Megatheriums for Breakfast

I’m probably going to skip by a lot of books I’ve read in the last few months, too bad! Here’s just what I can remember. It does demonstrate (1) that I am reading a LOT of books and (2) that my iPad has become my reading device of choice. This list of books doesn’t even include the many articles from newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other shorter stuff which I also read on my iPad. More on this in a separate post.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Paperback, my own collection

I have always been very interested in the history of science and technology, and this book really pandered to that interest. Covering the late 1700s to the early 1800s, this is a beautifully written and fascinating look at the intertwining of science and culture in the “Romantic” era in Britain. I had no idea that scientists like Humphry Davy also wrote poetry and were closely associated with poets like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, who in turn had been deeply interested in contemporary science.

Even putting aside that fascinating side of the book, The Age of Wonder is also a wonderful collection of scientific biographies, covering the lives and work of Joseph Banks, William and Catherine Herschel, William’s son John Herschel, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, not to mention the explorer Mungo Park. Really well done.

Heresy by S.J.Parris

E-book, on my iPad

Ho-hum mediaeval mystery with Giordano Bruno as the protagonist, for some reason. I slogged through it, but was left unsatisfied.

A Game of Thrones

A Clash of Kings

A Storm of Swords by George R R Martin

Audiobooks, on my iPhone

This is the second time I’ve read/listened to this series by George R R Martin. I’m not at all a big fan of long-winded fantasy series, but Martin writes so well, with such interesting and three-dimensional characters, and with such a light touch on the magical or fantasy elements of his world that these books do stand out from the genre. The series now seems bogged down, with Martin spending the last ten or twelve years trying to get out the next volume (I count A Feast for Crows as an unfortunate and awkward attempt to satisfy the demands of his fans) with no real prospect in sight of the whole projected series (eight volumes) ever being completed. But I almost think that the series could end with A Storm of Swords and still be considered a completed and satisfying work in its own right.

Passage by Connie Willis

E-book, on my iPad

The premise of this book – researchers investigating near-death experiences – didn’t at first sound promising. But Willis takes it in unexpected directions, and really makes you think. Though the whole book is essentially about death, you close it with a smile.

Lincoln’s Dreams by Connie Willis

E-book, on my iPad

I really loved this. Again, Willis deals with an extremely unlikely premise – a young woman is beset with vivid dreams which seem to be communications from the past – and makes you believe it. It’s a romance but not a romance. A tragedy but not a tragedy. It will teach you a lot about the American Civil War, and will make you feel deeply about it and the leading players in it.

And it ends with a line which just bowls you over, because Willis has been leading you to it, step by step, throughout the entire book.

Blindsighted

Kisscut

A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter

E-books, on my iPad

Somewhat gruesome series of mysteries set in Grant County in Georgia, but well-done, with good characterisation. Not for those easily shocked, however.

The Temple of the Magic Rats by Robert Brunton

E-book, on my iPad

This is an unpublished novel written by a friend of mine. He gave it to me as a Word document, but it was far more comfortable to read it in iBooks on my iPad, so I did a quick conversion.

The author is an award-winning exhibition designer, and this book, like his first (The Golden Pavillions) is semi-autobiographical and features the building of a trade exhibition, in this case in Tehran in the late 1960s. But Brunton is able to weave in the tragic story of the Kurds and their persecution, making their plight seem personal and very real.

Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

E-book, on my iPad

Interesting non-fiction about the way that reading works from a neurological perspective. How did the human brain develop so that extremely specific areas of the brain seem to be dedicated to the reading process, when writing is a cultural construct only a few thousand years old, clearly too recent for these capabilities to have evolved? Dehaene answers that question in a satisfying manner, and elucidates much about the way we actually read and learn to read.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

E-book, on my iPad

This is an award-winning novel by an Afghani writer, but to be honest I didn’t much enjoy it, nor did I feel that it gave much insight into Afghanistan’s plight today.

