Prospect Park West
(Amy Sohn, stopped after 6 CDs)
Lots of sex, schadenfreude, and snark. Initially a guilty pleasure, but after a few rounds, the characters never become real people, the arch tone and bitchy perspective began to wear.

Changing My Mind
(Zadie Smith, 12:27 -- punted after four or 5 essays)
Some of these essays I have enjoyed immensely when I came across them in the NYRB. But for some reason, my attention was not at all held by these as an audible experience.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
(Daniel Okrent, 9:30)
Very nice history of a bad bad time. The take away facts that really shock: The US formerly was funded almost entirely by taxes on alcohol; the idea of Prohibition was only envisioned after the income tax was established. The role of Frances Willard, Carrie Nation and Mabel Walker Willebrandt left me wishing that someone would out these amazing dynamos (but apparently, wikipedia already does document Willard's sapphic side).

This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
(Carmen Reinhart & Ken Rogoff, 496pp)
Uh-oh, spaggheti-o. This time is the same as ever, and we're screwed.

Omega Point
(Don DeLillo, 2:47)
The last novel(la) of DeLillo's I felt I remotely understood was Cosmopolis. The Body Artist and Falling Man have wonderful sentences, but there's no gestalt there for me. This latest worries about topics such as the Iraq war, the Omega Point of Teilhard de Chardin (transformed by DeLillo's character into a desire for all life to be obliterated into mere matter), and the experience of art.

Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share
(Ken Denmead, 240pp)
Not really that awesome. Not even as much fun as the blog from whence it sprung. Here's the only chapters I even thought were worth reading: Model building with cake (and puffed rice + marshmallow). Pirate Cartography. Magic Swing (folding the pages together of 2 phone books). Best Slip 'N Slide Ever (really?)

The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive
(John Graham-Cumming, 544pp)
Very cool, fun, and no baloney. The book is filled out with expository essays on relevant aspects of each dweeby locale. First rate fun to page through.

Beckett in 90 Minutes
(Paul Strathern, 115 minutes)
This volume is actually worth the time it takes to hear. Unlike the 90 minute Wittgenstein, which I thought was a sham, this analysis used a very suave hand to move between Beckett's life and work, and the instances of biography all illuminated the thought and texture of his art.

Seeds : time capsules of life
(Rob Kesseler & Wolfgang Stuppy ; edited by Alexandra Papadakis)
Beautiful photos. And unlike the later published, The Bizarre & Incredible World of Plants, this actually has the photos labelled on the page. It's not quite as wide ranging, but it covers much the same ground.

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
(John Heilemann, 9 hours of 14)
This book enables news junkies to freebase the back story of the 2008 race. The version I had abruptly ended at the point that Sarah Palin gave her "hockey mom" speech. I'm not sorry to abort in midstream. The icky John Edwards' tale was abundantly quoted in the press at the book's launch. The insanity of Palin, unfortunately, is not something I could look away from if it were available, so I'm grateful that this bag of salty potato chips was dragged away.

50 Favorite Rooms by Frank Lloyd Wright
(Diane Maddex, 128pp)
Not a success photographically, since very few of the photos of buildings evoke places I've visited (e.g., Robie House, Hanna House, Morris Gift Shop, FLlW Studio and Home). It's probably very difficult to convey the space from the flat image. One other question: Hey, what's with the gaudy coloring that Wright used for curtains in his Hillside Theater? I got to see the actual object at the Guggenheim's 50th, and the color scheme still jangles.

Distraction
(Bruce Sterling, 120 out of 532pp)
Fascinating little sacks of prophetic insights and observations, wrapped up as a novel published in 1998. The government's broke, the military has to resort to road stop "bake sales" to fund themselves, there's so much biotech knowledge that huge squads of unemployed just rove the terrain, extracting food as they go. Buildings are programmed to almost self-assemble, with just a little help from humans who get directions from the bricks themselves. This is really fun, but also a bit of a vice. The love angle is the least fleshed out/plausible, which is what caused my interest to flag (or did I just succumb to small 'd' distraction?) Here's one little oddment: The main character could be a transmogrified Steve Jobs, and in the novel is a mutant adoptee who's had three bouts with liver cancer. A lot of fun, and I will pack this for future camping trips to fall back into.

Venice Queen of the Seas
(Thomas Madden, 7:43)
Very pedestrian lecturer, with almost no flair for anecdote, psychology, synthesis, or summary. Nevertheless, the city itself is so alluring that I listened to the entire tale. His pronunciation of so many Italian words is so specious that it undercuts one's sense that he actually knows how to speak Italian. Favorite factoid that will stay with me: That the word "Mediterranean" meant "middle of the earth."

Business Stripped Bare
(Richard Branson, 12:23)
This probably isn't the way to be introduced to Branson, but it still shows the manic intensity and zeal for fun he puts into his life. I stopped after 10 hours, because the prose isn't particularly engaging, and the lessons learned start to recur: Be Committed to Give Value, Be Ambitious, Develop a reputation for a superior experience.

Speed the Plow
(David Mamet, 1:21)
An interesting little tour of the rung of hell denominated Hollywood producer. Jeff Goldblum was the head weasel.

Ulysses
(James Joyce, 47 hours; paused at Chapter 13)
It's been 6 years since I last concelebrated Bloomsday by listening or reading Joyce. This time, I was curious just how much I could enjoy the book sheerly as A novel, rather than THE novel. The characters are rich, the story line engages, and the language delights.

Hitch 22
(Christopher Hitchens, 20 hours)
Fairly interesting, esp'ly as it was narrated by the author. I could not listen at double speed, because Hitchens has a sort of low-volume mumbly accent, which made it a challenge to attend to all the nuance at higher than spoken word speed. After all his flips and flops, I don't see why he would trust his own judgment at all. He does have a powerful urge to be pugnacious, a nicely refined wit, and an esthetically evolved capacity to appreciate the absurd. Most of the leftist arguments he espoused seem bizarre to me, no less than the advocacy for militaristic attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. His love for friends, esp'ly Martin Amis, shines through.

Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure, and Lessons Learned
(Stephen Heller, 224pp)
A slender book, without enough specificity on the screwups to make it possible to learn much from. I also didn't encounter any really sharp demonstrations of how the failures or fiascos were educational. I'd recommend hearing Merlin Mann narrate his experience with "The Perfect Apostrophe" instead. Or just repeat Samuel Beckett's lines: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Worstward Ho!)

Go Outside!: Over 130 Activities for Outdoor Adventures
(Nancy Blakey, 144pp)
Worth scanning. I experimented through several trials to make the popcorn in tinfoil (p45), and although it was fun, the page of steps was not KlutzTM level of detail to make the output a compelling alternative to just popping on a little stove.

Wittgenstein in 90 minutes
(Paul Strathern, 76 min)
Pretty slim volume. A huge amount of the "90" (ahem, 76 including pointless appendices covering the history of philosophy and Wittgenstein's chronology) is gossip. Granted, gossip about Wittgenstein can be quite fascinating, but devoting so much time to his life does zilch to advance any understanding of his ideas. Not unpleasant, but also not at all illuminating. Note: Wikiquotes has a much better tour of Wittgenstein's quotability at
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee
(Sarah Silverman, 240pp)
A pleasure (guilty? nah) to read, and also a breeze to finish. Her book starts very well, where she opens: "When I selected myself to write the foreword for my book, I was flattered, and deeply moved." Her intelligence shines through, and although she apologizes for never having been molested or incestuously involved with her own father, the revelations are funny and interesting. I particularly enjoyed her philosophy of "Make it a treat" -- "MIAT ... encourages you to keep the special things in life special." (p95) Her quotes from her adolescent diary do justify her aphorism, "If life is a meal, then diaries are the toilets in which we shit out its vile remnants." (p136)

Although of course you end up becoming yourself
(David Lipsky & David Foster Wallace, 10:42)
This book, while annoying at times, was not insufferably irritating, which is how I have to describe some of DFW's own work, particularly Infinite Jest, but also his book on transfinite set theory. The interviewer, David Lipsky, is a douchebag, a whisker less irritating than David Hadju, but still, an asswipe who has actually beefed up his presence in this posthumous transcription of a 5 day interview with DFW. One very revealing statement made by DFW: "I don't mind appearing in Rolling Stone, but I don't want to appear in Rolling Stone as somebody who wants to be in Rolling Stone." Why couldn't he allow himself to take pleasure, publicly, in the acts that privately gave him some pleasure? It turns out, from listening to this, that DFW actually did pose, really did posture, and that he occasionally recognized how distorted he was by his need to appear smart. Ultimately, that helps explain what can be so irritating in his writing, the drive to sound smart; worse, his attempt to overcome it by attributing intelligence to others was a second order distortion, since it's damaging to true empathy to imply that the way to redemptively portray ordinary people is by boosting their IQs. DFW cops to having been obstreperous in his youthful fights with editors, and ultimately, that character flaw is almost sadder than the drive to be a genius which forced him to murder himself.

