Books Read, September 2010
Oct. 6th, 2010 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashnistrikeThis was a low reading month, a phenomenon explained by several false starts and 114 papers graded. I'm even more embarrassed when I confess that half the list were audiobooks listened to on the way to and from work. (ETA: I don't know why the cut tags are doing that, and it's late. Assume I only read the Winchester once, and we'll all be happy.)
Marked, by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. This book does everything wrong. The main character is a Mary Sue: she gets all the best vampire powers that No One Has Ever Had Before, everyone loves her and tells her she's special except for the Nasty Girl at School whose position she usurps, and she is specially chosen by the vampire goddess. The worldbuilding is nonexistent: for all of human history some people have turned into infertile vampires at puberty and about a tenth of them haven't survived the process, but Shania Twain exists. The mainstream human religion is fundamentalist Christianity with the serial numbers filed off, and the vampire religion is the flakier sort of modern Wicca without the serial numbers filed off. No trope goes unused or deconstructed. I could not put it down, and want to read the next one.
S points out that the Mary Sue actually has a good voice, and the writing is well done on a sentence and paragraph level. Nevertheless, I think I may have encountered my first genuine guilty pleasure. I here confess my sin.
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. I loved this. It's written with the vocabulary you'd expect from someone writing about the OED, and I often had to wait a minute or so after parking for him to get to the end of a sentence. This is a good thing. The book also has a wonderful sense of deep time. The first edition of the OED took 71 years to complete, and work on the second started immediately. I find this intensely reassuring.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden says that the OED is no one's dictionary of first resort. If you, like me, put the lie to this, you should read The Meaning of Everything. If you've ever looked something up in a dictionary for fun, or gotten distracted by the word next to the one you were actually after, I suspect you'd also enjoy it. It's a tribute to the joy of language as a treasure that deserves proper display.
A Primate's Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky. What it says on the cover. The author spent much time living with a tribe of baboons in Kenya, studying the biology of stress among social primates. He talks about baboons like they were people, and people like an interesting group of primates to be observed by the careful researcher. He tells funny stories, about half of which leave you suspecting that he's probably a bit of an asshole in person, and laughing anyway. The book gets more somber towards the end, so if (as I was) you're reading it to get out of a bad mood, it's probably worth waiting on the last couple of chapters until your good mood is more stable.
Dinosaur in a Haystack, by Steven J. Gould. Abridged, I think, which turns out to be a major risk of audiobooks. The essays that were included were, for the most part, good ones. There's one in which Gould complains about stupid misinterpretations of Darwinism, in which he makes a stupid misinterpretation of Darwinism--he was at pains to insist that natural selection favors benefit to individual organisms, not species, while I quietly started to replace "individual organism" with "gene" in every sentence. However, there were excellent discussions of publication bias, the history of female astronomers, and the effect of Jurassic Park on public conceptions of dinosaurs.
Other Media Consumed:
Being Human (Season 1). I spent the first couple of episodes completely distracted by my annoyance with the female lead. Halfway through the season (that's 3 episodes), the reason for her stereotypical weak-woman behavior is revealed, she gets over it, and the series gets awesome. Highly recommended, but takes some patience.
Farscape (Season 2, episodes 1-5). Some really excellent episodes, some complete duds. This is now firmly situated between the dolphin and the shark; I'm waiting for a return to the consistent characterization and plotting that we saw at the end of Season 1.
Cry Cry Cry (Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplansky, and Richard Shindell). Covers of recent folk music, with a definite country/blues feel to much of it. I love several of these, particularly "Fall on Me" (originally REM, which they count as folk), but should probably take the album in small doses. Lots of blues.
Total Books: 4
Recent Publication: 0
Rereads: 0
Recommended by Jo ratio: 1/4
New Music: 1 album
New Media Produced: I mentioned about the 114 papers? A little editing here and there on stories in progress, but little else.
Marked, by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. This book does everything wrong. The main character is a Mary Sue: she gets all the best vampire powers that No One Has Ever Had Before, everyone loves her and tells her she's special except for the Nasty Girl at School whose position she usurps, and she is specially chosen by the vampire goddess. The worldbuilding is nonexistent: for all of human history some people have turned into infertile vampires at puberty and about a tenth of them haven't survived the process, but Shania Twain exists. The mainstream human religion is fundamentalist Christianity with the serial numbers filed off, and the vampire religion is the flakier sort of modern Wicca without the serial numbers filed off. No trope goes unused or deconstructed. I could not put it down, and want to read the next one.
