Does anyone read? Part II

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

despite scattering Capital Letters about with Gay Abandon.

I always wanted to meet Gay Abandon. I'm sure I'd like her a lot.

I enjoy the 18th century attitude toward capitalization and spelling. Everything is optional.

[dai bread]

I do too. I find the custom very Quaint and Interesting in that it Adds Vitality to a Work of Literature, even such a Small Effort as Mine Own.

[jamiebk]

Besides, Using Large Letters Spawns Handy Initialisms of Text.

[Shapley]

[Schmeelkie]

Nice....

Always loved reading in the Thomas the Tank Engine series about all the engines wanting to be a 'Really Useful Engine'. They've got a good work ethic...

Finally got the afternoon off I had planned for my birthday this past Tuesday. So I got to do a nice slow browse at the bookstore without kids and finally use the gift card I got for Christmas! Got a Get Fuzzy compendium - it was in the paper in Michigan, but not here, so I've been missing it for the past 7 years... Also, Stardust by Neil Gaiman - had heard the movie was mediocre, but the book is great. Read the first 2 chapters that afternoon in the sun, sipping chai, nibbling at a cinnamon scone (well, they called it a scone - too soft by my scone standards), and am looking forward to more reading time over the weekend. Last two books were: Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card - I just can't resist anything in this series (husband rolled eyes when he saw it), and the no-cry sleep solution for toddlers and preschoolers as I think 6 years without a good night sleep is quite enough, thank you! Pumpkin sleeps like a log - he's had 1/2 hour long coughing fits that don't wake him up. Crazy. On the other hand, even after ending nursing, Bella still rarely sleeps more than 4-5 hours at a time, then after the 4-5 hour start, rarely more than 1-2 hours at a time afterwards. so I'm averaging more like 7 hours a night (up from 5.5-6 a year or so ago), but it's choppy... we'll see if this helps. Sometimes it just helps to know that I'm not the only mother of a 2.5 year old who can't sleep through the night. Also figure this book will have better solutions than my thought one night at 4am of just getting some cloroform.... (and no, Benedryl does not knock her out - has little if any effect on her at all).

[dai bread]

Besides, Using Large Letters Spawns Handy Initialisms of Text.

Nice one!

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

...Got a Get Fuzzy compendium - it was in the paper in Michigan, but not here, so I've been missing it for the past 7 years...

That, I can help with. It's online. Here!

http://www.comics.com/get_fuzzy/

Deb didn't sleep through the night, either. It finally became an absolute rule that she had to stay in bed. An I don't care if you're not tired, you have to go to bed because Mommy's tired. sort of rule. She'd sneak out of bed long enough to fetch toys back to bed with her and she must have been fifteen before we could quit remaking the bed every morning because the sheet went that way, and the blanket went the other way, and the quilt was over there, and the cats must have dragged the pillow down the hall because Deb would never have been out in the hall.*Sigh* They do grow up. Meanwhile, I sympathise with you.

[Giant Communist Robot]

"Beethoven," Seipmann

Another fine book by Seipmann; comes with 2 CDs and Naxos website access.

"A history of Japan to 1334," Sansom

Almost always on reading lists for courses that cover this time period. A standard reference, so to speak. A great book with some of the most exciting history of Japan.

"Madame Chaing Kai-Shek," Li

Prototype for the Dragon Lady of Terry and the Pirates. You could say one of a kind, except she had two sisters that were equally prominent.

Pizarro, Orellana, and the exploration of the Amazon," Bernhard

With an introductory essay by Michael Collins, the pilot of the command module of Apollo 11. Orellana's hair-raising journey from Peru to the mouth of the Amazon has to be read to be believed. Incredible!

"!00 myths about the MIddle East," Halliday

Halliday is a professor of International Relations at London School of Economics. Sound refutations of myths.

"Chicken with plums," Satrapi

Cartoon panels tell the story of Nasser Ali Khan, a musician who dies of a broken heart and disappointment. By the author of Persepolis, a much better book about the author's childhood in Iran and growing up in France.

