Goodreads: Albion's Seed

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What started out as following a reference in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" ended up with me reading this monstrous 900-page behemoth over a period of months (mostly... in the bathroom). I feel like I learned a lot about the different British subcultures that settled in America and their effect on modern US culture. There were definitely some boring stretches - lets face it: Quakers are not that interesting. But the backcountry Southern Highlands stuff was a hoot, and I liked the way he compared each subculture in terms of everything from naming habits to sexual mores. For a serious student of American History, its well worth a read. Most of you can probably skip it, however.

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Low-Hanging Media Fruit

Here are some things I finally read or watched this week, which have been on their respective queues for a long time:

1) The Magnificent Seven. Good - easy to see why it's a classic. Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen are especially magnificent - they just don't make 'em like that anymore.

2) Be Cool. Not Cool. That's all it deserves. Any more would further desecrate the original, which I still like.

3) Freakonomics. Liked it. It's a quick read and, even if it's not as enlightening as some would make it out to be, it did spur me to reconsider a few things and see certain trends in a new light, and that has value to me.

4) Curb Your Enthusiasm. Long-recommended by friends, the show is undeniably funny. Whether I can bear the awkwardness it invokes remains an open question.

A few related media thoughts:

5) Re-watching The Hobbit and Return of the King with the kiddos has us all (well, not M, but me and the kids) singing "The Greatest Adventure", "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way!", and "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" with great aplomb. I think I like The Hobbit better (probably b/c that was the one I watched a lot as a kid), but H seems to like RotK more, at least at the moment.

5a) The Last Unicorn is en route from Netflix - it will be interesting to see if H loves it or if it scares her too much.


6) We've been playing (a simplified, extremely brief) version of Gloom, a card game based on Edward Gorey's work where you try to make the members of a quirky family suffer horribly with cards like "Mocked by Midgets" or "Marooned on the Moors" and inflict happiness ("Slept without Sorrows") on opposing players' families, until everyone dies horrible deaths! The kids saw it on the shelf and begged to play it, and we always make clear that it's comedy, and THEY LOVE IT. They want to play it every night. I'd be lying if I denied it makes me proud. Tonight we read "The Doubtful Guest" as our bedtime story.

7) As a balance for all the bits of my childhood and sense of humor/humour that I'm inflicting on my children, it's only fair that we give the classics of their own generation a fair chance. Thus, M and I will probably be watching High School Musical this week to see if we think it's OK for Hilde to watch yet.

Goodreads: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. Not for dumb kids. This is one of those books that exposed me to a flood of history, ideas, cultures, facts, and theories that I had never before managed to encounter. It filled in lots of gaps I knew I had along the way, like how New York changed hands from being Dutch to being English, or how Phoenician language became Punic and the language of the Carthiginians. It is a remarkable book in the same way that Guns, Germs and Steel or A Short History of Nearly Everything are remarkable - on nearly every page you will have learned something that will fascinate you.



If you're in the right mood, that is. This book took me nearly a year of stops and starts to get through. It can be, let's say, a little dry. But it's still the kind of book I want to make other people read just so I can have the pleasure of discussing it with them. But it is NOT an undertaking for the faint of heart or short of attention span. Anyone up to the challenge?


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Goodreads: "The Polar Bear Book"

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfeld

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
A well-balanced and well thought-through introduction to the field of information management. Parts of this book, like how to optimize within-site search engines, aren't important to me right now, but lots of the ideas surrounding information architecture are of extreme interest to me.



Since it is such a new field, a decent amount of the book is about things like how to self-train as an information architect or how to sell the value of investing in information architecture to your corporate masters. What is of more interest to me personally are things like how to do knowledge management across an enterprise to facilitate information sharing and collaborative thinking.



Since my perspective is that of a software developer, I wished there had been some more attention paid to algorithms, database structures, and relational computing. That is well outside the expertise of the authors however, and so instead I had to satisfy myself with the theories that might guide the design of such things. Still, it got me thinking and that is what I was hoping for.


