The Big Rich
(Bryan Burrough, 19:52)
Pretty enjoyable tales of Texans who got super rich, before Saudi oil made the whole enterprise of drilling in the US unprofitable. The Hunt family is surely the most "colorful": the founding father (HL Hunt) was a bigamist, who kept his second wife in complete ignorance of the fact that he hadn't legally married her before siring 4 children with her. He spawned a third family with his mistress, whom he legally married after the death of his first wife. Prone to paranoia, he funded a lot of right wing media, and one of his 14 children, and another of his grandkis, were clinically schizophrenic. The winding up, with wild cat strikes of great good fortune, are not quite as fascinating to me as the bumpy road down hill. In particular, the 2 Hunt brothers (Nelson Bunker & William Herbert) managed to lose an estimated $5 billion in their crazed project to corner the silver market.

Dispatches
(Michael Herr, 8:33)
I've been looking at this book since the US entered the Iraq war, as it is widely viewed as the best writing about Vietnam. Until it became audible, however, I had never mobilized the vim to complete it. Herr's writing is quite vivid, direct, and gives a sense of how sad and scary Vietnam felt. In the final chapter, he describes his preference for sitting by an open helicopter door, with the claim "I didn't go through all of that not to see." (p256)

Just In Tokyo
(Justin Hall, 68pp)
I re-read this while we stayed in Shibuya, and it was a pleasurable and pithy discussion of the thrills of living like a pachinko ball. Although the currency conversion is dated by its 2002 publication (130 yen to the dollar then, now more like 108), most of the observations are still relevant. Here's a fine representative quote: "If you order and consume natto in a Japanese restaurant, you will never have to prove your courage in any other way." (p49)

Assistive Media readings of magazine articles
(12 hours, miscellaneous authors)
I don't quite understand the model here, but amateurs read articles (from the New Yorker, Atlantic, Scientific American, and elsewhere). There's not a very deep pool, only about 100 articles total, and most of these are from the late 1990s. I selected about 20, and enjoyed the way the narrators read them. My favorite was revisiting the piece by Jay McInerney from the New Yorker about Fat Possum records, "White Man at the Door."

Japan (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
(416 pp)
I read only the parts about Tokyo, and skimmed the introductory 50 pp about the background and history of Japan. This was useful as a guide to neighborhoods, in the way that a helicopter flyover would be. Not a guide for nitty gritty, but useful for seeing the contours of the greatest hits.

How Fiction Works
(James Wood, 5:50)
Tightly written, perhaps in imitation of the Tractatus, since the points it presents are given in numbered paragraphs. Worth attending to, as this famous critic works to distill what he appreciates about reading. His love of Bellow is easy to share, his annoyance with Nabokov mirrors some of my own irritation with the limpid eyeball, and his general assessments repay the attention demanded of the reader.

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
(William D. Cohan, 25:16)
This massive book documents the death spiral of Bear Stearns, a firm run by a CEO, Jimmy Cayne, who chose to devote all but 3 hours a day to playing bridge. As Bear Stearns went down, Cayne was unreachable because he was in the finals of a bridge tournament. The narrative definitely shows what leveraged companies can go through as confidence in their positions evaporates. The biography of a firm, with detailed accounts of power struggles and posturing, is the testicular version of a People magazine, and I can consume these stories forever. I found this book more interesting than Cohan's recent account of Lazard brothers, and even though this book is quite fat, I wished there'd been a sustained discussion of at least 20 pages describing what the world of power bridge is really like. I don't know how Cohan manages to write so much so well; a great deal of this huge book is about events that started just 16 months ago.

The Pullman porters and West Oakland
(Thomas and Wilma Tramble, 127pp)
There's some detail about the early stages of Pullman porters (started in 1868), and the insidious fact that Pullman hired blacks because their proximity to slavery made them reliably subordinate and cheap labor to boot. Another focal point is CL Dellums, one of the leaders of the union. Most of the photos are from a small group of private family photos, some of those who worked as Pullman porters. Many of the photos aren't very vivid at suggesting the lifestyle and status of these workers. Shots of people sitting near their cars are captioned with labels such as "two young ladies sit on a new Cadillac car, the ultimate announcemnet of the owner's wealth." (p44) There's not much in the way of sociology, but there are hints of history. I'd rate this as the weakest Arcadia publication of the 3 or 4 that I've read, although it's still worth a scan.

San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury
(Katherine Powell Cohen, 127pp)
Another Arcadia press title (and there are thousands) focuses on this lively (and frequently degenerate) neighborhood. The most surprising photos are the Haight in the 1970s, when it was extremely sketchy.

The white tiger
(Aravind Adiga, 8:07)
This is the first Booker Prize Winner that I've been able to finish in several years (and surely the Life of Pi was the nadir for that award). A very stimulating novel of a low-caste man who strives, and ultimately succeeds, in becoming the much vanted "entrepreneur." Structured as a sequence of letters to a visiting Chinese emissary, the novel at times could have used a slightly lighter touch on political matters, but the voice of the main character deserved to be heard.

Cuisines of the world : Japan
(Kiyoshi Hayamizu, Yuhei Hoshino; 144pp)
Lovely guide to understanding what goes into Japanese food. As a bonus, I left this around the house, and my wife picked three dishes labeled "easy" and made a great dinner Saturday night from the recipes.

The art of tile : designing with time-honored and new tiles
(Jennifer Renzi, 318pp)
Beautiful, interesting, thought-provoking, and probably expensive to pursue, but based on some of the beautiful things done with tiling here, well worth the effort. The one thing I wished had been mentioned is the generalized topic of "tiling" which I trace to Roger Penrose (by way of being discussed by Martin Gardner).

Redwood City
(Reg McGovern et al; 127 pp)
I'm a sucker for local history, and even though my connections to RWC are just a notch above tenuous, I enjoyed looking through this collection of photos. The publisher, Arcadia, apparently specializes in local history, which involves only a little more than finding a source of old photos, and people from the town who must be eager to caption the photos.

Architecture now! / Architektur heute / L'architecture d'aujourd'hui
(Philip Jodidio, 576pp)
This is a score from Amazon's reader suggestions, since I'd checked out this massive Phaidon resource in Feb, it was too repetitive in showcasing sterile geometric structures. An Amazon reviewer mentioned this book as a compressed set of highlights. It delivers some interesting buildings, as well as some grim "austere" turds. One funny editorial comment was about a very dark, prison like school that seemed to scant "perhaps overmuch" the light and joy that is asssociated with school environments.

The Post-American World
(Fareed Zakaria, 8:29)
An interesting and well researched book on how America's going to have to share the planet with China, India, and the Rest. The historical discussion of what kept China backwards is noteworthy. One significant factor that I don't recall reading about before: The plains of Asia enabled one power base to rule from end to end, whereas Europe was broken up into 100s of principalities that encouraged competition and prevented policies from halting progress.) Barack Obama was seen reading this book during his campaign, and it's thesis is well worth thinking about.

Down and Out in Paris and London
(George Orwell, 6:28)
When I read this as a high school freshman (loaned by my favorite English teacher), I found it rather dreary, and never really could figure out what a plongeur did for his grubby wages. Rereading this decades later, it was fresh and interesting, an experiment in poverty that is all the more relevant as we approach our own little econ-apocalypse. Some of the economic thinking seems half-boiled (is it really true that restaurants cause needless drudgery and should not be encouraged?), but the vision of encouraging tramps to stick around and do a little farming sounded positively 21st cent.

Drunkard's Walk
(Leonard Mlodinow, 9:21)
Excellent review of probability and statistics, with exciting discussions of topics as thrilling as chi square and the law of large numbers. I don't particularly share Mlodinow's sense of humor, so when he wasn't writing about math, it wasn't that fun. He also betrays a southern Californian fixation on movie box office yields. While surely that process has a large random component, it wasn't the most interesting domain for me in which to ground his discussions. He frequently referred to movies and stars about whom I knew nothing. Still, as a popular treatment of randomness, this is quite good.

More games to play with toddlers
(Jackie Silberg, 271pp)
Pretty lame, not very useful. Most of the games are very uninspired.

George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals
(Nelson Aldrich, 432pp)
This echoes the format that Plimpton established for Edie, the snippets that form a gestalt. There's a claim in the book that Plimpton drew this style from an earlier source, but I think of him as the master, and many comments do say that he was a master of transforming interview transcripts into diamantine pith. A lot of the discussions are about class, the Porcellian Club, and stuff that only WASPs get supremely off on. The best take away quote, from Chris Cerf, is attributed to Mel Brooks: "You like the nose, you buy the face." (p292) The most vivid source was Norman Mailer, who admitted how much he envied Plimpton-- he said George got more than he deserved, and he watched this from a vantage of only getting whatever he had earned, which never seems enough. At the end of their lives, Mailer and Plimpton, along with a woman whose name I don't recall, wandered the globe playing F. Scott, Hemingway, and Zelda.

The Ascent of Money
(Niall Ferguson, 11:30)
This book was so compellingly attractive that I re-upped my account at Audible, to be able to listen to Ferguson's timely and incisive account of how finance has been so central to the rise of civilization.

The Design of Future Things
(Don Norman, skimmed the 240pp)
Took a poke at this, and wasn't interested in reading much about driving cars, which isn't the world's most pressing question. The contrast imported from horseback riding, between loose rein (letting the horse make decisions) and tight rein control (p70) was nice, and worth thinking about in interaction design. Norman's crabbed discussion of the Newton's handwriting algorithm emphasizes the way that people blamed the Newton for it's "freckled egg" guesses, whereas when Palm's graffito came out, the computer taught people how to talk to it.

Persepolis 2
(Marjane Satrapi, returned to library after 100pp)
Interesting, but not a genre-bender like Maus. It's a picture into the post-Iranian life of the author while she was at a Swiss boarding school. Perhaps the 1st volume is more eye-opening about Iran.

