{"id":2,"date":"2015-04-11T05:45:41","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T05:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susby.com\/mdb\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2026-04-25T15:50:52","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T23:50:52","slug":"sample-page","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/?page_id=2","title":{"rendered":"Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOKS I READ IN 2026<\/b><\/p>\n

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  1. Cosmos <\/em><\/strong>by Carl Sagan * * * * <\/em><\/strong>(Audiobook)
    April 23, 2026
    I read this book about 25 years ago and loved it.\u00a0 It just came out as an audiobook.\u00a0 So, I decided to listen to it.\u00a0 Carl Sagan is dead.\u00a0 So the introduction is by his wife and it is Narrated by:\u00a0LeVar Burton<\/a>,\u00a0Seth MacFarlane<\/a>, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.<\/a>\u00a0 He covers a lot of territory, from the birth of the earth, to how humans formed, the formation of our brains, whether there is other life out there, what encounters with those other life forms might be like, and the urgency in preventing us from destroying ourselves.\u00a0 I did not remember the end where he talks about the idiocy of nuclear weapons build up and other human failings.\u00a0 Some of the science is old and outdated but most of the book is a pertinent today as it was when first published.\u00a0 Wonderful book that should be read by everyone.\u00a0\u00a0

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  2. Starlight Nights: The Adventures of a Star-Gazer<\/em><\/strong> by Leslie Peltier * * * 1\/2
    April 17, 2026
    Leslie Peltier looked out the window at a very young age and realized he did not know a single star.\u00a0 He went to the library, checked out a book on the stars, and slowly taught himself the night sky.\u00a0 Later he subscribed to an astronomy magazine and saw an advertisement for people to observe variable stars.\u00a0 \u00a0He joined the AAVSO, the American Association of Variable Star Observers and became a life long variable star observer.\u00a0 He lived on a farm in Ohio in the 1920s in Delphos, no doubt very dark back then.\u00a0 He built his own platform for a small refractor and began observing on every clear night.\u00a0 the AAVSO gave him a six inch refractor and he became a comet hunter.\u00a0 \u00a0He discovered several comets from the farm with that telescope etching each one on the telescope’s mahogany case.\u00a0 He and his father built an observatory with a rotating dome.\u00a0 Due to his discoveries of comets he became somewhat of a celebrity and later in life the University of Miami of Ohio gave him an Alvan Clark 12″ refractor and its own observatory!\u00a0 \u00a0He eventually discovered 12 comets and six novae.\u00a0 The book published in 1965 is a collection of vignettes about his life and his love of the stars and all of nature.\u00a0 Even though the book describes a time and place that has altered irrevocably, I enjoyed reading about his passion and his adventures.\n

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  3. Razorblade Tears<\/strong><\/em> by S. A. Cosby **\u00a0
    April 2, 2026
    This is a terrible book.\u00a0 It’s a crime novel about two low life criminals whose sons were brutally murdered and they decide to seek out the murderers on their own and get revenge in the most horific way possible.\u00a0 The book is full of gratuitous violence and excessive cussing and vulgarities.\u00a0 Everyone in the book is excessively homophobic.\u00a0 The main character, I can’t remember his name, a black dude who committed a retribution murder and went to prison for years, is married to a nurse who sticks with him despite his violent and explosive nature.\u00a0 After being released from prison he does try to make something of his life by starting a successfuly lawncare business but it takes very little to get him to revert to his old violent ways.\u00a0 I did not like this book.\u00a0 I only read it for book club.<\/li>\n
  4. The Universe<\/strong><\/em> by Andrew Cohen * * * 1\/2 (audiobook)
    March 20, 2026
    Excellent book about the universe.\u00a0 I almost stopped reading it when it opened with an entire chapter on explanets, the most boring uninteresting aspect of astronomy, but once he left that worthless pursuit, the book got much better.\u00a0 I highly recommend it.<\/li>\n
  5. The Mayor of Casterbridge<\/strong><\/em> by Thomas Hardy * * * * 1\/2
    March 12, 2026
    Thomas Hardy is buried next to Charles Dickens at Westminster Abbey for a reason– two of the greatest novelists of all time.\u00a0 In addition to being one of the greatest novelists of all time, he was also a great poet and it shows in his fabulous writing style.\u00a0 He has a way with turning a phrase that had me constantly stopping to write down things he said in this book.\u00a0 Hardy was very concerned with how poorly women were treated in Victorian England and it comes through in this book where the only decent character, Elizabeth Jane is victimized and ignored and left to her own devices over and over.\u00a0 \u00a0Elizabeth Jane is shamed by her father for doing menial work for pay at the hotel when she and her mother first arrived in Casterbridge and decides to educate herself by immersing herself in every book she can get her hands on.\u00a0 Though the main character, Michael, is well drawn in all his complexities, some of the other characters could have use a little more elaboration but overall Hardy covers well the contradictions and flawed nature of humans.\u00a0 The book opens with Michael committing an unforgiveable act of selling his wife and daughter but by the end of the book we find ourselves filled with pity for this tragic character and rooting for him to make better decisions and do something with his life.\u00a0 On the other hand, I had no patience for the flighty and capricious Farfrae who sings patriotic and wistful songs about his homeland then decides to permanently reside in Casterbridge.\u00a0 Later he first begins to woo Elizabeth Jane, only to deny her and indeed totally ignore her after meeting with Lucetta and later still quickly getting over Lucetta after her untimely death and going back to Elizabeth Jane.\u00a0 I didn’t like this character.\u00a0 The book is a classic, well written, and deep in its understanding of the complexities of human nature.<\/li>\n
  6. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Robert Hazen (audiobook) * * * 1\/2
    March 4, 2026
    In this excellent work of non-fiction, Robert Hazen, American\u00a0    mineralogist<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0astrobiologist, as well as <\/a>\u00a0research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington<\/a>‘s Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at\u00a0George Mason University,<\/a>
    tells the whole history of earth from its inception and well into the future.\u00a0 \u00a0I have always loved geology and so this book caught my attention.\u00a0 It is well written and engaging.\u00a0 I learned a lot about the latest theories about how the moon formed and how earth evolved.\u00a0 I did not know about the many cycles of glaciation and thawing.\u00a0 Nor did I know about the great extinction 150 million years ago before the dinosaurs died off.\u00a0 This was an excellent book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in geology of just learning about the earth’s history.<\/li>\n
  7. The Last of the Stargazers<\/strong><\/em> by Emily Levesque (audiobook) * * *\u00a0
    February 13, 2026
    This non-fiction book was written by a professional astronomer.\u00a0 I was interested to read the book to find out more about what exactly professional astronomers do.\u00a0 I already had a sense that what they do has very little to do with actually observing the night sky and I was right.\u00a0 Levesque’s family had an 8″ telescope and so she had exposure to actual star gazing when she was young but that was not convinced her to become a professional astronomer.\u00a0 It was attendance at an astronomy event.\u00a0 Nevertheless, she did get hooked on astronomy and got her undergraduate degree in astronomy at MIT and then her PhD at the University of Hawaii.\u00a0 When she first started out in her internships during college and at the beginning of her career as a professional astronomer she actually spent time at some of the world’s greatest observatories, Keck, Mount Kitt, the big telescopes in Chile, and even Sophia and later Hubble but by the end we were building huge automated telescopes that could be operated remotely further removing the professional astronomer from any contact with the actual night sky.\u00a0 \u00a0 The remote telescopes and incredibly advances we have made in techniques for studying the universe have no doubt increased our knowledge of our universe while at the same time our actual observations of the night sky among professional amateur astronomers alike have dwindled to nearly extinction.\u00a0 This does not seem to bother this author at all and she revels in the advances to our understanding of the universe.\u00a0 She explores at the end of the book what drives someone to want to devote their career and their lives to the study of the universe and she answers this question pretty well but never answers why that pursuit doesn’t entail actual observations of our universe and actually looking and seeing what’s really out there.\u00a0 \u00a0I enjoyed the book immensely although Levesque’s writing style is not at all literary and she often gravitated to hackneyed English aphorisms and maxims.\u00a0 I could overlook that given that she is a professional astronomer and not a professional writer but what I could not forgive was any error involving her profession such as when she repeatedly called the constellation Scorpius, Scorpio!<\/li>\n
  8. The Correspondent<\/em><\/strong> by Virginia Evans * * * 1\/2
    February 9, 2026
    In this epistolary novel the author slowly reveals the life of the protagonist, Sybil, as she handles in her own way, life’s many struggles and sorrows.\u00a0 Sybil comes across as a cold curmudgeon but as the story unfolds we learn in part why she is the way she is as we hear her describe a very traumatic event in her life.\u00a0 Partly though it is just her nature to be opinionated and strong-willed and of course have a penchant for writing over phone calls or emails.\u00a0 After all she was a very successful lawyer and opinions and strong writing skills are essential tools of the trade.\u00a0 By the end we begin to have more sympathy for her particularly when she reconciles with her daughter, begins losing her vision, and comes to grips with the earlier tragedy in her life.<\/li>\n
  9. Seeing in the Dark<\/strong><\/em> by Timothy Ferris (audiobook) * * *\u00a0
    January 29, 2026
    Timothy Ferris grew up in Key Biscayne, Florida where he began his love affair with the stars with a small telescope.\u00a0 The book follows his journey through the stars meeting with famous amateur astronomers, and discussing various aspects of astronomy and what stargazing means to him and various other people, the advance of the use of CCD cameras to learn more about the universe, moving to California where he builds are very fancy two story observatory, and ends with a brief discussion of whether any of this conflicts with belief in God.\u00a0 It interested me most of the time as an avid lifelong stargazer myself.\u00a0 Each chapter begins with lines from two poems relevant to stargazing and each chapter meanders between various aspects of astronomy.<\/li>\n
  10. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny<\/strong><\/em> by Kiran Desai (audiobook) * * * *
    January 15, 2026
    An upper class family in India sends their daughter, Sonia, to a small liberal college in Vermont.\u00a0 She is lonely as she spends the breaks on campus when everyone else goes home.\u00a0 During one lonely break she befriends an artist, Eland, who seduces her and leads her to believe that she is his one and only.\u00a0 She falls for it, due to her innocence and youth, despite heaps of evidence that he is a mentally disturbed womanizer, user, and abuser.\u00a0 Meanwhile her family tries to set up an arranged marriage for her to another ex-pat Indian, Sunny, living in New York where he has just graduated from Columbia and is trying to make it as a journalist for the Associated Press.\u00a0 He already has an American girlfriend that the family does not yet know about but rejects the offer for other reasons.\u00a0 Sonia returns to India and moves in with her father but as fate would have it, she ends up meeting Sunny in India and they seem destined for each other except for the fact that Sonia is haunted by memories of Eland.\u00a0 It’s a beautifully written novel with an interesting and engaging plot.\u00a0 Maureen Karrigan calls it the best book of 2025.\u00a0 I’m not sure about that but it is a very good book.<\/li>\n
  11. I Have Some Questions for You<\/strong><\/em> by Rebecca Makkai * * *\u00a0
    January 4, 2026
    It was a creative and interesting story about a murder that occurred at a posh boarding school in New Hampshire in the 1990s, where the only black person at the school, the trainer, is wrongfully charged and convicted of the murder based on a shoddy investigation and helped along by institutional coverup.\u00a0 The plot kept you reading as the narrator and protagonist, Bodie, has conversations in her mind with various suspects but these were interspersed with long boring chapters of reliving adolescence in the 1990s with excessive drinking, wild reckless sexual encounters, and enduring embarrassing class differences.\u00a0\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    BOOKS I READ IN 2025
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    19. The Aeneid <\/em><\/strong>by Virgil * * * * * (audiobook)
    <\/strong>December 4, 2025
    <\/strong>In this fantastic rendition of this famous and fabulous book, the Trojan hero, Aeneas, escapes from conquered Troy with his aged father and son and small group of other Trojan survivors and makes his way through a perilous journey against all odds to found a new home for the Trojans in Italy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    18. The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife <\/em><\/strong>by Anna Johnston * * * 1\/2
    <\/strong>November 30, 2025
    An old guy is evicted from his apartment and has nowhere to go.\u00a0 After considering sleeping in the men’s room he ambles down to the river and finds a group there on a nursing home outing.\u00a0 One guy is apart from the rest in a wheelchair.\u00a0 Fred sees the guy slump from his chair and races over to assist him but the old man in the wheelchair who bears an uncanny resemblance to Fred has died.\u00a0 Fred tries to get him into his wheelchair to wheel him over to the others but the man slips out and into the river where he is carried away along with Fred’s wallet.\u00a0 Just then the Nursing Home manager comes over and puts Fred into the wheelchair and back to the nursing home assuming he is the dead guy.\u00a0 Fred tries to tell everyone he is not the dead guy but they just think he is delusional because apparently the guy who just died had dementia.\u00a0 So, Fred just goes along and starts living in the nursing home pretending to be the dead guy.\u00a0 Fred is uneasy at first and has to pretend to wet the bed and other unpleasant things in order to not be discovered.\u00a0 Things get out of hand though when the dead guy’s furious daughter shows up for retribution against her horrible father’s behavior in the past.\u00a0 \u00a0It was a fun book to read but at times heart breaking and disturbing.\u00a0 I would recommend this book.\u00a0 It’s an easy read.<\/p>\n

    17. The Names <\/em><\/strong>by Florence Knapp * * * 1\/2
    <\/strong>November 23, 2025
    This first novel by Florence Knapp explores how your given name can completely change your life.\u00a0 It also explores domestic violence and how women find it hard to get out of an abusive relationship.\u00a0 It’s well written and interesting but the way the novel goes back and forth between the imagined different lives on the son who is given different names at birth, got confusing keeping up with all of the many characters.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    16. What Kind of Paradise <\/em><\/strong>by Janelle Brown * * * 1\/2
    <\/strong>October 10, 2025
    A girl is kidnapped by her deranged father and taken away to a cabin in the woods in Livingston, Montana.\u00a0 Although her life is idyllic in many ways living in nature with wolves and deer and a wild and care free life far from any bustling city, she is boxed in and unable to make friends or have a normal life– almost like she is in prison and her father’s odd behavior is troubling.\u00a0 He disappears for days at a time leaving her to her own devices.\u00a0 \u00a0One day he makes her dress up as a distraction while he goes into a building in Seattle to “meet an old friend.”\u00a0 Actually he blows up the building and old friend and tells her to escape and go back to the cabin and wait for him.\u00a0 She goes back and waits but realizes she needs to escape and runs away to San Francisco where she starts a new life enjoying all the amenities of city life she never had growing up isolated in the cabin.\u00a0 But she is troubled by the knowledge that her father is a killer.\u00a0 Should she turn him in?\u00a0 Will she be implicated?\u00a0 What should she do?\u00a0 This work of fiction by Janelle Brown was well written and original though obviously loosely based on the unibomber and a good read.

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    15. Before We Were Yours <\/em><\/strong>by Lisa Wingate * * * 1\/2
    September 12, 2025
    In this novel based on real life occurrences at a disgraced orphanage, Lisa Wingate leaves the reader spellbound anticipating what will happen to the main character, Rill Foss, as she is ripped from her idyllic life aboard the family riverboat shanty and thrown into an abusive horrific orphanage.\u00a0 At the same time, we are tantalized by intermittent chapters of the Sherlock Holmes adventures of Avery as she comes to terms with her uncertain future and as she tries to unravel the mysterious past of her grandmother.\u00a0 Some of the parts dealing with the treatment of Rill and her siblings at the orphanage are hard to read and the novel mercifully switches at that precise moment to Avery as she navigates what is expected of her if her senator father succumbs to his cancer diagnosis, her future with her boyfriend, and what she really wants from life.\u00a0 Meanwhile Avery becomes more sleuth than lawyer as she uncovers clues about her grandmother’s hidden past.\u00a0 Ultimately the connection between the two characters is revealed.<\/p>\n

    14. Black Holes Explained <\/em><\/strong>by Professor Alex Filippenko * * * 1\/2 (audiobook)
    August 18, 2025
    Excellent explanation of black holes told in an easy to understand way.\u00a0 Professor Filippenko teaches physics and astronomy at UC-Berkeley.\u00a0 He has a very engaging style and is very enthusiastic about the topic.\u00a0 Very enjoyable.<\/p>\n

    13. Wild Dark Shore <\/em><\/strong>by Charlotte Conaghy * * * * 1\/2
    August 2, 2025
    This is a wonderfully written book with an engaging plot that keeps you reading well past midnight.\u00a0 It explores so many themes– dealing with death and loss, the relationship between parents and their children, climate change, what it means to love someone, and how we can learn to deal with loss and change.\u00a0 Dom has just lost his wife and decides to accept a job on remote island between Tasmania and Anarctica as the manager.\u00a0 The island has been chosen to store the world’s seed reserves but it is slowly sinking due to climate change.\u00a0 \u00a0Dom takes his three children there and they begin living on the island taking care of it but one of the researchers there in charge of the seeds becomes violent and unpredictable but the family doesn’t know what to do with him because someone has destroyed all communication instruments.\u00a0 Meanwhile a strange woman washes on shore badly injured from a boat wreck.\u00a0 She is looking for her husband who just so happens to be the deranged researcher who has abandoned her.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    12. Rental House<\/em> by Wieke Wang *
    <\/strong>July 16, 2025
    Terrible book.\u00a0 Mental immigrant from China, Keru, marries a boring American, Nate.\u00a0 Keru’s parents are overbearing and irritating but Nate’s parents are even worse.\u00a0 The mother is imperious and clueless at the same time.\u00a0 The book is supposed to be an exploration of a marriage between two people from very different cultures.\u00a0 The book doesn’t really have a plot.\u00a0 But I found the writing style wooden and boring and the topic uninteresting even though my partner is Chinese and a little crazy.<\/p>\n

    11. A Gentleman in Moscow<\/em> by Amor Towles * * * * 1\/2
    <\/strong>June 20, 2025
    <\/strong><\/p>\n

    What a great elegantly written book.\u00a0 I highly recommend it.\u00a0 The Count, Alexander Rostov, has written a poem undermining the principles of the new Bolshevik government in Moscow after the revolution. He has been sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel and if he steps foot outside the hotel, he will be shot.\u00a0 When I heard the plot it sounded unbearably boring but nothing could be further from the truth.\u00a0 This book was so incredibly well written and engaging that you simply cannot put it down.<\/p>\n

    The Count comes from a wealthy family and under Bolshevik rule, the aristocrats are the enemy.\u00a0 Moved from his luxurious apartment to a small attic space, Rostov must endure his punishment for many years.<\/p>\n

    Over the years he befriends a young girl staying at the hotel with her family, the hotel employees, and many guests.\u00a0 \u00a0His life is confined but he accepts his fate and as his father told him you either master your circumstances or they master you.\u00a0 \u00a0But life in confinement can drown you and his thoughts about the death of his sister and his perceived roll in it lead to his near suicide until miraculously saved by a chance encounter and relationship with the hotel maintenance man who tells him of the return of some bees from Rostov’s beloved apple orchard.<\/p>\n

    The ending is simply stunning.<\/p>\n

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    10. Star Gazers: Finding Joy in the Night Sky<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>by David Levy * * *\u00a0
    May 23, 2025
    David Levy is a famous amateur astronomer, comet hunter, and prolific astronomy author.\u00a0 In this short book of essays he unbears his sole over the loss of his long time wife, Wendee and also fellow comet hunter, Gene Shoemaker, with whom he jointly discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the famous comet that slammed into Jupiter in 1994.\u00a0 There are essays about how he came to love the night sky, what draws him to it, some famous poems about it, sharing the night sky with others, and musings about why appreciating the night sky can bring so much joy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    9. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers<\/em><\/strong> by Jesse Sutanto * * *\u00a0
    May 18, 2025
    In this latest novel by Jesse Sutanto, she follows the life of Vera Wong, an eccentric old Chinese lady who runs a teahouse in San Francisco.\u00a0 Her husband has recently died and her only customer at the tea house is an old Chinese guy, Alex.\u00a0 One morning Vera wakes up to find a dead body on the floor of the tea house, the odious Marshall.\u00a0 She immediately draws an outline around the body in magic marker and then bafflingly steals a flash drive from his hand.\u00a0 She is convinced he was murdered even though the San Francisco Police Department tells her the victim died from anaphylactic shock from ingesting bird dander.\u00a0 Undaunted, Vera sets out to solve the murder herself.\u00a0 Parts of the story were improbable but not outlandish.\u00a0 The characters, all suspects in Vera’s list of potential murderers, all live in the greatest place on earth, San Francisco, and move about among the famous sites of the City.\u00a0 I have lived in San Francisco for 37 years and never not once have I said nor have I heard anyone say let’s take the “tram.”\u00a0 There is a bus system in San Francisco, Muni, that includes above and below ground cars that run on rails and are powered by electric cables overhead and these are called “Muni” not the tram.\u00a0 Also, Sutanto uses some acronyms in the book I have never heard of and still don’t know what they mean.\u00a0 Other than these things the book was engaging enough to propel you to the end.<\/p>\n

    8. The Wind in the Willows<\/strong><\/em> by Kenneth Grahame * * * * (audiobook)
    April 27, 2025
    This children’s novel was first published in 1908 and follows the adventures of Mole, Rat, Badger, and the incorrigible Mr. Toad.\u00a0 The novel is a classic of British literature and a must read for everyone for its lyrical musings on the importance of nature and home.\u00a0 The novel open with Mole doing some spring cleaning which is soon abandons for the spring-time air.\u00a0 He finds himself on the banks of a river he has never seen before where he encounters a water rat. The two soon become the best of friends.\u00a0 Rat introduces Mole to Mr. Toad who has just become obsessed with a fancy colorful cart.\u00a0 When the cart is totalled by a motorcar, Toad becomes besot by motor cars to the point that he steals one and is imprisoned on multiple charges.\u00a0 Toad escapes and they are reunited but Toad is not over his prodigal ways.\u00a0 Mole and Rat enlist the help of Badger to rehabilitate Toad.\u00a0 Eventually they succeed but not before Toad’s home is invaded by a band of weasels.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

    7. The God of the Woods<\/em><\/strong> by Liz Moore * * * 1\/2
    April 13, 2025
    A wealthy family, starting with Peter I, purchases property in the Adironacks and turns it into a summer camp.\u00a0 \u00a0Peter II is to hand it down to Peter III.\u00a0 Peter III is a domineering self possessed asshole.\u00a0 He marries the unfortunate and lost soul, Alice, who takes to drinking and drugs to compensate for her miserable life with the impervious Peter III.\u00a0 They have a child, Bear, whom Alice adores but Peter tries to keep away from Alice.\u00a0 Alice starts drinking more and more and becomes an embarrassment to the family.\u00a0 Bear goes missing one day while ostensibly hiking with Peter II, his grandfather.\u00a0 They never find him and the circumstances are very mysterious.\u00a0 Alice and Peter have another child, Barbara, whom they both basically ignore and abandon.\u00a0 Barbara begs to be allowed to go to summer camp and they agree and then she goes missing. The two mysteries are resolved as the novel unfolds in page turning events told through multiple characters and voices.\u00a0 \u00a0Excellent well written book.<\/p>\n

    6. James<\/strong><\/em> by Percival Everett * * * 1\/2
    March 22, 2025
    This novel by Percival Everett, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, retells Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the slave, Jim.\u00a0 I read Huckleberry Finn years ago and I remember that part with the two petty criminals, posing as the king of France and the dauphin, driving me crazy.\u00a0 I wish that Huckleberry and Jim had run instead of waiting for those two losers.\u00a0 I couldn’t wait for that part of the book to end.\u00a0 I was so relieved when they finally escaped from those two evil clowns.\u00a0 The rest of the book was engaging and interesting but a bit unbelievable that the slaves were able to learn how to read and write and hide it from their masters and that Jim so easily escaped so many close calls and most unbelievable of all that he was able to find and reconnect with his wife and daughter in a slave breeding camp and again escape with them in tow.<\/p>\n

    5. The Remarkable Science of Ancient Astronomy<\/strong><\/em> by Dr. Bradley Schaefer (Audiobook) * * * 1\/2
    March 13, 2025
    Professor Schaefer reads the text in this Great Courses Audiobook about ancient astronomy.\u00a0 He starts by explaining Stonehenge and that it was not built by the Druids and was actually a marker of the setting sun on the summer solstice.\u00a0 He also covers the pyramids and other solstice markers such as the one in Chaco Culture. Sometimes he makes proclamations that seemed unconvincing but mostly he supported he arguments and conclusions with facts and leaves it up to you to conclude.\u00a0 For example he says with absolute assurance that the “Supernova Petroglyph” at Chaco Culture is not a petroglyph of the supernova of 1054 but a sun watching station.\u00a0 Later he discusses in detail the magnificent device found under the ocean off the coast of Antikythera known as the Antikythera Device and leaves it up to you to decide who invented this amazing analog computer of the motion of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, as well as the timing of the Olympic Games and eclipses.\u00a0 He also covers the incredible advances made in astronomy by the Greek and ties it all together at the end with how ancient astronomy provided more modern astronomers with a wealth of information about the placement of the stars to more accurately time other events with precision.\u00a0 Excellent book.<\/p>\n

    4. The Glass Castle<\/strong><\/em> by Jeanette Walls * * * 1\/2
    February 9, 2025
    This book is a memoir of a girl and her three siblings raised by a very eccentric mother and brilliant but alcoholic neer-do-well father.\u00a0 They moved from place to place always escaping imminent jail time or debts or other disasters but always in dire circumstances in filthy squalid conditions and with little food to eat.\u00a0 \u00a0The title comes from the father’s detailed plans to build a glass castle.\u00a0 Naturally he never gets around to even getting anywhere close to actually building it but Jeanette holds out hope for him until almost the very end of the book when it becomes patently obvious that she needs to escape her crazy parents and get the hell out of nasty West Virginia.\u00a0 You would expect Jeanette to be severely scarred for life by the horrendous life she lead as a child but incredibly she overcomes her upbringing to live a normal life.\u00a0 The same cannot be said for her little sister who tried to stab her mother and went to prison.\u00a0 She was doomed to a fate you would expect of children raised in such a haphazard chaotic lifestyle.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    3. Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0by Nicola Twilley * * *\u00a0
    February 2, 2025
    Fascinating history and science of how the invention of refrigeration changed the world.\u00a0 Twilley follows the early days of eating habits from the slaughter of cows at your local butcher shop to the transport of already chopped up beef on rail cars packed in ice stopping at ice houses along the way to the invention of reefers and later precisely refrigerated containers to ship not just already processed cattle but everything from apples to lettuce to well, everything we eat.\u00a0 Along the way you learn that everything you eat these days is not “fresh” but picked while still green and then frozen and injected with chemicals until it reaches your table for consumption.\u00a0 This part of the book was engrossing but when she went into actual refrigerators that go into your homes and the mass scale intentions of bringing this same horrifying transformation of refrigeration to every home in sub-Saharan Africa, I lost interest and just wanted to finish the book.\u00a0 It was obvious that the real solution to poverty and hunger is not refrigeration but population control, which is not going to happen.\u00a0 Moreover, it is obvious that nothing can exterminate or even slow down the overexpansion of human populations. Nothing can kill or stop us.\u00a0 I don’t know how it’s going to end but I just know it will end badly.<\/p>\n

    2. The Frozen River<\/strong><\/em> by Ariel Lawhon * * * 1\/2
    January 31, 2025
    This is the first book I have ever read by Ariel Lawhon but apparently she writes a lot of biographical fiction.\u00a0 This book is based on the real life of the midwife, Martha Ballard, who kept a meticulous journal of her life delivering babies in post-Revolutionary War Massachusetts.\u00a0 The story departs from the real life of Martha Ballard and into an intrigue and mystery involving a murder of a man accused of rape.\u00a0 The story was well told and engaging but sometimes it was hard to believe that a woman in the 1790s would be as highly regarded at that time and do some of the things she does in the novel.\u00a0 She drinks in a tavern amongst the men and at one point her husband tells her to meet him there for a pint.\u00a0 I was incredulous that this would be acceptable at that time but Lawhon explains at the end of the novel that she took much of the story from the diary kept by Ballard.\u00a0 Also troubling was the fact that the midwife unflinchingly accepted the admission toward the end of the novel that her son was a party to a brutal murder and hanging.\u00a0 There was also no explanation about what happened to the poor child, born of the rape and rejected by the mother.\u00a0 \u00a0Other than that it was well written and interesting and a good book.<\/p>\n

    1. The Life and Death of Stars<\/strong><\/em> by Kevian Stassun (Audio book) * * * *\u00a0
    January 24, 2025
    This book is part of the Great Courses Lecture Series.\u00a0 This one was read by the author noted professor of physics at Vanderbilt, Kevian Stassun.\u00a0 He tells you about stars how they are formed and how they die and how stars are the basis of all life and everything that we are made up, in an easy to understand and engaging way by analogizing the life and death of stars to the life and death of us all.\u00a0 He is a good story teller and teacher but he stumbles frequently and unlike other Great Courses lectures, he doesn’t bother to do re-takes.\u00a0 Other than the frequent stumbling speech, it was an excellent book and thoroughy enjoyed it.\u00a0 It’s a lot to take in and I plan to listen to it again.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

    BOOKS I READ IN 2024<\/b><\/p>\n

    20<\/strong>. The Violin Conspiracy<\/strong><\/em> by Brendan Slocumb * * * 1\/2
    February 1, 2024
    Ray Macmillian is a black violinist who struggles against blatant racism and his own short-sighted and miserable family to achieve his dream of becoming a first-rate classical violinist.\u00a0 He can’t afford a high quality violin but is given his great-grandfather’s fiddle by his grandmother only to learn later that it is acually a Stradivarius. Unfortunately, after his star begins to rise and begins preparing for the prestigious Tchaikovsky competition his beloved violin is stolen.\u00a0 The rest of the book is a mystery about solving this crime and about whether he will win the competition.\u00a0 This was a good book.<\/p>\n

    19. Lessons in Chemistry<\/strong> by Bonnie Garmus * * * *\u00a0
    December 21, 2024
    This is Bonnie Garmus’s debut novel and what a novel it is.\u00a0 I loved it even if it did include some sections that required the reader’s suspension of disbelief.\u00a0 Elizabeth Zott is a fiercely independent, smart, good looking, highly intelligent chemist working in a sexist man’s world surrounded by barbaric men who demean her, assault her, degrade her, and prevent her from pursuing her dream of being respected and paid equal pay for her work as a scientist.\u00a0 Then one day she meets one man who respects her for who she is, they fall in love and finally her life seems right until tragically he dies and leaves her world shattered, pregnant, jobless, and reviled, her work stolen by her boss who fires her.\u00a0 All ends well in the end just like in a Charles Dickens novel and I would compare both the story and the story telling to a modern day Dickens novel.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

    18. The Women <\/strong><\/em>by Kristen Hannah * * *\u00a0
    November 23, 2024
    A young girl, Frances, growing up in an upper middle class family in Coronado, an island off the coast of San Diego, decides to go to Vietnam and serve her country as a nurse in order to follow her beloved older brother, Finley, and see him there.\u00a0 Finley dies in action before she leaves and the whole family is devastated but never really works through the grief at all.\u00a0 Frances arrives in Vietnam completely green and unprepared to the point she drinks the water and becomes violently ill her first few days.\u00a0 She is shown the ropes though by her first two bunk mates at the evacuation hospital, Barb and Ethel.\u00a0 Ethel calls her Frank and everyone calls her Frankie which is ironic because my mother’s name was Frances and she hated being called Frankie by my father.\u00a0 Frankie witnesses too many gruesome war scenes and is exposed to Napalm and other atrocities.\u00a0 She also falls in love with first Jamie, a doctor at the hospital and later to a lying womanizer, Rye, before she is finally finished with her two tours and returns home only to be spit upon and rejected as a war monger and evildoer.\u00a0 Her own father refuses to acknowledge her military service.\u00a0 She falls into a drug addled alcohol fueled anger and resentment.\u00a0 She seeks help at the VA Hospital only to be turned away because “there were no women in Vietnam.”\u00a0 Finally her alcoholism and drug addiction reach a breaking point when she nearly kills a bicyclist and then herself.\u00a0 She finally gets some real help at a psyche ward and leaves California for Missoula of all places and starts a ranch for recovering returned women Vietnam Vets.\u00a0 It was a gripping story and a page turner.\u00a0 The writing style left a little to be desired though.\u00a0 It was very straightforward and unadorned but got the story told like listening to an old friend tell you some things from her past.\u00a0 Having lived through the Vietnam War years in my youth, it brought back a lot of memories.<\/p>\n

    17. Project Hail Mary<\/strong><\/em> by Andy Weir * *\u00a0
    October 27, 2024
    This book was selected by someone in book club.\u00a0 I would not have selected it.\u00a0 The writing is clunky and unadorned.\u00a0 There are no metaphors or beautiful descriptions and Weir is incapable of turning a clever phrase.\u00a0 The book is about a microbe that attacks the sun and if unchecked will lead to the anihilation of humans.\u00a0 What a preposterous premise.\u00a0 Nothing can anihilate humans– not two world wars, not the Plague, not COVID, not anything.\u00a0 We are indescructible.\u00a0 Weir knows a lot of science but I would rather read real science in Sky & Telescope or in a book of non-fiction than the science discussed in Weir’s wild imagination.\u00a0 At least Weir removed all the cussing that was littered in his last book the Martian<\/em><\/strong> but he still is incapable of drawing a character with any depth and the main character in this book is still Matt Damon who left Mars and is now on 40 Eridani’s planet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    16. The Bee Sting<\/strong><\/em> by Paul Murray * * *
    September 1, 2024
    Set in Dublin and a small town about two hours away, this novel follows the tumultuous lives of Dickie and Imelda and their families and friends.\u00a0 Dickie and his brother, Frank, come from a well to do family while Imelda comes from a low class family with an alcoholic father and criminal brother and weird aunt.\u00a0 But Imelda is the town beauty.\u00a0 She falls in love with Frank but ends up marrying Dickie but Dickie is very conflicted.\u00a0 They have two children PJ and Cass who are both very smart but Cass is conflicted also and PJ is the only normal one in the family.\u00a0 The book raises a lot of ethical issues for the reader but does not provide any answers and annoyingly many of the chapters are written without periods.\u00a0 \u00a0The book ends abruptly and leaves you to decide whether it was right or wrong.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    15. Autobiography of the Milky Way<\/strong><\/em> by Moiya McTier (audio book)\u00a0 * * * *\u00a0
    July 27, 2024
    Moiya McTier is an astrophysicist able to convey astronomical concepts in a relateable and interesting way by telling the story of the Milky Way as if by the Milky Way itself.\u00a0 The book was read by the author and she does a great job with it.\u00a0 I thoroughly enjoyed this book.\u00a0 She is quite irreverant in the book and critical of human foibles and this might put some people off but I liked it.\u00a0 \u00a0In fact, after finishing I started listening again I liked it so much.\u00a0 There are a lot of facts to take in.\u00a0 I highly recommend this wonderful book.<\/p>\n

    14. David Copperfield<\/strong><\/em> by Charles Dickens (audio book) * * * * *\u00a0
    July 20, 2024
    I have read this book many times and watched movies of it, and also listened to re-enactments and here listened to it read by Richard Armatage.\u00a0 This is quite possibly the greatest novel ever written by arguably the greatest novelist of all time.\u00a0 This is one of my favorite books and no matter how many times I read it, it never gets old.\u00a0 The characters are unforgettable and you miss them when you finish the book.\u00a0 That is the hallmark of a truly great novel.\u00a0 I mean who could forget Mrs. Gummidge, the lorn and lonely creature?\u00a0 To name just one.\u00a0 \u00a0What a great book.\u00a0 I don’t often give books five stars but this one deserves it.<\/p>\n

    13. A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters<\/strong><\/em> by Andrew Knoll * * * *\u00a0
    June 16, 2024<\/p>\n

    How well do you know the ground beneath your feet?\u00a0<\/p>\n

    Odds are, where you\u2019re standing was once cooking under a roiling sea of lava, crushed by a towering sheet of ice, rocked by a nearby meteor strike, or perhaps choked by poison gases, drowned beneath ocean, perched atop a mountain range, or roamed by fearsome monsters. Probably most or even all of the above.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    The story of our home planet and the organisms spread across its surface is far more spectacular than any Hollywood blockbuster, filled with enough plot twists to rival a bestselling thriller. But only recently have we begun to piece together the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet’s epic 4.6 billion-year story. Placing twenty first-century climate change in deep context,\u00a0A Brief History of Earth<\/span>\u00a0is an indispensable look at where we\u2019ve been and where we\u2019re going.<\/p>\n

    12. The Lost Bookshop<\/strong><\/em> by Evie Woods * * * 1\/2
    June 4, 2024
    In the 1920s in Dublin women still had few rights or opportunities but Opaline was far too iconoclastic and adventurous to be forced into an arranged marriage as proposed to her by her deranged and violent brother (who turned out to be her father).\u00a0 \u00a0She escapes to Paris where she lands a job in a bookshop and learns how to deal in rare books.\u00a0 Eventually she ends up in Dublin working at a curiosity and book shop.\u00a0 Intertwined with the chapters on Opaline’s story is a concurrent story of a PhD candidate, Henry, who travels from England to Dublin in search of a lost bookshop and lost manuscript and there he meets Martha, the housemaid of the mysterious Madame Bowden.\u00a0 Martha has also escaped from an abusive man, Shane, her violent husband.\u00a0 The story was intriguing and enjoyable to read especially the chapters about Opaline told in the first person.\u00a0 My biggest complaint about this book is that the character of Henry was not well formed.\u00a0 Usually when I read a book I make a mental picture of how each character looks but Henry was just an unformed blob in my mind’s eye.\u00a0 \u00a0He never came to life for me.\u00a0 Other than this failure to draw the character of Henry, I thought the book was well written and engaging.\u00a0 In the end the connection between the three characters is finally achieved through a little bit of mysticism and magic which is not ordinarily the kind of book I would read.\u00a0 However, it worked well to convey the main themes of the book –the joy of reading, loss, redemption, and finding one’s self.\u00a0 \u00a0I highly recommend this book.<\/p>\n

