Finished Deadly Memory by David Walton, which was okay.
Now I’m reading good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980, by lucille clifton.
Finished good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980, by lucille clifton, of which the best poem (in my opinion) was “some dreams hang in the air”.
Now I’m reading Robots Have No Tails, a collection of short stories by Henry Kuttner.
Great stuff, if dated. The stories were originally credited to “Lewis Padgett”, which was the pseudonym used by Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, but Moore credited Kuttner as sole author in an intro she wrote for the first paperback edition.
Sometime in the 1990s someone wrote a Gallagher-esque story that was published in Playboy, but didn’t acknowledge its being an homage to Robots Have No Tails.
I read that back in my 20s! I loved it, should probably reread it since I’m actually reading science fiction again.
Finished Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis. James Bond goes to the rescue of his kidnapped boss, M, and has an adventure in Greece, aided by a beautiful Soviet agent and a badass boat captain there as he squares off against a top Chinese agent. It’s a pretty good 007 book, and very much in the Ian Fleming style. Interestingly for 1968, there are hints of the détente that was to come a few years later.
Next up: Sinkable by Daniel Stone, about shipwrecks generally and the Titanic in particular. I like it so far.
I’m still reading my short story book, but I think I’ll use it to fill in the cracks between my longer novel reading. So today I started on Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle. It’s about horrific happenings at a religious gay-conversion camp. I mean, unintended supernatural happenings.
Started listening to All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. Hoping it’s as good as No Country for Old Men.
Finished Robots Have No Tails, a collection of short stories by Henry Kuttner, which I enjoyed. I’m pretty sure I’ve read the first paperback edition, because it includes the introduction by Catherine L. Moore you mention here. (The publication date is 1952.) I thought the best story was “Ex Machina”.
At one point in another story, “Gallegher Plus”, our hero is locked in an attic and frantically looks around for something to defend himself with. The attic includes the things you’d expect in an ordinary attic, but I knew he’d be okay when one of those things was a box of scraps (imagine the villain yelling at his minions in Iron Man)
Now I"m reading Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, by Dimitris Xygalatas.
I haven’t started Pyle’s King Arthur book because I’ve been diverted by Alexis de Toqueville’s Democracy in America, a really amazing book. It’s constantly referred to but you wouldn’t guess from the references that the book is:
1.) The work of two Frenchmen sent to the United States to study the prison system
2.) Gustave de Beaumont traveled with d Toqueville, but didn’t co-author the book, so he doesn’t get remembered.
3.) Nobody asked him to write an evaluation of the state of Democracy in America. That was his own choice
4.)From the quotations people give and the way they write about the book, you might think that de Toqueville was an admirer smitten by the wonders of the working of Americabn politics. He wasn’t. He was looking for a political philosophy to guide his own France, which was floundering after the upsets of the previous half century. There was much that he admired about America, but he didn’t approve of everything he saw.
5.) He sets out the historical reasons that American government evolved and conditions that allowed it to evolve the way it did, not always to the glory of the USA. As he points out, America had the advantage of isolation from other power imposed by the wide Atlantic, a lack of an entrenched aristocracy and modes of thought and action. He saw two important leveling agents in the difficulties in frontier life preventing the development of a European-style “rent” system, and in the lack of primogeniture causing large estates to break up into smaller, more egalitarian units. It’s not by virtue of innate American Goodness or Purity of Soul or the distillation of good governmental theory that the United States developed a working system with admirable traits, but because, in large part, or the situation under which it was forced to develop.
I’m only a third of the way through. This, or at least parts of this, ought to be required reading in high school history or civics classes. I loved the iconoclastic readings we got in my high school, but this wasn’t part of it.
Next up, if I don’t get to Pyle, Jules Verne’s A Priest in 1835 – his first published novel. It predates Five Weeks in a Balloon by almost a quarter of a century, and is even earlier than his plays
This has long been a favorite de Tocqueville quotation of mine, Cal:
“It must not be supposed… that the legal spirit is confined in the United States to the courts of justice; it extends far beyond them. As the lawyers form the only enlightened class whom the people do not mistrust, they are naturally called upon to occupy most of the public stations. They fill the legislative assemblies and are at the head of the administration; they consequently exercise a powerful influence upon the formation of the law and upon its execution. The lawyers are obliged, however, to yield to the current of public opinion, which is too strong for them to resist; but it is easy to find indications of what they would do if they were free to act…"
de Tocqueville frequently tosses off bon mots or asides that make you want to protest “Hey, wait a minute…”, but he’d already moved on to something else"
“The American cannot converse, but he can discuss…”
“the Happy and the Powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than Poverty and Misfortune.”
