Rule #1: Do Not Read War and Peace in Public

I defeated the premise of sociologist Dalton Conley's new book Elsewhere USA: how we got from the company man, family dinners, and the affluent society to the home office, blackberry moms, and economic anxiety, he illustrates the economic "red shift" in America, how for the first time in our history (and maybe the history of the world) people who make more money also work more hours, and how they are usually married to someone else who makes more money and works more hours, thus the divide between rich and poor is growing quicker than ever, and if you are in the "top half" than though you are doing materially better than anyone at any time in history, it still appears as if the other people in the top half are moving away from you in economic class, because now we have the ability to work all the time (home office, Blackberry, cell phone, outsourcing around the clock, etc.) and those of us who are making money realize that all our time is billable and valuable, and so we become fragmented, and we pass this "weisure" ethic on to our kids, and the result is we can rarely focus ourselves for a long enough time away from work, technology, social networking, etc. to read an entire book in one day unless you are a teacher and it is exam period, which I love, because you get a duty where you are sentenced to guard a hall for several hours, and then you have to sit in a room and proctor an exam, and then the school day is over-- so it's an excellent time for total reading focus, in fact, several years ago this is how I got deep into War and Peace . . . but the only problem was that when people walked by me in the hall, and saw the giant book I was reading, they jokingly asked, "What are you reading? War and Peace?" and I would have to say, very apologetically "uh, yes, it's really good, actually" and show them the cover . . . but they would still look at me like I was a big asshole, because who goes around reading War and Peace when you can update your Ebay and your Facebook and your stock portfolio and your tutoring schedule and your kid's activities from a cell-phone or an I-touch, unless you're some kind of deviant miscreant up to no good?

Clay Shirky, You Are My Nemesis!

I am reading War and Peace for the second time right now-- and that's not counting the time I read six hundred pages and and then quit, so really it's my third time reading the first half-- and it is even more absorbing and epic than ever (partly because of the new and excellent translation and partly because now I recognize all the insanely long Russian names) but according to internet theorist and "digital media scholar" Clay Shirky, this is not possible . . . because he infamously wrote in 2008: "No one reads War and Peace . . . it's too long, and not so interesting," and people have "increasingly decided that Tolstoy's sacred work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it," and although I know that Shirky was probably grandstanding when he wrote that and isn't actually that stupid, I'm going to treat him literally and challenge him to a Tolstoy era duel . . . our weapons will be appropriate-- I will fight with a copy of War and Peace, which at 1200 pages is hefty enough to cave in the soft skull of an academic, and he can defend himself with his lap-top . . . so Clay Shirky, I will be waiting by the "smoker's gate" after school today and every day until you arrive, with my weapon in hand-- which I can also read while I wait (one of the benefits of a large book) . . . this library isn't big enough for the both of us.

You Had to Be There (Not That You'd Want To)

