they want it to take place out of sight, so it will be out of mind. Which is why our prison system is out of its mind. Those who believe that our legal system dispenses justice should read this book and be disabused: innocent defendants railroaded to guilty pleas simply to cover the asses of the police and D.A.; convictions sought for purposes of public relations; police torture denied by a judge in the face of clear and consistent evidence, when even the police admit that it's occurred. It it any wonder that we now have Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

The Cuckoo's Egg. Clifford Stoll. I re-read this on June 5 - 6, 2005.

Database Nation. Simson Garfinkel. A bit out of date (things change fast in the arena of computers and privacy), but still useful, and still scary. Privacy? Forget it.

Deaf in America.

Dead Lucky. Lincoln Hall. Though his name sounds like a dormitory at a black college, the author is actually a white Australian who climbs Himalayan peaks. That's a bit like being a scuba diver from Chad, since Australia is the flattest continent and doesn't have any high peaks. In this tome, he dies on Everest, comes back to life, and then has to deal with the consequences of severe frostbite. Personally, I suspect that his pulse was simply undetectable and he wasn't actually defunct.

Doubt. Jennifer Michael Hecht. Not much about doubt here -- it's all about disbelief. And there's a great deal about that, probably several times as much as there should have been, every word of which I slogged through, despite knowing it was largely a waste of time. The author would have done better to spend less effort on being comprehensive and more on the clarity and depth of her ideas, such as they were. I can't criticize the accuracy of the text (the writers covered I mostly haven't read), except to note that her treatment of one thing I do know about (Zen) is superficial and inaccurate; for instance, in a footnote she attributes the authorship of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind to D. T. Suzuki. The correct name was the other Suzuki: Shunryu.

Eavesdropping on Hell. This book can't be bought over the counter. I sent an e-mail to the fellow at the National Security Agency who wrote it and he sent me a copy. The subject is Allied eavesdropping/spying/cryptology on the Axis during WWII, especially as it concerns the extermination of the Jews. Would be worth the money, even if it weren't free, which it is, though for all I know my name is on some list at the NoSuchAgency now. Things have really changed since the days when they wouldn't even admit they existed; now they hand out free books!

The Elegant Solution. Matthew May. I should have known better than to expect a business book to be readable. I have yet to find one. This one's the usual puff piece, hyperbole, and gibberish.

An Embarrassment of Mangoes. Ann Vanderhoof. Author and her husband leave a high-pressure life in Toronto for two years; they sail from Canada to the Carribean. Vanderhoof writes like the magazine writer she is, not realizing that full-length books require a different touch -- that the saturated colors of small pieces are simply too much when they're carried on for hundreds of pages. She indulges in that one extra sentence at the end of the paragraph telling us what she felt, when the reader already knew from the sentences before it. She punches up her language with too many colorful adjectives. She tries too hard. She's merciless in her interminable descriptions of food. Worst of all, she loves hyphenated strings of nouns serving as adjectives: "close-to-our-own-age Trinis", "melt-your-heart [voice]", "ginger-lime-rum-butter sauce", "front-of-house sister". And she never met a standard hyphenated phrase she disliked, either, from "high-test" to "small-sized" to "middle-class", even when she's the only one who thinks they should be hyphenated, or the extra word (wouldn't "small" have sufficed?) is necessary. She reads like a bad writer who's trying for vivid writing. In short, her annoying style gets in the way of what she's trying to say, none of which shows an original sensibility, or any original ideas. No, she got rid of all the interesting stuff years ago, writing for the magazines. Not one fresh phrase or idea in this entire book, though she tried. Yes, she tried on every page. I can picture her with her thesaurus, and her word processor, endlessly revising. Instead of relying on stale technique, though, she should have engaged her mind. Too bad; I generally love nonfiction about authors' sailing adventures.

An End to Suffering. Pankaj Mishra. Ostensibly about Buddhism, this book is equally a personal memoir, travelogue, and cultural history. Much of the material (Nietzsche, for instance) shouldn't fit, but somehow the book works anyway.

English Hours. Henry James. Exquisite vignettes of the English countryside, without that prolixity of the late James that someone once compared to a hippopotamus picking up a pea.

Extreme Weather. Christopher C. Burt

The Face of Battle. John Keegan. Rigorous examination of three famous battles by a leading military historian. Written with an emphasis on what the foot soldiers experienced.

Fast Company. David Gross. Memoir of an American's life in Italy, working as an executive in a motorcycle factory (Ducati, probably).

Fast Food Nation. Eric Schlosser. He does a thorough job of making the food, and the process of getting it into American bellies, frightening and disgusting. The book is not a jeremiad -- it seems to be an honest description of what crawled out when he turned over the rock. A modern equivalent, in a way, of Sinclair Lewis's The Jungle.

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Growth of Raunch Culture. Ariel Levy. The author pretty much tips her hand with the title: she's agin it. I read it through because I've been trying to figure out why, these days, even the good girls dress and (sometimes) act like tarts. While there were some worthwhile insights, in the end the book failed to give me those one or two crucial ideas I'd been looking for -- but that's just me. There's a lot between these covers that's worth learning, buried though it is in dross.

First Encounters. Edward and Nancy Sorel. I re-read this periodically. Quirky anecdotes about first meetings -- Pascal and Descartes, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson, Marat and Charlotte Corday (also their last meeting!), Wittgenstein and Russell, Roosevelt and De Gaulle, Cassatt and Degas, Sartre and Beauvoir, Howard Hughes and Ingrid Bergman, Byron and Shelley, and so on. A great source for dinner conversation. The little stories seemed a bit touched up (sometimes veering into speculation), but they're entertaining. And the drawings are fun, too. If your book club is getting burned out on long, heavy books, try this one; it's guaranteed to light the spark again.

Foreign Babes in Beijing. Rachel DeWoskin. Girl goes to China to work as a PR flack and becomes a TV star and more.

Founding Faith. Steven Waldman. Careful examination of the roots of the tradition of separation of church and state in this country, and of the religious beliefs and practices of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and most of all Madison.

Freakonomics. [I forget the authors' names.] Interesting, but riddled with error -- for instance, the authors perform thought experiments, then draw conclusions based on them, without showing that their imaginings match reality. They speculate endlessly. They conflate ideas, insert new notions into the middle of an argument without laying the groundwork for them, and fail to support their assertions. There's a lot of entertainment here, but the arguments are not rigorous, and the book is not groundbreaking.

Geisha, A Life. Mineko Iwasaki.

Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world. Jack Weatherford. Trying to correct the smears we Westerners have heard since childhood, Weatherford goes too far the other direction.

god Is Not Great. Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens indulges himself as usual, hurling vitriol at those he disagrees with (in this case, anyone religious). He's a master of invective. But his usual set of rhetorical tropes is here: exaggeration, sweeping statements, unsupported assertions, factual errors, insults, and mistakes of reasoning, among others. He never restrains himself, and his only goal seems to be to cover his foe with spittle, and so, as usual, he's unconvincing. If you want to read an atheist's manifesto, Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation is much better, and Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth better yet.

Great Battles of the Ancient World. Garrett Fagan. 4 DVDs. Skipped around; watched Alexander the Great, Marathon, Thermopylae, Cannae, Teutoburg Forest and a few others. Good stuff, but it needs more visual aids and less talking head.

The Great Human Diasporas. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza.

The Grid. Philip Schewe. Interesting enough book, but for at least the first half of this tome I felt I was being lectured to, somewhat de haut en bas. Check out these two examples of the writer's usage, on successive pages: "cerebral circuitry" for "brains", and "diurnal period" for "day". This was a disappointing book. I expected a man with a Ph.D. in physics, who's written more than one play produced in Washington and New York, to know what he wanted to say, and how to organize it.

Homage to Catalonia. George Orwell. Well worth reading, though the chapters on the politics of the Spanish Civil War are difficult to get through. Orwell is unique, in his honesty and integrity. I can think of no other writer quite like him.

How Doctors Think. Jerome Groopman. Confirms what I thought about the difficulty of being a doctor: the vast amount of material to be mastered, and then remembered and used -- a tremendous intellectual (and even emotional) feat.

How to Tell When You're Tired. Reg Theriault. An intelligent commentary on work, especially the labor that longshoremen do. Sort of a cross between Eric Hoffer and Studs Terkel. This kind of take on life usually flies below the literary radar; we rarely hear from guys like Theriault, and when we do, and they're this articulate, the book is a delight.

Human Sexual Response. Masters and Johnson. Heavy sledding -- overloaded with jargon, even when jargon isn't called for. I did learn a few things, despite their attempts to disguise it all.

Ideas and Opinions. Albert Einstein. Essays and journalism by, yes, that Einstein.

Idols of Perversity. Bram Dijkstra. The author, through massive research, makes his case. (The subtitle is "Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture.") He's read everything, and looked at every painting. The scholarship is overwhelming. (What's also overwhelming is the leakage of sensitive-new-age-guy PC feminism that seeps out between the lines.) I suspect that his case is oversimplified, but the only way to refute him would be to undertake massive research of one's own. I lost heart less than halfway through. Also, it didn't help that some asshole had cut out pages and illustrations -- from a library book, no less. But at least the book, with its interminable jargon (the sort so often found among academics) was a reliable soporific.

Imperial Hubris. Anonymous. There's some score-settling going on here -- Scheuer has foes he's disputing. And he's gone native to some extent, even so far as to exaggerate the truth in the same fashion as our foes. Despite its faults, though, the thesis is persuasive.

In the Freud Archives. Janet Malcolm. The controversy between Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the keepers of the Freudian flame, and even some third parties. It reminded me of the theological struggles of the Catholic church, but back then they killed you. We've learned now to merely discredit each other and take away livelihoods. I suppose that's progress. But since I can't take Freud seriously, and Malcolm does, I have to conclude she was the wrong person to write this book.

Infidel. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Autobiography of the famous, and controversial, Somali Dutch woman. She grew up a Muslim in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, but eventually became a secularized Westerner. As a child, her clitoris was cut off with a pair of scissors and her Quran teacher broke her skull. That's not all of what she went through by a long shot. Her criticism of Islam, especially its treatment of women, has drawn repeated death threats. Theo Van Gogh, whom she made the movie "Submission" with, was killed for making that movie. The book is consistently interesting, though it becomes a recitation toward the end. Even then, it remains engrossing, though perhaps a bit self-serving. Certainly, I think, she has swung from being a true believer (in the Eric Hoffer sense) in one thing to being a true believer in its opposite -- and a provocateur: the book tones down or fails to mention many of her most inflammatory statements. I admire her guts. I agree with many of her opinions. I'd hate to be her enemy, her mind and tongue are so sharp.

The Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain. Prolix.

I Feel Bad About My Neck. Nora Ephron. Humorous personal anecdotes by the writer and director of Sleepless in Seattle.

Inside the Kingdom. Carmen bin Ladin. (Note spelling of last name.) A get-even book by a woman who was married to one of Osama bin Laden's brothers.

An Introduction to Old Norse. E. V. Gordon. Why does he call this an introduction when, except the discussion at the beginning, the book consists of excerpts of old Norse, with no translation, no grammar, and no vocabulary? Useless, unless you already know the language.

Iowa. Various authors. Various books by this title, many of them books for children.

Jarhead. Tony Swofford. Read part of the book in the Atlantic, then went to hear the guy at Rockhurst, then went drinking with him afterward. A burly, lively, likeable guy.