"The tao of Mrs. Wei," Tham

Poetry by the late Hillary Tham. Her character, Mrs. Wei, is the Chinese equivalent of a Jewish Mother. Here's a sample:

Mrs. Wei & Ancestor Worship

An Englishman is visiting his mother's grave
with flowers. He sees Mrs. Wei
spreading a feast of roast chicken, moo shu pork, noodles
before her father's grave.
"When's your father coming out
to eat the food?" he asks.
Smiling, Mrs, Wei answers,
"Same time your mother
come to smell the flowers."

"The Ultra Americans," Parrish

Did you know there were Americans working at Bletchley Park to decode Enigma during WW2? I didn't.

"Death rays, jet packs, stunts and supercars," Parker

A physicist looks at James Bond movies.

"Whale," Roman

Serious and informative book about whales. Part of a series of books about animals. Desmond Morris likes.

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

Torch of Freedom (The Advance Reader Copy) ((For fellow addicts, this can be purchased from Baen.com))
David Weber and Eric Flint

The characters keep improving, and "Good Guys" and "Bad Guys" are hard to keep track of, what with all the polychromatic hats.

I've run out of Karleen Koen hysterical, ah, historical novels and I'm running through Patricia Briggs' backlist with joy. (Joy helps me keep my place on the Kindle.) ((I crack myself up.))
GCR, you must read like the wind. I am all admiration; you impress me.

[Giant Communist Robot]

you must read like the wind.

I think I've confessed here before to speed reading (E. Wood)--the truth is you miss a bunch that way, but I want quantity not quality.

[Giant Communist Robot]

"Ideas," Watson

History of ideas. Ambitious, but dull. Couldn't finish.

"Flash fiction forward," Thomas & Shapard

I really don't read fiction, but I ran out of books temporarily and this was one my wife had laying around. So I read it. Flash fiction are extremely short stories; these average about 500 words. So you can read a bunch at one time. It takes more than a small amount of skill to write so economically, and these are really good. Here's a selection of some titles:

My date with Neanderthal woman
Crazy glue
Map of the lost world
Toasters

Who could resist stories with titles like that? Not me. There are 80 of them, and they are so short I could reproduce one here but it wouldn't be fair to the author. So I will post part of one. Its three stories from three soldiers, and this is one:

The Hardest Question

My marines bring me questions. "When do we get to shower?" "Sergeant, how do you say 'Good afternoon' again?" "Sarge, where can I get more gun oil?"

I have answers. "Tommorrow, maybe." "Maysuh alheer" "Use mine."


Answering their questions is my job. But when Anaya was shot and bleeding out, he grabbed my arm and said, "Sergeant? Sergeant?" I understood the question, but damn. I didn't have an answer.

"Japanese death poems" Hoffman

If you're unfamiliar with these, every Japanese is supposed to write a poem before dying. They wish to leave a cultural legacy. This is a collection from Zen masters and Haiku poets. Here's a few:

Chogo--died 1806, age 45

I long for people--
then again I loathe them:
end of autumn.


Hou-died 1811, age 86

Encased by winter;
before long I'll
become dried salmon.

Ichimu--died 1854, age 51

A broken dream--
where do they go
the butterflies?

Kisei--died 1764, age 77

Since I was born
I have to die,
and so...

Kyo'on--died 1749, age 63

A last fart:
are these the leaves
of my dream, vainly falling?

[piqaboo]

Oh dear. So many of those have so much sadness and disappointment in them.
I am hoping I will be feeling more ... satisfied/content with things, at the end.
More like the I was born, so I die, guy.

[Giant Communist Robot]

Not all are sad. A fair number look to the other side and see contentment, a few are humorous. I just thumbed through the book and posted those that caught my eye at the moment.

Here's my daughter's favorite:

Mabutso
died 1874, age 79

Moon in a barrel:
you never know just when
the bottom will fall out

Mabutso died during a full moon, so I was thinking it was reflected in a barrel of water

[Giant Communist Robot]

"Requiem for battleship Yamato" Mitsuru

A minor classic in Japan. Mitsuru was an assistant radar officer aboard the Yamato. He tells the story of their last sortie. Everyone on board understood the term 'special mission' meant suicide mission. Such knowledge, he writes, gives one a perspective on life, and the crew search for meaning in their task and lives. On the morning before the American attack:

Breakfast.
Probably the last meal we can enjoy in a normal atmosphere.
I cannot bear to eat it inside this gloomy compartment. I scramble up the ladder outside the radar compartment, come out atop the platform of the antenna used in sending out transmissions, a flat area a little more than two meters square. I take a big bite out of my ball of rice.

