Love and other impossible pursuits
(Ayelet Waldman, 11:20)
Opens strong, with a tale of a woman who's coping, in a very flawed fashion, with her losing a baby to SIDS. Having read her Bad Mother before coming to the novel, I can't help mapping the details into the confessions she poured into the essays. My ultimate take on why the book is not quite right: Waldman wrote eloquently about her grief at terminating a pregnancy due to diagnosed genetic risks. These emotions are cathected onto the character, Emilia Greenleaf; instead of lavishing love on this damaged perspective, she never truly accepts the self-pitying neediness. It's difficult watching her beat up this voodoo doll. One fascinating dropped detail, which could well be autobiographical (given that Waldman went to Harvard Law with Obama): "There was a guy in my orientation group in law school whom I probably would have married but for his conviction that marrying a white woman would ruin his chances of being elected to public office (he and his mocha-colored wife just moved to Washington, D.C., representatives of the Nineteenth Congressional District of New York)." p30

A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(Henry David Thoreau, 13:27)
This is not as good as Walden Pond or his essay on Civil Disobedience. I believe Thoreau wrote it while living in that shack near the pond. He took a two week trip on the water with his brother, and then compressed it into a week's journey. There's a level of impersonality in the writing that sounds antiquated to our era of oversharing. His love of nature is concomitant with a prickly tendency to distance himself from others, and although I'd hoped to get closer to Thoreau by reading this, I can't say it spoke to me. One note about this "books on tape" edition that I listened to on my iPhone: The narrator, James Killavey, is very old-school, super nasal, and as far from Thoreauvian transcendence as a voice can be. Because I've been listening to books for almost 15 years, the reedy sound of the narrator brought me back to the distant time, when I'd drive around Palo Alto with a GE tape recorder in my lap.

The primate family tree : the amazing diversity of our closest relatives
(Ian Redmond, 176pp)
Very handsome book, well organized, with a chapter on each species (or cluster of species) among the prosimian, monkey, and ape species. Learned a lot, as for example, that the Barbary macaque is a tailless monkey. I formerly believed that all monkeys had tails, and that all apes lacked them (hence, Curious George has to be a chimp). But lo, there's an exception here.

Manhood for amateurs
(Michael Chabon, 8:08)
Ayelet & Michael comprise my Brangelina couple, and now I know far too much about this Berkeley couple. I am almost the same age as Chabon, although I haven't published a raft of great novels-- If I started tomorrow, my publishing career would trail his by at least 21 years. I definitely enjoyed these essays, as each topic is turned over with subtlety, astute reflectiveness, and tact. The last term (tact) explains why if I had to choose between this and Bad Mother, the latter is the tastier snack. I was glad to see that one of the final essays works to salvage the term "amateur" as rooted in love. I was provoked by his discussion of his fondness for the Christmas pageant, and his unusual defense of sending his kids to St. Paul's episcopalian school in part leaps from his delight and fascination with all forms of mythology.

Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
(Sarah Lacy, 294pp)
This was published 18 months ago (May '08), so many passages suffer from a certain forward-looking future tense that has now lapsed, without it companies having IPO'd. E.g., what's become of Slide (Max Levchin's post-Paypal baby)? This magazine article on steroids is not a tell-all, since Ms Lacy clearly relied on friendship with Randi Zuckerberg, Kevin Rose, Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, and their cohorts to gain access, and she portrays somewhat insider-y perspective, without spilling the real beans.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (abridged)
(David Foster Wallace, 4:17)
Some of these pieces are read by the author, and I'd be interested in learning more about when/how they were recorded. I never made it through all these stories on paper, and I'm dismayed that my favorite story, "The Depressed Person", was omitted. There's too much attention to the horrific, and instead of insight into human psychology, DFW generates glimpses into his own obsessive anxiety about being human.

Losing Mum and Pup
(Chris Buckley, 272 pp)
I've read some of Chris Buckley's humor, and I've derived guilty pleasure from his father's prose style. This book is a pretty sad tale: 'Christo' (his father's nickname for the author) apparently hated his mother and angled his whole life for the love and approval of his father, surely a good recipe for screwing you up for life. The prose in this book shows every flaw of his writing for humor: stiff formulaic phrasing, bombastic comparisons between some little life perturbation and geopolitical or thermonuclear catastrophe, and a thick slather of WASPy mayo. The gossipy stuff kept me going, and I was particularly intrigued to learn about his father's abuse of drugs (Rits was the nickname for Ritalin, probably always in the plural).

