Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.

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{ June : junio (see also books on learning Spanish) 2010 }

(6.30.2010)

• Finished Poet's Choice (2006), an excellent collection of 130 brief essays on poetry. by Edward Hirsch.

• Finished listening to How to listen to and understand great music: Part II — The High Baroque by the informative yet rather egoist "my friend" Robert Greenberg: one of the minor annoying behaviors of the bouncy narrator is to address his unknown-to-him listeners as "my friend".

  Features the High Baroque (post-1700), whose defining composers were Vivaldi, Handel, and J.S. Bach, and uses examples from:

  • Monteverdi's Orfeo.
  • Handel's Concerto Grosso op.6, no. 7 and Messiah.
  • J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1; Passacaglia in C Minor ofr Organ; and the Brandenburg Concertono. 5.
  • Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.

  Sections:

  9. The Rise of German Nationism in Music.
  10. Fugue. ["a flexible procedure (rather than a rigid form)"; this "complex polyphonic process" generates "a systematic exploitation of nonstrict imitative polyphonic techniques."] A fugue contains:
      • The subject, "a very special sort of melody, constructed in order to be dissected, manipulated, and reintegrated".
      • The counter subject, a melody that complements the subject, played after the subject ends in one voice while the subject is restated in another voice.
      • The episode, a modulating transition that separates "restatements of the subject".
  11. Baroque Opera, Part 1. e.g. Verdi's Aida, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and Monteverdi's Orfeo.
  12. Baroque Opera, Part 2.
  13. Baroque Sacred Music, Part 1 — The Oratorio: "essentially an opera on a religious subject"; originally performed in an oratory ("a small chapel ... or house of prayer").
  14. Baroque Sacred Music, Part 2 — The Lutheran Church Cantata: "a one-act opera" and thus "shorter than an oratorio but similar to an oratorio as a work for chorus, soloists, and orchestra".
  15. Baroque Instrumental Forms, Part 1 — Passacaglia. A passacaglia contains:
      • The theme as "a baseline and/or harmonic progression built on that baseline".
      • Repetition of "the baseline and/or harmonic progression, more or less verbatim, over and over (cyclically)". Thus it almost sounds like a chorus to let the audience re-ground before the next flight into a solo.
      • Upper voices that "will change from variation to variation (cycle to cycle)".
  16. Baroque Instrumental Forms, Part 2 — Ritornello ["Refrain"] Form and the Baroque Concerto.

  See also:

  The History of Classical Music (1997) by Richard Fawkes. Wonderful musical history with 150 musical excerpts on four CDs, over five hours of commentary and samples "from Gregorian Chant to Henryk Górecki ... over a thousand years of Western classical music ... polyphony, sonata form, serial music ..."

• Attempted various times to listen to an appallingly self-centered and pretentious CD: Change your thoughts -- change your life: living the wisdom of the Tao: live seminar (2007) by Wayne W. Dyer.

  He seems self-aggrandizing and proud. It is astonishing that someone speaking about the Tao can not speak about the Tao but about himself, his addictions, his eight (!) children (no limits-to-growth for our Wayne), the number of books he has written, and his inability to give credit where due. On the latter, for example, Dyer claims on the CD that he had reached an amicable settlement for his plagiarism of Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao: as of June 24, 2010, the wikipedia entry for Stephen Mitchell says:

  On May 24, 2010, author Stephen Mitchell sued Dyer for plagiarism, accusing him of taking 200 lines of his interpretation of the Tao Te Ching for Dyer's books Living the Wisdom of the Tao and Change Your Thoughts -- Change Your Life.

  Dyer is therefore Off The Island.

• Finished browsing The Landmark Herodotus: the Histories, history by Herodotus, edited by Robert B. Strassler.

• red lights: Spring 2010 issue. Includes a couple of tanka by J. Zimmerman.

• Listened to Jeeves Takes Charge (1995 recording of six stories from the 1956 Carry On Jeeves) by P.G. Wodehouse, well narrated by Alexander Spencer.