Hubble: Imaging Space and Time
(David Devorkin & Robert Smith, 224pp)
Amazing images, and a great account of the technology that launched the original HST. I particularly appreciated the clear explanation of the imperfection of the main mirror. I'd always associated Hubble with its fiasco launch, but the story behind the failure is fascinating. There was a "null-detector" device that analyzed the shape of the mirror, comparing its optics with the model, and when there was no difference between the model and the mirror, the null detector confirmed that the mirror was perfect. Alas, the sensor device (the null detector) had been misassembled, so it introduced a distortion that was recognized almost immediately after it began sending images. Three years later (1993), the mirror was corrected by attaching a mirror that exactly reversed the distortion. The contrast between images before and after the correction are astonishing. And of course, the images that have streamed since 1993 have deepened my sense of awe at the complexity of the universe. The images included in this book repay constant study.

Country Music: The Masters
(Marty Stuart, 384pp)
I picked this book up from the library because it promised some photos of country music stars. I didn't realize that the photographer was himself a very accomplished musician, who began playing with Lester Flatt when he was only 14 years old. Since Stuart was a musician, he had access to people that appears more natural. Once I understood how he had photographed the people he worked alongside of, the gaps omitting some musicians of stature is explained. His notes about the images are charming and humble; I haven't yet listened to the accompanying CD which includes his own stories about the photos.

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity
(Michael Lewis, 14:08)
1987, 1997, 2000, and 2007 - four crashes worth revisiting. Michael Lewis has done the editorial work to collect newsy stories just before or after each crash. The prediction, in 1987, that the crash would wipe out yuppies, proves to be the most laughable prediction. Pretty interesting, although the latest crash doesn't require the same archival support for context.

The Bizarre & Incredible World of Plants
(Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler, Madeline Harley, 144pp)
My one peeve is that the labels for all the beautiful microscopic images are pushed to an appendix, so that one has to jump to the back to find out what is depicted. Since over half the pages don't even have page numbers, this task of decryption is extra hard. I wish that the authors would have found a design method for including a modest amount of identifying text on the page with each image. This quibble, notwithstanding, the book is a joy to page through, and repays frequent returns to study the unusual shapes of each surface.

What the Dog Saw and other adventures
(Malcolm Gladwell, 12:48)
This collection of Gladwell's favorite New Yorker pieces is interesting, but as the Yiddish saying goes, even kreplach one can eat too much. Gladwell is a very good story teller, but his handling of data is a little loose. He goes from "high correlations" (which would be on the order of .7 or so) to treating a relationship as if it's an identity, and then stacks up inferences built on chains of such plausibilities. In his piece on Nassim Taleb, I heard him read the phrase "igon value" for which Steven Pinker named his overarching critique of Gladwell's method. Besides the surprise that such a lapse occurred, it undermined the idea that New Yorker fact checkers do more than match phonemes. But here's a reference showing that the spelling was correct in the New Yorker, at least in their digital archive. But in Gladwell's own archive of his work, it's spelled igon. So, he likely used his text, rather than the one corrected by the New Yorker, for his book.

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons & True Stories, vol 1
(ed by Ivan Brunetti, 400pp)
I had seen this when it first came out, but only because of my great love for vol 2 did I try to scrounge this up to re-examine. I don't think it's as compelling and interesting as vol 2, in part because it has to cover much more hallowed ground, and so, doesn't show as much odd, crinkly, unusual material. It still succeeds in displaying great artistry in the editing, as there's a smooth flow between distinct artists. Yet, it's not eye-opening, and it much more likely that a reader has already read the artists collated here.

The Lynda Barry Experience
(Lynda Barry, 2 cassette sides)
It's always a good time to listen to Lynda Barry, before you "go out there and have your own experience." Amazing glimpses of what complex outgoing phone messages she crafted (perhaps during the era when Ira Glass was her frustrated genius boyfriend?).

The Sibley guide to trees
(David Sibley, written and illustrated by, 426pp)
Amazing and interesting book. The most lucid and helpful explanation I've ever encountered of how to identify and distinguish trees.

The lost books of the Odyssey
(Zachary Mason, 4:43)
Amazing re-animation of the Odyssey, without even once nodding to Joyce. I first read the opening chapters on paper, and was dazzled. I had to return the book before I'd gotten too far, but now that it's audible, I got a second chance to savor it. Oddly, the audible version leaves out the forward, where Mason discusses his archeo-cryptographic tricks for extracting these stories. Mason reminded me at times of Italo Calvino, esp'ly Invisible Cities, but Mason's taste is impeccable, whereas Calvino often had to fight against becoming a parody of his own talent for pastiche.

Portable Dorothy Parker
(Dorothy Parker, 15 hours - only read a couple of hours)
If this is portable, why is it 15 hours? Her work has never been out of print, but I found the stories at the opening too depressing to forge on.

Wild Child
(T.C. Boyle, 10:22)
Good, but suffers by comparison with his early stories, which impressed me more. Listening to Boyle read his own words is a real pleasure. His accent is interesting. His pronunciation of "Manichean" struck me as uniquely his own (Ma-nick-i-an).

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons & True Stories, vol 2
(ed by Ivan Brunetti, 400pp)
Delightful, nearly perfect. Ivan Brunetti has curated a marvelous range of artists, laid out with acute sensitivity. His 3 issues of Schizo were the most interesting and complex comics I have ever read, and this volume gives a great guide to his own formative influences.

Eating Animals
(Jonathan Safran Foer, 10:13)
First book of his that I finished (although if I could find the collection he put together while he was an undergrad on Joseph Cornell, I would likely finish that too). Very thoughtful, supremely un-tendentious analysis of factory farming, and how it impacts the workers, the environment, the hot zone of virus contagion, as well as a moral assessment of how much suffering is required to put birds and fish on our plates. I finished listening to this while shopping at Safeway for lamb chops and chicken. Very little was said about lamb in the book, but the chicken tales nauseate. I think the one response I have to all this uncomfortable information is that it is odd to spend so much time thinking about animals. For a withering view of those too empathic of animals to care about people, see Mike Leigh's BBC Play Nuts in May. I don't dispute that the arguments and reflections that JSFoer mobilizes weigh on all who pursue gustatory pleasures over moral decisions. I do wish that there was less suffering. But there's a serious risk of sanctimoniousness for those who aspire to have no negative footprint on the planet.

The adventures of Baron Munchausen
(Raspe, illustrations by Gustave Doré, 206pp)
This ancient book, with a very complex provenance, is not quite as good as the Terry Gilliam film that inspired me to read it. I may have had some vague awareness of Munchausen due to reading Kierkegaard. The prose is florid, and deliberately ridiculous.