Getting Unstuck:Breaking Your Habitual Patterns & Encountering Naked Reality
(Pema Chodron, 3:27)
Great tips from a Tibetan nun on how to treat your own mind compassionately. It's pretty simple, and requires a lifetime of practice. This set of talks was passed over to me by a good friend. The collection was published by SoundsTrue, and I have to confess that I've always been almost addicted to the voice of the person who does the intros and outros, with its deep calm timbre. It turns out that person, Tami Simon, is the founder, and although her blog isn't always as full of light as these dharma talks, I'm very delighted to find the name to match with this soothing voice.

AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War
(Tom McNichol, 6:29)
This was a good book on Edison, in his battle against AC (with Nikolai Tesla guest-starring, and revealed to be a former Edison employee). The biography of Edison I read this summer had none of this dirty business, for example, the dogs and other animals (including a Coney Island elephant) electrocuted in pseudo-scientific experiments aimed to demonstrate that DC was safer. That particular part was too gruesome to endure. The story moves quickly, and even includes an epilogue discussing current standard wars, e.g., DVD vs. Blu ray. The author explains that Sony's BetaMax lost to VHS because it couldn't fit 2 hours on one cassette.

Ubik
(Philip K. Dick, 7:08)
This is now my favorite Dick novel. It doesn't always make sense, but it certainly gives a great trip around the space time warps. (It's future takes place in 1992, when people travel to Mars, and psychics are significant workers). Very humorous-- read only as directed.

Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace
(Ayelet Waldman, 200pp)
The wife of Michael Chabon, Waldman is his shadow: Where he is endlessly genial and too-good-to-be-true, sensitive and wistful, her great strength is speaking the stuff that's off-putting, awkward, effortfully grating. Her prose is light and well-phrased (e.g., her succinct description of her female friends' having "more education than they can currently use.") I gobbled this up, and found her discussions very piercing. I particularly liked the last chapters, which touch on how she wrestled with aborting a baby diagnosed with genetic anomalies, her fear of being crazy and passing that on to her kids, and the troubles experienced in having kids with learning disabilities. Footnote: Here's the article from March 2005 where she confessed to loving her husband more than her kids.

Confessions of an opium eater
(Thomas De Quincey, 3:30)
The ur-Junkie tale. It's not proto-Burroughs, but there's still a dedicated attempt to tear away the pretense of politeness. Some interesting psychology, and well balanced speculation, but not enough about life on the skids.

The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America
(Steven Johnson, 6:06)
I'm a big fan of the way Johnson writes, and the topic of Joseph Priestley's life makes for a great bundle of interesting strands: Enlightenment experimental science, the conviviality of the coffee house, the critique of supernaturalism that drove Unitarianism, as well as the way America managed to be a refuge for JP when he was ostracized in England for his religious and political views.

Hiding Man: A biography of Donald Barthelme
(Tracy Daugherty, 592pp)
I've been noshing on this for the last few months, and it really delivers a vivid picture of the life of one of my favorite writers. The author was a student of DB's, and the comments he makes about significant stories and the novels are very penetrating, without ever being pedantic. DB's life was sad, and the alcoholism laid him low before he was 60 (he died of throat cancer, which neither smoking nor drinking could have helped). The book studies with great insight his relationship to the New Yorker: he worked steadily to give it golden eggs, and even still, he was often in arrears, owing the White Man money for advances. His editor, surprising to me, was Roger Angell, and at times, his pieces were rejected. There's a great sense of the sadness, and the charisma. I personally wish there'd have been a little more psychodrama on the quality of his tense relationship to his father, but that topic wasn't skimped, just treated with tact.

Neutral Color Schemes
(Alice Buckley, 256pp)
I thought this might be a bone I could throw my wife, who lives in a more subdued esthetic realm. I'd much prefer Mediterranean palettes.