    11. Remarkably Bright Creatures<\/em><\/strong> by Shelby Van Pelt * * * 1\/2
    May 9, 2024
    I enjoyed this book.\u00a0 The protagonist, Tova, a 70 year old Swede who is impeccably kind but inscrutable has lost her son to the sea and works at an aquarium where she befriends a wise Pacific Octopus who manages to solve what happened to her son.\u00a0 the Anti-protagonist, Cameron, appears to be a lost loser at the books opening when he has been fired from yet another job and his girlfriend throws his belongings out the window and kicks him out.\u00a0 But he ultimately redeems himself after meeting Tova when he takes a job at the aquarium and oddly they seem related in some odd way.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    10. Berlin<\/strong><\/em> by Bea Sutton * *\u00a0
    April 12, 2024
    This novel was selected by my book club.\u00a0 I didn’t care for it at all.\u00a0 \u00a0Ms. Sutton writes well enough and keeps you interested in the story but the main character was completely unlikeable.\u00a0 I hated her.\u00a0 She was a compulsive liar, had a severe eating disorder, had self-image issues, and terrible low self-esteem and feelings of loathing.\u00a0 I loathed her too.\u00a0 In summary, she was a loser.\u00a0 After she learned how to speak German she should have returned to London, gotten a job, changed her horrible eating habits, and signed up for a self-improvement course or counseling.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    9. Demon Copperhead<\/strong><\/em> by Barbara Kingsolver * * *\u00a0
    March 24, 2024
    This book was selected by one of the members of my book club.\u00a0 I downloaded it to my Kindle and started reading it without knowing anything about it.\u00a0 I found it difficult to read at first and, in fact, found myself in tears reading it most of the time.\u00a0 Then, I came to a section of the book when a character appears named Mrs. Gummidge who is very lorn and lonely and when Demon says something cheerful about a Christmas Tree she says, “yes but they often burn down,” or something to that effect.\u00a0 I was shocked that Barbara Kingsolver would so blatantly plagiarize a famous character from Charles Dickens’s famous novel, David Copperfield.\u00a0 I told the book club I was shocked and was informed that I was a dummy for not knowing that Barbara Kingsolver wrote Demon Copperhead based on David Copperfield as a vehicle to tell a difficult story about poverty and drug addiction.\u00a0 Then I realized that of course the book was indeed, based on one of my all time favorite books, David Copperfield.\u00a0 After sharing the Pulitzer Prize for this book and winning the prize for Women’s Fiction, Barbara Kingsolver gave interviews in which she explained that she thought David Copperfield was the perfect vehicle for her to tell this difficult story and that she had gone to England and visited the place where Dickens wrote David Copperfield and sat at his desk and actually started writing Demon Copperfield there.\u00a0 It would be impossible for me to give this book more than three stars since it would be impossible for anyone to improve upon one of the greatest novels of all time.\u00a0 But as a vehicle for telling a difficult story it served her well.\u00a0 I had a hard time making it through the drug taking and drug recovery sections of the book.\u00a0 Other things about the book irritated me.\u00a0 For example, Kingsolver completely left out David Copperfield’s beloved great Aunt Betsy instead inserting an Aunt June who was a poor substitute for one of Dickens’s greatest female characters and who disappointingly did not call Damon, Trot.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I give the book three stars for covering a depressing and difficult topic of drug addiction and poverty and the low opinion cast on Appalachia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    8. Longitude<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0by Dava Sobel * * * * (audiobook)
    March 21, 2024
    In the 18th century mariners had no problem determining latitude based on the declination of the sun at noon or Polaris at night but to determine longitude they had wives tales and such unreliable methods as “dead reckoning.”\u00a0 \u00a0Many of England’s ships ran aground due to misjudging their longitude but when England lost multiple ships and thousands of sailors to miscalculations of longitude, it was then that the British government established the Board of Longitude in 1714, to award prizes to anyone who could discover the longitude.\u00a0 Astronomers were convinced the answer lay in the stars and moon but John Harrison was convinced it lay in building a clock that could withstand the extremes of weather, temperature, and water.\u00a0 It took Harrison decades to perfect this watch that could reliably determine the time at sea.\u00a0 At that time, it was impossible for mariners to know the time where they set sail and the time where they had sailed to, but if they could know those two times reliably then in that way they could easily determine their longitude since the earth rotates once every 24 hours and hence moves 15 degrees in longitude every hour.\u00a0 Harrison submitted his master piece, the watch that kept reliable time at sea to the Board of Longitude but it took him decades to recover the prize.\u00a0 In addition to battling the Board of Longitude he also had to battle with his nemisis, Maskelyne, who had become the Royal Astronomer and who was the main proponent of using the moon to measure longitude.\u00a0 The moon can be used to measure longitude but the moon is not visible for six months out of the month and of course is not visible if it is cloudy.\u00a0 In addition, using this method took laborious calculations of up to four hours.\u00a0 \u00a0Maskelyne confiscated Harrison’s clocks claiming they were needed for testing against the official clock at Greenwich.\u00a0 After his death the clocks were ignored and left to deteriorate in his basement until rescued and meticulously refurbished by Goulding.\u00a0 They are now on display at the Royal Museums Greenwich.\u00a0 This captivating story is beautifully told by the gifted Sobel in another one of her great historical books.\u00a0 I highly recommend this book.<\/p>\n

    7. The Brothers Karamazov<\/strong><\/em> by Fyodor Dostoevsky * * * * (audiobook)
    March 6, 2024
    Widely regarded as Dostoevsky’s greatest book, this sprawling novel opens with the disgusting, depraved, and licentious buffoon, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov marrying twice and fathering four sons, two by a woman who killed herself and another by a woman who ran away, and the last a bastard son, Smedykov, the result of Fyodor’s rape of the beloved town gypsy.\u00a0 \u00a0Fyodor abandons the first three children and they are discarded and raised by other people.\u00a0 The last child, Smedykov, is taken in by the man servant and raised by him.\u00a0 The novel explores many themes regarding whether god exists, whether the devil exists, crime and punishment, psychology, all interwoven into the plot of who killed Fyodor Pavlovitch and who amongst the brothers is guilty and of what.\u00a0 Ivan’s dissertation on the existence of god was rather long-winded and tedious and the ending was abrupt and dissatisfying, bizarre really but overall the book was a great read and the kind of book that leaves you pondering long after you have finished.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    6. Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark <\/strong><\/em>by Sarafina El-Badry-Nance\u00a0 * *\u00a0 \u00a0
    February 5, 2024
    In this memoir, 26 year old, El-Badry-Nance tells her harrowing story of overcoming an anxiety disorder, overwhelming feelings of self-doubt and low self-esteem, and even physical abuse to become a PhD candidate at UC-Berkeley in astrophysics in a field dominated by men while also writing this book.\u00a0 She faces many other towering obstacles as well including her father’s diagnosis with a genetically based cancer, her parents separating and leaving her on her own in 11th grade, and her own diagnosis of the same cancer causing gene, BRCA.\u00a0 In reading the book it is obvious from the beginning that she is talented and bright and has a bright future ahead of her but you feel like reaching into the book and shouting at her and shaking her out of her self-loathing and irrational thoughts.\u00a0 Fortunately for her, she does eventually seek out professional help and by the end of the book is on the long hard road to recovery.<\/p>\n

    5. The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 by Caroline Alexander * * * *
    January 19, 2024
    In this gripping re-telling of Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole on the ship, the Endurance, Caroline Alexander keeps the reader engaged through the dull daily details of life on an ice floe for over a year, with excerpts from the crews’ dairies and incredibly stark, haunting, and revealing photographs taken by the expedition’s talented photographer, Hurley.\u00a0 I had already read Aipsley Cherry-Garrard’s moving book about the more famous expedition to the south pole by Robert Falcon Scott and crew.\u00a0 \u00a0So, I was familiar with the challenges and deprivations suffered by these brave and fearless men but I had no idea of the sufferings of Shackleton’s crew especially when they sailed in three little boats from an ice floe for three days to Elephant Island without food, water, or shelter in a raging storms.\u00a0 Shakleton’s expedition never even got close to the south pole but what makes the story so fascinating is how he kept the crew motivated and made sure each one survived to return to civilization.\u00a0 Shakelton is known today as a true leader and he deserves that as his enduring legacy but if you want to read about a successful journey to the south pole I recommend Cherry-Garard’s book.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    4. The Measure<\/strong><\/em> by Nikki Erlick *
    January 15, 2024
    Everyone receives a box with a string inside on their 22nd birthday.\u00a0 The length of the string is the length of their lives.\u00a0 The theme is that a life is more than the length of its string.\u00a0 It could have been interesting if Erlick had one iota of talent at writing but instead her writing style was that of a high school senior trying to complete her creative writing assignment before Christmas break.\u00a0 The sentences were boring, simplistic, unadorned, and without any kind of literary references or metaphors.\u00a0 There were multiple instances of gratuitous foul language and the sentences in general were like being stuck sitting next to two Millennials conversing on the bus unable to block out their boring trivial conversation.\u00a0 Erick at least didn’t pepper each sentence with multiple superfluous “likes” but that was little comfort to get me through this poorly written book.<\/p>\n

    3. Galileo’s Daughter\u00a0 <\/strong><\/em>by Dava Sobel * * * *\u00a0 (Audiobook)
    January 11, 2024
    This is the second book I have read by Dava Sobel and it is every bit as well written and well researched as the first one, Glass Universe<\/strong><\/em>, was that I read last year.\u00a0 \u00a0In this book Sobel tells us all about Galileo’s life including his mistress from Venice, Marina Gamba, with whom he had two illegitimate daughters and one illegitimate son.\u00a0 At the time Galileo was living in Padua and he could not marry her because of her Venitian background.\u00a0 The son, Vincenzo, was legitimized in 1619 but the two daughters were considered unmarriable due to their illegitimacy and were sent off to the San Mateo convent by Galileo.\u00a0 One daughter, Virginia, took the name Suar Maria Celeste, and remained in constant contact with Galileo through voluminous letters that still survive today.\u00a0 The other daughter, who became Suar Maria Archangelo, refused all contact with Galileo after being sent to the convent for life.\u00a0 The convent was more like a prison and the women lived an austere and bleak existence barely surviving and at times almost starving.\u00a0 This book interweaves Galileo’s important discoveries and struggles with the Catholic Church with the loving adoring letters from Suar Maria Celeste whom Galileo obviously shared a mutual love.\u00a0 He complied with her every request for necessities for Suar Maria Celeste and she no doubt provided great comfort to Galileo during his public humiliation and tribulations with the odious Pope Urban VIII.\u00a0 Maria Suar Celeste died young in the convent but was buried beneath Galileo.\u00a0 The letters are touching and heartbreaking.\u00a0 The book is so lovingly written that even though you might know the outcome of Galileo’s struggles with the church you still hang on every word in anticipation of the next letter from Suar Maria Celeste and it will reduce you to tears when she dies.\u00a0 Excellent book.\u00a0 I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n

    2. Fahrenheit 451<\/strong><\/em> by Ray Bradbury * * *\u00a0
    January 5, 2024
    In this famous science fiction classic, Bradbury shows great prescience in predicting the slow human decline in intellect and curiosity.\u00a0 His book takes place around 2022 and while we are not quite burning books in 2024, we humans are very much banning them in masse in some states in the US.\u00a0 \u00a0In the novel it is illegal to own books and if you are caught with them the “firemen” come and burn the books and your house and even you in some cases.\u00a0 \u00a0I enjoyed the book but its starting to show its age, not in the topic but in the way Bradbury presents it.\u00a0 All of the characters are men except for our hero’s wife, Millie, who is a completely vapid dunderhead.\u00a0 It was completely unconvincing by today’s standards that Montag would marry and love such a simpleton.\u00a0 It seemed like they had nothing in common at all.\u00a0 All the “firemen” (I put it in quotes because they do not put out fires but start them and not because we call them Firefighters today) are men and when Montag escapes to the countryside and encounters are camp of likeminded people they are all men and all the books they quote and all the book writers, every single one, are men.\u00a0 At one point during this encounter one of the men says that their heirs will also carry out their mission of memorizing books, and I thought to myself, “how will you all do that without any women?”\u00a0 While parthenogenesis is possible, I don’t think it was even known about at the time this novel was written.\u00a0 Bradbury can be excused for the blatant sexism inherent in the book but it is amazing that he could anticipate so nearly precisely the dumbing down of America but not that its women would lose the shackles and drudgery of being condemned to be a housewife.\u00a0 \u00a0Still, I recommend the book.\u00a0 As a dystopian novel it is far more uplifting than, say, 1984<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    1. Wuthering Heights<\/strong><\/em> by Emily Bronte * * * * *
    January 2, 2024
    Emily Bronte’s masterpiece was published under a pseudonym no doubt due to its unusually cruel and at times violent characters.\u00a0 \u00a0If you watch the 1939 movie with the handsome Lawrence Olivier you might feel sympathy for Heathcliff and be astonished when you read the book to find out the true depths of Heathcliff’s unquenchable bitterness and cruelty.\u00a0 \u00a0The movie leaves off at the end of part one of the book but it is in part two that the psychological drama truly unfolds and you understand that Nellie is not just being overly cautious and protective of little Cathy; Nellie understands that Heathcliff really is a brute.\u00a0 Yes, he had a cruel childhood full of misery but he not only cannot overcome his miserable life but is intent on inflicting similar pain and cruelty on everyone around him as well.\u00a0 You simply cannot put this book down until the end hoping for something good to happen but in the interim cannot help but be spellbound by Bronte’s talented and original exploration of the psychology at play in a tormented and demented upbringing both of Heathcliff and in a repetition in later generations of Herndon as well.\u00a0 What a great book.<\/p>\n

    BOOKS I READ IN 2023<\/b><\/p>\n

    21. The Fraud\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Zadie Smith * * *\u00a0
    December 26, 2023
    In her latest book, acclaimed author, Zadie Smith, explores what it means to be true to oneself and also what we can really know about other people all within the backdrop of the true crime story of the 19th century fraudster, Orton, who claimed to be the wealthy inheritor of a vast estate, Roger Tichborne, who was thought to have died at sea.\u00a0 \u00a0Orton is an obvious fraud but the working classes latch onto him and take up his cause despite the inconsistencies and improbability of his story.\u00a0 Orton’s best witness at his two trials is the steadfast former Jamaican slave, Bogle.\u00a0 \u00a0But the main character of the book is the indomitable Eliza abandoned by her sorry husband who runs off with the maid and Eliza’s son at the beginning of the book.\u00a0 Eliza has a gift for seeing through people to their core.\u00a0 She takes up many causes during the book including abolitionism, feminism, and worker’s rights and does her best to stay true to herself.\u00a0 \u00a0 She begins attending the famous trial of Orton with her cousin’s second wife, a complete imbecile who blindly supports Orton while secretly writing a book about it.\u00a0 In doing so, she becomes intrigued by Bogle and gets him to agree to an interview in which Bogle tells her about his time as a slave in Jamaica.\u00a0 I didn’t enjoy this part of the book.\u00a0 It went on for too long and seemed to stray too far from the rest of the story.\u00a0 I had a hard time plowing through\u00a0 this part.\u00a0 Smith was at her best when pitting Eliza against the male chauvinists who show up at her cousin’s many gatherings.\u00a0 Her cousin is a prolific fiction writer and friends with Charles Dickens (whom Eliza detests) and William Makepeace Thackeray, and another sort of fraudster at the heart of the story.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

    20. Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists 2nd Edition <\/strong><\/em>by Professor Richard Wolfson (audiobook) * * * *
    December 12, 2023
    I started this audiobook a long time ago and never finished it until now.\u00a0 It’s very well presented by Professor Wolfson.\u00a0 He explains relativity and the other concepts of physics in very easy to understand language and uses examples that make everything very clear and in doing so only uses a bare minimum of mathematical equations.\u00a0 \u00a0I enjoyed reading this book and feel I have a much better understanding of relativity having read it.\u00a0 Professor Wolfson explained it so much better than Richard Gott did in Welcome to the Universe.\u00a0 If you are a non-scientist but just have curiosity about understanding physics better I highly recommend this Great Courses course on relativity and quantum mechanics.\u00a0 Excellent presentation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    19. Glass Universe <\/strong><\/em>by Dava Sobel * * * * *\u00a0
    December 7, 2023
    In 1884, Edward Pickering took over as director of the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.\u00a0 Pickering was interested in photometry, the study of the spectra of stars by photographing them.\u00a0 One of his duties as director was to obtain funding and shortly after he took over some funding became available from Anna Draper, the wife of Henry Draper, who had also been photographing the stars on glass plates.\u00a0 Mrs. Draper donated the glass plates and some of Henry Draper’s telescopes to Harvard College Observatory and pledged annual funding to honor her late husband’s work and legacy.\u00a0 Pickering began hiring women to work for the observatory to examine the plates and categorize the spectra of stars.\u00a0 He famously hired his housemaid, Williamena Fleming as one of the “computers” and also famous astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and many others.\u00a0 In this fantastic wonderful book Ms. Sobel engagingly unfolds the story of Pickering, the women computers he hired who added so much to our understanding of the universe, and the role of the Harvard College Observatory in general.\u00a0 Ms. Sobel handles the technical nature of the topic in an easy to understand way and tells the story in way that brings the characters to life.\u00a0 I could not put the book down.\u00a0 I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in astronomy or the role of women in the work force in early 19th US, or just want to know more about a special part of history.\u00a0 \u00a0Read this book.<\/p>\n

    18. Native Peoples of North America: Great Courses <\/strong><\/em>(audiobook) by Daniel Cobb *\u00a0 *
    November 14, 2023
    I have read many books about Native Americans but this was my least favorite of all of them.\u00a0 \u00a0First of all, Daniel Cobb is not a good orator.\u00a0 His speech is halting and he has a poor cadence.\u00a0 But aside from that, I disagreed with him many times during his dissertation.\u00a0 He irritatingly mispronounced Appalachia multiple times.\u00a0 He called Charles Mann a historian, a moniker I disagree with completely.\u00a0 \u00a0He spoke approvingly of his book, 1491,\u00a0<\/em>a book I hated and also disagreed with.\u00a0 He called Dee Brown’s book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee<\/em>, “revisionist history.”\u00a0 But the thing that bothered me the most was how he glowingly described Indian Gaming, something I profoundly disagree with and not for any of the reasons cited in his course.\u00a0 According to Cobb many non-Indians disapprove of Indian Gaming because of its “get rich quick” aspect and because they resent Indians making money from gaming.\u00a0 That has nothing to do with my supreme disagreement with Indian Gaming.\u00a0 I hate it because the Indians who supposedly value the land above all else and spent the past 500 years trying to hold on to their sacred ancestral lands, debase and defile it with monstrous casinos and hotels in formerly untamed wilderness.\u00a0 Speaking of wilderness, Cobb also claimed that the Indians did not consider the American landscape wilderness and this is also a claim made by Mann in his ridiculous horrible book, 1491<\/em>.\u00a0 It is an idiotic claim.\u00a0 Sure, the Indians had proscribed burns, grew crops, managed the lands they inhabited, and had large settlements at Cahokia and other places but that doesn’t mean the entire contiguous United States at that time was tamed and not wilderness.\u00a0 What an outlandish claim asserted by Mann and repeated by Cobb without evidence.\u00a0 This was a terrible book and I do not recommend it.\u00a0 There are many other much better books about Indians by Indians and non-Indians.\u00a0 Maybe they are not as comprehensive as this book was covering Indians from as the first encounters with white people all they way through to the present, but you can read much better books about individual periods of time, that don’t make such appalling claims and assertions and certainly do not praise Indian Gaming as the savior of Indian poverty they way Cobb does.\u00a0 It was sickening to listen to this book not because Americans abused Indian, we most certainly did, but because of the way, Cobb pretends that Indians have survived all of the assaults, murders, theft of lands, betrayals, etc. by setting up hideous gaming casinos and hotels.\u00a0 I profoundly disagree.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    17. The Iliad <\/strong><\/em>by Homer, translated by Stephen Mitchell and read by Alfred Molina. * * * *
    November 7, 2023 (audio book)
    This great epic poem covers the end of the Trojan War and focuses on the actions of Achilles.\u00a0 Given that it is a poem, I felt that listening to it was better than reading it.\u00a0 The writing is superb but there was a little too much geneology and way too many graphically described splattered heads and severed body parts.\u00a0 My favorite part of the book was when Athena, daughter of Zeus, dressed up in Zeus’s armor and helmet and descended to earth to attack Ares, the god of war, who was slaughtering Achaeans relentlessly.\u00a0 Ares then returned to Olympus and complained to Zeus that he allows Athena to do whatever she wants, to which Zeus retorts that Ares is his least favorite child.\u00a0 This is one of the greatest poems of all time and I enjoyed listening to it even though I have read it before.\u00a0 The greatness of the poem transcends the graphic violence which was very hard to listen to at times.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    16. The Wager <\/strong><\/em>by David Grann * * * *
    October 23, 2023
    This well researched and well written book relates the compelling and ill-fated true story of the British expedition to intercept the Spanish Galleon.\u00a0 \u00a0One of the ships, the Centurion, commanded by Admiral Ashton, intercepts and defeats the Spanish Galleon and brings home the booty but at an enormous cost in money, human misery, and loss of human life, all in the name of expanding the British empire.\u00a0 The capture of the Spanish Galleon is a side story to the heart of the book which involves a young officer commanding a ship, the Wager, that is shipwrecked on a remote island off the coast of Chile and the barbarism that ensues.\u00a0 \u00a0One of the survivors is no less than the grand-father of Lord Byron.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    15. Welcome to the Universe <\/strong><\/em>by Neil de Grasse Tyson, Michael Strauss, and Richard Gott * * *\u00a0
    October 7, 2023\u00a0
    This book is based on an introductory astronomy course taught by Tyson, Strauss, and Gott at Princeton.\u00a0 I enjoyed immensely the early chapters written by Tyson but got bogged down in the middle chapters written by Strauss which contained an inordinate amount of math equations and highly technical information and became dismayed at the end of the book in the tedious chapters by Gott about time travel and ultimately decided I did not like the book at all when I arrived at the conclusion written exclusively by Gott, when he declared that we, humans should be striving to inhabit other galaxies.\u00a0 I could not disagree more!\u00a0 If you just read the chapters written by Tyson they are engaging and interesting.\u00a0 After that you can just skim over the chapters written by Strauss which are covered in much better and easier to understand books and just don’t bother with Gott’s final chapters at all which are just nonsense.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    14. She Caught the Light: Williamina Stevens Fleming: Astronomer <\/strong><\/em>by Kathryn Lasky * * * *
    September 30, 2023
    \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In this brilliant children’s book Newbury-award winning author, Kathryn Lasky tells the awe inspring and compelling true story of Williamina Fleming, a Scottish immigrant abandoned upon arrival in the US by her worthless husband while pregnant.\u00a0 Ms. Fleming began working as a maid for Charles Pickering who hired her to work at the Harvard College Observatory to work as a “computer” computing data from glass plates about the spectra of stars.\u00a0 Ms. Fleming against all odds became proficient at this arduous task and in the process discovered over 50 nebulae including the famous Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion.\u00a0 The book is beautifully illustrated by Julianna Swaney.\u00a0 All little girls should read this book.<\/p>\n

    13. Oresteia by <\/strong><\/em>Aeschylus * * *\u00a0
    July 30, 2023
    I didn’t care for it.\u00a0 This is the famous trilogy by Greek writer Aeschylus who lived around 500 BC.\u00a0 The first part is Agamemnon, second part Libation Bearers, and the finale is Eumenides.\u00a0 Agamemnon just returned victorious after 10 years at war with the Trojans, with his concubine, Cassandra.\u00a0 It was a silly war caused by Paris abducting Helen and taking her to Troy.\u00a0 When Agamemnon returns to Greece, his wife, Clytemnestra, brutally murders him because before he left for the ridiculous war he sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia.\u00a0 Clytemnestra rules as the queen with her new boyfriend, Aegisthus, and that’s the end of part one.\u00a0 In part two, Clytemnestra has a nightmare and in the morning orders her daughter, Electra, to pour libations on the grave of Agamemnon.\u00a0 At her father’s grave Electra meets her brother, Orestes, who had been in exile and they plan to kill Clytemnestra as ordered by Apollo.\u00a0 Orestes kills Clytemnestra and her lover.\u00a0 In part three Orestes goes to trial before Athena and an Athenian jury for the murder and is exonerated because the jurors feel he was justified in killing Clytemnestra for her treachery.\u00a0 This is the part I disagreed with and caused me to dislike the book.\u00a0 The family was cursed and doomed all along by earlier gruesome events whereby someone in the house of Atreus chopped up the children and cooked and fed them to the father.\u00a0 But Orestes’s actions serve to bring justice to the house of Atreus and to bring humanity back to Athens.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    12. Room with a View<\/strong><\/em> by E. M. Forster * * * *\u00a0
    July 15, 2023
    Excellent 1908 novel by English novelist, E.M. Forster about a smart young lady, Lucy, coming of age in the constricting confines of Edwardian England.\u00a0 The novel opens with Lucy traveling to Florence with her ridiculous cousin, Charlotte Bartlett.\u00a0 They are unsatisfied with their room because it has no view and two gentlemen overhear them and offer the two ladies their room which does have a view.\u00a0 Lucy and Charlotte move into their room and this sets into motion a series of events that allow Lucy to become her own woman and avoid what would have no doubt been a disastrous marriage to the snobbish Cecil.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    11. The Devine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno * * *\u00a0
    <\/strong><\/em>June 27, 2023
    It took me a long time to finish this book and I was only able to understand all the references at all because of the excellent notations at the end of each Canto provided by the translator of this edition.\u00a0 \u00a0In this volume of this famous poem, Dante descends into purgatory and hell lead by Virgil.\u00a0 In each canto Dante encounters people he knows from Italy.\u00a0 \u00a0 They are punished in various ways depending on the severity of their crimes and this gives us an idea of Dante’s thinking on what he considers the most egregious and detestable crimes.\u00a0 \u00a0 It is widely considered the greatest of Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature but I just didn’t like it.\u00a0 I’m glad I finally finished it and I have no intention of torturing myself by reading Paradise<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    10. The Complete Works of Shakespeare * ** *
    <\/strong><\/em>May 22, 2023
    I finally finished the complete works of Shakespeare today.\u00a0 After finishing all of the plays, I read his two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and all 154 sonnets plus Shakespeare’s songs. Venus and Adonis is about Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempted seduction of the very handsome, Adonis.\u00a0 Adonis spurns Venus as he would rather go hunting.\u00a0 Unfortunately, in the end he is fatally wounded by a boar while hunting.\u00a0 The Rape of Lucrece is a narrative poem about the chaste Lucretia who is happily married to Collantine.\u00a0 While Collantine is away, Tarquin sneaks into Lucretia’s room and threatens to kill her if he doesn’t get his way with her.\u00a0 Tarquin rapes Lucretia.\u00a0 She tells Collantine but decides to commit suicide rather than live a life of shame.\u00a0 I enjoyed all of the sonnets which cover the themes of love, passage of time, mortality, beauty, and infidelity.<\/p>\n

    9. The Tempest <\/strong><\/em>by William Shakespeare * * *\u00a0
    <\/strong><\/em>April 23, 2023
    This play opens with a violent storm which carries the king of Naples, Alonso, his son, Ferdinand, and his brother, Sebastian along with a courtier Gonzalo and Antonio, the Duke of Milan onto an island.\u00a0 From the island, Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, and his daughter, Miranda, watch the storm.\u00a0 Prospero tells Miranda how he was robbed of his Dukedom by his treacherous brother, Antonio.\u00a0 Following the coup, with the aid of Gonzalo, Prospero and his young daughter escaped in a boat along with Gonzalo’s book of magic.\u00a0 Upon arriving on the island Prospero enslaved the inhabitant, Caliban, and rescued a spirit, Ariel.\u00a0 When the others land on the island Prospero plots to win his dukedom back.\u00a0 King Alonso is in despair because he believes his son, Ferdinand, has died but he actually landed on another side of the island where he meets and falls in love with Miranda.\u00a0 With the help of Ariel, Prospero eventually wins back his dukedom, approves of the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand, frees Ariel, and all is resolved.<\/p>\n

    8. Cymbeline <\/strong><\/em>by William Shakespeare * * * *
    April 16, 2023
    Cymbeline is the king of Brittian as the Roman Empire’s vassal.\u00a0 He is married to an evil queen and they have one son, the blustering idiot, Cloten.\u00a0 Cymbeline has a daughter, Imogen, and two sons by a previous now deceased queen.\u00a0 The two sons, Arviragus and Guiderius, were stolen at birth by Belarius, a banished lord who raises them in a cave.\u00a0 Imogen marries Posthumus, a gentleman in the court.\u00a0 Cymbeline does not approve of the marriage and banishes Posthumus.\u00a0 Imogen gives Posthumus a ring and Posthumus gives her a bracelet.\u00a0 In banishment Posthumus enters into a bet with his ostensible friend, Jachimo, that Jachimo cannot seduce his loyal bride, Imogen.\u00a0 Jachimo tries unsuccessfully to seduce Imogen and when he fails he hides in a trunk in Imogen’s bedroom and steals her bracelet and notes a mole on a private area of her body as proof he will present to Posthumus of his seduction.\u00a0 What kind of “friend” would do such an odious thing?\u00a0 When Jachimo presents his proof to Posthumus of his adultery with Imogen, Posthumus becomes outraged and orders his servant, Pisanio, to kill Imogen.\u00a0 \u00a0The evil queen meanwhile is plotting to kill Imogen also and to kill Cymbeline with some poison she has asked the doctor to make for her which she says she intends to use on cats and dogs.\u00a0 The doctor is suspicious and gives the queen a sleeping potion instead.\u00a0 Queen gives the medicine to Pisanio and tells him to give it to Imogen.\u00a0 Pisanio tells Imogen to dress up as a boy and escape to Italy.\u00a0 He gives her the medicine which he believes will quell her anxiety.\u00a0 She falls asleep and is found by the abducted sons of Cymbeline who are living in a cave.\u00a0 They think she is a boy but they love her instantly.\u00a0 Cloten shows up on a quest to rape Imogen and force her to marry him.\u00a0 He encounters Guiderius whom he threatens with a sword and Guiderius beheads the vile Cloten.\u00a0 They throw the head in the river and place the body next to Imogen disguised as a boy, whom they think is dead because she passed out after taking the potion.\u00a0 She wakes up and finds the headless body of Cloten whom she believes to be Posthumus.\u00a0 She is grief stricken.\u00a0 Caius, a roman soldier shows up demanding that Cymbeline pay tribute to Rome but he refuses at the insistence of the evil queen.\u00a0 Rome attacks and Posthumus valiantly fights the Romans back.\u00a0 During the battle he has a chance to kill Jachimo, who is Roman but spares him.\u00a0 \u00a0Brittian wins the battle and Posthumus is arrested.\u00a0 He falls asleep in jail and Jupiter comes to him and leaves a note on his chest that everything should end well.\u00a0 Posthumus is released from prison and taken to Cymbeline and Caius, Imogen, the two abducted sons are there as well.\u00a0 Jachimo admits to his heinous deceit.\u00a0 A messenger comes and announces that the queen has died.\u00a0 Imogen’s identity is revealed as well as the two abducted sons.\u00a0 Everyone is forgiven.<\/p>\n

    7. Pericles, Prince of Tyre <\/strong><\/em>by William Shakespeare * * * * * +
    April 9, 2023
    Antiochus, King of Antioch is having an incestuous relationship with his daughter.\u00a0 He tells his kingdom that anyone who wishes to marry his daughter must solve a riddle and if he fails he will be executed.\u00a0 Pericles, the Prince of Tyre, tells Antiochus that he would like to attempt to solve the riddle which he does.\u00a0 But the solution to the riddle reveals the incestuous relationship and Antiochus cannot have his incest revealed to the kingdom.\u00a0 So, he hires Thaliard to kill Pericles but Thaliard learns of the incest and decides not to follow through with the king’s request and Pericles is able to flee from Antioch.\u00a0 He leaves his faithful friend, Helicanus, in charge of Tyre in his absence.\u00a0 He goes to Tarsus where King Cleon and his wife, Dionyza are bemoaning the famine that he plagued their kingdom.\u00a0 Pericles rescues their nation by giving them corn and then sets sail back to Tyre at the request of Helicanus and en route Pericles is shipwrecked at Pentapolis.<\/p>\n

    6. Timon of Athens <\/strong><\/em>by William Shakespeare * * * *\u00a0
    <\/strong><\/em>April 7, 2023
    Timon was a wealthy Athenian who gave money and gifts lavishly to his friends and those in need.\u00a0 His real friends warned him that the recipients were merely sycophants.\u00a0 Timon has a feast and afterwards finds out he is broke.\u00a0 He asks everyone for money and all refuse.\u00a0 So he rejects society and man and retreats to a cave where he finds some gold.\u00a0 He gives the gold to Alcibiades and tells him to sack Athens.\u00a0 Timon’s loyal servant, Flavius, comes to the cave and begs Timon to come back to Athens but he refuses and gives some of the gold to Flavius.\u00a0 Timon’s writes his epitaph and dies.\u00a0 Alcibiades goes to Athens to sack it.<\/p>\n

    5. A Winter’s Tale <\/strong><\/em>by William Shakespeare * * * *\u00a0
    April 2, 2023
    This was a very strange play in which the king of Sicilia, Leontes, becomes insanely jealous and convinced his pregnant wife is having an affair with his best friend, Polixenes, king of Bohemia.\u00a0 Leontes orders his servant, Camillo, to kill Polixenes,\u00a0 Instead Camillo alerts Polixenes and the two flee.\u00a0 Leontes then publicly accuses his wife, Hermione, of infidelity and throws her in prison.\u00a0 Leontes sends a servant to the oracle at Delphi to ask whether Hermione is guilty.\u00a0 The son of Hermione and Leontes is horrified and dies.\u00a0 While in prison Hermione gives birth to a girl.\u00a0 Her friend, Paulina, goes to prison and asks Hermione to give the girl to her to present to Leontes thinking it will assauge him but instead he calls the child a bastard and asks Paulina’s husband, Antigionus, to take the bastard child away.\u00a0 Hermione dies in prison and soon thereafter the servant returns with the verdict from the oracle who says Hermione is innocent.\u00a0 Antigionus takes the baby girl, whom he names Perdita, to the coast of Bohemia and leaves her there with some gold and tokens.\u00a0 She is found by a Shepard who raises her.\u00a0 Perdita grows up and falls in love with Florizel, the son of Polixenes.\u00a0 They get married but Polixenes is horrified that his heir is marrying a shepard girl. Florizel and Perdita disguise themselves and sail to Sicilia but they are betrayed and found out.\u00a0 The shepard then reveals that he had found the child on the coast and that he has gold and tokens that he found nearby proving that Perdita is the long lost daughter of Leontes.\u00a0 \u00a0Everyone goes with Paulina where she unveils a very realistic statue of Hermione and while there Hermione comes to life.\u00a0 Paulina was one of the best female characters in all of Shakespeare’s plays.\u00a0 \u00a0She was strong-willed and outspoken and didn’t back down.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    4. Coriolanus <\/strong><\/em>by William Shakespeare * * * *
    March 14, 2023\u00a0
    The people are revolting because they don’t have enough food but Menenius dissuades them until Caius Martius comes along and riles them up again but then an invading army, the Volscians, come lead by Aufidius to attack Rome.\u00a0 Caius Martius valiantly fights back and defeats the Volscians but fails to kill Aufidius.\u00a0 Afterwards the Roman senators appoint Caius Martius consul and the people call him Coriolanus because he defeated the Volscians at Coriole.\u00a0 But he must win the approval of the people.\u00a0 He refuses to bear his arms and show his wounds and the people reject him and indeed, they exile him from Rome.\u00a0 \u00a0Coriolanus is outraged but has nowhere to go so he finds Audifius and allies himself with his former enemy to attack Rome.\u00a0 Coriolanus’s mother, his wife, and his son come and beg Coriolanus not to attack Rome.\u00a0 After much begging Coriolunus concedes to their wishes and breaks with Aufidius.\u00a0 They all return to Rome but Aufidius comes right behind with some of his soldiers and kills Coriolanus.\u00a0 Then he feels bad about it and agrees to honor him with a funeral.<\/p>\n

    3. Antony and Cleopatra <\/strong><\/em>by William Shakespeare * * * *\u00a0
    February 23, 2023\u00a0
    After Julius Caesar was murdered, his son, Octavius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Lepidus, track down Brutus at Phillipi and kill him and the three share power as rulers of Rome.\u00a0 While in Alexandria, Antony becomes enamored with Cleopatra and rumors start to swirl in both Rome and Alexandria.\u00a0 Cleopatra is the mother to Julius Caesar’s illegitimate son, Caesarion, and this contributes to the gossip and causes a rift between Octavius and Antony.\u00a0 Meanwhile, a disaffected senator, Pompey, gathers forces to challenge the three rulers and Antony learns also that his wife, Fulvia, has died forcing him to return to Rome.\u00a0 In Rome, Cleopatra is out of sight and out of mind and to make peace with Octavius, Antony agrees to marry Octavius’s sister, Octavia.\u00a0 But Antony and Octavius have disagreements and Antony returns to Alexandria and enthrones himself with Cleopatra as king and queen.\u00a0 Octavius then declares war on Egypt.\u00a0 There are three battles.\u00a0 The first is at sea and Octavius defeats the Egyptians when Antony flees the battle.\u00a0 He is ashamed and rallies the troops for a second battle which he wins.\u00a0 In the third battle which Antony decides to wage at sea, the Egyptian mariners are muleters and desert.\u00a0 Antony thinks that Cleopatra deceived and was behind the desertion.\u00a0 She is so enraged that she retreats to her monument and tells her assistant to tell Antony she has killed herself.\u00a0 \u00a0When Antony learns of this distressing news he asks his servant to stab him.\u00a0 The servant refuses and instead kills himself.\u00a0 Antony then falls on the servant’s sword mortally wounding himself.\u00a0 His servants carry him wounded to the monument where he dies in Cleopatra’s arms.\u00a0 Octavius then comes to Alexandria and tells Cleopatra that he won’t become her lord but she doesn’t believe him and is ashamed to be paraded before all of Rome to be scorned and puts a deadly asp on her arm and dies.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

    \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a02. The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human<\/strong><\/em> by Siddhartha Mukherjee
    * * * 1\/2
    February 18, 2023\u00a0
    My brother gave me this book for Christmas.\u00a0 I don’t normally read books about medicine but I found this one fascinating.\u00a0 Mukherjee is a brilliant Rhodes Scholar who graduated from Stanford, Oxford, and obtained his MD from Harvard Medical School.\u00a0 He is currently associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.\u00a0 He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.\u00a0 In this book he explains how the cell was first detected in the 1600s by Robert Hooke and Antonie Leeuwenhoek looking through single lens microscopes.\u00a0 From there he traces the history of the cell and how scientists discovered that the cell is the basic building block of the entire body and how this ultimately lead to therapeutic manipulation of cells to treat all manner of maladies from hip fractures to sickle cell anemia and beyond.\u00a0 The book was very well written in plain easy to understand language.\u00a0 Mukherjee is a gifted writer but he had one irritating habit of misusing the phrase “beg the question” when what he really meant was things lead to further inquiry.\u00a0 “Begs the question” is a phrase in English that is frequently misused.\u00a0 It actually means that something raises an issue that has not been dealt with and not as Mukherjee uses it to mean that the thing needs further elucidation.\u00a0 Other than this irritating habit, his writing was lucid and engaging.\u00a0 I recommend this book.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The Tragedie of MacBeth<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * * *\u00a0
      January 10, 2023
      MacBeth is a general and one of the sons of the King of Scotland, Duncan.\u00a0 As the play opens MacBeth and another general, Banquo, have just defeated Norway in a great battle and MacBeth’s father, Duncan, rewards MacBeth with the Thane of Cawdor.\u00a0 The next day MacBeth and Banquo encounter three witches in the woods, who tell MacBeth that he will one day be the king of Scotland.\u00a0 MacBeth becomes overwhelmed with ambition and with the encouragement of his wife, Lady MacBeth, decides to murder Duncan.\u00a0 \u00a0Lady MacBeth plies the guards with alcohol and while they are inebriated MacBeth stabs Duncan and then places the bloody swords in the hands of the guards.\u00a0 MacBeth then goes on a killing spree, killing the guards and later still others\u00a0 \u00a0MacBeth’s brothers flee along with the nobles MacDuff, Lennox, Rosse, and others.\u00a0 MacBeth leads everyone to believe his brothers killed Duncan and that they are showing their guilt by fleeing.\u00a0 The general, Banquo, remains MacBeth’s loyal friend but MacBeth is consumed with paranoia and fear of being caught in his heinous crime and therefore, also murders Banquo and his son, Fleance.\u00a0 MacBeth goes back into the forest to find the witches and find out what will become of him.\u00a0 The witches tell him he can only be killed by a man not born of a woman.\u00a0 Malcolm, MacDuff, Siward, Lennox, Rosse, and other nobles gather an army to defeat the villian, MacBeth.\u00a0 While awaiting their arrival MacBeth is informed that his wife has died.\u00a0 MacBeth overcome with grief gives the famous speech: “She should have died hereafter.\u00a0 There would have been a time for such a word.\u00a0 Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.\u00a0 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.\u00a0 Out, out brief candle!\u00a0 Life’s but a walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.\u00a0 It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”\u00a0 The nobles hide behind tree branches of the Birnan Wood as predicted by the witches.\u00a0 Siward’s son, Young Siward, finds MacBeth and confronts him but MacBeth slays young Siward.\u00a0 But just after, MacDuff encounters MacBeth as well and MacDuff tells MacBeth that he was ripped from his mother’s womb prematurely (born by Caesarian section) and then he chops of MacBeth’s head and MacDuff becomes King of Scotland.\u00a0 The play is one of Shakespeare’s greatest and a powerful portrayal of the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition and pursuit of power at any cost.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Books I Read in 2022:<\/b><\/p>\n