Journey of the Jihadist. Fawaz Gerges. The author, a Christian Arab who grew up in a Lebanese village, is thoroughly familiar with his subject. He's ready everything and interviewed Islamists in half a dozen countries. His treatment is even-handed. This book has helped me understand Arab attitudes more than any other I've read.

Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched. Amy Sutherland. A year in the life at the top exotic animal training program in the world. Great topic, which is the only reason to read the book, since the writer should find another line of work. Too bad John McPhee didn't get to the subject first.

Lectures on Russian Literature. Vladimir Nabokov. I've always found Nabokov intelligent and insufferably in love with his intelligence -- a sort of intellectual narcissist.

Letter to a Christian Nation. Sam Harris. Sometimes I find I dislike people I mostly agree with; the author of this book is such a case. Though he indulges himself in a lot of black-and-white thinking, and a lot of sweeping assertions, I agree with most of what he says, having thought it myself at one time or another. But Sam, baby, this atheistic rant isn't going to convince anyone who isn't already on your side. You'd catch more flies with honey.

Little Heathens. Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the Depression. Remarkably loaded with detail.

Living on the Wind. Scott Weidensaul. Migratory birds, especially the threats they face. A bit alarmist, but a wonderfully knowledgeable book.

The Lost Continent. Bill Bryson. I usually like Bryson, but this is a snotty book, probably because it's pitched to a European market. Read it without ever having been to the U.S. and you'd conclude that a trip to the U.S. would be full of encounters with the small-minded and ignorant.

Love, poverty, and war: journeys and essays. Christopher Hitchens. Brilliant as usual, but too combative and deliberately iconoclastic. But always useful.

Making the Perfect Pitch. Katharine Sands. Getting the attention of agents and editors. Odd, I just found a rejection letter from Sands (a literary agent) the other day -- quite a complimentary one, actually. But it is strange that I should be reading her book, and have forgotten the rejection.

The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair. George Plimpton.

The Mapmaker's Wife. Robert Whitaker. About the time of the American Revolution, an upper-class Peruvian woman crosses South America to join her French husband whom she hasn't seen in 20 years. Readable, especially where she's lost in the jungle alone and very nearly dies.

The Multi-Orgasmic Man. Mantak Chia. Didn't get very far into this. Seemed like a lot of work, so I lost interest. At my age, one orgasm is enough.

Music theory. George Thaddeus Jones. Starts off readable, then becomes unintelligible, as if the reader already had mastered the subject.

My Friend Maigret. Georges Simenon. He must have cranked this one out in a few days, the narrative and plotting are so weak.

Naked. David Sedaris. Not one of his better efforts.

Nanosystems. K. Eric Drexler.

A Natural History of Love. Dianne Ackerman. She throws in everything, including the kitchen sink (I still fail to see what the Indy 500 has to do with love -- except that, like so much else, she had the piece sitting around and threw it into the book). She's mistress of the sweeping statement, the jumped-to conclusion, the personal extrapolated to the universal, and the mixed metaphor. She should restrain herself. But sometimes her exuberance is appealing, and occasionally she comes up with gorgeous, unexpected analogies. Not to mention the abundance of interesting detail.

A Natural History of the Senses. Dianne Ackerman.

The Nature and Logic of Capitalism. Robert Heilbroner. A favorite writer of my father, and I inherited the taste. Heilbroner may not be fashionable, but he's honest, and he has a conscience.

Neither Victim Nor Executioner. Albert Camus. This essay has been published in abbreviated form, and at full length. If you read it, try to find the full-length version. It's a masterpiece.

No More Aching Back. Leon Root, M.D. How to fix and prevent problems.

No Shortcuts to the Top. Ed Viesturs with David Roberts. I enjoyed this book, with increasing irritation. Many mountaineering books are like this: the writers don't have the patience to do the job properly. They can't wrestle with ghosts, the way they wrestle with concrete problems in the Himalayas. The result, in this case, is distinctly slapdash, haphazard, disorganized and asininely conversational, as if much of it were recorded over the fourth beer in a sports bar. I expect more when David Roberts is involved. Still, you'll get a clearer idea of what's involved (on a pragmatic level) in big-mountain expeditioneering than from most other comparable books -- if you can stand the sloppiness of the writing.

On Liberty. John Stuart Mill. Given to me by a philosophy professor friend, in response to a remark I made. That'll teach me to open my mouth. (As the Zennists say: "Open your mouth. First mistake.") Brilliant, but I keep thinking, "Only an Englishman, or maybe an American, could have written this." Well-argued though it is, it's strongly formed (and informed) by the author's native culture; to me, that narrows its usefulness.

Offshore. William Brittain-Catlin. By the middle, this book had been too muddled for too long, and I abandoned it. I yearned for the simple virtue of Anglo-Saxon clarity, instead of a business writer who seems to aspire to be a French philosopher. Obfuscation (unconscious or not), and grasping for profundity where inappropriate are not virtues.

The Old Way. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Life with the Bushmen. Thomas and her family went to live with them when she was only 19, at a time when the Ju/Wasi still were hunter-gatherers.

On Boxing. Joyce Carol Oates. A short and very knowledgeable book -- who would have guessed that a doe-eyed, swan-necked, pensive and frail woman writer like Oates is a boxing fan, and extremely well-versed in the subject? I've read this, I think, four times.

One Man's Wilderness. Dick Proenneke. Actually, someone else wrote the book from Proenneke's diaries, but I think the man deserves the credit. He built himself a cabin in the wild Alaskan back of beyond, so far out of reach that the only way in and out was by airplane, and lived there all alone, but his days were never boring. He always had something to do, and he did it well, whether it was building, or repairing, or anything else. This man came closer to true self-sufficiency in every respect than anyone else I've ever heard of.

Our Molecular Future. Douglas Mulhall. I thought I'd seen every sin of writing, but apparently not -- the content of this book has less to do with the title than any other book I've ever read. A slapdash, muddled, haphazard, grandiose, self-important project. One of many flaws is that the type on the first page of every chapter is set as a truncated pyramid. Was this supposed to enhance the value of my reading somehow? Since I don't read "Wired" magazine and that sort of rubbish, this pointless little trick only served to distract and annoy. I'd actually hoped to get useful information for some research I'd doing, but it wasn't worth the effort, even to read the chapter titles.

Paris to the Moon. Adam Gopnik. Memoir of life in Paris with the writer's family.

The Paris Review Interviews. Volumes 1 and 2. Wonderful interviews with various writers, by various interviewers.

The Path Between the Seas. David McCullough. Writing about an engineering project is difficult. Even more difficult is to make it authoritative and objective. Most difficult of all is to produce a compelling page-turner.

Patriotic Gore. Edmund Wilson. I always find that Wilson wanders from the subject at hand. To the Finland Station was another case in point. He covers bits and pieces of his subject matter in depth, omitting areas that he should have treated. Still, his insights are sometimes startling in their freshness and depth.

The Places In Between. Rory Stewart. The author walked across Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul, a few months after the fall of the Taliban. He encountered stone-throwing children, attack dogs, uncooperative officials, dysentery, fatigue, bitter cold, and (at the end) Pashtun Taliban. Ballsy.

Planet Drum. Mickey Hart. Drumming, by the Grateful Dead drummer.

Pornified. Pamela Paul. The woman has an agenda, and hammers at it all through the book, as if piling on personal testimony and quoting survey results would prove her point, but she doesn't reason with her evidence, and constantly exposes her bias. As William Penn said, "Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers." Maybe she, or someone close to her, was hurt because of a lover's use of porn; there's no telling (or maybe she admits this in the few dozen pages I didn't get through). But she does herself no favors by calling Maxim porn, or those underwear commercials for Victoria's Secret. (Hey! Maxim is stupid, but the women are clothed, so there's no porn there. I enjoy those Victoria's Secret models, however lame and fatuous the commercials are -- and they are. Those women are babes, and they aren't even naked. Does that make me a pornophile? But I digress. Pardon me.) Pamela Paul ruins her credibility. This is one of those cases where I was prepared ahead of time to agree with a writer, and disappointed that I couldn't. I had to dismiss the case she'd constructed because it was lopsided and weak. If she'd been more honest, I would have been happy to join her side.

Promiscuities. Naomi Wolf. The author understands herself quite well, other women not quite so well, and men scarcely at all. Insightful in places, the book is fruitless in the end, its fatuousness summed up in the subtitle "The Secret Struggle for Womanhood". Her solution to the Madonna/whore dichotomy is that women should be worshiped, or at least revered, as goddesses of sex. This is supposed to solve the problems between women and men? Replacing patriarchy with its opposite? Swapping one oppression for another? Frankly, I don't plan to worship women. The notion is ridiculous, and Wolf is self-absorbed.

The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. Bertrand Russell. As Bohr once said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially when it involves the future." Russell's analysis of Russia (written in 1920) is shrewd; his predictions are less so. Still, the book is startling in some of its insights. The man was smart.

The Professor and the Madman. Simon Winchester. How a sex criminal helped write the Oxford English Dictionary.

Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Not the one that was just published (July 2004) and in the bookstores, but the earlier one (Dec. 2002). About the size of a phone book, with redactions on nearly every page.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Robert Kiyosaki. I didn't entirely trust this book, though some of the advice is good. The author seems to be a bit of a snake-oil salesman. Maybe he wrote this book to get rich.

The Roman Way. Edith Hamilton. I tried, but couldn't get through this. Too much irrelevancy, and pompous as well.

Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con. Andrew Sullivan. A balanced collection of essays, some of them quite good, on both sides of the issue.

Self-Made Man. Norah Vincent. Lesbian disguised herself as a man to find out what it's like to be one of the opposite sex. Uneven, but in places very interesting.

Silence and Noise. Ivan Richmond. The subtitle nails it: "Growing up Zen in America". He was raised on Green Gulch Farm, and he's had a lot of trouble adapting to life outside. He misses a lot of cultural references, and doesn't like the loud music in bars. I feel a rapport with much of what he says. The main problem with the book is that he has a few simple ideas that he repeats, trying to explain everything with them.

Silicon Snake Oil. Clifford Stoll. A bit dated (e.g., the modem speeds he refers to), but even more timely than when written. The first anecdote, about his caving trip and the conclusions to be drawn from it, pretty much sums things up: the real world is much more interesting than the virtual world of monitors and keyboards.

Stick Figure. Lori Gottlieb. A memoir of teenage anorexia. Authentic and insightful, so that for the first time I actually understood something of what anorexia is, and the way that an anorexic perceives herself and other people -- which I've never had a clue about, before now.

Stiffed. Susan Faludi. After a great start, Faludi wanders. Overlong, disorganized, the book nevertheless shows that the author understands men better than most women, and even than many men themselves. I often felt like she was explaining me to myself; it was like listening to a great psychoanalyst telling me things that had always been just below the surface of my consciousness.

Strange Piece of Paradise. Terri Jentz. Memoir by one of the women who was run over by a truck and attacked with a hatchet in Oregon in 1977. I've had to conclude that introspection is usually a mistake. Few writers can carry it off.

Spychips. Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre. This has to be the clumsiest, most heavy-handed, paranoid book I've read in years. They would have been convincing if they hadn't gone so far off the deep end. They needed a good editor and a major publishing house, who would have steered them away from their ham-handed attempts to savage the opposition; the book reminds me of the political writing that passionately ideological students produce. Too bad, since the subject is important and timely, and the research thorough.