Philosophical Baby
(Alison Gopnik, paused after first chapter)
I was wary, since Susan Carey's philandering with philosophy has not resulted in much more than phlogiston. But I listened to the first chapter, on children's capacity to handle counterfactuals, and Gopnik's treatment is lucid, entertaining, and unpretentious. I will now track down the remainder of this book on paper (the first chapter was a free audible)

The Irresistible Henry House: A Novel
(Lisa Grunwald, stopped after first chapter)
Fun premise: Home economics classes in the 30s at Cornell used to have a 'practice' baby, loaned from an orphanage. This novel jumps off from this fact, and while it may have been promising, the first chapter lacked any real zest.

Don't Bite the Hook: Finding Freedom from Anger, Resentment, and Other Destructive Emotions
(Pema Chodron, 3:03)
Interesting to hear Pema talk, interleaved with passages from Shanti Deva's verses. I plan to listen to it once more [just did on 4/19]. The very first verse is piercing: "Good works, gathered in a thousand ages, such as deeds of generosity or offerings to the blissful ones, a single flash of anger shatters them." There's an online translation of this work, but it's not as well-translated as the one in the audiobook. One of the things I studied the first time I listened, even though it comes in at the level of guru fascination, was whether she was able to smoothly and personably share the stage with the person assigned to read the poet's verses. My immediate impression was that, in handling this, she was not perfectly soft in giving the speaker the direction to resume reading. On the 2nd listen, this didn't seem at all prominent. It's not simple to hand off the mike to another reader, but I don't think there was anything unsoft or imperious about her manner.

The Colonel and Little Missie
(Larry McMurtry, 7;22)
This book definitively establishes that I'll read anything by McMurtry. It was moderately interesting to learn about 2 of the early stars, when no real star system existed. But I don't have a very clear sense of Annie Oakley, except as a modest sharp shooter, who advocated that all women should learn to handle rifles, nor does my image of Buffalo Bill burn much brighter than as a handsome guy who drank a lot and was exploited by his management.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
(Stieg Larsson, listened to 3 out of 13 CDs)
I aspire to be able to read a mystery, and surrender to the fantasy, even if it's roughly sketched. But I lacked the momentum to care about the murder of an imaginary being, with frills placed into a locked box conundrum.

Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Hou
(William T. Vollmann, skimmed 528pp)
I paged through this, while at Moe's to listen to Vollmann read from/talk about his latest book. I have always wanted to know if he considered himself a graphomaniac, but in the Q&A, he denied that the label fits. I had to agree that this latest work is practically a mere pamphlet, considering his oeuvre. Still, he flails away for hundreds of pages trying to make sense of something (in this latest book, it's "What is a woman?"). I don't really consider his obsessive M.O. to be very successful. In this book, there's a spreadsheet, for god's sake, that includes quotes from Japanese plays where the text either shows attributes of beauty or ugliness. I think of this as rather undigested. He also mentioned at Moe's that he liked being able to tax-deduct time spent dancing with Geisha's; I asked "just how expensive are Geishas?", to which he revealed that they're about one to three thousand dollars an hour. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised to learn that, while touring for Infinite Jest, DFW confessed to David Lipsky: "I’ve got my weird neuroses. Like I’m totally — I had this huge inferiority complex where William Vollmann’s concerned. Because he and I’s first books came out at the same time. And I even once read a Madison Smartt Bell essay, where he used me, and my “slender output,” and the inferiority of it, to talk about, you know, how great Vollmann is."

Behind the Pink Curtain
(Jasper Sharp, 415pp)
I paged through this (well, mostly just looking at the photos. This sufficed to persuade me that I'm not missing out on a neglected form of pornography.

Soren Kierkegaard, Various Readings
(Various, 4:27)
This is a curious collection from Librivox. Someone has stitched together a bunch of public domain essays that discuss Kierkegaard. It's odd and somewhat interesting to read what people thought of SK ninety to one hundred years ago (he died in 1855). None of the essays are great, and only small snippets of SK's work get quoted-- I'm not sure when he was first translated into English, but would imagine it's around the 1950s. I did like hearing the pronunciation of his first name as "Sirren."

Outliers
(Malcolm Gladwell, 7:18)
A bouquet of bon-bons. The thesis, that superstars have environmental exposure that builds on native talent, is best argued regarding Canadian hockey players. The case of the Beatles (who cranked for a year in Germany) is never analyzed by contrasting their experience with that of the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan. The elevation of Bill Gates into a mystical PC trio also including Steve Jobs and Bill Joy is pretty lame, even though it's interesting to note that being born in '55 was a great year to catch the wave.

The Checklist Manifesto
(Atul Gawande, 6:13)
I admire Gawande's writing almost as much as our president Obama does. I thought this book might not be too exciting, since the topic is so patently obvious, viz., that human performance can be dramatically improved by formulating succinct checklists for crucial decision nodes. Once I started listening, however, the author's incisive observations, as well as his attempt to generalize the relevance by looking afar (at the Cambridge restaurant Rialto, e.g., or hedge fund investors who've checklisted key ) made the story flow. It's actually quite a fascinating subject. I've flown in planes and helicopters with Philip Greenspun, and I had myself noted how useful it is for pilots to handily go through quick checklists. But I'd also assumed that such tools would crush the spontaneity of the activity. Gawande does note how resistant professionals are to checklist; the goal is not to routinize every single dimension of the choice, but rather to make sure that crucial points are kept ready at hand during difficult circumstances. It's inspiring to hear that the aviation community can undergo a critical experience (in his example, ice crystals that caused the crash of a British Airways airplane), and then develop and deliver a solution via checklist within a month of encountering the difficulty, so that future encounters of the same problem have a ready-at-hand technique for resolving that crisis.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A New Approach to Preventing Relapse
(Zindel Seagal, J. Mark G. Williams, John Teasdale, 351pp)
The approach is interesting (used Jon Kabat-Zinn's training from Full Catastrophe Living to treat classes of former depressives at risk of recurrence). The authors have proven in a journal article that the technique is more effective than anti-depressant pharmaceuticals at preventing a relapse. The book contains interesting confessions about how reluctant the authors were to actually practice the mindfulness based meditation, but they grudgingly came to see that they'd need to practice what they aimed to teach. The book is practically a journal article inflated to fill a book, since so much of the content is their own handouts, which are wholesale adaptations of Kabat-Zinn's teaching.

Learning Meditation
(Pema Chodron, 5:52)
This is a 5 session class (meeting once a week) that was audiotaped in the 1990s at the Gampo Abby in Nova Scotia. The technique of meditation is open-eyed, usually gazing about 4 to 6 feet in front of ones self. There's nitty gritty about approaching the discomfort of sitting. Since I listened to most of this while driving, I got to practice mindful traffic jamming.

Ten Most Inspiring Texts (a theme spun first by Tyler Cowen)

Dialogues of Plato. The maxim, "The unexamined life is not worth living" pierced me as a high school freshman. Over time, I've come to believe the overexamined life also has its flaws, but Socrates has been a persistent and vital gadfly to my own thinking.

Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick. (1980) Most affected by the bravura hand-waving, with the intellectual excitement overflowing in the footnotes; his omnivorous references greatly guided my undergraduate reading, which meant reading everything by Hilary Putnam, Kripke & Wittgenstein, as well as studying information theory and flirting with the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Tracking the wrestling match between Rawls & Nozick on justice turned me on to Kant, & also happened to make me a vegetarian for nearly 2 decades.

Genes, Mind and Culture, EO Wilson and Charles Lumsden. (1980) Wilson's capacity to deploy an encyclopedic range of examples overdetermined my genetic predisposition to view life as deeply guided by genes. His outlook would today be called evolutionary psychology. I recently read Before the Dawn which reminded me of how ambitious EO's program was, and also how much more data has been collected in the past 25 years to support the claim that cultural can rapidly catalyze genetic updates that intertwine and facilitate cultural predispositions. The book's naked mapping of models from physics overawed me, which turned out to have anticipated a trick much practiced a decade or so later at the Santa Fe Institute.

Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme. I'd been tipped off in high school to look for Barthelme's stories in the New Yorker, but this collection bowled me over, and pushed me to track down all his books. The sparkle, the buzz, the endless playfulness, and the anger and sadness continue to guide my own approach to playing with and listening to language.

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon. My hunger for an unmasterable book was nearly vanquished by this novel. While I came to harbor a predilection for V over GR, being turned on to Pynchon by my father counts as one of great endowments of my patrimony.

The Concept of Irony, Soren Kierkegaard. Reading SK's masters thesis celebrated the use of language to mean more than one thing at a time, and is one of his most accessible works. It seriously compromised my interest in communicating clearly, as it tempted me to encrypt many layers of impossibly interior jokes every time I wrote.

Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker. (1982) A first rate tour of Cantor's transfinite set theory, and an inspiring take on Godelian incompleteness. Completely changed my attitude toward the null set, and inspired me to take a lot more logic and philosophy of math courses.

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky. (1982) I read these papers on a road trip the summer before my senior year, and it rocked my world, persuading me that philosophy plus probability theory was not enough. Ultimately, this book caused me to pursue graduate work in psychology at Stanford, which included the great joy of taking classes with Amos from 1994 to '96. [One bibliophilic aside: Almost all of the most inspiring books I studied in college came from one amazing bookstore, Great Expectations, by the Foster St El Stop in Evanston. Run by a misanthrope named Truman, his curatorship of important books was sublime]

Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky. (1988) This book didn't seem so original on first scan, but when I sat down and read it through, it motivated me to audit Minsky's lectures (as well as Seymour Papert's) at the Media Lab. Listening to Marvin (who incarnates intellectual hubris) exposed me to scores of vivid anecdotes, some great jokes, and tipped me to read exciting fiction writers such as Nicholson Baker and Stuart Kauffman (well, the latter's not a novelist, but I admire Kauffman's appetite for speculative modeling, & I started reading him due to a tossed off remark of Marvin's).

The Case for God
(Karen Armstrong, 17 hours)
I was impressed by this former Catholic nun's argument for religion when she wrote a brief column in the WSJ. Her most congenial formulation of how to approach spiritual practice was this sentence: "The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder." I listened to a lot of this book, but only the first and last chapters really deploy the outlook she advocated. The great majority of the work is an argument against literalistic fundamentalism, with a very detailed review of the history of Western civilization, from the point of view of theology. There's only a small place for Judaism in such a broad scope, and a smattering of Islam. I found her argument that Muslim fundamentalism started in post-WWII somewhat dubious, since the Wahabi sect that emanates from Saudi Arabia dates much further back in time. The much shorter work by Hilary Putnam, which foregrounds the importance of an experiential engagement with spiritual practice, does a better job of conveying an approach I find congenial. Armstrong's long book more closely resembles a semester length humanities course, where everything you need to know about God in relation to Western Civ is tossed in, including a lot of tangents on the Crusades, WWI, quantum physics and relativity, etc.

The Ask
(Sam Lipsyte, 304pp)
I pre-ordered this, and it arrived the first weekend in March. I knew it was going to be delicious, since I had rated his earlier novel, Homeland, as one of my favorite books of 2006. I also enjoyed his 2 earlier books, The Subject Steve, and Venus Drive. Lipsyte has quoted his writing teacher, Gordon Lish: ‘There is no getting to the good part. It all has to be the good part.’ This book shimmers on every page, and is Lipsyte's best. Here are some of the worlds he so adeptly captures: the cubicle void of a man clinging to a "good shitty job"; the entitlement and skill-lessness of Americans who attend high-ticket colleges to "take hard drugs in suitable company"; the tension of parents who want so much to have their offspring somehow grow up without the vices that make the adults' lives bearable; the conversational sparks of a 4 year old; the trauma and horror of Americans ground up by Iraq. Lipsyte's dark hilarity and verbal facility are, in this novel, wedded to themes that give him his fullest range of expression.

From Fear to Fearlessness
(Pema Chodron, 2 hours)
Sounds true: Listening to Pema give a couple of talks back in the 1990s. She continues to interest me, with her fierce attention to being where you are. The most memorable story she told concerned a guy who was depressive, and meditated for over a decade, only to realize that the depressions recurred with the same pattern even if he stuck with his practice. But according to Pema's teacher, almost nothing is juicier than depression for practicing compassion. The depressive dude also came around to accept that this approach made sense. I would say that, if, after taking anti-depressants, etc., one was left with an intransigent remnant of depression, then tackle it with loving kindness. But I am assuming that however rich the opportunity for deep insight might be inside depression, this does not imply that one shouldn't seek every avenue for reducing the pain of depression.

Angels
(Denis Johnson, 7:17 -- paused after an hour)
Johnson's prose sings like poetry, and yet, I have to admit that this novel's world was so dark, I couldn't see myself diving in just now. I will have a time for this, but it's not the present.

The Professor and Other Writings
(Terry Castle, 14:07)
I didn't enjoy this, and often skimmed this audible book hoping to land on something more juicy. The best chapter by a long mile is the one confessing to how crappy it was to be Susan Sontag's dear friend; who could have known that even to her intimates, Sontag was narcissistic, hectoring, and condescending? The chapter on her buries, rather than praises, the intimidating one. It's almost sad to read how Castle angled so intently to impress Sontag, and in the end, was forced to listen to her intellectual top dog recounting how important her own fiction would doubtless prove to be. I was suckered into this by the TNR review that claimed "her splendid vocabulary will have you Googling." I didn't notice any particularly sharp turns of phrase. It seems vitally important for Castle to convey what a cool kid she is, hip to the jazz and autobiography of Art Pepper, but I preferred reading her talk about the lesbian separatist songwriter Alix Dobkin. Not a fun read.

Face to face with orangutans
(Tim Laman & Cheryl Knott, 32pp)
Orangs are the strangest of the great apes, and this book has some great photos, as well as a lot of interesting bits of information about these unusual "people."

More things like this
(Editors of Mcsweeney's, 224pp)
Very stimulating tour of the art of mostly low-fi creators who combine text with images in an explicitly funny way. The range of people included is quite eclectic, including Raymond Pettibon (whose work is at least as likely to disturb as it is to provoke laughter), the singer-Buddhist-deity Leonard Cohen, and a wide range of here-to-fore unknown artists. I enjoy a lot of this art, and it's a pleasure to page through. An early cartoon by Art Spiegelman draws his alter ego standing on a high wire roped between R. Crumb and Saul Steinberg. That suggests one axis of the work collected here, although it seems a shame that no Lynda Barry got included. A complexification of the mix is that very few of the artists could be considered cartoon artists. Two discoveries for me: Matthew Vescovo and Enrique Chagoya, but there are dozens of others who I'd never known about. My one critique of the book is that each interview seems to follow a set script, which recurrently asks what to me sounds like a dumb question, "How quickly does something develop into a methodology?" So, the interviews weren't a highlight. But if you enjoy whimsy, textual playfulness, and quirky imagery, this book is certain to expose you to work you have never before encountered.

Amazing places to take your kids : hundreds of North American adventures
(Laura Sutherland, 320pp)
No out and out surprises, but still a nice collection of fun places to go. Next time we're in New Haven, besides the Peabody, the book recommends the Barker Museum. I would actually place the two 101 books ahead of this as more practicable guides to having fun.

Brazen Careerist
(Penelope Trunk, 4:24)
Trunk is an oversharing blogger, and though her personality must be fatiguing in real time, she has a fierce commitment to being self-reflective (and not irrelevant to this book, also become a powerful and renowned woman). This is a book of advice, which is subjective, partial, and most applicable to someone who aspires to be a pro volleyball player. I enjoyed it, caveats and all, because I hunger to hear more thoughts about how to deal with life in business.