Mark Bowden's new book Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam recounts the Tet Offensive, the capture of the ancient provincial capital city of Hue by the North Vietnamese, and the ensuing epic 24 day battle waged by the Marines and the ARVN to recapture the city . . . the book is over 500 pages and a monumental day-by-day account of the heroism, atrocities, propaganda, misinformation, strategy, blunders, civilian casualties, destruction of ancient wonders, Communist purges, political failures, and-- amidst great effort and honor-- the futility of top-down command in warfare . . . Bowden interviewed scores of people from both sides, so while he focuses on American perspectives and tells the stories of many, many Marines and reporters who were at Hue and witnessed the bloodiest battle in the war, he also recounts civilian and North Vietnamese perspectives of the tragic month; the sum total of this grueling depiction is the ultimate expression of "I support the troops but not the war," although at times it's even hard to support the troops, who often busy themselves shooting dogs and civilians, prying gold fillings from the teeth of the dead, and committing other acts that could only occur in the moral vacuum of a chaotic, street-to-street, house-to-house plodding assault, where young men watched their friends get shot in the streets, tried to retrieve the wounded, were consequently shot and on and on-- the book graphically describes the many many deaths and injuries-- the Marines were used as fodder and many are still angry about this, none of the people higher up the chain understood the amount of NVA in the Citadel, nor how well entrenched they were, or that their supply chains were intact . . . they didn't understand how well-trained the NVA soldiers were, the generals thought they could be brushed aside with little collateral damage, they didn't understand that the spider-holes, trenches, towers, turrets, snipers, and occupation of the city created a maze of interlocking fire that just devastated our troops, nor did the people calling the shots understand the North Vietnamese strategy, which was simply to hold onto the city as long as possible, cause as many casualties as possible, and-- though the NVA knew they would eventually lose the battle-- they would win the war, because the American people and media (including Walter Cronkite) would finally realize that it wasn't worth the effort . . . so while the Marines heroically took back the Citadel, the generals (Gen. Westmoreland specifically) didn't realize that the death toll, the destruction of the city and its historical wonders, and the civilian casualties would drive Lyndon Johnson to bow out of the presidential race, and completely change the strategy in Vietnam . . . while the capture of Hue did not foment a fervent Communist uprising, and-- in fact-- many of the people in Hue (an educated, upper-middle class city) tried to stay out of the war and not choose sides at all, many of these people, the ones not killed by the initial battle, were killed by the Communists in purges . . . it was horrible and ugly on both sides, the genetically engineered IR8 rice didn't do the trick, nor did the Hanoi government, and while the war would slog on for several more years, as we tried to "seek honorable peace," the lessons were obvious and while we have gotten mired in places we don't belong, we at least know now that we have to "win hearts and minds" in order to achieve any kind of lasting success in a foreign proxy war (not that we're immune to this sort of thing, despite what we learned, we still managed to concoct Abu Ghraib . . . but that's still a far cry from the treatment of the civilian "gooks" in Vietnam, there was very little thought of collateral damage by the soldiers and the generals, despite the fact that we weren't fighting a war against Vietnam, we were supposedly fighting a war for the Vietnamese people . . . what a fucking mess, read the book).

Hey Jazz Dogs! It's The War and Peace of Dope War Books!

Once again, while my family was enjoying the sun and sand, I read about drug wars and torture: The Cartel is part two of Don Winslow's magnum opus on the Mexican drug trade; when I reviewed The Power of the Dog (part one), I described Winslow's writing as "Ellroy-esque," and now, on the back cover, Ellroy himself pays Winslow the highest of compliments . . . he calls the novel "The War and Peace of dope-war books" and then he goes on to say, "it's got the jazz dog feel of a shot of pure meth!" and while that quotation is certainly Ellroy-esque . . . and I'm not sure what a "jazz dog" is, I highly recommend this book (though you should read Power of the Dog first) and while I admit that it's an undertaking, it is worth it-- there's plenty of action and there's even a map, so that finally --after reading five or six books about the Mexican drug wars-- I am starting to understand the how the cartography and the politics fit together . . . and at least it's a real map of actual Mexican states, not a fictional map, like at the start of Lord of the Rings . . . so that when reality mirrors fiction and the real person after whom Adan Barrerra is modeled: "El Chapo" Guzman, escapes once again, you know where he is headed to hide-out (Sinaloa) and while I am always suspect of fiction that requires a map, Game of Thrones has made me change my tune on this rule of thumb, and I am always grateful when non-fiction includes a map because I am spatially challenged.

The Nix: A Big Book with a Lot of Stuff Inside (Except Leeroy Jenkins)