Supercrunchers. Ian Ayres. Hype for a supposedly new way of making decisions, based on numerical data and statistics.

Takedown. Tsutomu Shimomura and someone else. Something of a ho-hum, but I read it a second time for purposes of research, along with re-reading "The Cuckoo's Egg", a vastly better book. The book is also marred by Shimomura's obvious ego involvement. The guy has a real problem with arrogance, and Mitnick's ability to penetrate his machines stung him. This is the story of a vendetta, mostly.

Taliban: militant Islam, oil, and fundamentalism in Central Asia. Ahmed Rashid. The story of these guys, and their success through bribery and the inability of their foes to get together against the Taliban's incompetence, is a real oddity. It reads like a description of something that might have happened centuries ago -- but, then, Afghanistan has yet to make it out of the medieval period, so perhaps it was to be expected that even their wars aren't like the rest of the planet. Their policies certainly weren't.

Talk of the Devil. Riccardo Orizio. The 2004 edition, with a new afterword. Interviews with Ida Amin, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, and their like. Since Milosevic was in prison and Enver Hoxha dead, he talked to their wives in lieu of the men themselves; he claims that these women were the power behind the men. Convenient, eh? Some of the other chapters are similarly padded out -- e.g., there's little with Amin himself, and most of the chapter is about Orizio trying to track him down in Saudi Arabia. Sometimes he fails to confront his subjects with tough questions. But an engrossing read nevertheless.

They Call Me Naughty Lola. David Rose, ed. Hilarious personal ads from the London Review of Books. Much better than the ones in equivalent U.S. publications.

This I Believe. NPR. Excerpts from the regular series.

This Is America? Rusty Monhollond. Lawrence, Kansas in the late 1960s. Cops shot two kids dead on the streets, and people were shooting back at the cops afterward. Twenty (?) arsons in one summer. Bombings on the K.U. campus. The governor replaced the police department with the Highway Patrol, matters were so desperate. I was there. I didn't know the half of it. "Bleeding Kansas" all over again, a century later.

The Torture Papers. (I don't remember the editors' names). Collection of memos from the current administration, justifying the use of torture and other illegal operations. These are taken straight from government documents. The best description is Hannah Arendt's, of the Nazis: "the banality of evil". The bureaucrats who wrote these made the treatment so boring that writing this way about Satan would even put the reader to sleep. Needless to say, I didn't get much read, it was so soporific. What I did read scared me: they bury their disregard for humans, and for the law, under endless words, without addressing the ethical issues.

Trawler. Redmond O'Hanlon. A departure from the other books of his I've read, since this one takes place in the North Sea, instead of in a jungle. But he's as fun as always.

The True Believer. Eric Hoffer. A book that needs no introduction or explanation.

Truth and Beauty. Ann Patchett. Story of her friendship with Lucy Grealy (see above).

The Ultimate Book of Lighthouses. Crompton and Rhein. I love lighthouses, and I love looking at big coffee-table picture books. The buildings always look well-kept, in wild, beautiful places.

The Unabomber Manifesto. Ted Kaczynski. Poorly written and more poorly reasoned.

Undaunted Courage. Stephen Ambrose. The usual over-adulatory but highly readable Ambrose product.

Under a Sickle Moon. Peregrine Hodson. Adventures with the mujahedin, back in the 80s (when they were still our friends).

Video night in Kathmandu : and other reports from the not-so-far East. Pico Iyer.

Wealth and Democracy: a Political History of the American Rich. Kevin Phillips. Supposedly a conservative, Phillips is in fact very difficult to characterize. Many of his ideas most of us would classify as liberal or populist; he goes where his thinking and his research lead him -- and research he does. This is a book packed full of statistics and wide and deep reading. It's very slow going, and even though I read it on the train to Chicago and renewed it, I still only got through about 2/3 of it. I do know now, though, that we appear to be following the same path the Dutch, Spanish, and English (the imperial powers) followed, and that led to their downfalls. His argument is as persuasive as such a broad argument can be, mostly because of the scope of his research.

What Evolution Is. Ernst Mayer. A very clear explanation of evolution (though I read slightly less than half the book). Its chief flaw is the overuse of unexplained jargon.

When you Ride Alone, You Ride with bin Laden. Bill Maher. Too many exclamation points, too overheated, and sometimes naive and simply incorrect. But full of candid observations of the sort no one else has the brains or guts to make.

Why Americans Hate Politics. E. J. Dionne. Brilliant, thorough, well-researched, well-reasoned parsing of the state of U.S. politics as of 1991. But very slow reading; couldn't find the time to finish it, renewed it three times, and finally had to give it back to the library.

Why I Climb. Famous climbers talk about their pastime, many of them boringly.

Why Most Things Fail. Paul Ormerod. Unconventional economics. The basic argument, that the econonomy, like the ecology, is too complex to predict, seems sound to me. But the conclusions drawn from manipulating oversimplified models -- actually, most of the conclusions in the last few chapters -- need much more justification than he gives. Like most economists, he has a theory, and not enough facts and reasoning to support it, but that doesn't slow him down any.

Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature. Lucien Malson. Incoherent, in that peculiarly trying-too-hard-to-be-deep French way.

The World Without Us. What would happen if the human race died out.

Worse than Watergate. John Dean. Why we should fear Bush -- and if anyone should know, Dean should: having worked for Nixon, he knows skulduggery when he sees it.

The Writing Life. Annie Dillard. Sometimes she overdoes it, but when she's on, her prose is pyrotechnic.

The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion. I've always thought Didion is a lousy writer, and have never understood her critical acceptance. In this book, about the death of her husband and her daughter's comas, Didion commits her usual writing sins: the dwelling on irrelevancies, the references to things known only to her as if everyone knew what she's talking about, the obsession with small details, the anxiety, and above all the fragmented writing. The worst of it is her attempt to give everything more significance than it has by using one-sentence (and even one-word) paragraphs. They teach you not to do this in high school English. She never learned.

A book on the Japanese keiretsus (conglomerates, though the word is inadequate), the name of which escapes me.


Fiction.

About a Boy. Bruce Hornsby?

Aesop's Fables. Aesop.

The Abortionist's Daughter. Elisabeth Hyde. Nicely plotted and paced, with good characters. The only problem was that about a quarter of the way into the book I knew who the murderer was -- but that didn't really matter, the book was so engrossing.

Aiding and Abetting. Muriel Sparks. Fictionalization of two famous criminals -- an aristocratic murderer, and a woman who masqueraded as a psychiatrist.

America the Beautiful. Moon Unit Zappa. Weirdly readable, if girlish and inconsequential, novel about a breakup and the recovery afterwards. The protagonist bears certain resamblances to the author: daughter of a famous artist who cheated on his wife; sister of a would-be rock musician; has a weird name (America Ludmilla Odin Throne). I read it mostly because the clever details, the ways of describing people and situations, kept reeling me in.

Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy.

The Assignment.Friedrich Durenmatt. A book like this would never be published in the U.S. nowadays; publishing has become too commercial. Even though each chapter is a single sentence, and the story is a bit experimental, it's very readable.

Atonement. Ian McEwan. Gorgeous prose.

Back Story. Robert P. Parker. The Spenser novels can usually be relied on for good brain candy.

Bangkok 8. John Burdett. Raymond Chandler goes postmodern Far Eastern. Noir detective story set in Thailand; the narrator is a half-Caucasian police detective. I've never read a book quite like this. Too bad the author slowly loses control of the narrative.

Bangkok Tattoo. John Burdett. Much like the first novel -- do we detect a crime series, all of them titled with the word "Bangkok"? Another inventive plot, same sensibility as the first one, but the shock of the new has worn off, so the effect isn't as strong. And there's too much "Dear Reader" breaking of the fourth wall, though here the reader is insultingly and repetitively addressed as "farang", italicized.

Bangkok Haunts. John Burdett. Damrong stars in a snuff movie and comes back to haunt her ex-lovers. That's the least of it. Burdett has a perverted imagination.

Bitten. Kelley Armstrong. Great twist on the werewolf genre: story of the only female werewolf on the planet. Well written, and a fun read.

Blue Angel. Francine Prose. Also have read her Lives of the Muses, and her A Changed Man, both of them superb.

The Blood Countess. Andrei Codrescu. Of course a novel about Countess Bathory would be written by a Transylvanian. Accomplished writing, but a bit overheated for me. I quit 3 chapters in.

Borderlines. Archer Mayor. Police procedural, reminiscent of Ed McBain or the Maigret books.

Broken. Kelley Armstrong. This series has gone downhill. The book reads as if the author slapped it together on deadline: incoherent and jumbled. Bitten was skillful and clever, Stolen much less so. With this third one, Armstrong's taking her audience for granted. I'm outta here.

Breath and Bones. Susann Cokal. Highly literary novel, like her first (Mirabilis); also like her first, has an unconventional heroine in an historical context. Much of the writing is highly accomplished, and her re-creation of the American West feels authentic. There may be a few too many twists in the plot, and the narrative is less compelling in places than fascinating, and at the end the writing feels as if she's simply tying it all up -- but it's a great read... Cokal is only the second writer I've contacted (the other being James Salter). I sent her a congratulatory e-mail when she was at Cal Poly, telling her how much I'd enjoyed her first book, and she replied with one line, something like "Thanks, you made my day."

Catcher in the Rye. J. D. Salinger. Holden Caulfield is an insufferable, egotistical little prick, and I'm not surprised he got beaten up twice in two days. And Salinger's overrated as a writer, too.

A Changed Man. Francine Prose.

The Cat-Nappers. P. G. Wodehouse. Hilarious book about kidnapping a cat (or not). I'd like to figure out how he manages to be so funny without any actual content; nothing happens except the sound of the reader's laughter.

The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen. Re-invents the contemporary novel. I read the book with astonishment -- on almost every page Franzen does things I've never seen fiction writers do. Supreme mastery of his craft.

The Count of Monte Cristo. Alexandre Dumas. Only got 41 pages into this, and was too overwhelmed by the staggering size and bleakness of this tale of revenge that I let it go.

Counting Numbers in the Dark. Italo Calvino. Hadn't read any Calvino in years, and talked to someone in a bookstore about him, so checked this one out. The title story is a masterpiece, with that unique Calvino sensibility. Once in a great while I read a short story that leaves a permanent impression -- "The Swimmer", by John Cheever, or "Girls in Their Summer Dresses", by Irwin Shaw. "Counting Numbers in the Dark" is another.

Cousin Bette. Long, and the plot never stops changing. But great; Balzac was certainly a brilliant writer. Had he lived a hundred years later, he'd have won a Nobel, for sure.

The Crimson Petal and the White. Michel Faber. Remarkable heroine, engrossing story.

The DaVinci Code. Dan Brown. Sticklers unite. Brown has the incredibly irritating habit of dropping into first-person internal monologue for a sentence or two on nearly every page. His editor -- and Brown, too -- should be sent back to school.

Devil May Care. Sebastian Faulks. The new James Bond novel. He did a good job of bringing it up to date -- but it's so old and tired that even a perfect job would probably have been inadequate. The Bond genre appears to be used up.

Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl. Tracy Quan. A professionialized version of Sex and the City. These Manhattanites always seem utterly unconnected to anything I recognize as real. They're preoccupied with clothes and brand names and the latest trendy drinks and restaurants. They've got a little world, it's smaller than your hand. The word that describes them is insular. Or provincial, though it's technically incorrect when applied to them. Whatever the case, they're boring. Still, the book was a reasonably good read. The woman can plot, and her writing is smooth.

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. Ursula K. LeGuin. Wrong subtitle; should have been "An Ambivalent Utopia".

Driving Lessons. Ed McBain. This was so short it shouldn't have been between hardcovers, but in a collection of short stories. Nevertheless, it's the usual compelling story from the master of police procedurals.

Dumped. collected by B. Delores Max. A collection of stories, many of them by great writers, about getting dumped. Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Roal Dahl and Steve Almond are here, and more just as good.

East Bay Grease. Eric Miles Williamson. A sordid novel of growing up in Oakland. Makes Charles Bukowski seem like Pollyana by comparison.

The Elementary Particles. Michel Houellebecq. This would be a novel of ideas, if the author knew what he was talking about. The math, and the references to computers, are nonsensical. The biology and physics are inaccurate, too, though I'm less familiar with them. The social theory I'm not up on, not having read the French on this... Houellebecq has some worthwhile insights (which annoyed me, since several of them are ideas I've been thinking about for years), but he doesn't manage to tie them together. He asserts a theory, but without filling in the details, and with neither evidence nor logic to back it up. In fact, this book isn't a novel at all, but a collage. There's no artistry to it -- the scenes and the characters are thrown together, and don't fit. Worse, his big ideas are unworkable. The man is a fascist (and I mean that literally, not rhetorically) in the making, and perhaps already in fact. And the idea he introduces at the end would lead to the extinction not only of our species, but of its successor. (I'd go into this further, but I don't want to give anything away.) This is the most dystopian utopian novel I've ever read, not only because it takes place in the present, and the characters are miserably depressed, but more so because Houellebecq himself seems to be a depressive who simply doesn't like human beings, and his book reflects it. His weltschmerz permeates the book. If he could only look at and love a single human being, he'd be able to produce a human work of art, instead of this artifact masquerading as a book... This is a creepy novel by a creepy misanthrope.

The Emperor's Children. Claire Messud. Amazing, the way she limns her characters. Like a modern Henry James.

Ethan Frome. Edith Wharton. Wish I'd read Wharton sooner; pity and terror. The pure storytelling skill of this novella is astonishing.

Evening in Byzantium. Irwin Shaw. Shaw wrote a story that was one of the few that ever made a lasting impression on me: "Girls in their Summer Dresses". (Others were Cheever's "The Swimmer", and Chekhov's "Lady with Lap Dog".) But I don't like the storytelling in Shaw's novels. His usual obsessions are in evidence here: booze, money, women and travel. But I read him anyway, for the pure perfection of many of his sentences (though his dialogue was dated even when he wrote it).

Fade to Blonde. Max Phillips. Raymond Chandler crossed with Mickey Spillane. Noir L.A. crime novel.

Fear of the Dark. Walter Mosley. Another Fearless Jones -- what? -- more like crime than mystery. Mosley isn't as convincing as Elmore Leonard; there's a lot in his books that almost caricatures itself. But he keeps me up late, reading to get to the end.

The Fencing Master. Arturo Perez-Reverte. Written recently, this reads like a 19th-century novel.

Find Me. Carol O'Connell. This book has the same noir, exaggerated writing that novels by Andrew Vachss do. The plot steams right along -- in fact, the book is hard to set down -- but all the time I was unable to achieve suspension of disbelief. There are a lot of contrivances, especially characters who don't behave consistently or credibly, only in service to the plot; and right from the start there's a huge problem because the two major threads of the story have nothing to do with each other but happen simultaneously: Mallory following her father's trail down old Route 66, and the serial murders along old Route 66. This is a major piece of literary cheating, which O'Connell never so much as attempts to explain away. There are also a lot of loose ends. The plot ran away with her.

Fleshmarket Alley. Ian Rankin. The book jacket claims that Rankin is the top-selling crime novelist in the U.K. I don't think he deserves to be. Three crimes -- two buried skeletons, a rape/suicide/disappearance/murder, and another murder -- all turn out to be neatly related, tieing together characters who should have had nothing to do with each other (and, in the real world, wouldn't have had). Suspension of disbelief shouldn't be stretched this far.

Free Food for Millionaires. Sun Min Lee. Novel about Korean Americans set in New York City.

Friday. Michel Tournier. Retelling of Robinson Crusoe, with twists.

Gates of Fire. Steven Pressfield. You'd think the man had lived in ancient Sparta and been through the battle of Thermopylae, the feel of this book is so authentic.

Ghost World. Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. Screenplay of the eponymous movie.

The Giant's House. Elizabeth McCracken. Touching, well-written story about a librarian and a giant.

Gilead. Marilynne Robinson. Amazing novel. Gorgeous simplicity, full of the wonder and beauty of human life. I've never read another novel quite like it. It certainly deserved the Pulitzer it got.

The Giver. Lois Lowry. Maybe the best, and saddest, children's novel I've ever read.

A Good Year. Peter Mayle. The same all his other books. Mayle can be relied on to produce light, charming, consistent fiction. Something like what his personality seems to be. He never fails to turn out a fun, if predictable, read.

The Grave and the Gutter. Ed McBain. Noir detective novel originally published under a different pen name in the late 1950s. McBain got better later, but if you like crime novels, this one's plenty good, though a bit stylized in the manner of Raymond Chandler crossed with Mickey Spillane.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. J. K. Rowling. She made a billion bucks off this series. That's about a thousand times more than she merits... I read one of the other books in the series, too -- goblet of fire? The woman can write (her sentences never jar me, which is rare for a popular writer), and she has an unequalled imagination. Imagination is her strongest suit, I think. She has an interesting brain, and I'd like to meet her someday and have a long talk with her. The day would be colored differently afterward.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Alice Munro. The equal of any short-story writer today (too bad Cheever isn't still alive).

Henry's War. Jeremy Brooks. I re-read this every once in a while. Story about a man who refuses his military call-up because he can't kill.

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. J. T. Leroy. Think how discouraging Hubert Selby, Jr. is, then triple that. You'll need a strong stomach to read these linked stories, about a boy who, from the age of four, is mentally and physically tortured, and then begins to do the same to himself. Abduction, abandonment, beating, scalding, anal rape, and more.

The Highest Tide. Jim Lynch. Novel about the annus mirabilis of a thirteen-year-old boy with an obsessive interest in marine biology. Reads like a textbook in places... Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management; Published by Bloomsbury

His Illegal Self. Peter Carey. This man is a phenomenal writer, which is exactly why I stopped reading halfway through -- the story was depressing me more than I could handle. Another book I had this reaction to was Atonement.

The Huntsman. Whitney Terrell. Whitney's a local boy (Kansas City), an acquaintance, not just a good writer, but a decent man as well.

I Love You, Beth Cooper. Larry Doyle. Comic novel about a nerd on graduation night, who declares his love for the head cheerleader in his valedictory speech. He spends the next 24 hours running from the beatings her boyfriend administers.

Illegal Action. Stella Rimington. That's it. I've been reading too many mediocre novels lately. After this one, I'm ready to quit for a while.

In Our Strange Gardens. Michel Quint. Shouldn't work, but works very well indeed.

In the Fold. Rachel Cusk. Have to admit I don't understand the dialogue, which mostly seems like non sequiturs to me. But Cusk is tops at finding fresh ways to limn the interior life of the main character, and his insights into the other characters.

Independent People. Haldor Laxness. A novel about a shepherd in Iceland a century ago, by the Nobel prize winner. I really don't quite know how to describe this book -- an unrelentingly grim story of poverty, constant work, and death? Peasant life was no picnic.

Jade Palace Vendetta. Dale Furutani. A not-exactly-crime novel set in medieval Japan.

Jar City. Arnaldur Indridason. Superb mystery set in Iceland.

Kill the Shogun. Dale Furutani. Another novel with same protagonist as Jade Palace Vendetta.

The Jane Austen Book Club. Karen Joy Fowler. Novel as pastiche. It inspired the book club a friend and I founded. After we'd read the six Austen novels, we changed from the JABC to the ABC (alphabetic book club -- we're working from A (Austen) to Z; currently we're reading a Balzac novel.)

The Japanese Corpse. JanWillem van de Wettering. Another Grijpstra/de Gier mystery. I quit reading when I realized I'd read it years ago. He sticks too much trivia into his books, and too much editorializing, and too many characters reciting history and sociology.

Julian. Gore Vidal. Novel about the eponymous Roman emperor. Massive research, flawless writing.

King and Joker. Peter Dickinson. It's pretty obvious that Dickinson painted himself into a corner with his plot and had to cobble together a solution to the problems he'd set himself. But the writing is so interesting, and the main characters so sympathetic, that it doesn't matter. An enjoyable, and original, read.

The King of King's County. Whitney Terrell. This second novel was written by an acquaintance of mine. His first book was good, but this is an enormous leap in skill. Read it. If there's any justice in the world of books, this deserves to be a best-seller.

Kiss. Ed McBain. Master of the police procedural. The craftsmanship of this book is unbeatable. The plot twist of the betrayal is particularly good.

The lamentable journey of Omaha Bigelow into the impenetrable loisaida jungle. Edgardo Vega Yunque. This book has a labored, forced feeling. Yunque is trying to blend magical realism and metafiction, and he doesn't have the chops to pull off either one, much less both together. Every page reads as if he suffered from a lack of inspiration, or pure laziness, and quite possibly both. Even the places that work are spoiled by being set in so much junk.

The Laments. George Hagen. Good writer, and very approachable in person.

Letters from the Earth. Mark Twain. Persuasive blasphemy. Convincing enough to make even a believer an atheist.

Little Children. Tom Perotta. I'd never heard of this guy until he was interviewed on the radio one day. Then I read this book. Perotta has the novelist's full toolkit: great characterization, interesting plotting, good pacing, an adequate, if sketchy, setting, and style that stays out of the way while being clear and clean. His reversals are superb, and he can leave you hanging so that you'll hurry back to the book the moment you get home from work. Even the final sentence of the book is clever (don't look, now, or you'll spoil it for yourself).

Loop Group. Larry McMurtry. The man is writing by rote; there's a certain indifferent (in both senses of the word) quality here. Pedestrian details, uninspired writing -- the narrative doesn't involve the reader, which McMurtry always used to be able to do.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels. Catherine Hanrahan. Had no reason to get this book except that I spent some time in Japan and stumbled across the title. For a book read at random, I expected it would disappoint, but it didn't. Not the sort of literary or genre book that will set the world afire, but a solid first outing. I'll read Hanrahan if I she publishes any more novels.

The Lovely Bones. Alice Sebold. By the end, I hated this book; I can only describe the story as dishonest.

Magical Thinking. Augusten Burroughs. Not so much essays as personal mini-memoirs. This guy reminds me of David Sedaris: faggy, funny, and with a deep mean streak. Sure, he's had a tough life, but does he have to be vicious?

The Magician's Assistant. Ann Patchett. Clear, detailed, touching description of grief in the first part of the book. After the main character leaves L.A., the novel loses credibility.

Man Walks Into a Room. Nicole Kraus. This is quite an extraordinary novel, especially because it's Kraus's first. There's a distinct falling off as the novel progresses, but Kraus set herself a very difficult task, examining the implications of amnesia. The relationship between the protagonist and the wife is one of the most deeply, truly imagined I've ever read in fiction.