The Ghost by Robert Harris

Audiobook, on my iPhone

Entertaining novel about a ghost writer (whose name, appropriately, we never discover) hired to write the autobiography of an ex-Prime Minister of Britain (suspiciously similar to Tony Blair). Secrets are eventually revealed. Not great literature, but enjoyable enough.

My fortnightly occasional summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Hardcover, my own library

Amazon link

I finally finished this book, subtitled ‘The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln’. It’s a fascinating study of Lincoln and the men he appointed to his cabinet, several of whom had been his bitter rivals for the nomination of the Republican Party. Can we see a certain repeat of history today in that Lincoln appointed his main rival – the person whom almost everyone thought would win the nomination – as Secretary of State? Certainly we know that President Obama was reading this book between his election and the inauguration.

But modern parallels aside, I found this a really gripping read, as we see Lincoln practically lift himself up by his bootstraps from extremely humble beginnings, educating himself and then following the law and eventually stepping in to politics, to become the unlikely nomination of his party. This, however, was not mere luck. Lincoln had a careful plan and built up his support at the expense of his much richer and much more well-connected rivals – William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edward Bates – and snatched the nomination. Most people at the time, and certainly those rivals, thought it a bizarre and unwise choice by the party, and Lincoln was much disparaged as a ‘backwoods lawyer’ and a ‘rail-splitter’. This book demonstrates how Lincoln overcame those perceptions and built the initially grudging and then full-hearted respect of men like Seward, his Secretary of State.

The book also tells, of course, the story of the Civil War, but dwells only briefly on the campaign itself, and more on the personalities and the politics of the war which Lincoln shrewdly managed.

As an Australian, my knowledge of American history is only limited. I learnt a lot from this book, and enjoyed it greatly.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• American Empire: Blood and Iron by Harry Turtledove (Audiobook).
• Angel’s Flight by Michael Connelly (Ebook).
• Ruled Brittania by Harry Turtledove (Ebook).
• American Journeys by Don Watson (Hardcover, my own library).

My fortnightly occasional summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

The Grail Quest by Bernard Cornwell

Audiobook on my iPhone

Amazon link

This is a trilogy of historical novels, set during the Hundred Years War between England and France (mid 1300s), and centered on the exploits of Thomas of Hookton, an English archer. In those days, the English longbow, en masse, had the devastating impact on opposing armies that the machine gun did during World War I. Arrows from such bows, plied by men trained from youth to have the strength to draw them, could pierce even plate armor.

Cornwell has an excellent sense of period, and has clearly done his historical research thoroughly. There are several battles in the book which – if they were fiction – would seem to strain credibility: the Battle of Crécy, in which the English army in France under the command of Edward III, hugely outnumbered, desperate, out of supplies, and exhausted, nevertheless managed to wipe out a vast proportion of the French nobility and escape; the Battle of Durham, where again a greatly outnumbered English contingent destroyed the flower of Scottish arms and captured the King of Scotland; the Battle of La Roche-Darien where Duke Charles of Brittany thought he had a cunning plan to destroy the English archers, but was in fact defeated and captured. All of these are true stories, but Cornwell brings them vividly (and bloodily) to life; and it’s perfectly credible that his protagonist would be at each of these events, which happened within the span of a few years in the 1340s.

The character development of Thomas, his loves and friends, is all excellently handled, particularly the conflicts between Thomas and his one-time friend, the Scot Robbie Douglas in the last book.

And then there’s the plot device of the search for the Holy Grail. No Arthurian (or even Monty Pythonesque) romance here, but a belief that the relic exists among the powers of the Church, and a connection through Thomas’ family which holds out the tantalising thought that the Grail might really exist and be located. It’s this hope which drives the characters.

Really entertaining reading. And very well narrated by Sean Barrett.

Almost Perfect by W.E. Pete Peterson

E-book on my iPhone

Interesting history of the word processing software which for a time was the best-selling product in the field.

The book could have been subtitled “The Rise and Fall of Word Perfect”, I guess, for the product is now long gone, swept away by the ubiquitous Microsoft Word.