Nathan Hill's new novel The Nix is a tour-de-force decade defining portrayal that does for the post-recession twenty-tens what Tom Wolfe did for the '80's with Bonfire of the Vanites, the '90's with A Man in Full and the aughts with Charlotte Simmons, but it's more than hyper-realistic literary fiction-- the multiplicity of tone, from and structure pays homage to David Foster Wallace . . . and you also get plenty of John Irving-like anecdotal flashbacks to the 1968 Chicago demonstrations and riots, which is a hell-of-a-lot to do in one book and a hell-of-a-lot of story to tell, so the book checks in at over 600 pages and while it's often hysterically funny, especially the opening chapters, which detail a satirical World of Warcraft type game and the unlikely players, and an entitled and very persistent college student who has blatantly plagiarized a paper and is attempting to argue her way out of the punishment, and after that compelling and incredibly entertaining kick-off so much happens and there are so many plot strands, that the actual ending feels tacked on and too easy-- but the thing has to come to an end (or does it? War and Peace is over a thousand pages . . . maybe Nathan Hill just needed more pages to get the ending right) and while the actual plot sort of fizzles in its conclusion, the meta-ending is more compelling: a lesson gleaned from video game design . . . people are either "enemies or obstacles or traps or puzzles" and while the characters begin the novel as enemies and then often treat each other as obstacles to success or traps that lead to an existential abyss, by the end, the fictional author in the novel and the actual author realize that everyone is a puzzle, but that solving the puzzle of everyone takes many, many pages and you have to see things from many, many perspectives, from many times and places, and even then it's not enough to understand everyone's motivations and desires, and, as if to further develop this theme, after you finish the last page, if you turn to the Acknowledgments-- and after reading that many pages, I figured I could read two more-- then Nathan Hill does something wonderful to the puzzle of his novel: he lists all the books and articles and radio shows that helped him flesh out all these many many ideas-- Chicago '68 by David Farber and Folktales of Norway and "Microstructure Abnormalities in Adolescents with Internet Addiction Disorder" by Kai Yuan and lots of others-- and so he essentially lays the puzzle of the book bare, a brave thing to do . . . although he doesn't mention being inspired by this event, which he certainly was, as it's almost as infamous as the most notorious World of Warcraft moment: Leeroy Jenkins (which Hill definitely should have alluded to, because, when you have the opportunity, you should always allude to Leeroy Jenkins).

Dave's Book List for 2021

1.  A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

2. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes To a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib

3. Mooncop by Tom Gaul

4. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

5. Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

6. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

7. Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill (with Jake Rosen)

8. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

9. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

10. A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

11) Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey Selingo

12) Dead Land by Sara Paretsky

13) Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America by Kurt Andersen

14) Coyote America by Dan Flores

15) Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen

16) One by One by Ruth Ware

17) The Searcher by Tana French

18) No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

19) Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

20) In the Woods by Tana French

21) Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500 Year History by Kurt Andersen

22) We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker

23) Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

24) We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix

25) My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

26) The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

27) The Guest List by Lucy Foley

28) The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova

29) The Auctioneer

30) Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix

31) Phil Gordon's Little Gold Book by Phil Gordon

32) Maynard's House by Herman Raucher

33) When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom

34) CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill

35) The Humans by Matt Haig

36) Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

37) Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Medieval World 

38) The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

39) Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About His Past and Future by James Shapiro

40)  Killing Floor by Lee Child

41) Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell

42) Soccer IQ vol 1 and 2 by Dan Blank

43) The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais

44) The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

45) The Man Who Cast Two Shadows by Carol O'Connor

46) The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

47) The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

48) Countdown City by Ben H. Winters

49) World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters

50) The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green

51) The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

52) The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michale Lewis

53) Fall or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

54) Lazarus vol 1 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark

Almost (but not quite)  . . . War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin and The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge

Dave vs. The Looming Specter of his Mortality

I was in a lousy mood last week. January really dragged-- lots of gray and damp weather. No joyful snowfall. The park is a muddy goose-shit filled swamp. The ticks haven't even gone dormant. And I was scheduled for an MRI on my shoulder on Friday. I expected bad news, as the doctor suspected a tear in either a rotator cuff injury or a labral tear. A rotator cuff injury would require serious PT and a labral tear would most likely need surgery.

My shoulder has been injured since the summer. I hurt it during a tennis match, screwing around with a topspin one-handed backhand. I can't get any juice on my serve (and I can't chuck a football with any velocity either). This shoulder injury (and my impending 50th birthday) have been really weighing on me. I'm not ready to hang up my racket yet. Beating my kids is too much fun-- and I've only got a few years left where I'll be able to do that (consistently). Or perhaps my run is over-- my shoulder burnt out-- and I won't get a chance to fade away.