God Optional Judaism
(Judith Seid, skimmed the 226pp)
Talk about de-racinated. This is a very slim thread to pin participation with Jewish traditions. I didn't encounter any reflective treatment of Reconstructionist approaches to Jewish tradition, nor any deep thought about how Judaism actually is quite accepting of its atheist practitioners.

Jewish Stories from the Old World to the New
(Narrated by Leonard Nimoy, 18 hours)
Originally an NPR series, this is a real pleasure. I listened to this on cassettes over 10 years ago, and although I recalled some of the stories, it was a delight to hear them almost for the first time.

Jane Austen
(Carol Shields, 5;07)
Both interesting and sad: Austen's life was quite cramped, compromised by the impossibility of living independently when she (and her older sister Cassandra) were both spinsters, doomed to live under her parents' thumb. Truly, all that is divine about Austen was captured in her novels. The letters, which Shields quotes extensively, are moe bitter and cutting.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
(Susan Schroeder, 35 hours)
Definitely could have been compressed by 30%, but I love biographies, and didn't mind at all that this was the oversized Jumbo popcorn bucket. I learned a lot about Omaha, about Buffett's eating habits (he has a rule that he won't eat anything that a 3 year old doesn't like), and much more about his single minded intention to accumulate millions, then billions, of dollars. Though he was first an undergrad at Wharton, then got his master's from Benjamin Graham at Columbia, he claimed that his most valuable degree was the course he took from the Dale Carnegie corporation. He is a very earnest and single minded miser, who has done all he can to cumulate an enormous pile of money. His motive is apparently mostly competitive, focused on the numerical metric, although he clearly enjoys the business of analyzing and mastering industries. Side characters of note include Charlie Munger, and Mrs. RoseBlumkin. I also discovered that an early Buffett-follower was Bill Ruane, whose son Billy is a famous impresario in Cambridge MA. One of the more intriguing things about Buffett was his ability to participate in a menage a trois for years, until his first wife died and he married his mistress. This book reveals that it was actually his wife who architected this arrangement, since she wanted to move out of his world to fulfill her own needs. Buffett had always assumed that his wife needed to give, and he reciprocated by always being able to take.

Listening to parents: Listening partnerships for parents
(Patty Wipfler, 47pp)
Useful techniques for focusing attention. It appears to be very influenced by co-counseling, although it never specifically mentions the debt.

The rough guide to travel with babies and young children
(Fawzia Rasheed de Francisco, 224pp)
I found the first half of the book very basic, and so I stopped reading. It's adventurous to travel with young kids, and if you're up for the adventure, perhaps this bulky pamphlet covers all that can be generally conveyed in a book. After all, attitude is the crucial factor, and after you've packed the snacks and toys recommended here, you still have to keep a cheery face on all the curveballs that are glossed over in this summary. I contrast this generic book with the recent NYT article on family traveling to Venice. Only the latter makes me eager to tackle the challenges, rather than anxious about all that's been left unsaid.

It Came From Berkeley
(David Weinstein, 224 pp)
This book handily covers a lot of the history of Berkeley. There's plenty of surprises (e.g., the Jacuzzi family invented the hot tub here in 1915, & the first street curb cut to facilitate wheel chair accessibility was put in on Center & Shattuck in 1972). It's certainly a surprise to read that Berkeley was a heavily Republican town until after Eisenhower left office. Each chapter covers a slice of history. The only significant flaw with this book was the decision to title the chapters in a formula that generated some real klunkers: "How Berkeley Women Grew Uppity" is probably the worst chosen (about anti-pornography demonstrations in the 80s), but "How Berkeley Got Good Taste" is more typical and in its own way, annoying. I've also read Wollenberg's recent history of Berkeley, and I would rate this book as much pithier and generally more entertaining.

How to see yourself as you really are
(Dalai Lama, 7 CDs, only listened to the first CDs)
I'm not very receptive to this, although it's amusing to hear someone counsel that since, in the vast number of rebirths, every being has at one time been a parent of mine, I should approach all with compassion and acceptance. I hesitate to point out that I don't even have an easy time being accepting of my actual (non-metempsychotic) parents.

Lush Life
(Richard Price, 13 hours)
Dense, very interesting novel about a senseless murder on the lower east side in the early 21st century. Price packs so much street slang & police argot into each conversation that I had to slow the pace down to be able to process more of what was being encoded. Highly recommended.

See How It's Made
(DK Publishing, 96pp)
This was a fascinating little treatment of what goes into the manufacturing of items such as LEGOs, paint, glass, cheese. Each chapter is about 4 pages, treating a single production process. The rope chapter was particularly fascinating, as I've never been clear on how little strands can align to turn into an amazing length. The book didn't nail every particular, but talking about it with a knitter added the last little aspect (that wool, e.g., is directionally faceted, so that it grips when pulled in one direction, enabling different strands to link together across the entire twine).

Lincoln through the lens : how photography revealed and shaped an extraordinary life
(Martin W. Sandler, 96pp)
Fun to look at, and although the book's targeted for grammar school kids, I found the text full of interesting and nuanced information.

The Phaidon atlas of contemporary world architecture
(editors, 824pp)
Impressive, huge (16+ lbs), and of interest to page through. It's hard to make it through the book. Too many of the buildings look like streamlined boxes, and it would be better to see the funky and interesting curated out of this enormous collection. One chastening fact is how many of these houses were built for less than the cost of a middling home in Berkeley.

Merlin Mann's podcasts
(about 5:30)
Triggered by Merlin's decision to resurrect his podcast, I re-listened to all the old ones. The most piercing one remains The Perfect Apostrophe, but the whole ball of wax is worth the attention it took. (True confession: As with almost all of my listening, I multi-tasked shopping, child-caring, driving and eating).

The World Without Us
(Alan Weisman, 12 hours)
A weird book, whose tone struggles to keep from cheering the extinction of the human race. Thought provoking discussions of the very small number of acres in Poland that remain virgin forest, the environmental resurgence in the DMZ between the 2 Koreas, and the strange ecology around Chernobyl (which means "wormwood" in Russian, by the way). Very stimulating, but also, quite disturbing. The one analytical flaw in the book is the assumption that the Earth's climate is in some sort of equilibrium which it would return to if only humans vanished. I recall listening to an Econtalk podcast which pointed out that there's no evidence the ecosystem is, or ever has been, in equilibrium. But it's also clear that entropy will ravage major technological marvels (oil refineries, nuclear waste storage sites, the Panama canal) that Weisman describes with great vividness.

Peace First: A New Model to End War
(Uri Savir, 7 hours)
I found this very exciting to listen to, even though the prospects for peace right now are quite grim. At times, I felt provoked, since he lumps Arafat in with others he calls peacemakers, but that is a measure of his larger vision. His basic argument is quite attractive: that politicians should not be the owners of bringing about peace, that all of society should invest in and dream of and aspire for peace.

The Fire Next Time
(James Baldwin, 2:40)
Published in 1963, this is Baldwin's eloquent analysis of his life, with attention to the feelings stoked by being Black. His vivid encounter with Elijah Muhammad leads him to comment that the Black Muslim message is one that everyone assented to, long before Elijah Muhammad formulated it. There was anger in his voice as he described RFK's statement that America could have a Black president in 40 years. Now, 46 years later, that anger is surely still alive, but Obama's speech on race was the next generation's contribution to this discussion.

Holy Days: The World Of The Hasidic Family
(Lis Harris, 300pp)
Dedicated to William Shawn, this book appeared first as essay(s?) in the pages of the New Yorker. The effort of the author to "get inside" the Lubavitcher world is necessarily limited by the fact that she's someone who doesn't understand Hebrew or Yiddish (and she's also limited in her tour by being a woman). She devotes herself to knowing one specific family, a middle-aged couple who are both in their second marriages, the husband widowed, the wife divorced and a baalat teshuvah. I found the chapter on Lubavitch fights with the Satmar most saddening, and it surely demonstrates Freud's concept of the narcissism of small differences. The Satmars come off as thugs. This book was researched before the fall of the Soviet Union; it describes life at "770" when the Rebbe was alive, when the Lubavitch had stickers proclaiming "We want Moschiach Now."

Little Blues Book
(Brian Robertson, with R. Crumb's images, 160pp)
I've been scanning this little volume before bed; at first, it competed with Infinite Jest, but pretty soon, I just gave up on the 1,000 page behemoth, and cozied up with this little snack. The book just threads together snippets of blues songs, and interweaves images from Crumb. The images aren't that well-reproduced, and the occasion of an image does not guarantee that you'll find a quote by that blues singer within proximity of the illustration. Still, it was fun to page through this, and I hadn't known that certain phrases, such as "Bright lights, big city" came from the blues.

Flat, Hot and Crowded
(Thomas Friedman, skimmed the first 12 hours)
There's almost no arguing with Friedman's platitudes, although the value of hearing him voice the NYT-bourgeouis norm is rather thin. I'm glad he's green, it does show that the idea has become the norm. As he himself observed in the book, if everyone's for it, then it's not really a revolution, since an idea that is so universally applauded cannot be specific enough to demand sacrifice and battle. The book is too long, and I listened to about one minute of each 3 minute segment.

Content
(Cory Doctorow, 6:40)
Cory Doctorow talks the talk (quite entertainingly), and then walks the walk: If you follow the link above, you too can listen to his book, read with a high level of skill by one his fans, and made available through creative commons. His arguments do cut through the legalistic view that "rights" are inviolable, and that property ownership should give creators of ideas/sounds/images unlimited ability to swoop in and defend their copyright. Doctorow uses this argument to strong effect: Though the government outlaws gambling, do we want them to surveill and punish people who bet an ice cream cone between themselves? Similarly, most sharing is on that order, and he demonstrates how useful and positive the effect is of his putting his books for free up on the web. The free downloads show up in search results, get previewed like a scan in the bookstore, and generate lots of speaker invitations as well. I wanted to honor his generosity, and he invites readers who benefit from the free reading to send a physical copy to a teacher on his wish list.

