"I cannot live without books." Thomas Jefferson

These lists are only partial; I have been erratic about keeping them, and even more erratic about writing actual reviews. I suspect this is somewhere over half of the books I have read in the last decade. In some years, when I had a long commute by car, I read/listened to books on tape/CD more than in actual print. I always prefer unabridged, but can't always get them.

This list partly pre-dates and was partly inspired by Ted's Bell, Book, and Candle.

Topics

History

• Asia.
• The Mine Wars of the early 20th century.
• Other Appalachian history.
• Biographies of famous scientists.

On the Nightstand

• Seven plays by Sam Shepherd
• The Autobiography of Mother Jones
• numerous others...

In progress

• Wind in the Willows
• When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
• John Updike, The Poorhouse Fair
• Don't Think of An Elephant!
• A Man, A Cat, and Two Women
• A People's History of the United States (perpetual)
• Vidal, Essays (occasional reading)
• The Great Game (dormant)
• The Ralph Nader Reader (occasional)
• Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
• Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar

2006

• Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy
  
• David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace
  Great, but controversial, book on the making of the modern Middle East.
• Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
  I can't remember when I last read a book I agreed with more. It's not perfect; he doesn't understand or doesn't explain technology very well, and while I don't doubt that he understands the Japanese banking system better than I do, his impressions of Japan ring slightly off-key for some reason. But I agree that globalization is almost inevitable, and generally desirable, and what governments can and should do about it.
• Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
  Beautiful prose and poetry by the man credited with perfecting the haiku. The opening paragraph of title essay is just stunning.
• Karel von Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power
  Not yet finished, but amazingly relevant despite its age. You would think that things would have changed in more than fifteen years of economic malaise, but no.
• The Best American Essays of the Century
  Include's John Muir's "Stickeen", which is one of the best things I've ever read.

2005

• There are more somewhere...
• Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller, the Real Dr. Strangelove
  Lurid title, lurid cover; you wouldn't expect a balanced biography of one of the most hawkish and controversial scientists of the 20th century. Well, you'd be wrong; this is far better than I expected. Goodchild is really a television producer, and many of the more than fifty interviews that contributed to this book were done when he was making a film about Robert Oppenheimer. Teller and Oppenheimer worked together on the Manhattan Project, but had a falling out, and were on opposite sides during the McCarthy era; many blame Teller for Oppie losing his security clearance. Teller was a brilliant but flawed man, the father of the hydrogen bomb, a skilled political operator, and the force behind Star Wars/SDI. The book is heavily footnoted, the writing is good, and the editing is good (something I seem to rarely say these days). This book is at times sympathetic, and always seeks to understand Teller. Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, this book is recommended to anyone interested in the Cold War.
• Robert Shogan, The Battle of Blair Mountain, The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising
  The subtitle is actually more appropriate than the title; the book is about much more than the Blair Mountain incident itself. It covers the unrest in the southern West Virginia coal fields from roughly the turn of the century through Blair Mountain, in 1921, including the Matewan Massacre that made Sid Hatfield nationally famous. My own great-grandfather, Anderson "Anse" Hatfield, appears; he ran the Urias Hotel in Matewan where the Baldwin-Felts agents (the thugs hired by the coal operators to control the miners) stayed. According to Shogan, Anse was an informer for the Baldwin-Felts agents; my grandfather insisted that he would never have done something like that, but had no choice but to allow the Baldwin-Felts guys to stay at the Urias. However, my grandfather was only five when his father was killed for his suspected role.

  The book starts at the Matewan Massacre, in which the mayor of Matewan, two miners, and seven Baldwin-Felts agents died, on May 19, 1920, then works its way backwards and forwards to the Blair Mountain incident in September, 1921, in which 10,000 angry miners (called "rednecks" for the red bandannas they wore) marched on Logan, where they were intent on lynching Don Chafin, the coal-company-bought-and-paid-for sheriff of Logan County.

  The author is a former correspondent for Newsweek and the L.A. Times, and has written numerous books, but I was disappointed in the writing. The prose is pedestrian, sometimes almost high-schoolish. The flow of the book could have used some work; it reads more like a first draft than a finished book. My copy is a galley, uncorrected proof (courtesy of Bobo), and there are lots of copy-editing problems, which perhaps contributed to my impression, but that's not my real complaint.

  Shogan is a pro-labor guy, and doesn't hide his feelings, but the book is ultimately pessimistic in tone, not favorable toward the individuals or the labor movement as a whole and its leverage in the 20th or 21st century.

• Pico Iyer, Sun After Dark
  Iyer is perhaps my favorite writer, and this collection of essays amply demonstrates why. "A writer like no other," the cover says, and I agree. I've read most of his stuff, and it seems his prose is becoming lighter, almost ephemeral, over time. He seems to spend more time in this book quoting other writers (Camus especially) than I recall him doing before. I'm a little curious about the choice of order of these essays; after an excellent opening, the pieces with Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama seem a little out of character in some ways, before he shifts into his more usual mode of solitary adventures in out-of-the-way places. This collection seems, perhaps, a little more lonesome than prior ones. Whether seeing in the new millenium on Easter Island, visiting Bali, or touring Angkor Wat for New Year's with his mother (an emotional examination of the moral complexity of tourism in the developing world), I can't recommend him highly enough, but this one might not be the most accessible place to start for those who haven't read Iyer before.
• Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
  I actually started out to read The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code instead, but after enjoying leafing through that and accidentally hitting a couple of plot spoilers, decided I should read the novel first.

  The novel is famous for a couple of reasons: one, it's a real page-turner - I stayed up too late a couple of nights to finish it; two, lots of the history of the church and secret societies and Jesus himself that shows up in the book has resulted in a huge furor. Lots of it is fictional, which is fine by me, but don't take it too seriously or try to quote history from this book! (Even random facts such as the mileage of a Smart Car are wrong; no car in existence gets 100km to the liter! It really gets about a quarter of that, or less. I also suspect the writer meant to refer to the "turbid" waters of the Seine rather than the "turgid" waters, but that could be someone else's fault.)

  I enjoyed the puzzles in the book, solving a couple and not solving several before they were revealed. The action is compelling, though the plot is implausible at many junctures and the writing of character and dialog is sometimes weak. If you've read or seen "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," Cryptonomicon, and "Eyes Wide Shut," parts of this will feel familiar, perhaps even derivative. The narrative is quite linear; I was surprised, given the topic, that we don't hop back and forth in time. Everything we learn about the past comes from the mouths of the historian/symbologist characters.