The Women
(T.C. Boyle, 18:23)
Very engrossing, but like 2008's less involving Loving Frank, the tactic of portraying Frank Lloyd Wright involves not directly looking at his face. By refracting his genius through the women he loved, there's less hubris (only Ayn Rand aspired to outstrip FLLW with her fictional Roark). The motto that opens this book is a very apposite aphorism: "Early in my life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose arrogance." This is one of Boyle's better historical novels. My favorite of his remains The Road to Wellville, but he displays a great talent for exploring the snarls of romantic attachment. The narrative approach here is somewhat akin to the path inside the Guggenheim that I ended up taking during the recent exhibit about Wright. I went up to the 6th floor, and strolled downward, starting at the end of his life and moving back toward the origin.

Inherent Vice
(Thomas Pynchon, 14:31, stopped after 10 hours)
Not bad, and even somewhat interesting to watch Pynchon do a lighter, less heavily structured novel. There's some amusing pot jokes, a vibe of the 1960s (haunted by Manson family allusions). In many ways, it feels like a THC version of the LSD tinged Lot 49. I didn't quit this novel, I just stopped returning to follow the shaggy tail.

Tough times, Great Travels
(Peter Greenberg, 182pp)
Worth a scan, but not presented in an order/organization that makes the tips accessible in just-in-time fashion. There were some tips on flying alternate airline connections (e.g., fly from LAX to London on Air New Zealand). In Sausalito, look for Caledonia street.

The Adderall Diaries
(Stephen Elliott, 224 pp)
I didn't read all of this but I jumped around, looking for the naughty bits. Since my understanding of the S/M scene is not based on first hand experience, I wanted to learn more about how that subculture works. I was also hooked in by the connection to the sociopath, Hans Reiser. This book was sent to me in a round-robin of postal mail sharing of an author's pre-press copy, and that personal connection made reading this more fun.

Culinary artistry
(Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, 426pp)
Like the Flavor Bible, a more recent work which I read before tracking down the earlier 1996 tome. This has a similar organization, a thesaurus of flavors, with "flavor pals" and "flavor enemies" getting the same typographic layout for suggesting themes, rather than simply algorithms. It's a "pattern library" for foodies.

60 Stories
(Donald Barthelme, 16:46)
What a sublime treat, to ramble around in the beautiful world of Barthelme's select stories. This comes recorded from a new series (Audible Modern Vanguard), which records lapsed work from two of my favorite authors, B & B (Barthelme and Bellow). I listened to this collection twice, and virtually within each story, I encountered demonstrations of how perfectly his ear was tuned for the felicities and infelicities of our language. I have a deeper sense for how revealing he actually was, encrypting his life on a sandwich board that he paraded up and down the Village streets; for the last month or so I've been reading his biography, Hiding Man, each night before bed, and it heightens my awareness for how much of a struggle his work was. He crafted so many beautiful objects, each a jewel to behold. Of course, there's anger, hurt, frustration, but even when the mood is dark, the language is lambent.

Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind (abridged)
(Daniel Tammet, 10:54)
Gifted with an amazing mind, and a gentle spirit, Daniel Tammet discusses a wide range of interesting psychological topics. His expository style is very lucid, and even when he criticizes another writer, he does it with kindness. One real keeper (worthy of being added as a node in wikipedia) concerns his treatment of Oliver Sacks' story about autistic twins (which fed directly into the Rain Man script). According to Sacks, the twins mainly spoke to one another by exchanging 4 digit primes. He recorded their miraculous subitizing of the entire contents of a matchbox, which when it was knocked to the floor, caused both twins to shout "111." Tammet points out how nearly impossible it would be to accurately count this many falling matches; it's much more plausible, he notes, that the twins had primed the box by keeping only 111 matches in it, since that number is so "match-like" to Tammet, and quite plausibly, to the twins as well. Rather than the miracle of counting the sticks instantaneously, he gives a much better explanation. He also raises a serious question about Sacks' veracity in claiming to have brought a book to the twins that contained 10 to 20 digit primes. For those who enjoyed this work, as well as Tammet's autobiography, Born on a Blue Day, I'd recommend a scan of Tyler Cowen's recent Create Your Own Economy, which sustains a very attractive vision of what we can gain from respecting neurodiversity.