I played indoor soccer well last Sunday, which should have bolstered my spirits-- but when I was crossing the ball, I caught the lip of a gym door with my toe-- and while I didn't hurt myself enough to stop playing, my ankle and knees were sore for days. I felt really old all week (until I drank too much Thursday night . . . oddly, Friday morning my knees were no longer sore).

I'm no dummy, so I started preparing for the worst a couple weeks ago. There's only one way to fight the looming specter of mortality: keep busy. My first project was to use my left hand as much as possible. Brushing my teeth, driving, pulling the wet laundry out of the washer, etc. I even started shooting darts left-handed-- which actually works fine unless I'm trying to hit the bullseye-- and I played tennis left-handed a couple times with my son Ian. My groundstrokes are pretty much the same-- I could always hit a decent lefty forehand and a lefty two-handed backhand is similar to a righty forehand-- but learning to serve lefthanded is a bitch. I went down to the park and practiced and I felt like a spaz. This article inspired me to keep at it. My left shoulder still has a lot of gas left in the tank, but I'll need a lot of mental fortitude to develop the fine motor skills necessary to play well lefty.

I've been preparing in several other ways for my impending midlife crisis. I don't want to resort to the typical shit: prostitutes, alcoholism, drag-racing, and dog-fighting, so I've implemented a preemptive strike on my mid-life crisis.

Project #1:

I've switched my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) from a PC to an iMac. I'm using Logic now instead of Cakewalk Sonar. I'm watching tutorial videos at the gym and learning a lot. I still don't know what I'm doing with Smart Tempo and Flex-Time, but I'm trying. Learning the new platform is keeping me off the streets and keeping my brain away from early onset dementia.

Project #2:

I'm reading some big books. I normally value quantity over quantity (aside form War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, and Infinite Jest). I'm barrelling through Uncle Tom's Cabin-- it's gripping-- and then I've got Tom Jones queued up on my Kindle.

In meatspace, I'm reading this absurd book.

This is mainly to irritate my fellow Philosophy teacher Stacey-- I've claimed that once I finish the book, she's not allowed to teach the class any long (unless she refers to me as The Philosophical Overlord). When I know Stacey's about to come into the office, I like to put my feet up, read something obtuse aloud, and brandish my new knowledge. A.C. Grayling is actually pretty entertaining-- for a philosopher-- although I skimmed the section on Empedocles.

Project #3:

Apparently, Google Play Music is going extinct. I've already been through this once with Rdio.

Remember Rdio?

No?

Serendipitously, my buddy Whitney just gave me a gift voucher for Spotify, so I've switched over. It's great, but I'm transferring playlists and massaging the algorithm-- so I'm spending a lot of time "hearting" songs and putting them on various playlists. I'm impressed with what Spotify spits out once you spend a little time on it. This project is not keeping me off the streets-- I use Spotify while I'm walking and driving-- so I'm working hard not to screw around with it while I'm driving and to look up once in a while when I'm crossing the street.

Project #4

So I was all depressed Thursday, because of the MRI on Friday. I drank too much and stayed out too late, and by the time I raced out of school and got to University Orthopedics, I was groggy and tired and hungry. They had a cooking show on in the waiting room. Guy Fieri ate various kinds of barbecued meats. By the time they called me, I was salivating.

They took me in, I put my valuables in a locker, and the guy told me the machine was a little loud. He handed me a pair of earphones. I lay on the sliding bed, my shoulder in the cup, and he slid me in. He gave me a little emergency switch and told me if I had any problem, to press it. I wondered why. Until I got in there.

I'm not sure if being tired and hungover was bane or blessing. The top of the cylinder was an inch or two from my nose. And the machine was LOUD. Not a little loud. SUPER-LOUD! Science-fiction loud. Weird grinding and banging and revving noises. And the music in the headphones was awful. Cheesy piano, occasionally interrupted by ads. Yuck. I didn't press the little button (or move at all) but I wanted to. Twenty-five minutes later, I was out and on my way to talk to the doctor.

While I waited, I could see the inside of my shoulder on the desktop. Looked fine to me.