  Not just a hoot and a wheeze. Wodehouse is a fond experimenter of the verb, especially with regard to how Jeeves moves. A light-weight treat -- summer gelato on a hot day.

• The Best American Poetry 2009.
  Guest Editor David Wagoner; Series Editor David Lehman.

• The Death of Arthur by Thomas Mallory.

• KATA (2009) by James Maughn.

• Reread The Gospel of Thomas, 114 paragraphs, "adapted" by Elaine Pagels and Marvin Meyer.

  Some of it is anti-woman and offensive; e.g. paragraph 114:

  Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "Look, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will Enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

• Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal (issue 8, 2010).

• Read Edisto Revisited (1996) by Padgett Powell.

  A self-imposed mini-odyssey of a recent architecture graduate who could potential add to the architecture-and-greed-powered despoliation of the southeast coast: another richly written romp from Powell. His slant-wise references to and imperfect quotes from the literature canon will no doubt feed MFA students for generations.

  Powell is a more literate but less politically vengeful and less funny version of Carl Hiassen (e.g. Native Tongue).

  Not as creative and amusing as his 2009 The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?.

  Robust (almost Wodehouse-eque use of verbs; also adjectives, or simply interesting comments, e.g.:

  At the sideboard I was enfiladed by an epiphany. [p. 14]

  The gravity of habit looks perdurable and instantaneous. [p. 30]

  Hysteria is a gold mine of opportunity in my limited experience. [p. 35]

  The shadow of palled relations with men has not been penumbrated into me. [p. 35]

  I eased around him, moving the tureen away from him as you would a woman from a drunk on a dance floor. ... Jake was watching things very closely, sideways — his blue-jay style of close witness. [p. 60]

  It was removed from the Quarter just a bit in space, but in spirit it was miles away: it was the final resting place for boozists, remove all pretense to Catholic this, voodoo that, and Creole this and that. ... Beside the pay phone a hand-lettered sign read 'Imaginary conversations prohibited.' [p. 108]

  My mother, the Doctor, is capable of a kind of iconic metonymy that will steer her, and you, if you allow it, through the complex dance of despairing, fretting, bougeois others about you. If you can have metonymy when those about you are losing theirs, she implies, you'll be a man. She does this not infrequently with food. In a case I'm thinking of recently, it was potato salad. [p. 125]

• Omerta by Mario Puzo.

  Omerta — Sicilian for "code of silence" — is Puzo's final book (before his 1999 death) in the Mafia/Godfather novels. Brisk; not especially well written but satisfactory company during house chores.

• The Enigma of Arrival: a Novel (1987) by V. S. Naipaul.

  A slow meditation of change and decay through the perspective of a seemingly depressed and reticent narrator. In five sections, that revisit the past, laying down increasingly complex and rich views of the people in contact with the narrator. But while this was a highly recommended book, ultimately I read it as a duty and chore (and at places skimmed).

  His Magic Seeds similarly had a narrator that presents himself as passive and disengaged, though the plot of that book was more interesting.

• Color Theory for Watercolors (2002) by Michael Wilcox.

  The theory of color and the practice of watercoloring by applying that theory. Properties of color:

  • Hue — red, blue, indigo, etc., and determined by the wavelength.
  • Saturation/intensity. Adding white or black or the complementary color will cause desaturation, moving the color toward grey.
  • Neutral: A hue low in saturation; ideally achieved by mixing complementary colors.
  • Grey: a neutral without color bias; ideally achieved by mixing complementary colors.
  • Value: the shade of grey that a color would register if photographed in black-and-white.
  • Tint: lighter than the normal value of a hue; obtained by the addition of white or a color that lightens the hue's value.
  • Shade: darker than the normal value of a hue; obtained by the addition of black or a color that darkens the hue's value.