Create your own economy
(Tyler Cowen, 7;37)
This is the second consecutive book of Tyler's that I've pre-ordered on Amazon, and I think it is even better than his last book. The unifying themes seem to mystify many who attempt a description of the wide ranging coverage, but I'd hazard a summary thus: 1- Neurodiversity, with particular attention to the Asperger continuum, suggests that many cognitive styles come with special advantages; while there's no exact description of what characterizes Asperger-ish styles, the tendency to generate an order on some specialized domain is key. 2- From the vantage of interiority, the subjective experience of feasting on information, there's a huge win today in the generation of nuggets mined and distilled to brief moments. 3- With great compassion and equanimity, Tyler advocates a kinder re-assessment of the drift toward info-gluttony (he uses the term 'infovore', although I wish he had adopted George Miller's older neologism 'informavore'). For those seeking more information about how an Asperger mind perceives the world, read Daniel Tammet's new book, Embracing the Wide Sky.

The crying of Lot 49
(Thomas Pynchon, 6:19)
I often recommend this as the entry drug for getting to appreciate Pynchon. I've long enjoyed the "rich chocolatey goodness" of this psychedelic trip. It is a little thinner in its hooks than my memory had made it, but it is still a fun spin, and a warmup lap for the new Pynchon that's just out but unread.

Only 127 Things You Need
(Donna Wilkinson, 380pp)
Magazine pabulum parading as an instruction book. It's not even concise, so that it fails to live up to its claimed inspiration, a brief notice in the New Yorker about how to simplify and streamline the preparation of a summer wardrobe. There's nothing insightful or original. On diet, e.g., who would think the USDA food pyramid should be consulted for guidance? The importance of stress reduction and good sleep habits are repeated in several different places.

Extreme Ice Now
(James Balog, 120pp)
Scary photographs about the absconding ice caps, and a fascinating narrative about the work this National Geographic photographer has done to set up and observe the Extreme Ice Survey(EIS).

Amerika: The Missing Person
(Franz Kafka, 9:37)
This is the new translation by Mark Harmon. It definitely has sparks of brilliance (for example, the Stoker, which is the opening chapter, and was published as a stand alone story in 1913). But it is not nearly as intensely involving as either the Trial or the Castle, both of which are truly sublime. This work seems more akin to juvenilia, although I don't know the whole back story of where it stands in relation to his other works. (Go trek off to Wikipedia to learn more than I know about this.)

Novel destinations : literary landmarks from Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West
(Shannon McKenna Schmidt & Joni Rendon, 368pp)
Fun, and sort of interesting, but not sufficiently nerdy. Sure, it covers Bloomsday in Dublin, and points to Bath for Jane Austen, but I wish it would go crunky (or is that crunki-pedia?) and detail things such as PKD's birthplace, and where to find places mentioned in Gravity's Rainbow. Or even, Mrs Dalloway's walk. Still, this book turned me on to the Dashiell Hammett tour, and SF literary walks. As the authors appear to be staff on National Geographic, their tastes are middle-brow. The Dickensian (with only one K) was pretty rich.

Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (33 1/3 series)
(Jim Fusilli, 2:47)
Given that the album (not a CD when published in 1966) is just an hour long, it's odd to listen to a rock critic perseverate for almost 3 hours about how significant this work is. I did like this summation, "The writer Nik Cohn once called Pet Sounds a collection of 'sad songs about happiness'" (p107) Rock criticism is probably the most depraved line for earning an income (and David Hadju gets the innermost rung for being a stinker), but I found this halfway engaging. There was too much about the author -- I asked myself more than once while listening to this, Who the hell is this no name? But, on the eve of Tisha B'av, I did finish this.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
(Haruki Murakami, 4;25)
This book was wrapped up exactly 2 years ago, and one year ago, I heard Murakami talk during his recognition for the Berkeley Prize. The most memorable lines from his Berkeley talk were about his physical exercise regime. This collection of essays about his training, running, and participation in triathlons contains some interesting thoughts. Most pithy: "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional." I find Murakami's personality somewhat blank, presenting a visage similar to that of an anime character.