• The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code
  This is an enjoyable skim across European history for the last couple of thousand years, prompted by the success of The Da Vinci Code. Organized as an alphabetic catalog or encyclopedia, there are entries on the papacy, various historical figures, and even some of the fictional ones from the novel, giving, for example, the clever etymology of their names. If you like history, you'll find something interesting here, for sure, and plenty of references to other material. Recommended as an inoculation against accidentally filing some of the fiction in the novel under "historical fact", but read the novel first -- there are spoilers here!
• Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
  Read this book! A fascinating roam through mobile phone and networked PDA-based games in Stockholm and Shibuya, wearable computing, WLAN, and projects such as SETI@home, this book is ultimately in search of the impact ubiquitous computing will have on our lives in the coming decades. Perhaps a little breathless in its description of coming technologies, it's not always sanguine about the effects. Copyright 2002, this had sat on my shelf for two years or so, and I was afraid it would seem dated. On the contrary, not everything in it is coming to pass, but it seems practically prescient and still relevant. Highly recommended.
• Richard Preston, The Hot Zone
  According to the cover, Stephen King called this "One of the most horrifying things I've ever read." It's the true story of several Marburg and Ebola incidents in the 1970s and 1980s, and was a New York Times number one bestseller. My recommendation: don't read it over lunch. It's written potboiler/bestseller style, and the descriptions of monkeys and people dying horrible deaths are pretty graphic. Also, don't read it if you're hypochondriac :-). Some might call the level of the book "accessible", others might call it "dumbed down". It takes time to explain such difficult words as "intern". It's a quick, light read that still manages to be somewhat informative.
• ??? Philosophy
• ??? surely there's a book or two missing there...
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  Rowling's writing is getting better. In the earlier books, everyone always "said" something. Now they exclaim, muse, shout, etc. This book is a relationship book; there's very little action. And, even more than the earlier ones, it feels unfinished; we have more to do. Can't wait for the big finish!
• Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?
  Subtitled "How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," I actually learned more about the title than the subtitle. It fills in some depth and provides some ammo in the wars, and it's an entertaining read, but... The first half documents in detail what's wrong with Kansas, and the second half purports to tell us how we got there, but I wasn't totally satisfied with that part. One interesting (solid left) bit is that it lays part of the blame on the Clinton DLC gang; since they deliberately triangulated on the economic issues, they left only the cultural issues to distinguish the Democrats from the Republicans, and the continual broadening of our coalition by adding interest groups inevitably alienates some parts of our existing base who think we've gone too far.
• David Goodstein, Out of Gas
  Stephen King called The Hot Zone "one of the most horrifying things I've ever read." I would hand that title instead to David Goodstein's Out of Gas (he has also lectured on this topic; you can get RealVideo here). Goodstein's concern is not the possible deaths of millions of people due to Ebola and Marburg. It's not the Bush administration paving over Yosemite. It's not even anthropogenic global warming and a piddling few degrees' increase in average temperatures. He's worried about whether or not we will run out of fossil fuels before we figure out how to live sustainably, and consequently whether civilization as we know it will come to an end. Goodstein is a physics professor at Caltech. In the book, he heads straight for the basics: we're consuming energy that was stored in the ground long ago. We are consuming it far faster than it replenishes itself. It will run out; what are we to do when it does? Goodstein covers the well-known Hubbert peak, and suggests that we are now at the world-wide peak of petroleum production, give or take a decade or so. When we hit that peak, we are about half way done with the amount of oil we can successfully extract and use. But that doesn't mean we have another 150 years to go before problems occur; because demand is increasing and production is flat to declining as we pass the peak, serious shortages are likely to begin within a decade or two at most. Such shortages will lead to price instability, and are especially problematic since petroleum is such a flexible, useful material. We use it in plastics, fertilizers, and more, as well as burning the stuff directly, so a shortage has the potential to threaten such fundamental societal requirements as food production. He discusses where oil comes from, how inefficient it is to use oil shale, how natural gas, coal, and even accessible supplies of fissionable uranium will run out, and relatively soon. Each of those supplies is worth a few decades, given reasonable projections about population growth, energy consumption, and the fraction of the resource that is recoverable at reasonable economic and thermodynamic returns. All told, if we are flexible enough about our fuels, we have maybe until the end of the century. Then what? Our only choice is fusion. We can either get our energy indirectly, by creating solar cells that ultimately derive the power they deliver from the sun's fusion, or we can figure out how to run fusion here on earth - but we haven't been very successful at that yet. What to do, what to do?

2004

• White, Charlotte's Web
• A Life of Erwin Schroedinger
• Don't Try This At Home
• Giardina, Saints and Villains
• An Army at Dawn
• The Year's Best SF, Dorzois, ed.
• Whiting, Tokyo Underworld
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie
• Jeffrey Lee Funk, The Mobile Internet
  I bought this book a couple of years ago, when I was still working for Nokia, and finally got around to reading (most of) it recently. The premise is that the U.S. has been caught sleeping and Japan, especially in the form of i-mode, has a huge lead in mobile Internet technology and penetration. Funk knows his stuff - he lives in Japan, I believe, and consults and teaches here. But the book is both a little dated and a little basic for me; it was probably a real eye-opener to many people when it was first released, if they even knew enough to read it. Focuses more on the business aspects than the development of the technology itself.
• Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
  Trippi was Howard Dean's campaign manager for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. I picked up the book at MIT's Media Lab, where Trippi was speaking; unfortunately, I had a prior engagement and couldn't stay to hear him. Trippi believes in the power of people to change things, and believes that technology empowers people. He's an optimist, and so am I most of the time, but I disagree with some of his conclusions.

  Dean's campaign was largely driven by grassroots folks (many of them unhappy about the war in Iraq, and equally unhappy that most mainstream Democrats wouldn't show enough spine to stand up to Bush) who organized themselves. The formal campaign didn't even realize that a lot of it was going on. Trippi is a technology consultant in the real world, and so helped push both Dean and the other campaign staff to ride the wave of support, helping to enable it and embracing the Internet, using ideas from supporters, not censoring their comments, and more - not just taking their money.

  Trippi believes that the Internet provides a great means for empowering people, getting information to them, helping them meet each other, helping them keep their leaders accountable - it almost turns our country back into a village. That much, I agree with. But, Trippi seems to think it will inevitably result in a stronger democracy and more liberal government.

  In my opinion, the Internet is more value-neutral. It's just as powerful a tool for conservatives as for liberals, for liars as well as for saints. We saw with the fall of the Soviet Union how the fax machine could be used to combat authoritarianism. With the Internet, people mostly seek out other people and sources of information that already match their existing biases. In that sense, it's an extension of top-down broadcast media. Websites documenting the negative side of the war in Iraq are pooh-poohed, ignored, whitewashed, or vilified by those on the other side. Few people actually look at information from both sides of a story, and the Internet is a perpetual-motion spin machine. You can use the Internet to, oh, say, track the movements of an army in an actual coup, but you can't use it to convince your neighbor to take the Bush-Cheney sign out of his front yard, at least not in the time frame of a single presidential election.

  The book is highly recommended for anyone interested in how politics really works, or in the societal impact of technology.

• Michael Moore, Dude, Where's My Country?
  You pick up a Michael Moore book expecting a rant, and boy, do you ever get one here. The first chapter, "7 Questions for George of Arabia", is vicious enough to make even me whince. But, after that, it kind of calms down, and one of the surprising things is how rational Moore sounds. His chapter where God steps in and does the talking reflects most of my thinking pretty accurately: W's direct connection to God is no better than yours or mine. The chapter on how liberals are actually winning in the long run is comforting, but is it reality? Only time, and a lot of effort, will tell, one way or the other. Recommended, but be aware of what you're in for :-).