      <\/b>18. Bad Indians\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>by Deborah A. Miranda * * * * *\u00a0
      December 31, 2022
      I was listening to KQED one day when they were airing a program called the California Report which often highlights indigenous people of California.\u00a0 This particular day the reporter was interviewing Deborah Miranda on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of her book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir<\/em>.\u00a0 Ms. Miranda had released a tenth anniversary edition and was talking about the book and the additions for the new release and also just generally about the book.\u00a0 Sadly, I had never heard of the book before but I am grateful to KQED and their excellent program, the California Report for bringing public awareness to this important book which should be required reading for all Californians.\u00a0 Having grown up in another state I was not aware that until 2016, California required all fourth graders to complete a project on the California Missions which tend to glorify them and ignore their violent and ignominious histories.\u00a0 Miranda’s mother was of European descent while her father was descended from indigenous tribes of California and born on a reservation called Tuolumne Rancheria.\u00a0 The tribe, Ohlone-Castanoan-Esselen strives to this day to achieve federal recognition.\u00a0 \u00a0 Miranda’s memoir intertwines the story of the survival of her tribe from the brutality of the Mission era with her violent and brutal upbringing by her alcoholic criminal father, himself a victim of intergenerational trauma.\u00a0 At times the book was hard to read but at other times it was uplifting and inspirational.\u00a0 The format of the book is unconventional but always engaging and interesting.\u00a0 I highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to know the truth about the California Missions and the indecent and approbrious way in which the Catholic Missions enslaved native California Indians to build the missions (they basically made slaves of the Indians and treated them much the same way blacks were treated on the plantations in the south) and also learn Ms. Miranda’s story, her indominatable will to survive and her pusuit of recognition for her tribe and quest to honor her ancestors at the same time.\u00a0 This is a truly great book and I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n

      17. Photographing the Night Sky<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>by Alyn Wallace * * * 1\/2
      December 16, 2022
      I stumbled across Alyn Wallace on YouTube one day and was impressed with his introduction which shows him standing on a rock and throwing his arm out as the Milky Way becomes visible and then writing his name across the sky.\u00a0 He calls himself a landscape astrophotographer, a description I find too long and not really descriptive enough of the type of photographer he is.\u00a0 He is a very talented photographer of the night sky or what I call skyscapes and I have found many of his YouTube videos very informative and useful.\u00a0 He gives out advice on getting that shot almost freely.\u00a0 I say almost because his videos are chock full of annoying ads and some of the ads are embedded with him telling you to get this or that in the middle of the tutorial.\u00a0 So annoying.\u00a0 I am not interested in Square Space; I have a web site and it is free from Freepress!\u00a0 Also one of his ongoing videos is called What’s in the Night Sky and in it he insists on mispronouncing Auriga even after I left a comment telling him how to pronounce it (eventually he started saying Auriga correctly).\u00a0 (By the way it’s pronounced oh-RYE-ga).\u00a0 But he has some good information if you don’t mind all the obnoxious ads.\u00a0 So, when I found out he had published a book about photographing the night sky I was intrigued and bought the paperback version of his book.\u00a0 Mine is signed by Wallace (although it looks like a stamp to me).\u00a0 I just finished the book and it is mostly what he advertises it as which is an encyclopedia on what I call skyscape photography.\u00a0 It’s a very large book.\u00a0 So, I am glad I bought the paperback version and I’m sure I will be consulting it frequently in the future on various topics. For example, when I go to Austin for the next total solar eclipse, I will be very interested in reading more in depth on his techniques and recommendations for photographing eclipses although you can find almost everything in this book on his YouTube Channel if you don’t mind all the horrible ads.\u00a0 There were a few annoying things about the book just like there are annoying things about his YouTube channel.\u00a0 He says some bizarre things and there were many errors which he outlines in one of his videos.\u00a0 At one point he said the moon is light pollution which is ridiculous since the moon is not artificial.\u00a0 On page 320, he says that he took a single exposure of Orion with a 16-35mm lens for 120 seconds and yet there are no star trails which is not possible.\u00a0 On page 321, he has himself in an image far away from the camera but never explains how this was done.\u00a0 On noctilucent clouds on page 463, he says to face the direction of the sun below the horizon, northwest to northeast.\u00a0 What?\u00a0 I love photographing the night sky especially the moon, planets, conjunctions, sunsets, I hope one day a lightning strike and a total solar eclipse but I found that when I flipped through the book and looked at all those dark pictures altogether I found myself craving the sun and some light.\u00a0 \u00a0All of his pictures are well composed and on a technical level almost perfect (well except for that terrible selfie phone picture of him and a friend wearing solar glasses and with the shadow of the phone in the picture– horrible) but there are a lot of his pictures and they are all dark.\u00a0 \u00a0In a sense the book is more like a compendium of his photos.\u00a0 But my biggest criticism is that because mostly the book is a showcase of his photography, it left little room for the recommendations and guides and therefore, the print was inscrutable and I don’t mean hard to understand: I mean it was so tiny that at times I had to get out a magnifying glass in order to see the fine print.\u00a0 Surely he could have made the print a little bit bigger than that!\u00a0 It was very hard to read the book for any length of time without having to rest my eyes for a while.\u00a0 However, overall I think he has some good tips and advice for getting good skyscapes and processing them.\u00a0 I think I will keep it on the shelf like a reference book as he intended it.<\/p>\n

      16. The Tragedy of King Lear <\/em><\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * * * *
      December 12, 2022
      Oh so sad but so great.\u00a0 This play was so sad, in fact, that for many years it was not performed and instead a different version with a happier ending was performed but now it is performed regularly the way Shakespeare wrote it with the unbearably sad ending.\u00a0 The play opens with Lear, King of Britian, deciding to retire and give all his land and kingdom to his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia.\u00a0 He asks each first to profess their devotion to him.\u00a0 Goneril and Regan flatter him shamelessly but Cordelia refuses insisting that this is an unfair request by her father since when she eventually marries she would be devoted to her husband in place of her father.\u00a0 King Lear is outraged at Cordelia’s response and disinherits her and divides his kingdom between his two other daughters, Goneril and Regan.\u00a0 Cordelia is passed off to the king of France and she becomes the queen there.\u00a0 Goneril and Regan refuse to allow Lear to live with either one of them with any attendants and they push him out into a raging storm where he becomes ill and insane.\u00a0 Duke of Kent disguises himself as Caius and sets out to undo a plot hatched by the evil bastard son of the Duke of Gloucester, Edmund.\u00a0 Edmund jealous of Gloucester’s legitimate son, Edgar, hatches a plot to convince everyone that Edgar was trying to kill Edmund and Edgar has to go into hiding.\u00a0 Edgar disguises as a beggar in a cave where Kent takes Lear for refuge from the raging storm.\u00a0 Gloucester stumbles upon them and tells Lear that he remains loyal to him despite Goneril and Regan abandoning him.\u00a0 Gloucester does not recognize his son disguised as a beggar.\u00a0 Oswald, Goneril’s filthy, worsted-stocking whoreson, knave, attendant, finds them in the cave and blinds Gloucester.\u00a0 Kent escapes with Lear and Gloucester, despondent asks the beggar to take him to the edge of the cliffs of Dover where he plans to jump off.\u00a0 Edgar doesn’t allow him to jump and reveals himself to his father.\u00a0 Edgar comes into possession of a letter his half-brother, Edmund, wrote plotting to take over and leaves Gloucester propped against a tree while he goes to unfoil the plot.\u00a0 Meanwhile Cordelia has come to England with an army but really she just wants to see her deposed father.\u00a0 They reunite but then Edmund and his army prevail and Edmund has Lear and Cordelia both taken to prison.\u00a0 Edmund then gives a note to a servant to go to the prison and kill Cordelia.\u00a0 Right after that Edgar arrives and tells everyone about Edmund’s evil plot. Goneril and Regan kill each other.\u00a0 Edgar makes a noble speech and Edmund relents and tells a servant to go in haste to the prison and tell the guy not to kill Cordelia after all.\u00a0 But it’s too late and the play ends with Lear holding his dead daughter.\u00a0 And Edgar says, “the oldest hath borne most, we that are young shall never see so much nor live so long.”\u00a0 There are many, many famous lines in King Lear, among them:<\/p>\n

      Jester do oft prove profits.
      Like a scurvy politician seems to see things thou dost not.
      As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods
      Many a true word hath been spoken in jest
      \u00a0Nothing can come of nothing, speak again.\u00a0Now, gods, stand up for bastards!\u00a0To have a thankless child!\u00a0Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.
      He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love or a whore’s oath.
      This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune often the surfeit of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers\u00a0 by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.<\/p>\n

      15. Explore the Universe <\/em><\/strong>by Brenda Shaw * * * *
      <\/strong>December 10, 2022
      When I became a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC), I was given a copy of this book but I never took the time to read it until today when I read the whole book which is not very long.\u00a0 The book is published by the RASC as an introduction to the Society’s Observing Program.\u00a0 These are programs offered by RASC to members where they complete a set of programs for observing various objects and phenomena in the night sky and then receive a pin (and the intrinsic reward of observing the night sky).\u00a0 The introductory program, Explore the Universe, is meant for beginners and is the only one open to both members and non-members of RASC.\u00a0 The little book provides a basic overview to the beginner of how to get started in amateur astronomy and observing the universe and provides the list of objects the observer must observe in order to complete the program.\u00a0 It includes well written and easy to understand descriptions of basic astronomy concepts and a very basic guide to the universe.\u00a0 It provides an outline of information the observer must record in order to successfully record the observations and a set of basic star charts at the end of the book as well as additional resources for the burgeoning amateur astronomer to consult.\u00a0 This is an excellent beginner guide and I highly recommend it.\u00a0 You can get it for free by joining the RASC if you are interested in pursuing the hobby of amateur astronomy or just want to know more about amateur astronomy.<\/p>\n

      14. Othello: Moor of Venice <\/em><\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * * *\u00a0
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 November 27, 2022
      Othello is a dolt and as ignorant as dirt.\u00a0 \u00a0He is married to the beautiful and wonderful, Desdemona, who is faithful to him to the very end.\u00a0 \u00a0Meanwhile, Othello is tricked by the evil pernicious Iago into believing that Desdemona is unfaithful to Othello with his best friend, Cassio.\u00a0 He becomes enraged with jealousy and kills Desdemona.<\/p>\n

      13. T<\/em><\/strong>he Tragedy of<\/em> Hamlet, Prince of Denmark <\/em><\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * * * *\u00a0
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 October 20, 2022
      Hamlet’s father was the king of Denmark until his brother murdered him by pouring poison in his ear.\u00a0 Then Hamlet’s mother married Hamlet’s killer uncle.\u00a0 At the beginning of the play Hamlet’s mother callously tells Hamlet to get over it and stop being so saturnine which seemed outrageous until you find out why she is so unaffected by his and her loss.\u00a0 Hamlet reminds her that he just lost his father.\u00a0 Later Hamlet’s friends, Horatio and Marcellus, tell Hamlet that they have seen a ghost resembling his dead father.\u00a0 They take Hamlet to the ghost and the ghost is indeed Hamlet’s dead father who tells Hamlet that his brother, Hamlet’s uncle, killed him and that he must avenge his murder.\u00a0 Hamlet agrees and feigns insanity to his mother and the woman he loves, Ophelia, daughter of the dunderheaded old fool, Polonius.\u00a0 Hamlet tells Ophelia repeatedly “get thee to a nunnery” and “why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” Other famous lines were:\u00a0 “But look, the moon in russet mantle clad walks over the dew of yon high eastward hill.” “it is a nipping and eager air,” ” angels and ministers of grace defend us!”\u00a0 “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”\u00a0 “Brevity is the soul of wit and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes. I will be brief.”\u00a0 “These tedious old fools.\u00a0 An old man is twice a child.” “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause, thieves the respect that makes calamity of so long a life.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

      “For to the noble mind rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”\u00a0 “it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to totters to very rags.” “Purpose is but the slave to memory.”\u00a0 “The lady doth protest too much.” The killer king says, “In the corrupted currents of this world offense’s guilded hand may shove by justice and oft tis seen the wicked prize itself buys out the law but tis not so above.” “Be soft as senews of a new born babe.” “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”\u00a0 The killer king also says, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below words without thoughts never to heaven go.” “Oh tis most sweet when in one line two crafts directly meet.” “the cat will mew and dog will have his day.”<\/p>\n

      One line I like is when Hamlet dies and Horatio says, “Good night sweet prince and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”\u00a0 In the end, Hamlet kills himself by taking poison after both his uncle and his mother also take poison and die.\u00a0 Very tragic.<\/p>\n

      12. Julius Caesar <\/em><\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * * * *\u00a0
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 September 30, 2022
      Three times Caesar is offered the crown to become emperor of Rome and every time he declines.\u00a0 But the senators of Rome, jealous of Caesar’s fortune, valor, and power, conspire against him.\u00a0 They convince Brutus to join in the plot to kill Caesar.\u00a0 Caesar’s wife, Calphurnia, warns Caesar not to go to the senate that day, the Ides of March voicing the famous phrase, “beware the Ides of March.”\u00a0 But Caesar does not want to appear weak and superstitious and goes to the senate anyway, and that’s when the conspirators all stab Caesar.\u00a0 The last fatal blow is given by Caesar’s friend, Brutus, leading Caesar to utter the famous line, “et tu, Brute?”\u00a0 \u00a0 Brutus and the other conspirators at first convince the crowds of their righteousness in killing Caesar by telling the crowd that Caesar was ambitious to become emperor of Rome.\u00a0 But then Antony shows up with Caesar’s will and before reading it, reminds the crowd that Caesar three times refused to become emperor of Rome.\u00a0 Then Antony reads the will in which Caesar leaves 75 dracmas to every citizen and at that point the crowd turns against Brutus and the conspirators and they flee.\u00a0 Antony gathers an angry army and they have a battle at Phillipi.\u00a0 Brutus’s wife, Portia, commits suicide and when Brutus sees that his side is losing, he asks his servant, Strato, to hold a sword while Brutus runs into it.\u00a0 Strato agrees and Brutus kills himself just as Antony arrives with the victorious army.\u00a0 The play ends with Antony saying of Brutus, “this was the noblest Roman of them all.\u00a0 All the conspirators,, save only he, did that they did in envy\u00a0 of great Caesar, he only in a general honest\u00a0 thought, and common good to all, made one of them.\u00a0 His life was gentle , and the elements so mixt in him, that nature might stand up and say to all the world, “This was a man.”\u00a0 There are many famous lines in this play but I most liked it when Caesar says, “I am constant as the north star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality, there is no fellow in the firmament.\u00a0 The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks.\u00a0 They are all fire and every one doth shine.\u00a0 But there’s but one in all doth hold his place.”<\/p>\n

      11. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet <\/em><\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * * * *
      <\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0August 27, 2022<\/p>\n

      Everyone knows Shakespeare’s brilliant tragic story of Romeo and Juliet: two families, the Montagues and the Capulets are bitter enemies.\u00a0 But the Capulet’s only daughter, Juliet, and one of the Montagues, Romeo, fall in love and are furtively married by Friar Lawrence with deathly consequences.\u00a0 Mr. Capulet insists that Juliet must marry County Paris and she refuses since she is already married to Romeo, who has been exiled from Verona for killing her violent cousin, Tybalt.\u00a0 Friar Lawrence cooks up a scheme to get Juliet out of marrying twice and getting back to exiled Romeo by giving her a potion that causes her to appear dead and sending a letter to Romeo to come get her just as she wakes up and take her to Mantua where he has been exiled.\u00a0 Romeo never gets the letter but upon learning of her death finds her in the tomb and takes deadly poison given to him by a penurious apothercary.\u00a0 Juliet wakes up to find Romeo dead and stabs herself.\u00a0 In the end the Capulets and Montagues make up.\u00a0 The story is famous but the best thing about this play are all of the beautifully written and memorable lines.\u00a0 Some of my favorites were when the nurse said about men, “there’s no trust, no faith, no honesty in men, all perjured, all forsworn, all naught, all dissmblers.”\u00a0 I also liked, “Night’s candles are burnt out and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”\u00a0 Mrs. Capulet calls Juliet a, “green sickness carrion, baggage, and tallow face.”\u00a0 When Juliet’s father tries to force her to marry Paris, she says, “bury me in a charnel house with dead men’s rattling bones with reeky shanks, and yellow chapless skulls.\u00a0 \u00a0Mr. Capulet calls her a “pevish, self-willed harlot.”\u00a0 \u00a0Someone says of Juliet, “death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”\u00a0 One of the musicians at the doomed wedding says, “then music with her silver sound with speedy help doth lend redress.”\u00a0 Romeo tells his friend Mercutio, “I talk of dreams which are the children of an idle brain begot of nothing but fantasy, which is as thin of substance as the air and more inconstant than the wind.”\u00a0 \u00a0 Romeo tells Juliet, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep, the more I give to thee, the more I have for both are infinite.”\u00a0 \u00a0And finally Romeo tells the penurious apothecary, “gold, worse poison to men’s souls doing more murder in this loathsome world, than these poor compounds that thou mayest not sell, I see thee poison thou hast sold me none.”<\/p>\n

      10. Titus Andronicus <\/em><\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * *
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 July 31, 2022<\/p>\n

      The emperor of Rome has just died and his two sons, Bassianus and Saturninus, are arguing over who should assume the position when an esteemed Roman general, Titus Andronicus, returns from ten years of war against the Goths with four prisoners, the dread queen of the Goths, Tamora, and her three sons, Alarbus, Demetrius, and Chiron.\u00a0 She is also accompanied by her lover, the barbaric Moor, Aaron.\u00a0 Titus has lost many of his sons in battle and considers slaughtering Tamora as a sacrifice but then decides to sacrifice her son, Alarbus, instead.\u00a0 Titus’s son, Lucius, grabs Alarbus and despite Tamora’s pleas, chops him up and sacrifices him.\u00a0 The emperor position is offered to Titus but he declines and instead sides with Saturninus to be the new emperor since he is the eldest son of the deceased emperor.\u00a0 \u00a0Titus also recommends that Saturninus marry his daughter, Lavinia.\u00a0 Saturninus’s younger brother, Bassianus, is outraged because he is already married to Lavinia but they proceed anyway.\u00a0 Once Saturninus is emperor he frees Tamora and her sons and then dumps Lavinia and marries Tamora.\u00a0 \u00a0Tamora then plots to get revenge on Titus for killing her son, Alarbus, while also continuing her affair with the barbarian Aaron.\u00a0 Tamora’s two sons kill Bassianus and throw him in a ditch and then attack Lavinia, cut off her tongue and both hands and rape her.\u00a0 Meanwhile Tamora is impregnated by Aaron and has a black baby which is obviously not the son of Saturninus.\u00a0 Tamora implicates Titus’s two sons in the murder of Bassianus and Saturninus has them rounded up and executed.\u00a0 He sends Aaron to Titus to negotiate and offers the sons back in exchange for Titus’s hand.\u00a0 Titus cuts off his hand and Aaron delivers the two sons’ heads to him.\u00a0 Titus is outraged and heart broken.\u00a0 \u00a0He finds his ravaged daughter and gets her to write in the dirt who raped and mutilated her.\u00a0 Once Titus learns that Tamora’s sons are responsible, he hatches a plot for revenge.\u00a0 Eventually he captures the two vile sons and cooks them and serves them to Tamora.\u00a0 Aaron is also captured and Titus is about to hang him when Aaron agrees to tell everyone that he and Tamora are responsible for the vile mutilation of Lavinia and murder of his sons.\u00a0 Titus spares Aaron until he tells all but later buries him up to his neck in the dirt to die a horrible death.\u00a0 Aaron is non-repentant to the end.\u00a0 The play does not mention what happened to Aaron and Tamora’s son which Titus agreed to spare.\u00a0 The play was horrific and full of violence.\u00a0 I would imagine it is not performed with any frequency.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

      9. Henry VIII <\/em><\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * * *\u00a0
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0July 28, 2022
      King Henry the VIII is advised by Cardinal Wolsey.\u00a0 Cardinal Wolsey frames the Duke of Buckingham and King Henry has him executed.\u00a0 The people are unhappy and hate Cardinal Wolsey.\u00a0 King Henry has been married for 20 years to Katherine but he meets one of her assistants, Anne Bollen, at a party and falls in love with her.\u00a0 He asks for Wolsey’s advice and he advises against divorce becaues he doesn’t want to further enrage the public and tells King Henry to ask the pope to rule on a solution.\u00a0 Wolsey is starting to lose favor so he asks the pope to delay a decision.\u00a0 Henry can’t wait.\u00a0 Wolsey is ostracized.\u00a0 Katherine becomes gravely ill from the humiliation of being divorced by the king and dies.\u00a0 Wolsey becomes ill from being ostracized and he also dies.\u00a0 King Henry marries Anne Bollen and she has a daughter, Elizabeth, and King Henry is ecstatic about it.\u00a0 Cranmer baptizes her and says she will have a glorious reign and the play ends.\u00a0 Time to move on to the tragedies.<\/p>\n

      8. 50 Things to See on the Moon: A First-time Star Gazer’s Guide <\/em><\/strong>by John Read *\u00a0 *
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0June 13, 2022
      John Read is an astronomer, author, and publisher of Stellar Publishing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he lives.\u00a0 He has self published a number of astronomy books for beginners and has a YouTube Channel with videos about star gazing.\u00a0 In this beginner book, he explains in plain language a novice can understand, the basic concepts you need to know about the moon and how to observe it.\u00a0 He provides a list of 50 things to look at on the moon explaining what each one is and for whom it is named.\u00a0 He also shows a picture of each object as seen through a refractor, reflector, and binoculars.\u00a0 I recommend his book to anyone who would like to find out more about what all those dark and light patches are that we have all seen on the moon.\u00a0 The moon is well worth studying and this book will guide you to some features to look for on the moon.\u00a0 I mentioned this book in my YouTube video, Observing the Moon, which can be found here: https:\/\/youtu.be\/SzCpayEj_Zo<\/p>\n

      7. King Henry V <\/em><\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * * * *
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0June 1, 2022<\/p>\n

      Henry V<\/em>\u00a0is a history play, probably written around 1599. It covers events during the Hundred Years’ War, immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt (1415).<\/p>\n

      Soon after he becomes king, Henry V is considering making a claim to rule France as well as England.<\/p>\n

      He asks the Archbishop of Canterbury about how strong his claim is, but it’s when the dauphin sends Henry an insulting message that he makes up his mind and decides to invade France.<\/p>\n

      The king’s former companions from his days in the Eastcheap tavern hear of the death of the slovenly fat Sir John Falstaff from Hostess Quickly. They take their leave of her and set out to join Henry’s army.<\/p>\n

      Despite the dauphin’s insistence that Henry is an unworthy opponent, the French king receives the English ambassadors but finally rejects Henry’s claim to the crown.<\/p>\n

      Meanwhile, as her father gets his nobles ready to retaliate, Princess Katherine begins to learn English with the help of her companion, Alice.<\/p>\n

      The English soldiers are in poor condition – disheartened by sickness and foul weather. They begin to retreat, but Henry rejects the French Herald’s offer of ransom and the two armies prepare to fight.<\/p>\n

      The evening before the battle, Henry tours the camp in disguise, finding out what his men think. It leads him to consider the heavy responsibilities of kingship.<\/p>\n

      In the French camp, by contrast, confidence is high. As battle begins, Henry rallies his troops and places them all in God’s hands.\u00a0 On the battlefield, Henry gives his famous Battle of Agincourt speech in which he glorifies the rewards of the victorious soldier and ignites his severely outnumbered troops to defeat the French.\u00a0 \u00a0English losses are small while the French losses are great.\u00a0 King Henry asks the French King to concede to his demands and also agree to his marriage to the French King’s daughter, Katherine.\u00a0 Henry marries Katherine and brings a brief peace between the bitter rivals and unifies the two kingdoms as the play ends.<\/p>\n

      6. <\/strong>King Henry IV Part Two\u00a0<\/strong>by William Shakespeare * * * *
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0May 15, 2022
      At the end of Henry IV Part One, King Henry IV accidentally caused former King Richard to be killed by mentioning that he might be a threat to Henry’s throne.\u00a0 King Henry’s son, Hal, has redeemed himself but there are still threats to King Henry’s reign from within England as forces are still conspiring to overthrow him.\u00a0 The rebels suffer a defeat at the Battle of Shrewsbury but they are still conspiring lead by the Archbishop of York, Lord Mowbray, and Lord Hastings.\u00a0 King Henry has become gravely ill due to anxiety over these internal threats.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the lazy bum, Falstaff, is still drinking and carousing in taverns with prostitutes and derilects but somehow is enlisted to recruit men to fight the rebels.\u00a0 King Henry becomes increasingly ill even as his son, Prince John, deceives the rebels into thinking he is on their side only to have them arrested and executed.\u00a0 Hal is summoned to his father’s side and barely makes it before King Henry expires and Hal is crowned the new King Henry V.\u00a0 Falstaff shows up for the coronation but is spurned by King Henry V and told not to come within 10 feet of his kingdom and then plots to invade France as the play ends.<\/p>\n

      5<\/strong>. King Henry IV Part One<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * *
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0April 17, 2022
      This historical play follows up on the life of Henry IV after he became king at the end of King Richard II. King Henry’s son, Hal, Prince of Wales, is a dissolute wayward child hanging out in bars with gangsters and playing pranks.\u00a0 He has befriended a louche, fat, lazy bum, Falstaff, who is the brunt of one of his pranks which involves having some thieves attack and rob Falstaff just to see what kinds of lies Falstaff tells Hal and his friends about it later.\u00a0 Falstaff’s story is worse than apocryphal; he out and out lies about the outcome of the theft.\u00a0 While Falstaff is spinning some incredible tale about the outcome of the robbery, Hal’s father, King Henry, calls for him to report back to him immediately.\u00a0 King Henry calls Hal to the carpet about his louche and unbecoming behavior and tells Hal that he is most needed for a coming rebellious attack organized by Henry Percy also known as Hotspur.\u00a0 During the King is nearly killed but rescued by his son, Hal, and Hal also manages to kill Hotspur, although Falstaff tries to take credit for it.\u00a0 Hal’s esteem with his father has been renewed as the play ends.<\/p>\n

      4. King Richard II<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * *
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0March 30, 2022
      In this historical play, King Richard II, the last of the Plantagenants has become king but he is fickle, vacillating, and wasteful.\u00a0 At the beginning of the play, Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, accuses Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, of killing the Duke of Gloucester.\u00a0 Mowbray invites Gaunt to a dwell and at first King Richard agrees.\u00a0 But once they are on the battlefield, he changes his mind and exiles, Mowbray, John Gaunt, and his son, Henry Bolingbroke.\u00a0 John of Gaunt is distraught at the banishment of his son and falls ill.\u00a0 Richard is glad and once John Gaunt dies, Richard seizes his land and estate and uses the money to wage war against Ireland.\u00a0 Henry Bolingbroke assembles an army while Richard is off to war and so Richard comes back and in a famous scene willingly gives his crown to Henry making him Henry IV, the first of the Lancaster kings.\u00a0 Richard is beside himself with grief and asks to be sent away.\u00a0 So Henry sends him to prisonin a castle in Pomfret.\u00a0 While in prison Henry mentions to Exton that Richard remains a threat to him.\u00a0 Exton takes this to mean that Henry wants him to kill Richard and he goes to the prison and does kill Richard.\u00a0 He brings back Richard’s body to show Henry and Henry is very displeased with him.\u00a0 It is a very inauspicious start to the reign of Henry IV.\u00a0 Some famous quotes from Richard II:<\/p>\n

      \u201cThis royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands,–This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.\u201d<\/p>\n

      \u201cMy dear, dear Lord,
      The purest treasure mortal times afford
      Is spotless reputation; that away
      Men are but gilded loan or painted clay…
      Mine honor is my life; both grow in one;
      Take honor from me, and my life is done.\u201d<\/p>\n

      \u201cMore are men’s ends mark’d than their lives before:
      The setting sun, and music at the close,
      As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
      Writ in remembrance more than things long past\u201d<\/p>\n

      \u201cO, who can hold a fire in his hand
      By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
      Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
      By bare imagination of a feast?
      Or wallow naked in December snow
      By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?
      O, no! the apprehension of the good
      Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:
      Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more
      Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.\u201d<\/p>\n

      3. The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide<\/strong><\/em> Fourth Edition by Terrence Dickinson and Alan Dyer * * * *
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 March 12, 2022
      I wish I had had this excellent book when I bought my first telescope back in 1995.\u00a0 There was no YouTube or internet search engines or anything really to help an aspiring amateur astronomer back then.\u00a0 \u00a0I had a few books but mostly I would just drag out my 6″ Dobsonian and pan the sky and stop when I stumbled onto a star cluster or galaxy.\u00a0 I bought a $6 star map from Orion Telescopes and that was what I used for my guide which is not a good way to learn how to locate objects.\u00a0 I had no idea what I was doing; I just knew I enjoyed looking at the sky.\u00a0 This book lays it all out for you from beginning to end.\u00a0 It tells you how to get started in this fascinating field, the gear you need, the way to learn the night sky, sky tours you can take with your naked eye, binoculars, and with a telescope.\u00a0 It discusses techniques for getting the most enjoyment out of amateur astronomy from casual star gazing all the way to deep sky astrophotography.\u00a0 Terence Dickinson has written several books about astronomy.\u00a0 All of them are very informative and well written but this book is indispensable for beginners and experts alike.\u00a0 I already knew many of the things discussed in this book but I learned a lot too.\u00a0 I read the whole book from cover to cover (well I skimmed over the night tours of the southern hemisphere because I doubt I will ever go star gazing there).\u00a0 Alan Hewitt-White provides excellent sky tours.\u00a0 I was most interested in the telescope tours showing finder scope views to give you an idea of how to find the objects and discussing how it would look in a four inch refractor and an eight inch reflector.\u00a0 Alan Dyer provides very useful information on starting out in astrophotography all the way from nightscapes through deep sky.\u00a0 He discusses basic equipment you need to get started in astrophotography and how to process your photos.\u00a0 I thoroughly enjoyed this book and what I most liked is that Dickinson and Dyer always emphasize the importance of taking the time to learn the night sky and not trying to jump right in and take up something extremely complex like astrophotography and he always gets back to the joys of star gazing and astronomy.\u00a0 Great book and I highly recommend it.\u00a0 \u00a0Everyone can get something out of this great book.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

      2. A Brave and Cunning Prince<\/strong><\/em> by James Horn * * * *
      \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0February 28, 2022
      \u00a0In this thoroughly researched and engagingly written book, James Horn lays out a compelling case that the Great Pamunkey Indian Chief, Opechancanough, was the same person as the Indian, Don Luis, who was kidnapped by the Spanish explorers and that Opechancanough was the older brother of the much more well-known Chief Powhatan.\u00a0 Although much has been written about Powhatan, nothing to date has been written about this formidable chief.\u00a0 Opechancanough was born around 1542 around the Chesapeake.\u00a0 In 1561 he and another Indian were abducted by the Spanish who had come looking for gold and silver.\u00a0 The Spanish took the Indians back to Spain and gave Opechancanough the name Paquiqueneo and later Don Luis.\u00a0 Don Luis was introduced to the king of Spain, Philip II.\u00a0 The Spanish wanted to convert the Indians they had just conquered in Mexico to Catholicism and also to convert Don Luis.\u00a0 He agreed in an effort to be returned to his homeland.\u00a0 They took him to Mexico for two years before finally taking him back to the Chesapeake.\u00a0 He agreed to help the Jesuits convert the Indians in North America to Catholicism but he never really intended to do so and as soon as he returned to the Chesapeake he turned on the Jesuits and set out to restore the once mighty kingdom of Powhatans.\u00a0 By this time the English were setting up settlements along the James (Powhatan) River and Opechancanough spent the rest of his life fighting and repelling them.\u00a0 We all know how this sad story ends.\u00a0 The English at first were starving and the colony at Jamestown nearly collapsed were it not for corn supplied by the Indians.\u00a0 Eventually though more and more ships came and more and more weapons and more and more settlements pushing the Indians further and further inland and away from their historical lands.\u00a0 In the end Opechancanough was captured by Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, and put in jail and on display.\u00a0 By this time he was 100 years old and frail but always maintaining his dignity.\u00a0 His life only ended by a bullet in the back from an angry soldier.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

      I have read many books about Indian warriors but this is the first I have ever heard of this great chief.\u00a0 His niece, Pocahontas (also kidnapped and sent to England) has had more written about her than her uncle the Chief.<\/p>\n

      1. The Life and Death of King John<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * *\u00a0
      January 22, 2022
      I didn’t like this one as much as the other plays I have read.\u00a0 King John goes to war against France after France claims that John’s nephew, Arthur should be king instead.\u00a0 They meet an Angers, an English town, but the town spokesman, Hubert, says the town will only acknowledge the winner.\u00a0 Neither side wins.\u00a0 The Falconbridges come to King John to resolve an inheritance dispute but John is unable to do so because the law is unclear as Philip is the older son but is illegitimate.\u00a0 He finds out his real father is John’s dead brother, Richard.\u00a0 So Philip gives up on his claim to the inheritance and goes to fight France instead.\u00a0 John feels his kingdom threatened by the existence of Arthur so he asks Hubert to kidnap him and kill him.\u00a0 Hubert feels sorry for Arthur and doesn’t kill him but then Arthur tries to escape by jumping out of a window and dies.\u00a0 The nobles think King John killed him and are furious.\u00a0 King John tries to make peace with France by becoming Catholic and the Bastard Philip is outraged.\u00a0 A monk poisons King John and John’s son, Henry, becomes king.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