Edison: A life of invention
(Paul Israel, 23 hours)
Very interesting. Edison was a work-horse, with a great deal of curiosity, whose mind was wide ranging enough that he earned the nickname "Hugo" as a kid for reading the novels of Victor Hugo. He had indefatigable energies, as well as a great deal of confidence in his ability to invent his way out of any corner. This book documents his capacity to set up the first industrial research lab, his attitude toward building an industry (rather than an isolated invention), and his role in electrifying America, the invention of the light bulb, phonograph, and moving pictures. Some of the author's choices mystify me; the book opens with a discursus on Edison's attitude about the deity, and there's also not a single word about Tesla. Nevertheless, the book has a great topic, and much of the writing is lucid and exciting. Here's some memorable quotes:
At the core of his strategy was an abiding faith that he could produce technology superior to any competitor's and thus beat anyone in the long run. This was particularly evident in his views on patent infringement suits; he consistently aruged against bring such suits as they 'would require me to give my personal attention to the matter & take me off other far more important work, besides involving us in a great deal of expense & giving our opponents a notoriety which it is hardly desirable they should gain at our expense... When they affect our business then we shall reason to sue them but so long as their work is conducive to their own ruin I see no reason for attacking them." (p209)
even so simple an instrument as an unproved flat-iron involves a certain amount of explanation by an 'expert' before it can be intelligently introduced into domestic use (p287)
Edison listened by placing his head against the phonograph and by biting into the wood with his teeth to hear faint sounds... It is striking that a man who had become extremely hard of hearing would set himself up as the sole arbiter of the artists and music to be recorded for his discs (pp435-36)

Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation
(Helen McCarthy, 240pp)
Published in 1999, this book is a primer of Miyazaki's pre-Millenial work, and covers Nausicaa and Totoro. I paged through this, to learn more about the Master in advance of his interview, which was held Saturday night following his recognition by being handed a bag of bucks for the Berkeley Prize. I can't say this book made me want to see Nausicaa, nor did it re-interpret Totoro to overthrow my own doubts about the work's capacity to appeal to me (although I did learn that Kurosawa listed Totoro as one of the 100 greatest films (Score one for the internet-- I just located Kurosawa's entire list).

100 words almost everyone mispronounces
(editors of the American Heritage dictionaries, 118 pp)
Even though there are no amazing boners revealed here, it's fun to scan the etymological spelunking that uncovers a preferred pronunciation. Add to that the notes on how the tide changes over time, and you have a fun little book on pronunciation.

Asterios Polyp
(David Mazzuchelli, 300 pp, read half-- About a month later I finished this, but the 2nd half didn't change my view of the book.)
I went to MOCCA this night and listened to the author discuss his work. After a while, my lack of expertise in the world of graphic novels drove me to slip away from the fan base, and I stood in a corner reading the first 150 pp of this book. There's definitely some visual rewards, and there's an allure in the conceit of the central character as a "paper architect" who has never had a single building constructed. I found the verbal exchanges not as sharp as I'd want from a novel, but then again, who'd trust Helen Keller as film critic?

The flavor bible : the essential guide to culinary creativity, based on the wisdom of America's most Imaginative chefs
(Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, 392pp)
This book caught my eye, since it offers good combinations, rather than recipes. I paged through, and was esp'ly interested in foods I eat frequently (blueberries, as one example). There's a list of dozens of flavors that chefs across the country have combined with blueberries. When a flavor is bolded (as cinnamon is for bluebs), then it is a recurrent favorite. A very interesting way into experimenting with taste combinations. The one limitation of the book seemed to be that many chefs would make almost the same comment, showing what a small world the culinary universe actually is.

FREE
(Chris Anderson, 6:58)
Worth every penny, and more (since the audiobook was free). This is much more interesting that Anderson's blook, The Long Tail, which failed to be more than a magazine charticle. Free tours the range of ways that businesses have already dealt with falling prices, and methods that enable cross-subsidies to sustain the free business. The details are quite thought provoking (e.g., there's a store in Tokyo's Harujuku neighborhood where shoppers get everything for free, but you have to join a club to shop there, and most businesses extract valuable market research reactions from the people who get free items there).