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Goodreads: Notes from a Small Island

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I first tried to read this one a few years ago, before I lived in England. It quickly became clear to me that it was written as a love letter to Britain for British people to read; not at all for Americans. But now, having lived here a year, I get all the jokes, I sympathize with the ways Bryson pokes fun at them as an American at heart. Basically, Bryson travels around Great Britain complaining about all the things that are going wrong with it and how old buildings are being replaced with new ones and so forth, and yet all of this complaining is in fact pandering to his (equally crotchety) audience. This being Bryson, of course there are moments of laugh-out-loud funniness, but I grew tired of the book at times. In every town he visits (including mine; he lived not 25 miles from here before he moved back to America) he sees a few lovely things and then moans and complains about some building ruining the skyline or something. Which can be a bit tiresome. But none of that changes the fact that it really is a love letter.



I'd have trouble recommending this book to anyone who hasn't lived here a while, unless they are true Anglophiles.


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(note: I read this a while ago now and just didn't review it till now)

Goodreads: Carry on, Jeeves

Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Having seen several episodes of the BBC adaptation of the Jeeves & Wooster stories, it was difficult for me to read Jeeves without invoking Stephen Fry's portrayal of him; likewise Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster in all his exasperated cluelessness. Wodehouse is of course exceedingly clever - one wonders what it might do for the verbal talents of a generation if they were required to read Wodehouse in school instead of ghastly classics like The Scarlet Letter.


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Goodreads: Mouse Guard - Fall 1152

Mouse Guard Volume One: Fall 1152 by David Petersen

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
What's not to like? Beautifully drawn, well scripted adventure tale. It's a fantasy tale in that they're up against huge, foul beasties, but these are things we all know like snakes or crabs. No sign of "magic", which is fine - totally unnecessary here. If it were all humans, the plot might be a little flat, but they're mice! And that makes up for it. In a few years (when I'm sure they won't rip anything) I'll happily let my kids read it.


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Goodreads: The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
My friend Ty is a big fan of both the movie and the book. When I happened to mention that I hadn't seen or read either, he was aghast, and loaned me the movie immediately. I enjoyed the film quite a bit, and so he insisted I read the book. The stories themselves and the people involved are quite interesting, and make for compelling reading. Wolfe's style is a bit grating at times - he picks a few themes and then mentions them and points them out OVER and OVER ad nauseum, as if the reader might not be able to connect the dots without his big pointing finger to tell you that here's yet another example of "flying and drinking and drinking and driving." Still, it's worth knowing a bit about the men involved in the beginnings of our manned space program. I've always leaned towards unmanned projects, partly because my grandfather was heavily involved with them at JPL and partly because I never understood what was so important about having people be there. Reading this helped me understand the viewpoint of those who love manned space flight (although it does nothing to change my position on the subject).



If I were in a book club with my former workmates with whom the subject of manned vs. unmanned space exploration was a common subject of discussion, this would be an excellent book for us to read & discuss. I am with the Chuck Yeagers of the world who thought that the Mercury astronauts were little more than payloads, and that truly piloted flight (of planes that reach space flight) is more impressive. But I still question the enterprise at all at this point - now that the cold war is over, what is the point of, say, working towards putting a single person or few people on the surface of Mars? It is inspiring as a human enterprise, but more than anything it is a colossal way to burn money. No doubt you have some thoughts on the matter; feel free to share them.


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Goodreads: Body of Lies

Body of Lies: A Novel by David Ignatius

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
The movie was pretty good - one of the best spy films I've seen lately. The book was better in some ways and worse in others for me. Ignatius definitely knows his stuff, and you have no trouble visualizing the places he's talking about - he clearly knows them well. Likewise, he seems to have a decent hold on the modern business of espionag e. All that stuff is good, but the love story in the book is just not compelling for me - the girl, Alice, is a little too plainly allegorical for the "just-show-the-Arab-world-we-care-and-they-will-love-us-back" point of view, and so the whole story of their relationship and the dissolution of the main character's marriage to a "true believer in the War on Terror" becomes political commentary to beat the reader over the head with. The spy stuff is good, though.


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Goodreads: I, Robot

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Groundbreaking at the time, to be sure, but the fact that it was written in the 40s & 50s makes its vision of the future not just wrong but completely silly. Not to mention all the "swell" lingo we all use in the year 2003 on Venus. Aasimov does well at poking holes and finding loops in his own three laws of robot behavior, which is an interesting ethics/logic exercise; it's just buried in story that I had trouble caring about.