      Books I Read in 2021:<\/b><\/p>\n

        \n
      1. \u00a0Richard the Third<\/em><\/strong> by William Shakespeare * * * * *\u00a0
        December 22, 2021
        At the end of Henry the Sixth, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, stabs Henry the Sixth multiple times, stabs his son, and stabs a couple of other people.\u00a0 However, this still does not make him king.\u00a0 Instead, his father Edward is the new king.\u00a0 \u00a0As this play opens Richard is bemoaning his deformed and hideous body.\u00a0 He is also plotting how to become king.\u00a0 His strategy is very straightforward.\u00a0 He beheads anyone in his way.\u00a0 He is a completely immoral, louche, cacodemon, sick and murderous bastard.\u00a0 He eventually annoints himself king and then convinces Anne, widow of the Prince of Wales, the son of Henry the VI, whom Richard stabbed to death, to marry him.\u00a0 Incredibly she agrees but later he chops off her head too.\u00a0 Then he announces that he is going to marry his niece and incredibly her mother agrees to it.\u00a0 Before he can marry her though Henry, the Earl of Richmond, gathers an army and attacks Richard and his bloody followers.\u00a0 The ghosts of the many people Richard has slaughtered come to him in his sleep and wish him failure in battle.\u00a0 Despite being severely outnumbered Richmond prevails and kills the heartless boar, Richard, and proclaims himself the new king, Henry the VII).\u00a0\u00a0
        There are many, many famous quotes in this brilliant play.\u00a0 The most famous of all is when Richard loses his horse during the battle with Richmond, and yells, “a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”\u00a0 Other famous quotes are the opening lines recited by Richard, “now is the winter of our discontent.”\u00a0 Also, “all the world is cheered by the sun,” and “the world has grown so bad that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.”\u00a0 Other quotes I liked, “true hope is swift and flies with swallow’s wings. Kings it makes gods and meaner creatures kings.” “The weary sun hath made a golden set and by the bright tract of his fiery car gives token of a goodly day tomorrow.”\u00a0 \u00a0Though bloody and full of evil characters, everyone should read this play or better recite it aloud and savor over every carefully crafted word.\u00a0 I highly recommend it.<\/li>\n
      2. Henry the Sixth<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * *\u00a0
        December 8, 2021
        It took me so long to finish this fantastic play because I could not stop savoring every delicious word.\u00a0 The characters themselves are, every single one, abominable people lacking in morals, completely dissolute and reckless, murderous and greedy and grasping but the way that Shakespeare expresses the things these despicable people say, is so beautiful and profound.\u00a0 I found myself reading it aloud as it was meant to be.\u00a0 The play is one of Shakespeare’s historical plays and tells the story of how after Henry the Fifth defeated France and won Normandie and other territories, his son Henry the Sixth was beset by infighting and disarray and promptly lost all of the aforewon territory back to France.\u00a0 In many of the battles France is aided by a fierce warrior, Joan of Pucelle.\u00a0 Many of Henry’s followers are outraged that he has lost all this territory to France and he is beset by multiple attempts to dethrone him.\u00a0 His protector tricks him into marrying, Margaret, whom he claims descends from royalty and in exchange Henry gives away Maine and some other territory to France.\u00a0 Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, attempts to regain the throne for the House of York claiming Henry’s claim to the throne is tainted by a weak link when the throne was usurped from the House of York by an earlier Henry from the House of Lancaster.\u00a0 Richard fails and his head is placed on the gates of York.\u00a0 But then his son, Edward engages on another campaign to dethrone Henry and well, read the play and find out if he succeeds (if you can’t remember what happens historically).\u00a0 There were many memorable quotes, “the fox barks not when he would steal the lamb,” “oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, and makes it fearful and degenerate; think, therefore, on revenge and cease to weep,” and, “seeing ignorance is the curse of god; knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven” (was my favorite).\u00a0 Also, “for what doth cherish weeds but gentle air” and ” hasty marriage seldom proveth well.”\u00a0 Wonderful, wonderful play.<\/li>\n
      3. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking<\/strong><\/em>) by Katie Mack * * * *\u00a0
        October 31, 2021
        I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in cosmology or astrophysics or the latest science on how the universe might end.\u00a0 Ms. Mack is an astrophysicist from North Carolina State University.\u00a0 It’s refreshing to find a woman in a field dominated by men.\u00a0 She consults with other women in the field and gets their perspectives among others in the book and I really liked that.\u00a0 Also her writing is very engaging on an arcane subject.\u00a0 Hoorah for Katie Mack for writing this book.\u00a0 I am so sick of reading astronomy books only by men and about men.\u00a0 All the astronomy Youtube videos are men, all the astronomy books are men, men, men.\u00a0 So thank you Katie Mack from the bottom of my heart.\u00a0 I felt all alone in the universe as a woman interested in astronomy, kind of like how Henrietta Swan Leavitt must have felt.<\/li>\n
      4. Dune<\/strong><\/em> by Frank Herbert * * * *
        September 23, 2021
        I have never been a big science fiction reader but when my mother mentioned this book being the greatest science fiction book of all time, I thought I better read it.\u00a0 She was adamant that the movie was not nearly as good as the book.\u00a0 So I had to read the book.\u00a0 \u00a0At first I kept wondering why I was reading all this made up stuff but my mother assured me that it was fascinating that Herbert had made up an entire society.\u00a0 About mid-way through the book it got much better and by the end I couldn’t put it down.\u00a0 I highly recommend it if you have never read it.\u00a0 It’s set far into the future when humans have colonized numerous other planets but there is a battle to control one planet in particular that has the sought after spice in the dunes.\u00a0 \u00a0However, the planet has very little water and so the people who live there have had to adapt and in addition where there is spice there are dune worms.\u00a0 There are many parallels between Dune and modern day society.\u00a0 This truly is a great book and Herbert did a tremendous job researching it and writing it.<\/li>\n
      5. All’s Well That Ends Well<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * *\u00a0
        July 25, 2021
        I did not think that it ended well.\u00a0 In this play The Countess of Rossillion is entrusted to care for Helena, who just lost her father, a gifted doctor.\u00a0 Helena is in love with her son, Bertram, Count of Rossillion.\u00a0 The king of France is ill and Helena goes to him and cures him of his disorder.\u00a0 In exchange, the king promises Helena that she can marry any man she wants.\u00a0 Helena selects Bertram but he is outraged because he considers her beneath him and he rejects her.\u00a0 They are married against his wishes and so he refuses to sleep with her and flees to Italy where he fights for Italy against France.\u00a0 \u00a0Helena chases him into Italy where she befriends a widow and her daughter, Diana.\u00a0 \u00a0Bertram falls for Diana but he tricks her and Bertram sleeps with Helena thinking she is Diana. They return to France where the whole unseemly plot is revealed to the king who forgives Bertram for everything.\u00a0 Bertram gives in and accepts Helena.\u00a0 Although Helena’s persistence and skills were impressive, it was perplexing that she would still pursue Bertram when he was so obviously a beef-witted mongrel and churlish, rascally knave.\u00a0 It was more than perplexing; it was disturbing.\u00a0 For that reason I only gave it three stars.<\/li>\n
      6. History of Troilus and Cressida<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * *\u00a0
        July 21, 2021
        This play finished right after Hamlet, is based on Homer’s famous play the Iliad and centers on the war between Greece and Troy caused by Paris running away with Helen.\u00a0 Troilus is a Trojan warrior in love with Cressida but just after they profess their love for each other, Troy agrees to trade Cressida to Greece in exchange for a Trojan prisoner of war.\u00a0 After she is handed over Troilus overhears the Greek warrior, Diomedes, wooing Cressida and becomes enraged.\u00a0 There are some skirmishes in which Patroclus is killed and this drives the heretofor unwilling fighter, Achilles, into a rage in which he with the assistance of his ruffians, the Mirmidons, kills Hector and then famously drags him tied to his horse’s tail through the shame fields and there the play mysteriously ends without resolving anything.<\/li>\n
      7. Twelfth Night or What You Will<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * *\u00a0
        July 5, 2021
        I didn’t like this play, written in 1601, very much, not because again he uses the plot device of a woman dressing up like a man or again uses the two siblings separated at birth.\u00a0 I didn’t like it because it didn’t have nearly as many memorable quotes as some of his other plays.\u00a0 Also, I’m sorry but the clowns are just not funny.\u00a0 \u00a0 The plot involves a duke in love with a countess, Olivia, who is not interested.\u00a0 Viola dresses up like a man named Cesario and sets out to convince Olivia that she should love the duke but instead Olivia falls in love with Cesario.<\/li>\n
      8. As You Like It<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * * *\u00a0
        May 31, 2021
        Shakespeare wrote this play in 1599 and it again has women dressing up as men and addresses the themes of love and sibling rivalry.\u00a0 Sir Rowland de Boys has died and left his estate to his eldest son, Oliver, and instructed him to take care of his little brother, Orlando, but Oliver refuses to do so.\u00a0 Meanwhile Duke Senior has been dethroned by his brother Duke Ferdinand and taken to the forest with a band of followers.\u00a0 \u00a0Duke F’s daughter loves her cousin, Rosalind, and so he allows Rosalind to stay in the kingdom to keep his daughter, Celia, company.\u00a0 Orlando shows up and challenges the Duke’s wrestler, Charles, to a match.\u00a0 Orlando defeats Charles as Rosalind and Celia watch and Rosalind falls in love with him.\u00a0 But then Duke F, the usurper banishes his daughter Celia and her cousin Rosalind.\u00a0 This is when Rosalind dresses up like a man in order to be safer while making their way to the forest.\u00a0 Oliver plots to kill Orlando so he also escapes to the forest.\u00a0 There he is taken in by Duke Senior.\u00a0 There is a clever clown Touchstone also hanging around and he falls in love with a country wench named Audrey.\u00a0 \u00a0 Celia falls in love with someone and eventually everyone gets married in a massive wedding and Duke F returns the throne to Duke Senior.\u00a0 Famous lines from the play abound including “dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wit.”\u00a0 And “pity fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.”\u00a0 And one of my favorites, “Oh how full of briers is this working day world.”\u00a0 Probably the most famous lines are: “This wide and universal theatre presents more woeful pageants than the scene wherein we play in.\u00a0 All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.\u00a0 They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts.\u00a0 His acts being seven ages. At first the infant mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.\u00a0 Then the whining school boy with his satchel and shining morning face creeping like a snail unwillingly to school. … That ends this strange eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”\u00a0 Other famous lines are: “Most friendship is feigning; most loving mere folly,” “greatest fruit have sourest rind,” “the fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool,” “life was but a flower in springtime, and therefore, take the present time,” and “then there is mirth in heaven, when earthly things made even atone together.”\u00a0 You can see why Shakespeare remains one of the greatest writers of all time.<\/li>\n
      9. The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0by J. Drew Lanham * * * *\u00a0
        May 30, 2021
        I was reading Audubon Magazine the other day and came across an article written by a black birder from South Carolina.\u00a0 At the end of the article it mentioned that he had recently published a new book.\u00a0 So I decided to take a departure from my project to read the entire works of Shakespeare this year, to read it.\u00a0 Turns out that Mr. Lanham and I have quite a bit in common and I thoroughly enjoyed his book, a memoir mostly about growing up in South Carolina and the land that shaped who he is.\u00a0 Although we grew up quite differently, I am white and he is black, we are both South Carolinians who love nature.\u00a0 We went to the same high school, Schofield High School, in Aiken (I went when it was finally integrated 25 years after Brown v. Board of Education) and we both grew up loving the nature that surrounded us.\u00a0 In the book, Lanham explores his past and how his upbringing on a 200 acre farm in rural Edgefield County, yes the same county that gave us many famous racists such as Strom Thurmond and Pitchfork Ben Tillman, made him develop a deep appreciation for all that nature has to offer us and for the land that binds us and sustains us.\u00a0 Our upbringing while similar in many ways, departed in fundamental ways in that I couldn’t wait to get out of that hell hole state while Mr. Lanham felt bound to it.\u00a0 I really enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it.\u00a0 I’m glad that people like Mr. Lanham stay in S.C. and try to bring conservation values to the people there.\u00a0 Hooray for people like him who are able to do so even while living in the state that started the Civil War and is still fighting the lost cause today and doing so while black.<\/li>\n
      10. Much Ado about Nothing<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare\u00a0 * * * *
        May 1, 2021
        \u00a0The daughter of the Prince, Hero, is falsely accused of infidelity to her fiancee by the Prince’s bastard brother, Don John, and the Friar suggests they pretend like Hero died in order to restore her reputation.\u00a0 They follow his advice and eventually her good standing is restored and she is able to marry her beloved in the end.<\/li>\n
      11. Merry Wives of Windsor<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0by William Shakespeare * * * * *
        April 24, 2021
        The fat louche villian, Falstaff, tries three times unsuccessfully to bed two different wives, Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page but they are far too clever and trick him three different times and foil his unrealistic whims and desires.\u00a0 In the meantime, Mr. Ford, who is extremely jealous of his wive, befriends Falstaff who unwittingly reveals to Mr. Ford whom he believes to be someone else of his salacious plans to cuckold Mr. Ford.<\/li>\n
      12. Merchant of Venice<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * * *\u00a0
        April 10, 2021
        A merchant of Venice, Antonio, has all his wealth invested in some ships at sea he is counting on returning.\u00a0 His friend, Bassanio, would like to borrow some money from Antonio in order to marry a rich heiress, Portia.\u00a0 Since Antonio’s wealth is all tied up in his ships at sea, he agrees to borrow the money from a rich Jew, Shylock, but as part of the agreement he must give Shylock a pound of his flesh if he fails to repay Shylock.\u00a0 The ships ostensibly all sink and Shylock calls in his debt because he dislikes Antonio for lending money without interest and because Antonio has insulted him.\u00a0 Bassanio is horrified at his friend’s imminent death caused by his loan, and tells Portia about it.\u00a0 Portia tells Bassanio she will give Shylock triple what Antonio owes but Shylock refuses insisting on taking a pound of Antonio’s flesh instead.\u00a0 At the trial Portia appears disguised as a doctor.\u00a0 Through her wit and ingenuity she finds Shylock has violated the contract because he has threatened Antonio’s life, as the contract only called for flesh but no blood.\u00a0 Therefore, she deems that Shylock must give up half his estate and convert to Christianity.\u00a0 While modern audiences are appalled at this unfair and anti-Semitic condemnation of Shylock, I was more focused on the brilliant genius of a female character who suffer mightily in some other Shakespearean plays.\u00a0 Portia saves the life of Antonio through her brilliant disguise as the doctor and arranges for a beautiful ending for herself, Antonio, and her undeserving husband, Bassanio.\u00a0 While the harsh treatment of Shylock is appalling, he was appalling for wanting a pound of Antonio’s flesh instead of treble damages offered to him.\u00a0 The best part of the play is Portia.\u00a0 The best line was by Portia who said, “the quality of mercy is not strained.\u00a0 It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.\u00a0 It is twice blest;\u00a0 it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”\u00a0 Second best was Lorenzo who said about music, “By the sweet power of music, therefore, the poet did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, hard and full of rage.\u00a0 But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.\u00a0 Mark the music.”\u00a0 Yes, indeed!<\/li>\n
      13. A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * * *
        March 16, 2021
        I have read this play a couple of times, been to a live performance, and watched the movie.\u00a0 This comedy was written by Shakespeare in 1595 or 96.\u00a0 In it, Theseus, Duke of Athens, is about to marry Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, but before they do, Egeus barges in complaining that he disapproves of his daughter’s love of Lysander, instead wishing her to marry Demetrius.\u00a0 His daughter, Hermia, declares her love for Lysander despite dire consequences declared by the Duke and they sneak off into the woods.\u00a0 Helena is in love with Demetrius but he is in love with Hermia.\u00a0 The four of them go to a wood where they are drugged by a wild crazy fairy, Oberon, and his minion, Puck.\u00a0 Also in the woods is a band of laborers practicing a play they intend to perform for the Duke’s wedding.\u00a0 Puck drugs Titania, Queen of the Fairies, who has refused to give Oberon her Indian boy, causing her to fall hopelessly in love with one of the performers, Bottom, who is given an ass’s head by Puck.\u00a0 Puck also mistakenly drugs Lysander who falls in love with Helena.\u00a0 Eventually Puck gives all potions to undo his mischief and by morning all are in love with the right people and the play is performed hideously while the Duke and his train pan it viciously.\u00a0 In the movie Mendelssohn’s beautiful, Pomp and Circumstance is played during the wedding of the Duke and Queen forever becoming wedding music.<\/li>\n
      14. Love’s Labour’s Lost<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * *\u00a0
        March 2, 2021
        In this early comedy Shakespeare again explores the theme of love .\u00a0 The king of Navarre and his lords vow to forswear women for three years while they focus on study.\u00a0 One of the lords, Berowne, is hesitant to take this vow, and indeed soon falls in love with one of the ladies attending the Princess of France.\u00a0 Then the king himself and the others follow suit and also fall in love and eventually all abandon their vows in pursuit of the women.\u00a0 \u00a0 Costard the clown is enlisted to deliver a love letter from Berowne to one of the ladies in waiting and another from a dandy visiting Spaniard, Adriano de Armado, to a wench named Jacquenetta but he intentionally mixes them up.\u00a0 The king’s lords dress up as Russians in order to advance their pursuits but the women catch wind of their deceit and switch rolls to confuse the men.\u00a0 \u00a0In the end they all concede but because the king has died they must wait a year and day.\u00a0 \u00a0The dialogue is very witty and full of word play.<\/li>\n
      15. Two Gentlemen of Verona<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * *
        February 4, 2021
        In this play two friends from Verona, Valentine and Proteus, decide to take different paths in life.\u00a0 Valentine decides to go off to Milan to be educated at the Duke’s court while Proteus stays in Verona because he is ostensibly in love with Julia.\u00a0 In Milan Valentine falls in love with the Duke’s daughter, Silvia, one of the strongest and most venerable women characters in a Shakespearean play, but the Duke is having none of it.\u00a0 Meanwhile Proteus’s father ships him off to Milan against his will, to be educated.\u00a0 There Proteus ditches Julia and falls in love with Silvia.\u00a0 He abandons his friendship and oath to Julia for his new found love of Silvia but Silvia is having none of it.\u00a0 Meanwhile Julia dresses up as a boy in order to go off to Milan alone to find Proteus.\u00a0 The play explores the themes of friendship and how love makes us do the most inexplicable things.\u00a0 The ending was weak but tolerable.<\/li>\n
      16. Taming of the Shrew<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * * *
        January 27, 2021
        In this comedy a lord decides to play a trick on a drunk man, Christopher Sly, by making him think he is a lord when he awakes from his drunken stupor.\u00a0 In so deceiving him, the servants perform this play for him.\u00a0 In the play, a rich man in Padua, Baptista, has two daughters, the beautiful Bianca, and the shrew, Katherine, who is older and must be married before Bianca can be married.\u00a0 Petruchio, a gentleman from Verona, vows that he will marry Katherine because of her large dowry despite knowing she is a notorious shrew.\u00a0 He marries her and abuses her into submission with his stupidity.\u00a0 Basically he acts so beastly and makes her life so miserable that it is easier for Katherine to give in to him than defy him.\u00a0 In the meantime, Lucentio, the son of Vincentio, a gentleman in Pisa, plays a ridiculous trick on everyone including Baptista, in order to marry Bianca in which he nearly causes his father to be thrown into jail.\u00a0 His ruse is uncovered after he has managed to trick Baptista into giving his second daughter away to this knave\u00a0 but in the end no one is mad about it or sees anything wrong with his knavery.\u00a0 To me this was far more shocking than Petruchio’s villainous behavior toward Katherine.\u00a0 There are many famous quotes from this play; probably the most famous “no profit grows where is no pleasure taken.”\u00a0 But I liked all the insults, the best including “beetle-eared, flap-eared knave, heedless jolthead, loggerheaded and unpolished, peasant swain, malt horse drudge, rogues and villians, irksome, brawling, scold, crack hemp, notorious villian, and currish.\u00a0 \u00a0I also liked the quote, “tis the mind that make the body rich.”<\/li>\n
      17. Cherokee Voices Early Accounts of Cherokee Life in the East\u00a0<\/strong><\/em> by Vicki Rozema * * *\u00a0
        January 24, 2021
        In this slim volume Rozema puts together actual writings, journals, letters, treaties, and other documents to give the reader a look into the lives and culture of the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia from about 1730 up to the Indian Removal in 1838 by President Jackson.\u00a0 This book does not deal with the Trail of Tears which would require an entire separate volume.\u00a0 \u00a0It was interesting to learn some details about Cherokee life including that the Cherokee people invented the game of LaCrosse.<\/li>\n
      18. Comedy of Errors<\/strong><\/em> by William Shakespeare * * *
        January 18, 2021
        My 2021 new year’s resolution is to read the entire complete works of William Shakespeare this year.\u00a0 I started with this early work by Shakespeare. I know it’s harsh to give Shakespeare three stars when he was one of the greatest English writers of all time, but the plot was so ridiculous and absurd that I had to mitigate the high marks for the great writing with low marks for the idiotic plot.\u00a0 Basically Egeon has twin sons who are separated at birth in a shipwreck and they are both named Antipholus one of Syracuse and the other of Ephesus.\u00a0 Duke Solinus has a travel ban between the two cities on pain of death.\u00a0 Egeon is caught violating the travel ban and is given a day to come up with 1000 ducats to avoid death.\u00a0 While traveling the city he stumbles across Antipholus of Syracuse who has a bondsman named Dromio who it just so happens also has a twin brother named Dromio, who is bondsman to Antiphous of Ephesus but since they look identical he mistakes him for the other Antipholus\u00a0 and a series of mishaps ensue involving Antipholus of Ephesus’s wife Adriana.\u00a0 \u00a0Eventually they discover that he is the long lost twin and everything is tidied up and resolved by the end of the play.<\/li>\n
      19. All the Light You Cannot See<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 by Anthony Doerr* * *\u00a0
        January 10, 2021
        In this Pulitzer winning novel, a blind girl, Marie Laure, is living in Paris with her father who works at the Museum of Natural History when Germany invades France and they flee to a small island, Saint Malo, to live with her great-uncle in a tall house.\u00a0 At the same time a boy, Werner and his sister, Jutta, two orphans living in Germany discover an old radio and with it hear broadcasts by the great-uncle.\u00a0 Later Werner is enlisted into the German army where he becomes repulsed by the horrors of the war and disgusted by his failure to resist it in some way.\u00a0 He does his best to do good in the world despite the difficult circumstances and challenges of doing so while fighting for Germany.\u00a0 Eventually Marie Laure’s and Werner’s paths briefly cross but the ending is incredibly awful and unsatisfying just like life.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the book is hard to put down.<\/li>\n
      20. \u00a0Jane<\/em> Eyre\u00a0<\/em><\/strong> by Charlotte Bronte * * * * *(Audiobook)
        January 9, 2021
        For my second free book from Audible I selected this classic, brilliantly narrated by Thandie Newton.\u00a0 \u00a0I first read Jane Eyre when I was 10 years old.\u00a0 I wrote a book report about it for school using a picture of a fire from an old Time Magazine lying around the house for my book report.\u00a0 I loved the book as a child for the strong female character and read it again later in life.\u00a0 I’ve also watched a movie version that simply cannot compare to this great book, one of the greatest 100 books ever written.\u00a0 Ms. Eyre has a hard life as a child; she is an orphan raised by an uncaring and resentful aunt who soon ships her off to an unhealthy, abusive, and oppressive school for orphans, Lowood, where many children contract Typhoid fever and die including her best friend, Helen.\u00a0 She eventually escapes Lowood by securing a position as a governess for Mr. Rochester’s ward, Adele.\u00a0 Mr. Rochester is enigmatic and dark but speaks as if reading poetry and his colloquies with Jane Eyre are the most delicious, engaging, and memorable parts of the book.\u00a0 \u00a0 The book is a masterpiece not only for the sublime writing but the original page-turning story, compelling and memorable characters, and most of all for how it presents the societal challenges facing woman in England at that time and how they are dealt with by the independent and indefatigable, Jane Eyre. <\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        \u00a0Books I read in 2020:<\/strong><\/p>\n

          \n
        1. \u00a0Brave New World<\/strong><\/em> by Aldous Huxley * * * (Audiobook)
          December 26, 2020
          I read this book years ago but I was given two free books on my Audible account and as the choices were terrible, I selected this.\u00a0 This\u00a0 audiobook was narrated by Michael York.\u00a0 The topic of the book is horrifying; a future world where the people in control have decided that stability supercedes all else thus requiring all people to be raised in tightly controlled test tubes pre-destined as workers or the elite but by all means as conformists without any of the usual baseless instincts of humans of the old world of violence or jealousy or rage and where the least uncomfortable situations are alleviated by taking a drug, Soma, that doesn’t leave you hung over or they claim addicted (although in truth everyone is addicted to Soma).\u00a0 Apparently mistakes are occasionally made though and some people do still have some non-conformist ideas such as a need for solitude which is strictly forbidden.\u00a0 Also some who were impossible to make to conform were sent to reservations in New Mexico.\u00a0 One non-conformist, Bertrand Marx, goes on a holiday with the highly sought after, Lenina, there and discovers a half-breed, John, whom he brings back to London to show off and use as a pawn to get him out of some hot water he is in.\u00a0 The scheme back fires and he is shipped off to a remote island anyway but in the meantime, the poor half-breed, John Savage, is left alone in London to fend for himself with his quaint ideas of God and individualism which have all been rejected by the brave new world.\u00a0 He realizes he cannot fit in and escapes to the countryside where he meets a bad end.\u00a0 There is much philosophizing between John and the director about the benefits of the Brave New World without pain or baseless human emotions or the need for a God and John’s idea of an ideal world with pain and troubles and a God to pray to.\u00a0 So why did John meet a bad end?\u00a0 Does it mean that John was wrong and we were not meant to suffer?\u00a0 I guess Huxley meant for us to conclude otherwise.\u00a0 I rather like the idea of a harsh winter whilst dreaming of the coming spring and enduring hardship because of the possibility of the rewards to come from it.\u00a0 \u00a0Whatever, it’s meaning, I loved the writing and all the forgotten big words in it especially “indefatigable” which comes up rather frequently and “sententious” which is used to refer to the proclamations of the elite when lecturing to the lower classes.\u00a0 I don’t think the book was depressing so much as thought-provoking.<\/li>\n
        2. Charlotte’s Web<\/strong><\/em> by E.B. White * * *
          December 12, 2020
          At the end of the last book I read, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek<\/strong><\/em>, the author, Kim Michele Richardson states that one of the authors she admires is E. B. White.\u00a0 So I re-read this children’s classic by him.\u00a0 I loved his knowledge and love of nature and how the book encourages in children the observation and immersion in it; something sorely lacking in today’s youth.\u00a0 It’s a bit outdated in its division of the sexes; the boy is excused for his youthful pranks and the girl is expected to be more proper and eventually loses her interest in the barnyard animals for her interest in boys but otherwise I liked the lessons in observation of nature and what we can learn from it.<\/li>\n
        3. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek<\/strong><\/em> by Kim Michele Richardson * * * *\u00a0\u00a0
          December 10, 2020
          This 2019 book of historical fiction by Kim Michele Richardson concerns two bits of obscure American history: the last of the blue-skinned people and the Pack Horse Librarians.\u00a0 \u00a0The heroin, Cussy Mary, is the last of the people suffering from methemogloblinemia, a rare genetic blood disorder in which the blood is unoxygenated, leaving her skin a blue color.\u00a0 \u00a0As the novel opens it is 1936, the middle of the depression in the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Kentucky and Cussy Mary has obtained a job as a pack horse librarian, a part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA, to bring books to poor hill people of Kentucky.\u00a0 Over 100 women actually served as pack horse librarians during the depression bringing books to patrons who would otherwise have absolutely nothing to read as books were hard to come by at that time.\u00a0 Cussy Mary is actually white but because of her blood disorder, the hill people of Kentucky treat her as a colored person.\u00a0 She is horribly discriminated against and treated cruelly by the townspeople. Her whole life is lacking in love and affection except for that of her loving father, a Kentucky coal miner.\u00a0 They live a very modest life in a shack in a holler of the Kentucky hills.\u00a0 A doctor in town begs her to allow him to study her and eventually discovers her blueness is due to a blood disorder.\u00a0 He gives her medicine that makes her white but causes severe reactions.\u00a0 She goes into town while white believing she will finally be accepted but the ignorant hillbillies assume she is sick and diseased and continue to mistreat and abuse her.\u00a0 Her life is full of sadness except for the joy her job of delivering books to Kentuckians living in the hollers, brings.\u00a0 She believes in the power of books and it is redemptive to both her and her patrons who are very grateful for what she does referring to her affectionately as the Book Woman.\u00a0 The book explores racism and the power of reading.\u00a0 I highly recommend this book.\u00a0 It is well researched and well written.<\/li>\n
        4. \n

          The Trail of Tears : Explore the Take Over of Nations from Beginning to End<\/strong><\/em> by Adrian Ramos\u00a0 * * *
          November 24, 2020
          This book is part of a series of history books called History Compacted that tell the story of a part of history in a straightforward factual way.\u00a0 Although this book was well researched and presented all the most salient facts of this tragic part of American history, it had numerous typographical errors and misspellings.\u00a0 Other than that I think it was well done and should be read by every American.\u00a0 \u00a0It tells the story of the forced migration of thousands of Native American tribes out of their ancestral homelands in the southeast to west of the Mississippi over thousands of miles to a land with which they were not familiar and not well equipped to inhabit.\u00a0 Most people associate the Trail of Tears with the Cherokee Tribe because they were the last tribe to be forced out of the South but several other tribes were forced west as well, including the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole.\u00a0 Thousands of Indians died along the way of sickness, hunger, and exhaustion.\u00a0 As white settlers pushed into Georgia, Florida, and Alabama they clashed with the Indians who had already been living there for thousands of years cultivating the land and living peaceably.\u00a0 After the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson, known as Old Hickory, became a war hero and subsequently the seventh president of the US.\u00a0 He advocated for the forced migration of the Indians.\u00a0 He could not see a way for them to assimilate.\u00a0 Many people opposed his idea at first but it became more popular as more people flooded into the southeast with their slaves and also when gold was discovered in Georgia.\u00a0 Jackson was able to push through legislation forcing the Indians out and congress agreed with his plan in 1830.\u00a0 What followed was a shameful part of American History as thousands of Indians were pushed out, had their land stolen, and were marched to territory they were unfamiliar with to start new lives.\u00a0 Later treaties guaranteeing them this new Indian Territory was also stolen and inhabited by the ever encroaching white settlers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

        5. Uncommon Glory: The First Ascent of Huascaran<\/strong><\/em> by Annie Smith Peck * * * *\u00a0
          November 15, 2020\u00a0
          Annie Smith Peck not only had to overcome meager resources and\u00a0 inadequate equipment, but also constant belittling treatment by the men she hired to assist her in her multiple attempts to summit the highest peak in Peru– Huascaran.\u00a0 Despite incredible adversity, Peck finally ascended Huascaran, elevation 22, 205 feet, on September 2, 1908, at the age of 58, after six prior failed attempts and was acknowledged for doing so by the president of Peru, Senor Leguia, with a coin struck in her honor.\u00a0 She had hoped to measure the altitude of Huascaran in her ascent of the intimidating mountain, which was unknown at the time, but she was not able to light the instrument in the fierce wind near the summit when her paid Swiss guide, Rudolph, abandoned her in order to summit first in violation of protocols that the expedition leader be always allowed to summit first.\u00a0 Rudolph paid dearly for this insult, by developing frost bite and ultimately losing his right hand, fingers of his left hand, and part of one foot.\u00a0\u00a0
          The determination of Peck was admirable if not a little crazy.\u00a0 The fact that she was able to summit the great mountain in the midst of the black plague, during a time that mountaineering gear was not nearly as sophisticated as today, during a time that women did not even have the right to vote much less any of the other rights and respect due them, and at an altitude well over 20,000 feet with no oxygen speaks to the incredible willpower and endurance of this amazing woman and of the second sex in general.\u00a0 Hurrah for Annie Smith Peck.<\/li>\n
        6. Classic Krakauer<\/strong><\/em> by Jon Krakauer * * * 1\/2
          October 5, 2020
          I have read two of Krakauer’s most famous books of non-fiction, Into the Wild<\/em> and Under the Banner of Heaven<\/em> previously but never read any of these previously published essays before.\u00a0 He is an excellent writer and I enjoyed almost all of them except the boring one about the architect.\u00a0 The most stunning essay was the last one, which if you don’t peak at the bottom and see the date the essay was written, you might well believe it was written just today.\u00a0 It’s uncannily prescient and topical.\u00a0 \u00a0The most interesting essay concerned the corrupt wilderness therapy industry which is mostly run by unscrupulous Mormons who pray upon parents of out-of-control children.<\/li>\n
        7. Hamnet\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Maggie O’Farrell * * * 1\/2
          September 24, 2020\n

          With her eighth novel, O’Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent’s worst nightmare: the death of a child. Set in Stratford, England, in the late 16th century,\u00a0Hamnet<\/em> imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world’s most famous (though never named) playwright and his wife, Agnes, lose their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, to the bubonic plague in 1596. Four years later, the boy’s father transposes his grief into his masterpiece\u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/em>titled with a common variant of his son’s name \u2014 in which the father dies and the son lives to avenge him.<\/p>\n

          \u00a0In this novel, <\/em>O’Farrell switches between two timelines, one beginning on the day the plague first afflicts Hamnet’s twin sister Judith, the other returning to the beginning of their parents’ passionate relationship some 15 years earlier.\u00a0 I found it odd that O’Farrell chose to never state Shakespeare’s name in the novel.\u00a0 His wife, Agnes, is a very unorthodox character and it seemed improbable that the two, so unalike would end up together.\u00a0 The endless chapter on the parents’ grief was too grievous and had to be skimmed.\u00a0 Other than that, it was a delightful book and very well written and imagined.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

        8. Bowery Girl<\/strong><\/em> by Kim Taylor Blakemore * * *\u00a0
          August 5, 2020
          Two girls, one a pick pocket and the other a prostitute, are best friends trying to get out of their destitute lives and out of the Bowery.<\/li>\n
        9. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft<\/strong><\/em> by Claire Tomalin
          * * * *\u00a0
          August 1, 2020
          Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in a grubby textile town outside of London and died too young at 37 years old in 1797.\u00a0 She lived in a time that women had very few choices in how to survive in a male dominated world.\u00a0 When her grandfather died he left everything to his grandson, Ned, and two other male relatives and zero to his three granddaughters.\u00a0 \u00a0While Ned went on to become well off, thanks to the largesse of his grandfather,\u00a0 Mary struggled to find a way to make a living, all of her life.\u00a0 She tried her hand at being a governess for the Kingsboroughs in Ireland but was dismissed after a year.\u00a0 She returned to England and befriended many free thinkers and dissenters and began developing her feminist views.\u00a0 She became friends with Johnson, a publisher, and he took her in and put her on board for his magazine, The Analytical, and also published her most famous book, Vindication of the Rights of Woman<\/em>.\u00a0 For a while Mary Wollstonecraft was the most famous woman in England.\u00a0 She also wrote many articles for The Analytical and two novels but even today Vindication of the Rights of Woman remains her crowning achievement.\u00a0 She championed the reformation of marriage and divorce laws and promoted the idea that allowing women the right to an education would provide them more opportunities for making a living than becoming a governess or seamstress or marrying a man.\u00a0 For a while her views seemed to catch on.\u00a0 She left shortly after the publication of her book for France just after the Revolution and also wrote about Post-revolutionary France.\u00a0 She had an illegitimate daughter Fanny, who wrote a novel now long forgotten.\u00a0 Later she married William Godwin incurring the scorn of her peers for being a hypocrite but felt it necessary because of the public scorn she faced for having an illegitimate child.\u00a0 She became pregnant with her second child, Mary, but died shortly after her birth due to an infection caused by the doctor trying to remove the placenta by hand.\u00a0 Her daughter, Mary, went on to marry the famous poet, Shelley, is most well known for writing Frankenstein<\/em>.\u00a0 Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas were well ahead of her time but unfortunately there was a public backlash against her after death and it was over a hundred years after her death before woman obtained the right to vote in the UK.\u00a0 Nevertheless she is still remembered today for her significant contribution to the advancement of the rights of women and for her high intellect, writing skills, and forward views.\u00a0 \u00a0She was buried at St. Pancras which was a beautiful church at the time but fell into disrepair with the encroaching development and coming railway extension to Kings Cross.\u00a0 I visited St. Pancras in 2014 and the placard is still there but her body had been removed by Shelley long before to Bournemouth.\u00a0 \u00a0 The church has beautiful sculptures around it and it’s a shame it has not been restored and that the high place that Mary Wollstonecraft deserves for her contributions, ideas, and intellectual prowess, has not also been restored.\u00a0 Tomalin herself is a brilliant writer and this is an excellent biography of Wollstonecraft.<\/li>\n
        10. Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for Bears Ears<\/strong><\/em> by Jacqueline Keller\u00a0 * * *\u00a0
          July 18, 2020
          Ever since I first learned about the remote area of southern Utah known by all the Indian tribes in their native tongues, as the Bears Ears, I have been fascinated by it.\u00a0 Bears Ears was first proposed as a national park in 1935 and was recommended to be included when Canyonlands National Park was established in 1964 but the Utah delegation was opposed to it and in the end Canyonlands was a measly 68,000 acres and did not include the spectacular brick red buttes known as Bears Ears or the extraordinarily beautiful area surrounding the buttes nor the thousands of architectural sites in the area.\u00a0 The Bears Ears are considered sacred by the Indian tribes in the area and they have used this area for thousands of years.\u00a0 Finally, December 28, 2016, President Barack Obama declared 1.39 million acres the Bears Ears National Monument.\u00a0 These days when a president declares a national monument\u00a0 pursuant to the 1906 Antiquities Act, the monument is administered by the federal body who administered it before it became a national monument.\u00a0 (All national monuments are already\u00a0 federal land).\u00a0 Since the Bears Ears were BLM land, President Obama could have had BLM administer Bears Ears National Monument but at the request of a Five Tribe Intertribal Coalition, Bears Ears was to be administered by the Intertribal Council in conjunction with the federal government.\u00a0 \u00a0A month later, Trump was elected and he reversed Obama’s Proclamation both reducing the size of Bears Ears to a mere 300,000 acres and also removing the administration of Bears Ears from the Intertribal Council and back to the BLM.\u00a0 This book was written before that happened and is mostly about how the Indians have always struggled to fight for protection of sacred areas from depredations such as pipelines, uranium mines, oil and gas extraction, and ecological disasters.\u00a0 \u00a0Having just visited Bears Ears last month and being horrified at how many cattle grazing leases the BLM maintains there, I mainly wanted to find out how the Tribes felt about grazing leases on national monuments.\u00a0 There was only one mention in the whole book about grazing where one of the Indians interviewed by the author mentioned overgrazing being a problem.\u00a0 I would call that a vast understatement.\u00a0 Most of the interviewees talked about how Indians value land and protecting and preserving mother earth.\u00a0 I\u00a0 believe that but the book overlooked the many Indian tribes who have used their tribal lands for casinos which is not that less intrusive on an ecosystem than a pipeline for example.\u00a0 Also I would think that all Indians would be opposed to cattle grazing since cows are the very symbol of white European domination over indigenous tribes.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the book was instructive.\u00a0 I learned a lot and I commend Jacqueline Keller for taking the time to write it and put together a narrative of white suppression of indigenous people.<\/li>\n
        11. Middlemarch<\/strong><\/em> by George Eliot * * * * *\u00a0
          July 9, 2020
          I read this book years ago and decided to read it again.\u00a0 You can’t rush through a great book and that’s why it took me so long to read it.\u00a0 I had to linger over every carefully crafted and beautifully written sentence.\u00a0 \u00a0Due to her idiosyncratic views and her fear of feminism, Mary Ann Evans felt compelled to hide her identity and published this book under the pseudonym, George Eliot.\u00a0 Middlemarch is a tour de force and Eliot’s masterpiece, though she published numerous other books and articles.\u00a0 Her psychological insights are formidable and her writing is sublime.\u00a0 \u00a0 If only people could write so well today.\u00a0 I loved the last sentence: “But the effect of her [Dorothea, the heroine of the novel] being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as\u00a0 they might have\u00a0 been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”<\/li>\n
        12. The Night Watchman<\/strong><\/em> by Louise Erdrich * * * *
          April 16, 2020
          In this latest book by award winning author, Louise Erdrich, she gives a fictionalized account of the true story of how her grandfather fought to save the Turtle Mountain Tribe of Chippewa Indians from “termination” by an act of congress.\u00a0 The book gives a glimpse into life on an Indian Reservation in mid-20th Century American and gives an unflinching look into the crushing poverty of American Indians all over America while at the same time revealing lovingly the deep connection of Indians to each other and to the land they once dominated. \u00a0 It also takes a look into the dark side of Indian life in the side story about an Indian girl subjected to human trafficking.<\/li>\n
        13. \u00a0Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power<\/strong><\/em> by Pekka Hamalainen * * * *\u00a0
          March 19, 2020
          This is a superb book, incredibly well written and researched.\u00a0 I highly recommend it as an update and adjunct to the earlier Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee<\/em>.\u00a0 Hamalainen does an excellent job of portraying life for the Indians as the white settlers arrived, invaded, and ultimately crushed the them and tried to eradicate their culture.\u00a0 I couldn’t help but think while reading the book how I might feel if some other people, Chinese perhaps, were to invade and take over the US and impose their way of life on us.\u00a0 I truly felt for the Indians and for their struggle.\u00a0 I will never visit Mount Rushmore; what a blight and disgrace.\u00a0 We stole the Black Hills, the Paha Sapa, from the Indians after signing treaties promising it would remain theirs, after discovering it contained gold.\u00a0 To then carve it up with giant facades of white people is in insult beyond comparison.\u00a0 Read this book!<\/li>\n
        14. Montana Before History: 11,000 Years of Hunter-Gatherers in the Rockies and Plains<\/strong> <\/em>by Douglas H. MacDonald * * *\u00a0
          February 3, 2020
          I picked this book up at the airport during another United Flight delay out\u00a0 of Bozeman. \u00a0 It was very interesting and had an impressive catalog of all the important historical sites in and around Montana.\u00a0 Montana is unique among the states as in that its historical record is exclusively of hunter-gatherer populations before contact with the Europeans.\u00a0 Apparently the first people in Montana were the Clovis people but nobody knows exactly where they came from.\u00a0 The books gives you a lot to think about and it gave me a lot of ideas of places I would like to visit.\u00a0 Number one on the list is Pictograph Cave.<\/li>\n
        15. All the Houses<\/em><\/strong> by Karen Olsson * * 1\/2
          January 4, 2020
          This novel was written in the middle of the occupation of Iraq and is about a family in Washington, DC, whose father was implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair during the Reagan Administration.\u00a0 The novel is primarily about family interactions where they intersect around the father’s reaction to being caught up in Iran-Contra.\u00a0 Although Olsson tries to make the family drama more interesting by mixing it up with the political scandal, it failed to do so.\u00a0 I only finished the book because I was hoping the narrator, Karen, an aspiring writer who has moved to LA but come back after her father’s heart attack, would break up with the guy she is dating in DC and also find out why her sister was acting so mysterious after a basketball injury.\u00a0 They were only mildly enticing events. \u00a0 Her sister was taking pain pills for her ankle obtained from the same guy that Helen is currently dating all these years later.\u00a0 Helen tries hard to remain non-political throughout the novel but it is impossible to write about a political scandal without taking some kind of position. Her position is that the Iran-Contra Scandal was just good people doing what they thought was right even though Iran-Contra was really about questionable people breaking the law and selling guns to Iran with long-standing horrible consequences that are never brought up in the book even though we were occupying Iraq at the time and even though Iran is currently our enemy.\u00a0 I can’t recommend this book.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Books I read in 2019:<\/b><\/p>\n