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation
(Sheila Weller, 22 hours)
I'm a big fan of Carole King's despairing Tapestry, and until reading this, I thought she had written Up on the Roof and The Locomotion by herself (she was actually partnered with her husband at the time, who wrote the words to her music). Carly Simon is of some slight interest (who is the guy that's So Vain?), and Joni Mitchell gets a slight lift from Camille Paglia's claim that her song Woodstock is one of the best poems of all time. Some nuggets: Neil Young's Sugar Mountain was written after he was forced to leave a folk club that only accepted teenagers (hence, you can't be 20...) Joni Mitchell later wrote the Circle Game as her rebuttal about the value of moving around on the rack of time. Graham Nash wrote Our House about his time shacking up with Joni Mitchell. James Taylor, alas, floats through this book like an STD epidemic. I couldn't pull myself away from all the gossip, although the writing's mediocre, and I did skim when the women's lives hit the skids in all too repetitive patterns.

Consumer Reports guide to childproofing & safety
(Jamie Schaefer-Wilson, 200pp)
Somewhat useful, although the ultimate tone is pretty strident and fearful. If a product has been responsible for 100 deaths in the past 7 years, it is treated as a real threat, yet the count there is just a whisker over 10 deaths per year.

Blindness
(Jose Saramago, 13 hours, stopped after 7)
Tyler Cowen praises this book, includes it on his Literature and Law syllabus, so I was willing to give this a serious attack. The parabolic tale, of a city where people go blind in a mysteriously contagious form, creates an environment where the sequestered blind people spiral into behaving like pigs. The prose is interesting, and poised, but I couldn't see how it made sense to continue after the women were transformed into chattel for abuse by thugs. How the men who loved these women could cower and accept such abuse exceeded my comprehension.

Octavian Nothing
(MT Anderson, 8 hours, stopped after 2 hours)
This is a somewhat amusing conceit: a rationalistic empiricist in the slavetrading era would devote himself to experimentally evaluating the extent to which a black was human, by contriving to educate said African, while scrupulously keeping records. The form of an 18th century novel supports the author's impulse to lather it on. I'd previously read his young adult novel, FEED, which discussed a planet where everyone was forced to have an implant stuck in their head, continuously exposing their consciousness to a barrage of distractor stimuli. This is another novel of ideas.

Everything he hasn't told you yet : a new way to get men talking about stuff that matters
(Burton Silver & Martin O'Connor, skimmed 372pp)
Interesting to page through, since it appears that many women don't have husbands/partners who do more than grunt in front of a TV. Me, I'm a loquacious multi-tasker happy to talk while surfing on the web. Some of these exercises would not be bad, although others sound like they were lifted from Cosmo.

The sneaky chef : simple strategies for hiding healthy foods in kids' favorite meals
(Missy Chase Lapine, 200pp)
Interesting approaches to pulverizing spinach and blueberries to get kids to eat more healthy foods. Not required for my twins (at this point), but still interesting. Since blueberries are the miracle food, I must be a superhero.

A Flag for Sunrise
(Robert Stone, 17 hours, stopped after 8)
I enjoy Robert Stone's paranoid visions. This novel focuses on South America in the late 1980s, as it echoes our Vietnam hangover. At times, I thought of Graham Greene, and also the Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. Eventually, those similarities undercut my motive to soldier on.

The Wordy Shipmates
(Sarah Vowell, 6 hours)
I'm a fan of Ms. Vowell's form of historiography, which dives into the tale of the Puritans, with special attention to how we've derived our outlook on them largely from their portrayal in the Brady Bunch. Her discussion of Anne Hutchinson, antinomian, will forever transform my experiences of riding the Hutchinson Expressway, as I think back on how this articulate woman so humiliated John Winthrop in her trial that the powers in charge expeditiously established Harvard to counter the recurrence of such threats.

Eastern Standard Time
(edited by Jeff Yang, et al. 337pp)
A miscellany of articles, culled from A. Magazine, which acts as a guide to introduce Asian culture, which includes India. Fun to page through, but not encyclopedic

The best American essays of 2007
(Ed by DFW, from 100 essays shortlisted by Robert Atwan, 307pp)
DFW's intro wraps around the theme of his deciderizing what to cull. He claims that only Atwan is the real curator, and that with one exception, the essays came from Atwan's list (I'd hazard a guess that the additional essay was Cynthia Ozick's, on a strange book by a man named Baeck). The exposure here made me want to read more Jerald Walker, and maybe someday, I'll track down the collages of Mary Delany, praised so highly by Molly Peacock.

2008 Favorites
Top 10 Non-fiction
1- The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century [Jan 1]
The very first book I finished in '08 appears to have been the best. Ross's tour of the 20th century, in terms of avant garde music, fascinated and educated me, and also whet my appetite to seek out oddballs such as Stockhausen & Reich.

2- The Audacity of Hope [Nov 6]
I was a fan of OUR PRESIDENT (still a thrill to write that) since I read his first book back in Aug 2005. This book deploys his even-handed tone to discuss political issues, and it was a great pleasure to read this, and then re-read his first book, right after his election.

3- Our Band Could Be Your Life [Jan 26]
Four of the 10 books on the non-fiction list cover music, and I'm not even a music fanatic. This history of '80s punk covers the bands of my youth's passionate enthusiasm: in particular, Husker Du, Big Black, and the Replacements. I also became aware of the Olympia Subpop scene, which I've been poking at for the rest of the year.

4- This is your brain on music [Apr 14]
The exposition and reporting of neuroscientific findings is first rate. Very interesting, and crystal clear.

5- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain [Apr 1]
Oliver Sacks' story-based thread contrasts with Dan Levitin's analytical treatment.

6- Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency [Nov 30]
This portrait of evil incarnate was something I couldn't face until the election was resolved. The stories are not quite as involving as in Caro's Power Broker, although the consequences of Cheney's rape of the Constitution reach further on the scale of naked power.

7- Team of Rivals [Aug 8]
Given Obama's reliance upon this text as a manual for his cabinet, I might re-visit this. Lincoln's self-confidence, in tapping men who all believed they were superior to him, is awfully impressive.

8- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions [Mar 2]
Dan Ariely is a very gifted experimental psychologist, and even though this book is rather breezy in its presentation, the results of each experiment left a deep impression on my thinking.

9- Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance [May 12]
Physician, wash thy hands!

10- Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story [Oct 6]
Though this isn't very well-written, the language of Ray shines through. I still aspire to say about my life, something like Ray's motto: "When I do a song, I must be able to make it stink in my own way; I want to foul it up so it reeks of my manure and no one else's."

Honorable Mention: The art of simple food [Nov 22]
The first cookbook I've read in its entirety, and Waters' homey approach has kept me in the kitchen trying to emulate her style.

Fiction (It always surprises me that I read more non-fiction than fiction)
1- No one belongs here more than you [Oct 25 and Feb 9]
This book may seem slight, but her twinkling playfulness drew me to read this two separate times this year.

2- Wonder Boys [Aug 20]
I've done a lot of Chabon this year and the exuberance of Wonder Boys was extremely winning. Model City, his early stories, had charms, and the collection, Maps and Legends, revealed a more mature take on his autobiography and golem-ical quandaries.

3- Coetzee's Disgrace [Aug 31]
Including this on my list demonstrates that I only include books with humor in the dominant key. Coetzee might be a man's answer to Susan Sontag, since he perceives almost all interactions in light of their moral significance.

4- Russian Debutante's Handbook [Apr 22]
Shteyngart is so funny, who cares that he has written the same book twice?

5- Tree of Smoke [Mar 25]
Mesmerizing look at the baffle of Vietnam.

6- Pale Fire [Aug 27]
I read this with great delight, and then scanned the prequel Pnin. This experience has won me over to Nabokov, notwithstanding his quirks.

7- Unaccustomed Earth [Aug 6]
Jhumpa Lahiri's gifts at rendering the worlds she knows so intimately continues to fascinate.

8- The Swimming Pool Library [Apr 8]
Hollinghurst's portrayal of the British life before AIDs shimmers in its exactitude, providing a glimpse of a lost world as if through a crystal.

Honorable Mention: Podcasts (NextBook, Philadelphia Free Library, the NY Public library, & EconTalk)
I have discovered several rewarding podcasts which cuts into the time I spend listening to books, and since I've listened to more than 50 hours of author talks/interviews, the number of books I read has dropped to 125 this year. The Free Library of Philadelphia in particular is a geyser of author talks. NextBook focuses on Jewish culture, and EconTalk probes the world from the libertarian perspective emanating from George Mason University.

Progress Report on Infinite Jest: I began reading this after DFW's suicide, and am currently about 200 pp into the mass. Even this far in, I doubt my willingness to do the whole dance. The tone in the footnotes is strikingly different than the text, and although Wallace's obsessions and fears can be quite piercing, his quirks and pedanticism about drugs make the going as tough as my first encounter with this book.

The superorganism : the beauty, elegance, and strangeness of insect societies
(Bert Hölldobler & E.O. Wilson)
Fun to page through, and although I mostly looked at the pictures, I learned more about my housemates, the noble ant.

Enchantress of Florence
(Salman Rushdie, 13 hours, quit after 6)
I kept trying to care about this novel, but my interest could never rally to match the flow of verbiage. I definitively quit once Niccolo Machiavelli was introduced as a teenager, and the character's a mere stereotype. Rushdie claimed that one of his inspirations was to renovate Machiavelli, presumably as a precursor to Salman.

Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter
(Lloyd Kahn, 256pp)
The first few homes are stunningly beautiful works of art, in locations so remote that one can only be reached in the high water season by a 500 foot swing that crosses the river. Many of the mini-essays are written by the people who've built these homes, and the personalities of these builders is as idiosyncratic as the homes themselves.

Lyrics 1964 to 2008
(Paul Simon, 380pp)
I enjoyed reading these lyrics, calling back to mind my experiences of listening to Paul Simon's songs. The book is very spare, with only lyrics, and a couple of brief intro essays by Chuck Close and David Remnick.

Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
(Stuart Kauffman, hundreds of pages, of which I read the first 80 or so)
I'm a fan of Stuart Kauffman, and I find his general argument quite engaging: Namely, that the spontaneous capacity for the natural world to generate new orders of complexity is worth re-denominating with a label that makes it capable of awe, adoration, even worship. The world is amazing, and endlessly creative (in our cosmic neighborhood to be sure). I stopped reading because the treatment is less technical than his earlier magnum opus, The Origins of Order, which I devoted significant time to during the last years of the 20th century. I also passed this library book onto a friend, who has never encountered the arguments SK is making. This looks like a good first intro to Kauffman's ideas on the order inherent in complexity

Indignation
(Philip Roth, 5 hours)
This is another memento mori, as Roth apparently feels the need to practice speaking from the grave. The story line is good, the writing engaged me, and the narrative as a whole is succinct. Occasionally, the story seemed distorted by what must be odd anachronisms/wish fulfillment fantasies (a girl who gives the narrator a blow job on his first date, a mom who doesn't harbor any objection to his dating a gentile). Even though the hero gets fellated, he does manifest a 1950s screwed up attitude toward sex in his interaction with her following his good luck.

Traffic
(Tom Vanderbilt, abridged, 5;37)
When I moved to California, I was haunted by the refrain from Repo Man, "The more you drive, the stupider you get." I spent the first 6 months biking around Stanford, but it wasn't easy to visit places off campus, especially a dojo in Redwood City. This book sums up a lot of interesting tidbits on safety, driving patterns, and parking propensities.

Paradise Lost
(John Milton, first 7 of 12 books)
This reading was performed by academics at Christ College, Cambridge, in honor of Milton's 400th birthday. The audio quality is adequate, and the voicing of the dramatic conflict is very fine. I was a big Milton fan as an undergrad, and dived in deep for a class led by Elizabeth Dipple, where I profoundly enjoyed Paradise Lost, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and Areopagitica, and didn't mind Paradise Regained. Listening now, I still enjoy Milton's grandiloquence, his sensuality, and his vigorous way of posing things. The theological absurdities whelmed me, so that I did not pursue poem to its conclusion. I recommend this particular reading, even though the links make it a bit of work to download the 12 separate files.

Bonk
(Mary Roach, 9:33 - punted after ~3 hrs)
Way too jokey to make this worth the fun facts sprinkled throughout. The author does raise some interesting questions about the methods of sexologists (at least one of whom reported that he studied the reactions of the vagina during penetration by looking at porn films, since the camera men were pro's at placing the angle of the lens). Her sense of humor is discordant with mine, and I found her lurches for humor off-putting.

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
(Barton Gellman, 13:43)
A very disturbing and thorough documentation of our precious Darth Vader. This book focuses entirely on the span of time following from Cheney's selection of himself as Bush's VP. His first act of overt evil came directly from the access he gained to naked disclosures from the dozen potential candidates for the VP spot. When Oklahoma governor Frank Keating made a joke about Cheney, his admission that his kids' college educations were paid for by a billionaire was leaked, significantly damaging his career, and according to Gellman, served a role of broadcasting to the whole of Washington elite that Cheney was not to be crossed. The most harrowing disclosures focus on the way that John Yu, David Addington, and Cheney worked to nearly destroy the constitutional bar to unlawful search and seizure, as well as the promotion of torture. Bush was kept unaware, up until the moment that Ashcroft, and all his senior lieutenants, were about to resign en masse. The only bright side of Cheney's drive is its gluttonous overreach provoked a counter reaction that has somewhat tempered his reach.

The Rabbi's Daughter
(Reva Mann, 326pp)
A rather sad story, and the hole at the heart of this woman's life gapes through most of the account. To paraphrase Lucinda Williams, Reva Mann "never got enough love, in all her life." The author was a very wild teenager, who claims that she first had sex at 16 on the bima of her father's synagogue; she later was kicked out for dating a goy, and moved in with him for a year, until she turned around and jumped into an ultra-orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem. Embracing this observant lifestyle alienated her bourgeouis British parents perhaps as much as had her earlier swinging around. She married a baal teshuva kid from Colorado, and had 3 children with him, before in frustration, she pursued infidelities that led to her divorce. Most of the recollections of wantonness do not appear to be resolved in a light of self-acceptance, so that makes the stories harsh, and self-exploitative in a manner analogous to the earlier actions themselves. At the very close of the book, the epilogue does posit a resolution in her commitment to avoid self-destructive behavior, to care for her 3 children, and to continue in her Judaism, observant but not orthodox.

The art of simple food
(Alice Waters, 360pp)
This is the first cookbook I've ever read cover to cover. There's lots of useful information, and tips on how to cook healthy, relatively uncomplicated vegetables (and lots of meat). The one flawed sentence for me is the very first in the introduction, when Alice Waters writes "My delicious revolution began..." The hubris of claiming ownership of a phenomenon that involved a large cast struck a tin note. At the very end of the book, there's no acknowledgements, which may be due to the contested authorship of Waters' earlier books.

East Bay: Then and Now
(Denis Evanosky and Eric Kos, 144pp)
The interesting photos are the archival ones, and yet, sometimes the modern photos are quite banal (I was sure there'd be a Wendy's, and indeed p77 showcases one). The modern photos are also not painstakingly shot to mirror the perspective of the antique ones. One big surprise: the fountain in Marin circle was knocked out in the '40s by a run away truck, and wasn't re-built until 1994.

Tiffany
(Jacob Baal Teshuva, 336pp)
A beautiful collection of photos of the lamps and stained glass designed, or at least, overseen by Louis Comfort Tiffany. This Taschen press book is a pleasure to page through, and the accompanying text taught me that Tiffany was one of the first to hire women designers, and at one point, his greatest designer was the highest paid woman in America.

American Pastoral
(Philip Roth, stopped after 5 hours)
I'd had a conversation with someone about how great this book was, and it made me hanker to re-visit. I did end up finding the highlights much as I'd recalled, e.g., the impossibility of ever understanding another person gets very passionate treatment here. I think this book came after Roth's divorce from Claire Bloom, and as an extra fillip, he cast her fat daughter (from her marriage to Rod Steiger) in the role of a weatherman-like terrorist. I stopped listening when the glove factory comes into strong focus. Although it's a fetish of Roth's to painstakingly document the work details of the past century -- Everyman dilated on watch making -- one imperfection is that there's not a strong connection between the line of work and the narrative contour.

Dreams from My Father : A Story of Race and Inheritance
(Barack Obama, abridged, 6 CDs)
This was a re-listening, after 3 years passed. At the very end, the editors tacked on Obama's 2004 DNC (Democratic National Convention) speech, and although that had been the original spark that interested me in his point of view, I think he has sharpened and deepened his message since then, so the closing speech was a surprisingly light landing, rather than the resounding high that so many of us feel right now. The book itself stands as a model of even handed self-reflection.

The Audacity of Hope
(Barack Obama, abridged, 6 CDs)
I picked this up at the library on the day of the election, and it was an inspiring and nuanced discussion of the issues that Obama faced in his campaign. I connected to him first when I heard his 2004 DNC speech, and then I read his earlier book in Aug 2005. I don't know why I denied myself the pleasure of hearing his discussion of most of the major political issues. Amazingly, his thinking in this book (from 2006) sounds virtually as mature and sophisticated as he sounds today.

Pnin
(Vladimir Nabokov, 191pp)
This light little confection was a natural follow up to Pale Fire, and I'd rate this as lower in the hilarity scale, and not so artful a jewel in its construction. It is narrated by Nabokov himself, from an oblique and remote perspective. Professor Pnin is an amusing boobus, who as the story progresses, proves to be a man with true sympathies, a love for children, and a socially warm nature. Again, I wish I had read with a dictionary at hand, but even the American Heritage had no definition for a term like cathetus.

Berkeley, a city in history
(Charles Wollenberg, recalled when I was at 135pp)
Enjoyable and worth the scan.

Leonard Bernstein: An American Life
(narrated by Susan Sarandon)
It's a bit trying to listen to a sequence of radio shows, because they repeat information from one episode to another, which undercuts the concision and directness I value. I learned some things about Bernstein's involvement in Tanglewood, from its founding in 1940, but this ended up being lighter fare than I'd hoped. Also, its presentation on the radio prevented it from telling the real dirt, so that LB is glossed as a bisexual (who did marry and have children). The best parts were little quotes from others, and the most memorable was Bobby McFerrin's claim that when he was trying to learn to conduct, Bernstein gave him the assurance that "It's all jazz."

The Bellarosa Connection
(Saul Bellow, 2 cassettes)
An odd effort, from 1989, with some piercing thoughts about the Holocaust, a lot of fat woman jokes, and a variegated set of reflections on memory, as the narrator is ostensibly the wealthy founder of the Mnemosyne Institute.

History of Ancient Israel
(Eric Cline, 7:37)
Not very satisfying, and I quit halfway through. The connections between Biblical texts and archeological data is quite tenuous. The lecture would have been more satisfying if it focused on what we know about the way of life, the political climate, etc. Instead, the lecturer tries futilely to align the scant evidence with the Bible. There's a passing reference to Biblical minimalism, which sounded reasonable to me, but was dismissed out of hand.