An Ideal spot, surrounded by the sky. When the sea wind blows up and threatens to knock me off, I hold on by wrapping my legs around the support.

I cannot keep this wonderful spot all to myself. I summon Petty Officer Katahira, a skilled radar operator, and we eat together, our knees bumping.

He hurries through his meal silently and then departs with a stiff nod. His face betrays his impatience to be alone.

A few hours later all hell breaks loose as 350 American planes attack. Mitusuru says machine gun bullets fell on the Yamato like rain. At any give time they had to dodge 20 or so torpedoes. 500 pound bombs exploding all around made verbal communication impossible. He writes he could see the pilots faces as the planes dove perilously close to the bridge--their mouths open, probably screaming or even their eyes shut tight. In typical Japanese fashion, some ponder the brilliance of the attack plan and admire the skill of the pilots.

3,000 men went down with the Yamato. Some chose to lash themselves to the ship to avoid surviving.


"In search of King Solomon's mines," Shah

The author buys a map to Solomon's mines from an "antique" dealer in Jerusalem. It turns out to be fake (imagine that). Sitting in his hotel room, he decides the mines were located in Ethiopia, and heads out there to find them. Or at least to find material to write a book.

It turns into a sort of interesting travel story--he goes places likely better to read about than to visit. Not too bad.

For a man working as a desk clerk in a small hotel, he seemed unusually well informed. I asked if he expected tourism to pick up again.

"Hah!" he jeered. "Only when the government fails."
"When will that be?"
The clerk looked at his watch.
"It could be any minute."

[piqaboo]

The Anne of Green Gables series.

Avonlea got telephones!

[Giant Communist Robot]

"Human trafficking," Cullen-Dupont

Global issue needs attention. Book is dry beyond belief

"Tattooing the world," Ellis

Scholarly

"Claude Debussy," Roberts

Also scholarly

The Oxford history of ancient Egypt," Shaw

Very nice.

"Song without words," Bendavid-Val

Diary and photographs of Countess Sophia Tolstoy. Interesting.

[Giant Communist Robot]

"The Aztecs," Davies

Nice history of the Aztecs. Detailed.

"Television truths," Hartley

I'd heard this book was witty, but I couldn't get past the dryness. Didn't like.

"Attack poodles and other media mutants," Wolcott

A book that targets the "Republican lap dog media"--not nearly as good as Dowd's Bushworld.

"The encyclopedia of Japanese pop culture," Schilling

Here I thought I'd find a key to the pop references on the Japanese TV shows imported to Honolulu. No. But I did learn about Pink Lady and that they had a show on NBC in the summer of 1979. I didn't know that.

The encyclopedia of dead rock stars," Simmonds

Occasional curious entry like Frank Sinatra or Stan Rogers, the Canadian folk singer. Rock stars? Some interesting tidbits like Claude Francois was electrocuted changing a light bulb while standing in a bathtub of water. Meh.

[Giant Communist Robot]

"The last emperor," Behr

Two years before the movie started filming, the producers approached Behr and told him he should write this book, which he did. Behr did the usual reading, some research, and interviewed many of the key people who were still living. He tries to present a balanced look at a complex man. The truth is all individuals are complex, they might look or seem simple. I felt sorry for the empress. One doesn't get a feel for her character, but she went through a real hell. Pretty good book.

"The dragon empress," Warner

This book covers the period just before the one above starts, with Tzu Hsi, the dowager empress. I've read a couple of other books about her before. The older books tend to vilify her; the newer to sympathize. Any book citing a guy named Backhouse as a source are a little suspect, as he had been identified as a forger and a liar--Trevor-Roper skewered him for his fantasies. This one doesn't use his stuff.