            \n
          1. A History of Montana, Volume Two: Priests and Prospectors <\/strong><\/em>by Greg Strandberg **
            December 22, 2019
            I had intended to read a new book I just bought about the Lakota Indians but I inadvertently left it in Montana and I was taking a five and a half hour flight.\u00a0 So I had no choice but to finish part two of Greg Strandberg’s poorly written history of Montana.\u00a0 Volume two was much better than volume one in terms of having far fewer typos and grammatical errors. \u00a0 Nevertheless, there was little difference between this book and reading a write up in Wikipedia of these years of the history of Montana. The blurb on the book jacket says that it is told through the lives of the people who made history there\u00a0 but it’s not.\u00a0 It’s told in this boring style like an outline for a history course.\u00a0 On the other hand, I learned a lot about this period of time in Montana’s history, a history of exploitation and lies told to the native inhabitants, and murderous prospectors, which explains a lot about why Montana is the way it is now.\u00a0 It was settled by prospectors who had little regard for the beautiful countryside they were digging up and destroying, and who were above all interested in getting rich quick.\u00a0 The state was populated by lawless criminals with little regard for the government or the rule of law.\u00a0 No wonder it went overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.\u00a0 During the years covered by this book the state was largely democratic but that is because at that time the democratic party was people who sided with slavery and the southern states.\u00a0 Montana was declared a state in 1864 but the governor was appointed by the president and the residents were only allowed to vote for legislators and one member of the US House of Representatives. \u00a0 The state still have only one US Representatives and currently that position is held by a convicted criminal.<\/li>\n
          2. Only Pack What You Can Carry: My path to inner strength, confidence, and true self-knowledge <\/strong><\/em>by Janice Holly Booth *\u00a0 * * 1\/2
            December 19, 2019
            While vacationing in Galapagos Islands this year, I met Janice Holly Booth.\u00a0 I didn’t know anything about her or her book.\u00a0 In fact, her partner, TJ, is who even told me about her book.\u00a0 We got to be friends on this trip and so at the end of the trip after I sent them a copy of my video, they mailed me a signed copy of Janice’s book and I just finished it.\u00a0 I believe this is only the second self help book I have ever read (the only other one was about getting over a break up and was given to me in 2011 by a friend).\u00a0 I enjoyed reading this book very much admittedly, mostly because I have spent hours upon hours in the slot canyons of Utah and lost my heart to the Utah desert years ago, and have nearly died there more than once.\u00a0 The chapters on canyoneering and hiking captivated me most.\u00a0 I tried to think of something I am afraid of while reading the book to give it some practical application, but the only thing I came up with is my fear of needles.\u00a0 By necessity I must overcome that fear because I grind my teeth at night and this has lead to my seventh crown just today, the day I finished Janice’s book.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I can see applying the book’s recommendations to overcoming this fear.\u00a0 According to the book, fear of needles is one of the top five most common fears next to snakes and heights.\u00a0 I recommend this book to anyone looking to overcome any fear or anyone dissatisfied with his or her life, or needing help breaking out of limits we place on ourselves.\u00a0 If you are reading this, good job Janice!\u00a0 Thank you for the book and thank you for the inspiration to go after my dreams and break free from the chains of fear.<\/li>\n
          3. A Job with Room & Board: Memories of an Early Montana Forester <\/strong><\/em>by John B. Taylor <\/em>* * * 1\/2
            <\/strong><\/em>December 9, 2019
            While in Barnes and Noble looking for something to read other than Volume Two of Greg Strandberg’s catastrophically and horribly written history of Montana, I came across this book and was fascinated by it. \u00a0 A friend who got me interested in Montana and encouraged me to buy property there was raised by a U.S. Forest Ranger.\u00a0 The author of this book was quite a bit older than her father but I’m sure he would have been able to relate to much of what Taylor wrote about being a Forest Service employee in Montana.\u00a0 Taylor started out at eighteen taking a summer job with the Forest Service where he had a million acres of free room and board, only the board was dried pork and hard crackers that mostly ran out before they could return from mapping the uncharted wilderness and counting timber, and the room was nothing more than a rolled up blanket.\u00a0 He supplemented his diet by catching Spruce Grouse with a stick.\u00a0 At that time in Montana the National Forests were roadless and wild.\u00a0 Despite the meager supplies given to the employees while carrying out the arduous task they were asked to do, Taylor fell in love with the wilderness and went on to work his way up the ranks of the Forest Service to personnel supervisor. \u00a0 Along the way he earned degrees in botany and forestry from the University of Michigan (University of Montana didn’t offer a degree in forestry).\u00a0 Taylor worked for the U.S. Forest Service from 1907 until the 1960s and saw many dramatic changes in Montana during that time.\u00a0 He would return to wild places he had mapped during his youth only to find them sliced up by roads and overrun by tourists and development.\u00a0 He was appalled at the development and lamented the building of dams for hydroelectric power and the bulldozers of the Army Corps of Engineers and their reckless destruction when he returned on backpacking trips with family and friends, and yet he said nothing about it while actually working for the Forest Service, and never saw anything wrong with the Forest Service clear cutting and selling our timber or other destructive activities of the Forest Service.\u00a0 Overall though his passion for the outdoors and all nature has to offer comes through clearly throughout the book.\u00a0 It was a joy to read and I recommend it.<\/li>\n
          4. Tribes and Trappers: A History of Montana Volume One<\/strong><\/em> by Greg Strandberg **
            November 26, 2019
            I was looking for a history book about Montana and all I could find was this terrible, horribly written set of volumes by Greg Strandberg.\u00a0 Strandberg’s only qualification for writing a set of history books about Montana, apparently, is that he has a BA in history from the University of Montana and that he grew up in Missoula, Montana, where the\u00a0 University of Montana is located.\u00a0 The “About the Author” section at the end of the book states that Strandberg spent five years as a “slave for the English language industry” when he moved to China after the U.S. economy collapsed in 2008, to teach English as a second language and that he abandoned “this nonsense” after five years.\u00a0 After reading his terrible first volume of the history of Montana, I fear for all those poor souls in China who took English lessons from this idiot.\u00a0 His English is an embarrassment to the English language and he has no business teaching English or writing a book in the English language.\u00a0 The book had so many grammatical errors, typographical errors, and syntax errors that I had to just translate his sentences into proper English in my head as I read.\u00a0 The book is terribly, or not really, organized and not really about Montana at all for most of the chapters.\u00a0 It is mostly a more general history of the early years of the U.S. after independence.\u00a0 Please don’t read this book.\u00a0 It’s embarrassing.\u00a0 I enjoyed reading about famous mountain men like John Bridger and Jedidiah Smith but I am sure you can find a better written book about those two if you care to learn more about their lives.\u00a0 If you are interested in the history of Montana though I suggest taking a course at University of Montana or Montana State University, Montana’s two great universities.<\/li>\n
          5. Educated<\/strong><\/em> by Tara Westover * * *
            November 3, 2019
            This memoir is about a girl who grew up in a small town in Idaho who never attended school and yet went on to graduate from BYU and receive graduate degrees from Harvard and Cambridge.\u00a0 Her parents were Mormons and had many unorthodox beliefs and practices.\u00a0 They didn’t believe in modern medicine and refused medical care despite several horrific accidents suffered by the father and two of Westover’s brothers.\u00a0 Her mother was a midwife and healer and Tara assisted her in mixing concoctions in the kitchen that she used to heal all maladies. These herbal mixtures ultimately lead to a successful business for the Westovers.\u00a0 Most of the time, though, they struggled to manage on the father’s scrapping business, scrapping metal from his junkyard using extremely dangerous methods to do so.\u00a0 The parents were survivalists and stockpiled food and fuel and the father raged against the “government.”\u00a0 Her brothers were cruel and violent and abusive.\u00a0 One brother had a serious psychological problem that went undiagnosed and untreated due to their disdain for modern medicine administered by “the government.”\u00a0 You couldn’t help but plow ahead with the book hoping Tara would escape her insane, abusive, sexist, violent, misguided family but again and again she returned to only be tormented and abused by her father and brothers and even by her mother who turned a blind eye to the violence over and over.\u00a0 It was frustrating to the very end when she finally decided to cut ties and you can just imagine the reaction of her family when this expose was finally published.\u00a0 Westover tries to explain in an epilogue that the book is not an indictment of Mormonism but you can’t help but notice how the Mormon beliefs shaped at least in part some of the more pernicious practices and beliefs of her parents.\u00a0 On the other hand, her father suffered from bipolar disorder and was clearly insane and at least one of her brothers was possibly psychotic or a sociopath, and this could be used to explain away their atrocious behavior aside from their ridiculous religious and political beliefs.\u00a0 Hurrah for Westover for escaping from this violent, misogynist, backward family and finding that an education is invaluable.<\/li>\n
          6. \u00a0Astrophysics for People in a Hurry<\/strong><\/em> by Neil de Grasse Tyson\u00a0 * * * 1\/2
            October 24, 2019
            This slim volume by one of the most famous living astrophysicists is really just a series of essays about chemistry, the earth, planets, galaxies, and the universe, as well as the latest theories and discoveries about the universe, the possibility of a multiverse, the discovery of numerous exoplanets, and other fascinating topics concerning astrophysics.\u00a0 It is by no means comprehensive but was interesting and easy and fun to read.<\/li>\n
          7. Gates of Fire <\/strong><\/em>by Steven Pressfield * * *
            <\/strong>October 13, 2019
            <\/strong><\/em>This book is a fictionalized and graphic account of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC between a large Persian Army, historians estimate at anywhere from 100,000 to 1,000,000 soldiers, against a much smaller Greek army of only 7000.\u00a0 The Greek warriors were lead by King Leonidas of Sparta and the Persian Empire was led by Xerxes.\u00a0 The book is told through the main character, Xeones, whose family is murdered when his home town is overrun and burned down.\u00a0 He and his cousin, Diomache, escape to the mountains with their blind caretaker until he perishes in the mountains, and they descend and start a long march to Athens.\u00a0 Diomache is taken in by a family and forced into prostitution while Xeones joins the Spartans and is quickly recognized for his skills and fierce determination. Xeones is captured by the Persians during the battle of Thermopylae and later, after the Spartans are finally routed and defeated after seven days of battle, Xeones agrees to record the details of the battle and how the Spartans prepared for it, for the Persian King in a running dialogue recorded by the King’s recorder, for the King is anxious to understand how the Spartans were able to repel the Persians who were so severely outnumbered.\u00a0 The book is required reading for US Marines and is often used as a missive on the power of a patriotic army to defend its native soil and as a primer and symbol of courage.\n

            The book was very historically accurate but I could have done without reading some of the more gory passages.\u00a0 There were far too many spears going through bodies and bloody hand to hand combat and the cursing in modern language was absurd and gratuitous and added nothing to the story.\u00a0 Other than that it was a good book and easy to read.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

          8. Future Home of the Living God<\/strong><\/em> by Louise Erdrich * * *
            September 1, 2019
            I don’t know how all these dystopian novels ended up in my Kindle.\u00a0 I don’t know how long it’s been in there waiting to be read but there is was. \u00a0 So not knowing a thing about the book, I started reading it this week and finished it today.\u00a0 The book is a long letter written by a 32 year old mother, Cedar Songmaker,\u00a0 to her unborn child.\u00a0 Cedar is raised by her liberal vegan adoptive parents but was the biological child of an Ojibwe Indian living in Minnesota.\u00a0 Cedar makes fun of her parents, Sera and Glen, but they turn out to be right about their fears of the coming de-evolution of human beings.\u00a0 Cedar becomes pregnant just as climate change is having devastating effects on humans to the extent that pregnancies are ending in stillborns at such an alarming rate that someone has taken over the government and it is capturing all pregnant women and imprisoning them to take away any viable babies.\u00a0 Cedar tries to hide inside her apartment once her pregnancy becomes obvious and she and her boyfriend, Phil, try to carry the child to term without being captured by whoever is in charge of things which is not explained very well.\u00a0 Many things are not explained but the novel tumbles along anyway leaving you wanting to believe Cedar’s baby will be born and will survive.\u00a0 I don’t know why I wanted this to happen when what I really believe is that humans are an awful species and the world would be better off if we did peacefully slip away unable to perpetuate the species.\u00a0 The novel seemed to mirror Handmaid’s Tale<\/em> except that book was much darker and more sinister whereas Future Home<\/em> tries to stay sanguine about the devolving human race and collapsing society.\u00a0 By the end of the novel I just wanted it and us over.<\/li>\n
          9. Where the Crawdads Sing<\/strong><\/em> by Delia Owens * * * *
            August 7, 2019
            I gave this book four stars because I couldn’t put it down and because how I have dreamed all my life of knowing all the flowers, all the trees, all the insects, all the birds, all living things all around me just like the Marsh Girl.\u00a0 This novel, the first from the previously only non-fiction writer, Delia Owens, is about a girl who is abandoned by her family to live on her own from age seven in a shack in a marsh in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.\u00a0 She overcomes tremendous adversity to grow up into a living legend writing numerous books about the flora and fauna of the marsh but is haunted by her sad lonely life.\u00a0 She is accused of a murder and the ending is as murky as the marsh.\u00a0 That’s all I’m going to say because you should read this book.<\/li>\n
          10. The Pickwick Papers<\/em><\/strong> by Charles Dickens * * * *
            July 24, 2019
            I have read this book before years ago and enjoyed it very much.\u00a0 Then recently I watched a BBC presentation of it which was very good and now I have read it again and it was just as enjoyable this time.\u00a0 It took me so long at over 600 pages but was worth every delicious word.\u00a0 A couple of the stories I skimmed over– the strange little dreamy stories– but most of the stories were hilarious and so well written.\u00a0 How did Dickens come up with some of this stuff?\u00a0 What a brilliant writer.\u00a0 Mr. Pickwick, a sweet gentleman beloved by all, starts a club with four of his friends and they set out to have adventures and adventures they have.\u00a0 Halfway through Pickwick meets the unique and lovable character, Sam Weller, whom he hires to be his manservant.\u00a0 Pickwick accidentally leads his housekeeper, Mrs. Bardell, to believe he is proposing to her when he is actually trying to tell her he is hiring Sam to be his manservant and she ends up suing him for false promise of marriage.\u00a0 She wins the lawsuit but Pickwick refuses to pay and is sent to Fleet Street debtors prison.\u00a0 In the end it all works out for all but not before many more amusing adventures told with such powerful good writing you cannot put it down.<\/li>\n
          11. MacBeth<\/em><\/strong> by William Shakespeare * * * * *
            June 1, 2019
            What a great play but why are the female characters always harridans, vixens, and shrews?\u00a0 It’s amazing how many sayings in English come from Shakespeare.\u00a0 Even if the themes are horrible and some of the stories atrocious such as this one where lady MacBeth talks her husband into murdering Duncan, the king of Scotland, the language is timeless and eternal, quoteworthy, and fabulous. \u00a0 Re-read Macbeth again and again.<\/li>\n
          12. Kudos<\/em><\/strong> by Rachel Cusk * * * 1\/2
            April 13, 2019
            This book was in my Kindle.\u00a0 So I started reading it after I finished Lenin since I needed some fiction for a change.\u00a0 I had no idea what it was about or who the author was.\u00a0 As it turned out, Kudos<\/em> is the last book in the Faye Trilogy.\u00a0 Unfortunately I have not read the first two books in the trilogy but they are also about the author, Faye.\u00a0 In Kudos, Faye goes to an European city to attend a literary conference and the book is about the strangers and acquaintances she meets and the things they tell her.\u00a0 She relates the stories in the third person which is somewhat boring but what comes across is a unique new kind of literature created by Cusk that attempts to be an inward looking novel that is both passive and impartial, searching and authentic or attempts to be anyway.\u00a0 As she relates the story some of their prologues seem improbably philosophical for the ordinary person.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the book was very enjoyable to read for its creativity and attempt to be the negative novel.\u00a0 Kudos to Cusk for this very different and refreshing take on the modern novel.<\/li>\n
          13. Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror<\/strong><\/em> by Victor Sebestyen
            * * * 1\/2
            March 30, 2019
            In this engrossing biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the first in English in two decades, journalist, Victor Sebesten, tells not only the story of how Lenin came to power through the Bolshevik revolution but how Lenin grew up and the forces that lead this rather ordinary man to become an enduring legend in Russia 90 years later long after Communism has been roundly debunked, the Russian government he helped establish dissolved, and his life exposed as a dictatorship based on terrorizing the people and executing anyone opposed to his reign.\u00a0 Although Lenin was opposed to statues and memorials, and against his express wishes and those of his surviving and long-suffering wife, Nadya, his body was embalmed just after he died in 1924 and placed in a Mausoleum\u00a0 in Red Square.\u00a0 To this day people continue to line up outside the Mausoleum to see his embalmed body. \u00a0 The Mausoleum was refurbished in 2011\u00a0 by Putin to signal to the world that then and now Russia needs a dominant, ruthless, autocratic ruler.<\/li>\n
          14. Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter<\/strong> <\/em>by Ben Goldfarb\u00a0 * * *
            February 18, 2019
            I never really thought of beavers as the potential saviors of the ecological disasters wrought by marauding hordes of humans until I read this book. Goldfarb makes a strong case for letting beavers co-exist with humans as a way of reinstating our devastated wetlands and restoring a more balanced ecosystem.\u00a0 At the same time, the book is just another example of how humans don’t really fit into the ecosystem. \u00a0 Wherever we are there is destruction and degradation.\u00a0 It’s not just restoring beavers that will make the ecosystem work more like mother nature intended it to but just preventing humans from overrunning every other species and tormenting the world into what must inevitably be an uninhabitable planet at some point. \u00a0 I enjoyed this book very much.\u00a0 It gave me an idea.\u00a0 Maybe I could introduce some beavers onto my property to turn my seasonal stream into a perennial one and cut off the water supply to my neighbor’s obnoxious cattle ranch!<\/li>\n
          15. The Tangled Tree: Radical New History of Life<\/em><\/strong> by David Quammen * * * *
            January 24, 2019
            David Quammen is a talented science journalist who has written 15 books of fiction and non-fiction.\u00a0 This book tells the story of how exciting new discoveries have changed our thinking about where we came from and how we evolved.\u00a0 He starts with Charles Darwin’s revolutionary book Origin of Species which explained his theory that species evolved over time through genetic mutations and natural selection.\u00a0 Though Darwin’s work was startling and profound he had no way of knowing\u00a0 that there was such much more involved and that we did not evolve exactly like the tree portrayed in his book.\u00a0 Instead, as explained in the book, through ground breaking work of people like Carl Woese, a biologist working at University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne, discovered in 1977 that there was another life form, archea, that was neither bacteria nor plant, that had contributed to our genome.\u00a0 Lynn Margulis, former spouse of Carl Sagan, around the same time as Woese’s work realized that we are actually mosaic creatures.\u00a0 The tree of life was not as straight forward as we had previously thought.\u00a0 We now know that 8% of our human genome is made up of bacteria and virus. \u00a0 Our genes are not just transferred through our ancestors but horizontally from all the bacteria and viruses we come in contact with through horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and that this is what makes some part of the evolutionary process much faster than by mutations of millions of years. \u00a0\u00a0 I’m not a scientist but I found this book fascinating and a great read.\u00a0 I highly recommend it.\u00a0 I will probably read one of Quammen’s other many books as well.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            Books I read in 2018:<\/b><\/p>\n

              \n
            1. The Little Prince<\/em><\/strong> by Antoine de Saint-Exupery * * * *
              December 16, 2018 (Audio book, although I also read it years ago in Spanish)
              Saint-Exupery was a French aviator and author whose plane was shot down in World War II and landed in the desert of Libya.\u00a0 He published this book in 1943 in French and it has sold millions of copies since then and been translated into dozens of languages.\u00a0 The book is a fable about a pilot whose plane is shot down and lands in the desert 1000 miles from the closest person.\u00a0 While repairing his plane a boy appears out of nowhere.\u00a0 Over the next week he learns that the boy has come to earth from a far away asteroid the size of a house, that he left after tiring of watering his overly needy rose.\u00a0 During this brief encounter the little prince shows that actions speak louder than words and that most people are vain and superficial and finally that the best things in life are the simplest, such as the sunset and the stars.<\/li>\n
            2. Crescent and Star: Turkey between Two Worlds<\/em><\/strong> by Stephen Kinzer * * *
              December 8, 2018
              This book tells the story of Turkey from its founding in 1922 by Ataturk after World War I when Great Britain was ready to divide it up between the victors, through its troubled history after his death crushing the Kurds, quieting dissenting voices through an overriding military, and numerous incidents of human rights abuses and abuses of power.\u00a0 Though Ataturk dreamed of Turkey becoming a modern nation and a part of the European tradition, it never quite gets there by the time the book ends in 2001.\u00a0 Ataturk was determined to drag Turkey into modernity by banning the ridiculous subservience of women bowing to men, the absurd veil, requiring that people wear western attire, and restricting the building of mosques or teaching of Islam in schools.\u00a0 He had many great ideas that prevented Turkey from becoming a backward like the rest of the surrounding Arabic countries but at a price.\u00a0 He basically became the dictator of Turkey.\u00a0 Although Turkey has come a long way toward modernization it still has a military that can overrule all else, a growing Muslim population pushing it closer and closer to a Muslim state, and it is not quite ready to embrace all that Democracy entails or that Ataturk envisioned for Turkey.\u00a0 Although invited to join the EU in 1999, it still has not met all of the requirements to be a part of the EU or even to be considered even close to a Democracy.\u00a0 To my reading it was in better shape when Ataturk was the dictator than it is now under the odious Erdogan.<\/li>\n
            3. The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend<\/strong><\/em> by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin * * * *
              November 19, 2018
              This well documented and well researched book about the famous Lakota Indian, Red Cloud, is a great read.\u00a0 It is written in a spell binding narrative that keeps you turning the pages to find out if Red Cloud will defeat the American Cavalry sent to Montana to protect white settlers wagon bound west for gold, fortune, a new life, a free 160 acres guaranteed by the Homestead Act, or just reckless adventure.\u00a0 Red Cloud is the only Indian who did actually defeat and repel the US Cavalry, however, as everyone knows, the story ends badly with Red Cloud and all the Native Americans herded onto less favorable lands, Reservations, while the White Americans took all the gold they could find, aimlessly slaughtered the American Bison, denuded the west, populated it, and in the process wiped out a way of life and a culture and a people.\u00a0 Red Cloud was able to live out his life peacefully on the Pine Ridge Reservation but most other Indians had their lives cut short by the repeating rifle, the encroaching mobs of white people, and the near extinction of the Bison brought about by the invading white people.\u00a0 It was a great book except for one jarring moment on page 346 when the authors referred to Indians as “half-man.”\u00a0 The sentence refers to Red Cloud’s most famous victory over the US Cavalry, known as the Fetterman Massacre, where the Indians killed 100 US Cavalry (not without reason: the US was once again reneging on its treaties with the Indians and invading promised territory in the Powder River Territory).\u00a0 After the Indians won the battle they referred to it as “Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands” and the authors say that the Indians calling it that is the “half-man’s augury.”\u00a0 This should have been removed from the book; it was needless and racist and had no place in this otherwise good book.\u00a0 I would say overlook this moral dereliction on the part of the authors and read this great book with a wealth of information about this sad part of American History and about a great Indian Warrior, Red Cloud.\u00a0 Everyone who reads it must ask his or herself why was the federal government spending tax dollars and endless resources and placing soldiers in harms way in remote areas of the west after promising those very same remote areas to the Indians and partially during a time those resources were desperately needed for the raging civil war.\u00a0 It’s mind boggling to think about that.<\/li>\n
            4. Petra: The Art, the History, and the Nature<\/strong><\/em> by Mohammad Farhan with photos by Qasim Bdoul * * *
              October 20, 2018
              Petra means rock in Greek and is the incredible World Heritage Site in Jordan where the ancient tribe, the Nabateans, carved beautiful monuments out of the sandstone and this book gives a guide and brief history of the area and the people.<\/li>\n
            5. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East<\/strong><\/em> by David Fromkin * * * 1\/2
              October 11, 2018
              At times there were a bit too many intricate details of all the inner workings of all the many people involved inside Great Britain responsible for the mess that is now considered the Middle East.\u00a0 Basically as explained in the book Great Britain was alarmed at the growing Ottoman Empire which had been taken over by\u00a0the young Turks, Kemal, Pasha, and Talaat.\u00a0 Great Britain under the leadership of the Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, attacked Gallipoli where they hoped to control the important harbor, the Dardanelles, but the British were repelled by the Ottomans under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal.\u00a0 This well researched and well documented books is highly informative of what lead up to and what motivated Great Britain to enter World War I and also what was behind the carving up and creation of what is now Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.\u00a0 I learned a lot of useful information from reading this book about the many mistakes Great Britain made both before, during, and after WW I.\u00a0 For example, the first battle won by Great Britain were in Basra and Baghdad where Great Britain ruled with protectorates.\u00a0 WW I did not end all wars.\u00a0 One reason for the failure of WW I to end all wars is that although Great Britain got into the war ostensibly to stop the Ottoman Empire, it inadvertently lead to the alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire and ultimately the rise in WW II of Germany.\u00a0 After winning the war, Great Britain sought to carve up not only the Middle East but what was Turkey.\u00a0 Then it\u00a0 allowed one of the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal, to establish a new empire in Anatolia, the heart of Turkey where he eventually pushed out the occupying forces of Italy, France, and even Greece and formed what is now modern day Turkey (Kemal is known throughout Turkey as Ataturk).\u00a0 The primary failure though was that through a series of blunders Great Britain forced the Ottoman Empire to ally itself with Germany.\u00a0 After defeating the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain also became very greedy and obsessed with depriving France\u00a0 of controlling parcels of the Middle East such as Syria and Lebanon and this was before they even realized these areas contained vast quantities of oil.\u00a0 Then to make matters worse the region was carved up desultorily without regard to regionalism and tribalism and handed over to sultans and kings.\u00a0 Then on top of that Great Britain signed the Balfour Declaration which established a Jewish State in the middle of a predominantly Arab area by making false promises of independence and autonomy to various leaders there and then reneging on those promises and trying to rule these distant lands through puppet governments.\u00a0 Although Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918 to end WW I, it really was just the beginning of far more serious and deadly consequences that ultimately brewed into WW II.<\/li>\n
            6. Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American English and British English<\/em><\/strong> by Lynne Murphy * * *
              September 1, 2018
              I have to admit that I was a target audience for this book since I am a grammar maven and detest hearing people mangle the English language.\u00a0 In this book Ms. Murphy presents some compelling arguments why we should not care so much about whether one kind of English is invading and ruining another kind of English.\u00a0 About 30% of the book consists of the well documented footnotes that support her arguments through exhaustive research into the origins of words and how they got into British and American English and why.\u00a0 I know it sounds like a dry topic but the book was both interesting and funny.\u00a0 I highly recommend it.<\/li>\n
            7. 1491<\/strong><\/em> by Charles Mann *
              August 4, 2018
              I just finished this horrible book.\u00a0 I cannot recommend it.\u00a0 It’s terrible.\u00a0 He makes the most outrageous specious arguments and allegations based on the flimsiest evidence.\u00a0 I almost burned it in the trash after reading the premise of his book in the introduction in which he claims that Indians destroyed North, Central, and South America long before Columbus arrived and there is no true wilderness, and therefore it’s fine for us to now tear it up and ruin it again.\u00a0 What an idiot.\u00a0 He makes the outrageous claim that the old commercial of an Indian on the side of the road crying, when careless white people throw thrash out the window, was very effective and lead to many people abandoning their littering wasteful ways but that it was a false image because Indians destroyed the environment around them long before the white people arrived.\u00a0 What nonsense! \u00a0 I only gave this ridiculous book one star because if you can overlook his many fallacious arguments and outlandish claims, the book is an excellent compendium of all the latest discoveries and information gathered about the cultures in North, Central, and South America that preceded the invasions and subsequent ruination caused by white people.\u00a0 For example, I was not aware that there was one large settlement of Indians near modern day St. Louis, called Cahokia where they grew maize and had the only Indian “city” north of those in Central America.\u00a0 He estimates the population there at anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000. \u00a0 I also learned of giant geoglyphs in Beni, Brazil that were ancient mounds built by the Indians of South America.\u00a0 The rest of what he says about those is pure speculation though.\u00a0 He makes the outrageous claim that the Indians of North America numbered 25 million before Columbus, basing his number on the number of deaths caused by exposure to smallpox.\u00a0 I already knew about the massive cities built by the Maya in Central America and yes those have mostly been reclaimed by the jungle but in how many years?\u00a0 Mann claims that Indians were burning, building canals, raising fields, hunting bison, netting salmon and “managing the environment” for thousands of years on a scale never before known to the white people. Naturally the Indians had to find a way to eat and live to survive but for Mann to suggest the sheer scale and to equate it with modern day rapacious ways of North Americans is untenable and simply false.\u00a0 Today there are no doubt many more people living in North America than at any time in human history (currently 350,000 million) and there can be no doubt that we are destroying the planet on a scale unknown in human history and in unconscionable ways that are irreversible.
              There were so many unsupportable claims by Mann in the book that I gave up marking the book up.\u00a0 He even went so far as to suggest that it was a mistake to pass the Wilderness Act in 1965 because there is no true wilderness.\u00a0 I\u00a0 guess he doesn’t understand the plain meaning of wilderness.\u00a0 It doesn’t mean it has to be like it was 1000 years ago or before Columbus arrived; wilderness means it’s wild now and that it is not now overrun by human habitation or buildings or machinery.\u00a0 Most irritating of all is his equating the Indian’s cultivating maize and hunting bison with modern day development.\u00a0 There is just no comparison.\u00a0 The Indians got by as they had to survive by hunting bison and in pre-historic times by growing maize, but that was absolutely nothing compared to today’s large scale agricultural practices and especially nothing compared to the hideous cattle industry of today.\u00a0 The Indians had a connection to earth and valued it.\u00a0 Modern North Americans seek only to do what will bring in an income and have no regard for the impact their activities have on Mother Earth.\u00a0 Just one small example is the exploitation and destruction of many areas of North America to extract gold, an intrinsically valueless object.\u00a0 Modern North Americans, most of them anyway, don’t consider the earth sacred, they don’t say prayers for the food it provides or praise it for how it nourishes and supports us all.\u00a0 Moreover, Mr. Mann fails to even mention that today’s practices are causing extinctions on a massive scale that are irreversible.\u00a0 He claims the Indians nearly hunted the bison to extinction which is completely false, and makes the completely unsupportable claim that there weren’t 62 million bison roaming North America, without any scientific support for his claims at all and yet mentions only one extinction caused by white people, the extinction of the Carrier Pigeon which he seemed to feel was justified because of their nasty ways of flying in flocks of millions and eating all the mast for miles and “thousands of acres.”\u00a0 Absurd.\u00a0 The white people who arrived caused the worst imbalance in the ecosystem in the history of the world by bringing their damn nasty ass cows and raising them in hideous feed lots that attract cow birds by the thousands, something unheard of before the arrival of white Europeans in North America.\u00a0 White people forced American Indians to raise cows instead of bison in order to rob them of their land.\u00a0 His book is just plain wrong.\u00a0 Don’t read it.\u00a0 horrible book.<\/li>\n
            8. Let’s Drive<\/strong><\/em> by Ann King Reynolds * *
              July 11, 2018
              I saw this book in the Anasazi Indian Museum and State Park in Boulder, Utah and bought it because the author had grown up in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument before it was designated a national monument in 1996, and I wanted to read what she had to say about it.\u00a0 It’s another horrible book.\u00a0 The book provides interesting insight into why the people of Kane and Garfield Counties are so angry and opposed to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (but not apparently the more popular and overrun, Bryce Canyon National Park which by the way started out as a national monument!) .\u00a0 The author quotes a poem by a Mrs. Alvey at the beginning of the book that is telling.\u00a0 The poem speaks glowingly about the prospects of digging for coal in Grand Staircase while chastising backpackers who come and upset their solitude and are according to her, rude.\u00a0 The poem is so offensive that I almost threw the book away after reading that hideous poem but I continued to the end.\u00a0 Mostly the book is about the local people (mostly Mormons), who moved there when and how many cows they had.\u00a0 Some of the stories about her father yelling at them were funny and engaging but I was disheartened at her treatment, or lack thereof, of the first inhabitants, the Native Americans.\u00a0 She is constantly referring to some Mormon with 500 cows being the first settler in such and such area and this Mormon came and named this place.\u00a0 Almost everything in the area is named for some Mormon with cows.\u00a0 Nothing is named for the Indians, including the Indian Museum which incorrectly refers to the earliest inhabitants as Anasazi.\u00a0 On the other hand she expresses outrage in the book when the BLM renames the Pink Cliffs, Powell Point neither of which are their original Indian name. \u00a0 I was shocked to read that it is her family that owns the cattle permit in The Gulch which is off of the Burr Trail in Grand Staircase, and one of it premier hikes.\u00a0 We all hiked The Gulch for the first time this summer and were stunned by its incredible beauty, only to be dismayed near the apex of the hike, by coming upon a cattle lineman’s house about 2\/3 down the canyon that was full of trash and partially burned beer cans and also had tacky orange mesh fence pulled across the wash to ostensibly stop the cattle from getting into the water.\u00a0 These cows are polluting the very water these people depend upon and yet there is no acknowledgement of the damage caused by the Mormons bringing all their damn cows to Southern Utah and using up all the water and resources by growing and eating useless alfalfa and by watering it with our precious resource, water. \u00a0 Ms. Reynolds tries to stay neutral throughout the book with the exception of the offensive poem at the beginning and attempts to avoid controversy by sticking to stories about the locals, but in reality the book cannot help but be controversial because by telling her story she is telling anyone willing to read this book wherein lies the problem– the cows have got to go.\u00a0 Ms. Reynolds has a point in opposing the change in the name of the Pink Cliffs to Powell Point.\u00a0 There are already three Powell Points in Utah, everything is named for men and nothing for women, and Pink Cliffs sounds better.\u00a0 However, she fails to show even\u00a0 the least remorse that the Mormons stole land from Indians and then renamed all their sites with white Anglican (probably Mormon) names.\u00a0 Shame on her and shame on the politicians and citizens of Kane and Garfield counties.\u00a0 Reynolds does acknowledge at the end of the book that visitors to southern Utah spend some $88 million a year visiting it, including Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and that is without any damn coal mine!\u00a0 I could go on.\u00a0 If you want to feel shame and outrage at Mormons in Utah read this book but more than that, I agree with her that you should go visit this wonderful spectacular place that should be a National Park and not a coal mine.\u00a0 Resist President Trump’s illegal attempt to reduce Grand Staircase National Monument!<\/li>\n
            9. Tangerine<\/strong><\/em> by Christine Mangan * * *
              June 25, 2018
              This novel set in Tangier in the 50s, is Ms. Mangan’s first book.\u00a0 Two women, Alice and Lucy, are roommates in college and become close friends.\u00a0 Alice is scarred by the death of both parents and finds comfort in the fact that Lucy has\u00a0 also lost her parents or so she tells her.\u00a0 Lucy begins to engage in strange inexplicable behavior.\u00a0 For instance Alice comes home one day to find her wearing one of Alice’s outfits.\u00a0 Alice overlooks Lucy’s many quirks but begins to distance herself from Lucy by spending more and more time with a male acquaintance, Tom. \u00a0 Lucy is resentful of Tom and one day Tom dies under mysterious circumstances and Alice tells her to disappear.\u00a0 Lucy complies.\u00a0 Later in life Alice ends up married to John and they move to Tangier.\u00a0 One day Lucy shows up on their doorstep and things go terribly wrong for Alice\u00a0 from there.\u00a0 The book is an excellent exploration of two very damaged people and provides insights into how one can slide into socially unacceptable behavior based on circumstances in our formative years and one’s failure to acceptable means of coming to terms with traumatic events in our lives.\u00a0 This book was a tremendous first effort for Ms. Mangan.<\/li>\n
            10. Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants & Animals Among California’s Oaks<\/strong><\/em> by Kate Marianchild * * * *
              May 31, 2018
              I loved this book.\u00a0 Even though I have been walking California’s oak woodlands for over 25 years now, I still learned so much from this book about the unique and fascinating ecosystem of California’s oak woodlands.\u00a0 From the bizarre sexual mimicry of Acorn Woodpeckers just before dusk when they crowd sometimes fourteen at a time into their little tree cavity for the night to the delightful little Woodrat’s fabulous mansions, there is so much to learn from this book and make your oak woodland ramble so much more enjoyable.\u00a0 Read this book and treasure the ineffable joys of California’s oak woodlands.<\/li>\n
            11. A Son of the Sun<\/strong><\/em> by Jack London * * *
              May 8, 2018
              I liked Call of the Wild<\/em> and To Light a Match<\/em>, also by Jack London much better.\u00a0 However, this swashbuckling adventure novel written in 1912 and set in the tumultuous south seas is full of pirates, scoundrels, and exotic people making it quite enjoyable to read.\u00a0 The novel follows eight separate adventures of the hero, Captain David Grief, as he travels the seas in his schooner.<\/li>\n
            12. The Maya<\/strong><\/em> by Michael Coe & Stephen Houston 9th Edition * * *
              April 17, 2018
              This is the most authoritative, exhaustive, and up to date introduction to the ancient Maya from their beginnings to their present situation.\u00a0 It has many photos of important discoveries, sites, pottery, murals, and inscriptions.\u00a0 The end of the book has some recommendations on sites to visit to learn more about the Maya.\u00a0 I highly recommend this book if you want to learn more about this fascinating people.<\/li>\n
            13. Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize<\/strong><\/em> by John Hollander
              * * * *
              March 23, 2018
              This compilation of fantastic poems was published in 1996.\u00a0 I bought the book years ago looking for some poems to memorize but I finally got around to reading the entire book cover to cover and really enjoyed it.\u00a0 I have already memorized three great poems in the book two by John Keats and one by Thomas Hardy.\u00a0 If you are interested in poetry but don’t know much about it, this book also makes are good starter.<\/li>\n
            14. Poems of Shelley<\/strong><\/em> selected and arranged by Stopford Brooke * * * *
              March 17, 2018
              This is the first time I have ever sat down and read an entire book of one poet’s poems cover to cover.\u00a0 Just reading the preface alone which was very long, took hours. \u00a0 Shelley felt nature very deeply and his expressions of it are profound and make up his best poems such as Mont Blanc, Skylark, The Alps at Dawn, and The Cloud.\u00a0 His poems also combine his love of nature with his hopes for man as in the beautiful poem Ode to the West Wind which this book ends with.\u00a0 Shelley was very interested in time and its changes which is best expressed in probably his most famous poem Ozymandias, the one poem I was most familiar with before reading this book.\u00a0 I very much enjoyed Adonais, Shelley’s elegy on the death of John Keats and also Sensitive Plant.\u00a0 With every poem I had to keep the dictionary close by as almost all of them contained references to Greek Mythology and also to ancient poets.\u00a0 I would sometimes find myself lost in some discourse on other topics while researching some of the references.\u00a0 I still love Keats more and I’m not sure yet whether Shelley is better than Lord Byron or not, but after reading this I am sure I will return to it again and again.\u00a0 What a shame he died so young.
              A note on the text of this book which I bought from Barnes and Noble; the book was a digital copy of someone else’s book which the guy had marked up vigorously in places rendering the text unreadable in many poems.\u00a0 If you are interested in reading Shelley, and I hope you are because he was a truly great poet, then I would recommend, Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley or The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley instead.<\/li>\n
            15. White Tears<\/em><\/strong> by Hari Kunzru * * *
              March 3, 2018
              In this novel Seth, an ordinary kid interested in recording sounds, meets a very rich kid named Carter who is interested in collecting old blues records.\u00a0 The two move to New York to set up a sound studio.\u00a0 Carter is in a serious accident which results in Seth discovering his family’s dark past with blacks in the south.\u00a0 The novel is a complex exploration of race, history, and white black relations in America today and in the past.\u00a0 It uses a narrative tool of weaving the past with the present and for this reason has been characterized a ghost story but I wouldn’t call it that.\u00a0 It’s a page turner with dark undertones.<\/li>\n
            16. Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York<\/strong><\/em> by Francis Spofford * * * *
              February 26, 2018
              After several books of non-fiction, this is Francis Spofford’s first book of fiction but even it is a historical novel of sorts set in New York in 1746.\u00a0 The writing was fantastic but after awhile I began to feel that the book might merely be a swashbuckling copy of The Three Musketeers<\/em> set in New York but as I continued to read I realized it was so much more.\u00a0 The novel opens with our hero, Mr. Smith, landing in New York with a thousand pound note.\u00a0 Who is Mr. Smith and how does he intend to use this vast sum of money is dangled imploring before the reader to lure you to the end of the novel.\u00a0 New York has a mere 7000 people at the time and is still very much a village that talks incessantly about liberty and virtue while black men and women are hustled through the streets in shackles. \u00a0 Mr. Smith notes at one point that New York has many more slaves than in London from whence he comes.\u00a0 Mr. Smith’s purse is stolen not long after landing in New York and this leads to one of many trial and tribulations he suffers along the way to accomplishing his unexplained goal which is only revealed at the end of the novel.\u00a0 Along the way Mr. Smith meets an enigmatic beauty named Tabitha, with whom he becomes enamored and a gay secretary to the governor. \u00a0\u00a0 I will leave out the ending of this book so that you will go out and read this little gem.<\/li>\n
            17. Reservoir 13<\/em><\/strong> by Jon McGregor * * *
              February 5, 2018
              This is a novel with no plot and no main character.\u00a0 It’s just a story with many characters as they move through life in a rural town in Ireland.\u00a0 As the book opens we learn that Rebecca Shaw has gone missing.\u00a0 What keeps you reading it is wondering if they will ever find Rebecca Shaw even though it is patently obvious after a few chapters that it is merely a novelistic tool.\u00a0 The writing was very fine and McGregor is a keen observer or nature; he knows a lot about birds and things which is rare these days and very refreshing.\u00a0 Other than that though, the book became tedious after a while.<\/li>\n
            18. Montana’s Pioneer Naturalist: Morton J. Elrod<\/strong><\/em> by George Dennison * * * 1\/2
              January 6, 2018
              I really enjoyed reading this biography of Morton Elrod.\u00a0 I had never even heard of him before reading the book.\u00a0 He was responsible for establishing the Research Station at Flathead Lake, a large lake near Glacier National Park, one of the top\u00a0 fresh water lake research stations in the world.\u00a0 He was also instrumental in establishing the University of Montana and was a professor of biology there, leading many field trips to study at Flathead Lake and also the Lake McDonald area.\u00a0 He played a vital role in establishing Glacier National Park and set up and lead a park naturalist program there for many years.\u00a0 He also established the Bison Range in Rivalli, still popular today.\u00a0 Sadly he suffered a paralytic stroke that left him unable to walk without assistance and hindered his ability to talk for the last 20 years of his distinguished life.\u00a0 There is a Morton Elrod School named for him in Kalispell.\u00a0 The University of Montana set up a sundial on campus in his honor.\u00a0 He left an abundant amount of photographs of Glacier National Park from the 20s and many articles and journals about the nature at Flathead Lake, Glacier National Park, Missoula, and other areas of Montana.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              Books I read in 2017:<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