  For pigment mixing:

  • Primary yellow is approximately Cadmium Yellow Pale; as that contains a little red, use the blue-leaning Lemon Yellow in any yellow-green mix.
  • Primary blue is approximately Cobalt Blue; French Ultramarine contains some red, and so mixes better for the violets.
  • Primary red is approximately Alizarin Crimson; as that contains a little blue use Cadmium Red to make an orange-red mix. [Rose Madder Genuine is closer to true red but very expensive so not widely used.]
  • Vivid orange: Cadmium orange is more vivid than any yellow-red combination.
  • Vivid green: Veridian is very pure and intense.
  • Vivid violet: Cobalt violet (if too red, add French Ultramarine).
  • Three colors:
    • blue and red equally plus a hint of yellow gives a warm colored neutral.
    • yellow and blue equally plus a hint of red gives a cooler neutral.
    • yellow and red equally plus a hint of blue gives a fairly warm colored neutral.
    • for a grey, combine red and blue and yellow equally.

  Valuable discussion and illustration of the planning and use of neutralized, tinted, and darkened complementaries; often a saturated complement occupies a relatively small area within the desaturated other color. Also the effect of after-image: successive contrast in isolation and simultaneous contrast when colors are side-by-side in a painting.

• Reread the luminous Where the World Does Not Follow: Buddhist China in Picture and Poem (2002) translated and introduced by Mike O'Conner, photography by Steven R. Johnson.

  Photographs of the mountains and the hermits of the modern Chinese mountain sage tradition, paired (in an open way reminiscent of the better haiga) with the poems of Tang Dynasty (618-906) poets, including the Taoist Li Po and the Buddhist layman Wang Wei and other Chinese Immortals.

• Gobbled The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? (2009) by Padgett Powell.

  Not a novel — no plot and the length is more novella than novel — this book is a fascinating romp. Comprised of questions, this book is about most readers' favorite subject — the reader herself, because at the end of this book you may not know more about the author than when you started and you will certainly not have a plot to tell a friend, but you will know more about yourself than when you started. Like other readers, I read it with a smile on my face — at least for about 90% of the time. And I've already swiped a couple of its questions as quotations:

  Have you ever set any part of yourself on fire? Will you wear rain gear or do you prefer to just get wet?

  One of the best book read in 2010.

• Finished listening to (and re-listening to parts of — it was that good!) The Yokota Officers Club (2001) by Sarah Bird, well narrated by Carine Montbertrand, with great sensitivity to the accents including those of the Japanese characters.

  A stunning exploration of the American Japanese-occupation military and their families from the end of World War II to 1968 together with the lives of women in occupied Japan.

  Although this earlier book has a much more serious theme than that of Bird's later and excellent How Perfect Is That (2008), (a hilarious romp down the social ladder of Austin, Texas), both books explore friendship and loyalty and revenge, and both have strong women and some very funny dialog to counterbalance some dark material.

  One of the best book read in 2010.

• Finally abandoned my decades-long struggle with Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar, the immensely respected creator of Iyengar Yoga.

  This is a master book for the hyper-flexible and the long-limbed. But I am neither.

  Better for me is the individualized approach as in Anatomy for Yoga with Paul Grilley

• I have been doggedly working my way through Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence as an audio book (reasonably well narrated by Firdous Bamji).

  It started well, but after about 10% it began to sound rather cumbersome and repetitive. I only completed it because it could be listened to while doing household tasks.

  It leverages, redacts, and/or rewrites portions of:

  • A lot of history and personalities of 16th century Europe and Asia and even the New World.
  • Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso".
  • Matteo Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato".
  • Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities".
  • Scheherazade's tales.
  • The Pygmalion and Galatea story.
  • Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings.

  The book would be charming at a third of the length. The main problems are that I feel nothing for the characters, there seems to be a lot of repetition, and the 'anything can happen' approach to reality (magical realism is simply used too much) dilutes the concept of plot. As the Washington Post's Michael Dirda wrote:

  [Rushdie] has produced a book that is the equivalent of a summer fling. Set during the 16th century, The Enchantress of Florence is altogether ramshackle as a novel — oddly structured, blithely mixing history and legend, and distinctly minor ... it is really not a novel at all. It is a romance.

{ May : mayo (see also books on learning Spanish) 2010 }

(5.31.2010)

• Modern Japanese Tanka an anthology edited and translated by Makoto Ueda.

  Marvelous 'first collection' of modern Japanese tanka available in English. A delightful and comprehensive presentation that shows the development of the tanka form.