The annotated Origin : a facsimile of the first edition of On the origin of species
(Charles Darwin; annotated by James T. Costa)
Scanned this, but it's not a compelling read right now. I can imagine circumstances where it'd be fun to read Darwin, while noting where later research has confirmed or disconfirmed his hypotheses.

Jesus' Son
(Denis Johnson, 2:43)
Sublime, funny, often pure poetry. After 17 years on paper, it's finally audible. The narrator, Will Patton, has a fantastic voice, and I realize I first heard him read the entrancing Cosmopolis back in '04. He also read Johnson's amazing Tree of Smoke, and he even has a small acting part in the movie adaptation of this novel. IMDB has some memorable movie quotes (most directly lifted from the book), e.g.: No more pretending for him. He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile, the rest of us go on pretending to each other.

What Shamu Taught Me
(Amy Sutherland, 5;31, punted early)
A bad book with a good premise, namely, that animal training works on the animal one usually refers to, in Berkeley, as "my partner." The writing's mediocre, self-indulgent, and too jokey to wade through. The whole book can be compressed into the NYT article that preceded the book. I had particularly relished reading this after the recent death of a SeaWorld trainer by Tilikum, since that incident underscores the fact that training can only go so far. But Amy Sutherland offered no likelihood of reflecting on or savoring the irony that the beast you try to tame may win the battle.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(Lewis Carroll, 2:48)
Listened to in honor of the upcoming film by Tim Burton. Nerd that I was, the first time I read Alice, it was Martin Gardner's annotated version. This volume has some splendid nonsense, but I think I favor Through the Looking Glass. Someday, let's check...

Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings
(Pema Chodron, 3;52)
My favorite nun! At one point in these teachings, she says that students "eat up the ideas", but barf on the actual exercise, which is not glamorous or transcendent in the least. Tami Simon reads the entire thing, in her mesmerizing sulky voice.

Genesis
(R. Crumb, 224pp)
This would not make the best audiobook, so I checked it out. My sons enjoyed the back page, with the pictures of Rachel, Sarah, Eve, and the patriarchs plus pharaoh. The book truly merits the warning label, "Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors." I didn't end up reading the whole book, but I enjoyed paging through it. At the same time, I can't say that this book was necessary, except as a way for Crumb to channel his obsessive compulsion to draw.

Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities
(Albertus Seba, Irmgard Musch, editor; 636pp)
This huge book is the distillation of 4 volumes, published in the 18th century, by a collector of oddities who commissioned drawings of his wunderkammer and began publishing them in the 1730s. This strikes me as a book for bibliophiles, rather than biophiliacs, even though almost all the drawings are of animals and plants (plus a few pages of mineral specimens). I can't grasp the value of spending hundreds of dollars to see drawings that demonstrate what was considered exotic 300 years ago, when today we have access to spectacular zoos and crystal clear photo and film documentation of a far wider range of living species. The drawings are almost entirely of surfaces, although one set of pages "models" an imagined set of steps to show how a frog transforms itself into a fish. Definitely worth a scan from a library, but for me, viewing these pages once was enough. I can't dispute the reviews on Amazon from people who have purchased it and report looking at the pages many times, but I would recommend that anyone contemplating such a serious investment first take this for a trial run at a well-provisioned library.

The Vagrants
(Yiyun Li, 11:33, stopped at 5)
Fairly interesting novel on life during the wind-down of the Cultural Revolution (1979). Set in a large, dreary city (Muddy River), the stories of interleaved lives revolve around cruelties and stoicism, and the elliptical focus is the execution of a 30 year old woman, once fanatical in her Red Army zeal, but now shot for her counter-revolutionary intransigence. Too bleak for me, even though the author's prose feels grounded in history.

Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
(Steve Zipperstein, 288pp)
I greatly enjoyed this biography of a Nobel Prize Loser. Many aspects of his life make one squirm, in particular the obeisance to Reichian flakiness in the last hump of his life. Dead at 38, buddy of Saul Bellow's at 16, he knew that one day "either Saul or I will win the Nobel Prize." Bellow buried Rosenfeld in an obit that defined the way the world views him even now, as a lonely outcast who held great promise but fumbled it. Had he lived, his insistence on being in touch with the experience and concerns of Jews would have gained him greater admiration for his prescience. I delayed writing this book up, after spending a weekend gobbling the memoir, in an almost Delmorean desire to do the book justice.

Rutherford (NJ) (Then & Now)
(Lee Francis Brown, 96pp)
Could be better, but it's still fun to see the history of a little burg in NJ. I await the second wave of this Arcadia publishing, when people can submit their own photos and annotate the ones that get posted. (Maybe that's Facebook?)

Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left
(Ronald Radosh, 8:43)
Somewhat painful to listen to the life trajectory of a red diaper baby, born in the late 1930s, who became the historian who definitively established the guilt of the Rosenbergs in 1983. This was viewed as being in such poor taste that the Left ostracized him. I was intrigued to hear some of the anecdotes, and he captures some of the absurdities of the apologists for state brutality. One keeper: While visiting Cuba, the delegation discovers that homosexuals are imprisoned in mental hospitals, and that the Cubans proudly boast the highest proportion of lobotomized patients. When someone objects, a fellow traveler exhorts the group to recognize the "differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies." He met Michael Lerner in the mid-1970s, and eventually shifted toward Michael Harrington. One thing that's not completely clear is how closely he's aligned with David Horowitz, who has surely covered similar ground, but now vociferates about the Left from his neo-con-man perspective.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940
(882pp -- Didn't get too far)
The vast majority of these are to one close friend, Thomas McGreevy, who was responsible for introducing SB to Joyce, as well as later to Jack B. Yeats. The editors note that "Beckett wrote letters primarily in English (65%), and also in French (30%) and German (5%)." (p. xxiii) The introduction and editorial notes are superbly helpful, immediately following each letter, and where the original letter is not in English, there's a complete translation right next to the French or German. The letters that I read didn't give a view of SB naked, but they capture his linguistic playfulness and his scatological bent. The editors mention in the introduction that SB constrained the publication of letters to those passages "only having bearing on my work” (p xvi)

Bend in the River
(VS Naipaul, bailed after 2 hours)
It's impossible to read this without thinking of what a hater Naipaul is. There's a very vicious (and to some extent, accurate) dismissal of Africa as a horrid backwater. Although recommended by a friend, I just couldn't slog through the vicious portrayal of every character as an insect deserving to be disemboweled with Naipaul's cutting prose.

Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life, & Culture of the Russian Silver Age
(John Bowlt, 400pp)
Beautiful book, quite interesting, worth paging through. Some really styling images. Not surprising, most of the artists were not involved in the politics that swept Russia-into-the-USSR. (Favorite images: Zinaida Serebriakova's self portrait, p92; Artur Anatr's airplane poster p123; Leon Bakst decor, p175; Natan Altman's Akhmatova p299; Mikhail Larionov's Jewish Venus p311; bizarre architectural confection, Church of the Resurrection, built in 1907 by Alfred Parland, p333)

101 Things You Gotta Do Before You're 12! & 101 Places You Gotta See Before You're 12!
(Joanne O'Sullivan, about 144pp @)
I love these kinds of books, and both of these are useful lists of fun things to do with kids.