S points out that the Mary Sue actually has a good voice, and the writing is well done on a sentence and paragraph level. Nevertheless, I think I may have encountered my first genuine guilty pleasure. I here confess my sin.
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. I loved this. It's written with the vocabulary you'd expect from someone writing about the OED, and I often had to wait a minute or so after parking for him to get to the end of a sentence. This is a good thing. The book also has a wonderful sense of deep time. The first edition of the OED took 71 years to complete, and work on the second started immediately. I find this intensely reassuring.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden says that the OED is no one's dictionary of first resort. If you, like me, put the lie to this, you should read The Meaning of Everything. If you've ever looked something up in a dictionary for fun, or gotten distracted by the word next to the one you were actually after, I suspect you'd also enjoy it. It's a tribute to the joy of language as a treasure that deserves proper display.
A Primate's Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky. What it says on the cover. The author spent much time living with a tribe of baboons in Kenya, studying the biology of stress among social primates. He talks about baboons like they were people, and people like an interesting group of primates to be observed by the careful researcher. He tells funny stories, about half of which leave you suspecting that he's probably a bit of an asshole in person, and laughing anyway. The book gets more somber towards the end, so if (as I was) you're reading it to get out of a bad mood, it's probably worth waiting on the last couple of chapters until your good mood is more stable.
Dinosaur in a Haystack, by Steven J. Gould. Abridged, I think, which turns out to be a major risk of audiobooks. The essays that were included were, for the most part, good ones. There's one in which Gould complains about stupid misinterpretations of Darwinism, in which he makes a stupid misinterpretation of Darwinism--he was at pains to insist that natural selection favors benefit to individual organisms, not species, while I quietly started to replace "individual organism" with "gene" in every sentence. However, there were excellent discussions of publication bias, the history of female astronomers, and the effect of Jurassic Park on public conceptions of dinosaurs.
Other Media Consumed:
Being Human (Season 1). I spent the first couple of episodes completely distracted by my annoyance with the female lead. Halfway through the season (that's 3 episodes), the reason for her stereotypical weak-woman behavior is revealed, she gets over it, and the series gets awesome. Highly recommended, but takes some patience.
Farscape (Season 2, episodes 1-5). Some really excellent episodes, some complete duds. This is now firmly situated between the dolphin and the shark; I'm waiting for a return to the consistent characterization and plotting that we saw at the end of Season 1.
Cry Cry Cry (Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplansky, and Richard Shindell). Covers of recent folk music, with a definite country/blues feel to much of it. I love several of these, particularly "Fall on Me" (originally REM, which they count as folk), but should probably take the album in small doses. Lots of blues.
Total Books: 4
Recent Publication: 0
Rereads: 0
Recommended by Jo ratio: 1/4
New Music: 1 album
New Media Produced: I mentioned about the 114 papers? A little editing here and there on stories in progress, but little else.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-07 02:16 pm (UTC)They seriously meant it with the title. (Grin.) Love the album, though!
no subject
Date: 2010-10-07 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-07 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-07 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-07 05:53 pm (UTC)I suspect a lot of people don't get past that point, which is a pity, because for once a show was actually Going Somewhere With That, and viewed as an overall arc it completely works. As for me, Idunno, maybe it's the writer in me, but I twigged to what was going on for her character the very first time I saw the other party to it, so maybe I was willing to cut the writers a bit more slack to see if they were really going to follow up on it. It will be interesting to see what you think of season two -- it's kind of uneven, but there are several moments of complete bonkers Awesome... (including, unfortunately, one that didn't even make it to the BBCA version which I suspect is a US rights issue and thus probably not on the DVDs as well, talk to me when you get to 2.5 ;) .)
no subject
Date: 2010-10-14 11:17 pm (UTC)Farscape 2, then Criminal Minds 5, then Being Human 2. This may take a little while--American shows have longer seasons. But it's always comforting to know there's good stuff waiting in the queue.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 04:19 am (UTC)I didn't start watching Being Human until partway through the second episode, and only got the last 20 minutes of the third. Of course, being me, I watched all the online extras I could find, so the whole distraction factor was minimal. Hopefully the whole thing will come around again.
I suppose that you could call it reading for a particular element instead of a guilty pleasure. If one hasn't found something that does that particular thing as well or better while avoiding the bits that make one wince, it's merely a case of reading what's available.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-21 10:38 pm (UTC)I can't say the Cast does anything better than any other book, and I can't identify any particular element I'm reading it for. It just has the page-turning nature.