  Includes the works of 20 Japanese poets writing in the 20th century. Two of the poets are Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) and Ishikawa Tabuko (1886-1912).

  Ueda's essays for each poet show context and influences.

• Listened to The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff, read by the author.

  A sweet little book that does make Taoism attractive: "While Eeyore frets ... and Piglet hesitates ... and Rabbit calculates ... and Owl pontificates ... Pooh just is."

• Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain (edited by Bernard DeVoto with a Preface by Henry Nash Smith).

  A collection of Twain's essays incomplete and unpublished during his life. In 1939 Twain's daughter, Clara Clemens, "objected to the publication of certain parts of it on the ground that they presented a distorted view of her father's ideas and attitudes", and DeVoto then published the relatively unproblematic essays separately. But in the early 1960s Clara withdrew her objection. So we have the essays on Twain's revisioning of Genesis and on the world he lived in. The slightly grumpy, slightly scathing Twain voice comes through, even if it gets a little predictable.

• The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

• Read issue 41.2 (Summer 2010) of Modern Haiku.

  Includes a beautiful haiku by Beverly Acuff Momoi:

  winter narcissus in the window bending to catch her reflection

  See also comments on previous issues of: Modern Haiku:

  • 41.1 of Modern Haiku.
  • 40.2 of Modern Haiku.
  • 39.3 of Modern Haiku.
  • 39.1 of Modern Haiku.
  • 38.2 of Modern Haiku.
  • 38.1 of Modern Haiku.
  • 36.2 of Modern Haiku.

• All That Follows (2010) by Jim Crace.

  Wonderful to have a new book by Crace, one of my favorite authors. Devoured it the first evening I had it. One of the best book read in 2010. Hope it gets on a Booker Prize list, though it's not as strong as his 1997 Booker Prize listed Quarantine.

  However, preferred his recent dystopia, The Pesthouse, with its North Americaan population crash and nationwide organization collapse.

• Finished dipping into the 900-page Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi (also called Firdawsai), translated (since 1997; this single volume published 2006) by Dick Davis with an introduction by Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran).

  Dick Davis opens his Introduction with:

  The Shahnameh is the national epic of Iran, or Persia as the country used to be called, composed by the poet Ferdowsi [born 940 C.E.] in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries C.E. Its subject matter is vast, being nothing less than the history of the country and its people from the creation of the world up to the Arab conquest, which brought the then-new religion of Islam to Iran, in the seventh century C.E.

• Abandoned listening toThe Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (2007) by Richard Preston read by George K. Wilson.

  See also Tree Rings — What they Are and Why they Vary.

  Exploration of tree canopy of the world's tallest trees, especially California redwoods. In 1987, botanist Steve Sillett, "free" climbed to the top of a redwood where, over 30 stories up, he found the gardens of ferns and trees, salamanders and voles. Preston tells the story of Sillett and other tree climbers and "skywalking".

  I could do with a little less about Preston and family. And perhaps a more confident author would have omitted his occasional gratuitous vulgarity; the result would have been a better book for me.

  I've some creeping concern about an author making money from a book that reveals, ha-ha, the author knows where the tallest redwood trees are and then gives lots of hints as to where they might be found.

• American Expansion: A Book of Maps by Randall Sale and Edwin Karn.

  12 annotated maps of the expansion of the United States of America from 1790 to 1900. Who knew the census definition of a frontier area? It's "two to six people per square mile" though in 1890 the Census Bureau announced that it could no longer draw a what had previously been a clear western boundary dividing settled from unsettled lands.

• Finished listening to Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul.

  The low-energy reading by Aasif Mandvi nearly made me give up on this book until I realized that he may be basing his modulation on the passivity of the text.

  A sad story about Willie Chandran, a weak-willed man drifting through life. He leaves his wife in Africa to live with his sister in Germany, leaves his sister at her prompting to join a revolutionary group (though apparently and accidentally not the one that his sister recommended) in India, wanders around with the revolutionaries from failure to failure, murders an innocent farmer, escapes from the revolutionaries, gets captured by the police, gets sprung from prison by her sister and a British lawyer he once knew, lives with the lawyer in Britain, and has an affair with the lawyer's wife.