McTeague, a story of San Francisco. Frank Norris. Famous novel, much admired. Felt obliged to try it, but couldn't see what the fuss was about.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The Memory of Running. Ron McLarty. Unpretentious picaresque novel of a man's grief and change. I disliked this novel well into it, but kept reading, I'm not sure why, and was increasingly engrossed. The end finishes the novel perfectly.

Middlemarch. George Eliot. A remarkable feat, weaving this many characters' personalities and motivations into such a large social portrait. Eliot is in the vein of the other great 19th-century writers like Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy, who could write about characters from any walk of life. Though I admire the book (it's the most masterful large-canvas novel I've ever read, with the possible exception of Anna Karenina), I have to admit that it's a mind-numbingly long read. In fact, it's so long that it broke up my book club. Four of the six members quit.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. John Berendt. Eccentrics and a murder.

Mirabilis. Susann Cokal. Astonishing.

A Multitude of Sins. Richard Ford. This writer is a virtuoso. My chief criticism is that he tends to cover the same territory in every story.

Music Through the Floor. Eric Puchner. There are people who tell stories naturally, the way they breathe, who convince because what they write simply seems to emerge and to exist on its own. Then there are those, like Puchner, who teach themselves to tell stories, maybe because they want to think of themselves as writers. The stories in this book are meaningless.

My Life in Heavy Metal. Steve Almond. Accomplished short stories about the man-woman thing. No enlightenment here, but there isn't any to be had, is there? Or is it just me? Anyone who can give me some clues, I'll be glad to listen to -- and Almond has more than a few between these covers.

Nixon under the Bodhi Tree, and other works of Buddhist Fiction. Edited by Katie Wheeler. There's some very bad fiction between these covers.

No One Belongs Here More than You. Miranda July. Short stories, some of them verging on disgusting, by the performance artist who made the movie "You, Me, and Everyone We Know".

The Odyssey. Homer, trans. Stanley Lombardo. Stan is a classics professor and Zen master acquaintance of mine, as well as Homer's translator. Besides (part of) Stan's translation, I've read Fagles', and the styles couldn't be more different. It's curious, how translations can end up so strangely divergent.

Odd Hours. Dean Koontz. Lame brain candy, but I kept me turning the pages, so I supposed I can't complain too much.

One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My son read this, and though he had trouble getting into it, he read it a second time, which charmed me: I used to read this every year or so. By now, reading it again, I find that it's pretty much used up for me. Still, it has the most perfect opening sentence I've ever read: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that long-ago day when his father took him to discover ice".

The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume 1: The Spell of Plato. Karl R. Popper. Brilliantly reasoned, researched, and argued. I've always felt that the standard interpretation of Plato's Republic was clearly at odds with what is actually said in it, and Popper shows that Plato was an early totalitarian.

Ottoman Cage. Barbara Nadel. Crime novel set in Istanbul, with a cast of eccentric characters. A bit draggy, too much dialogue, and the crime itself seems to serve mostly as an excuse to write about a place that apparently fascinates the author.

Out. Natsuo Kirino. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation -- but in Japan, for the women, desperation is an inadequate word. Crime novel by a Japanese woman; full of the perverse preoccupations of that country: torture, sex with a dying woman, pedophilia, and so on.

Petropolis. Susanne Santoro Whayne. Children's book by a friend's sister-in-law, about a dog who goes through a magic pet door, finds himself in a city populated by pets, and spends the day going to the art gallery, eating ice cream, etc.

Plain Language. Barbara Wright. Local writer. Story of a Quaker woman struggling with her husband to make a ranch in eastern Colorado go, during the dust bowl years. Barbara is one of the politest, best-mannered people I've ever met.

Prep. Curtis Sittenfeld. Wonderful detail of the inner wrestlings of an alienated teen, though it gets a bit claustrophobic near the end. A sympathetic unsympathetic character... The author is the daughter of a graduate of my high school (he was one year ahead of me).

Pulp. Charles Bukowski. Hilarious sendup of the tough-guy L.A. private-eye genre.

A River Runs Through It. Norman MacLean. Spectacular beginning and ending.

The Rainbow Fairy Book. Fairy tales -- a collection of stories from the red book, the brown book, the yellow book, etc.

The Razor's Edge. W. Somerset Maugham.

Roxana. Daniel Defoe. A whore's life.

The Russian Debutante's Handbook. Gary Shteyngart. A fun read -- witty.

Sea Change. Robert B. Parker. The man knows how to write page turners. I guess he got tired of his P.I., and decided to switch to writing about a cop, but I don't care. His books are still compulsively readable.

Scaramouche. Rafael Sabatini. I love this book; I'll probably re-read the parts I like every few years. It's the print version of an Errol Flynn movie, but more thoughtful. Sabatini was enormously popular in his day, and it's easy to see why. This book is fun to read. Swordplay, revenge, romance, undisclosed family secrets, the French Revolution. Something like those great 19th-century novels like The Count of Monte Cristo or The Man in the Iron Mask, or The Prisoner of Zenda.

Serenade. James M. Cain. Incredibly annoying, because the writer apparently thinks he's being worldly and hardbitten when in fact he's jejeune and naive.

Sharp Teeth. Toby somebody-or-other. Modernization of the werewolf novel. Would be something like Already Dead, except that it pretends to be in verse.

The Shotgun Rule. Charlie Huston. Nowhere near as good as his Already Dead.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Marisha Pessl. At 500 pages, most novels like this one (are there any novels like this one?) would feel far too long, but this one doesn't. The plot, which is complex, doesn't really get rolling until halfway through the book, but that doesn't matter, because the writing is compelling. There are many kinds of believability in fiction, and this book is definitely convincing -- this reader gave it his trust, and read it compulsively. For a first novel, the plotting is skillful, the twists plentiful, and everything coheres. Most books with this many reversals have gaping holes in them. More than that, though, the damn thing is just engrossing.

Star Maker. Olaf Stapledon. Far more visionary than most science fiction (a genre I generally loathe). The book is marred by hasty writing and a hurried narrative, but is otherwise a mind-blower.

The Stars My Destination. Alfred Bester. Despite the heavy-handed and melodramatic overwriting, this book is compulsively readable because of the story; it's one of the best plotted, perhaps the best plotted book I've ever read.

Stolen. Kelley Armstrong. Not quite up to the first novel with the female werewolf character (Bitten), but still an entertaining way to while away a few hours.

The Stories of John Cheever. John Cheever. Keepers, every one -- and there are lots.

The stories of Paul Bowles. Paul Bowles. Probably the most compelling writer I've ever read. If I start a story, I'm seized from the first sentence, and can't stop until I finish it. And yet, I can't explain why. A typical Bowles story might be: man goes out for a walk, gets murdered. There's something timeless about these tales, something that could have been written centuries ago, on another continent. Something impersonal and cold. In one of his best, a thief falls in with several merchants taking their goods by camel across the Sahara. One after another he kills them. He takes the goods to a city and makes his living selling them. A month or two later, friends of the men he killed recognize the goods. They report him to the French authorities, who investigate. With a wink and a nod, the French let the merchants know that they're free to do with the man what they want, so they take him out into the desert and bury him up to his neck. A day passes, the sun on his unprotected head, and he goes mad and begins to sing, while the wind kicks up and blows dust into his mouth. In another story, a woman kidnaps local children and feeds them to her crocodile. She cuts out the croc's heart and feeds it to a man, has sex with him, and gloatingly tells her sister that the child will have the strength of 47.

The Sure Hand of God. Erskine Caldwell. This book sucked.

Surrender the Pink. Carrie Fisher. Written in aphorisms.

The Tale of the Body Thief. Ann Rice. Her usual literary sins are here in particularly egregious form. Not one of her better books. Of all her books that I've read, I liked her soft-porn novel Belinda best.

Tarzan and the Madman. Edgar Rice Burroughs. The usual Tarzan formula. I have to hand it to Burroughs -- he wasn't much on characterization or plausibility, but he can plot like no one else.

Terrorist. John Updike. Good old reliable Updike -- he just keeps knocking them out, though this one isn't up to his usual standards.

Testimonies. Patrick O'Brian. Early novel, before O'Brian turned to writing the Aubrey-Maturin series. I re-read it because my memory of it was so extraordinary. The man had a shining talent; the book leaves an indelible impression.

Totally Dead. Michael Stone. Don't bother; this is second-rate Elmore Leonard.

Train. Pete Dexter. I saw this guy at Rainy Day Books, and he's just as compelling a storyteller in person as he is in this book.

Tricky Business. Dave Barry. Predictably Dave Barryish.

Uncle Silas. J. S. Le Fanu. Extreme Victorian Gothic. This book has two of the creepiest characters I've ever encountered. Mme. de la Rougierre, in particular, is about as bizarre and repulsive as I can imagine a fictional character being -- more repellent than any of Elmore Leonard's characters, even. And Uncle Silas is no slouch, either -- he's evil incarnate. My worst gripe with the book is the near-total passivity of the heroine. In typical Victorian fashion, she gets hysterical, faints, or at most defends herself by screaming. Times have changed -- and for the better, I say. I like strong female characters. Nevertheless, the book was weirdly readable. Despite the holes in the plot, it's a compelling read.

Ulysses. James Joyce. I detested this book, until recently, when I had the opposite reaction. But it was such slow going that I only got a third of the way through, despite renewing it at the library. This is one of those books that demands to be read slowly, so it can be properly enjoyed and understood.

Vanilla Bright like Eminem. Michael Faber. Short stories by the author of The Crimson Petal and the White, but very contemporary; about as different from that Victorian novel as possible.

Vertical Run. Joseph Garber. Thriller, and not bad.

War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy.

West of the Thirties. Edward T. Hall. Memoir by the famous anthropologist of living and working among the Hopi and Navajo during the Depression. The first half is interesting, but then he seems to have run out of steam, and his tendency to switch subjects in the middle of a paragraph gets much worse, not to mention the profundities he writes about the Indians. It's often difficult to get any idea what he's talking about, his sentences are so full of vague generalities.

Whitethorn Woods. Maeve Binchy. Not a novel, but short stories, sketchily linked.

The Wife of Martin Guerre. Janet Lewis. Perfect novella about a true event in medieval France. An exquisite little read.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Haruki Murakami. A long and odd novel, not quite like anything else I've read. Not much story, much of the time, but compelling reading nonetheless.

Wives and Daughters. Elizabeth Gaskell. 600-page novel by a Victorian lady novelist, and damn good. A lot like Jane Austen's novels. Gaskell died while writing the book. At a guess, she probably had another 50 or 75 pages to go. Those Victorians were nothing if not exhaustive -- and exhausting to modern readers. But the woman could write, that's for damn sure.


Linguistics and language.

Doing our Own Thing. John McWhorter. How language and music are becoming increasingly informal and unskilled.

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler. Masterful, though long, discussion of the great languages, how they spread and how they die. Combination of history and linguistics.

Ethnologue. SIL. No one actually reads this book; it's a reference to all the languages known on the planet.

Going nucular. Geoffrey Nunberg. Yes, that's the real title. Another collection of Nunberg's careful parsings of what our words really mean.

The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Geoffrey K. Pullum. Columns from a linguistics periodical.

Handbook of the International Phonetics Association. Heavy going.