Miscellaneous Undated, 1995-2003

• Scott Berry, A Stranger in Tibet
• Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
• Nien Chieng, Life and Death in Shanghai
• Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China
  I actually read most of this while travelling in China for several weeks in spring, 1995.
• Dalai Lama, My Land and My People
• Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster
• Joe Kita, Another Shot: How I Relived My Life in Less Than a Year (audio)

2003

• Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
  A small, light novel without a narrative, it's literally what the title says: small vignettes, snipets of how Einstein might have dreamed while working on special relativity. Time behaves oddly, and in different ways, in each setting, and the glimpses we have of human behavior are touching despite their brevity and ephemeral nature.
• Pico Iyer, Abandon: A Romance
  Iyer is one of my favorite writers; I love his light, almost lyrical prose and his insights. But, I much prefer his non-fiction to his fiction.
• Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
  A fabulous, funny, cyberpunk novel from the early 1980s. Our protagonist is a data shuffler by profession, and gets involved with multiple gangs and a rather goofy professor. Touching and memorable. Absolutely nothing to do with Japan except the coincidence of a smattering of Tokyo geography. Highly recommended.
• John Keegan, The First World War
  

2002

• Simon Singh, The Code Book
  The year's off to a good start, finishing this book about three hours into the new year :-). This is a good read, well written, about an important subject. Singh keeps the math to things he can demonstrate with very simple examples, but I still found the explanations accurate, to the extent I understand the technical material. There is a lot of the history of cryptography that I was unaware of, including its role in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Singh can't resist a detour into the decipherment of Linear B, an ancient script from Crete, and the use of Navajo speakers by the U.S. Marines in the Pacific War of WWII. I like it, even if it does somewhat stretch the subtitle of "The Evolution of Secrecy". Recommended.
• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings
  Okay, so my reading pace didn't last very far into 2002 :-(. This book has been in process for nearly a year. It's fascinating reading in most places, but there are a few spots where it's difficult to pick back up once put down. The autobiography only covers up to 1757, but details numerous events in Franklin's formative years that I was unfamiliar with -- the founding of the Junto, his liaisons with "low women" from whom he was lucky enough not to catch a "distemper", adventures in England, on boats, and running away from home. The other writings range from politics and religion to science to personal letters. Franklin was a complex individual, and some of the revelations of his personal foibles near the end of the book lend just a touch of melancholy to the whole book. To complete the picture, I hope to read _The First American_ or another biography sometime soon. Recommended.
• David Brin, Brightness Reef
  This isn't a standalone 600 page novel, it's the first third of a 2,000 page novel. As you'd expect from a story like that, it's complex, there are a fairly large number of characters, and yes, it drags just a bit in places. Brin's usual inventiveness is present, from species, to social systems, to plot twists. Even his characters themselves are inevitably bright and resourceful. In this novel, six species have deliberately stranded themselves on a world that's supposed to be fallow, all fleeing something. We're not completely sure *what* they're fleeing at the end of this first installment, but the peace has been disrupted by the arrival of someone who wants something from them -- or their planet. For the first part of the book, I had trouble keeping all of the aliens straight, and didn't develop a strong mental picture of what they look like, which was a little frustrating. Like all Brin, recommended, but not his best.
• Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell (unabridged audio)
  Mostly covers the advance of theory in the last twenty years or so, talking about inflation and string theory and M theory and branes. As you'd expect with Hawking, it's clear but very concise. Doing it as audio suffers a bit; some of the drawings are probably important, and in a few places what seem to be sidebars get linearized into the reading with no obvious breakpoints. Recommended, but probably better in print.
• Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
  I bought this book and read it because the head of Sophia's preschool recommended it. I figured it would be a Rifkin-style foaming-at-the-mouth Luddite diatribe with no basis in reality, and I wanted to be able to tell him *why*. I couldn't have been more wrong. This book actually seems to be a generalized liberal rant, using fast food as a takeoff point for concerns about the corporatization of America, the homogenization of the entire planet, the loss of cropland and grazing lands to minimalls and suburbs, the disempowerment of ranchers and farmers in the face of the agriconglomerates and the buying power of McDonald's, and more. Much of it reads to me as aggressive but mostly legit business tactics through the 1950s and 70s; it's the end result that's the problem, more than how we got here. Now, of course, the major corporations are politically very astute and oppose increases in the minimum wage and safer workplace rules. Everyone knows that obesity is a major epidemic in the U.S.; there are few facts here that weren't available elsewhere, but this book is pretty well written and brings it all together. The Sinclair-like muckraking in the meatpacking industry is riveting, but not particularly revelatory, stuff. I have only a few quibbles with the book. Schlosser characterizes jobs in meatpacking plants as desirable, highly-paid union jobs from the end of the Depression through the union-busting and increase in migrant workers brought in by the big packers in the 60s and 70s. While I don't doubt that things improved after Teddy Roosevelt read Sinclair's _The Jungle_ and declined under the laissez-faire Reagan administration, meatpacking has undoubtedly always been messy, dangerous, exhausting work. Schlosser, especially in the epilog and afterword, describes what we can do about it. He actually seems not to be a cow-hugging vegan, but to want a healthy, healthful, accountable restaurant industry; he's eminently rational. Highly recommended reading.
• Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dillema (revised 2000)
  Perhaps the most important business book of the mid-90s, especially if you're in the disk drive industry. Says that good companies almost always manage to succeed with the introduction of new _sustaining_ technologies, no matter how difficult, and no matter if they are the first to introduce them. _Disruptive_ technologies, on the other hand, the incumbents almost always fail to handle properly, because their processes and values are very effective at killing projects that promise low margins in undeveloped, undefined markets. While this risks being tautological, he actually backs it up quite well. Disruptive technologies initially don't directly threaten the existing customer base, but if both sustaining and disruptive technologies are improving faster than customer demands, they may later. Disruptive technologies often perform worse than sustaining ones, and need small markets with growth to survive before they threaten existing ones. His main example is the disk drive industry (he refers to disk drive companies as the fruit flies of business); other ones are excavators and retailers (variety stores getting killed by discounters such as K-mart). In disks, form factor is the disruptive technology; smaller and more expensive per MB, with worse margins, but eventually they are what customers need. None of the 14" drive makers succeeded in 8", none of the 8" in 5.25", and so on. Important material on how customers' buying criteria can change over time. Doesn't, but probably could, use fast food killing off drive-ins. Final example is the electric car industry. Describes how to identify and handle disruptive technologies if you're a manager. Not sure how extensive the revision is, but there are a few quite topical notes from 2000, such as DaimlerChrysler. Required reading for almost everyone in the high tech business, and maybe ought to be for researchers, too.
• Gideon Kunda, Engineering Culture
  The author spent a year studying DEC in the early 1980s. This is his take on how DEC attempted to create a culture of dedication to the company, with individuals taking responsibility for their actions and careers, with internal job rotation, etc. I was given this book as part of a Nokia training course. I suspect the people who selected it didn't realize that Kunda is a left-wing Zionist highly skeptical of such corporate tactics, and very interested in the empowerment and disenchantment of people in such environments. Talks about how people have internalized a certain dichotomy, simultaneously buying into and expressing skepticism of the company. Interesting reading, but not really earthshaking; probably more enlightening but less compelling if you've never worked in a large high-tech company.
• Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William J. Broad, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (abridged audio)
  A quick history of biological weapons written by folks from the New York Times. Mostly starts post-WWII, with the U.S. and Soviet efforts during the Cold War. Has lots of detail on who said what to whom at various meetings and once-secret U.S. installations and efforts. I suppose those are footnoted in the print version, but they aren't in the audio. Detailed account of America's concerns about bioweapons during the Gulf War, how thoroughly unprepared we were, and the on-again/off-again vaccination of our troops (we didn't have enough anthrax vaccine, only miniscule amounts of botulism vaccine, and at any rate resistance takes months to develop). Follows U.N. attempts to monitor Iraq after the war, and U.S. efforts to understand and curtail Russian efforts after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the rather disturbing revelations by Soviet and Iraqi defectors. Turns out Iraq and the USSR both had literally tons of this stuff; we were never anywhere close to ready for an attack with it. The question is, now what? We're still underprepared for terrorist attacks on our soil, but it's not clear that a democracy ever can be. Generally well written, I'd love to follow some of the source material on this. Predates 9/11 and the following anthrax attacks, but up to date through the end of the Clinton administration. Recommended.
• Richard Hack, Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters (abridged audio)