  Most of the characters in the book are leaches in society, either explicitly according to Naipaul (e.g. in his tirades against the modern British poor living in subsidized housing estates and getting financial allowances for each of their children) or implicitly (not just the protagonist, his lawyer friend, and their architecture-and-real-estate-dealing friend but almost all the revolutionaries). The only non-leaches seem to be the rural farmers, including the man Willie Chandran murdered.

• Ladies of horror : two centuries of supernatural stories by the gentle sex selected (from Mary Shelley to Agatha Christie) and commented upon by Seon Manley.

• Best American Essays: 2008 edited by Adam Gopnik (staff writer at The New Yorker) (series editor Robert Atwan). A more robust collection than those selected for the 2009 collection.

• Best American Essays: 2009 edited by Mary Oliver (series editor Robert Atwan).

  Pretty good; as is often found in such collections, many of the choices seem rather close to the editor's style.

• The New Yorker (May 17, 2010) includes David Owen's article "The Inventor's Dilemma: an eco-minded engineer discovers the limits of invention". While the whole article is fascinating, note the comments by Saul Griffith on Al Gore.

• The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto.

  An odd book: "Doctor [of 'Alternative Medicine'] Masaru Emoto discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific thoughts are directed toward them. He found that water from clear springs and water that has been exposed to loving words show brilliant, complex, and colorful snowflakes. In contrast, polluted water, or water exposed to negative thoughts, forms incomplete, asymmetrical patterns with dull colors."

  While I put this in the Spoon Bending school of science, one of my friends seems to believe it all.

  There is a minimal description of how the freezing is done; apparently the actual work was not done by Emoto:

  [p. xxi] Late each evening, I would take the young [and never named for credit] researcher to dinner and try to encourage him. I told him that I only expected him to do his best. After two months of experiments, we finally succeeded in getting one photograph. The water gave us a photograph of a beautiful hexagonal crystal. I was filled with excitement where the researcher came to me with the news. ... [p. xxii] I put fifty different types of water [quantity?] in each of fifty different Petri dishes. ... I then freeze the dishes at -20°C (-4°F) for three hours in a freezer. [He had previously [p. xxi] said that he uses a -5°C (23°F) freezer for experiments, but apparently that is not used at this step.] The result is that surface tension forms drops of ice in the Petri dishes about one millimeter across.

  Well the photos are nice.

• Selected Poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited with an introduction by William Empson and David Pirie.

  Margaret Atwood praised Empson and this book in her essays Negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing.

• Finished listening to Persuasion (published posthumously in 1818 after the author's death in 1817) by Jane Austen (in a pretty good narration by Flo Gibson).

  A much more somber and serious book than its contemporary Northanger Abbey.

  Austen books read:

  • Northanger Abbey (1817 — posthumous)
  • Persuasion (1817 — posthumous)
  • Also Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies (2009) (Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith).

• Relistened to the start and end of The Pickup (2001) by Nadine Gordimer, read in strangely prissy voice by Lisette Lecat, who does not do justice to this semi-mythical story about race, culture, and defining one's own path and one's own dignity.

• My Uncle Napoleon (1973) by Iraj Pezeshkzad, translated (1996) by Dick Davis.

  An Iranian novel: a soap-opera masterpiece of contemporary fiction.

• A Question of Blood (2003) by Ian Rankin.

  The 14th REBUS book: interesting revisit of a full-length version of this book. Previously saw a TV summary which got the gist — but the book is richer. The reading (particularly the regional and class-level accents) by Michael Page is apt and brilliant, reinforcing the characters and the plot expressed in the book.

  REBUS books read include:

  • The Black Book
  • The Falls
  • Fleshmarket Ally ['Fleshmarket Close' in UK]
  • Hide and Seek
  • Knots and Crosses
  • Let it Bleed
  • The Naming of the Dead
  • A Question of Blood
  • Resurrection Men
  • Strip Jack

{ April : abril (see also books on learning Spanish) 2010 }

(4.30.2010)

• Finished dipping into: The Norton Book of Light Verse
  edited by Russell Baker with the assistance of Kathleen Leland Baker.
  A delight!