                \n
              1. Hillbilly Elegy<\/strong><\/em> by J.D. Vance *
                December 22, 2017
                This is a really bad Memoir by a guy who grew up in a lower class poor area of Ohio and Kentucky among what he refers to lovingly as hillbillies.\u00a0 His circumstances being raised by a drug addicted mother and intermittently by his shotgun toting, foul mouthed, violent grandparents, and surrounded by ne-er-do-well losers who are ready to blame the government for all their problems did not win my heart over.\u00a0 The most shocking part was that this mediocre writer got into Yale Law School and published a book about his life when he is only 30 years old. \u00a0 I was amazed to learn that this self-described conservative lives in ultra-liberal San Francisco.\u00a0 His book propounds to provide an explanation for why hillbillies live the way they do but I failed to find an answer in this book.\u00a0 You are better off looking elsewhere for answers.<\/li>\n
              2. Sweet Days of Discipline<\/strong><\/em> by Fleur Jaeggy * * * *
                December 17, 2017
                Fleur Jaeggy’s prose is remarkable and beautiful.\u00a0 Although this novel is a sparse 100 pages, I wanted to savor every engrossing sentence and take my time enjoying each one re-reading them at times for the fun of it and even thinking while reading the book how I must read it again as soon as I finish it .\u00a0 The novel was originally written in Italian and this translation into English is by Tim Parks.\u00a0 The novel is about a young girl sent to a boarding school in Switzerland where she seeks the affections of the school’s new student, Frederique, who appears to be perfect but as the novel moves along becomes increasingly bizarre and ultimately mad.\u00a0 Great book that is hard to find but well worth the search and the read.<\/li>\n
              3. We Shall Not All Sleep: A Novel<\/strong> <\/em>by Estep Nagy * * * 1\/2
                December 13, 2017
                This is a well written compelling and original story that takes place partly in New York during the Communist witch hunts but mostly on an island off the coast of Maine where two families go for refuse and solace.\u00a0 But there is conflict between the families, within the families, CIA intrigue and real Communist incursions into this idyllic place.<\/li>\n
              4. Pure<\/strong><\/em> by Andrew Miller * * *
                November 17, 2017
                This is a work of historical fiction about the dismantling of les Innocents cemetery in the heart of Paris by an engineer from Belleme.\u00a0 The writing was brilliant and the story was a spell binder.<\/li>\n
              5. The Mayan Prophecies<\/strong><\/em> by Adrian Gilbert & Maurice Cotterell * * *
                October 10, 2017
                Interesting book about the Mayan people who built their pyramids and temples in the depths of the rainforests of Central America two thousand years ago.\u00a0 The Mayans had two calendars and their own written language.\u00a0 In this book the author explores the main Mayan ruins and explains who the Mayans were, why they disappeared and his theories of why their culture so uncannily mirrors that of such far away places as Egypt.\u00a0 Some parts of the book were very hokey especially Gilbert’s theories about the Egyptians having potentially visited Central America before the European invasions.<\/li>\n
              6. Route of the Mayas<\/strong><\/em> by Numerous Specialists and Academics * * *
                September 25, 2017
                This guidebook outlines the Mayan heritage through five countries, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.\u00a0 It is full of detailed pictures of many of the sites including Chichen Itza, Tikal, Copan, and the many steles, architecture, and figurines, and has a lot of useful and practical information on the plants, animals, jungles surrounding the sites, and history of the Maya culture.\u00a0 My biggest complaint is that the format of the writing in columns made it incredibly difficult to read and that along with the tiny type has caused my vision to fail.\u00a0 You need a very bright light to read this book but it’s an excellent primer and starter book for anyone wanting to visit the magnificent Mayan Ruins of Central America.<\/li>\n
              7. The Stranger in the Woods <\/strong><\/em>by Michael Finkel * * * *
                September 13, 2017
                This is an absorbing book about a man, Christopher Knight, who spent 27 years utterly alone in a tent in Maine, before he was finally caught by the local sheriff while raiding a summer camp that was near his campsite, of its food storage.\u00a0 The author, Michael Finkel, doggedly pursued Knight in order to tell his story. \u00a0 After a while I started to think Finkel was as crazy as Knight was.\u00a0 However, as it turns out neither was crazy at all; they both shared a love for solitude.\u00a0 Admittedly I started the book thinking it would be like some similar books I had read, A Year in the Maine Woods <\/em>by Bernd Heinrich, and Diary of a Wilderness Dweller<\/em> by Chris Czajkowski, about people who are completely self-reliant and alone.\u00a0 However, even after learning Knight actually survived his 27 years alone in the harsh environment of Maine by stealing food from cabin owners and the summer camp, I could not put the book down until finished.\u00a0 The issues raised by Knight and his story are as timeless as Socrates and Nietzsche, both quoted in the book for their references to the benefits of solitude.\u00a0 This is a very good book and I highly recommend it.<\/li>\n
              8. The Crossing<\/strong><\/em> by Andrew Miller * * *
                September 4, 2017
                This is Andrew Miller’s fourth novel.\u00a0 While he writes very well, (his novel Pure won Book of the Year) he obviously has trouble getting inside of the head of the female character who also happens to be the protagonist of this book.\u00a0 Maud is quiet and competent and smart but has almost no emotions and is presented as an automaton even as tragedy strikes her family.\u00a0 It is only at the very end of the novel when Maud has landed on an island inhabited by children, after her boat barely survives a ferocious storm at sea, that she finally opens up about the gapping wound in her heart to the children there, and it is there that we find oh yes, she does actually have a heart and emotions.<\/li>\n
              9. Conversations with Friends: A Novel <\/strong><\/em>by Sally Rooney * * * 1\/2
                August 12, 2017
                Sally Rooney was a world champion debater before writing this, her first novel.\u00a0 The writing is good and has glimmers of greatness but is not dazzling.\u00a0 The novel follows the lives of two women, Frances, the narrator, and Bobbi, while they are attending college.\u00a0 At the beginning of the novel Bobbi has broken up with Frances but they still share an apartment and close friendship.\u00a0 They met a married couple, Melissa and Nick.\u00a0 Frances starts an affair with Nick right under Melissa’s nose and continues even after Melissa finds out. \u00a0 It is a dead end relationship with nowhere to go as Nick has no intention of leaving Melissa and yet Frances continues with a completely unfounded hope that it will go somewhere.\u00a0 Eventually it ends and she and Bobbi get back together although Bobbi insists they are not girlfriends.\u00a0 Then unforgivably the book ends with the outrageous and unconscionable when Frances agrees to meet Nick again.\u00a0 What a disappointing ending.<\/li>\n
              10. Augustown<\/strong><\/em> by Kei Miller * * * 1\/2
                August 3, 2017
                Augustown, Kei Miller’s third novel, is a fictionalized account of August Town, Jamaica. \u00a0 Though the town is inhabited by slaves freed after emancipation, the struggles continue in the daily encounters with Babylon which is their word for the system, the police, and all inequalities of society.\u00a0 The book is written in the Jamaican patois and includes such real life characters as the messianic preacher, Bedward, though presented in a much more sympathetic light, a hateful dunderheaded teacher who sets off a violent “autoclaps” (Jamaican for apocalypse) by cutting off the dreadlocks of an innocent child, and Ma Taffy, the ganja smoking matriarch of the boy’s family .\u00a0 Dreadlocks are considered to give power like the hair of Samson.\u00a0 The only bright light of the novel is Gina, a highly intelligent child who appears poised to rise out of the poverty and chaos of Augustown and the struggle against Babylon, only to be crushed down at the end of the novel.\u00a0 The struggle continues.<\/li>\n
              11. Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and its Demons <\/em><\/strong>by Elizabeth Brown Pryor * * *
                July 26, 2017
                I thought I liked Lincoln until I read this book.\u00a0 Lincoln emerges from the history books as a benign and democratic figure, ultimately a champion of slave emancipation.\u00a0 After reading this book though, I see that he was actually\u00a0not very concerned about slaves or the horror of slavery at all.\u00a0 His main concern was to keep the Union together at whatever cost.\u00a0 He not only had little regard for blacks or the blight of slavery, he had little regard for the most prominent women of the day either, at one point refusing to meet with the famous, Clara Barton, and dismissing other famous women fighting for women’s suffrage as well.\u00a0 He dressed frumpishly.\u00a0 His hair was like an abandoned stubble field and his\u00a0face had an unfortunate simian cast.\u00a0\u00a0He was viewed by many as a country bumpkin.\u00a0 He was described by his peers as using indecorous language and hideously bad rhetoric.\u00a0 After reading this book he does come across as a yahoo and barbarian whose ambitions outweighed his intellect.\u00a0 He seemed to bumble through this hectic time in history and just by chance we remained one country after all.<\/li>\n
              12. War, So Much War<\/strong><\/em> by Merce Rodoreda * * *
                May 21, 2017
                This is a highly symbolic novel about war.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t really enjoy symbolic novels and I’m not sure why I bought the book but it was in my Kindle so I read it.\u00a0 It was a highly praised novel written in Catalonian and translated into Spanish and later into English.\u00a0 According to the critics the language is beautiful.\u00a0 I found it frightening and upsetting.\u00a0 It is basically the story of a solider bungling his way through the embers of war.<\/li>\n
              13. The Sense of an Ending<\/strong><\/em> by Julian Barnes * * *
                May 6, 2017
                This novel explores memory and how we shape our own memories of ourselves.\u00a0 It bogged down about 2\/3 of the way through before the shocking conclusion.<\/li>\n
              14. Days Without End<\/strong><\/em> by Sebastian Barry * * * 1\/2
                April 17, 2017
                Our narrator, Thomas McNulty, escapes the Irish famine by boat to Canada and from there enters the US where he meets and falls in love with John Cole.\u00a0 They both join the cavalry and go west to slaughter Indians to clear the way for the white migration.\u00a0 During their travels, they are employed to dress as ladies for entertaining the white settlers and there Thomas gains a life long taste for cross-dressing.\u00a0 The book is told in a wonderful lilting prose filled with Irish brogue grammar mixed with beautiful insights and aphorisms.\u00a0\u00a0 The two engage in bloody battle reluctantly and without judgment and in between live their lives peacefully.\u00a0 The peace is interrupted again though when they join the Union Army in the Civil War.\u00a0 The only weakness of the book is the unexplained past of an Indian girl they adopt and raise.\u00a0 While Thomas expresses his disgust with the dirty business of war and killing, nevertheless he engages in mindless slaughter of innocent Indians and then removes an Sioux girl from her Indian heritage.\u00a0 Other than that I enjoyed the book immensely and highly recommend it.\u00a0 It is original and well written.<\/li>\n
              15. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee<\/strong><\/em> by Dee Brown * * * *
                March 18, 2017
                This outstanding, well written, and thoroughly researched book about the white man’s deadly attacks on Native Americans to take their land and herd them onto reservations in the American West in the late nineteenth century, is told from the Indian’s perspective.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Although it will make you cry, it should be required reading for all U.S. History courses in this country.\u00a0 But you know who would really benefit from reading this book?\u00a0 Senator Orin Hatch and other like minded politicians from Utah, should read it.\u00a0 They were so upset at Obama for designating Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, that they have vowed to undo the national monument designation because they claim it contains Utah’s oil and gas.\u00a0 What they seem to forget is that Utah belonged to Indians before Mormons and other white usurpers arrived there and took it over.\u00a0 Bears Ears is considered sacred territory to the Native American tribes there.\u00a0 I highly recommend this book to all Americans who ignorantly continue to falsely state that they own oil and gas rights\u00a0 on any national lands.\u00a0 They seem to forget that there were Indians here for thousands of years before white settlers arrived, slaughtered them, and drove them out. You must read this book.<\/li>\n
              16. South of the Clouds Travels in Southwest China<\/em><\/strong> by Bill Porter * * *
                February 21, 2017
                Interesting travel book about Bill Porter’s travels through southwest China in 1992.\u00a0 He starts out on a boat ride but travels by tractor, train, numerous buses and always on foot to find remote and interesting out of the way places in China.\u00a0 He drinks a lot of rice wine, meets interesting people, and intertwines myths and stories of the tribes he encounters along the way about their origins and always some references to the great flood.\u00a0 There are a few magnificent black and white photos interspersed.\u00a0 Overall a good book but the use of Wade Giles instead of the much more widely used Pinyin to name the towns and places was a big distraction as well as his insistence on annoyingly using serials connected by “and” instead of a comma which makes all sentences boring beyond belief in my opinion.\u00a0 Other than that a good read especially for anyone planning a trip to South China.<\/li>\n
              17. Black Wave<\/strong><\/em> by Michelle Tea * *
                February 4, 2017
                Novel about a lesbian writer living in San Francisco.\u00a0 She drinks a lot, takes a lot drugs, has a lot of random sex, and has to escape to Los Angeles to try to reorder her life.\u00a0 In Los Angeles she stops taking heroin but starts drinking excessively every night.\u00a0 Her life is still a mess and the book ends messily.<\/li>\n
              18. Endgame Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization <\/i><\/b>by Derrick Jensen * * *
                January 9, 2017
                A comprehensive indictment of what is wrong with civilization.\u00a0 His conclusions that we are all doomed is pretty well documented and vindicated by the fact that our current president is a complete incompetent idiot.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                Books I read in 2016:<\/strong><\/p>\n

                  \n
                1. A Cure for Suicide<\/em><\/strong> by Jesse Ball * * *
                  December 23, 2016
                  A claimant has been given a drug that erases all memory of some past painful event in his life and now an examiner must rehabilitate him.\u00a0 He lives in a village where all the houses are alike and the examiner attempts to reintegrate him there.\u00a0\u00a0 When it doesn’t work they move him during the night and start over giving him a random name each time because it really doesn’t matter what name he has just as the examiner explains to him cemeteries are no longer needed because they only prolong the suffering of those left behind.\u00a0 The book explores in this way to what extent pain informs our identity.<\/li>\n
                2. The Field of the Cloth of Gold<\/strong><\/em> by Magnus Mills * * *
                  December 11, 2016
                  This novel is about a field bounded on the east, west, and south by water, that is inhabited by people living in tents.\u00a0 The book is an allegory about the numerous invasions of Great Britain over the centuries, first by the Romans and so on.\u00a0 It was very interesting and original \u00a0if you could follow all the allusions. (Also it was short and easy to read\u00a0and made a quick year end addition to my book list!)<\/li>\n
                3. The\u00a0 Year of the Runaways: A Novel<\/em><\/strong> by Sunjeev Sahota * *
                  November 27, 2016
                  The author had the annoying habit of repeatedly using serials connected by “and” instead of commas, making the sentences clunky and boring.\u00a0 The story is about several poor Indians who are smuggled into England to look for work.\u00a0 The book was sprinkled with Punjabi words and delved into the culture and poverty of India.\u00a0 It was hard to feel sympathy though because all of the characters were morally bankrupt.\u00a0 The ending seemed hurried and implausible.<\/li>\n
                4. Loner<\/em><\/strong> by Teddy Wayne * * * 1\/2
                  October 25, 2016
                  A Harvard freshman, David becomes obsessed with a glamorous rich attractive co-ed, Veronica, \u00a0living in his dorm.\u00a0\u00a0 His obsession becomes darker and more sinister as the novel progresses.\u00a0 The novel explores the timely topics of assault on college campuses, class identity, and how our upbringing shapes who we are as adults.<\/li>\n
                5. Letters Never Sent<\/em><\/strong> by Sandra Moran * * * 1\/2
                  October 20, 2016
                  In 1997 Joan returns to Lawrence, Kansas to arrange the things left after the death of her mother, Katherine, with whom she had a very strained relationship.\u00a0 While there she learns that her mother was actually a lesbian who had a deep love for another woman and that her father was a rapist and a murderer.\u00a0 But what the book is really about is the struggle of all people, but especially gays, to reconcile the loyalties they have to their families with those they have to their significant others.<\/li>\n
                6. The\u00a0 Sport of Kings: A Novel<\/em><\/strong> by C. E. Morgan * *
                  October 1, 2016
                  I didn’t care for this book at all.\u00a0The book is a study of race relations in America but Morgan is incapable of writing succinctly and it was just too stretched out with her musings and ramblings for me.\u00a0 In addition,\u00a0all of the characters were horrible people, the sole exception being Marie, the mother of the hopelessly lost Allmon.\u00a0\u00a0 The book traces the Forge family, a rich white racist family in Kentucky, through several generations leading up to Henry, who is obsessed with raising a thoroughbred race horse.\u00a0 Henry has a daughter, Henrietta, whom he sexually abuses.\u00a0 Henrietta is a lost soul who retaliates against her father by having mindless sexual encounters with numerous men including Allmon, whom Henrietta hires to train the horses.\u00a0 She falls in love with him but he is obsessed with “winning” and accepts an offer from Henry to leave the horse farm in exchange for a percentage of the winnings of one of the thoroughbreds, and he abandons Henrietta who unbeknownst to Allmon is pregnant with his child.\u00a0\u00a0 Things end badly for everyone and race relations are only slightly better at the end of the book than they were at the beginning.<\/li>\n
                7. Heat and Light<\/strong><\/em> by Jennifer Haigh * * *
                  August 21, 2016
                  \u201cHeat and Light,\u201d\u00a0Jennifer Haigh’s\u00a0latest book, covers many topics including fracking, drug addiction, and how relationships work, while exploring small town life in Bakerton, PA. \u00a0 \u00a0 As the book opens gangsters are paying house calls on the local farmers, offering them cash\u00a0up front if they will \u00a0sell the underground drilling rights on their beautiful property. \u00a0The problem is that unbeknownst to them there will be noisy, disruptive, and in the end dangerous extraction of natural gas going on a mile underground. Along the way, Ms. Haigh creates a wide and completely believable cast of characters who lock antlers over Bakerton\u2019s latest development and whose viewpoints are representative of those across the country regarding fracking.To the extent that \u201cHeat and Light\u201d has a main character, it is probably Rich Devlin, a prison guard and burgeoning farmer by day and bar tender by night. \u00a0Through Rich the author evokes what goes wrong in Bakerton and sets the stage for his troubled marriage to the kooky hypochondriac, Shelby, who may or may not have Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.\u00a0 There are many things wrong with Bakerton including methamphetamine labs, drunks, bigots, idiots; in short the gambit of small town life.\n

                  While tending bar, which might as well be the Town Hall, Rich is able to observe the sexual habits of the town vamp and the new influx of Texas roughnecks, hired to do the fracking.<\/p>\n

                  The town and Rich’s marriage go through tumultuous times as a result of the influx of fracking. \u00a0There are no solutions but one thing is sure; as the fracking winds down and finally leaves Bakerton it leaves a path of pollution and destruction.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

                8. The Sympathizer<\/strong><\/em> by Viet Thanh Nguyen * * *
                  July 23, 2016
                  The narrator of this debut novel is an Americanized Vietnamese who sympathizes with the communists in the lead up to and aftermath of the Vietnam War. \u00a0This leads him into taking some morally unsupportable \u00a0actions most notably murdering two innocent people. \u00a0Parts of the book were like reading the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and indeed in the afterword, Nguyen acknowledges its contributions to parts of the book. \u00a0While interesting to read a fictionalized account of this horrific time from the perspective of a Vietnamese, the book was harrowing and difficult to read at times. \u00a0I had a hard time sympathizing with the narrator most of the time.<\/li>\n
                9. My Name is Lucy Barton<\/strong> <\/em>by Elizabeth Strout * * *
                  June 10, 2016
                  The narrator, Lucy Barton was raised in abject poverty in a small town in Illinois. \u00a0She has not seen her mother for many years when she suddenly appears at Lucy’s bedside after she is hospitalized for an extended period of time due to an infection. \u00a0The novel explores how our upbringing and specifically poverty leave an indelible mark on us.<\/li>\n
                10. The Little Red Chairs<\/em><\/strong> by Edna O’Brien * * * 1\/2
                  May 22,2016
                  In acclaimed writer, Edna O’Brien’s, latest novel, war torn Bosnia intrudes on rural Ireland when a war criminal escaping prosecution and posing as a sex therapist wreaks havoc on the life of the town beauty.<\/li>\n
                11. Widening Income Inequality: Poems<\/strong><\/em> by Frederick Seidel * * *
                  May 13, 2016
                  Frederick Seidel, the author of this latest collection of poetry, has been called many things: a “transgressive adventurer,” “a demonic gentleman,” “a “triumphant outsider,” “a great poet of innocence,” and “an example of the dangerous Male of the Species,” just to name a few. \u00a0 I would add to that, vulgar and offensive at times. \u00a0The poems in this collection deal with many things including\u00a0aging and decrepitude. \u00a0It\u00a0is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical and cultural exuberance, a sweet and bitter fever of Ted Cruz, Obamacare, Apollinaire, John F. Kennedy, jihadi terror, New York City, and Ducati motorcycles. \u00a0The poems are at times uplifting and others dire but always poetic.<\/li>\n
                12. Animals<\/strong><\/em> by Emma Jane Unsworth * * * 1\/2
                  April 30, 2016
                  The narrator, Laura, is best friends with the wild, unstoppable, and hilarious, Tyler. \u00a0Both of them are brilliant, witty, and loads of fun to be around. \u00a0They both drink way too much and take way too many drugs in this wild tale before Laura finally settles down to write that novel she has been meaning to write.<\/li>\n
                13. Vanity Fair<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 by William Makepeace Thackeray * * * * *
                  March 31, 2016
                  This fantastic book, Thackeray’s masterpiece, is subtitled “book without a hero,” and although we are probably not supposed to in any way \u00a0consider the scheming artful, little minx, Becky Sharp, the hero of this novel, I could not but help to pull for this dynamic, smart, inventive, resourceful woman to succeed. \u00a0Her friend, the weak, pathetic, boring, Amelia, left me wanting her to pass away. \u00a0The book, a satire of early 19th Century British society, dazzles with its incomparable writing which sent me time and again to the dictionary and my pad of paper to make notes of every witty and clever turn of phrase. \u00a0It took me two delicious months to read it but what a pleasure. \u00a0What a great book!<\/li>\n
                14. Wallcreeper<\/strong><\/em> by Nell Zink * * * *
                  January 25, 2016
                  Our protagonist and narrator, Tiffany, spends the entire novel giving herself away to worthless men most notably her philandering bird watching husband, who in the opening scene crashes the car causing her to have a miscarriage while stalking a lifer woodcreeper. and then is more interested in the bird than in his bleeding wife\u00a0 Tiffany is both hilarious and irreverent but in the end it is sad that it is only in the final lines that she finally finds herself and pursues her own interests and dreams of becoming an environmental activist and not just a breeder and feeder.\u00a0 Zink is a gifted and unusual talent.<\/li>\n
                15. Fates and Furies<\/em><\/strong> by Lauren Groff * * *
                  January 16, 2016
                  A privileged white boy from Florida falls in love at first sight with a French girl in college.\u00a0 They marry and she sticks with him even though his mother disinherits him and refuses to have anything to do with his new wife, not even to meet her.\u00a0\u00a0He is blissfully unaware that she secretly makes him a world renowned playwright while he is asleep and she is rewriting his plays.\u00a0\u00a0 Things end badly.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                  Books I read in 2015:<\/strong><\/p>\n

                    \n
                  1. Gold, Fame, Citrus<\/strong><\/em> by Claire Vaye Watkins * * * *
                    December 29, 2015
                    This is another apocalyptic novel set at some unnamed date in the future after part of California has become a vast moving sand dune. \u00a0A young woman meets a young man returned from war and they inhabit an abandoned mansion in the LA Hills before deciding to try to drive through the vast dune to get out of California. \u00a0They run out of gas and he sets out for help while she waits in the car with their adopted child, Ig. \u00a0He dies and she is rescued (abducted) by a Mormon charlatan thief.<\/li>\n
                  2. To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science<\/strong><\/em> by Steven Weinberg * *
                    December 20, 2015
                    This book mostly focused on the history of the science of cosmology starting with Aristotle through Ptolemy, Copernicus and leading up to the pinnacle of modern scientific discovery with the publication of Newton’s Principia<\/em>. \u00a0It was very interesting but a bit too bogged down in the details of mathematical equations that went into many of the discoveries Mr. Weinberg was discussing making the book a bit inaccessible to the average person. \u00a0The text was more at a level for a physics textbook than general non-fiction and then at the end of the text was another 45% of the book with detailed notes on mathematical equations, trigonometry, calculus, and such that I would imagine would go right over the heads of the average person.<\/li>\n
                  3. City on Fire<\/strong><\/em> by Garth Risk Halberg *
                    November 17, 2015
                    What a waste of time and at over 900 pages it was a lot of time to waste, finishing this tome.\u00a0 What did it all mean?\u00a0 I could find no deeper meaning other than to document NY in 1976.\u00a0 The plot revolved around a band of street urchins who murdered a girl and a drug addled painter who dabbles with an innocent young writer briefly before the lights go out.<\/li>\n
                  4. A Year in the Woods: The Diary of a Forest Ranger<\/strong><\/em> by Colin Elford * * * 1\/2
                    October 27, 2015
                    Beautifully written diary of a forest ranger in the English Countryside, who spends his days alone except for the loads of deer, owls, birds, rabbits, trees, spectacular sunrises, cloud formations, and other nature that fill up his days. \u00a0His job is to cull the deer population, a job that he approaches with a healthy balance of a love of nature and cold reality.<\/li>\n
                  5. The Old Curiosity Shop<\/strong><\/em> by Charles Dickens * * * 1\/2
                    October 23, 2015
                    Whoa this book is long. \u00a0It took me all month to read it. \u00a0However, the writing was magnificent as usual and made the book, despite its convoluted story, well worth the read. \u00a0The book contains some of literature’s greatest passages such as, “Day destroys an air built castle at the moment of its completion without the least ceremony or remorse.” \u00a0 On the other hand, it has some strange attributes such as that the story starts out told through a third person narrator who disappears without explanation around chapter three. \u00a0Some of the characters such as the evil dwarf are unforgettable and others, such as the weak gambling addicted senile grandfather are better forgotten. \u00a0Just for the superior writing alone I highly recommend this book<\/li>\n
                  6. Great Expectations<\/strong><\/em> by Charles Dickens * * * 1\/2
                    October 10, 2015 (audiobook)
                    It was very difficult to understand what Magwitch, the convict who provides Pip with the money to make him a gentleman, was saying because he had a thick British accent, was elderly, and talked like he had marbles in his mouth. Other than that it was a very good oral performance of the book.\u00a0 I have read the book too but never liked it nearly as much as David Copperfield or some of Dickens’s other great books.\u00a0 Still I would recommend it in audiobook or the written book which like all Dickens’s other books is brilliantly written.<\/li>\n
                  7. The Green Road<\/em><\/strong> by Anne Enright * * *
                    August 14, 2015
                    This novel is a family saga of the Madigan family spanning three decades and various continents. The book is organized around the lives of the children and then culminates with their reunion at a bad Christmas at the family home in Ireland.<\/li>\n
                  8. Mislaid<\/em><\/strong> by Nell Zink * * * 1\/2
                    August 1, 2015
                    Hilarious novel by a bright new original voice in fiction.
                    Ms. Zink was born in Virginia and this gives her a license to poke fun at southern eccentricities. Our hero, Meg, who is a lesbian, marries a gay guy, Lee, who mistreats her so she leaves and takes her daughter but leaves her son. Then she decides to raise her blonde haired blue-eyed daughter as a black girl.<\/li>\n
                  9. The Narrow Road to the Deep North<\/em><\/strong> by Richard Flanagan * *
                    July 25, 2015
                    The protagonist of this novel set during World War II, is a highly unlikable womanizer named Dorigo Evans, an Australian officer. After carrying on a torrid affair with a married woman at the first section of the novel, he is deployed and then captured by the Japanese. They are trying to build a railroad through the Burmese jungle using POWs as forced laborers. The jungle scenes go on interminably with frequent references to mud and cuss words that were not even invented yet. The war finally ends and he is released. There is not a single admirable or likable character in the entire novel.<\/li>\n
                  10. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History<\/em><\/strong> by Elizabeth Kolbert * * * *
                    July 18, 2015 (Audio book)
                    Elizabeth Kolbert is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. She writes science articles in lucid prose about the destruction of our planet’s ecology. In this book she explores what scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction, an explosion in the rapid loss of plants and animals that could ultimately eliminate 20-50% of all species on earth within this century. You could just read the book and walk away completely depressed about how humans harm and destroy wherever we are but she ends the book on a positive note, making the case that though what we are doing to our planet earth is wrong, we can make it a more sustainable world by doing what is clearly right. it remains to be seen whether we will make the right choice or be a part of the next great extinction.<\/li>\n
                  11. Man’s Search for Meaning<\/em><\/strong> by Viktor Frankl * * *
                    June 25, 2015
                    Viktor Frankl was sent to the worst of the worst Concentration Camps during World War II and against all odds survived. Partly it was due to luck but also due to his ability to find meaning in the smallest things.<\/li>\n
                  12. Atomised<\/em><\/strong> by Michel Houellebecq * * *
                    June 18, 2015
                    As filthy, vile, and full of repulsive explicit sex as this novel was, I could not put it down. It’s a story about society falling apart told through the lives of two half brothers, Bruno, the sex addict, and Michel, the scientist, who is incapable of love or even a libido. At the beginning I thought the book was a joke when Houellebecq said that Kant was right when he said morals were fixed and immutable. There were some funny sections but mostly the book was depressing, depraved, and full of outrageous conclusions about society. Embarrassingly I actually read this book years ago but didn’t realize it until well into the book when I read that it was also known as Elementary Particles, the title it had when I read it the first time.<\/li>\n
                  13. H is for Hawk<\/em><\/strong> by Helen Macdonald * * * 1\/2
                    June 5, 2015
                    Helen Macdonald was in her third and final year as a research fellow at Cambridge, a prestigious postgraduate position, when her father, a professional photographer based in London, had gone out after a violent storm to take pictures of the damage down at Battersea, and suffered a heart attack and died suddenly. Ms. Macdonald was crestfallen. To help her cope with this sudden and deep loss she bought a Goshawk, a huge bird of prey, that is often trained like a falcon by a falconer. She intertwines her recovery with insights into another austringer (someone who trains hawks) and famous writer, T.H. White, who was a profound failure at training his Goshawk. By the end of the books she realizes that she has been escaping her grief over the loss of her father through immersion in her bird.<\/li>\n
                  14. The Mayor of Casterbridge<\/em><\/strong> by Thomas Hardy * * * *
                    May 10, 2015
                    Thomas Hardy’s ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey next to Charles Dickens–the two greatest English novelists side by side with Handel making a great trio. Hardy was an admirer of Schopenhauer and this novel could in a way be called a paean to him. Schopenhauer believed all human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world. The protagonist of Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard, bears this out throughout his life. The novel begins with Henchard selling his wife and daugther to a passing sailor while in a drunken stupor. Later he cannot find her and wanders aimlessly until landing in Casterbridge where he works so hard in the corn and hay fields that he becomes the town mayor. However, he cannot overcome his futile illogical desires and eventually comes to a ruinous end. The writing is examplary as always with a Hardy novel. His descriptions and philosophical insights make what would otherwise just be a bleak story an unforgettable novel that was hard to put down.<\/li>\n
                  15. The Master and Margarita<\/em><\/strong> by Mikhail Bulgakov * * * 1\/2
                    April 14, 2015
                    Published posthumously, this brilliant novel was written during Stalin’s regime and deals with the power and evil of the Russian state as much as with good and evil in general. The plot alternates between 1930s Moscow and the death of Jesus at the hands of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem.<\/li>\n
                  16. The Year of Reading Dangerously<\/em><\/strong> by Andy Miller * * *
                    April 8, 2015 (audiobook)
                    Andy Miller spends a year reading 50 great books and one terrible one by Dan Brown and in the process re-discovers why he loves to read so much. Hilarious at times and also full of insights and wisdom garnered from some of the world’s greatest books.<\/li>\n
                  17. Hold the Dark: A Novel<\/em><\/strong> by William Giraldi * *
                    March 30, 2015
                    Well written sentences in a gripping but gory tale set in barren outbacks of Alaskan winter. I cannot for the life of me remember where or how this novel got on my Kindle but once I started I could not put it down. Other than that I cannot recommend it; there was too much killing and too much blood and guts.<\/li>\n
                  18. River Town<\/em><\/strong> by Peter Hessler * * * *
                    March 29, 2015
                    This book is about two years Peter Hessler spent in the Peace Corps in 1997 in Fuling, China on the Wu River. I was interested in the book because I was also in the Peace Corps in a remote village and I could relate to many of Hessler’s early tribulations being the only white person in a remote isolated village. Hessler has a straight-forward unadorned writing style but his observations are keen and insightful. He tells with great compassion how he comes to finally understand the culture and the lives of the people in isolated but changing China. The town, Fuling, was destined to be flooded upon completion of the Three Gorges Dam across the mighty Yangtze River.<\/li>\n
                  19. Against the Country: A Novel<\/em><\/strong> by Ben Metcalf * * * 1\/2
                    March 11, 2015
                    This book is one long diatribe against the false American belief that all good comes from the rural pastoral life. Written in the first person, the book follows the life of our hero as his hippie parents move him from a town in Southern Illinois to some god forsaken rural outpost in Virginia named, impossibly, Goochland.
                    There he suffers all the indignities that rural life brings, such as fighting off attacking copperheads, being the victim of an attempted rape at the claws of an oversexed rooster, and swimming in a snake filled pond to escape the heat of a hot southern summer. There is the usual rabble of idiots, racists, and bigots among the squabbling chickens being attacked by snakes and dogs. This was no ordinary novel though. The writing was intelligent and sublime and even though there was no real plot it was the kind of book that was hard to put down until the final page.<\/li>\n
                  20. Lost in Translation<\/em><\/strong> by Nicole Mones * * *
                    March 1, 2015 (audiobook)
                    Nicole Mones”s first novel is about an American translator, Alice Mannegan, in China who is hired by an archaeologist to assist him in his quest to find the missing bones of Peking Man. Along the way Alice meets a Chinese man, Lin, and falls in love with him but both of them have issues from their past that they need to work out.<\/li>\n
                  21. The Bone Clocks<\/em><\/strong> by David Mitchell * * *
                    February 24, 2015
                    The first section of David Mitchell’s latest novel was brilliant. I thought it was going to be another bildungsroman much like Black Swan Green<\/strong><\/em> (2006)which I loved but then it veered off in a weird underground Night of the Living Dead, Wakling Zombies thriller. However, even during its weirdest sections Mitchell’s incomparable writing shines. I especially found the chapters about the author, Crispin Hershey very funny, despite the dark themes of betrayal and self-preservation. At the end I thought it would turn out to be a rather normal dystopian futuristic novel when the narration returned to our hero, Holly Sykes, in old age back in Ireland, but no it returned to the weird walking zombie plot in the end! Drat. I was about to give it another star but forget it. Who has David Mitchell been hanging out with to come up with these bizarre plot twists? Such a talented writer wasting his time on such nonsense was disheartening but not nearly as troubling as his twice bungling the meaning of “begs the question” which was unforgivable.<\/li>\n
                  22. The Blue Flower<\/strong><\/em> by Penelope Fitzgerald * * * 1\/2
                    February 6, 2015
                    This is Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel published in 1977 when she was already 60. It is set in Saxony in the late 1790s. The book is about Fritz, a German romantic poet, who falls in love with a 12 year old dolt. It is beautifully written and I highly recommend it.<\/li>\n
                  23. Dear Thief <\/em><\/strong>by Samantha Harvey * * *
                    January 29, 2015
                    This novel is written in the form of one long letter from the narrator, a middle-aged woman, to her absent friend, Butterfly. We learn that her former friend disappeared for years only to return and steal the narrator’s husband and marriage.<\/li>\n
                  24. Station Eleven<\/strong> by Emily St. John Mandel <\/em>* * *
                    January 12, 2015
                    I don’t know why I always end up reading all these post-apocalyptic books. This one I would rate much better than Cormac McArthy’s Road and way way better than that trash novel Dog Stars by Peter Heller. The writing was good but not great. Some chapters were boring and others I couldn’t put the book down.It made me think a lot which is a reliable indicator of a good book.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                    Books I read in 2014:<\/b><\/p>\n

                      \n
                    1. The Watchtower<\/em><\/strong> by Elizabeth Harrower * * *
                      December 27, 2014
                      Well written novel about two sisters who are abandoned by their mother just after their father dies and sent to live in Australia. Alone with no prospects the older daughter meets an older man who employs, her, marries her, and then ultimately imprisons her and her sister. We are rooting for the older sister, Laura, who is married to the beast to leave the bastard but she can never bring herself to do so and spends half the book convincing her more practical younger sister, Clare, not to leave either. You want to strangle Laura and her controlling husband by the end of the book.<\/li>\n
                    2. The Worst Journey in the World<\/em><\/strong> by Apsley Cherry-Garrard * * * *
                      November 30, 2014
                      Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the members of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901\u201304,Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic, tells the harrowing story of the journey through his, Scott’s, and other’s journal entries kept during the trip. The journey took place during the cold winter months and involved incredible strength, will power, and perseveration to endure -75 degree temperatures, living off pemmican and biscuits for three months, and pulling a 500 pound sled over dangerous cravasses. After enduring this impossible arduous journey the party was able to retrieve three eggs from Emperor Penguins who live and breed there. Although they did not make it to the South Pole on the winter journey, the Emperor Penguin eggs they retrieved lead to important discoveries regarding the development of birds from pre-historic reptiles. Cherry-Garrard was invited to return for the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition, 1910\u201313. During the second venture, Cherry-Garrard was sent back with a return party while Scott led five others who reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find that they had been preceded by Roald Amadsen’s Norweigen Expedition. On their return journey, Scott’s party, at a distance of 150 miles from their base camp and 11 miles from the next depot, died from a combination of exhaustion, starvation and extreme cold. Cherry-Garrard and several others made a recovery journey to determine the fate of Scott, Wilson, and their companions. After finding their bodies frozen in their tent, Cherry-Garrard and the others buried them and erected a marker.<\/li>\n
                    3. 10:04<\/em><\/strong> by Ben Lerner * * *
                      October 11, 2014
                      Though \u201c10:04\u201d is preoccupied by the narrator\u2019s relationship to others, particularly the possibility of \u201cco-constructing\u201d a child with his best friend, Alex, his real compulsion is himself.<\/li>\n
                    4. Salmon without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis<\/em><\/strong> by Jim Lichatowich
                      * * * *
                      September 28, 2014
                      A very well researched and well written book explaining in great detail why our native salmon populations have crashed to near extinction.<\/li>\n
                    5. On Such a Full Sea<\/em><\/strong> by Chang-Rae Lee * * *
                      September 6, 2014
                      In this dystopian fantasy, Earth has been contaminated years before the novel begins, by rampant industrial development. Chinese workers, eager to flee their dead cities, have been brought over to America to live in labor centers. There, they cultivate food products for the mostly white elite who dwell in heavily fortified “charter” villages that boast the climate controlled amenities of your average suburban mall and hospital center. Beyond the walls of these labor settlements and “charters” stretches a vast wasteland where depravity rules. In accordance with every coming-of-age narrative ever written, our girl Fan is destined to test herself in this wild zone.<\/li>\n
                    6. Night in Shanghai<\/em><\/strong> by Nicole Mones * * *
                      August 9, 2014
                      In this well researched historical novel, Mones brings to life the Golden Years of Shanghai just before the outbreak of World War II, through the life of a black American classical pianist, Thomas, who is recruited by a jazz club owner in Shanghai to play in the city’s growing vibrant night life.<\/li>\n
                    7. In the Light of What We Know<\/em><\/strong> by Zia Hader Rahman * * *
                      July 22, 2014
                      The protagonist of this novel, Zafar, is a shattered figure and this is his story told by an anonymous narrator, his friend from college days. In between the tale are pages and pages of history, mathematics, politics, religion, alure of aristocracy and chilly manners, all intended to show off the authors erudition. It’s all very impressive but the best part of the book were the parts about Zafar’s heart breaking love story which reminded me of Of Human Bondage. The best part of the book was the last 100 pages or so. I could have written this 500 page novel in 100 pages.<\/li>\n
                    8. Lost for Words<\/em> <\/strong>by Edward St. Aubyn * * * 1\/2<\/em>
                      <\/em><\/strong>July 6, 2014<\/em>
                      <\/em><\/strong>Edward St. Aubyn who wrote the oh so depressing Patrick Melrose novels, has a sense of humor. In this scathing satire on the literary world St. Aubyn uses wit to also explore the difficult issues of what is art and what is literature. Good read from a great writer.<\/li>\n
                    9. Famous Writers I have Know<\/em><\/strong>n by James Magnuson * * *
                      June 27, 2014
                      The premise was ridiculous but funny. Frankie Abandonato, a small time criminal, scams a family member of a major crime family into buying a fake lottery ticket and the book follows his downfall from there.
                      <\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n
                    10. Life and Death in Shangha<\/em><\/strong>i by Nien Cheng * * * *
                      May 30, 2014
                      This memoir tells the harrowing tale of Ms. Cheng’s ordeal as the victim of maurading crazed Red Guard’s at the start of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. She came from a well to do family and married a wealthy business man who worked for a foreign oil company in Shanghai making her an easy target as a despised imperialist “Capitalist Roader.” The brain washed thugs ransacked her house and threw her into prison in solitary confinement for six and a half years on trumped up charges of being a foreign spy, before she was finally released with no apologies.<\/li>\n
                    11. The Story of a New Name<\/strong><\/em> by Elena Ferrante * * * 1\/2
                      April 30, 2014
                      This is part two of a trilogy narrated by Elena Greco and is about the divergence of her life and the life of her friend, Lila Cerullo, whom she meet at age 8 in early 1950s Naples. They bond over their love of books and their yearning for a life larger than what’s offered by their poor, working-class neighborhood that cruelly grinds down everyone, especially women. Where Elena is a bright, accommodating, and eager for approval her brilliant friend Lila is more gifted, sexier and utterly implacable. In a decision that alters their lives, Elena’s parents pay to let her continue beyond grade school, but Lila’s father refuses.<\/li>\n
                    12. The Goldfinch<\/em><\/strong> by Donna Tartt * * *
                      March 30, 2014 (audiobook)
                      Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer winning third novel tells the story of Theodore Decker, who is forced to grapple with the world alone after his mother dies in an explosion inside a museum. In the terrible wreckage of the building, Theo discovers the work of the sublime Dutch master Carel Fabritius, just before the fateful event that will carry his mother away. \u201cAll the rest of it is lost\u2014everything he ever did,\u201d his mother quietly laments of the little-known artist, and it is Theo\u2019s mission as he moves through life to cling to this one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art. The book is an odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity.<\/li>\n
                    13. Alaska A Novel<\/em><\/strong> by James Michener * * * 1\/2
                      February 28, 2014
                      In this well researched historical novel, James Michener, traces the history of Alaska from its inception as the result of the smashing of the tectonic platesthrough its inhabitation by people 12,000 years ago as they crossed the Bering Land Bridge, the arrival of the Russians, the European whalers, the Yukon and Nome Gold Rushes, statehood, up to the present. You will fall in love with the unforgettable inhabitants brought to life by Michener and with the place.<\/li>\n
                    14. Steve Jobs<\/em><\/strong> by Walter Isaacson * * *
                      February 7, 2014 (audiobook)
                      \u201cSteve Jobs,\u201d begins with a portrait of the young Mr. Jobs, rebellious toward the parents who raised him and scornful of the ones who gave him up for adoption. (\u201cThey were my sperm and egg bank,\u201d he says.) Steve Jobs, who founded Apple with Stephen Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976, began his career as a contradictory blend of hippie truth seeker and tech-savvy hothead. This is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, compiling stories well known to tech aficionados but interesting to a broad audience. Some of it is already quaint: Jobs\u2019s first job was at Atari, and it involved the game Pong. Some, like an account of the release of the iPad2, is so recent that it is hard to appreciate yet.Although not analytical about Jobs’s volatile personality,, Issacson at least raises the question of whether feelings of abandonment in childhood made Jobs controlling and manipulative as an adult.<\/li>\n
                    15. The Book Thief<\/em><\/strong> by Markus Zusak * * * *
                      January 12, 2014Zusak has created a work that deserves the attention of sophisticated teen and adult readers. Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book\u2013although she has not yet learned how to read\u2013and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook<\/em>, to lull her to sleep when shes roused by regular nightmares about her younger brothers death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayors reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesels story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves. An extraordinary narrative.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                      Books I read in 2013:<\/b><\/p>\n