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
(Nicholas Wade, 12:51 -- read this a second time by 2/16)
Delightful discussion of how population genetics illuminates the origins of modern Homo Sapiens (this book was cited as one resource in the first footnote of Wrangham's Catching Fire). Wade helps explain how it is that human populations of 100,000 years ago, while anatomically similar to modern man, did not share many behaviors that are universal today (religion, art, possibly even language). There appears to have been a small group of some 150 humans who left Africa just 50,000 years ago (qv wikipedia), and managed to migrate and conquer all of the other continents. It's almost inconceivable that such a small group is responsible for all the earth's inhabitants outside of Africa, but Wade marshalls the evidence. The study of genetic diversity (particularly with mitochondrial and Y-chromosome data) creates surprisingly precise dates for many significant events. For instance, to date the time at which humans began wearing clothes, researchers have analyzed how much the genes of body lice differ from head lice, and arrive at a point 72,000 years back. There's many fascinating and insightful discussions of the origin of agriculture, sedentism, human language. The most surprising concept is that evolution has continued to push differentiation of isolated groups, and while the example of lactose tolerance among Northern Europeans is not shocking, other claims are more controversial, such as that selection pressure among Jews may have operated for a 1,000 years (from 800 to 1700 CE), or that running skill among Kenyans is conceivably connected to the cultural competition for cow stealing. Sphingolipids are at the heart of the Jewish selection pressure story. The mottoes for each chapter are drawn from Darwin's Descent of Man; his prescience and lucidity make me want to track down this big tome. UPDATE on March 3: Wade reprises his book in a NYT article here

A New Literary History of America
(edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, 1095pp)
I am mystified by this volume. It's not so big that you can't page through it, and the essays cover topics with an interesting slant. Nevertheless, when I was jumping around to gainsay what was inside, I kept thinking how odd it was to publish a reference without making it searchable online. Maybe there's a way to read around in it for kicks, but it seems almost obscurantist to publish such scholarship without being indexed on the internet.

Gifted Tongues: High School Debate and Adolescent Culture
(Gary Alan Fine, 328pp)
Painfully accurate in places, this portrays the life of a mid-Western high school debate team as a window on the entire world of "policy" debaters in the '90s. Although the Minnesota context is unfamiliar to me, I experienced waves of awkward deja vu about my own experience about a decade earlier in another middling debate state. The author, a sociologist, writes without snark or academic cant. He admits that his son did well enough to win the nationally prestigious Tournament of Champions in the late '90's. I'd say this work does a fine job of capturing the main experiences and drama in the tiny world of forensics. Several micro-worlds could be studied further, namely, the atmosphere of summer institutes (esp'ly Northwestern's cherubim), a close study of the high-powered atmosphere in a dominant debate school, such as those in Chicago's North Shore, and a study of the influence of high school debate on those who participated in it. (One of the most fun factoids from this book was that Michael Stipe, lead singer of REM, was a high school and college debater, and his song, "The End of the World as We Know It" may very well evoke his memory of the many nuclear wars he must have spoken about in his time debating.) The only weakness in this book: a paltry index, which could not possibly have been put together by anyone who'd read the book. Two of the most quoted people, James Copeland and David Zarefsky (the most experienced sages of high school and college debate, respectively) have no index entry. UPDATE: I found a documentary on Netflix, RESOLVED (2007) that covers this world with comprehensive accuracy. It accomplished in 90 minutes more than is captured in Gifted Tongues.

Flotsam
(David Wiesner, 36pp)
A beautiful picture book, reminiscent of a favorite, Zoom (and more recently discovered, Re-zoom, both by Istvan Banyai; in a quick search, I find that there's an adult group game built on top of those 2 picture books). This story has an ever expanding eye on the whimsical world revealed from the perspective of a little boy's beach sand castle.

The Three Pigs
(David Wiesner, 48 pp)
Dedicated to David Macaulay, this is a much prettier and funnier way to play with story lines. The deconstruction of the 3 little pigs story basically involves the pig that's about to be eaten by the wolf escaping off the page, and popping up in another narrative.

Black and White
(David Macaulay, 48pp)
A post-modern blender of 4 frames, which have sufficient cross-cut connections to make it fairly clear how to stitch the story lines together. Not a funny story in any of the 4 frames, although there's some nice shots of cows. I didn't like this book, and neither did my 3 year old sons.

Too Big to Fail
(Andrew Ross Sorkin, 24 hours)
This is the acclaimed account of the "decisionmaking" that fed into the US allowing Lehman Brothers to fail. At times, I had to ask myself, why am I listening to a story where just a bunch of guys stumble along, and the world goes down? Sorkin doesn't glamourize the personalities of these bankers, and it would indeed be damned hard to play it as if "genius failed." When I think of previous business sagas, e.g., Barbarians at the Gate or Liar's Poker, I think those earlier books made the personalities sparkle. Even Disney Wars, starring Eisner and Ovitz, showed them to be spectacularly pinheaded egomaniacs. In this tale, the huge scale of the failure collides with the dreary mundanity of the actors. Sure, some of the big wigs take helicopters to work, but most of the CEOs just had a driver, and so, could get stuck in Manhattan traffic like anyone else. The most memorable scene for me was in the weekend before Lehman failed (Sept 12-14), as Paulson corralled all the CEOs of the major investment firms into a conference room. Although they realized the dire situation that was about to transpire, the CEOs lacked any way to take action. Instead of thinking hard, they ended up doing impersonations of Geithner, and before long, "Colm Kelleher, Morgan’s CFO, had begun playing BrickBreaker on his BlackBerry, and soon an unofficial tournament was under way, with everyone competitively comparing scores." (p326). It's painful to realize how little could be done at the moment of crisis. The competitive, cut-throat training of investment banking blocked the management teams from having any way of coordinating for the good of the community. Worse, there had been no real awareness of how frail things were, until it all spun out of control, and at that point, the tough guys played Brickbreaker.

Whole earth discipline : an ecopragmatist manifesto
(Stewart Brand, 325pp - had to return at p169)
Very stimulating synthesis of what's going on around on this planet. Brand argues that nuclear power is the only solution to climate (in that, he echoes the 1970s Harvard debate team, although without invoking their motto, "Crush the weak.") He also articulates why urbanization is great, and you can get the appetizer at his notes site here. The advocacy of genetic engineering wasn't super interesting to me, but he clearly explains how important it is to addressing poverty.

Wolf Hall
(Hilary Mantel, 24:50 -- stopped at 15 hours)
Interesting, but not riveting: Cromwell (not Oliver, who apparently was Thomas's great-great-grandnephew) was not a dark Richard III character, but rather, an omni-competent assistant, first to Cardinal Wolsey, later to Henry VIII. I have been nipping from this since December, but my interest has flagged. It's not a boring book, but the story & writing did not compel me to forge on.

The poet's guide to life : the wisdom of Rilke
(translated and edited by Ulrich Baer, 215pp)
Rilke's letters are very sensuous, but they also feel ethereal, and the passion he pours into his advice, exhortatory ways to cope, to WORK, to suffer, often strike me as quite abstract. I paged around, but this is harder to bite into than pure foie gras.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
(Richard Wrangham, 6:50)
Amazing, fascinating proof of the evocative power wielded by a lucid exposition of physical anthropolgy. The revolutionary conceptual framework proposed by Wrangham is as wide-ranging as "Guns, Germs and Steel", with a theoretical account that cuts deep into the very concept of what distinguishes humans from apes. Wrangham is my favorite primatologist, and about 20 years ago, a lecture he gave introduced me to what is surely now the world's favorite primate species, the Bonobo chimpanzee. At that time, he spoke with vivid imagination about the speculative fork that caused pan troglodytes to differentiate from pan paniscus. In this book, he lays out a very compelling account of how hard it is to eat like a chimp or gorilla. Both apes spend more than 6 hours a day chewing, to break down the fibrous foods they eat raw. There's a hilarious discrediting of the raw food movement. He quotes a raw advocate who boasted of losing his need to ejaculate, which he assumed indicated his body no longer needed to secrete toxins. Needless to say, there's no evidence for semen as a trash bag; but there's compelling evidence that humans can't sustain raw only diets based on the fact that over half the women on such diets are amenorrheic. When food is cooked, it's easier to chew, and the nutrients available to the body are greatly increased. This latter point is not well understood by nutritionists, yet Wrangham mobilizes plenty of evidence for this difference in nutritive absorption. I loved, loved, loved this book, and am going to listen to it at least once more, as it is dense with fascinating observations about evolution, diet, and the way those are intertwined. If you would like an appetizer, listen to this podcast talk by Wrangham, where he reprises his argument, with hilarious anecdotes about what it was like when he tried to not just follow chimpanzees, but also eat the same foods they do.