  This is a rubbernecker's biography of the train wreck that was Howard Hughes' life, too fascinating to look away but you hate yourself for looking. The audio version is an appallingly bad abridgement; at less than seven hours it's probably about half the book, and it really shows. Women who have apparently left his life mysteriously reappear, his yacht appears unintroduced, his attempt to buy ABC gets one inconclusive mention from sometime in the middle of the deal, a move to the Bahamas is sprung on the unsuspecting listener, the Hercules flies then vanishes from consideration, and on and on. It's a real hack (sorry) job. The biography itself occasionally uses bad similes, but the prose is mostly fine. I learned a huge amount about an intriguing and important 20th century figure. I didn't know he was such a notorious womanizer and *total* eccentric. It's pretty clear that for most of his adult life he had some serious mental problems that needed treatment, but probably not institutionalization; he still handled his businesses with clarity and only occasional fits of irrationality, driven by a rather skewed world view. The biggest problem with the book is that it focuses on minutiae, giving you the street addresses he lived at, the exact dates and even officiating priests of the marriages of ex-girlfriends, the number of pills he took and bottles of rubbing alcohol he used, but not a good view of the big picture. I didn't particularly need details of his bodily functions, down to his bowel movements. Even on the business side, it mostly focuses on his tribulations; listening to it, there are mentions of his wealth as it rises but no understanding of why. Almost every time business is mentioned, it's some sort of failure. I'm glad I listened to it, but disrecommend it in abridged audio and have trouble recommending it in print.
• David Brin, Infinity's Shore and Heaven's Reach
  Wow! This is the last two-thirds of the novel that begins with _Brightness Reef_. I said it began slowly, but it really picks up in these two volumes. The climax starts just a couple of hundred pages into the third book, and continues for 300 pages. It's almost, but not quite, into stay-up-till-all-hours-finishing-it range. Brin never seems to run out of fascinating ideas. He picks up themes from bad SF movies of the Seventies and good SF from all eras, expands on them, and puts his own, mature twist on things. This is slam-bang space opera at a *truly* breathtaking scale, but with heavy doses of religion, racial tolerance and intolerance, and environmentalism thrown in. Apparently didn't even make the final ballot for the SFWA's Nebula award, but in my opinion it's bordering on must-read for hard SF lovers.
• Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense
  Written after Sokal's hoax on the postmodernist journal _Social Text_, this book goes into detail on why Sokal was so outraged that he wanted to pull the hoax. Postmodernist philosophers are quoted left and right (well, mostly left) abusing science, often quite badly, sometimes hilariously. I spent more time in this book (in the quoted texts of the philosophers) saying, "Huh?" than I have in a long time. I doubt very much that advances in topology tell us anything about schizophrenia; I'm certain the philosopher involved couldn't tell me _why_ it mattered. Recommended, if you're interested in the collision between philosophy and science, but not a must-read.
• The Sokal Hoax
  A collection of source materials -- newspaper articles, etc. on the hoax. Fun, but gets repetitive pretty quick. I didn't read the whole thing, but it's interesting seeing the different spin put on it by different newsmedia. Includes the response from _Social Text_'s editorial board.
• Kore dake dekireba tsume-go shodan
  Okay, so a lot of my free time in the past six weeks or so went into studying life and death problems. This is a good set. I managed to reach shodan on some sections, and 3k on others; I clearly need more work on corner to-kill problems, but I did okay on the side and on to-live problems.
• Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
  (Has it really been that long since I finished off a book??? Where has the summer gone?) This is a hilarious, hard-to-put-down memoir of a mid-level New York chef, starting from his days as a bus boy through executive chef at several places. The individual chapters give an unflinching look into parts of everyday life in a major kitchen -- the chaos, drugs, and sex (lots of all three, apparently). Bourdain's love of food and cooking come through pretty clearly. If, after reading this, you still want to be a chef, you're pretty hard-core. Continuity between chapters is a little thin. Not for the squeamish or anyone who dislikes four-letter words, but recommended.
• Hikaru no Go, v.1 & 2
  The Japanese manga story of Hikaru, a boy who hangs out with the ghost of a go player, and learns to play himself. This series is an outright phenomenon in Japan. It takes Mayumi ten minutes to get through one volume, but it takes me a few hours, so I'm including it.
• John R. Vacca, i-Mode Crash Course
  This just might be the worst technical book I own. There is some useful material in it, but it is so poorly written that it's hard to tell. I'm not even convinced that the author is a native English speaker, and I AM convinced that NO ONE at McGraw-Hill actually READ the text before they published it. There are non-sentences, some sentences that are impossible to understand even after re-reading, non-sequitirs, and more typos than I have seen in any other book. The text repeatedly says things like, "At present (as of this writing)", without telling you when that is -- and the data given will be at odds with data just a few pages away, which begins with the same disclaimer. The text is also highly repetitive -- how many times do I have to be told that cHTML is just like HTML? The material on WAP is internally inconsistent, and, from what I can tell, outright wrong in places. Many of the pictures are low-resolution images apparently swiped straight from JPEGs on web pages. McGraw-Hill couldn't afford to have someone redraw a pie chart so that the fonts are legible? Avoid this book! There must be a better one on the topic.
• James B. Murray, Jr., Wireless Nation
  If you like current business history, you'll like this, even if you're not in the wireless industry (I am). It is generally a well-written book by a minor player during much of the explosion. I can't vouch independently for the accuracy of his history, but Murray had access to first hand accounts for many of the events. He does misspell Marina del Rey and have some L.A. geography wrong, and that minor continent called Europe doesn't even appear until about p. 250, while Asia gets even shorter shrift. Not a technical book, it's sometimes difficult to map to what I know about the technology. These are mostly minor flaws; the history of McCaw Cellular, Nextel's stealth move into the market, the lotteries and auctions that enriched players large and small, and the bungling at giants like AT&T and Western Union make for compelling reading. Murray, btw, clearly has spectrum envy toward television broadcasters. It's hard to put down. Recommended.
• Theodore Rex (abridged audio)
  This is a very enjoyable biography, picking up when TR becomes president, and ending when his term ends. The reading was outstanding, too. I want to go read both the prior one and the hopefully-soon-to-come third book.
• Hikaru no Go, v. 1-16
  Man, I'm really hooked on this stuff. It's compelling storytelling, totally leaving aside the go.
• Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence (unabridged audio)
  I like Mayle's observations of life in France. He and his wife bought a house in Provence and fixed it up, and the stories of the trials and tribulations of dealing with local craftsmen in the south of France are funny, and warmly told. Mayle has a good eye for the human experience, and a nice touch with a phrase. The reading is mostly good, though the phrasing is occasionally annoying. Recommended.
• Bix, Hirohito
  It took me a couple of tries to really getting going on this massive tome, but once I got past Hirohito's childhood, this became riveting, covering the imperialism of Japan and carefully documenting (with many footnotes and original sources) Hirohito's direct role in the atrocities perpetrated in the emperor's name. While I have little doubt that this is true, I read it more as an indictment of the Meiji governmental structure, with a cabinet and military outside the oversight of elected officials, and the out-of-control military and inter-service rivalry, than I do as an indictment of Hirohito the man. It's also important to place this in context; I recommend reading a basic Japanese history as well as having something of an understanding of the waning days of imperialist fervor in Britain, the U.S., Spain, and other European powers before tackling this volume. Highly recommended.
• Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
  The central premise of how conservatives are ruining our country and keeping us at odds with the rest of the planet is undermined by a rather whiny, bitter tone. It's more of an essay than a book. The best feature is a list of 200 times the U.S. has used military force since the end of WWII, though the list is clearly padded by Iraq and Kosovo being listed multiple times.
• Michael Moore, Stupid White Men
  Funnier, less bitter, wider-ranging, and more coherent than Vidal's Pereptual War, but hits some of the same points. This book describes how W's theft of the presidential election actually began long before Election Day, and continues with standard anti-corporate rants. My favorite part is "Kill Whitey", describing how Moore has been wronged repeatedly by white men, but never by a black one. Perhaps the most important part is the description of how Clinton really failed liberals; at least W _tells_ us he's going to hose us. Don't expect an unbiased treatise, but highly recommended.
• Hikaru no Go, v. 17-19
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (abridged audio)
  Somewhere is the claim that T.R. is the most _interesting_ man ever to be president of the United States, and here is the documentary evidence to back that up. I learned a huge amount about this fascinating character, including much about his literary career that I was unaware of. While, as with Hirohito, it's important to understand the atmosphere of imperialism that colored international relations in this era, Roosevelt's virile, jingoistic bloodlust (for hunting game as well as territorial expansion) and complete certainty that the United States was the greatest, and nearly perfect, country (complete with condescending, paternalistic attitude toward the native Americans, who, in his opinion, were savages wasting the lands they held) still come across as a little shocking. The details of the ups and downs of his political and financial dealings are edge-of-your-seat stuff, even more than his charge up San Juan Hill, even though we know how it comes out. Well written and very well read; I only wish it were unabridged. I am DEE-lighted to highly recommend this book.
• Making of Modern Japan
  

• Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need
  Pretty funny, characteristic Barry stuff.
• Schrag, Paradise Lost
  This book is a rant, by a former editor of the Sacramento Bee. Quite liberal, but he doesn't pull any punches with conformist liberal thinking, either. Mostly lays the blame for the sorry state of California politics and the education system at the feet of the ballot initiative process. The legislature actually has almost no freedom of movement on budget issues, and with the powerful teacher's lobby keeping their salaries up, school infrastructure has gone to pot, with literally billions of dollars in maintenance deferred. Lots of facts and footnotes, but still reads like a rant rather than a coherent argument, to me. I'm sure opponents of his viewpoint could marshall an equally impressive array of factoids. Ted would love this.
• Go Seigen, A Way of Play for the 21st Century
  Go Seigen is arguably the best go player of the 20th century. At first, I was convinced this book is way over my head. However, as I got into it deeper, I began to see the value. It's a collected series of lectures on the opening, and discusses lots of recent advances and trends. I thought he was talking about subtle differences that would matter only to pros, but I later realized that the analysis is quite revealing even to relatively weak players like me.
• Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost (unabridged audio)
  A moving tale about the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka. A Sri Lankan forensic doctor who moved to the U.K. & the U.S. comes back as a human rights observer, and gets caught in a tangled political web where truth is a relative thing. Beautifully written and well read.
• Rowling, Quidditch Through the Ages; and, Magical Beasts and Where to Find Them
  These two little books are two of Harry Potter's favorite books. Light and amusing, nothing earth-shattering. This is some of the stuff she no doubt had in the back of her head while writing the HP books. The nice thing about these two is that the profits are going to Comic Relief U.K. Beasts could no doubt have been much longer. The explanation of the difference between beasts and beings is good, but I'm curious how animated objects such as Dumbledore's hat fit in. Not all of the explanations of magical beasts tell you what particular magic they have, as opposed to merely being hidden from Muggles.
• Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (audio, read by the author)
  A nice set of pieces by a writer for the New Yorker who moved with his wife and infant son to Paris in 1995 and stayed for five years. This is what we hope our life will be like someday, since we're thinking about spending a year in Paris. Well read by the author. "Unabridged selections", which sounds like an oxymoron, but I presume means they left some entire essays/chapters out.
• Lem, The Futurological Congress
  This book is marvelous. This is the first Lem I've read, and if it's all like this, that's a major oversight on my part. Serious socio-political satire couched as outrageously funny science fiction. Our entire society becomes one that manipulates both personal traits and outright reality through the use of psycho-active chemicals. The future language and the names of drugs are all quite clever. The translation from the Polish is absolutely outstanding; the level of artistry and command of language of the translator is breathtaking. This is what I wish Phillip K. Dick was. Basic premise is good, characters are more believable than Dick's, dialog is worlds better. Not sure when this was translated, but I'll bet it influenced a lot of people, including Terry Gilliam (Brazil).
• Sam Clemens (Mark Twain), The Diaries of Adam and Eve (audio)
  An excellent audio reading/adaptation of Twain's excellent work. Walter Cronkite and Mandy Patinkin. More social satire, and also some valid thinking about how Adam and Eve would have had absolutely no social context. God told them not to eat from the tree, but, living in paradise, they could have no real conception of what sort of bad things could happen to them. Death would have been a completely foreign concept, for example.
• Kerouac, On The Road (unabridged audio)
  "Can you dig this crazy novel, man?"
  Jack Kerouac's novel is justly famous. Marvelous insight into the just-barely-post-WWII, don't-really-care-about-anything Beat Generation. Supposedly autobiographical, I wonder how much is real. The main characters split and rejoin repeatedly while wandering about the country, mostly in New York, Denver, and San Francisco. They don't care about money or the law, and only a little about each other. Always looking for a new experience, whether it's sex, drugs, bebop, or just meeting other characters on the road, these guys were the hippies before rock and roll and Vietnam. The dialog is witty and believable, and I like Kerouac's turn of a prose phrase, too. Everyone will see echoes of themselves, or at least their secret desires, and their less inhibited friends from high school here. Matt Dillon does the reading. His character voices fit the characters quite well; it's too bad his phrasing and breathing on prose are bad enough to be distracting.
• Pico Iyer, Global Soul
  I love Pico Iyer's stuff. This book goes a little deeper, a little more personal than most of his others into the feelings, the thoughts, indeed, the soul, of those who wander the planet voluntarily, in something like its upper classes. Having lived abroad (and, perhaps as relevant, having moved from rural West Virginia to L.A. and the Bay Area), I fit into the category of people he's discussing. Your answer to as simple a question as, "Where are you from?" varies depending on where you are and who is asking. The book is ultimately a thoughtful, somewhat melancholy look at how our cultures are merging and those who are doing the merging are forced to wander, not aimlessly but unsatisfied, finding it difficult to belong anywhere. As with all of Iyer's books, I can't recommend this highly enough.
• Sebastio Salgado, Migrations
  The constrast between the photos and essay in this book and the text of _Global Soul_ could not be more stark. Salgado is a photographer who documents people on the move, some voluntarily, some not, all under harsher conditions than Iyer's. Many, many photos of the tragedies in Rwanda and Kosovo, the Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong and elsewhere, north Africans at Gibraltar, Latin Americans on the move throughout North and South America. I saw the exhibit this book is based on in Paris in 2000; the power of his large, black and white photos is hard to describe.
• Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: technophilia and its discontents
  A quick read written with an enjoyable style, Ullman is a software consultant living in a loft in San Francisco. Gives good expression to the joys of programming, as well as the concerns about the social effects of the work we do, mostly in the context of a project to help AIDS providers with a better data system. She details the fears of becoming obsolete that I think all thoughtful programmers beyond a certain age face. A touch melancholy, too, or is it just me these days?
• Charles Peters, How Washington _Really_ Works, 4th ed, 1993
  An instructive book with chapters on the media, lobbyists, Congress, the president, the military, and the bureaucracy. Mostly tells you what thoughtful folks already know -- Congress runs on a series of favors everyone does for each other, without an explicit quid pro quo; in Washington, almost everything is imaginary -- really fixing things would require cutting agencies, which would annoy constituents, so it isn't done; lots more. Peters came from West Virginia to join the Kennedy administration, and is now editor of the Washington Monthly, so he knows whereof he speaks on this. With the most recent edition 1993, he was guardedly optimistic about the Clinton administration, but didn't expect much; I suppose he was neither surprised nor disappointed. A readable, worthwhile liberal rant. Recommended.
• Shane Crotty, Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore's Life in Science
  A good, not great, biography of one of the most important biologists of the second half of the twentieth century (and the first half of the twenty-first?). Keeps the science at an unintimidating level, but written interestingly and clearly. Nowhere near as moving and well written as Nasar's _A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbed Nash, Jr._, _Ahead_ reads somewhat like a graduate thesis in popular science history writing, which I kind of suspect it actually is. Worthwhile info on how science really revolves around people, and how funding works and problems to attack get chosen. If _The Baltimore Case_ is too heavy for you, the chapters in _Ahead_ on Thereza Imanishi-Kari's fraud case are quick, easy reading.
• The Best American Short Stories of the Year 2000 (unabridged audio)
  Many of these are quite good, and the readings are mostly good. This is far more accessible than the anthology of the best of the 20th century, and the readings are better, too. I think not a single story was written by an author with whom I was previously familiar.
• The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson
  It took me three tries to get through this. I wound up skipping Dumas Malone's introductory essay, then things got much better. It doesn't tell you anything about the development or conditions of the autobiography itself, anyway; it's just an essay about TJ's importance. The autobiography is quite idiosyncratic; while it is chronological, and written when Jefferson was 77, it's quite incomplete. He seems to have concentrated only on things he thinks were mistold or untold elsewhere. It also ends rather abruptly after his return from Paris, where he was witness to the beginning of the French Revolution. There is literally no mention of the minor fact that he was elected president. Overall, a worthwhile read, but I need to find a biography to learn more...on to Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and other writings...
• Peter Mayle, French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew (unabridged audio, read by Simon Jones)
  If you're into food, this is a diverting collection of essays by an Englishman who has fallen in love with food and wine -- French food and wine, in particular. He spends a year traipsing around the countryside attending festivals celebrating chickens and frog's legs, and a mass for black truffles. Enjoyable and often humorous, Jones' reading is good, with a marvelous baritone.
• David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (unabridged audio, read by the author, with additional live material)