• Resurrection Men (2002) by Ian Rankin.

  The 13th REBUS book: very complicated: almost 50 people are named in the character list at the start of the book. Something of a slog to get through this, which is partly an excuse for giving Rebus' partner, DS Siobhan Clarke, more independence and initiative.

  REBUS books read include:

  • The Black Book
  • The Falls
  • Fleshmarket Ally ['Fleshmarket Close' in UK]
  • Hide and Seek
  • Knots and Crosses
  • Let it Bleed
  • The Naming of the Dead
  • A Question of Blood
  • Resurrection Men
  • Strip Jack

• Finished dipping into: Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (1999) by Kenneth R. Miller.

  The book presents the case for evolution, which biologist Miller accepts and does not find inconsistent with his belief in a single God:

  In obvious ways, the various objections to evolution take a narrow view of the capabilities of life — but they take an even narrower view of the capabilities of the Creator. They hobble His genius by demanding that the material of His creation ought not to be capable of generating complexity. They demean the breadth of His vision by ridiculing the notion that the materials of His world could have evolved into beings with intelligence and self-awareness. [p. 268.]

  The biological account of lucky historical contingencies leading to our own appearance on this planet is surely accurate. What does not follow is that a perceived lack of inevitability translates into something that we should regard as incompatible with a divine will. To do so shows no lack of scientific understanding, but it seriously underestimates God, even as He is understood by the most conventional of Western religions. [p. 273.]

  The final sentence of the book (Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species): There is grandeur in this view of life; with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have been and are being evolved. What kind of God do I believe in? The answer is in those words, I believe in Darwin's God. [p. 292.]

• The Devil's Star (2005 in GB, 2003 in Norway) by Jo Nesbø (Norwegian) translated by Don Bartlett.

  A reasonably well-plotted serial-killer revenge thriller. But after reading two of his books, I get the Nesbø deal. How different in effect, then, from the Swedish Steig Larsson's series:

  1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008 in UK/USA; 2005 in Sweden).
  2. The Girl who Played With Fire (2009 in UK/USA; 2006 in Sweden).
  3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009 in UK; 2007 in Sweden).
  as I looked forward to reading each of his new books and was sad that he can no longer write another.

  See also Nesbø's:

  • Nemesis (2008 in GB, 2002 in Norway) translated into British English (I like the slang) by Don Bartlett. A messier and coarser book.

• Finished listening to Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome (2006), by Robert Harris (excellently narrated by Simon Jones, which one remembers for the earliest BBC version of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

  This historical novel is based on the early years of the orator and senator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C.E. - 43 B.C.E.) and told from the point-of-view of his slave-secretary, Tiro, who is presented as creating and using an extremely concise shorthand. Tiro's loyalty to Cicero trumps has prissiness, and neither attribute is overdone. The story begins early in Cicero's career as a lawyer, and shows Cicero as a great collector and collator of facts, and a great speech writer and memorizer and a great orator. This volume ends when Cicero (age 43) is elected Consul for the year 63 B.C.E. Looking forward to the next volume!

  See also others by Harris:

  • The Ghost (2007), a clearly and cohesive political thriller; an excellent paranoid romp.

• The Call: An Anthology of Women's Writing (primarily poetry but also prose) selected and edited by Calder Lowe.

  Includes work by poets K.E. Copeland, Lara Gularte, Parthenia Hicks, Kathie Isaac-Luke, Mary Lou Taylor, and Calder Lowe. The authors were selected, Lowe says, not only for the quality of their work but also for their personal bonds of friendship with her.

• Nemesis (2008 in GB, 2002 in Norway) by Jo Nesbø (Norwegian) translated into British English (I like the slang) by Don Bartlett.