Masterpiece Comics
(R. Sikoryak, 64pp)
Amusing, even though I didn't always immediately grasp who the parody was targeting (Mary Worth aimed at MacBeth). Blondie mapped to Adam and Eve created a great spot for Dagwood's boss to play the angry Lord. An excellent touch: Comic book ads remapped to fit this tome.

Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind
(Gary Marcus, 6:37)
Very nice review of the ways our minds hobble toward god-like vistas of our power and grace. I never tired of Marcus's main point, which is that human intelligence is the fruit of a zillion hacks. My only quibble is with his adopted spelling. He cites the original paper, Jackson W. Granholm's 1962 "How to Design a Kludge", but for less than compelling reasons, chose to go with a non-standard spelling. (Wikipedia plumps for my side of the orthographic battle)

The smartest animals on the planet
(Sally Boysen, 192pp)
An interesting series of chapters, each of which lucidly describes the details around a particular trait and the data demonstrating which species' behaviors underlie the attribution of intelligence.

Biophilic design : the theory, science, and practice of bringing buildings to life
(eds Stephen Kellert, Judith Heerwagen, Martin Mador, 385pp)
Tantalizing, but nothing I saw in this collection of essays revealed more than hints of how to synthesize biology and architecture.

Shop class as soulcraft: An inquiry into the value of work
(Matthew Crawford, 6:42)
This book revisits topics from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but is infinitely less turgid and pompous. The fundamental question for the author is how to do something that has sufficient clarity and crispness to undergird personal authenticity. Although his rhetoric implies that a trade is the golden road to such direct insight, it's surely possible to feel real, immediate, and unconfused while working with words, symbols, numbers, or even just vague "teams". I enjoyed considering his thesis, although his position is ultimately well-argued but only half-baked.

2009 Top Texts [The links jump to the original review at the time I read the book]
Non Fiction
Create your own economy: Mephistolean defense of the new range of experiences available in the tweeting multitasking RSS-sampling world.

Rapt: Riveting account of how attention flows through our world.


Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment: May have the greatest impact on my life, since one of his experiments sparked the invention, within my own marriage, of "Monarch for the Day"

Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace: Superbly articulated feelings/conflicts in parenting.

The Man Who Knew Infinity: Fascinating to spend time thinking about how the world appeared to one of the most naturally gifted of mathematicians.

How Fiction Works: A manly defense of this critic's favorites, and my own fondnesses overlap with his enough to make this fun.

Hiding Man: A biography of Donald Barthelme: An excellent (and profoundly sad) life of an amazing writer.

Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life -- Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein: An enjoyable exposition of how to be engaged with religious practice, even while such behavior is mystifying to one's rational self. May be of interest even beyond observant Jews.


It Came From Berkeley: Only of interest to those who want to think about all the strange things that first occurred here, but that should be a large set of reflective people (or at least 100,000 Berkeleyans).

Just for Dads: Through the Children's Gate: A lovely account of being a happy father, while engaged in the cultural polevaulting that is Manhattan life. & Manhood for amateurs: As a Chabon fanboy, I admit there are definitely some nice memoiristic essays here. Still, nothing beats Neal Pollack's Alternadad, read almost 3 years ago.

Fiction -- Less and less of what I read is fiction, even though I so savor its unique insights. My favorite book of the Decade would have to be the Corrections, so I just hunger for more huge novels. Rare is the novelist whose books I start and sustain a hold upon my attention to finish. In one carping remark, let me admit that this year has definitively established that Bolaño holds no charms for me (I place him within striking distance of the tedious graphomaniac, Vollmann).

My favorite novel of the year: Lush Life. I should read more Richard Price.

Ubik: Flashback delight in PKD.

Children's books
Some are so painful I throw them out when my kids aren't looking, and a few exert persistent charms.

The only one I reviewed this year was Face to Face with Gorillas -- a very beguiling collection of vivid photos of individual gorillas.

I also have read, and re-read: I Stink

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (Mo Willems)

Too Many Toys and No, David (both by David Shannon)

Goodnight Gorilla - whimsy in the margins of every page, and no bowls of mush and old women whispering hush.

The Sweet Science
(AJ Liebling, 8:45, stopped about half way)
Pretty entertaining language at times, but it really is all about guys pummeling each other, occasionally to death.

The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes
(Bill Ury, 7:15)
I love these kinds of books, which rehearse ways to deal with "difficult conversations." Ury's book is pretty engaging, and it dives into some interesting examples of how to start with a Yes (a commitment to the value/relationship), the resulting No (why one can't, consistent with one's values, say otherwise), and then another Yes.

The Montessori Method
(Maria Montessori, 11:51 -- stopped halfway)
A librivox rough diamond. It's interesting to hear the description of Montessori's method from the Grand Dame herself. The emphasis on listening to the children, and observing where their interests and abilities lie, is very compelling. There's some kookiness about food (e.g., never feed young children raw fruit or vegetables). To make the listening more exciting, the first chapter's reader consistently pronounces pedagogy as it must be said in Russian or perhaps Italian, with such an outre sound that it makes for extra fun.

Handwritten : expressive lettering in the digital age
(Steven Heller & Mirko Ilić, 192pp)
Interesting examples of the expressive use of hand drawn script in the past 20 years.

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
(Sue Johnson, 320pp)
I just skimmed this, and it struck me as a little thin/brothy, yet I did find at least one of the exercises to be useful on categorizing partners' action-reaction cycles.

Book of Pirates
(Howard Pyle, 8:01, quit halfway)
Hemingway liked this, but I didn't. The pirates are described as villains, but most of the attention is focused on their activities/exploits, so the value-laden terms don't blind Pyle to the many merits of being a bunch of men on the sea. Even though it's assumed they're all scoundrels, there are passages which recognize the compact that worked efffectively to bind many to act cooperatively in decisive battles. The punishment of "marooning" a man sounds dreadful (whereby a ship would leave a man on an island with just a few days provisions.) It's not clear how frequently this was actually imposed.

Radical Empiricism
(William James, 6:45)
Another Librivox recording. Even though I'm a fan of William James, it may be a symptom of my time in life that I didn't find these essays riveting. The last one is untranslated French, so I can be excused for skipping it. Some good thoughts, but at bottom, I didn't really feel engaged by the disputes he addresses.

Books
(Larry McMurtry, 5;37)
A life dealing books, with nice autobiographical flourishes, starting with the box of 19 books young Larry received. His "Cadillac Jack" apparently channelled his collecting passion for books and transformed it to antiques because he felt book collecting was too bloodless. The difficulty of conveying the specialness of a book does end up forcing a compression into the shorthand of "bought for X, sold for 1,000X."

High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture
(Kirk Varnedoe & Adam Gopnik, 464 pp)
This book plays seriously with the topic of how demotic/low brow stuff has fused with high art. Much of the acheivement traces to Picasso, who collaged in ordinary crap. One of the more surprising cascades: the elevation of sans serif type in modernism (think Futura and Helvetica) is traced to the tendency of Picasso (and Braque) to paste in lowbrow ads from newspapers. Their quotation of the typically vulgar ads used sans serif type, and over the next 15 to 20 years, that association helped elevate the esteem for this kind of typography with the austerities of modernism. On a sentimental level, the authors Varnedoe and Gopnik shared a great friendship, with Varnedoe as director of MOMA, and Gopnik his student and apprentice. Gopnik wrote alternating chapters to this compendious museum catalogue (e.g., the chapter on comic books).