  I read these last two in the right order. Sedaris is a writer and ex-performance artist from North Carolina who lives in New York for the first half of the book and France for the second. His essays definitely have a bit of an "edge" to them; he's not afraid to laugh at the misfortunes of people including himself and his family. I could easily see myself in part of his father's role (coincidentally, a jazz-loving computer engineer) -- "Sit down and listen to this! This is Lionel Hampton! This album will change your life!" but, I pray, not the whole package. At first I was a bit put off by Sedaris' voice, but it suits his material perfectly. Much of this is riotously, tearfully, car-wreckingly funny, but not all of it's for the fastidious. His description of life in his French class in Paris will bring howls of laughter in recognition to anyone who has learned a second language as an adult.
• Agatha Christie, The Spider's Web (audio reading of a novel of a play)
  I wasn't excited by this. Probably it's the play-novel-audio transcriptions, but the plot is also thin and the characters much less interesting than Christie's usual.
• Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (revised)
  This is one of the best popular science books I've ever read. I had trouble putting it down. It describes how we have finally learned to read the Maya script found on monuments, ceramics, and, tragically, the only four actual books remaining -- the Spanish burned thousands. This is a very human story, full of interesting personalities, false starts, professional jealousy, autocratic professors, Cold War politics, and more. And the script itself and the Mayan culture (only touched on here) are fascinating. Written by one of the participants. Read this book!
• David McCullough, John Adams abridged audio, read by Edward Herrmann
  This is an excellent biography, well-read, but either there's noticeable abridgment (despite the 9 CDs' length) or there are gaps in the text. I've heard that some people think it's too favorable toward Adams; I'm not enough of a historian to know. I learned a great deal about Adams, including his time in Paris and his friendship turned rivalry turned friendship with Jefferson. Recommended, even though it has a million copies in print and didn't get nominated for the National Book Critics' Award.
• David Alan Corbin, ed., The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Anthology
  This is a collection of source materials on the 1912-1921 struggle to unionize the coal mines of southern West Virginia (during which my own great-grandfather Hatfield was one of dozens murdered, the Army was sent to quell the protests, miners were bombed from the air by their own government, and the term "red neck" originated because the miners' army identified themselves with red bandanas around their necks). The book contains Congressional testimony of the wives of murdered men, a speech by Mother Jones (who, at over ninety years of age, was thrown in jail for inciting the miners to unionize), New York Times and The Nation articles from the period, things of that sort. Not a coherent story or complete picture by any means, this is a biased (pro-labor), probably somewhat scattershot collection. The best article title goes to "Private Ownership of Public Officials," about the system of coal mine operators paying the salaries of the sheriff and his deputies, who in return kept union organizers out of the county. I enjoyed this book, but have trouble recommending it. As a serious scholarly work, it's frustrating with its inconsistent approach to sources; the Congressional testimony isn't even dated, the roles of some of the testifiers and examiners aren't explained, and some of the articles which purport to have been published appear to have no attribution at all. If you're new to the topic (which EVERY American should know something about), Lon Savage's _Thunder in the Mountains_ is a better history, or, if you want the feel of the era and don't mind your history fictionalized, Denise Giardina's novel _Storming Heaven_ is outstanding, or, of course, there's the mostly factual film _Matewan_, by John Sayles, about the Matewan Massacre in which ten men were killed -- seven "detectives" working for the coal operators, the mayor of Matewan, and two miners. Should you happen on this book first, or need a refresher, the best place to start is the two essays by James M. Cain near the end of the book.
• Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo (abridged audio, read by the author)
  Pablo Escobar was the brutal king of the Colombian Medellin cocaine cartel. He started as a small-time criminal, but his ruthlessness, charm, and organizational capabilities combined with being in the right place at the right time to make him the seventh richest man in the world at one point. He controlled much of the regional government, gave a lot of money to the poor, and even got as far as congressman before his natural violent tendencies and pressure from the U.S. put him at odds with the Colombian government in the late 1980s. Ultimately, Pablo was on the run and attempted to car-bomb, assassinate, bribe, and intimidate the government into leaving him alone. A group, perhaps allied with the Colombian government and using U.S. intelligence, responded by killing his family and associates. He managed to stay on the run for years, and the death toll reached horrifyingly into the thousands before he was tracked down and killed. This is PoliSci 101 material about the rather ambiguous roles people and governments (including police) can be forced into, what tactics are appropriate for a democratic government to employ, the Faustian bargains sometimes entered into, and the extent to which the U.S.'s role interfering in other countries becomes muddy (regardless of your opinion of the "war on drugs"). This came recommended by Bobo as the U.S. hunt for Osama bin Laden began, and it's dead-on relevant. The topic material is rivetting, and the investigative journalism was obviously a lot of work, but the writing is merely good, not great. The last CD contains some sort of video that I haven't watched yet. Recommended, though I wish they had hired a better reader than the author.
• Robert Park, Voodoo Science
  I love books like this, that tell me how much smarter I am than the average American. The question is, how do you get the people who _need_ to read books like this to read them? I'm not talking about the hopeless ones who've already fallen for some huckster, but the ones who ought to be teaching ordinary folks how to avoid some of these pitfalls -- especially teachers. Park, who spent many years splitting his time between the physics faculty of U. Maryland and the Washington office of the American Physical Society, takes on some of the obvious, such as perpetual motion machines and quantum healing, and shows how there's a spectrum that runs from there through cold fusion to the International Space Station, SDI/Star Wars (Parks is rough on Teller), and global warming, from outright shysters to real scientists who become too caught up in their own ideas. Ultimately a love letter to the scientific method, he thinks that scientists are flawed but that science will ultimately triumph. Highly recommended.
• Ursula K. LeGuin, Tehanu
  This follows the earlier Earthsea Trilogy, and uses the same main characters -- Ged, Ogion, and Tenar, many years later. I love the original series, though it's been years since I read them. This one seems to me to fit well; I like the thoughtful, almost wistful quality they all have. This one is somewhat more complex than the others, though I always found the label of "juvenile" to be derogatory and misstate the depths of the earlier works. Only the linear plot and short length marked them as accessible for younger readers; the complexity of the world and characters hold up fine as the years pass. Tehanu is a little different, with much of the action taking place essentially off stage. It's natural to want to see more of it, but ultimately I like the way Le Guin handles it. Tehanu was hard for me to put down. I did reread A Wizard a few years ago, but it's been too long for the others; I should have reread them before beginning this one. Now I have to go find The Other Wind, and Tales From Earthsea. Recommended.
• John W. Dean, The Rehnquist Choice (abridged audio)
  This describes what might be called a "pivotal anecdote" in history: how Rehnquist, who ultimately became one of the Supreme Court's most conservative chief justices, went from being dismissed by Nixon as a "clown" to being his last Supreme Court nominee. It details Nixon's manipulation of the court, forcing resignations, both before and after his election as president, but primarily concentrates on a few weeks in the fall of 1971 as the Nixon team looks first for ideologically correct and politically advantageous appointees (even considering a woman) before settling on Rehnquist. The missteps and somewhat random nature of the whole thing are revealing. Dean was White House Counsel during this period, and claims to have originated the idea of Rehnquist, but seems now to quite regret his role. I doubt he has become a liberal, but appears to have expected a more compassionate justice. Dean also thinks Rehnquist lied during both his 1971 confirmation to the court and his 1986 elevation to Chief Justice, about challenging black voters in Arizona in the 1950s and 60s and suggesting that Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal) be upheld. This audio version is a noticeably different experience from the book. In numerous places, Dean himself speaks in the first person about his experiences. Even more interesting, original audio tapes from Nixon's office are included! The audio quality on those is often low, so the words are sometimes repeated or interpreted by the book reader. Recommended.
• V. S. Naipaul, Guerillas
  "The masterpiece of the best novelist now writing," the New York Times says of the 2001 Nobelist's 1975 novel. If I didn't know it was an "important" book, I probably wouldn't have gotten all the way through it, and I think it's unlikely that in ten years it will stand strong in my mind as so many of my favorite novels do. It's set on a Carribean island where revolution is imminent, with English, South African, and island-native-Chinese-mix characters. It's ultimately a story about complex, unlikeable characters doing unspeakably awful things to each other. I suspect if read in one sitting (it's short) under the right circumstances, it could be a high-impact book, but I found it uninvolving.
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
  I've only read a small part of this collection of short stories, but I like her style. They seem to be mostly about Indians in the U.S., often first-generation immigrants in the Boston area. Sometimes moving stuff.