No one belongs here more than you
(Miranda July, 4:55)
I read these stories about 8 months ago, but when I had a chance to listen to them read by the author, I returned, and I enjoyed these even more this time round. "This Person" still remains this person's favorite, but it resembles the other stories, in their whimsical expression of life's small, terrible disappointments. The language is very fine; I can't shake the phrasing of a woman, 7 years into a stunted relationship, who describes a pattern as one that would "be in the 2nd grade by now if it were a person."

Lovesick Blues: The life of Hank Williams
(Paul Hemphill, 8:29)
Hiram (Hank) Williams' sad life unfolds with lots of interesting revelations (although the author uses occasional awkwardly phrasing). After a harsh childhood, he married Audrey, the woman with a cold cold heart. When his son Hank Jr was born, his life temporarily looked up. 'The downside was this: Hank was so happy that he couldn't write a word.' (p79) Listen to Hank's carefree, arrogant phrasing when he would show up at the bank, "emptying pockets crammed with crumpled bills and personal checks onto the counter, telling the cashier, 'I make it, you count it.'"(p97). Although he was a binge drinker, he guarded his legacy by treating "the studio as his church, his laboratory, his one true friend.... Of the legions of Drunk Hank Stories, not one of them takes place anywhere near a recording session. The studio was sacrosanct." (p125) Toward the end of his life, he attached himself to the Carter family, and apparently fell for 17 year old Anita Carter. There's a duet he performed with her on the Kate Smith show (on youtube). As he went off the rails, he shot a pistol at his wife that hit within 6 inches of June Carter's head, causing her to temporarily lose her hearing. His life ended before he was 30, sick to death in the back of a car, en route to a show just after New Year's Eve.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
(Haruki Murakami, 12:35)
A wide range of stories, including the early parable, Sharpie Cakes, which I recently heard him read in Japanese.. Temperamentally I think Murakami's appeal may be due to his mellow, humble, intelligent, aloof personality. In other words, someone utterly unlike me. I didn't greatly enjoy Kafka by the Shore, and this collection now dissuades me from my previous assumption that I prefer Murakami in shot glass sized short stories. I would give the Wind up bird or Norwegian Wood a spin, but I sense that this author (the most widely translated author in the world), is not aligned with my obsessions.

City Secrets: New York City
(Robert Kahn, 582pp)
A great resource (published in 2002). When I mentioned little finds that I encountered here to life-time New Yorkers, the nuggets surprised even them. I forgot to pack this when I last went to the City, and now it's time to return it to the library, but someday, I hope to find a copy for my own. Or better, I'll give a copy as a birthday gift to those I love who live in its environs.

A tranquil star: Unpublished Stories of Primo Levi
(Primo Levi, 3:54)
This was not the most promising place to start with an author's work, since it collects juvenilia and previously unpublished work. The stories that gripped me were about the War: the opening story describes two Jews who are being transported on a truck with a bunch of brutal Germans. Other stories, which I only skimmed, reminded me of the science-y fiction of Italo Calvino

Last Night at the Lobster
(Stewart O'Nan, 3:50)
This short novel is pretty depressing, but mirrors the mood of the US economy at the present time. The writing and character development is engaging, even though the affective tone is a total downer. O'Nan does succeed in crafting a slightly bleary, but distinct, window on a bunch of people I would never know otherwise.

Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story
(Ray Charles and David Ritz, 13:23)
This autobiography throws light on this musician's drive, discipline, and intense focus on maintaining his own autonomy. He writes frankly about his love of pussy, his enjoyment of heroin (and his refusal to ever claim it hurt him). About smack, he says the only thing he'll ever say to those angling for him to renounce it was that, when he was a child, he peed in his bed, but stopped when he saw how that ultimately made him more uncomfortable. He provides glimpses into his interesting mind and his austere life, devoted to music, pussy, and a little bit of other pleasures on the side. As commonly occurs to me after falling into a book, I now want to dive into his music to hear his true genius. I love his expression about music's individuality that it has to stink. (On p. 292: When I do a song, I must be able to make it stink in my own way; I want to foul it up so it reeks of my manure and no one else's.) Another Ray-ism is "nasty" as a superlative encomium (p137: The blues were brewing down there [in New Orleans in '53] and the stew was plenty nasty.)

Nabokov's Quartet
(Vladimir Nabokov, about 100pp)
The short stories were little confections. I read 3 out of 4, but skipped the one that was described in the intro as including an anagram in the last paragraph that spelled out the mystery. I enjoyed Lik the most, and noticed that the stories translated by Dmitri were not packed with obscure words that may well have been invented by the author.

Model City
(Michael Chabon, 180pp)
This collection of stories, published in 1991, is fun to read, but also demonstrates persuasively that Chabon needs a larger canvas than the short story to really hit stride. There's very insightful glances into the love mad male soul, but each story felt rather slight. The last half of the book was a memoir-stream of shorts, titled collectively Lost World, about a family (like Chabon's) that undergoes divorce. Over half the collection was previously published in the New Yorker.

Treehouse living : 50 innovative designs
(Alain Laurens, Daniel Dufour, Ghislain André, 200pp)
These French architects build treehouses for zillionaires. The designs are spectacular, and the use of spiral staircases captivates the eye.

Backyards for kids
(Ziba Kashef and the editors of Sunset Books, 150pp)
Here's how to design castles for your little precious ones. Many of the suggestions are over the top, but some of the ideas on water and sand looked fun. I really liked the suggestion to turn a wall into a playspace by using "chalkboard paint" to make the surface into a chalkboard.

The Dew Breaker
(Edwidge Danticat, 6:43)
Not quite as harrowing as her autobiographical work, Brother I'm Dying, but still, a harsh and direct look at the life of a torturer from Haiti, who escapes to a nearly normal life in the US.

Gut Feelings: The intelligence of the unconscious
(Gerd Gigerenzer, 7:29)
This book took me months to finish. It is fairly interesting, and worth keeping in mind when a complex and very fancy model beckons. Basically, there are many instances where simple, nearly stupid solutions triumph.

Punk House
(ed by Thurston Moore, photos by Abby Banks, 270pp)
Yuck! It would not be possible for an uptight guy like me to live in the squalor captured here. The guys in Bloomington IN actually looked more uptight than me (or even young David Byrne). It takes 20 minutes to page through this. Thurston Moore's 3 page intro cops to never being part of this scene; he also manages to mention the parents of punks almost as frequently as he refers to the punks themselves.

The Replacements: All over but the shouting
(ed by Jim Walsh, 304pp)
This oral history is sort of embarrassing. A bunch of people who loved the 'mats remember the glory days. The only fascinating voice is Paul Westerberg's, and he wasn't interviewed for the book. The implosion of Bob Stinson is also well documented here, as elsewhere.

It's all too much
(Peter Walsh, 7 hours -- skimmed the last 2)
I am not someone who collects a lot of crap, but that's like saying someone is thin "for an American." The obsessions of this author are a little sad, even though most people in our crap-encrusted society need a volt of his message.

A Short History of Everything
(Bill Bryson, unabridged, 25 hours)
I read the abridged version back in January, and I enjoyed it so much I really wanted to dive in to the whole cosmic vastitude of the unabridged. There's a certain tendency to his writing to a) Identify a precursor scientist who's been cheated out of credit for a major discovery, and b) Glorify the personalities that build the theories under discussion. Neither is so twitchy that it's a distraction, although over the course of the book, it's such a regular pattern that I had to call it out.

It's a boy! : understanding your son's development from birth to age 18
(Michael Thompson & Teresa Barker, stopped at 2 years)
I scanned this, and although it's message is basically sound (i.e., boys are wilder than girls), there's not a lot to chew on. I did learn that boys' hearing is not as acute as girls, and that this is part of a whole constellation of reasons for their less rapid language development. The style and tone didn't tickle me, and I generally object to writers who raise fears that some early stage experiences may lead to huge differences later.

Sotah
(Naomi Ragen, 485pp -- stopped after 217)
A pot boiler set in the Haredi community of Jerusalem. The author provides some glimpses, but the tone jangles, since she has to occasionally add narrative explanations for things that would be taken for granted among its members. Stranger still, I can't believe that the Haredi call themselves that, when it would make more sense to simply have labels for people who are not as ultra-orthodox. It's hard to read a book that's pumped out, rather than written, but the story had various hooks that kept me reading for a longish while.

Feather Merchants
(Max Shulman, 143 pp -- read maybe 1/3)
This WWII era novelette has some yuks in it (as it was clearly penned to be funny), but it also has some yucks ("From behind the green baize curtain separating the Jim Crow section of the car came the voices of darkies, as they are affectionately called in the South" p5). I mooched this book, initially confusing it with a children's book about Chelm. I learned that the title is a slang term for civilians.

Assassination Vacation
(Sarah Vowell, 7:24)
I read this 3 years ago, and I think it was after listening to the Lincoln bio of Doris Kearns Goodwin that I decided to dive back in. Ms Vowell has done her share to re-invigorate my interest in the Civil War, and I liked this book more the 2nd time than when I first heard it.

Disgrace
(J.M. Coetzee, 6:56)
A fearless look into the life of a middle aged man whose desire for his undergrad student causes him to lose his job. The thesis of desire, and power, and the moralistic society that zealously aspires to judge the male, are themes that have also been studied by Philip Roth (in particular, the Human Stain). Coetzee's treatment is more subtle, less angry, and even as it captures the man's perspective (that, e.g., demanding an apology for his expression of desire is effectively equivalent to castration), he manages to simultaneously express the views of those who are condemnatory. The second half of the book is a brutal account of the character's visit to his daughter, who is raped while he is there by marauding Africans. The daughter's reaction is tinged by her regrets for the colonialist power dynamics, while the narrator's rage and disgust are a powerless reminder of how the blacks must surely have felt in apartheid South Africa.