This e-book is a fascinating look at the early history of computing and word processing in particular. Since I am someone who cut their teeth on a dedicated Wang word processing system, and who has seen the introduction and rise of Microsoft’s products, it was particularly interesting to me. But it would be equally interesting, I think, to students of business dynamics and interpersonal relationships in business, as the company grows and grows and relationships get stressed. Peterson eventually gets shafted by his long-time partners, and a fair bit of his resentment and self-justification comes out in the book.

This is only available as an e-book these days as the original is long out of print (if it ever was in print, not sure).

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library) – yes, I’m still reading this – it’s a long book, and I find it hard to find time to sit down with a physical volume these days.
• Ruled Brittania by Harry Turtledove (Ebook)

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

While I’ve been reading a fair bit over the last fortnight, I haven’t completed very much in the period.

I’m part way through:

• Trunk Music by Michael Connelly (Audible audiobook)
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (Ebook on my iPod)
• Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol I by Edward Gibbon (Ebook on my iPod)

I confess that I’m reading Gibbon’s massive treatise on the iPod just to prove that it can be done, and how well the iPod Touch/iPhone works as an ebook reading platform, something I’m growing increasingly to believe. Even Gibbon’s extensive footnotes work pretty well thanks to intelligent formatting by Gutenberg (from where I sourced the book).

On the down-side, Lexcycle, who produce the Stanza ebook software I had been using to read books on my iPod, dropped the ball. They released a new version incorporating a dictionary lookup feature which manages to interfere with the comfort of reading (the feature pops up if your finger dwells a fraction of a second too long on the screen when you are turning pages). They have promised to fix it, but in the meantime I’m using the almost-as-good eReader from Palm.

Friend of the Devil  by Peter Robinson.

Ebook on my iPod Touch.

I grew up in what is now West Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. Robinson was born not far away from where I was born, and only a year before me. His series of novels about Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks are all set in this part of the world, so many of the places he writes about are quite familiar to me from my childhood. This, of course, adds to the interest I have in this series.

But even if you don’t know this area of the world, DCI Banks is an engaging and multi-layered character with a complex private life, and the cases he encounters are full of interest and mystery. In this novel, the 17th in the series, a young woman is raped and murdered in the town of Eastvale; and in what seems a completely different case, a woman quadriplegic is found murdered in her wheelchair at the top of a set of cliffs facing over the North Sea. How these two cases – one handled by Banks, one by his colleague and ex-lover Annie Cabot – are related only becomes clear as the book progresses. A really intriguing read, and the ending was not at all obvious for almost all of the book.

Various Blogs

Here are some links to a few of the blogs I read regularly:

Coding Horror  by Jeff Atwood

This is always must-read stuff for me. Jeff Atwood talks intelligently and interestingly about the craft of programming, and continually introduces me to new thoughts, and links to things I ought to know or to think about.

I, Cringely  by Robert X. Cringely

Cringely wrote one of the best, and funniest, books about the early days of the computer industry which I have ever read: Accidental Empires (or, How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date)

He writes regularly and very intelligently about technology. While he’s occasionally a bit too self-important and self-congratulatory for my taste, he’s never less than thought-provoking and well-informed.

Whimsley  by Tom Slee

This British-born Canadian doesn’t blog anywhere never enough so far as I am concerned. He writes very clever and amusing stuff, sometimes at great length, about the digital economy. For example, he dedicated dozens of well-thought-out posts to demolishing the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson; and he has written amusingly about the hidden flaws in the way that Google and Amazon work.

I hope Slee keeps on blogging, because I want to keep on reading his stuff.

Journal  by Sam Pepys

This guy blogs just about every day, and it’s all full of his rich life in London, all the stupidities and corruption of the politicians and bureaucrats that he has to work with, about all the women he bonks (he’s a very naughty man!), his long-suffering wife, and the renovations he’s having done to his house. Just lately, he’s been rather worried about the spread of a dangerous infectious disease in the city, seemingly on the rise every day. And about the progress of the current war with the Dutch, of course.

Fascinating reading. Oh, did I mention that this guy is writing in the 1660s?