“The defects and weaknesses of a democratic government may readily be discovered; they are demonstrated by flagrant instances…The laws of the American democracy are frequently defective or incomplete; they sometimes attack vested rights, or sanction others which are dangerous to the community; and even if they were good, their frequency would still be a great evil.”
That last one is actually a preamble to saying something good about America – “How comes it, then, that the American republic s prosper and continue?”
Like I said, de Tocqueville was not an unalloyed approver of everything American, but he saw things that he thought he could take away and try to apply to France.
Quite so, and thanks.
Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History Rebecca Struther
A history of timekeeping technology, from marks on a stick to atomic clocks, with a focus on watches.
Although it didn’t live up to the book cover reviews (“a joy to behold”, “endlessly fascinating”, “it blew my socks off”) it was an enjoyable read.
I did stick with the Jurafsky book, sort of…I continued to find the chapters on the foods (and names) of things like salsa, toast, and turkey, and skimmed some of them at best. OTOH, I did like the chapters on how brands of foods get named, the different types of words used by Yelp reviewers to evaluate restaurants, and class divisions and their connection to potato chip advertising. So in the end it was worth getting, from the library at least.
I also read Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies. It’s very much like his earlier novel Mystic River–hardscrabble ethnic white people in Boston, crime, drugs, hopelessness. Oh, and a teenage girl who just disappears one day. She disappears just after a young African-American man dies on a subway platform, right when the busing controversy in the seventies is reaching its peak. Are the disappearance and the death connected? Hey, is the Pope Catholic? I can’t say I “enjoyed” the book–it’s too grim for that–and it’s not as good as Mystic River in my opinion, but if you’re in the mood for something well-written and depressing it might fill the bill.
Finishing Fair Warning by Michael Connelly.
Next up is The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss.
Finished A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie. I think it’s my favorite one so far. It was also the only one where I was able to partially deduce the ending.
Finished Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler. It’s really a beautiful memoir, both funny and heartbreaking. It’s told from the perspective of a Christian theologian studying the prosperity gospel, but it’s not an evangelizing book. On the contrary, it’s kind of about how Christianity isn’t enough to explain, justify, or ameliorate intense suffering. Also this woman wrote another book after this one, which means she’s more prolific than me, while dying.
I started Pseudoscience in Therapy, a collection of articles by psychological researchers edited by Stephen Hupp. It reviews treatments for various mental health conditions, one chapter per condition, discussing popular but dubious/unscientifically supported interventions. I was hoping for something more in-depth, but it’s a good start to understanding what treatments are and are not supported by the evidence.
I started book two of The Molecule Thief series by LP Styles. It’s a sci-fi thriller whose protagonist is a very smart kid with ADHD who finds a connection with alternate dimensions while being attacked on a Canadian research base. A lot of the science is lost on me, but it’s conceptually pretty cool, and the storytelling is great. The author LP Styles is really two people, who are good friends of mine and fellow writers. So I’ve read the first book about eight hundred times in edits, but I haven’t read much after that yet.
Finished Camp Damascus. It was okay, the writing wasn’t great and the tone was very YA. However, this Chuck Tingle dude is quite the character! I might read something else by him (not the pounded in the butt stuff). 
A Murder is Announced is one of my favorite Christie novels, too.
Finished Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, by Dimitris Xygalatas, which was very interesting. It’s like my college sociology course, but interesting.
Now I’m reading Grendel, by John Gardner. My high school English teacher recommended it while we were reading Beowulf, and now, decades later, I’m finally getting around to it.
Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–and How to Think Deeply Again Johann Hari
A look at why you can’t pay seem to pay attention. The short answer is that there is just too much information out there via TV, internet and social media. People respond by trying to multitask, but the science is clear: You can’t multitask. Although I am not as bad off as some people (the average college student focuses on one thing for 65 seconds) I’ve noticed that I have a hard time concentrating on one thing too. He documents his own struggles, including spending three months without internet access at all. The book outlines a number of practical things you can do that are pretty helpful, like setting limits on your screen time and even locking you phone away for a while. He then goes a little overboard and advocates banning, or nationalizing, social media, which seems a little extreme.
In the second half of the book, ironically, the author loses focus and starts discussing all sorts of things that he finds bad about the modern world, like junk food and people working too long hours.
He also has a chapter where he argues (with some equivocation) that ADHD is not a real condition but is just a case of kids who can’t pay attention because of bad parenting and poorly organized schools. I’m not an expert but I’m skeptical.
Recommended, at least the first half
Finished King’s latest work, “Holly”. Not bad, not great. Now I’m back to the Hillerman books (up to #6 so far), which are entertaining and also informative about the Navaho culture.