Pale Fire
(Vladimir Nabokov, 320pp)
Amazing, irritating, engrossing.

Brother I'm Dying
(Edwidge Danticat, 7 CDs)
An unflinching recollection of growing up in brutal times in Haiti. This author tipped me to Junot Diaz. There is a strange commonality, since each of them have families that have faced extreme ugliness in governmental repression. (Wikipedia Flash! I didn't know until I began writing this note that the Dominican Republic is the other half of the island on which Haiti exists.) Danticat's family is pickled in profound Christian belief, so their attitude towards death and suffering is deflected by hopes for another world. The book's stark prose avoids most introspection. The formal rigor assumed by Danticat entailed that everyone outside her family of origin is generically labeled, even "my husband" and "my daughter", neither of whom are named or otherwise introduced.

Demons in the Spring
(Joe Meno, 8:18 -- punted after the first 10 of 20 stories)
David Eggers' gushing blurb tipped me to read this, but almost every story read like an exercise. The themes are quite diverse, but none felt inspired, as one story takes a poke at some little corner of historical trivia (the bank robbery that gave rise to the term "Stockholm Syndrome,", or a voyage into the creepy, or an highly contrived spookiness (a cop who belongs to the Kiss Army watches a black hole swallow much of his dingy little city). The writing would likely be quite suited to teenagers, who would enjoy the weird, and would not be as vulnerable to being annoyed at the lack of insight/sympathy into the characters sketched.

When you are engulfed in flames
(David Sedaris, 9:34)
I've read about half of these when they were printed in the New Yorker, and at times I felt a haunting suspicion that some of the passages were re-used from earlier books, but I don't think that's really likely for someone as accomplished (and smothered with fans) as David Sedaris. The final (title) essay is an extended piece on visiting Japan to quit smoking, and weaves together many hilarious remarks about the Japanese.

Wonder Boys
(Michael Chabon, 9:40)
What a great shaggy dog story. I don't know why I had neglected this Chabon novel until now, but it was probably because I'd seen part of the movie. Chabon's Niagara Falls of language pumps through this, and makes every twist and turn fun to follow. The treatment of a pot-head's haze perfectly captures the drugged life of the lost boys (who may well be middle-aged men).

Atmospheric Disturbances
(Rivka Galchen, 7:43, punt after 2 hours)
This was widely praised, in particular by Tyler Cowen. But he reads much more rapidly than I do (and also knows Buenos Aires first hand), and so, he can glide over rough patches. The Capgras delusion reference is frequently noted, but I haven't seen many connect this to In her absence, which was a slow start for me, though it eventually paid off.

Beautiful Minds: The parallel lives of great apes and dolphins
(Maddelan Beartzi and Craig Stanford, 351pp)
Great topic, not a particularly distinguished execution. Since I am not as familiar with the cetacean side of this ace double, I read that part with more interest, and did learn some interesting facts about the social/cultural diversity of dolphins. The layout of the book (very small pages, maybe 500 words/per) underscores how little there is here. The text is about what you'd expect from watching a Nature TV show, except there's no pictures, and at times, the language switches into technical jargon without any good explanation. Even though Harvard University Press has published many primatology classics (Frans De Waal and Jane Goodall, e.g.), this book is mediocre. About the time I was to make the transition to papa-hood, I bought Parenting for Primates, a book too weak (in part because of its focus on the psychoanalytical) to finish.

Proust was a neuroscientist
(Jonah Lehrer, 9;26)
The conceit of this collection of essays is that modernist artists anticipated important neuroscientific findings, and that reading their work can shed light on the newest experimental insights into the brain/mind. I found the pieces about the writers were the best and the ones on musicians were the weakest. Besides Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and George Eliot, I also savored the piece on Auguste Escoffier, the architect of French cuisine.

The 100 best vacations to enrich your life
(Pam Grout, 288pp)
Worth a skim, but mostly PR about various educational/craft-oriented camps. Useful as an initial guide, but not likely to provide the full skinny on which places live up to the promise.

Team of Rivals
(Doris Kearns Godwin, 9:29)
Great account of Lincoln's sudden rise to the Presidency, how his cabinet members all assumed they were his superior, and how he managed to harness their skills in spite of their failure to esteem him initially. I now want to read Lincoln's correspondence, since his wit sparkled in the quotes throughout.

IDEO Method Cards

Don't know what to say about these. Great packaging of ideas, but not very hearty for nibbling on.

Unaccustomed Earth
(Jhumpa Lahiri, 10:08)
Fine stories, woven together with sufficient art to be nearly a novel.

Shakespeare: The Seven Major Tragedies
(Harold Bloom, 9:24)
Bloom lectures extemporaneously here, and it's somewhat stimulating to hear him rhapsodize about Shakes. He imposes some pretty arbitrary (read: Freudian) mappings, for example, that Hamlet may have been Claudius' son, and that Brutus was widely reputed among the Romans to be Caesar's offspring. I have to confess, yet again, that I'm a Miltonist, born a generation too late to love Will most.

Our Story Begins
(Tobias Wolff, 13:09)
The first 2/3 are stories from the author's 30 year career, and after the classic "Bullet in the Brain," a set of "recent stories". The term that comes to mind is flinty, which I often associate with Wallace Stegner's work. His themes revolve around harsh living, men at loss with the emotions that float around them, military bases (both Vietnam and Iraq era), and boys who confabulate to keep themselves engaged in life.

Dickens, Dali and Others
(George Orwell, 252pp)
I read only the pieces on Kipling, Wodehouse, Dali, with a desultory scan of the remainder. The vigor and incisive logic of these essays favorably impressed me, and helped illuminate why Orwell is considered the supreme stylist of short prose.

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
(Sonja Lyubomirsky, 384pp)
Had to return to the library after 233pp. This is written well enough to be readable, and it's so sensible it seems on the verge of cliche.
p198-- Walt Whitman quote p326 - "Personal disclosure: I love Al Franken"

On the Wealth of Nations
(P.J. O'Rourke, 5:43)
This survey of the classic does a nice job of boiling down the basics: the plot of Adam Smith's magnum opus, the intellectual climate at the time, a brief biographical sketch. O'Rourke succinctly explains where the essential insights lie, and also points out the lapses (on the theory of price/value, and the longueurs of Smith's detailed arguments with mercantilists). This book achieves its goal so worthily (O'Rourke says he read the Wealth of Nations so we don't have to) that I am surprised to see that I am less intent on ever trying to tackle the fat book from 1776.

American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work
(Susan Cheever, 6 CDs)
The genius of Thoreau, Emerson and others is on display here, and I enjoyed this sketchy treatment of Concord's impact on American intellectual life. Reviewers at Amazon cavil Cheever's inaccuracies; my primary objection is her slightly arch tone. I found it amazing to read how much Emerson devoted to import and fund his social world, for example by paying the rent for the Alcotts. As a result of this exposure, I'm now interested in Little Women.

Berlin Alexanderplatz
(Alfred Doblin, translated by Eugene Jolas -- 378pp, stopped after 65, and jumped to the end)
After viewing the 15 hours of Fassbinder's 1979 masterpiece, I was sent back to the source. I didn't feel that the book was as good as Rainer's near-verbatim visualization. In a DVD documentary, the actor who played Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht) confessed to having only read 60 pages of the book; he said the book finally made sense when he read Fassbinder's script.

Then we came to the end
(Joshua Ferris, abridged, 4:30)
A not bad effort at describing life within 4 moveable cube walls. I have been aware of this book for a while, and in listening to the abridgement, decided it was not necessary to read the whole story.

Holidays on Ice/Barrel Fever/Me Talk Pretty One Day
(David Sedaris, 13 hours total)
A re-visiting that made me laugh as much as the first time I'd heard them (they are all abridged, and so, I should look to the printed versions for essays ommitted). It's also obvious that in the 2 earlier books (Holidays on Ice and Barrel Fever), Sedaris wrote not memoir, but comedy. The title essay in Barrel Fever (one of the most hilarious) is not even in the voice of David Sedaris, but rather, a man who works in an office and torments people in his social circle too weak to handle their addiction to drinking. In each of these 3 books, Sedaris manages to work in a timeless joke, by singing mundane songs (christmas carols or TV jingles) in the style of Billie Holiday.

Nextbook Podcasts
(over 24 hours)
I fell into the Nextbook archive, which covers all things in Jewish culture. In the over 130 episodes (between 10 and 30 minutes in length), I skipped less than one in 12. The way people described their own Judaism (mostly secular-cultural, although others, such as the founder of Heeb said she "davened around"; differing approaches to kashrut; recollections or anticipations of b'nei mitzvah ceremonies. The interviews are pointed without being abrasive; I especially appreciated how Tiffany Shlain was asked to make sense of her mini-documentary about Barbie. I was turned on to the Israeli klezmer band Oy Division, Naomi Alderman's book Disobedience, and S&S cheesecake in the Bronx, and the author Leonard Michaels. One particularly nice aspect of Nextbook's format is the minimal quantity of cruft stacked in the front and back of each podcast; unlike, say the Folkways shows, which wasted the first 90 seconds of each file with repetitive formulaic intro.
Nerd Note: The tool Audiobook builder helps here, by gobbling up a bunch of MP3s into blocks of 12 hour AAC format for the iPod, which can then be played at a pitched adjusted fast rate.