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Goodreads: 10 Bad Dates with De Niro

Ten Bad Dates with De Niro by Richard T. Kelly

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am naturally a list-reader. I make lists too, when the occasion warrants, but I like reading a good list just as much as making a good list. Not all the movie lists in this book are great, but there are enough lists and enough films covered to make it very enjoyable. And, since there's no plot to follow, there's no guilt in skipping a list that doesn't look interesting, or only reading the paragraphs about movies you've heard of in a list. This may reveal more about my personal habits than I'd like, but I should mention that I read almost all of the parts I read on the toilet. Now you know.



Be forewarned: it is impossible to read this without adding a bunch of movies to your Netflix queue. Seriously, unless you've seen them all, at least add one from the "10 Best Gangster Deaths" list.


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Park Women, or Those Who Frequent The Parks at Night And Other Retired Places

(From the book "London's Underworld", a 19th-century expose on London's seedier side; my current bedside reading)

"Park women, properly so called, are those degraded creatures, utterly lost to all sense of shame, who wander about the paths most frequented after nightfall in the Parks, and consent to any species of humiliation for the sake of acquiring a few shillings. You may meet them in Hyde Park, between the hours of five and ten (till the gates are closed) in winter. In the Green Park, in what is called The Mall, which is a nocturnal thoroughfare, you may see these low wretches walking about sometimes with men, more generally alone, often early in the morning. They are to be seen reclining on the benches placed under the trees, originally intended, no doubt, for a different purpose, occasionally with the head of a drunken man reposing in their lap. These women are well known to give themselves up to disgusting practices, that are alone gratifying to men of morbid and diseased imaginations. They are old, unsound, and by their appearance utterly incapacitated from practising their profession where the gas-lamps would expose the defects in their personal appearance, and the shabbiness of their ancient and dilapidated attire. ... The unfortunate women that form this despicable class have in some cases been well off, and have been reduced to their present condition by a variety of circumstances, among which are intemperance, and the vicissitudes natural to their vocation."

Seriously, the whole book is like that. It's hilarious. Here's part 1 of the table of contents (the portion dealing with prostitution):

Introduction
Foreword
Prostitution in London
General Remarks
Seclusives, or those that live in private houses and apartments
The prostitutes of the Haymarket
Board Lodgers
Those who live in low lodging houses
Sailors' women
Soldiers' women
Thieves' women
Park Women
The Dependents of Prostitutes
Bawds
Followers of Dress Lodgers
Keepers of accommodation houses
Procuresses, Pimps, and Panderrs
Fancy-men
Bullies
Clandestine Prostitutes
Female Operatives
Maid-Servants
Ladies of Intrigue and Houses of Assignation
Cohabitant Prostitutes
Criminal Returns
Traffic in Foreign Women


Next time: Thieves!

Goodreads: Vegetarian Planet

Of course! Cookbooks! I've loads of those I could review!

Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Chock full of deliciousness! Among our faves:



- Creamy tomato soup

- Dirty Rice

- Roasted New Potato Salad

- Masa cakes with salsa verde



And lots more. There are whole sections we still haven't delved into, but I'm sure they're just as good as the stuff we've tried. My sister gave this to us for our wedding as I recall, and it's been serving us well ever since. Whether or not you're vegetarian (we are most definitely NOT), this book is worth picking up and cooking from.


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Goodreads: Conan and Hellboy

Conan of Cimmeria: The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
I had no idea going into this book that the original Conan stories were so incredibly rife with racism and misogyny, to the point where even though the plots are interesting and the setting excellent, I can't overcome my disgust every time (and it is EVERY TIME) that Conan has to save a near-naked white girl from the unspeakable horrors that "brown-skinned men" will inflict on her. Ugh. Have to quit this one 3/4 of the way in, I'm afraid.



Typical of pulp fiction for the time, I'm sure, but I'll just have to rely on later authors for my swords-and-sorcery fix.


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Hellboy Volume 6: Strange Places by Mike Mignola

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Great art, great stories, great one-liners. Not as epic or memorable as some of the earlier Hellboy tales, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.


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Here's a couple panels from that Hellboy comic that had me cracking up:

Goodreads review: Queen and Country Vol 8

So, I'm trying out Goodreads after realizing Librarything wasn't doing anything interesting for me. So far, it's been good - I've added several books to my 'to-read' lists based on seeing friends' reviews of them, and I always think its interesting to hear what friends think of the books they read. If you're on there, look for me. I also got a lot of books for my birthday and am technically in the process of reading at least 5 books, so I'm thinking I'll sometimes post my reviews here. This one is for Vol 8 of Queen and Country, a comic/graphic novel about the Special Section of MI6. I recommend watching The Sandbaggers first, which is dated (filmed 1979-ish) and has the low production values of the time, but is some of the best spy-drama I've ever seen; every bit as good as any of the Le Carre adaptations.