The Return of Depression Economics
(Paul Krugman, 6:33)
Pretty interesting tour of some of the ways that the Asian crashes and Japan's crunch were not just a fluke, as they provide insight into what we are going through this century. Even though Krugman uses the Baby sitter pool as an intuition pump, I still feel that most of the problems ripping through our economy right now remain ill-understood.

Night of the Gun
(David Carr, 10 hours out of the 13:28)
Kind of interesting, but really, just another drugged narrative. As one of Carr's friends told him, Sure, that story's been told before, but not by you. I read a lot of this because I wondered if it would hit some shit storm of intensity. I can't recommend this, although my interest was held for most of the tale.

Nobody Move
(Denis Johnson, 4:24)
Tight, fascinating, and the Johnson-ian (Denisian) approach to losers, scum of the earth, and the way that the lives of the same shimmer. The first sentence invokes what it must feel like to be in war (a light nod to Johnson's last book, the amazing Tree of Smoke). This was great. I have to get and read Jesus Son.

The Year of Living Biblically
(A.J. Jacobs, 14:33)
Great and truly funny tour of what would be entailed by living according to the literal tenets of the Bible. Jacobs opens with a great line, that his family was Jewish in the same way that the Olive Tree is an Italian restaurant. He undertakes a year long quest, spending the first 8 months in accord with the Hebrew Bible (making him a sort of nonce Karaite, since he is not Orthodox, ignoring the rabbinical tradition). He aims to live by all the precepts and explicit exhortations, including those from Psalms and anything else in the Bible. The last 4 months, this descendant of the Vilna Gaon explores Christianity, not so much by believing in it, but trying to see what they see.

Rudyard Kipling
(Andrew Lycett, 30 hours, flagged after 8)
Somewhat interesting to know about this little man, but not so compelling that I could make it through.

2666
(Roberto Bolaño, punted after 7;47 -- full length is more than 30 hours)
I was tempted by the paper bolus, Savage Detectives, but here's the latest as an audible book. Tyler Cowen praised this highly, but he reads faster than I do, and even teaches Saramago's Blindness, which I found unpalatable. Bolaño is literarily mad, and apparently believed that literary movements were worth thinking about, forming, and devising plots that incorporate such high brow frats. I didn't find the tale sufficiently engaging, didn't care much about the characters, and couldn't bring myself to slog on after the first audio blob was ticked off.

Rapt
(Winifred Gallagher, 7;50)
As someone who wrestles with his careening attention as it collides with its own omnivorous curiosity, I gobbled this up. I even listened to the good parts twice. The essence of stoicism (esp'ly as updated by Albert Ellis) is the thesis that you control what you attend to in your experience. I enjoyed every chpter, except the one devoted to Ellen Langer, whose later research I have less than zero confidence in, since I know her to be very opportunistic and un-principled about how she spins her tales. Nevertheless, even the Langer-ian tales support Gallagher's general argument that it's crucial that we learn to master our attention. In her chapter on ADHD, she tosses out the idea that it may have as many different underlying diseases as epilepsy, which she reports can be caused by over 200 distinct causes. (Wikipedia says "There are over 40 different types of epilepsy", but either number highlights how we can be tricked to call a heterogeneous class by a single term).

San Francisco art deco
(Michael F. Crowe and Robert W. Bowen, 100pp)
More Arcadia press, and rather un-even. The collection of photos is worth paging through, but there's no strong sense of a curatorial vision, and no cumulative impact. The spread on Coit Tower is interesting, with details on the WPA murals within.

How Life Imitates Chess
(Garry Kasparov, 6;41)
Interesting enough to listen to on a cross-country flight. This book tries to finesse a hard problem, namely that surely almost everything known by the highest rated Grand Master in chess is so technical that it would be impossible to convey without a vast amount of detail about the game. Kasparov opts for a very high level summary, and the tales of his epic battles with Karpov give a lot of psychologically compelling detail, without diving into the intricacies of the board. I admire him as a critic of Putin, and since this book was completed in 2006, it closes with comments on the dark political climate in Russia.

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.