The Man who Loved China
(Simon Winchester, 8 CDs 9:12)
Winchester reads this biography of Joseph Needham, a brilliant man who distinguished himself early at Cambridge (in 1930s) in the field of embryology. When a grad student came over from Shanghai, he fell in love with her, and soon thereafter, with the Chinese language, culture, and history. Needham was a gymnosophist, a radical Christian, a very far left leftist, and managed his marriage in a way gave rise to a striking resemblance to the Chinese concept of concubinage. His love affair with the Chinese grad student created his lifelong affair with Chinese culture. The book covers, with a somewhat sporadic nature, his travel to China as an English diplomat after the Japanese war with America started. He became friends with Chou En-Lai, and he threw himself into supporting the PRC once Mao won the Civil War in 1949. There were two areas where I wished to learn more: 1- Needham's relationship with the PRC, and 2- A much more thorough discussion of how "the book" grew, with at least one chapter devoted to a more in depth description of how Needham wrote about all the amazing technology that was developed in China.

Maps and Legends
(Michael Chabon, 222pp)
I've been exposed to about half of these essays before, but it was a pleasure to read through them, and see Chabon disclose little parts of his own biography. The piece that became the spark for the Yiddish Policeman's Union is reprised in a complex reworking. Throughout the book, I wondered if he was ever going to talk about the piece that I recall coming across in 2005, where he'd given a talk about what I recalled as a hidden Nazi who sold comics in his childhood neighborhood. (The link to the talk no longer seems to work.) In fact, it's the last essay, and Chabon adds a tag about the controversies that it sparked, without speaking to the central problem for me (and for Maliszewski, namely that Chabon wove a tale accusing someone of being a hidden Nazi, without bothering to invent a name for that invented person). Searching about, I just reread the nplusone piece that is more bothered by the subtle way the tale advances Jewish separatism.

Children playing before a statue of Hercules
(ed by David Sedaris, abridged, 3 CDs)
Rather slight collection, and a way for David Sedaris to showcase his own tastes and give props to his inspirations. There's no stinkers, and it was surprising to hear that he'd included Tobias Wolff's *Bullet to the Brain*, which I had recently heard T.C. Boyle read for the New Yorker's podcast series. Sedaris' taste clearly shows his desire for liars who tell astonishing whoppers.

The Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
(CKUA Radio in Alberta, 24 hours-- I skipped some of the tedious ones)
An interesting audio documentary of the sound library accreted by Moe Asch over his lifetime. There's specific hours devoted to Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly (whose first name was pronounced Hew-die, not Hud-dy, as I'd always supposed), and 3 entire sessions to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. The 24 hours include some repetition which de-condenses their impact; this must've been driven by the implausibility that most listeners would sit and listen to all of the sessions in one blast.

Loving Frank
(Nancy Horan, 13:40 -- stopped after 10 hours)
I wanted to listen to this since it first came out in 2007. The story of Frank Lloyd Wright's love affair with one of his clients Mamah Borthwick Cheney cannot fully evoke his genius, but it does capture the conflict and duress that a woman faced in breaking conventions. Mamah was by Wright considered his intellectual equal -- she left her husband and children to travel to Europe. In Europe, she chose her vocation, to translate the work of a prominent feminist, Ellen Key. There is a similarity between her chosen career, translator, and her role in Wright's life. As the book began to flag, I read the wikipedia entry on Wright, teased as I was by the recollection from the Oak Park tour of his studio that he'd once been prosecuted under the Mann Act (for transporting an under age woman across state lines). SPOILER HERE: This was in fact something that occurred much later in his life. But his biography recorded that his beloved Mamah, as well as 6 other people, were all murdered by a man servant in a fire that burned down Taliesin. Once I knew how the story turned out, I didn't have the mojo to continue with the tale.

Peel: The Art of the Sticker
(Dave Combs & Holly Combs, 160pp)
I hadn't been aware of the magazine PEEL, but this book collects the best from the first 8 issues, and includes 4 sheets of sample stickers. Will I ever have the inclination to use the stickers? Some are really interesting, but one of the things I value about stickers is their link to the terroir of the adhesive glue I sniff whenever I find new designs.

A Good Rat
(Jimmy Breslin, 6:54)
An interesting mafia story, about the two bad cops who performed hits for the mob. The book exposes the pettiness of their work (usually, they charged between $20 and $40K for a murder) and their lying ways. Breslin argues clearly that the mafia's unraveled, and the families have spun out into informers turning on one another.

Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited
(Elyse Schein & Paula Bernstein, punted after 2 CDs)
An interesting topic (two women, adopted into families with an older brother, turn out to be identical twins separated at birth). In spite of the topical interest, their collective strength is not analytical, and it's far too long to deserve being read in full.

H.L. Mencken: Disturber of the Peace
(William Manchester, 15 hours, pause after 10)
Mencken was such a firehose of words and clarity. I stopped reading because I knew how it was going to turn out, but it was still a pleasure to follow his life. Not quite as good as Mencken's own memoirs of his own childhood, but Manchester's prose stands as a fine guide to HLM.

Mothers and Sons
(Colm Toibin)
Fine, diverse collection of stories, wandering around (or at least touching upon) the complex theme of sons' relationships with their mothers. Most are set in Ireland, although the final, longest tale occurs in the mountains of Italy.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
(Michael Pollan, 6:23)
A manifesto that should more appropriately be titled "a North Berkeley eater's approach to food issues." Pollan's shorter followup to the Omnivore's Dilemma analyzes how poorly served Americans have been by nutritionists. Dietary science techniques and analytical tools are no stronger than sociology or econometrics, which is just to say, that they frequently collect a basket of fuzzy correlations that get reported as causation. He cogently argues that whenever a foodlike item makes nutrient claims on its packaging, you are more than likely to be eating a bunch of chemicals pushed by the food industry. Our family has attempted to hew to his pithy maxim: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants, and more leaves than seeds." The glaring exceptions are diet Pepsi and Nestle's skinny cows, which are true vices.

All the sad young literary men
(Keith Gessen, 6;45)
This was not nearly as much fun as Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision, but perhaps it is an unfair comparison to lump Gessen with his n+1 editorial colleague. I found the book depressing, rather than witty, and some of the attempts to sketch the character's limitations (e.g., a Jew who aspires to write the ultimate Zionist novel, in spite of his inability to understand Hebrew) to verge on a straw man characterization. Maybe Gessen is really an essayist, who cut himself into three strands to create a sort of novel.

The Hard Life
(Flann O'Brien, 132pp)
A minor work, with some humorous passages. After enjoying the Third Policeman so intensely, I've been on a quest to experience more Flann O'Brien. This is sort of his Portrait of the Artist, although it's written at the end of his life (and his Ulysses/Wake, At Swim Two Birds, was his first work).

Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
(Chip and Dan Heath, 8:43)
Even though it's impossible to come up with a taxonomy of concepts, and how to best communicate ideas, this book delivered well enough to hold my attention throughout. It's a textual equivalent of Tufte's tour of graphic hits, without the heavy hand of the Pope of Cheshire.

Beautiful Boy
(David Sheff, 11:31)
A father's recollection of his experiences with a son addicted to methamphetamine. (His son has also published his memoir, in a sort of parody of the father's writerly life. I studied this book to learn about the father's mistakes, which shows how naive and arrogant my approach was. I do think the story records numerous instances where the parental response to problems seemed lax. (As one example, the son got drunk at 12, and barfed all night. How would a parent not attend to the sick child, and then notice the alcohol odor?)

No country for old men
(Cormac McCarthy, 7:33)
The Coen brothers' film faithfully rendered this spare dark tale, and they did such a powerful job, it's difficult to read the book apart from their production. There are some ambiguities in the film that are made explicit, and one strand (regarding the Sheriff's self-doubts, which traces back to his experience in WWII, and goes straight up to his conflict with the psychopath Anton Chigurh).

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
(Atul Gawande, 7:34)
This collection of essays pushes on the drive for improved performance. The book includes a fine chapter on obstetrics and the drive toward caesareans that was published in the New Yorker while my wife was pregnant. The later chapters were particularly fascinating to me, especially the twin chapters on survival rates for Cystic Fibrosis and the description of how resourceful doctors in India are with their limited resources. The CF survival differs greatly by center, and the highest surviving center, in Minnesota, succeeds by going from 99.5 to 99.95% compliance. The relevance to India, and to the wider world, is that new technology and research are not nearly as important as intensive approaches to scrupulous practice. The final chapter, on how to become a Positive Deviant, is a summary of the lessons extracted from the observations made throughout the surgeon's young career.

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
(William D. Cohan, 32 hours)
Not quite as enthralling as Barbarians at the Gates, but the story is still more than fascinating. The first 60% of the book is focused on Felix Rohantyn, a brilliant refugee banker who "saved New York" when Ford told the city to drop dead, and who had been the key rainmaker at Lazard in the post-war era. His life story has many interesting turns; the one thing that isn't sufficiently detailed is his involvement in the aglommeration, ITT, which enabled him to spin many of his deals. Among its crimes, ITT tried to depose Allende and secretly funded Nixon's CREEP. There is a small rivulet of this massive book that treats of the history of Lazard, and the genius, Andre Meyer. The final 38% discusses the way the glutton, Bruce Wasserstein, managed to dupe all the partners, and particularly, the greatest single owner, Michel David-Weill. There's an amusing discussion of Wasserstein's communist revolution, since his insidious strategy enabled him to dissipate the capital of the owners, and give the equity to the workers. I'm sure I'll often quote this line, mentioned about the career of investment bankers: "You won't get to know your children, but you'll get to know your grandchildren really well."

Secrets of Power Negotiating
(Roger Dawson, 5:01)
I suppose it's always useful to hear people discuss negotiation, since it's endlessly difficult to get it right. This is not a very rigorous treatment, but I didn't mind hearing this, inspite of the corny jokes that were spliced in.

Guards! Guards! Guards!
(Terry Pratchett, 10:30)
Great fun, and very intelligent. I especially enjoyed the absurd discussions around a million to one shot, which is sure to always turn out successfully, but if there's a mistake, and the odds are merely 948,000 to one, there's a certainty that it won't succeed.