                        \n
                      1. Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists <\/em><\/strong>by Richard Wolfson
                        * * *
                        December 27, 2013 (Audiobook)
                        Excellent course for non-scientists about modern physics and relativity.<\/li>\n
                      2. Sky Burial<\/em><\/strong> by Xinran Xue * * * 1\/2
                        November 30, 2013
                        “No one likes crying, but tears water our souls,” writes the author and if you read this book, you will cry by the end. Beautifully written by Xinran, a journalist from China.Sky Burial is the story of Shu Wen, a young woman from China whose doctor husband is assigned to Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. One day she receives word that he has been killed, but there is no further information. How did he die? Wasn’t the point of the Chinese mission to spread peace and knowledge to Tibetans? How, then, did Kejun–a gentle man of learning and a doctor committed to saving lives–come to die?Wen decides she must find the answers to her questions. She asks to be assigned to Tibet, and searches for her lost husband. This is the story of her journey, over 30 years, in search of the lover she has lost. It is also the story of the people of Tibet and how different they are from the people of China. Wen understands nothing of the Tibetan people at first, but gradually begins to speak their language, living as they do, learning how to survive in a harsh natural environment, and coming to understand that their religion is everywhere.<\/li>\n
                      3. The Kite Runner<\/em><\/strong> by Khaled Hossieni * * * *
                        October 31,2013
                        (Audiobook)
                        Khaled Hosseini’s deeply moving fiction debut is about an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Set in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s. Hassan is narrator Amir’s closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with “a face like a Chinese doll” was the son of Amir’s father’s servant and a member of Afghanistan’s despised Hazara minority. In 1975, on the day of Kabul’s annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happens between the two boys which alters their worlds forever.<\/span><\/li>\n
                      4. The Iliad<\/em><\/strong> by Homer * * *
                        October 7, 2013
                        (Audiobook)
                        I hated this translation. It’s supposed to be a beautifully written poem and that is what is supposed to keep you reading a 476 page poem about an absurd and arbitrary war started by a Trojan, Paris, stealing a Greek woman, Helen. But this translation tries to attract a wider audience than those with a love of poetry by modernizing the poem with such modern verbal wonders as calling women bitches repeatedly. Please if people can’t understand Homer let them continue to read Nora Roberts romance novels.<\/li>\n
                      5. We Need to Talk About Kevin<\/strong><\/em> by Lionel Shriver * * *
                        September 25, 2013
                        The haunting story of the mother of a mass murderer. Told as an epistolary through a series of letters to her husband who consistently sided with the psychotic and deeply troubled killer as they tried to raise him.<\/li>\n
                      6. The Dog Stars<\/em><\/strong> by Peter Heller * *
                        August 29, 2013
                        A post apocalyptic story reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, except in this one the dog dies. Hig, the narrator, is a man who has survived a flu pandemic, that has changed life in the United States as we know it, completely wiping out most of the population. He finds joy in the company of his dog. Like The Road<\/em> he cares more about his dog than most of the surviving people.<\/li>\n
                      7. River God: A Novel of Ancient Egypt<\/em><\/strong> by Wilbur Smith * * *
                        August 7, 2013
                        (Audiobook)
                        In this book Wilbur Smith tells us the epic story of a great ancient nation on the verge of losing everything. What is unique in this book is that the hero and narrator is a castrated slave, Taita– someone who uses his intelligence much more than he uses his muscles. It is through his eyes that we see the story evolving. As a slave he has a duty to be historian of ancient Egypt: he also plays an active role in influencing the policy of the Pharaoh. Meanwhile, the love story between Taita, the Queen, Pharaoh, and the warrior Tanus is of unparalleled beauty. The blood and violence were a bit troubling to read. However, I believe that violence in River God is not exaggerated but rather a realistic depiction of the age and it is well integrated with the other ingredients of the story (e.g. romance, description of daily life in ancient Egypt etc.) Since the action of this book doesn’t take place in South Africa the readers won’t have to question themselves of whether Smith is in favor of Victorian imperialistic ideas. For those reasons River God can be appealing not only to committed fans of the historical novel but to a more general audience who appreciates a good read.<\/li>\n
                      8. The Lost Weekend<\/em><\/strong> by Charles Jackson * * *
                        August 5, 2013
                        This is the story of a man in the grip of alcohol; it moves forward with speed, force, and heartbreaking truth. Don Birnam is someone you know and care about. His loneliness, his need to drink, his dangerous hangovers, his daydreams of himself as a genius and actual nightmares are unforgettable experiences. No matter how it shocks or upsets you, you will find, after reading The Lost Weekend<\/em>, that you have acquired a knowledge you can never forget<\/span>.<\/li>\n
                      9. The Razor’s Edge<\/em><\/strong> by Somerset Maugham * * *
                        August 1, 2013
                        The Razor’s Edge is an unusual amalgam — three-quarters witty social commentary about American and European society, one-quarter Eastern philosophy — bound together by Maugham’s impeccable prose — almost as though Henry James and Hermann Hesse had collaborated. The book contrasts the adventures of Larry, a seeker who travels widely in search of life’s meaning, with that of his former fiancee, Isabelle, who sacrifices her love for Larry in favor of wealth and social standing. While the book is an odd literary chimera, the result is supremely satisfying. One gets to luxuriate in Maugham’s biting descriptions of the social milieu in Paris, the Riviera, and London, while simultaneously being exposed to some much bigger issues presented in the context of Larry’s intriguing quest for enlightenment. Along the way there is beauty, degradation, betrayal, forgiveness, art, fashion, turgid fascination with France’s demimonde, and lots of other juicy material. A great read.<\/li>\n
                      10. Treasure Island<\/em><\/strong> by Robert Louis Stevenson * * *
                        July 7, 2013
                        Popular adventure tale of piracy, mysterious treasure map, and a host of sinister characters charged with diabolical intentions.<\/li>\n
                      11. Why Does the World Exist<\/em><\/strong> by Jim Holt * * * *
                        July 6, 2013
                        Excellent philosophy book about why there is something rather than nothing.<\/li>\n
                      12. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking<\/strong><\/em> by Susan Cain * * *
                        May 27, 2013<\/li>\n
                      13. The Sea<\/strong><\/em> by John Banville * * * *
                        May 26, 2013
                        Beautifully written novel about a man, Max Morden, recovering from the death of his wife by returning to a sea side town he visited as a youth.<\/li>\n
                      14. In Defense of Food<\/em><\/strong> by Michael Pollan * * * 1\/2
                        April 28, 2013
                        Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That about sums it up.<\/li>\n
                      15. David Copperfield<\/strong><\/em> by Charles Dickens * * * * *
                        April 24, 2013
                        (Audiobook)
                        This is the third time I have listened to this BBC presentation of the greatest novel ever written and every time is just as good as the first.<\/li>\n
                      16. Rules of Civility<\/strong><\/em> by Amor Towles * * *
                        April 13, 2013
                        Two friends go to New York where they meet a rich guy and start hanging out with him. Then all kinds of improbable things start to unfold for all three of them.<\/li>\n
                      17. I Curse the River of Time<\/strong><\/em> by Per Petterson * * *
                        March 20, 2013
                        The narator and protagonist of this novel, Arvid Jansen, deals with cancer, death, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.<\/li>\n
                      18. Ahab’s Wife<\/em><\/strong> by Sena Naslund * * *
                        February 27, 2013
                        In ”Ahab’s Wife,” Sena Jeter Naslund has taken less than a paragraph’s worth of references to the captain’s young wife from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick<\/em>‘ and fashioned from this slender rib not only a woman but an entire world. That world is a looking-glass version of Melville’s fictional seafaring one, ruled by compassion as the other is by obsession, with a heroine who is as much a believer in social justice as the famous hero is in vengeance. Naslund, Ahab-like, has taken on an overwhelming quarry in pursuing Melville, but, true to her maternal, liberal philosophy, she does not harpoon the master so much as harness his force to her own. That Naslund is unstintingly reasonable, empathetic and kind should not, however, blind one to the fact that she is, in the most nonaggressive way, rewriting American history, revising American literature and critiquing traditional masculinity. On the froth and foam and rage of ”Moby-Dick” Naslund lays a cool hand, as if to say: ”There, there. Such a fuss about a fish.”Melville probably would have found Naslund’s inversion of his work anathema.<\/li>\n
                      19. The Street: A Novel<\/em><\/strong> by Ann Petry * * * *
                        February 22, 2013
                        (Audiobook)
                        This book tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry’s first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today. As much a historical document as it is a novel, it was the 1946 winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship .<\/li>\n
                      20. The Kitchen House <\/em>by Kathleen Grissom * <\/strong>* * *
                        January 14, 2013
                        (Audiobook) \u00a0In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds and when loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare and lives are at risk.\u00a0The Kitchen House<\/em>\u00a0is a tragic story of page-turning suspense, exploring the meaning of family, where love and loyalty prevail.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                        Books I read in 2012:<\/b><\/p>\n

                          \n
                        1. The Marriage Plot<\/em><\/strong> by Jeffrey Eugenides * * *
                          December 10, 2012
                          Madeleine, dutiful English major meets Leonard, a charismatic loner, in Semiotics, and tragically marries him. He turns out to be a manic depressive lunatic she ends up taking care of until he leaves her abruptly.<\/li>\n
                        2. The Story of Philosophy<\/em><\/strong> by Will Durant (audiotape) * * * 1\/2
                          November 13, 2012
                          Covers the lives and opinions of the greatest philosophers<\/li>\n
                        3. Lionel Asbo<\/em><\/strong> by Martin Amis * * *
                          October 28, 2012
                          Depraved novel about a depraved life. Lionel Asbo is a thug; the seventh child of a mother who had seven children by age 19. He weaves in and out of prison while trying to be a mentor to his nephew, Des, before he wins the lottery.<\/li>\n
                        4. Where’d You Go Bernadette<\/em><\/strong> by Maria Semple * * * * 1\/2
                          September 23, 2012
                          The mark of a great book is missing the characters when you get to the end of the book: you will miss these characters. Maria Semple did a brilliant job building unforgettable characters in this hilarious book.Our hero, Bernadette, suffers from social phobia and is loath to leave the family manse, delegating most of the logistics of her life to a virtual assistant from India, Manjula Kapoor, while decrying the “gnats” who surround her in Seattle.A few fantastical and unlikely plot twists near the end feel perhaps too convenient, but they don’t compromise the final analysis: “Where’d You Go Bernadette,” outrageously funny and deceptively deep, is a rewarding read.<\/li>\n
                        5. Absolution<\/em><\/strong> by Patrick Flannery * * *
                          September 9, 2012
                          A journalist returns to his native South Africa to interview a famous writer for her autobiography. As he delicately unfolds her tragic life– a murdered sister and a murdered daughter– the two find that they are both seeking absolution, also the name of her upcoming book, and an uncanny connection.<\/li>\n
                        6. Dirt <\/strong><\/em>by David Vann * * *
                          August 12, 2012
                          Twenty year old Galen lives with his mother off of a trust fund in broiling Sacramento Valley. He is obsessed with transcending but can’t get past lusting after his cousin. Eventually he discovers the transcendental aspects of dirt.<\/li>\n
                        7. Canada<\/em><\/strong> by Richard Ford * *
                          August 2, 2012
                          Novel about twins whose parents rob a bank and go to jail and it changes their lives forever. The female characters were poorly drawn. Why did the mother have to commit suicide and why did the sister get cancer and die while his life turned out great? I didn’t care for this book that much.<\/li>\n
                        8. Patrick Melrose Novels<\/em><\/strong> by Edward St. Aubyn * * *
                          July 15, 2012
                          Incest, domestic violence, pedophilia, drug addiction, abuse– this novel covers all areas of depravity as it follows three generations of a depraved upper class British family. The writing is exemplary but the topics covered are depressing and depraved.<\/li>\n
                        9. Winter Hours<\/em><\/strong> by Mary Oliver * * *
                          June 5, 2012
                          Book about three poets and about nature along with some poems.
                          The man who does not know nature
                          Who does not walk under the leaves as under
                          his own roof is partial and wounded<\/li>\n
                        10. Wild<\/strong><\/em> by Cheryl Strayed * * * 1\/2
                          June 5, 2012
                          Lyrical and honest memoir of this woman’s 1100 mile solo trek on the Pacific Crest Trail that broke her down and then built her back up again after she was reeling from the death of her mother and other catastrophes. The book explores what it means to be fully alive even in the face of catastrophe.<\/li>\n
                        11. The Orphan Master’s Son<\/em><\/strong> by Adam Johnson * * * *
                          April 10, 2012
                          This is a novel worth getting excited about. I truly enjoyed reading this book which demonstrates how to paint a fictional world against a background of fact: the secret is research. It is this process of re-imagination that makes the fictional locale so real and gives the novel an impact you could never achieve by simply reading newspaper stories about North Korea. Johnson has painted in indelible colors the nightmare of Kim Jung Il\u2019s North Korea. When English readers want to understand what it was about \u2014 how people lived and died inside a cult of personality that committed unspeakable crimes against its citizens \u2014 I hope they will turn to this carefully researched and well written novel.<\/li>\n
                        12. This Beautiful Life<\/em><\/strong> by Helen Schulman * * *
                          March 9, 2012
                          Teenager sends a pornographic video of a young teenage girl who made a pass at him at a party at her parent’s house, over the internet to his friends. It goes viral and ultimately destroys the boy’s entire family and circle of friends.<\/li>\n
                        13. State of Wonder<\/em><\/strong> by Ann Patchett * * *
                          February 24, 2012
                          In this novel by Ann Patchett, our hero, Marina, goes to medical school to become an ob-gyn but cuts a baby’s eye during a C-section permanently blinding it and transfers to pharmacology where she becomes entangled in a very superficial relationship with the CEO of Big Pharma. She ultimately finds redemption in the jungles of Brazil. The story was very compelling but my god Ann Patchett needs to take remedial English! Her grammar was atrocious.<\/li>\n
                        14. Cutting for Stone<\/strong> <\/em>by Abraham Verghese * * * 1\/2
                          February 12, 2012
                          British doctor in Ethiopia impregnates a nun who delivers twins connected at the head. She dies and after the babies are successfully delivered by the Indian ob-gyn at the Catholic hospital, he flees to the US. The twins are raised by the Indian doctor. And this is their remarkable story.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                          Books I read in 2011:<\/b><\/p>\n

                            \n
                          1. Stormy Weather<\/em><\/strong> by Carl Hiiasen * * *
                            December 23, 2011
                            Another eco-terrorist novel by the prolific Mr. Hiiasen. Only this one featured a mentally disturbed, drug addled, and confused ex-governor of Florida as the eco-terrorist.<\/li>\n
                          2. Nothing Daunted<\/strong><\/em> by Dorothy Wickenden * * *
                            November 20, 2011
                            Two women go off to a small cold western town in Colorado to teach.<\/li>\n
                          3. King of the Badger<\/strong><\/em>s by Philip Hensher * * *
                            November 16, 2011
                            A novel about the invasion of privacy. There were some very raunchy sections.<\/li>\n
                          4. A Town Like Alice<\/em><\/strong> by Nevil Shute * * *
                            September 7, 2011
                            A group of women are taken prisoner in Malaya by the Japanese and then marched across the country for miles. Half of them die en route but the rest survive spurred on by a determined soul who takes over as unnamed leader, Jean Piaget. This amazing woman not only survives the ordeal but comes back after the war to build a well for the local Malayas and moves to Australia where she single-handedly builds a town from scratch.<\/li>\n
                          5. Irretrievable<\/em><\/strong> by Theodor Fontane * * * 1\/2
                            August 21, 2011
                            This novel by one of Germany’s greatest novelists, is about a couple that slowly drifts apart. They live in a beautiful house overlooking the sea. Christine, the wife is brooding and far brighter while the husband, Helmut, is hedonistic and lighthearted.<\/li>\n
                          6. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore<\/em><\/strong> by Benjamin Hale * *
                            July 28, 2011
                            This book at over 700 pages has too many. It is an exploration of what makes us human as told by a chimpanzee who learns how to talk and lives as a human or tries to anyway until everything goes terribly wrong.<\/li>\n
                          7. Turn of Mind<\/strong><\/em> by Alice LaPlante * * * 1\/2
                            July 26, 2011
                            This psychological thriller is about the disintegration of a strong woman’s mind and the unraveling of her family. Dr. Jennifer White, an orthopedic surgeon, in the early stages of dementia, is the prime suspect in the murder of her best friend, Amanda, whose four fingers have been surgically removed after her death. Is Dr. White’s shattered memory preventing her from revealing the truth or helping hide i?<\/li>\n
                          8. The Professor and the Madman<\/em><\/strong> by Simon Winchester * * *
                            July 23, 2011
                            The compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857. It was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. The overseeing committee was lead by James Murray who set out to collect definitions from an army of volunteers. One person who submitted over 10,000 turned out to be a schizophrenic murderer living in an insane asylum, Dr. William Minor. The OED was completed New Year’s Eve 1927. This fascinating book chronicles its completion and the life and contributions of Dr. Minor.<\/li>\n
                          9. How to Survive the Loss of a Love<\/em><\/strong> by Melba Colgrove *
                            July 3, 2011
                            Self-explanatory self-help book. I guess it’s helping a little bit.<\/li>\n
                          10. In Zanesville<\/em><\/strong> by Jo Ann Beard * * *
                            July 1, 2011
                            Novel about two teenagers growing up in a small town in a midwestern city in the 1970s– two awkward, overlooked, and undiscovered girls who friendship is tested and whose character is built as they go through harrowing and sometimes embarrassing experiences on their way to womanhood.<\/li>\n
                          11. The English Opium Eater<\/strong><\/em> by Robert Morrison * * * 1\/2
                            June 17, 2011
                            This biography of the writer Thomas De Quincey was well written and well researched but very difficult to read without feeling immense sadness for the life of the addict. Mr. De Quincey was addicted to laudanum– opium– which he considered a poison and a cure. When he was able to rouse himself he was a great writer of English prose and his representation of himself and the complexities of his age influenced some of the major literary figures of the 19th & 20th centuries & continue to inform our understanding of autobiography, subjectivity, violence & of course addiction.<\/li>\n
                          12. So Much Pretty<\/em><\/strong> by Cara Hoffman * * *
                            May 8, 2011
                            Page turner about violence against women in a small town– indeed everywhere.<\/li>\n
                          13. Black Swan Green<\/em><\/strong> by David Mitchell * * * *
                            April 29, 2011
                            This novel by my current favorite author is about a 13 year old growing up in tiny town in Cold War England in the 1980s. An elegant and moving portrait of a young man’s trials and tribulations. Brilliant novel.<\/li>\n
                          14. Annabel<\/strong><\/em> by Kathleen Winter * * * 1\/2
                            March 31, 2011
                            Canadian author, Kathleen Winter’s debut novel centers around Wayne, a child born neither fully girl nor fully boy in a small town in Labrador and the struggles of Wayne, his family, and the people around him to deal with his differentness. Winter is a strong writer with great insight into people and a keen knowledge of the natural world as well. I loved all the references to the flora and fauna of Labrador. Great first book.<\/li>\n
                          15. Bird Cloud<\/em><\/strong> by Annie Proulx * * *
                            March 13, 2011
                            Bird Cloud is the name Annie Proulx gave to 650 acres of Wyoming land on a cliff overlooking the North Platte River, where she built what she thought would be her dream home. After the grueling ordeal of building the house in the Wyoming hinterland she tries to settle in for a year observing the many birds that course the river, a resident mountain lion among others but finally resigns herself to the fact that it is simply not possible to live in this remote, cold, windy, snowy outlier.<\/li>\n
                          16. Pilgrim at Tinker Cree<\/em><\/strong>k by Annie Dillard * * *
                            March 5, 2011
                            Annie Dillard spends a dramatic year in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Valley seeing what she can see. What she sees are astonishing works of mystery in ordinary works of nature.<\/li>\n
                          17. Anthill<\/strong><\/em> by E. O. Wilson * * *
                            <\/strong><\/strong>February 8, 2011
                            The world’s pre-eminent biologist and naturalist writes his first novel. The book is about a boy from Alabama who develops a love of nature, goes on to excel at Florida State and then Harvard Law, then comes home to save the last old growth tract of long leaf pine from greedy developers.<\/li>\n
                          18. Standing in the Light My Life as a Pantheis<\/em><\/strong>t by Sharman Apt Russell * * *
                            January 10, 2011
                            Memoir in which Russell alternates between her life in a rural setting in the Gila River Valley in New Mexico and her pantheistic beliefs. Included is a brief history of pantheism, the stoics, transcendentalists, and Quakers.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                            Books I read in 2010:<\/b><\/p>\n

                              \n
                            1. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoe<\/em><\/strong>t by David Mitchell * * * *
                              December 28, 2010
                              Jacob de Zoet, a devout clerk in the Dutch East Indies Company, stationed in Nagasaki Harbor, Japan in 1799, has five years to earn enough money to win the hand of his fiancee back in Holland. But to do so he must fight rampant corruption, devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and the oppressive presence of the Japanese Empire. His plans become waylaid after he meets and becomes obsessed with the brilliant but disfigured Japanese midwife, Orito Aibagawa.<\/li>\n
                            2. Parrot & Olivier in America<\/em><\/strong> by Peter Carey * * *
                              December 7, 2010
                              Carey explores the experiment of American democracy through the eyes of a fictionalized Alexis de Tocqueville, Olivier, and the son of a printer who was involved with printing counterfeit money and had to flee France upon the uncovering of the operation, Parrot, who is sent to America with Olivier as his servant. The book is written in opposing chapters from the very different voice and perspectives of both.<\/li>\n
                            3. Cloud Atlas<\/em><\/strong> by David Mitchell * * * *
                              November 5, 2010
                              David Mitchell is a prodigious talent. In this tour de force, his third novel, he proves why. His writing is simply superb. The novel begins in 1850 with a notary from San Francisco traveling by ship from Australia to his home. Along the way he is befriended by an ostensible doctor who purports to treat him for a parasite. From there the novel jumps midsentence to 1931 Belguim where a brilliant bisexual composer gets into a pale of trouble while writing a sextet. From there the novel jumps to a naive investigative journalist exposing corporate greed and murder. From there we go far into the future when the world is run by corporations and finally to the final days of the world (the most unreadable chapter). Then the novel winds its way back in reverse revisiting each previous chapter and revealing its relationship to the others<\/li>\n
                            4. Pearl of China<\/em><\/strong> by Anchee Min * * * 1\/2
                              September 10, 2010
                              Anchee Min is one of my favorite authors. In this book she tells the story of Nobel prize winning author, Pearl Buck, an American author who was raised by her zealous missionary parents in China. The book is a fictionalized account told through the narrator, her Chinese friend, Willow Yee.<\/li>\n
                            5. The Quickening Maze<\/em><\/strong> by Adam Foulds * * *
                              August 7, 2010
                              This book based on real events tells the story of the great nature poet John Clare and his fall into madness. The writing is superb.<\/li>\n
                            6. Summertime<\/em><\/strong> by J. M. Coetzee * * *
                              July 26, 2010
                              An English biographer researches a book about the late South African writer Coetzee. He interviews five people who portray a very awkward person. The format for this novel was very interesting and readable<\/li>\n
                            7. Rosalie Edge Hawk of Mercy<\/em><\/strong> by Dyana Furmansky * *
                              Rosalie Edge was an environmentalist and agitator who confronted the Audubon Society regarding its cozy relationship with gun toting groups. She founded Hawk Hill in PA and had what should have been a very exciting life but the book was written in such a boring incoherent style that I could not even finish it.<\/li>\n
                            8. Ghosts & Lightning<\/strong><\/em> by Trevor Byrne * * *
                              July 19, 2010
                              I found myself speaking with an Irish brogue after reading this funny but troubling novel about Denny and his band of drug-addled party loving friends living on the dole in Dublin.<\/li>\n
                            9. The Stranger<\/strong><\/em> by Albert Camus * * *
                              July 2, 2010
                              Very readable and interesting look into the mind of a killer but it was like a mini and not nearly as good rendering of Crime and Punishment.<\/li>\n
                            10. The Eye of the Elephant<\/strong><\/em> by Delia & Mark Owens * * *
                              June 24, 2010
                              Wildlife biologists obtain backing to conduct research and move to a very remote and beautiful area of Zambia, North Luangwa National Park, to study lions but end up spending all their time fighting elephant poachers and intractable corruption and the usual enormous problems of Africa in general. I was captivated and behind them the whole way until the end of the book where I was disappointed to find Mark’s solution to be the importation of beef! Good grief, what a moron. Doesn’t he know half the world’s problems are caused by cows?<\/li>\n
                            11. All Things Reconsidered<\/strong><\/em> by Roger Tory Peterson * * * *
                              June 14, 2010
                              A series of essays about Peterson’s life. He, more than any other person, was responsible for popularizing bird watching. In addition to writing and drawing the pictures for the most accessible bird guide ever, he was an accomplished photographer and artist, and made videos of many of his travels. This would be a great read for anyone interested in nature in general.<\/li>\n
                            12. Life List<\/em><\/strong> by Olivia Gentile * * * *
                              May 27, 2010
                              This is the biography of Phoebe Snetsinger, one of the greatest birders of all time and certainly the most famous female birder. Before she died in a bus accident while looking for birds in Madagascar at age 67 she had seen an incredible 85% of all the birds known to exist in the world.<\/li>\n
                            13. The Wind in the Willows<\/em><\/strong> by Kenneth Grahame * * * * *
                              April 14, 2010
                              Scottish writer, Kenneth Grahame’s life was torn asunder when his mother died when he was only five and his alcoholic father sent him to be raised by his cold distant grandmother on the banks of the Thames River, the setting for this novel. The novel is written in lyrical prose and tells the adventures of the loyal friends, Badger, Mole, and Rat, and the incorrigible Mr. Toad. Although a children’s book, written for his son, Alistar, it delights children and adults alike with its irresistible substance and depth.<\/li>\n
                            14. The Three Musketeers<\/strong><\/em> by Alexandre Dumas * * * *
                              March 13, 2010
                              I read this book in French when I was in High School and then just re-read it in English. I didn’t remember a thing so it retained all of its enthralling fast paced plot which involves the adventures of the bold Gascony D’Artagnan in his quest to realize his dream of becoming a Musketeer of the Guard of the French King.<\/li>\n
                            15. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy<\/em><\/strong> by Laurence Sterne
                              January 25, 2010
                              I just could not finish this book. I made it to page 250 but the book is just too bizarre. It’s mostly about Tristram’s father and his weird uncle Toby.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                              Books I read in 2009:<\/b><\/p>\n

                                \n
                              1. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em><\/strong> by Douglas Adams * * *
                                December 30, 2009
                                Arthur’s house is about to be plowed over to make way for a by-pass when the whole world is obliterated by some aliens to make way for a galactic super-highway. Arthur is rescued by a travelling alien who was stranded on earth for 15 years while researching an update to the book “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.<\/li>\n
                              2. Raney<\/em><\/strong> by Clyde Edgerton * * * 1\/2
                                December 30, 2009
                                Raney, a small town Baptist living in NC marries Charles, a liberal from Atlanta.<\/li>\n
                              3. An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oldest Town <\/em><\/strong>by David Farley * * 1\/2
                                December 27, 2009
                                A funny book about a journalist’s search for Jesus’s foreskin, a relic which was stolen from a small quirky town in Italy outside of Rome.<\/li>\n
                              4. Fingersmith<\/strong><\/em> by Sarah Waters * * *
                                December 4, 2009
                                Set in mid-19th century England this is a page turning tale of deception and intrigue.
                                The spell-binding plot allows you to overlook the language spoken by the characters which is far too modern for Victorian England.<\/li>\n
                              5. Tom Jones<\/strong><\/em> by Henry Fielding * * *
                                November 12, 2009
                                One of the first and most influential English novels. Tom, the hero, is a bastard taken in by a liberal squire. Tom means well and is very kind hearted but is a ne’er-do-well with a weakness for women. Many misfortunes befall him in his quest to betroth his beloved Sophia.<\/li>\n
                              6. Coaching Kids Flag Football<\/strong><\/em> by Danford Chamness * *
                                September 26, 2009
                                I needed a book to help me with my women’s flag football team. This was the only thing I could find. The grammar was bad and it was full of typographical errors. Also it was a little too basic for my skill set. However, it was helpful in pointing out some useful things to do on defense. Will see if it helps us to the championship this fall.<\/li>\n
                              7. It Will Come to Me<\/strong><\/em> by Emily Fox Gordon * *
                                August 9, 2009
                                Novel about a college professor and his wife, an author of two highly acclaimed novels who suffers from writer’s block and has not written anything for 20 years. The book would have been a good read but I simply couldn’t enjoy it due to Ms. Gordon’s refusal to use a comma between serials. I realize that using endless “ands” instead of the good ole comma is all the rage in contemporary writing especially in the New Yorker but that doesn’t mean it is pleasurable to read. Ms. Gordon used numerous serials all separated by and. Once in a while for effect would have been perfectly acceptable but to go on and on with one after another serial separated by “and” is so boring and idiotic that I just cannot recommend this book.<\/li>\n
                              8. The Epic of Gilgamesh<\/strong><\/em> by Unknown * * *
                                August 1, 2009
                                Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk, and his companion, Enkidu, are the greatest heroes of ancient Babylon immortalized in this epic poem from the third millennium BC.<\/li>\n
                              9. Field Notes from a Catastrophe Man, Nature, & Climate Change <\/strong><\/em>by Elizabeth Kolbert * * *
                                August 1, 2009
                                Journalist and science writer, Elizabeth Kolbert, asks what is it and what can be done to save the planet from global warming.<\/li>\n
                              10. Castle<\/strong><\/em> by J. Robert Lennon * * *
                                July 30, 2009
                                Eric Loesch returns to his home town after a disgraceful exit from a stint in Iraq and buys 612 acres on the edge of town. Ther woods surrounding the home contain may mysteries that serve as a metaphor for Loesch’s confused life and our failures in the invasion of Iraq.<\/li>\n
                              11. Life<\/strong><\/em> by Richard Fortey * * *
                                July 26, 2009
                                Senior Paleontologist at the London Museum of Natural History tells the history of the planet. The best part of the book was chapter one describing his experiences on a fossil finding expedition to the Arctic. The book got bogged down with too much academic wrangling over plant speciation but the book was very enjoyable nevertheless especially the early chapters on the evolution of the earth and the development of photosynthesis and the end regarding evolution of man.<\/li>\n
                              12. All the Living<\/strong><\/em> by C. E. Morgan * *
                                July 19, 2009
                                This orphan woman is raised by her aunt and uncle and when it gets too crowded shipped off to school where she meets a farmer. After his family dies in a crash she moves in with him and they have a lot of sex but little love but eventually they come around to each other.<\/li>\n
                              13. Wild America<\/strong><\/em> by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher * * * *
                                July 11, 2009
                                Travelogue of a 100 day adventure around the perimeter of America by famed ornithologist, author, and naturalist, Roger Tory Peterson, and his friend, James Fisher, British authority on seabirds. The drawings by Peterson are outstanding and the whole book is a fabulous natural history tour through America which would have been great if only told by the the famed Peterson but is all the better because we also get to see America through the eyes of Fisher, a first time visitor from Britain.<\/li>\n
                              14. The Ponder Heart<\/strong><\/em> by Eudora Welty * * * *
                                June 14, 2009
                                Edna Earle Ponder tells the story of her eccentric uncle and small town southern living in speech peppered with southern sayings. The story culminates in a hilarious murder trial.<\/li>\n
                              15. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/strong><\/em> by Mark Twain * * * *
                                June 13, 2009
                                I’m sure I read this when I was younger b ut since I couldn’t remember a thing it was like reading it for the first time and what a pleasure. Huckleberry Finn is kidnapped by his degenerate father but Huck escapes on a raft with a slave Jim, whom Huck eventually helps to his freedom. The book is all about their adventures but also about the transformation of Huck’s views about slavery and humanity.<\/li>\n
                              16. The New Rules of Lifting for Women<\/strong><\/em> by Lou Schuler * *
                                June 9, 2009
                                My brother recommended this book to me as a training guide. I like his ideas about working groups of muscles the way the body is intended to move in real life but his suggestions for dietary changes were to heavily weighted to cow products. The book also had a lot of fluff that could have been cut out. I just started the training program and I think it’s pretty good.<\/li>\n
                              17. The Optimist’s Daughter<\/strong><\/em> by Eudora Welty * * *
                                May 21, 2009
                                I loved all the southernisms in this book about a woman who after tragically losing her mother watches as her father dies while her step mother acts like a horse’s ass.<\/li>\n
                              18. Coming Up for Air<\/strong><\/em> by George Orwell * * * *
                                May 7, 2009
                                This book tells the story of George “Fatty” Bowling who grows up in a country village in England before going off to the First World War. After the war he settles down in boring marriage with an insipid wife and two brats but after winning some money in a race decides to take a journey back to his boyhood home only to find it vastly altered as if scraped by a blunt razor.<\/li>\n
                              19. Where Mountains Are Nameles<\/strong><\/em>s by Jonathan Waterman * * *
                                April 30, 2009
                                Part travelogue and part political analysis of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Although I am a political science major and intrigued by politics, the nature lover in me was much more impressed with the sections of the book that described the author’s adventures in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after paddling there all alone for 400 miles in a kayak braving polar and grizzly bears as well as the harsh elements.<\/li>\n
                              20. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith <\/strong><\/em>by Peter Carey * *
                                April 9, 2009
                                Very strange book about the life of the disfigured son of two actors in Voorstander.<\/li>\n
                              21. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek <\/strong><\/em>by Annie Dillard * * *
                                March 30, 2009
                                Very much in the style of Emerson’s Walden, this is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia’s Blue Ridge valley. Dillard tells of life’s mysteries and the astonishing natural world around us in this remarkable book of wonder.
                                <\/strong><\/em><\/li>\n
                              22. Collapse<\/strong><\/em> by Jared Diamond * * *
                                February 25, 2009
                                In this awarding winning book Diamond explores the reasons for the collapse of past civilizations such as the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Island, and the Norse in Greenland. The reasons are varied but always relate back in some way to the intentional or unintentional destruction of the very environment those civilizations depended upon. It is impossible to read the book and not worry about our own destruction of the environment which sustains and nurtures us and what the future may hold for our tenuous civilization.<\/li>\n
                              23. The Secret Life of Bees <\/strong><\/em>by Sue Monk Kid * * *
                                January 24, 2009
                                It was difficult to read following so closely on the death of my good friend, Bonnie Hansen, whom I knew for 20 years but had not contacted since a little fight in September 2006. I have struggled since with the remorse and guilt of not contacting Bonnie before she died suddenly on December 19, 2008. In this book a young girl struggles with the fact that she accidentally killed her own mother. She finds solace through an unlikely source ultimately connecting with the feminine divine.<\/li>\n
                              24. Octavian Nothing Traitor to the Nation, Volume II <\/strong><\/em>by M.T. Anderson * * * 1\/2
                                January 1, 2009
                                Excellent writing but not as good as part I with many dragging sections of the story line when the Ethiopian Army is trapped on a boat with Lord Dumore. Still a very good book.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                                Books I read in 2008:<\/strong><\/p>\n