Turns out I was right. Sort of. Fairly good news. No labral tear, no serious rotator cuff injury. Some arthritis, some bone cysts, and some swelling. Routine stuff. I didn't even need PT. I just had to do a bunch of exercises. And the doctor said I could play tennis! Right-handed! He said it might hurt a bit, and we could try a cortisone shot-- but I wasn't going to rupture anything. I would just be sore. If I really hurt it, I would know it.

This made me happy enough to get back to a project I've been putting on hold. I need a new tennis racket, an arm friendly one. If my right shoulder still hurts with the new racket, then I may still pursue playing left-handed. But I don't have to. I went to the gym today and did a bunch of shoulder exercises and I'm sore as hell. But I've eluded the looming specter another day.

I also think I need to make a doctor's appointment-- the appointment you make when you turn fifty-- and I think this is the appointment when the doctor will stick his finger up my ass.

Can't they just stick my ass in the MRI machine?

You vs. Speransky

It's often surprising what can generate a good discussion in English class: last week I had the kids read a short passage from War and Peace -- which sounds like the kiss of death for getting kids engaged -- and the passage is fairly abstract, it's about master rhetorician Speransky, who "would never even think of acknowledging the idea that we all have thoughts beyond our power to express them" and I then had the kids compare their persuasive ability to that of Speransky, on a scale of 1-10, with Speransky being a ten, and explain why . . . and this led to a surprisingly lively discussion . . . it's good to think about how well you can express yourself, and how well you can influence others with words, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm not very persuasive at all -- my credibility is suspect (earlier that day when someone was wondering about the difference between dandruff and dry scalp, I proclaimed: "Dandruff is dry scalp! Dry scalp is just a euphemism for people who don't want to say they have dandruff!" and I'm not sure why I claimed this, as I know nothing about either topic, and it turned out that I was completely wrong -- dandruff is caused by a bacterial infection . . . but I have a horrible habit of arguing any side of a topic -- even if I'm not passionate about it, and then I'm quick to concede that I'm wrong and often easily persuaded to the other side and I also have trouble remembering specific examples, and I'm not capable of generating a whole lot of emotion, like those teachers who can tell a class that they are "very disappointed in them and know they can do better" . . . I tried this and the kids just laughed at me . . . so I don't think I would be a very good politician . . . and, of course, when I needed persuade my students to donate money for poor children, I couldn't motivate my kids with words, I had to use this gimmick . . . and I'm also easily distracted, and apt to digress onto longwinded tangents).

The E-Reader: Pros and Cons

I am certainly what the tech-world calls a "late adopter," for example: I only recently got a cell-phone, and that's because my wife purchased it for me, brought it home, and said: "You have two kids . . you need a phone," and then handed me a slim, white, lime green gadget that my students described as the phone a "12 year old Asian girl would have"-- and so, well behind the rest of the reading world,  I have finally started knocking around the idea of getting an e-reader . . . but, as I am a disciple of Neil Postman, I always think about the pros and cons of any technology before I allow it access to my life . . . and the pros for an e-reader are pretty obvious:

1) I like to read multiple books at the same time and some of them are hefty, so it would save a lot of space and clutter,

2) I hate small font, and so I could adjust this on an e-reader,

3) my book-light would be attached to the e-reader, so I wouldn't always lose it,

4) when we travel, I like to bring a lot of books . . .

but I have decided, for now, that the cons outweigh the pros, and here they are:

1) I like to take books out of the library because (duh) it's free,

2) I like to buy cheap used books off Amazon and Half.com,

3) I don't want to spill coffee or soup onto an e-reader, while I don't care if I spill coffee or soup onto a library book,

4) this one is the most important: if I read on an e-reader, no one can see what I'm reading, and-- if these things become ubiquitous-- I won't be able to see what other people are reading, and maybe I'm obnoxious, but I like it when people see me reading the new translation of War and Peace, and I liked sharing a knowing glance with the dude I saw last week on the exercise bike at the gym reading Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From . . . and if that dude was a cute female, I might have even said a word or two about how much I liked the book . . . so really what it comes down to is that I have enough trouble making conversation, and I don't need the one topic that I am knowledgeable about taken away from me, made obscure by a convenient technology-- I'm still recovering from the switch from boom boxes to personal stereos . . . who knows what the kids are listening to on those head-phones?