  This book has some similar elements to those of the Swedish Steig Larsson's series:

  1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008 in UK/USA; 2005 in Sweden).
  2. The Girl who Played With Fire (2009 in UK/USA; 2006 in Sweden).
  3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009 in UK; 2007 in Sweden).

  particularly through aspects of Nazism and attendant racialism and abuse of women, in its main female character having special memory powers and social handicaps, and in its emphasis on personal justice and revenge.

  But Nemesis is coarser in sensibility and muddy in its plotting and telling; in Nemesis, coincidences play a large role; motivations are sometimes unclear; there is some fairly strong foreshadowing (such as about suicide and revenge); and parts of the plot (including the storage locker and some computer aspects) are hard to swallow.

• Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch.

• Listened to U is for Undertow (2009) by Sue Grafton.
  A very satisfying book, well read as always by Judy Kaye.

  Other books read in Sue Grafton's series include:
  A is for Alibi .
  B is for Burglar.
  E is for Evidence.
  F is for Fugitive: also a favorite.
  I is for Innocent.
  K is for Killer.
  L is for Lawless.
  M is for Malice.
  N is for Noose.
  O is for Outlaw (1999).
  P is for Peril (2001).
  Q is for Quarry (2003).
  R is for Ricochet (2004).
  S is for Silence (2005): my favorite in the series so far, perhaps because of the liveliness of the characters.
  U is for Undertow (2009): a very satisfying book.

• Ribbons: Spring 2010 issue. Includes a couple of Tanka of J. Zimmerman.

• The Stranger by Albert Camus (translated by Matthew Ward) in a recording read by Jonathan Davis.

• My favorite poetry book by Hirsch todate: Lay Back the Darkness by Edward Hirsch.

• Special Orders by Edward Hirsch.

(4.12.2010)

• Native Tongue (1991) by Carl Hiaasen.

  Another enthusiastic wishful-thinking Hiaasen romp about defeating the avaricious and the mean — and also the emotional costs to and dedication of the would-be defenders.

  As usual, the complexity and interleaving of plots are a delight in Hiaasen's novels: the jump-cuts and coincidences all work out, the evil are punished, the creative are on the wing, and at least some soul-mates are planning their futures.

  See also his:
  

  • Basket Case.
  • Nature Girl.
  • Sick Puppy.
  • Skinny Dip (2004).

• Glaciers by Robert P. Sharp.
• Exploring the Columbia Icefield by Richard E. Kucera.

Finished the excellent:

• Solar by Ian McEwan.

  One of the best books read in 2010.

• The view from the center of the universe: discovering our extraordinary place in the cosmos Joel R. Primack and Nancy Abrams.

  The notes in the back of the book are the most scientific aspect to the book. Sadly, the text is not as scientific as I had hoped for: Kabbala discussions alone are enough for me to shake my head and close the book.

• Down and Dirty Birding: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous, Here's All the Outrageous but True Stuff You've Ever Wanted to Know About North American Birds (1996), a cheerful delight by Joey Slinger.

• A mah jong handbook : how to play, score, and win, by Eleanor Noss Whitney.

• Saving the World, by Julia Alvarez, read by Blanca Camacho.

  Two overlaid stories, which could have been two separate novels but inform each other, one being about the 21st-century fear of and battle with AIDS and the other being a historical novel that creates character and plot around an early 19th-century expedition to relieve the New World of small pox by using children as carriers of the live vaccine. The older story was more interesting than the modern one, with its more practical and stable heroine.

• Home, by Marilynne Robinson.

  Oh what a sad book of a prodigal son's return. The prodigal is Jack Boughton, one of the eight children of Robert Boughton, the former pastor of Gilead (Iowa). Set in 1957, the book is a slow-moving struggle whose sad characters have heavy loads (alcoholism, innocence, etc) but mostly failed to warm me. In the end, there is some redemption but still rather a lot of suffering.

• The bone vault, by Linda A Fairstein, read by Barbara Rosenblat.

  Unsatisfactory: too many subplots and red herrings in this long book. But its blurb says that in this novel "Fairstein continues her New York Times best-selling series featuring Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper".

Related pages: Books on Buddhism. Books on Learning Spanish. Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own. Forests of California and Trees of the World.

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