                                  \n
                                1. Octavian Nothing Traitor to the Nation<\/strong><\/em> by M.T. Anderson * * * *
                                  November 30, 2008
                                  Very fine writing combined with a page turning story of a slave boy raised by philosophers makes for a very compelling book.<\/li>\n
                                2. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Cour<\/strong><\/em>t by Mark Twain * * * 1\/2
                                  November 18, 2008
                                  The narrator meets a stranger while touring Warwick Castle who gives him a manuscript relating how a factory worker from Connecticut goes back in time to Camelot where he abolishes sixth century ideas and institutions.<\/li>\n
                                3. Babbitt <\/strong><\/em>by Sinclair Lewis * * 1\/2
                                  October 15, 2008
                                  Babbitt is a prosperous real estate broker and social climber whose life is turned upside down by the turbulence of the roaring 20s. In the telling the deep hypocracy of the middle class is revealed.<\/li>\n
                                4. Children of the Alley<\/strong><\/em> by Naguib Mahfouz * * * 1\/2
                                  August 31, 2008
                                  Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature tells the story of an Egyptian family living in an alley in the shadow of a great mansion inhabited by the great ancestor and feudal landlord. Through tales of his progeny Mahfouz tells an allegory of all human suffering and striving.<\/li>\n
                                5. Case Histories<\/strong><\/em> by Kate Atkinson * * *
                                  August 1, 2008
                                  This is a sort of offbeat detective novel that is more compelling drama and dark psychological study of crimes. Detective Jackson Brodie doesn’t so much solve the crimes as become involved in the lives of the victims.<\/li>\n
                                6. Beijing Coma<\/strong><\/em> by Ma Jian * * *
                                  July 29, 2008
                                  Dai Wei, son of a counter-revolutionary, pro-democracy protester, and Beijing University student is put into a 10 year coma by a bullet to his head from a soldier while protesting at Tianamen Square in 1989. While in the coma he relives his past while China undergoes a transformation. He realizes he must emerge from the coma into death in life, that is life in China.<\/li>\n
                                7. Little Dorrit<\/strong><\/em> by Charles Dickens * * * *
                                  July 24, 2008
                                  This book tells the story of William Dorrit who is sent to the Marshalsea Debtors Prison where his daughter, Amy or Little Dorrit, is born and lives taking care of her father. She also sews for Mrs. Clennam. Her son, Arthur comes home from India, meets Little Dorrit, and they fall in love. Meanwhile the Dorrit’s fall into some unknown wealth uncovered by Arthur and get out of prison only to lose it all in the end to bad investments. Arthur too falls prey to a miscalculation on his investments and is sent to the Marshalsea. In the end he finds a way out of debt and marries Little Dorrit.<\/li>\n
                                8. White Fang<\/strong><\/em> by Jack London * * *
                                  June 7, 2008<\/li>\n
                                9. To Build a Fire<\/strong><\/em> by Jack London * * *
                                  Jun 7, 2008
                                  This idiot ignores the advice of a local not to go out alone when it drops below 50 below degrees, falls in icy water and then dies when he can’t light a fire.<\/li>\n
                                10. The Call of the Wild<\/strong><\/em> by Jack London * * *
                                  June 7, 2008
                                  A dog is stolen from sunny Santa Clara Valley, CA and sold to drag a dog sled on the frozen tundra during the Klondike Gold Rush. The dog becomes a survivor dominating all other sled dogs but then returns to his primeval roots and becomes a wolf.<\/li>\n
                                11. Treasure Island<\/strong><\/em> by Robert Louis Stevenson * * *
                                  June 7, 2008
                                  This adventure book about a boy who goes on a ship to search for hidden treasures on a deserted island, is considered a boy’s book but I liked it too.<\/li>\n
                                12. His Illegal Self<\/strong><\/em> by Peter Carey * * *
                                  April 19, 2008
                                  Precocious seven year old son of 60s radicals is kidnapped by the woman who raised him while his activist mother was blowing herself and others up. The rest of the book is a remarkable road book and adventure lovingly at times caustically others exploring the love between the boy and the woman.<\/li>\n
                                13. Diary of a Bad Year <\/strong><\/em>by J.M. Coetzee * * *
                                  April 10, 2008
                                  Another very good book by one of our best contemporary fiction writers. This book is part novel, part political diatribe, and part philosophical discourse on the roll of the writer in contemporary life. It is the story of an aging novelist who enlists the help of a young Philipina to type his thoughts on the state of the world for a book requested by his publisher and the interesting interactions that ensue.<\/li>\n
                                14. Diary of a Wilderness Dweller<\/strong><\/em> by Chris Czajkowski * * * *
                                  March 16, 2008
                                  This is a fabulous book by an amazing woman who moves to an extremely remote area of British Columbia’s Coast Range to build two cabins by herself and ultimately a business catering to others seeking a wilderness experience. She is a very good writer and gifted artist capturing the essence of the wilderness experience in her lyrical writing interspersed with some of her drawings.<\/li>\n
                                15. Him Her Him Again The End of Him<\/em><\/strong> by Patricia Marx * *
                                  March 8, 2008
                                  It started out being a pretty humorous story about a woman suffering from extreme low self esteem who becomes enamored with an intellectual she meets while attending Cambridge but her obsession becomes so extreme by the end of the book that it becomes tedious, ridiculous and not very funny.<\/li>\n
                                16. Barnaby Rudge <\/strong><\/em>by Charles Dickens * * * *
                                  March 2, 2008
                                  This was a great book. It is one of only two historical novels written by our greatest English novelist of all time and has his usual cast of unforgettable characters, covers important social themes such as the death penalty, social revolt, and mob violence, all within the context of the Gordon Riots in London in 1790.<\/li>\n
                                17. Letter to a Christian Nation<\/strong><\/em> by Sam Harris * * *
                                  January 20, 2008
                                  In this book the author of The End of Faith<\/em> responds to the hateful letters he received from so called Christians in response to his first book, by roundly repudiating their complaints point by point. I doubt he changed any minds but at least he didn’t cower before the assault on his atheism which was forceful by its sheer numbers rather than any logic or reason.<\/li>\n
                                18. Handful of Dust<\/strong><\/em> by Evelyn Waugh * * *
                                  January 19, 2008
                                  Witty and funny satire on British social life in the period between World War I and World War II. The story involves the odious John Beaver and his fatal involvement with Tony and Brenda Last.<\/li>\n
                                19. The Red and the Black <\/strong><\/em>by Stendahl * * *
                                  January 5, 2008
                                  Though tedious at times this was a fascinating story about a peasant, Julien Sorel, who uses villiany and manipulation to obtain power and wealth but at the same time struggles with his uncontrollable passions and the forces of religion, Napoleonic fervor, and the class differences which work against him.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                                  Books I read in 2007:<\/b><\/p>\n

                                    \n
                                  1. Away<\/strong><\/em> by Amy Bloom * * *
                                    December 31, 2007
                                    Lillian’s family is destroyed in the Russian pogrom against the Jews but escapes to America only to embark on a long odyssey to leave when she learns that her daughter, Sophie, survived the massacre.<\/li>\n
                                  2. Persepolis<\/strong><\/em> by Marjane Satrapi * * * *
                                    December 24, 2007
                                    Memoir of a young gril growing up in Iran during the repressive Islamic Revolution. Though written in black and white comic strips, the book is quite serious and powerful.<\/li>\n
                                  3. Thus Spake Zarathustr<\/strong><\/em>a by Friedrich Nietzsche * * *
                                    December 19, 2007
                                    Combination novel and philosophy, this book uses the wanderings and teachings of the prophet, Zarathustra, who is based on Christ, to expound the philosophy that humans should revere nobility, pride, and victory and not humility and weakness. In the end his teachings are for everyone and no one.<\/li>\n
                                  4. My Traitor’s Heart<\/strong><\/em> by Rian Malan * * *
                                    November 25, 2007
                                    Rian Malan is a South African journalist from a long line of famous Boers who fought the Zulus in the struggle to keep South Africa white. The book is a blindingly poignant and truthful account of his struggle to face his legacy and to understand this enigmatic country at once brutal, violent and race torn and yet a success story of sorts on the dark continent.<\/li>\n
                                  5. Cadillac Deser<\/b><\/i>t<\/em><\/strong> by Marc Reisner * * * * *
                                    November 2, 2007
                                    Staggering expose of the corruption, graft, lies, deception, lust for money and unbridled development, and burning desire to tame nature that led to the watering of the west and its concomitant explosive growth on borrowed time in a dry arid, mostly desert area that makes up the American West. This book should absolutely be read by all Californians but also by anyone interested in learning just what destruction we have unleashed on the environment in our quest to put water where it never was and never was meant to be.<\/li>\n
                                  6. The Sound and the Fury<\/i><\/b> by William Faulkner * * * *
                                    October 17, 2007
                                    In his fourth novel, the brilliant chronicler of post-civil war southern life, tells the tragic story of Caddy, the unloved daughter of a cold, self-absorbed, hypochondriac mother and a cynical father,
                                    through the voice of her dim-witted brother, Benjy, her suicidal depressed brother, Quentin, her psychotic and mean-spirited brother, Jason, and finally an anonymous narrator.<\/li>\n
                                  7. T<\/b><\/i>he Road<\/i><\/b> by Cormac McCarthy * *
                                    September 29, 2007
                                    Some horrible catastrophe has stricken the US or possibly the world. Instead of being rid of the most dangerous mammal ever–humans, there are marauding gangs of them who have survived and become cannibals threatening the tenuous survival of the “good guys,” a man and his son, and a very precious few others who represent goodness. It was idiotic that though starving they would not eat a stray dog preferring to become cannibals instead.<\/li>\n
                                  8. The Misanthrope<\/i><\/b> by Moli\u00e8re * * * 1\/2
                                    September 18, 2007
                                    In this masterpiece play by Moliere(1622-73) he portrays a man doomed to social wilderness due to his inability to concede to convention or compromise his principles.<\/li>\n
                                  9. Seasons on the Pacific Coast: A Naturalist’s Notebook<\/b><\/i> by Susan Tweit * * *
                                    September 13, 2007
                                    This book is a collection of elegantly written essays and beautifully drawn watercolor sketches of thirty-nine plants and animals that live along the rugged and intricately interwoven ecosystem that is the Pacific Coast.<\/li>\n
                                  10. Ulysses<\/b><\/i> by James Joyce * * *
                                    August 18, 2007
                                    OK, I cheated and listened to the audiobook as read by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan but I tried to read it twice and just couldn’t understand what was going on. With the audiotape I was able to understand that most of what was happening were Bloom’s internal thoughts. This is a lively reading and I highly recommend it to anyone struggling with the book as I did. Maybe now I can pick up the book and read what has been called one of the greatest literary works in the English language.<\/li>\n
                                  11. On Human Nature<\/i><\/b> by Edward O. Wilson * * * 1\/2
                                    August 10, 2007
                                    Our greatest living scientist, Edward O. Wilson, explains how the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material structure of the human brain helps us understand and explains much of human nature.<\/li>\n
                                  12. Civilization and Its Discontents<\/b><\/i> by Sigmund Freud * * * 1\/2
                                    August 3, 2007
                                    Published in 1930 when he was over 70 years old Freud explores the origins of civilization, aggression, the place of beauty in culture, and the reasons why we do the things we do in this his last book. He revises his theories slightly to include what he calls a death drive competing with the ego.<\/li>\n
                                  13. Montana 1948<\/b><\/i> by Larry Watson * *
                                    August 1, 2007
                                    The writing style was extremely basic– no words over five letters and while the story was interesting it had no point.<\/li>\n
                                  14. Far from the Madding Crowd<\/i><\/b> by Thomas Hardy * * *
                                    July 31, 2007
                                    Of the four Hardy novels I have read, this one is the weakest. It is expected in a Hardy novel that the characters will experience shattering griefs for no reason. However, the ill-fate of Bathsheba was not believable. I enjoyed reading about the strong character who takes the unprecedented step of running her own farm but her demise at the hands of the rogue cad Troy was out of character and unconvincing.<\/li>\n
                                  15. Kaufman Field Guide to Butterflies of North America<\/b><\/i> by Jim P. Brock and Kenn Kaufman * * *
                                    June 30, 2007
                                    The descriptions are not very informative, often having nothing to do with the little pointers on the butterfly pictures. Further confusing identification is the fact that he makes up many of the species in his book. There has to be something better than this.<\/li>\n
                                  16. Slow Man<\/b><\/i> by J.M. Coetzee * * *
                                    June 6, 2007
                                    Old guy loses his leg in a bicycle accident changing his reclusive life forever. He refuses a prosthesis and then falls inexplicably in love with his home health aide and has other struggles as he comes to terms with his new life.<\/li>\n
                                  17. Pere Goriot <\/b><\/i>by Honore de Balzac * * * *
                                    May 31, 2007
                                    This book made a list of the 100 greatest books ever written. I don’t know about that but it was a page turning plot and intriguing look into the glittering greedy Paris of the 1820s.<\/li>\n
                                  18. Things Fall Apart<\/b><\/i> by Chinua Achebe * * * 1\/2 \u00a0 May 20, 2007
                                    This book written in 1959 has been translated into 50 languages. It is a simple story set in an African village of a man whose life is dominated by fear and anger.<\/li>\n
                                  19. Tess of the D’Urbervilles<\/b><\/i> by Thomas Hardy * * * *
                                    May 7, 2007
                                    Another excellent book by the great English author, Thomas Hardy. As with all his books terrible things happen to the most undeserving people and Hardy does not disappoint here either. Beautiful good Tess stumbles through one harrowing experience after another in her tormented life until her final tragic end but her story still captivates readers after all these years due to Hardy’s great writing, compelling story, and interesting description of English country life.<\/li>\n
                                  20. Future of Life <\/b><\/i>by E.O. Wilson * * * *
                                    April 13, 2007
                                    Our greatest living scientist, E.O. Wilson, makes a compelling and cogent argument in this book as to why we must take all means necessary to preserve biodiversity by protecting and preserving our ecosystems. His writing style is engaging and lucid and his argument is ironclad. I highly recommend this book to everyone.<\/li>\n
                                  21. The Origin of Species<\/i><\/b> by Charles Darwin * * * * *
                                    March 5, 2007
                                    Charles Darwin, the greatest naturalist to ever live, in this monumental work, the most influential book in the natural sciences ever written, describes and documents in unassailable terms his theory of natural selection. The importance of this book on scientific thought cannot be overstated. Darwin’s writing style is elegant and engaging making the book highly enjoyable to read for scientists and lay people alike (he is buried next to Charles Dickens; need I say more?) It should be required reading for all school children.<\/li>\n
                                  22. Birding North Carolina<\/i><\/b>, Edited by Marshall Brooks and Mark Johns \u00a0\u00a0 *
                                    February 25, 2007
                                    This is the worst state birding guide in the US. It has no maps at all and no bar graph of bird distribution. It is also paper thin even though it covers a fairly large state with a long coast and mountains. Come on, y’all can do better than that.<\/li>\n
                                  23. Pigeons<\/i><\/b> by Andrew Blechman \u00a0\u00a0 *
                                    February 12, 2007
                                    Terrible book by a journalist who tries to glorify the unglorifiable.<\/li>\n
                                  24. Jude the Obscure<\/i><\/b> by Thomas Hardy * * * * *
                                    February 7, 2007
                                    In this, the great English novelist Thomas Hardy’s last novel (he gave up novels in disgust over the public’s negative reaction to it), he roundly condemns the idiotic institution of marriage and explores human passion through the tragic lives of the brick mason, Jude who aspires to university but whose ambitions are thwarted by his station in life, and the object of his passion, his brilliant and beloved cousin, Sue, a precursor to the modern day feminist.<\/li>\n
                                  25. Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music<\/i><\/b> by Stephen Fry * * *
                                    January 29, 2007
                                    My favorite contemporary writer, Stephen Fry, in his usual brilliantly funny and engaging style gives us his version of a brief history of classical music starting with Gregorian chants and going all the way to the sound track to a Harry Potter movie. It’s highly subjective in its tastes and noticeably absent is any reference at all to John Adams; however, it is imminently readable and fun.<\/li>\n
                                  26. The Uses of Enchantment <\/i><\/b>by Heidi Julavits * * *
                                    January 12, 2007
                                    A teenage girl tries to come to terms with a cold distant mother by encouraging her own abduction by a stranger. Her mother sends her for psychotherapy with what is at first a very conscientious and careful therapist. The dialogue and psychological intrigue are an engaging read but the biggest flaw with the book was the completely unconvincing dissolution of character of the therapist into a self serving opportunist.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                                    Books I read in 2006:<\/b><\/p>\n

                                      \n
                                    1. A Birder’s Guide to the Texas Coast<\/i><\/b> by Harold Holt * * * (January 20, 2006)
                                      Though a bit outdated with the last printing in 1993 it is still a great book for anyone wanting to take a birding trip on the Texas coast with detailed maps and a really nice bird list and distribution bar graph.<\/li>\n
                                    2. Vanity Fair<\/i><\/b> by William Makepeace Thackeray * * * * (January 29, 2006)
                                      This Incisive social satire exposes the greed, hypocrisy, and corruption raging in England during the Napoleonic wars. The book has no hero but instead focuses on the changing fortunes of two unforgettable women; the scheming opportunist Becky Sharp and her faithful, forgiving, naive life long friend, Amelia Sedley.<\/li>\n
                                    3. The Inheritance of Loss<\/i><\/b> by Kiran Desai * * * (February 22, 2006)
                                      Novel set in NE India at the confluence of several Himalayan states. A retired Cambridge educated judge lives there with his cook, granddaughter, and nasty dog whose company he prefers to that of humans. The novel explores nationhood, modernity, and class.<\/li>\n
                                    4. The Grapes of Wrath<\/i><\/b> by John Steinbeck * * * * * (February 26, 2006)
                                      In this powerful novel Steinbeck explores the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, son Toms’s fierce reaction to injustice and Ma’s stoical strength, the horrors of the Depression, and the nature of equality and justice in America.<\/li>\n
                                    5. Why Birds Sing<\/i><\/b> by David Rothenberg * * * (March 4, 2006)
                                      An exploration of bird song through poetry, music, and scientific research that concludes birds not only sing to attract mates and defend their territory but also sing because they can.<\/li>\n
                                    6. The Da Vinci Code<\/i><\/b> by Dan Brown * * 1\/2 (March 14, 2006)
                                      Two bit, second rate detective novel whose only redeeming quality was the wealth of information and research the book provided on the Catholic Church’s quest to stomp out any revelations regarding the truth about Mary Magdalene’s marriage to Jesus and the sacred feminine.<\/li>\n
                                    7. Dombey and Son<\/i><\/b> by Charles Dickens * * * * (April 24, 2006)
                                      769 pages! Took me all month but an excellent read about a proud arrogant son of a bitch who is obsessed with having a son to carry on his family business to the detriment of his darling daughter. I loved the willful second wife who refused to give in to his ridiculous demands. The writing was sublime as usual.<\/li>\n
                                    8. Absalom, Absalom <\/i><\/b>by William Faulkner * * * * * (May 23, 2006)
                                      In this stream-of-consciousness novel, Faulkner gives us an unflinching look at the post-civil war south with all its racism in full throttle. The main character, Thomas Sutpen, is a despicable reprobate who gets his due in the end. Having grown up in and then abandoned the south I loved the ending of the book, “why do you hate the south?” “I don’t hate it… I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it. I don’t hate it!”<\/li>\n
                                    9. The Way Out<\/i><\/b> by Craig Childs * * * (May 25, 2006)
                                      Two guys get permission from the Dine Indian tribe to hike around lost and nearly die in a remote routeless desert canyon in order to work out their issues.<\/li>\n
                                    10. The Book of Joe<\/i><\/b> by Jonathan Tropper * * 1\/2 (June 1, 2006)
                                      Joe wrote a scathing book about his hometown and then later had to return home after his father had a stroke, where he was beaten, harassed, and nearly murdered but reconnected with his old girlfriend.<\/li>\n
                                    11. Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science– from the Babylonians to the Maya <\/i><\/b>by Dick Teresi * * * (June 6, 2006)
                                      In this fascinating book, science writer, Dick Teresi, did extensive research to trace the origins of contemporary science in the non-western world– China, Mesopotamia, Maya, Persia, Sumeria, India, etc.<\/li>\n
                                    12. Yellowstone and Grand Teton, Must Do Hikes For Everyone<\/i><\/b> * * *
                                      (June 17, 2006)
                                      Some of the recommended trails have no business in the book. However, it has excellent descriptions with detailed maps of each hike and details of what you might see and the difficulty of the trails.<\/li>\n
                                    13. Walden<\/i><\/b> by Henry David Thoreau * * * * * (June 25, 2006)
                                      Vivid account of the time the author spent alone in a cabin he built himself in the woods at Walden Pond. Thoreau’s account is not just of his life as a hermit but expounds on themes of appreciating nature, eschewing consumerism, and exploring our world and ourselves.<\/li>\n
                                    14. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook<\/i><\/b> by Gary Shteyngart * * * 1\/2 (July 22, 2006)
                                      Very funny debut novel about a Russian immigrant trying to make it in the US.<\/li>\n
                                    15. Robinson Crusoe<\/i><\/b> by Daniel Defoe * * * (July 26, 2006)
                                      In this adventure novel, Daniel Defoe, considered the author of the English Novel, proselytizes about religion while following the life of a shipwrecked mariner on a deserted island.<\/li>\n
                                    16. Suite Francaise<\/i><\/b> by Irene Nemirovsky * * * (July 27, 2006)
                                      This incomplete novel published posthumously is a poignant portrayal of human drama on the eve of the German bombing of Paris and the German occupation. Nemirovsky planned three more chapters but she was unfortunately captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz where she died within 2 months.<\/li>\n
                                    17. Absurdistan<\/i><\/b> by Gary Shteyngart * * * * (August 14, 2006)
                                      Fat rapper Jewish son of the 1238th richest man in Russia gets exiled to his homeland, Absurdistan, where Halliburton has corrupted the politicians into starting a civil war so they can get cost plus contracts with the American department of defense.<\/li>\n
                                    18. Billy Bathgate<\/i><\/b> by E.L. Doctorow * * * * (September 15, 2006)
                                      Brilliantly written book about a 15 year old street urchin who gets sucked into the mob by legendary mobster, Dutch Schultz, and enters a world of depravity and violence.<\/li>\n
                                    19. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man<\/i><\/b> by James Joyce * * * * (October 21, 2006)
                                      A tour de force by the brilliant James Joyce. This book follows the life of Stephen from the Jesuit school, Clonglowes to college where he philosophizes on life with his friends and later finds himself as a writer.<\/li>\n
                                    20. Theft<\/i><\/b> by Peter Carey * * * * (November 12, 2006)
                                      I must say that I was cursing as I muddled through all the haughty art talk in this latest novel from one of the greatest living novelists, the brilliant Peter Carey. Still this novel shocked me at the end after weaving a tale of suspense and constantly returning to the main themes of obsession and deception.<\/li>\n
                                    21. The Voyage of the Beagle<\/i><\/b> by Charles Darwin * * * * (December 16, 2006)
                                      Charles Darwin, the most intelligent, observant, and thoughtful traveler of all time, spent five years aboard the HMS Beagle as the naturalist. This is his beautifully written travel book of his journey.<\/li>\n
                                    22. Uncle Tom’s Cabin<\/i><\/b> by Harriet Beecher Stowe * * * (December 28, 2006)
                                      Though a bit overly sentimental (the character of Tom was completely unbelievable) this book did a great job exposing the evils of slavery and helped bring about its demise in this country and for that alone it is worth reading.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                                      Books I read in 2005:<\/b><\/p>\n

                                        \n
                                      1. Holy War, The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World<\/i><\/b>
                                        by Karen Armstrong * * * + (January 1, 2005)
                                        An excellent look at all 5 crusades from the perspective of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and how those wars have impacted current conflicts between the three religions today.<\/li>\n
                                      2. The Librarian<\/i><\/b> by Larry Beinhart * * * (January 11, 2005)
                                        Innocent librarian is hired by an aging billionaire who is plotting to steal the election for the president who is running for a second term (he bears a striking resemblance to the current scum residing in the White House). The fictional president also uses scare tactics in his bid to win against his opponent, a democrat woman senator from Idaho. The librarian then attempts to foil the vicious plot.<\/li>\n
                                      3. Eats, Shoots & Leaves<\/i><\/b> by Lynne Truss * * * (February 18, 2005)
                                        Instead of flying into a murderous rage upon encountering grammatical errors, as I do; Lynne Truss, a woman after my own heart, rails against misuses of English punctuation. You go girl!<\/li>\n
                                      4. So You Want to Start a Nursery <\/i><\/b>by Tony Avent * * * (February 25, 2005)
                                        A well written, well researched, and interesting book on everything you need to know to start a nursery.<\/li>\n
                                      5. Wildly Successful Plants Northern California<\/i><\/b> by Pam Peirce * * 1\/2 (March 25, 2005)
                                        The history, care, control, propagation, and name etymology of 50 plants that grow well in local gardens, beautifully photographed by the author’s husband. Unfortunately almost all of the featured plants are vicious invasives that would be better eliminated from gardens.<\/li>\n
                                      6. Beowulf<\/i><\/b> by Author Unknown * * * (March 27, 2005)
                                        Heroic-elegiac poem of humankind’s struggle with the monstrous.<\/li>\n
                                      7. Ocean Birds of the Nearshore Pacific<\/i><\/b> by Rich Stallcup * * * (March 31, 2005)
                                        Though by no means a comprehensive guide to pelagic birding, star birder, Rich Stallcup, gives excellent insight into subtle field marks and behaviors of seabirds to help us identify and appreciate them.<\/li>\n
                                      8. A Tale of Love and Darkness <\/i><\/b>by Amos Oz * * * (May 10, 2005)
                                        Memoir, family saga, self-portrait, and tale of the birth of Israel as lived through by the author, Israel’s current most popular.<\/li>\n
                                      9. Finding Birds in Southeast Arizona<\/i><\/b> by Tucson Audubon Society * * * * * (May 22, 2005)
                                        Excellent guide to finding all the birds in Southeast Arizona with an excellent bar graph of the birds and index of all locations.<\/li>\n
                                      10. California Master Gardener Handbook<\/i><\/b> edited by Dennis Pittenger * * * * * (May 25, 2005)
                                        Everything you need to know to become an expert gardener in California.<\/li>\n
                                      11. Stone Desert A Naturalist’s Exploration of Canyonlands National Park<\/i><\/b>
                                        by Craig Leland Childs * * * (June 8, 2005)
                                        Beautifully written short history of the geology, indigenous plants, animal life, and native peoples who once thrived in the area. Maddening though in its intentional omission of reference to the specific locations of his travels in the park.<\/li>\n
                                      12. The Return of the Native<\/i><\/b> by Thomas Hardy * * * (July 7, 2005)
                                        The book elegantly brought out the beauty and lure of Egdon Heath. However, unlike a truly great novel, I will not miss any of the sorry characters in this book.<\/li>\n
                                      13. Lundy, Gem of the Eastern Sierra<\/i><\/b> by Jim Hanna * * 1\/2 (July 10, 2005)
                                        This little booklet was written by the great-grandson of John Muir. It is poorly printed with many errors but is a nice little guide to the area history and hikes.<\/li>\n
                                      14. Maximum City<\/i><\/b> by Suketu Mehta * (July 17, 2005)
                                        Very depressing book about the overwhelming problems of Bombay.<\/li>\n
                                      15. Elmer Gantry<\/i><\/b> by Sinclair Lewis * * * 1\/2 (July 24, 2005)
                                        In this portrait of a 1920s gospel shark Lewis thoroughly exposes the hypocrisy of evangelists.<\/li>\n
                                      16. Lord of the Flies<\/i><\/b> by William Golding * * * (July 25, 2005)
                                        Adventure story of boys on a desert island whose theme is that the defects of society trace back to defects in human nature and not the political system.<\/li>\n
                                      17. What’s the Matter with Kansas<\/i><\/b> by Thomas Frank * * * (July 27, 2005)
                                        Using his home state of Kansas as an example Frank explains why many Americans vote for the Republican party against their own interests.<\/li>\n
                                      18. The King of California<\/i><\/b> by Mark Araz & Rick Wartzman * * * 1\/2 (July 30, 2005)
                                        Fascinating account of the modern day robber baron Boswell family, farmers from Georgia who came to California, drained a giant lake in the San Joaquin Valley and became the largest most powerful farmers in the state.<\/li>\n
                                      19. The Mosquito Coast<\/i><\/b> by Paul Theroux * * (August 24, 2005)
                                        At first I was seduced by the main character’s iconoclasm and disappointment with this imperfect world. But later the book became a burden as Father’s iconoclasm gave way to paranoid delusions, idiotic ideas and even murder. I was very troubled by the way the book and the characters glossed over Father’s murdering some Indians.<\/li>\n
                                      20. Martin Chuzzlewit<\/i><\/b> by Charles Dickens * * * * (October 21, 2005)
                                        Dickens’s sixth novel deals with the greed of Old Martin’s family, particularly the arch-hypocrite, Pecksniff, who is hoping to inherit his wealth. There is a very unflattering description of America in the chapter where young Martin visits the new colony. As with all Dickens novels there are unforgettable characters including the sodden old nurse, Mrs. Gamp.<\/li>\n
                                      21. On Beauty<\/i><\/b> by Zadie Smith * (November 10, 2005)
                                        Don’t bother. Many plot lines are stolen whole cloth from Howards End but there is no theme to speak of. It claims to be about the meaning of beauty but I am still scratching my head.<\/li>\n
                                      22. The Hungry Tide<\/i><\/b> by Amitav Ghosh * * * (November 29, 2005)
                                        An interesting tale of love, romance, ecology set in the Sundarbans of east India. His writing is a little stiff but the story of the fate of a skilled cetologist studying a rare river dolphin, the dolphins, and the people living in this volatile tide country was very compelling.<\/li>\n
                                      23. To See Every Bird on Earth<\/i><\/b> by Dan Koeppel * * (December 2, 2005)
                                        This book disturbed me and left more questions than answers about why people are obsessed with counting how many birds they have seen but care nothing about bird conservation and really don’t even care about birds.<\/li>\n
                                      24. The March<\/i><\/b> by E.L Doctorow * * * (December 19, 2005)
                                        Riveting fictionalized account of Sherman’s march to the sea at the end of the US Civil war.<\/li>\n
                                      25. The Life & Death of Mary Wollstonecraft<\/i><\/b> by Claire Tomalin * * *
                                        (December 24, 2005)
                                        The astonishing life of Mary Wollstonecraft, radical feminist, who published a vindication of the Rights of Women in 1798 is vividly portrayed in this biography.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                                        Books I read in 2004:<\/b><\/p>\n

                                          \n
                                        1. My Life as a Fake<\/i><\/b> by Peter Carey * * * * * (January 2, 2004)
                                          Best book of the year! Intriguing story of an author who submits fake poetry for publication which leads to the editor\u2019s trial where the fictional poet appears and spends the rest of the novel torturing the fake poet.<\/li>\n
                                        2. A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/i><\/b> by Bill Bryson * * * + (January 6, 2004)
                                          What more can you say.<\/li>\n
                                        3. Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/i><\/b> by Jonathan Swift * * * * (January 8, 2004)
                                          Political satire on 17th Century England and spell binding adventure story.<\/li>\n
                                        4. 1984<\/i><\/b> by George Orwell * * * * * (January 11, 2004)
                                          Could be renamed 2004 and has very interesting parallels to the Bush administration but was actually written in 1939 about the evils of totalitarianism.<\/li>\n
                                        5. The Fortress of Solitude<\/i><\/b> by Jonathan Lethem * * (January 16, 2004)
                                          White boy grows up in black Brooklyn neighborhood in the 70s. Both do drugs, white boy succeeds, black boy goes to jail.<\/li>\n
                                        6. Samuel Pepys<\/i><\/b> by Claire Tomalin * * * + (January 20, 2004)
                                          An excellent biography of Pepys, a naval clerk during 17th century England, president of The Royal Society, contemporary of Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, book collector and memoirist.<\/li>\n
                                        7. Pompeii<\/i><\/b> by Robert Harris * * * (January 24, 2004)
                                          Fictional account of the explosion of Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii in 79 AD.<\/li>\n
                                        8. Reefer Madness<\/i><\/b> by Eric Schlosser * * * (January 30, 2004)
                                          Three interesting essays on the black market in the US: marijuana, undocumented workers, and pornography.<\/li>\n
                                        9. Middlesex<\/i><\/b> by Jeffrey Eugenides * * * (February 6, 2004)
                                          Traces three generations of an inbreeding Greek family that emigrates to Detroit. The narrator is a hermaphrodite. A coming of age story that explores the meaning of sexuality.<\/li>\n
                                        10. True History of the Kelly Gang<\/i><\/b> by Peter Carey * * * * (February 15, 2004)
                                          A story of the legendary outlaw, Ned Kelly, murderer and horse thief to some, but hero to the lowly classes of Australia, written in his own semi-literate hand, but brought to life by the dazzling prose of the author.<\/li>\n
                                        11. Absolute Friends<\/i><\/b> by John Le Carr\u00e9 * * * + (February 25, 2004)
                                          Epic tale of two 1960s West Berlin lefties who become Cold War double agents for Europe, only to end up as victims of the fake U.S. war against terrorism.<\/li>\n
                                        12. SIBLEY’S Birding Basics<\/i><\/b> by David Allen Sibley * * * (March 1, 2004)
                                          Using many illustrations David Sibley reviews all the basic concepts of bird identification.<\/li>\n
                                        13. The Great Unraveling<\/i><\/b> by Paul Krugman * * * + (March 10, 2004)
                                          NY Times Columnist and Award winning economist, Paul Krugman, chronicles the failed and irresponsible and deceptive policies of the Bush Administration.<\/li>\n
                                        14. Empress Orchid<\/i><\/b> by Anchee Min * * * * (March 19, 2004)
                                          The first volume in a trilogy about the life of Empress Orchid. A vivid portrait of a compelling woman who survived in the male dominated world of China’s Ch’ing dynasty.<\/li>\n
                                        15. American Dynasty – Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush<\/i><\/b> by Kevin Phillips * * * * (March 28, 2004)
                                          Mordant political and economic commentator, Kevin Phillips, reveals how four generations of Bushes fomented war and deceived the public through arms scandals and impeachable offenses in furtherance of their dynasty and megalopolies in the fields of intelligence, energy and national security.<\/li>\n
                                        16. The Way of All Flesh<\/i><\/b> by Samuel Butler * * * (April 12, 2004)
                                          A thinly veiled fictionalized account of the life of Butler himself. It wages war on all extremes, shams, and pretenses, is full of bitter irony, and gives a satiric picture of home life in mid-Victorian England.<\/li>\n
                                        17. The Big Year<\/i><\/b> by Mark Obmascik * (April 16, 2004)
                                          Don’t bother. Utterly ridiculous, but true story of three fanatics, two of whom abandon their wives and one of whom depletes six credit card accounts, who set out in 1998 to see more species of birds than anyone else in one year. Each one works for a polluting industry and while obsessed with seeing the birds, shows not one iota of concern for conserving bird habitat.<\/li>\n
                                        18. Bushwomen<\/i><\/b> by Laura Flanders * * * (April 21, 2004)
                                          Brilliant Liberal Radio Host, Laura Flanders, exposes how Bush conceals his ultra right wing policies under the skirts of some well placed women in his white house. While the Bush White House pretends that these women, Condaleeza Rice, Karen Hughes, Ann Veneman, Elaine Chao, Christy Todd Whitman, and Gale Norton, represent the “compassionate” side of his conservatism, Flanders outlines how truly ultra right wing these “women” are too.<\/li>\n
                                        19. Mutant Message Down Under<\/i><\/b> by Marlo Morgan * * * (April 26, 2004)
                                          American woman accompanies Australian Aboriginal group called the Real People on a barefoot 1400 mile trek through the bush with no provisions.\u00a0 She learns a spiritual lesson to become one with nature.<\/li>\n
                                        20. Waiting<\/i><\/b> by Ha Jin * * * (May 6, 2004)
                                          A Chinese Army doctor returns to his backward village every year to end an arranged, loveless marriage to his peasant wife. She refuses for 18 years, the required separation before the government will allow a divorce, causing his modern, educated nurse girlfriend in the city to wait.<\/li>\n
                                        21. Illywhacker<\/i><\/b> by Peter Carey * * * (June 7, 2004)
                                          Novel about a 139 year old Australian charlatan and his wacky extended family.<\/li>\n
                                        22. The Adventures of Augie March<\/i><\/b> by Saul Bellow * * * + (July 8, 2004)
                                          The life story of Augie a poor boy who grew up in depression era Chicago and spent his life wandering from one outlandish occupation to another. Bellow unfolds his hero’s tale with commanding prose and astonishing insight.<\/li>\n
                                        23. Consilience<\/i><\/b> by Edward O. Wilson * * * * + (July 22, 2004)
                                          Brilliant book by arguably our greatest contemporary scientist that lays out a plan for joining the sciences and the humanities with one unifying theory.\u00a0 \u00a0Sadly E.O. Wilson has now passed.<\/li>\n
                                        24. City of God<\/i><\/b> by E.L. Doctorow * * * (July 25, 2004)
                                          Multiple narrators shift between modern New York City, the holocaust and World War I to weave a story of spiritual reflection centered around the idea of modern God.<\/li>\n
                                        25. My First Summer in the Sierra<\/i><\/b> by John Muir * * * * (July 27, 2004)
                                          Enchanting chronicle of John Muir’s experience herding a flock of sheep from the San Joaquin Valley to Yosemite’s majestic High Sierra.<\/li>\n
                                        26. Drop City<\/i><\/b> by T. C. Boyle * * * (July 29, 2004)
                                          1970’s hippie commune in California moves to Alaska where some of the members befriend some locals who are communing with the harsh environment and living off the land of wild Alaska.<\/li>\n
                                        27. Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America<\/i><\/b> by Robert Reich * * * * (July 31, 2004)
                                          Former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration offers a bold plan for taking back America from the Radcons (Radical Conservatives) and their corporate greed, preemptive war, and weakened civil liberty policies through the politics of reason.<\/li>\n
                                        28. Dark Star Safari<\/i><\/b> by Paul Theroux * * * * (August 16, 2004)
                                          Fascinating journey by taxi, overcrowded rickety bus, canoe, train, and ferry from Cairo to Cape Town. Part history, part culture, part politics and insightful look into the people of Africa.<\/li>\n
                                        29. Heart of Darkness<\/i><\/b> by Joseph Conrad * * * + (August 29, 2004)
                                          Horrible tale of a madman in the Congo during Colonial expansion.<\/li>\n
                                        30. Youth<\/i><\/b> by Joseph Conrad * * * * (August 29, 2004)
                                          Beautiful prose! Story of a youth at sea.<\/li>\n
                                        31. Caramelo<\/i><\/b> by Sandra Cisneros * * * (September 13, 2004)
                                          Part Mexican history and part sprawling family history of the Reyes family as they criss cross the US-Mexican border and culture.<\/li>\n
                                        32. Under the Banner of Heaven<\/i><\/b> by Jon Krakauer * * * + (September 20, 2004)
                                          A shocking look at the history of Mormonism, its fraudulent foundations, and some of its most extreme and even criminal adherents. After reading this book I fear for my well being to ever visit Utah again!<\/li>\n
                                        33. Introduction to California Plant Life<\/i><\/b> by Robert Ornduff, Phyllis M. Faber, and Todd Keeler * * * *
                                          (October 7, 2004)
                                          A California Natural History Guide that introduces basic concepts of plant taxonomy, ecology, California soil, climate, and geography as well as evolution of the California landscape and changes in its flora.<\/li>\n
                                        34. Living on the Wind Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds <\/i><\/b>by Scott Weidensau * * * *
                                          (October 24, 2004)
                                          Beautifully written book about bird migration that weaves the latest science with the author’s personal experiences and his own contributions to understanding bird migration and saving it from human depredations.<\/li>\n
                                        35. The Known World<\/i><\/b> by Edward P. Jones * * (November 2, 2004)
                                          Novel about blacks in antebellum Virginia who owned slaves.<\/li>\n
                                        36. The Scarlet Letter<\/i><\/b> by Nathaniel Hawthorne * * * * (November 13, 2004)
                                          A woman in colonial puritan Boston was convicted of adultery and condemned to wear a bold “A” on her clothes as her punishment. She refused to disclose her co-adulterer. He went on to become an eminently distinguished minister until he could no longer bear the burden and died. She and her daughter went on to become prodigiously wealthy. The moral of the story is ambiguous and the “A” may symbolize this ambiguity. The only clue is the summary near the end of the book, “Be true. Be true. Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred.”<\/li>\n
                                        37. Snow<\/i><\/b> by Orhan Pamuk * * * (December 3, 2004)
                                          Poet, Ka, returns to his native Turkey to investigate suicides by girls banned from wearing scarves. While there, poetry bursts forth from our hero as he falls in love and develops a deep understanding of religious fervosity. The book explores faith, lack of it, love, and human contradictions.<\/li>\n
                                        38. The Plot Against America<\/i><\/b> by Philip Roth * * * * (December 15, 2004)
                                          In this excellent anti-roman a clef, aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer, Charles Lindbergh, defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and leads American Jews and America into a living hell.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                                          BOOKS I READ IN 2026 Cosmos by Carl Sagan * * * * (Audiobook)April 23, 2026I read this book about 25 years ago and loved it.\u00a0 It just came out as an audiobook.\u00a0 So, I decided to listen to it.\u00a0 Carl Sagan is dead.\u00a0 So the introduction is by his wife and it is Narrated by:\u00a0LeVar Burton,\u00a0Seth MacFarlane, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.\u00a0 He covers a lot of territory, from the birth of the earth, to how humans formed, the formation of our brains, whether there is other life out there, what encounters with those other life forms might be like, and the urgency in preventing us from destroying ourselves.\u00a0 I did not remember the end where he talks about the idiocy of nuclear weapons build up and other human failings.\u00a0 Some of the science is old and outdated but most of the book is a pertinent today as it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":330,"href":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1608,"href":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/1608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellebrodie.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}