Dave's 105 Books to Read Before You Die (Which Will be Sooner Than You Think)

Everyone seems to have a top hundred list of something, and so here are my top hundred books (plus five bonus books in case you finish the top hundred too quickly) and each author is only represented once, so while Shakespeare and Italo Calvino may actually deserve more than one slot, for the sake of variety there are no repeats; also, there is fiction, non-fiction, and everything else on this list . . . and I should point out that once you finish reading all the books on this list, then you will be much smarter than me, because though I've read them all, I'm not sure I remember anything from them:

1.   Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2.   Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
3.   War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.   The Lives of the Cell by Lewis Thomas
5.   Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
6.   If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
7.   Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
8.   Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard
9.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. V by Thomas Pynchon
11. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
12. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13.  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
14.  Into the Wild by John Krakauer
15.  Music of Chance by Paul Auster
16.  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
17.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
18. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
19. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
20. The Bible
21. Henry IV (part 1) by William Shakespeare
22. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
23. The Stories of John Cheever
24. Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver
25. The Image by Daniel Boorstin
26. Clockers by Richard Price
27. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
28. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
29. A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn
30. Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan
31. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
32. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch  by Philip K. Dick
33.  Chaos by James Gleick
34.  The Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky
35.  Watchmen by Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons
36.  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
37.  The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
38.  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
39.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
40.  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
41.  Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
42.  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
43.  War With The Newts by Karel Kapek
44.  The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky
45.  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
46.  Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
47.  White Noise by Don Delillo
48.  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
49.  Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
50.  Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
51.  Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
52.  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
53.  Bully For Brontosaurus by Stephen J. Gould
54.  The Drifters by James A. Michener
55.  Geek Love by Catherine Dunne
56.  The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
57.  Human Universals by Donald Brown
58.  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan
59.  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
60.  The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson
61.  The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
62.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
63.  American Splendor by Harvey Pekar/ Robert Crumb
64.  The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz by Hector Berlioz
65.  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
66.  The Castle by Franz Kafka
67.  Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
68.  Naked by David Sedaris
69.  Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
70.  The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
71.  The Big Short by Michael Lewis
72.  Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
73.  Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
74.  Monster of God by David Quammen
75.  Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
76.  Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco
77.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
78.  Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
79.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
80. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
81.  Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Richard Wright
82.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
83.  Manchester United Ruined My Life by Colin Shindler
84.  Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
85. From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
86. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
87. The End of the Road by John Barth
88. Neuromancer by William Gibson
89. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
90. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
91. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
92. Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
93. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
94. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
95. We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
96. The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane
97. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
98. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
99. 1493 by Charles C. Mann
100.  Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
101.  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
102.  The Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
103.  Methland by Nick Reding
104. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
105. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Book Review with a Side of Hyperbole, Please . . .

If you're only going to read one book this year, it should be War and Peace, but if you're going to read two books this year, then the other one should be Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History; while the message is grim, the writing is clear and engaging, and Kolbert narrates her own adventures in places as far-flung and varied as the Amazon, the Andes, the Great Barrier Reef, Italy, Vermont, and a littered fossil-filled stream in an undisclosed location near a ball field in the vicinity of Princeton, New Jersey to provide a counterpoint to some shockingly depressing lessons and predictions, and while I shouldn't be doing this, because you must read this book, I will provide a thumb-nail sketch of the content . . . before humans, there were five major extinctions, and "as in Tolstoy, every extinction event appears to be unhappy-- and fatally so-- in its own way"; there was the well-documented K-Pg extinction event (formerly known as the K-T extinction event) which wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago, when a huge asteroid hit the earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, but the four other extinction events are more mysterious . . . they may have been because of climate change, shifting continents, habitat loss, and/or ocean acidification (global warming's "equally evil twin") and Kolbert wants to welcome us to the sixth extinction event, the Anthropocene, where all of these forces -- cranked up to a much faster velocity-- are wiping out species faster than we can count them, and there is an apt comparison deep in the book, after Kolbert recounts the story of the brown tree snake, an invasive species that has voraciously eaten every indigenous bird, mammal, and reptile on the island of Guam, and she cites the great nature writer David Quammen for this analogy: "while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place . . . what Boiga irregularis has done in Guam is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeed extravagantly at the expense of other species."