2000

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
• A Wizard of Earthsea
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• A Wrinkle in Time
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• The Greatest American Short Stories of the Century, v.1 & 2 (audio)
• Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
• King, Wizard and Glass (unabridged audio)
  The fourth book in King's Dark Tower/Gunslinger fantasy series, I think each novel's length is the sum of the all the previous ones (and takes that long to appear). In general, this series is very entertaining, if not Great Literature, and the world he has built is rich and interesting. I found the whole Blair the Train thing silly, but once we get into the gunslinger's story of his youth, it becomes captivating. The reader has a million voices, and brings just the right touch of melodrama to this potboiler. Unfortunately, my copy (bought used) is missing the last cassette :-(. I'll have to check the book out of the library and finish it.
• Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (unabridged audio)
• The New New Thing
  This book is about Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, and more. Shows some of the eccentricities of him, and the excesses of Silicon Valley's venture-capital-stock-option-driven society. This book could use a good editor. It would have made an excellent magazine article.
• Daniel Kevles, The Baltimore Case
  This book is about the incident in which Theresa Imanishi-Kari was accused of scientific fraud. It became known as the Baltimore case because one of her collaborators, David Baltimore, is a Nobel laureate, and stood by her, taking much of the heat. The biology is a little thick in places, especially early in the book, but this is a well-written, well-researched, well-documented cautionary tale about almost McCarthyist witchhunts. We like to think in science we're immune to such things, but this book describes well the ways in which scientists show their human failings. Highly recommended for anyone who cares about how science is done in the real world, politics, funding, personalities, and all.
• The Dollmaker
• It Can't Happen Here
• Caedmon's Poetry read by the poets (audio)
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle
  I love this book. This is the novel Joseph Heller would have written if he had grown up black in L.A. in the 1980s. It follows Gunnar Kaufman as he discovers that he's black and can play basketball and write poetry. It weaves together in funny, socially insightful, and unexpected ways such diverse elements as jazz, gang life, and samurai flicks. The characters are quite memorable, too. _Shuffle_ is not as surreal as _The Tetherballs of the Bougainvilles_, but it's out there. Recommended.
• Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (abridged audio)
  A funny, personal account of one man's attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail. He sometimes rants about the National Park Service, and sometimes drops into discussing topics such as the composition of the forest and the death of the American chestnut. Mostly, though, it's anecdotes of his walk. Read well by the author. Recommended, but I wish there was an unabridged audio version available.
• Blind Man's Bluff
  Coincidentally, I had already begun reading this when the Russian sub Kursk went down. It lent a sharp sense of poignancy to the stories of loss in the book, as well as giving me more sympathy with and respect for the crew of the Kursk. The book offers lots of stories, gradually building up a relatively complete picture, of the missions of the U.S. sub force during the Cold War. This was the front where the war often offered the possibility of turning hot, though neither side wanted to admit it. Even if only a fraction of the details of the book are right (and I suspect it's a large fraction), the crews took many risks and made many sacrifices for sometimes unknown military and intelligence benefits. Regardless of what you think of our government's approach to the Cold War, this will provide you with more ammo for your arguments. Recommended.
• Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (radio dramatization)
  I'm not that wild about the voices on this, but the power of the original story certainly comes through. Some of the voices are flat and unexpressive, including Frodo's, while Gandalf's is excessively melodramatic. The packaging is silly; nine CDs in separate jewelboxes in a wooden crate. Could have been done in half the volume.
• Sharyn McCrumb, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter
  McCrumb is a well-known mystery writer, with lots of awards, and writes also about Appalachia. In this case, they come together. This novel about murders in eastern Tennessee in 1992 is involving and the Appalachian culture is authentic. It's somewhat unpleasant reading in places as disturbing things happen, but this just shows the power of the writing. Most of the characters show the human foibles of far-too-much procrastination and major ennui. Only in a couple of places did I find people's behavior hard to believe, and that was mostly things like doctors being too blunt. Mentions the flooding on the Tug River, which flows through my hometown. Has a different kind of ending than most murder mysteries, but it works. Recommended.
• Dower, Embracing Defeat
  This is a major book. Detailing Japan under the American occupation, it is well-written, well-documented, and almost endlessly interesting if you're a fan of modern history. Chapters are arranged by topic, so at first it's a little disorienting in timeline. Early chapters describe the horrors of the war's destruction and the efforts to rebuild. The U.S. bombed 25% of the nation's wealth out of existence; Tokyo was FLAT. 6 million Japanese, including many civilian bureaucrats and families, had to be repatriated into a country whose infrastructure was already non-functional; malnutrition, prostitution, and the black market were epidemic. Later chapters detail the fascinating machinations that revolved around the American decision to retain the Emperor and not prosecute him for war crimes, the sudden decision by the Americans to write the new Japanese constitution (and do it in a week), censorship under the Occupation, and the war crimes trials. It's quite thought-provoking and enlightening, if you're familiar with modern Japanese culture, to see where many characteristics come from. I'm still ultimately puzzled as to why Japan didn't stay a two-bit, third-world country after the war; I suppose the timing of the Korean War and its big economic boost are a large part of it. It's clear by the end of the book where Dower's political sympathies lie, as he strongly criticizes the Americans' behavior in the last several chapters. I wish I had read Dower's book on the Pacific War first, though. Highly recommended.
• Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary
  Marshall, of course, was the U.S.'s first black Supreme Court justice, nominated in 1967 by LBJ. In the 1940s and 50s, Marshall was the chief lawyer at the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund. Naturally, most of his major early cases were related to race -- often literally lynch mob cases. Marshall would have been one of the century's major legal figures even if he hadn't made it to the Supreme Court, since he argued Brown v. Board of Education, the case which resulted in public schools being desegregated. I find it amazing to think that when I was born there hadn't been any African-American justices, and segregation was still only slowly being overcome. It's pretty easy to argue that we haven't made enough progress in the last thirty years, but it's also easy to lose perspective on how far we had to come in the last sixty years. The book is generally well researched, and heavily footnoted. It's the closest thing there is to an authorized biography, since the author did many hours of interviews during Marshall's last few years of life, by which time he had become reclusive. Certainly the topic is a powerhouse of one, but I can't help being just a tad disappointed in the book. It could have used a good editor; some of the characters and cases are a little hard to place, while others seem to be reintroduced in every chapter. It certainly feels like it was written in many sessions by a writer who primarily produces newspaper and magazine length articles, which is the case here. The author definitely admires Marshall, but doesn't pull punches on his flaws. He's clearly reaching for an integrated portrait of a complex man, but some of it just feels tawdry to me. I learned a lot about the politics of the middle third of the century, which made it worthwhile to me. I don't mean to be overly negative; this is a good book about a great topic. I just wanted it to be a great book about a great topic, that's all. Everyone should understand the importance of Thurgood Marshall, so this book is recommended, more for the subject matter than the writing.
• Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things
  Shermer shows a lot of sympathy for various types of credulous nuts, since he used to be one. For me, the preface to the paperback edition, foreword (by Stephen Jay Gould), introduction, and first couple of chapters are collectively a little long. The material on witch hunts, Holocaust deniers, and Ayn Rand are new to me (I'm just a shade young for the last one), and the creationist material is good. Shermer's stories about his own experiences with megavitamins, chanting, auras, and pyramids are good, and his debates with creationists and Holocaust deniers are told well. The actual material about what weird things people believe, and why they're (probably) wrong, is right up my alley, but I find some of his reasoning on why people actual believe these things to be bordering on the kind of soft reasoning that gets you into trouble in the first place. I suppose he's asked the right question, and that makes this different from, e.g., Randi's _Flim Flam_, but it's a tough question to answer. Personally, I'm curious as to what Shermer has against CSICOP that led him to create his magazine and society; he praises individuals like Randi and Kurtz, but never mentions CSICOP by name. Shermer apparently got his start in Pasadena as the local CSICOP chapter there was starting; I was involved and hung around a bit with Randi. I wasn't wild about the guy running the group; maybe Shermer ran afoul of him, too, and took a more positive approach? If things had gone slightly differently, I could have ended up hanging out with Shermer, which clearly would have been a very interesting fifteen years! The book is recommended.
• Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm (unabridged audio)
  This is a really good book. The author does an excellent job of weaving together history, known facts about the characters, and speculation about the fate of those who disappeared, without fictionalizing or being dry. The book concentrates on the fate of the Andrea Gail in November 1991's North Atlantic storm that produced 100-foot seas. However, it ranges much farther, including the dramatic tale of the rescue of a helicopter crew that went down at sea in the storm. I found the reading a little melodramatic in the first third of the book, but appropriate as the tension and drama rose. Recommended.
• Ruth Rendell, Harm Done (unabridged audio)
  This is the first Inspector Wexford mystery I've read. This one is full of the fetid side of humanity -- pedophilia, wife beating, child kidnapping, alcoholism, on and on. Unusually for a murder mystery, the first murder doesn't actually occur until two thirds of the way through the book. I really like the woman doing the reading. The book is good, but not really gripping, and perhaps a tad long (thirteen CDs). I don't feel the need to rush out and get more of her work, but it's an acceptable diversion.

1999

• Goertzel, Linus Pauling
• Tanizaki, Seven Japanese Tales
• Brin, The Transparent Society
• Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue
• Dick, The Man in the High Castle
• Bester, The Demolished Man
• Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
• Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
• Cold Mountain (unabridged audio)
• Into Thin Air (unabridged audio)
• Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography
• Feynman, The Meaning of It All
• Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Leyner, The Tetherballs of the Bougainvilles
• abridged taped dramatizations of:
  The Invisible Man
  The Time Machine
  The Lost World
  Journey to the Center of the Earth

1998

• Surviving the Killing Fields (audio)
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Good Earth (audio)

1995-1997

1994

• Yoshimoto Banana, Kitchen (in Japanese)
• Tears of Blood
• Giardina, The Unquiet Earth
• Shatner, Star Trek Memories

1993

• Dave Barry Does Japan
• Genius
• Great Mambo Chicken
• Nam
• The Scarlet Letter
• The Jungle

1992

• King, The Stand
• Ten Tales of Tama (read in English; the book is bilingual)
• Bradbury, The October Country
• Jordan Rules
• Kokoro
• Japanese Miscellany
• Joy of Sumo
• Heller, Picture This
• A Diet to Die For
• Bozulich, The Second Book of Go
• Murder at the Tokyo American Club
• The Persistence of Vision
• JapanThink/AmeriThink
• The Mosquito Coast
• Hunting Ground
• Cross of Fire
• Mona Lisa Overdrive
• Burning Chrome
• Lieberman's Folly
• Never Look Back
• A Princess of Mars
• At the Mountains of Madness
• A Farewell to Arms
• A History of Japan
• 47 Ronin
• The Last Unicorn
• Attack and Defense (go)
• Elric of Melnibone
• The Book of Ptath
• Borrowed Time
• Last and First Men
• Elementary Go Problems v.2
• The Antipope
• Joy of Sumo
• Bluegate Fields
• Loose Balls
• My Life

Bookstores

• Powell's in Portland.
• Sadly, I believe Midnight Express is now defunct.
• Opamp Technical Books in Hollywood.
• Kinokuniya has branches in L.A., San Francisco, and many other places besides their base in Japan. Many of these have good selections of English-language books on Asia.
• Joseph Beth Booksellers in Lexington, KY.
• Green Apple Books in San Francisco.
• Bookshop Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz.
• The original A Change of Hobbit in Santa Monica is long gone.
• Tuttle Publishing has a bookstore in Tokyo; haven't been there in ages.
• Pilgrim Books in Kathmandu.
• Asia Books in Bangkok.
• Of course, everyone shops at Amazon.com.