Condoleeza Rice: An American Life
(Elizabeth Bumiller, 14:09)
It's not easy to admire Condi, and ever since I was a grad student underneath her provost-dom, I've found myself harboring a pretty intense dislike for her careerist singlemindedness. This book shows her to be Bush's Golem, while also revealing how intensely she ran into conflict with both Rumsfeld and Cheney, who felt comfortable bristling with old school sexist attitudes. To know her is not to love her.

Russian Debutante's Handbook
(Gary Shteyngart, 16 hours)
This is just as funny as Absurdistan, and in many ways, just as similar to the later book as it is to itself. I'm surprised that Shteyngart had to write the same book twice to get the recognition he deserves. I mean no criticism in saying Shteyngart's workign the same groove, because it's a hilarious and very interesting groove.

This is your brain on music
(Dan Levitin, 6:10, abridged)
Great fun to read, and even though abridged, this audible book had musical demonstrations that would have made The Rest is Noise, and even Musicophilia, much more instructive.

The Swimming Pool Library
(Alan Hollinghurst, 14 CDs)
Amazing freshman effort, even more engaging and intricately woven than the Line of Beauty, which had been one of my favorite books of 2005. Hollinghurst handles gay sexuality with as much fascination as Updike brings to infidelity, but I would rate him as much more deft at describing all the details of cruising without creating the awkwardness and embarrassment that I often feel with Updike.

The Dead Father
(Donald Barthelme, 256pp)
I've been picnicking with this novel most nights before bed for the past several months. It was a challenge for this seminal book to live up to the vast reputation I attached to it, based on my readings of it 20 years ago. I think it's quite fine, a true delight in parts. I hadn't been sensitive before to how intensely DB's anger is focused upon the father. The physical abuse that convicts the father seered my eyes to read.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
(Oliver Sacks, 9 CDs)
Definitely the best Oliver Sacks book since his signature Man who mistook his wife for a hat. It's fascinating to hear all the ways music can be a life preserver for those who've lost so much of their mind; surely the most fascinating life is Clive Wearing, who has even less capacity to store memory than HM, but still conducts choirs beautifully. Sacks reveals more of his own biography than usual, especially about his own family background.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
(Elyn Saks, 352pp -- stopped after 150p)
A unique internal account of the experience of schizophrenia, written by a woman with great academic powers (valedictorian in college, Marshall scholar to Oxford, Yale Law School). Her brain started going haywire when she was quite young, and she could easily have been mis-diagnosed as anorexic. Her academic powerhouse skills in part required a familiar structure to be expressed. Each school shift did trigger a serious outbreak, but eventually, she managed to receive sufficient support to motor through. I stopped reading after the Yale Law School episode, since it seemed clear she would always have psychotic episodes, voices and premonitions, and each outbreak resembled the earlier ones. Instead of finishing the book, I read Jay Neugeboren's NYRB discussion of the book, which arrived while I was just finishing the first half. He quotes the anecdote her asking "Will aliens be attending the reception?", and her partner's kind answer. Although Neugeboren reads her story as a vindication of psychoanalysis, that goes beyond the evidence: Saks clearly shows how valuable it can be to talk to someone every day. In England, psychoanalyst she visited charged only $6/hour (in the early 1980s). Perhaps people could benefit more if analysis were not so expensive in the US (which must be due to its medicalization here).

Tree of Smoke
(Denis Johnson, 23:05)
Amazing tour of the tunnels of Vietnam, from the time that Kennedy was shot, the Tet offensive, and times following. Johnson is the heir to Delillo, with his acute ear for dialog and fascinating quirks of the Psy-Ops world. I don't exactly understand how the book ended, although I found some of the earlier endings inside the massive novel to be quite rewarding. On the day I wrapped this up, I discovered that Gary Shteyngart judged TOS in a tournament hosted by Powells against a book I've been neglecting (Then we came to the end). But since he judged TOS to be vanquished by the other title, I'll try to track this down.

Lake of the Woods
(Tim O'Brien, 306pp read about 1/2)
This book has been highly praised in some circles, and I was tricked by the extensive wikipedia page it has. Had I thought for any length of time, the lengthy wiki homage would be a tip that this is a book for puzzle fans, rather than literary types. The book is an unsolved mystery, with "evidence" deposed from various characters. But the author heavy-handedly footnotes his own inability to solve the mystery, both at the beginning and end of the book.

Captain Blood
(Rafael Sabatini, 12:30)
I read this novel by Sabatini as a further path toward understanding Don Barthelme. DB frequently mentioned in interviews that his style borrows from Sabatini, and he even has a short story titled Captain Blood. The heroic Irish captain, Peter Blood, overcomes numerous injustices that forced him into slavery in the Caribbean. Blood's style, cool and ironic, is well drawn, and the range of his adventures includes Irish depressions and drunken despondency. I look forward to reading more Sabatini with my sons, since the writing style is quite good, and the adventures will surely rivet a young boy's attention.

Boswell's Life of Johnson
(James Boswell, unabridged, 36 hours)
I had listened to a different version 10 years ago, and it sparked a radical deep dive into Johnsoniana. I bought this from audible.com 5 years ago, but couldn't mobilize for the big listen. During a migraine, I fell in, and ended up listening to over 80% of this. Since there's several editions that Boswell published, this version sounded like a later, more comprehensive ball, with specific attacks on Mrs. Thrale as evidence that Boswell was positioning his life as superior to her recollections.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
(Dan Ariely, 304 pp)
Great tour of the experiments that Ariely has done, with some interesting remarks about his own personal experience, in particular, the accident that caused burns over 70% of his body.

From Crib to Kindergarten: The Essential Child Safety Guide
(Dorothy A. Drago, 208pp)
Useful, as it presents a description of the range of risks that children face without inducing hysteria.

Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley
(Richard Schwartz, 244pp)
Quaint, but hardly riveting. I skimmed this but didn't find the old eccentrics to hold a candle to current Berkeley nuts.

Getting Things Done
(David Allen, 7:13)
As soon as this came out as an unabridged audiobook, I decided to mainline it. And although listening to Getting Things Done is not the same as actually getting things done, I was pumped enough to actually build my own filing system this time round. Next time I listen, I'll tickle up 31 + 12 month folders.

Death in Venice
(Thomas Mann, 3 hours)
Because this story was assigned in high school, I was blocked from fully appreciating it before now. The new translation (by Joachim Neugroschel) flowed with supple ease.

The Black Swan
(Nassim Taleb, 12 CDs)
I could not bring myself to read Taleb's first book, Fooled by Randomness, even though I was quite sympathetic to its thesis. His writing style is incredibly irksome and arrogantly self-congratulatory -- his tone should be compared to the voice of Quasimodo, it is so ugly to behold. The current book is slightly less sophomoric, even though its jabs at economists, the French, academics fatigue. The worst part of the book are flaccid chunks of fictionalized projection, inventing idealized characters with less depth than Ayn Rand bestowed upon her giants. Notwithstanding all these superficial flaws, the idea that we can't normalize the future, that the most important facts are proverbial black swans (rare, unexpected, and hugely impactful). The author vociferates, repeating his theme (not really distinct from his earlier book), but still manages to toss out points worth considering. E.g., for all the risk management theorists hired by the MGM Mirage Vegas casino, the actual exposure they underwent was almost entirely due to items outside their models. Hundreds of millions of dollars was invested on gambling theory and high-tech surveillance, but the real losses were true black swans: the tiger that attacked its trainer Roy cost the casino $100 million. An owner broke the laws to pay his kidnapped daughter's ransom. "The dollar value of these Black Swans, the off-model hits and potential hits, swamp the on-model risks by a factor of close to 1,000-to-one."

The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty
(Julia Flynn Siler, 15 CDs)
This story of intra-family conflict, repeated anew across 3 generations has the quality of a Greek tragedy, since the reader fully expects to see the problems again, and then again. Robert Mondavi comes out as a charismatic personality, who triggered the first family fight by neglecting to share the limelight with his younger brother. Exiled from Krug, he started a high end vineyard in the mid-1960s, and worked to transform America's attitude about wine. His own sons ended up dueling in very much the same way. Ultimately, the family was forced to sell their vineyard in order for the grand father, Robert, to honor the philanthropic bequests he'd signed up to make. In discussing California's cuisine, the author mistakenly claims that Chez Panisse began in 1969 (it was actually 1971).

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
(Amity Shlaes, 15;30)
I found the writing pretty uneven, with clotted sentences, poor choice of detail, overly specific in directions that never take off. This is a history chock-a-block with personalities, and that is indeed the best value here. Ms. Shlaes hates FDR so much, that in a novel twist, she lumps Hoover in with FDR as a meddler. She celebrates Calvin Coolidge as a do-nothing president, and also reveres Andrew Mellon and Bill W. (the private person who founded AA). Her critique of FDR does highlight the 1930s enthusiasm for collectivism that would shock people today: Rex Tugwell, one of the brain trust, actually established a quasi-kibbutz in Casa Grande AZ. Even more surprising, the NRA insisted upon standardization that made it impossible for a kosher butchery to function, and the tale of the Schechter brothers' fight all the way to the Supreme Court is quite fascinating. Benjamin Friedman's review in the NYRB, FDR & the Depression: The Big Debate (preview only online), demonstrates that Shlaes' reading of the macroeconomics is unreliable: every drop in the Dow is read by her as proof that business/capital got scared, and every up movement reads as a deliberate celebration of FDR's retreat from his New Dealing ways. Even more telling, Friedman points out that the actual boost in productivity in the 1930's was perhaps the greatest of any decade within the 20th century, although that involved labor-saving substitutions that kept unemployment high. So, her economics can't be trusted, but the tales she tells often highlight novel or neglected aspects of the traditional story.