Kids Those Days . . .

Don't expect new book reviews any time soon, as I am re-reading War and Peace . . . super-translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky came out with a new translation a few years ago, and even though I'm familiar with the characters, the first scene, at Anna Pavlovna's soiree, is still brutal: full of French dialogue and explanatory footnotes, historical references, and loads of characters with long Russian names, but if you survive, then Tolstoy rewards you with something more exciting-- a night of drinking and debauchery, including a drinking challenge (Dolokhov chugs an entire bottle of rum while sitting on a ledge) and a prank . . . after the party the Dolokhov, Pierre, and Anatole tie a policeman to the back of a tame bear and toss the pair into the river, so that the policeman flails about while the bear swims . . . and that sets the bar pretty high for drunken idiocy . . . I've never done anything THAT stupid and I doubt my kids will either, so if they ever commit any drunken shenanigans, I'll take a deep breath and remember to compare it to the bear and the policeman.

Questions of Grammar

Yesterdays post revealed a thorny dilemma: when you are referring to a scene in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, then do you say the final scene of Of Mice and Men (e.g. the final passage of War and Peace) or do you simply say the final scene Of Mice and Men . . . since Steinbeck has given us a free "of," I chose to be elegant and use it and not put another "of" in front of the title Of . . . and now I've got the word "of" stuck in my head and it's weird, because it's pronounced "uv" and if you say it enough times, it starts to lose its meaning and just sound like some sort of primitive exclamation: uv uv uv . . . and there's nothing on the internet to settle this pedantic absurdity so I will promise to never mention it again (unless someone actually knows the answer).

Zombies Vs. Men In Tights

Last weekend, I consumed 11 volumes of Walking Dead comic books (but now I am back on track with the new translation of War and Peace) and I am completely addicted . . .the plots are inventive, surprising, and very, very dark . . . and I was pleasantly surprised as to how appealing a zombie apocalypse is to think about: it's not like the typical superhero scenarios of good versus evil-- where you contemplate what sort of hero the world needs and what sort of actions that hero needs to implement; The Walking Dead  forces you to ruminate on survival scenarios, about how far you would go to continue living and to protect your wife and kids-- it reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in that sense, but the series is much more fun to read because of the pictures-- unlike Watchmen, they are easy to digest . . . sometimes my eyes would race through an entire page and then I would go back and read the text to see exactly what happened-- and each volume has a serialized pulp feel and ends with a cliffhanger or major event, without ever being especially campy or cheesy: ten lurkers out of ten.

Dave's 2019 Book List

Another year, another book list . . .

I read forty books in 2019-- a number which seems about average-- and for the most part, I kept it eclectic: fiction, non-fiction, genre stuff, graphic novels, economics, history, and even some self-help. My friend and fellow English teacher Kevin pointed out that I don't read enough books by women. While I definitely consume some chick-lit every year, he is right. Only six of the forty books were by women authors (but several of the books by men are about women, so that should count for something). I might remedy this in 2020 . . . but I might not. Books are one of the few things in life that you have control over. If books by women appeal to me, I'll read them. If not, Kevin can fuck off.

I did go down a couple of rabbit holes.

I read the entire Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Cixin Liu . . . and it wasn't easy. I'm quite proud of this and highly recommend these books to diehard sci-fi fans. I also read four mystery novels set in Wyoming. I don't know how this happened, but I really enjoyed the Longmire stuff by Craig Johnson.

I wrote about my seven favorite books of the year over at Gheorghe:The Blog, so you can check that post out if you like, but if you want just one book to read, here it is:

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.

This selection may be a result of the serial positioning effect, but the best book I read in 2019 is the last book I read in 2019.

The book is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, mainly during the 1970s and 1980s, but there is a frame story that is completely topical. The story is scary and compelling and violent and incredibly researched. It will dispel any romanticized notions you have about the IRA. The British are portrayed as no better.

These books provided a lot of material for me to write about. If it wasn't for books, my dog, my wife, and my absurd children, this blog would have died long ago.

Thank you books!