How to Learn a Foreign Language. Arthur H. Charles, Jr.

How Language Works. David Crystal.

Introducing Phonetics and Phonology. Davenport and Hannahs. Loved this book, but it was so dense it took forever to get through it, so I didn't -- only a bit more than halfway.

Ishi's Tale of Lizard. Trans. Leanne Hinton. A story by Ishi, last of his tribe.

Language Death. David Crystal.

The Language Instinct. Steven Pinker. Subtitled "How the brain creates language", which is a better summary than I could come up with. Interesting, though too long and too unfocused.

The Mouton Interactive Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology.

The Power of Babel. John McWhorter. Subtitled A Natural History of Language; many's the time I've tried to look up that phrase "natural history", and failed. I still don't know what it means. Book covers material like evidential markers, alienable possession, and inherent reflexiveness, as well as articles and gender, which vary substantially from language to language. All of these things are lacking in many. Our own lacks the first three.

The Rise and Fall of Languages. R. M. W. Dixon. Short book, long read. Author doesn't support his punctuated equilibrium hypothesis very well, but he's an enormously experienced linguist, and the rest of the material is interesting and useful.

Schools of Linguistics. Geoffrey Sampson. Read several parts, esp. the Sapir/Whorf thesis (which strikes me as half-baked), and the part on the Chomskyans (with whom I have deep disagreements, and I've discovered a wonderful proof to refute them, but I have no space to write it in the margin).

The Science Times Book of Language and Linguistics. Nicholas Wade, ed. A bit lightweight.

The Story of Human Language. John McWhorter. 18 hours of lectures on DVD, every one of which I watched, though I did fall asleep a few times and have to replay sections.

Spellbound. James Essinger. The book is padded with a lot of stuff that has nothing whatever to do with English spelling; where he finally gets on topic, he's good. But the book would work better at half its length, though then it wouldn't have found a publisher.

Spoken Here. Mark Abley. A study of languages that are threatened with extinction. McWhorter's lectures also address this problem, near the end of the series.

Talking Right. Geoffrey Nunberg. How the right has hijacked political language.

Turkish. Language/30. Mostly just phrases.

The Way We Talk Now. Geoffrey Nunberg. Nunberg always has something interesting, perceptive, and unexpected to say about language.

When Languages Die. K. David Harrison. He's passionate about the subject of language death (as I am). Turns out there's only a degree of separation between us: he was the academic adviser to a young woman of my acquaintance.

Words, Words, Words. David Crystal. A book about words, by a word maven.

The World's Major Languages. Bernard Comrie, ed. I dip into this occasionally.


Misc. stuff downloaded from the web.

Algebraic Topology. Allen Hatcher. I know I'll never read this, but I just like to have these things. It's an interesting subject, though I lack the discipline to get through 500 pages of math.

Boost-phase intercept systems for National Missile Defense. American Physical Society. Just reading the 50 or so pages of executive summary and introduction, one thing is crystal clear: the whole notion is hare-brained because the problems are insuperable. It won't work. This should be immediately apparent to anyone with an IQ above 100.

Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District. The judicial decision on the famous Pennsylvania case (teaching of intelligent design in the public schools). To download it yourself, go here and click "click here for details" under "Decision handed down". Or go straight here to get the PDF of the court's ruling. For the viewpoint of the proponents of intelligent design (disclaimer: I am not on of them; I agree with the idea that "intelligent design is creationism in a cheap tuxedo"), click here.


Vampire Novels.

Already Dead. Charlie Huston. Whoa! Now here's something original -- a tale that combines vampires with gang struggles, a detective story of sorts, a dash of romance, and some really twisted plot turns. Best vampire novel I've read since Dracula.

Blood Noir. Laurell K. Hamilton. Soft-porn novel about a vampire killer / necromancer. Some novels are well imagined. This one is not.

Blood Thirst. Leonard Wolf. Short vampire fiction.

Blue Bloods. Melissa de la Cruz. I read a lot of vampire novels. This one's in the young-adult genre, so it's full of brand names and teen angst.

Dracula's Brood. Vampire stories. Read two, and gave the book to my son.

Dead to Worse. Charlaine Harris. Mediocre novel about vampires and werewolves; like Jim Butcher's book Small Favor, it has every kind of supernatural being the author can cram in.

The Empire of Fear. Brian Stableford. Alternate history of the world, with vampires as the rulers of Europe, and in different roles elsewhere. A startlingly accomplished literary and imaginative feat.

Marked. P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast. Teen vampire novel set in Tulsa, OK. First of a series.

The Revenants. Geoffrey Farrington. A re-read. Unconventional vampire novel. Has its flaws, but two great virtues: consistency of tone (19th-century, though published in 1983), and deep working out of the narrator's internal struggles and attitudes.

Small Favor. Jim Butcher. I never read sword-and-sorcery sci-fi. This novel is the first such in years that I have, and it will be the last for many more. Gag me with a spoon.

The Vampire Tapestry. Suzy McKee Charnas. A re-imagining of the vampire genre. For one thing, there's only one of them, and every so often he goes into suspended animation.

The Year of Disappearances. Susan Hubbard. The plot doesn't live up to its promises; a lot of threads are dropped without much attempt to tie them together, or even simply to tie them in. But it's a pleasant little literary read, about a 14-year-old girl who's a vampire (as are her parents). People she knows start to disappear or die. The pleasure of this book is in the character, and the writing, not in the plot or genre.


Vampire Novels I'd like to read, but haven't found yet.


The Judas Glass. Michael Cadnum.


The Golden. Lucius Shepard.


The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula. Robert Anscombe.


Mina. Marie Kiraly.


The Dracula Tape. Fred Saberhagen.


Children of the Night. Dan Simmons.


Dracula Unborn. Peter Tremayne.


Child of the Night. Nancy Kilpatrick.


I, Vampire. Michael Romkey.


Hotel Transylvania. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. First of a series about the vampire Saint-Germain.


The Vampire Tapestry. Suzy McKee Charnas.


I Am Legend. Richard Mathes.


Fevre Dream. George R. R. Martin.


The Hunger. Whitley Streiber.


Bloodlist. P. N. Elrod. First of a series.


Vampire$ John Steakley.


Vampire Junction. S. P. Somtow.


Lost Souls. Poppy Z. Brite.


Those Who Hunt the Night. Barbara Hambley.


The Black Castle. Les Daniels. First of a series.


Books by my friends.

Almost American. Catherine Browder. Unpublished young adult novel about two Korean-American boys, which I helped her edit.

Goat Boy of the Ozarks. John Mort. Unpublished novel about an orphan taking care of himself in the Ozarks, which I helped him edit.

An Uncommon Enemy. Michelle Black. White woman is captured by Cheyenne, lives with them; years later, recaptured by the Army, is reluctant to become white again. First of a trilogy.

Secret Lives. Catherine Browder. A collection of short stories.


Plays.

Woyzeck. Georg Buchner.

The ThreePenny Opera. Bertoldt Brecht, or whichever girlfriend wrote this one for him.


Adventure stories


Poetry

Beowulf. Translated by Seamus Heaney.
The Cradle Place. Thomas Lux.
Collected Poems. Philip Larkin.
The Duino Elegies. Rainer Maria Rilke.
Collected Poems. Wallace Stevens.
Gilgamesh. Translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Braided Creek. Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser.
Walking About. Reva Griffith. Posthumous poems by a Friend/friend.
The essential haiku: versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. Robert Hass. More than a book of poetry -- also criticism and biography.


Essays

Best American Essays 2000. ed. Stephen Jay Gould. And 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004; I read this nearly every year.

Essays. George Orwell.

The Art of the Personal Essay. Philip Lopate.

Against Joie de Vivre. Philip Lopate.

Starbeams. Bill Vaughan. A collection of one- and two-sentence observations by the last and best of the paragraphers. (He was also a friend of my father.)

Ideas and Opinions. Albert Einstein. A genius not only in science.


Quakerism, Buddhism, and religion in general

The Quaker Family in Colonial America. J. William Frost. Didn't get through much of this book, though it was far more interesting and readable than the title implies.

A Quaker Book of Wisdom. Robert Lawrence Smith. Memoir of ex-headmaster of Sidwell Friends School (attended by Chelsea Clinton).

A Colonial Quaker Girl. The diary of Sally Wister, 1777 - 1778. Perspectives on the Revolution. Short, children's book.

At the Crossroads: Disarmament of Re-Nuclearization. FCNL pamphlet.

On War. Jonathan Dymond. The actual title, much longer, I can't remember ("An Inquiry into ...."). The most powerful antiwar essay I've ever read. I read the 1892 edition. This will be very difficult to find; we happen to have a copy at my Meeting house, and that's the only reason it was available to me.

The Dhammapada. Translated Thomas Cleary. Worst translation of the Dhammapada that I've ever read.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Shunryu Suzuki.

The Mindful Quaker. Pendle Hill pamphlet.

The Quiet Rebels.

The Quaker Reader. Edited by Jessamyn West?

Quaker in the Zendo. Pendle Hill pamphlet.

Quaker in Vietnam. Pendle Hill pamphlet, about a former member of my Meeting who turned in his draft card and then went to Vietnam to make prostheses for Vietnamese who had lost limbs in the war.

Toward a Quaker View of Sex. A collective essay. Pendle Hill pamphlet.

Turnaround. Pendle Hill pamphlet.


Math, logic, puzzles, etc.

2 biographies of Paul Erdos:
     The Man who Loved Only Numbers Paul Hoffman
     My Brain is Open Bruce Schechter

3 books about the Riemann Hypothesis:
     The Music of the Primes Marcus du Sautoy
     Prime Obsession John Derbyshire
     The Riemann Hypothesis Karl Sabbagh

Books about Godel and/or his famous proof:
     Godel's Proof. Nagel and Newman. Mostly the math.
     Godel. Casti and DePauli. Mostly a bio.
     Another book (I forgot to write down the name and author), which was a technical, detailed explication of the proof; I got lost about page 97. I clearly remember a diagram, maybe of the diagonal lemma, which isn't in either of the books on my shelf.
     Incompleteness. Rebecca Goldstein. Bio, philosophy, and math. Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist.

Books about Fermat's so-called last theorem:
     Fermat's Enigma. Simon Singh. A rambling tour of the history behind Wiles's achievement.
     Fermat's Last Theorem. Amir D. Aczel. Apparently unedited, this book is rife with simple mistakes -- e.g., Evariste Galois is referred to as a 21-year-old, then, a few hundred words on, as 20 at a later date. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton is referred to the "Institute of Advanced Study" in at least one place. The copy I read was a library book, and an earlier reader underlined a date that was off by a century. The frequency of errors makes me wonder how accurate the mathematical details are.

Innumeracy. John Allen Paulos. Short, but I only made it a fraction of the way, because the author's too cranky, and the presentation in What the Numbers Say. was better.

Logic Made Easy. Deborah J. Bennett. Haven't made much progress here.

Concepts of Modern Mathematics. Ian Stewart. Haven't made...

Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes. Bryan Bunch. HMMPH.

Maps, tracks, and the bridges of Konigsberg : a book about networks. Holt, Michael.. Children's math book. Can't figure out how I got it. Took about 15 minutes to read.

What the Numbers Say. Niederman and Boyum. Quantitative Thinking 101.

Sudoki. Will Shortz. Not math, but puzzles that are the arithmetic equivalent of crossword puzzles.