Face to Face with Gorillas
(Michael Nichols, 32pp)
Delightful children's book, with accurate information about the behavior and threats for mountain gorillas. Very good pictures

Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life -- Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein
(Hilary Putnam, 136pp)
This brief book, built from 4 lectures that Putnam delivered, was a pleasure to read. I was not familiar with Franz Rosenzweig, the founder of the original Lehrhaus. Putnam devotes most of 2 chapters to this interesting personality. Chapter one treats Rosenzweig's book, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, which I'd like to read soon. One theme running through the book is that religion is not true or false, but only perceived through the choice of living in accord with its principles. Putnam jokes about covering "3 1/4" Jews (Wittgenstein had interesting ideas about mysticism and religion, but his Jewishness was seriously repressed/denied by his family.) The Buber chapter incisively opened a way of looking at his I-Thou relation that I'd not considered. Putnam made Levinas easier going than I've found by trying to read him, although I did not come away feeling as if I ought to read more of him just now.

Twilight of the Idols
(Friedrich Nietzsche, 4:43)
Another Librivox recording, and Nietzsche has always been an author I've been pining to re-read since I devoured his work in college. This is the original (rather than the Kaufmann translation), but plenty of the pungency and pith is there. I was more embarrassed this time by the bluster and misogyny. Still, as a psychologist, Nietzsche has penetrating insights, and it was a pleasure to review this text.

The Savage Detectives
(Robert Bolaño, punted within 2 hours)
I thought I liked this, when I had it on paper. But in fact, I just don't care for Bolaño. His passions don't absorb me. It is now completely obvious to me that unless the writing's funny, I'm 10X more likely to punt.

Vices Are Not Crimes
(Lysander Spooner, 1:16)
This was my first Librivox recording, which are all in the public domain. The narrator had a wonderful reading voice (Australian accent?), and the author, Lysander Spooner, is a 19th century libertarian theorist I'd always wanted to read. The book argues forcefully that every person should be able to determine for themselves what vicious habits they need in order to live a full and happy life. I find this tolerant and liberal line of reasoning appealing, but I am not persuaded that we should decriminalize highly addictive drugs (methamphetamine, crack and heroin are the ones TV has taught me to fear).

Rumi, Haffiz, and Lalla
(translated by Coleman Barks, 1:12)
Rumi is intoxicating. The other two poets, less well known, also have beautiful images to evoke the unity of the world.

The Man Who Knew Infinity
(Robert Kanigel, 17;26)
I've been aware of Ramanujan at least since reading, as an undergrad, Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology. Until I listened to this book, I didn't know that the pronunciaton of R's name was ra-man-u-jan (not, per my Kansas accent, Rama-NOO-jan). This was a fascinating book, although the life of Ramanujan has a tragic dimension to it. The zeal and intimacy with which he played with numbers is well discussed here. One example that I recall was a story about a little puzzle that was published weekly in the newspaper, where the number of a house was exactly half the sum of the numbers on the street, with the highest valued house being 500. Almost as soon as Ramanujan was told this puzzle, he dictated a formula of a repeating fraction that covered, not simply the case of the specific puzzle, but for the entire class of possible solutions. The book describes well the life of the Siva-ite Brahminical class to which R. belonged, with an interesting discussion of the value that mental development and aspiration played. The rigorous dietary proscriptions also played a key part in the culture, and those 2 aspects together make for a common, perhaps even cliched comparison, between Brahmins and Jews as analogous ethnic cultures. While Hardy claimed that his greatest mathematical discovery was Ramanujan, this book makes clear how difficult R's position was, once he moved to Cambridge. Collaborating with Hardy tapped and developed his math, but it all but neglected every other side of his personality. One anecdote reveals how fragile R's proud personality was: He cooked a meal for a South Indian friend who was engaged to be married. After two servings of his soup, the bride-to-be declined a third bowl. R disappeared, and it turned out later that he had fled his room at Cambridge, and taken a cab to Oxford. When he had returned after 5 days absence, he said that he'd been insulted at the refusal to take another bowl of soup, and needed to absent himself. Toward the end of his life, R. suffered from tuberculosis, and eventually, he traveled home to India, only to die shortly afterwards. He had been made a Fellow of the Royal Society, perhaps the first Indian to do so, and was greeted with reverence upon his return. It is mind-boggling to imagine how well oiled his brain was to dance with numbers.

Bicycle Diaries
(David Byrne, 320pp)
Great topics (bikes, cities, and a bit of art), but very flat writing. Byrne mentions in the foreword that he aspired to echo WG Sebald, which may have helped him sit down to write this, but it doesn't help the reader. Some things are just left out by his impersonal tone (e.g., what kind of folding bicycle did he use? Apparently, it's a Montague CX).

The art of Harvey Kurtzman : the mad genius of comics
(Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle, 241pp)
A great tour of Kurtzman's body of work, with a nice synoptic discussion of how Kurtzman was driven to start MAD magazine purely out of a drive to get greater control. He probably was a bear to work under, since he had such a precise vision of how he wanted everything to go. There's an impressive collection of velum oversheets for one comic story that show his process of sketching out the flow of each cell/frame, and then the completed comic reveals just how closely the final realization follows that first sketch. I would definitely like to track down Humbug, and especially Help! (the latter a magazine he worked on with Terry Gilliam as his assistant, and R. Crumb as one of the cartoonists).

Bellissima Venice
(Michael Setboun, 192pp)
Although the book is handsome in its layout, I did not find the photos themselves to be particularly evocative of the city of Venice. I continually looked for some angle or perspective that would trigger a spark of recognition. I only visited Venice for several days, in the fall, back in 2006, and I picked this book up with hopes that I would be able to savor the memories of that visit. For reasons that elude me, I never felt any particular affection for any of the photos here. I also can't believe that anyone who hasn't been to Venice would be able to experience the fascinations of that marvelously decadent and endlessly intricate world.

The ten cent plague
(David Hadju, 11:50)
I resisted reading this for a long time, because I really loathed his elevation of Richard Farina over Bob Dylan in his book, Positively Fourth St. It turns out that if he's writing about something I don't know first hand, he can manage fairly well. It's a little long on the conflict America experienced in fear of comics. For a history, I would still place Men of Tomorrow as more fun and well-rounded, without so much attention to the angst of 1950s booboisie.

The best American nonrequired reading 2003
(Dave Eggers, editor, 3 CDs)
I loved the intro by Zadie Smith, and I listened to the entire foreword of Dave Eggers. I didn't find any of the other essays particularly worth the time.

Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment
(AJ Jacobs, 256pp)
Very fun. The best chapters are the last (on doing everything in accord with his wife Julie's wishes for a month), and the one on radical honesty. Another fine piece is the one on Outsourcing my life (which was excerpted by Timothy Ferriss). There were only 2 chapters I didn't enjoy much: 1- Emulating George Washington (it turns out in the appendix that the 200+ rules that GW copied out were from a French abbot, rather than distilled from his own experience); 2- Being totally rational (a litany of cognitive biases flow by). It's untenable to imagine that being aware of the "availability bias" or even "the sharpshooter paradox" could enable a person to completely avoid such pitfalls. More to the point, there's no program to follow, which, as in the Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs throws himself into with gusto.

Through the Children's Gate
(Adam Gopnik, 9:06)
These essays of Gopnik's are suffused with his "trademarked comic sentimental tone" (promotional copy that is almost too absurd to not quote). There are some very nice sentiments about enjoying your kids grow up, as a parent strains to give children the orbit to feel free, but not so wide a path that they can do real damage. I enjoy his perspective, and this book includes two essays I fondly recall from the New Yorker, esp'ly Bumping into Mr Ravioli, as well as another on his mistakenly interpreting LOL as "lots of love." There's some 9/11 angst, and I find he's best at capturing the details of human interaction, and a little gauzed over and vague when reaching for summative accounts of how it all fits together. In a strange coincidence, I heard Ben Rubin speak about his Listening Post just hours before I heard Gopnik describe his own visits to this selfsame art installation during the days following 9/11.

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.