1) The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

2) An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

3) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

4) God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright

5) Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail by Rusty Young (and Thomas McFadden)

6) The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

7) The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

8) The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

9) Death's End by Cixin Liu

10) Atomic Habits by James Clear

11) Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

12) Glasshouse by Charles Stross

13) Educated by Tara Westbrook

14) The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

15) Redshirts by John Scalzi

16) Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nicholas Nassim Taleb

17) The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson

18) The Walking Dead 31: The Rotten Core by Robert Kirkman

19) The Walking Dead 32: Rest in Peace by Robert Kirkman

20) The Dark Horse by Craig Johnson

21) FreeFire by C.J. Box

22) Old Man's War by John Scalzi

23) Hell is Empty by Craig Johnson

24) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

25) The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block

26) Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

27) Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop

28) The Last Colony by John Scalzi

29) Locke and Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

30) Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

31) Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

32) The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

33) Real Tigers by Mick Herron

34) Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic by Ben Westhoff

35) Slow Horses by Mick Herron

36) Giants of the Monsoon Forest by Jacob Shell

37) Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell

38) Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

39) Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff

40) Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

2016 Book List

Here's what I read in 2016 (and despite reading nearly a book a week, I feel dumber than ever) and if you head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, you can see my eleven favorites . . . and if you're really feeling crazy and literary, you can check out my previous lists, but if you're going to read one book on this list, I would suggest Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather . . . I've read it twice, and I'll bet I'll read it again someday . . . anyway, here they are-- it's a little scary for me when I peruse this list, because I can't remember all that much about some of the titles, but I guess that's what happens when you read too much;

1) Trunk Music (Michael Connelly)

2) Hide & Seek (Ian Rankin)

3) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Robert D. Putnam

4) One Plus One Jojo Moyes

5) Andrea Wulf The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt's New World

6) Death Comes to the Archbishop (Willa Cather)

7) The Milagro Beanfield War (John Nichols)

8) Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)

9) The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run-- or Ruin-- an Economy (Tim Harford)

10) Tim Harford The Undercover Economist

11) The Expatriates (Janice Y. K. Lee)

12) Tim Harford The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

13) Dale Russakoff  The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools?

14) Charlie Jane Anders All the Birds in the Sky

15) Mohamed A. El-Erian  The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

16) Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh)

17) The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

18) Angels Flight (Michael Connelly)

19) Robert J. Gordon  The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

20) Tony Hillerman A Thief of Time

21) Peter Frankopan Silk Roads: A New History of the World

22) Tony Hillerman Hunting Badger

23) Tony Hillerman Listening Woman

24) Tony Hillerman The Wailing Wind

25) The Lost World of the Old Ones:Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest David Roberts

26) Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers)

27) Chuck Klosterman But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

28) White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer

29) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will Shape our future by Kevin Kelly

30) Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

31) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) Jerome K. Jerome

32) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

33) Truly Madly Guilty Liane Moriarty

34) Seinfeldia by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

35) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

36) Ghosts by Reina Telgemeier

37) The Walking Dead 23-26

38) The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark For the Ivy Leagues by Jeff Hobbs

39) The Nix by Nathan Hill

40) Bill Bryson The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

41) Tim Wu The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

42) Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad

43) Nicholson Baker Substitute

44) The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts

45) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance.

6/19/10 The Thousandth Post! $$^%&^ You!

That's right, all you nay-saying *&;(%&*^*&&$#;ers who said I would never &^%^&; keep this up, who said I was too lazy and too stupid and too unfocused to remember to write a sentence every day . . . now I have something to say to you: %*&;^% ^*^ ^;^*&;$$%^# (*&;(*&;)(%&;$# #$%^%$!!!! . . . and if I keep it up for ninety more years, then I'll have written my own personal War and Peace (which by my back of the envelope approximation has 31,000 sentences) so ^&a&^p;%^ you!

At Least Give Me A T-Shirt

I'm working my way through War and Peace for the second time, ostensibly because there is a new translation by the masterful Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, but also because I was slightly miffed that none of my "friends" threw me a party the first time I finished the book, as is traditional, so I'm hoping once I finish this time this oversight will be remediated.