The Most Beautiful Mathematical Formulas. Salem, Testard, Salem. Dumbed-down math -- but did you know that president Garfield devised an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem?

Applied Finite Mathematics. Anton and Kolman. Checked this out thinking I hadn't had any finite math -- but discovered that matrices, set theory, probability and statistics were covered, all of which I'd had and didn't want to read about. I was looking for stuff like graph theory, but didn't find any. Browsed it.


Natural History, science, etc.

The Beak of the Finch. Jonathan Weiner. Report on a decades-long project by a pair of biologists, the Grants, who have been observing finches in the Galapagos. For them as for Darwin, these islands are a laboratory on evolution -- only evolution apparently works more quickly than we'd thought. Which leads me to wonder whether natural selection isn't supplemented by some other mechanism we don't understand yet. I simply don't see how the beaks could evolve that quickly in response to selective pressure -- it's a fundamental tenet of evolutionary theory that changes occur because of natural selection, the weeding out of the less fit. One year isn't long enough for this to occur.

Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2000. ed. David Quammen (see comment on Quammen, below).

Birds, a Visual Guide. Joanna Burger. Almost a coffee-table book. Lots of beautiful photos of beautiful birds.

Establishment and Management of Native Prairie. Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The Fabric of the Cosmos. Brian Greene. Well-written and well-reasoned, not too heavy at the same time it's not too watered down.

Monster of God. David Quammen. Definitely one of the best natural-history writers around, and despite his love of and commitment to the natural world, very even-handed.

Sahara. Marq de Villiers. I didn't expect that a book about a desert, its history, topography and people, could be so interesting.

The Speckled Monster. Jennifer Lee Carrell. The story of smallpox vaccination, though the book reads more like fiction in spots (sorry about the pun; couldn't resist).

The Wild Trees. Richard Preston. People who climb giant redwoods. I read his book The Hot Zone years ago, and remember it as similar: compulsively readable at first, steadily losing momentum as the book progressed. Lots of good stuff, mixed with lost-focus filler.

To See Every Bird on Earth. Dan Koeppel. This might better be listed under biography. The author writes about his father, his father's life list of bird species seen (over 7,000), and himself. Both repetitive and speculative, because Koeppel never gets to know his dad.

Symbiotic Planet. Lynn Margulis. A slapdash effort if ever there was one. It reads as if every other sentence were cut -- transitions are missing. I couldn't follow what she was trying to say, she jumped around so.

What Evolution Is. Ernst Mayr. Good introduction to current thinking about evolution.


Pornography

Erotomania. Francis Levy. Amusing and hectic, if histrionic and wildly overwritten, novel about a sexual relationship, unlike any other porn you'll ever read.

Something about Workmen. Alison Tyler. Cat Harrington, bored with her boyfriend, takes up SM with a stranger.

Tokyo Story. Akahige Namban.

Blue Tango. Anonymous. Best pornographic novel I've ever read. The style reminds me of James Salter; I wouldn't be surprised if he'd secretly written it.

Curious Wine. Katherine V. Forrest. Famous lesbian novel. Very different from most porn, because more romantic than sexy.

Gettin' Buck Wild. Zane.

The Heat Seekers. Zane. Unreadable.

Seductions. Edited by Lonnie Barbach. Man, this book is a turkey.

Roman Orgy. Marcus van Heller. Spartacus, told dirty.

The Devil's Advocate. Marcus van Heller.

Macho Sluts. Pat Califia. Stopping at a local bookstore I saw that Califia (who in recent years has called herself "Patrick") has a new vampire novel out. The author's bio mentions "punishing deserving masochists" as a favorite activity. Her (his? its?) writing is, as you would expect, heavy on the sadism. Though I never find this erotic, Califia is so good at it that this book is the exception; it actually is sexy, the way she tells it. But I still don't understand the pleasure of pain. It's a contradiction in terms.

Venus in Furs. Sader-Masoch. The man who loaned his name to the world, giving us the word "masochism". One seriously bent fellow. I've read that this is almost a factual description of an affair he had. I find such a statement hard to credit.

The Olympia Reader. Excerpts from their many arty dirty books.

Delta of Venus. Anais Nin.

Several pornographic novels and many stories on the web.


The Sagas and all things Icelandic.

The Sagas of the Icelanders.

The Icelandic Saga.

Viking Age Life in Iceland.

Colloquial Icelandic. Since the language has changed almost not at all in nearly a millenium, and I couldn't find a book to teach me the written language (so I could read the sagas in the original), I bought this. Wasn't very useful, really. Another of my incomplete projects, I suppose.


Books connected to each other in some fashion or other

Truth and Beauty. Ann Patchett. Her friendship with Lucy Grealy.
Autobiography of a Face. Lucy Grealy.

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken over the Ship. Charles Bukowski. Memoir or journal. Lest I forget, it's illustrated by Robert Crumb. Isn't that appropriate?
The Buk Book. Jim Christy. Not sure whether this is the book I read, but I did read some strange obscure little bio of Bukowski. I remember that the book had photographs of Bukowski fingering the vagina of the woman whose husband was taking the photographs. The photos had been torn in half by Bukowski's girlfriend, then taped back together and printed in this book. Somehow this seems typical of Bukowski, even after death. Curious fact: Bukowski's books may be the most heavily stolen from bookstores; if not, they're right up there at the top.
See main body of reading list above for other Bukowski books.


Multiple books by same writer
Books by James Salter:
     Light Years. Portrait of a marriage. A novel about time. I've read this, at a guess, twenty or more times. It was my favorite novel for about that many years.
     Solo Faces. Novel about a climber.
     Cassada. Re-write of The Arm of Flesh.
     The Hunters. Korean fighter pilot novel.
     The Arm of Flesh. Fighter pilots in Germany. Borrowed from a friend. Forgettable -- Salter re-wrote this as Cassada.
     A Sport and a Pastime. Erotic novel set in France. Almost hallucinatory in the way it evokes sensory detail.
     Dusk. Short stories.
     Burning the Days. Memoir.
     Gods of Tin. Memoir about flying.
     Last Night. Short stories.
     There & Then. Travel writing.
     See also below, in biography.
Books by Albert Camus, which I'm dipping around in:
     Resistance, Rebellion, and Death The piece on the guillotine is good.
     Lyrical and Critical Essays
     Notebooks, 1942 - 1951
     The Rebel
Jane Austen:
     Pride and Prejudice.
     Sense and Sensibility.
     Mansfield Park.
     Emma.
     Northanger Abbey.
     Persuasion.
Lee Child (not in order read, so thumbnail reviews may be confusing, unless read without regard to each other).
     Bad Luck and Trouble.
     Echo Burning.
     The Enemy.
     The Hard Way. Jack Reacher, professional loner and drifter, saves the worthy by wasting the scum.
     One Shot. Child seems to be getting better. The style, though, remains choppy: simple sentences mixed with sentence fragments, never a complex or compound/complex sentence, and the rare compound sentences always so straightforward they may as well be simple sentences. (Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say that this style, like the book's content, is shrewdly calculated to the writer's audience.)
     Running Blind. The plot is as full of holes as a colander.
     Tripwire.
     Without Fail. Most of the books in this macho thriller genre are much worse. The protagonist is especially interesting, because he's out of the norm.
Francine Prose.
     Lives of the Muses. Nine women who inspired male writers and artists. Alma Mahler, Nancy Cunard, and Sheri Martinelli are gaping omissions.
     Blue Angel.
     A Changed Man.
     Reading Like a Writer.
Georges Simenon:
     Maigret and the Apparition. Gotta hand it to Simenon: he sure can plot.
     Maigret and the Bum.
     My Friend Maigret.
     Monsieur Monde vanishes. Got well into this, and realized I'd read it years ago, in high school or college.
William Trevor:
     The Collected Stories. If you like pessimists who write flawlessly, Trevor's your man.
     A Bit on the Side.
Books by Jim Harrison:
     Legends of the Fall.
     The Woman Lit by Fireflies.
     Farmer.
     The Year He Didn't Die. Much as I love Harrison's novellas, and glad as I am to read about Brown Dog again, this book may have finally cured me of my taste for these books. His sentences are getting worse; he's gone lazy on us.
     See also below, in biography.
     See also above, in poetry.
Books by Alex Kerr:
     Lost Japan. Interesting observations by an intelligent expatriate. Much better writer and observer than, say, Lafcadio Hearn, or, for that matter, anyone else I've read. Kerr is head and shoulders above them all.
     Dogs and Demons. How the powerful of Japan are destroying their country.
Books by Alexander McCall Smith:
     The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency.
     The Tears of the Giraffe.
     Morality for Beautiful Girls.
     The Kalahari Typing School for Men.
     The Full Cupboard of Life.
     In the Company of Cheerful Ladies.
     Blue Shoes and Happiness.
     Portuguese Irregular Verbs. Hilarious deadpan sendup of fusty academics.
     Heavenly Date and other Flirtations. Short stories about dates.
     The Sunday Philosophy Club. A mystery, of sorts.
     The Good Husband of Zebra Drive.
     The Right Attitude to Rain.
     Friends, Lovers, Chocolate.
     The Careful Use of Compliments.
Books by Elmore Leonard (many more, but these are the ones I remember):
     Up In Honey's Room.
     The Hot Kid.
     52 Pick Up
     City Primeval
     Tishomingo Blues
     When the Women Come Out to Dance The title story has one of the best plot turns I've ever seen.
     Last Stand at Saber River
     Out of Sight
     Jackie Brown
     Be Cool Have read this three times now, I think.
Books by Carl Hiaasen:
     Nature Girl
     Skinny Dip
     Sick Puppy
     Striptease
     Basket Case
     Lucky You (not sure)
     Tourist Season
     Native Tongue
Books by Paul Bowles:
     Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue.
     Collected Short Stories. See above, for a review.
     Paul and Jane Bowles. Jane sucked. She was as bad as Paul was good.
     The Sheltering Sky. Another bleak one from Bowles, this one in novel length. He was much better at short stories.
Books by Thomas Paine (skimmed or read in part):
     The Crisis
     Common Sense
     Rights of Man
Books by Zora Neale Hurston:
     Their Eyes Were Watching God
     Moses, Old Man of the Mountain
Books by H. Rider Haggard:
     She. Great pulp.
     King Solomon's Mines.
Books by John Welter:
     Begin to Exit Here.
     Night of the Avenging Blowfish.
Books by Philip Lopate -- see above, in essays.
Books by Andrew Vachss:
     Choice of Evil.
     Strega.
Books by Oliver Sacks:
     Seeing Voices.
     Vintage Sacks.
     Musicophilia.


Writing, and the English and American languages

Bird by Bird. Ann Lamott. This is a pretentious, repetitive book, full of irrelevancies (the "spiritual" benefits of writing and that sort of nonsense), and with little practical advice. Also, it's egocentric almost to the point of solipsism.

Self-editing for Fiction Writers. Renni Browne and Dave King.

The Sell-Your-Novel Toolkit. Elizabeth Lyon.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Lynne Truss. Vastly enjoyable. Strunk and White for punctuation. "Sticklers unite. You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have a lot of that to begin with." For proof that we need more like Truss, see the first page of this link I stumbled across. It's past time someone ranted about this subject, and Truss is a master at ranting. Her own punctuation, though, tends to be a bit erratic: see this link.

The Elements of Style. Strunk and White.