Warner shows the Ching dynasty to be inflexible and decadent. She says the two Opium Wars fought against Great Britain were the result of a misinterpretation. Warner says the Ching thought it was about conquest, not commerce (the right of the British to sell opium to the Chinese). The Ching had no understanding of commerce and business, nor of their contemporary world.

Tzu Hsi comes off as a willful and self-centered monarch with no knowledge of the Chinese. Her political machinations look like attempts to survive or at least to retain the life of power and luxury she's become accustomed to, not the murderous fiend Backhouse claimed poisoned everyone in sight.


This book has a photo of a eunuch holding his clothes open to reveal his crotch, which shows a scarred mound with a hole.

The castrations were carried out near the gate of the Imperial City. The operation cost six taels-- a derisory sum. The surgeon asked the parents, if the victim were still a child, if they consented; if he were grown up, they asked him if he were certain, just before the descent of the knife or scissors. For three days afterwards the patient could not drink, but if on the third day he was able to pass water all was well. The wound then took three months to heal completely. The casualty rate was three to four per cent; retention and incontinence were likely to arise, and a eunuch often suffered from evil-smelling discharges all his life. If castrated young they never became hirsute, and their voices never broke but developed into a rasping falsetto; if castrated after the age of puberty they lost all their facial and body hair and their voices were high, but less of a screech. They became slack-bellied and flaccid, their faces shrunken and wizened, and they suffered from premature ageing. At forty a eunuch looked like a man of sixty. The family who perfomed the castrations jealously guarded their hereditary role because, while the operation was cheap, they hired out the testicles or sold theim back at an exhoribtant rate to their client {from whom they had stolen them while he lay unconscious), for at the annual inspections which were carried out in the Imperial City by the Chief Eunuch each one was required to prove himself by producing his remains, bottled and labeled.

At any given time during the Ching dynasty their were about 5,000 eunuchs in the Imperial City.
An enjoyable book about a fascinating subject. I've ordered several more about Tzu Hsi.

"The last man who knew everything," Robinson

Today Thomas Young is nearly forgotten, remembered occasionally for the double slit experiment in physics and Young's modulus in engineering. But he was an acknowledged authority on just about everything. Wrote 63 articles for the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Just too much to list.

The book is a bit dry.

"The lighter side of gravity," Narlikar

Nice summary of gravity and related topics by an astrophysicist. Pictures and diagrams.

"The man who knew too much," Leavitt

Biography of Alan Turing. Very smart guy who was a pioneer in computing, worked at Bletchley Park decoding Nazi Enigma transmissions, and was arrested for being homosexual (a crime in Great Britain until 1967). Given a choice of prison or chemical castration he took the drug route, then killed himself by eating a poison apple.

"The empire of tea," Macfarlane and Macfarlane

History of tea written by first and second generation tea growers. Briefly mentions Robert Fortune, but doesn't describe how he was hired by the British to steal tea plants and seeds from China.

This book is refreshing.

[Shapley]

The book is a bit dry.

It can't be as dry as Young's own writing. I recall trying to read his own explanation of the modulus of elasticity. Interestingly, his studies that led to it dealt with the elasticity of materials in compression (which also works), although it is more common to think of it in terms of its relationship to materials undergoing tensile stresses. It is said that the Society of Engineers initially rejected his explanation because not one of them could understand it.

He also decifered Egyptian hieroglyphs for a hobby, I believe. I heard it commented that the hieroglyphs were easier to understand than Young's writing.

[Giant Communist Robot]

He also decifered Egyptian hieroglyphs for a hobby

Nearly everything he did was a "hobby", but he was no dilettante, he was an expert. His earlier work in decipherment was used by Champollion, he was a phenomenal linguist, a physician, explained the mechanism of vision, an authority on carpentry, music, a major scholar of ancient Greek, annuities, life insurance, ocean tides, bridges, chromatics, ships, Herculeneum, weights and measures, bathing, and on top of it all he showed Newton to be wrong about the corpuscular theory of light. Spent six months getting through medical school. Made a member of the Royal Society at age 20. His lecture on science, given in 1803, is still being used, the most recent republication was in 2003. And so on. But you get the idea.