Queen & Country, Vol.8: Operation: Red Panda by Greg Rucka

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. This one was near-perfect. I realized, after reading it all in one sitting, that I finally felt as though Queen and Country had surpassed The Sandbaggers, its own inspiration. Well done Greg Rucka.


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I know.

I'm sorry. It won't be the last time I neglect this blog; it hasn't been the first. Those of you still here, thanks. Its now less than a month until we get on a plane and go to England. We're excited and stressed.

Our house got listed for renters today. Pics in the "Virtual Tour". I find it amazing that houses still get sold or rented when basically all real estate sites have such appallingly poor web design, but so it goes.

I went to England for a couple of weeks, during which I worked about 150 hours, but I still found a little time to go look at houses and eat at some pretty decent pubs and curry houses. I think we're going to like it there. I originally had my heart set on some kind of stone barn conversion out in the country, but after driving through thick fog on twisty narrow roads, and after seeing what town has to offer, the idea of living in town is growing on me. It's a small town, anyway. But it has nice parks and Victorian townhomes, and its pretty. There's still a chance we'll end up in some little village surrounded by sheep, but town is probably where we'll end up. We won't actually find the place until after we're there, but it was nice to have a look around and see what's where.

Now begins the difficult task of sorting through all our stuff; deciding what goes to storage, what goes with us, and what simply goes away. I am fortunate to be married to someone who is a natural organizer, which makes many things about this easier for me - I am not very good at this sort of thing on my own.

On to media reviews:

The England Mix is done - thanks for contributions, you probably will get your copy shortly if you're on my list. If you think you should be on my list but didn't contribute, leave me a little note below telling me what you've done for me lately and get me your address (email to dave dot younce at gmail dot com, don't go posting it in comments) and I'll see what I can do.

Spice, History of a Temptation , by Jack Turner. 3.5 stars out of 5. It's fascinating for people like me, who want to know just how pepper came to be used as a common rent payment, or why the phoenix was said to smell of cinnamon, but its tone is rather academic (I suspect it's Jack Turner's dissertation turned into a book). There are some rather tawdry portions where spices as aphrodisiacs are concerned, but mostly it's about how spices came to have such value that the quest for them fueled the age of discovery. I liked it, but then, I was stuck on planes for hours and hours.

Michael Clayton: I watched this on the plane on my way over to the UK, and liked it quite a lot. Clooney is excellent, as is Swindon. 4.5 stars.

Big Love - Season 2: Oh fine, I admit it - I watched this show despite the many ill-informed email chain letters I got from LDS friends warning me about it's evil depictions of the Church. Actually, the LDS church is rarely mentioned, and when it is, it's usually treated with respect. Mostly I came away from Season 1 saying "Man, I'm glad that's not us". But Season 2 is just too hard to make myself want to watch - the show is really, really good at drama. But watching this family held together by threads is just too much for me anymore. So I'm moving on, but amiably. It was interesting, but I've no time for it anymore. 3 stars.

30 Rock, on the other hand, just gets better and better. We're only about halfway into the first disc of the first season, but it's a keeper. 4 stars.

To Have and Have Not: There's definitely chemistry between Bogart and Bacall, and it's pretty good - if I'd never seen Casablanca I'd have thought this was excellent. I have, though, and Casablanca's the better film. Their stories are similar enough that I think you'll see the connection too. 3.5 stars.

Something the Lord Made: Alan Rickman and Mos Def as pioneering heart surgeons in the mid-20th century. Both are excellent, but the combination of racial tensions and medical suspense makes it harrowing to watch. Excellent, and recommended, but I am unlikely to watch it again. Oh yeah, and its a true story. 4 stars.