2001 Guide to Literary Agents. Edited by Donya Dickerson.

Chicago Manual of Style. No, I didn't read it; I browsed it.

Reading Like a Writer. Francine Prose.


Biography, Autobiography, and Memoirs

About Alice. Calvin Trillin. The most loving, touching, perfectly written tribute to a dead mate that you will ever read.

Burning the Days. James Salter. See also above, for more by Salter.

The Bride of the Wind. Susanne Keegan. Biography of Alma Mahler, wife of Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel, lover of Oskar Kokoschka, loved by Gustav Klimt, etc., etc., etc.

Dark Harbor. Ved Mehta. Story of building a house on an island off the coast of Maine.

Dark Hero of the Information Age. Conway & Siegelman. Bio of Norbert Wiener. Didn't read much of it. An odd guy, Wiener, with an odd life and a very odd marriage. A Jew, he was married to an anti-Semite who mistreated him in the most underhanded of ways.

The Diary of Petr Ginz. Journal of a prodigy, a Jewish boy in Central Europe, written during the Nazi occupation. For a brilliant boy living in extraordinary circumstances he certainly kept a boring journal.

The Discomfort Zone. Jonathan Franzen. Essays/memoirs by the author of The Corrections.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Jean-Dominique Bauby. The book that inspired the movie. Incredible, to think that he wrote this little masterpiece by blinking his left eye.

Edie. Jean Stein. I think this was the biography of Edie Sedgwick I read some years ago, and finally gave away, not long before the current Edie craze took off.

The Education of Henry Adams. Henry Adams. Read between and third and a half of this, all the time wondering why so many critics think so highly of it: repetitive, tendentious, at times affected, and full of trivia.

The Eiger Obsession. John Harlin III, son of the legendary John Harlin II, works himself up to climb the Eiger, the mountain on which his father died. Interesting only if you're a climber yourself.

Elvis and Me. Priscilla Presley. Judging by this book, Elvis was more of a freak than Michael Jackson.

Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries. Jim Carroll.

Growing Up. Russell Baker. Prose that's perfect without calling attention to itself, superb storytelling, in an unusually selfless autobiography.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Crystal Zevon. Bio of my second-favorite musician, Warren Zevon. I usually don't like books that are cut-and-paste quotes from third parties and diaries, but this one was gripping. The man's life was a train wreck, and he made the lives of everyone around him the same. You have to read the book to believe the extent of it; there's no point in relating the anecdotes here. Of all the rockers who've ever lived, his was probably the most messed-up life. Way more fucked up than Elvis's, say, or Jim Morrison's.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself. Bill Bryson. Bryson's always fun to read: doesn't take himself seriously, great sense of humor, interesting, quirky observations. After 20 years living in England, married to an Englishwoman, he returns to the U.S. You'll see our country anew when you read this.

An Italian Affair. Laura Fraser. A charming book, and a gracious woman (she signed a copy for me).

See also above, in math: biographies of Paul Erdos.

Life on the Color Line. Gregory Howard Williams. A white boy with a drop of black blood, this is his memoir of finding out that he was mixed, and growing up in a ghetto. The black people treated him a damn sight better, though he looks completely white, than the white people did. Marred by clumsy writing, it's worth reading for the story.

Life with Picasso. Francois Gilot. Pablo comes across as possibly the world's most egocentric jerk. Gilot, on the other hand, is consistently appealing. After she dumped Picasso for being an asshole, she ended up marrying Jonas Salk (of Salk vaccine fame); interesting, that she should have been the muse of two such accomplished men, so different from each other.

Living to Tell the Tale. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. At first I was charmed. By the end of the book I was irritated. Marquez has a mental disorder. He claims, in all seriousness, to have seen a faun on the streetcar one day, to have met a man with a "satanic" beast growing in his belly, and to have lived in a village in the middle of which there was a magic land ruled by a sorceress who had all magical powers but one (which was reserved to God).

The Lone Samurai. William Scott Wilson. Bio of Miyamoto Musashi, the medieval Japanese swordsman; reads like adolescent hero worship.

The Mistress's Daughter. A. M. Homes. In her early thirties, Homes is tracked down by the birth mother who gave her up at the age of three days. The woman, and the birth father, and the story, are creepy. Homes is no paragon of sanity, either.

Monturiol's Dream. Matthew Stewart. Biography of the Catalan who invented the first practical submarine.

My Sense of Silence. Lennard J. Davis. Growing up the hearing child of deaf parents.

One Degree West. Julene Bair. Memoir of a western Kansas farm girl.

Off to the Side. Jim Harrison. Starts great, then deteriorates into name-dropping.

Patches from Life's Crazy Quilt. Marvin Arnett. Memoir of a black woman's childhood in Detroit during the Depression and WW II.

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Ulysses S. Grant. A masterpiece. His friend Mark Twain must have helped him with it. There was a time when this book was almost as ubiquitous on middle-class bookshelves in this country as was the Bible. Grant was too trusting, and for that reason his administration was ridden with scandal, and he was defrauded by men he trusted. To provide for his wife, he wrote this book as he was dying of throat cancer. He managed to finish the task a week before he died. A great man, a great warrior, and a great writer, he was nevertheless utterly incompetent in the Presidency.

Rimbaud. Graham Robb. Robb draws too many conclusions from inadequate evidence -- but that's the nature of any Rimbaud biography. This was a consistently interesting read, and much better than a hagiography of Rimbaud I read many years ago. Writers always have strong, well-defined positions on the man. This is probably one of the most balanced bios.

The Spiral Staircase. Karen Armstrong. Quite an extraordinary career: nun, academic, teacher, filmmaker, writer. And extraordinary writing, too, until the last third of the book, which becomes a dull chronological narration lacking in style and texture. The book is most interesting when her life was most troublesome, and loses force after she overcomes her problem.

Stuart: A Life Backwards. Alexander Masters. Bio of an English street person, who ran away dozens of times, sniffed glue, had gang fights, spent years in jail, etc. -- but has kept his intelligence.

This I Cannot Forget. Anna Larina. Memoir of Nikolai Bukhharin's widow; about what you'd expect, but more so. One more book that makes me thankful I was born here, and not in a totalitarian society.

Touching the Void. Joe Simpson. Since I used to be a climber, epic stories of disasters in the mountains always appeal to me. I've been through a few epics myself. But this one is on a scale that almost passes belief. Simpson's a real hard guy: he never quits, gives it his all, takes it as it comes, without self-pity; he shrugs off the pain and struggle. His attitude was "I'm better, and I'm going to show that this mountain can be done, and build my career". He paid the price, but he doesn't complain; I've heard him interviewed on the radio, where he's equally matter-of-fact. He reminds me a lot of some of the guys I used to know in Yosemite.

A Tuscan Childhood. Kinta Beevor. Memoir of growing up in a castle in Italy between the world wars, with walls so thick they grew trees on top of the ramparts. In the evening, they would drive the chickens into the dungeon to protect them from the foxes. There was a waterfall inside the castle. A magical read.

The Virgin of Bennington. Katherine Norris. Her essays are better.

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Larry McMurtry. Who knew that he's an even better essayist than a writer of fiction?

What It Used to Be Like. Maryann Burk Carver. A truly discouraging memoir of her marriage to the writer Raymond Carver, starting with teen love, pregnancy and marriage at 16, unending economic desperation, constant moves from place to place, alcoholism, marital violence (some of it life-threatening), multiple bankruptcies, and infidelities. This description is actually an understatement. The word "egocentric" is inadequate for Raymond Carver; "solipsistic" is closer to the mark, though still short of it.

Zappa. Barry Miles. Zappa comes across as a heavyhanded, overbearing, pompous ass -- something that's evident in his music, come to think of it. He always thought he was smarter than his listeners, and wrote his music that way -- he'd write twenty bars of something fantastic and then abruptly change it into something else completely unrelated. It pisses me off every time, and this book limns the personality that drove that sort of mangled creativity.

Subcategory: Sexual Memoirs (also see above, under "pornography").

100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed. Melissa P. Sexual memoir of a 16-year-old Sicilian girl. Jejeune, sordid, and egotistical. And not at all erotic. How can anyone have such varied and plentiful sex and make it come across so unsexy? Especially an Italian?

Bare. Elisabeth Eaves. One incredibly sexy woman's memoir of working as a nude dancer.

The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker. Suzanne Portnoy. Supposedly an erotic memoir, but obviously fictionalized. I mean, how many superlong penises are there in London? Fewer than she claims to have had. Either that, or the woman lives in some kind of porn hallucination.

Callgirl. Jeannette Angell. She protests too much: near the start of the book, she asserts, in italics, It's only a job, and goes on at great length about the hypocrisy with which we treat prostitution; then, all the way through, she's snobbish toward and fearful of her streetwalking sisters; increasingly, and especially at the end, she talks about the disgust she comes to feel for the work. She has multiple degrees, including a Ph.D., but her education hasn't helped her writing. This is a mediocre book.

Candy Girl. This is a good read, about stripping, working at a peep show, and phone sex work, though it tries a bit too hard sometimes, with the machine-gun humor and the obscure references, especially brand names and music. If she were wound a little less tight, the book would be much better, though it's plenty good as is. Proof that not all women who do this kind of work were sexually abused, nor exploited.

Love Sick. Sue William Silverman. Hackneyed, inauthentic, and unconvincing.

Memoirs of a Beatnik. Diane di Prima. After reading this, I wish I'd been a beatnik.

My Horizontal Life. Chelsea Handler. Comic sexual memoir. In places, it's hilarious, but she's reminiscent of Warren Zevon's line "I'm looking for a woman with low self-esteem". Handler does that Jewish thing of picking at herself as if she were a scab she wants to pull off and get rid of. Still, even if the book is depressing, it's also howlingly funny. Read the chapter in which her father comes home and catches her in bed with an extremely well-endowed black man; then tell me she's not a brilliant comic... If anyone doubts that women in the U.S. have achieved sexual parity with men, this book should dispel that illusion.

A Round-Heeled Woman. Jane Juska. Woman who hasn't had sex in decades places an ad in the New York Review of Books that goes like this: "Before I turn 67 -- next March -- I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." This book is about the responses she got, and what she did with them. ("Round-heeled" is definitely an exaggeration.) There's also a lot of her history in it; something of a pity party. Also, if one believes, as I do, that "anything too good to be true, isn't", then the character Graham is obviously made up from whole cloth.

My Secret Life. "Walter". A depraved man; when he wasn't whoring, he was raping. The subtext seems to be that since women enjoy sex, it's okay to force them to have it. Still, it's an interesting look at Victorian attitudes toward sex, which were considerably more complicated than most of us realize.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Catherine Millet. Caused a sensation in France -- and for good reason. Who could have imagined a sex life like hers?

The Surrender. Toni Bentley. The author's sexual history. Once both a famous ballerina and a famous writer (a tough double to pull off), Bentley is off her game here. This is the funniest sexual autobiography I've ever read, but unintentionally so. All the hallmarks of bad writing, fuzzy thinking, and self-delusion are present: extreme hyperbole, unsupported generalizations and fallacious reasoning, the overuse of strong adjectives, sentence fragments, and (on nearly every page) the worst puns I can remember ever seeing on the printed page. Read it for laughs. That's all it's good for. Anyone who tries to convince me that anal sex is the path to God should at least make an effort to be convincing. Instead, this book reads like de Sade chann