As if You Care about ... Cocaine

A few entries back, I mentioned a series of guest posts on the Freakonomics blog about how real life thugs view "The Wire", and I said I'd probably read Sudhir Venkatesh's book. Well, I did. It is probably the first book I've read in less than a week in a very long time - usually I'm splitting reading time between a lot of books, or not really reading at all for a few months at a time. This account held me captivated - it deals not only with the conditions of a poor black housing project, but with the economics of running a crack cocaine gang, and the other sub-rosa economics of car repair, prostitution, stealing cable, bribing housing officials, clergy, police, and everyone else. Also, I was sick a bit this week, and had more time to read than usual.

It took something I knew a little tiny bit about, and gave me a lot of fascinating details I would never have thought of. It focuses not just on how the gangs work in and of themselves, but also how they essentially function as a partial government in a place where there is none, along with empowered old ladies who control the buildings themselves and make sure when a woman is beaten that the culprit is rounded up and likewise beaten, or who take a cut of all the hairdressers' and candy-sellers' incomes as a sort of tax, the same way the gangs tax male hustlers in the buildings.

Now, that doesn't change the fact that there's a negative side to all of this: we're still talking about people in the most abject poverty, many of whom are selling drugs that destroy other people's lives. It's not exactly uplifting stuff. Recommended for those of you who are entreprenurial in nature, with the hope that you direct your energies into another field.

Then, today, I read about a town in Nicaragua where almost nobody works, but where bales of cocaine discarded by smugglers fleeing interdiction wash up on the shore. It makes for a fascinating story, and it's here. So its been kind of a theme this week.

Calling all Templar Fans

Via National Geographic:

This week officials announced that the Vatican will publish classified manuscripts about the mysterious Christian knights that have been kept under wraps for nearly 700 years.

The Holy See will publish 799 copies of the book-length document in leather-bound reproductions so faithful that they will even show stains left on the historic parchment.

The knights were a Christian military order created in 1119 to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. They were believed to have amassed great wealth and influence during the Crusades and have often been depicted as keepers of the Holy Grail.

The new publication won't reveal any relics' whereabouts, however. The document describes the knights' trial in the 1300s for heresy—including charges of idol worship and homosexuality—as well as their eventual absolution by Pope Clement V.

I was a Templar fan from the first time I read Foucault's Pendulum 13 years ago and my mom recommended Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Which is why I never saw or read The Da Vinci Code - I've always snobbishly looked down my nose at the 'new Templar fans' who only learned about this stuff from a book I haven't read but have prejudged. And I will continue to do so, stubbornly; snobbishly. But I do hope the new manuscripts have some juicy new info in them for us all, old fans and new, to check out.

Google Book Search 'My Library' so far falls short

So, I saw the items I Shared about Google Book Search now allowing a 'My Library' feature, with the potential promise of letting me put up a collection of books and allowing me to search them. If true, that would be huge - put all my church books up and let google pull out the bits I need for a talk, or build a whole ideal research library and go wild looking up text within. Sadly, that's not the case. I figured a way for Librarything to give me all my ISBNs, which I then imported into Google reader - about 1/3 were rejected for unknown reasons.

The rest are here, in 'My Library'. Kinda cool, but nothing Librarything doesn't already do. One thing you'll notice is that nearly all of the books have 'No Preview Available', which means their text isn't searchable on Google Book Search. A few have 'Limited Preview', which is just as useless.

So, for now at least, the 'My Library' function isn't all that useful.

Case of the disappearing books

I'm loosing books. Good books. Maybe only good books; it's a little difficult to tell.

I started to notice this when we were leaving for vacation and Michelle needed a good book to read. "Oh, I'll find you something," I said.

"Hmmm.... that's odd... Salt: A World History doesn't seem to be on the shelves..."

"No matter, let me dig out Neuromancer..."

"..."

"..."

"I... must have lent it out?"

Then, just now, I was checking out 'In Very Deed, where cousin-in-law Katy makes an off the cuff Confederacy of Dunces comment. Now, there aren't that many of us running around the internet, so when a fellow CoD fan throws that out there, its the responsibility of the rest of us to respond. Only, suddenly I couldn't remember Ignatius' last name! So I went for my trusty copy, but couldn't find it! Now, I might lend you Salt or Neuromancer, but I'm unlikely to suggest Confederacy of Dunces unless I know you pretty well; its just not a 'hey-you-might-try-this-one' kinda book. So now I'm convinced the book gnomes are making off with the good books.

If I've lent you a good book, please give it back to me. The library is shrinking.

(Epilogue: I did eventually find Confederacy. It was hiding behind Snow Crash)