Books Read in 2007

Neil Gaiman's fiction is a bit hit-or-miss for me. Sometimes he blows me away (e.g., American Gods), and other times (e.g., Anansi Boys), he's not that interesting. I saw the movie Stardust a few months before reading this book, and I liked the movie quite a lot. Happily, the book lives up to the movie, and Stardust is in the running for my favorite young-adult fantasy novel. And there are enough differences between the book and the movie to make it worthwhile to seek out both. Good stuff.

Most people know Hugh Laurie as the anti-hero on the television show House, M.D., but he's much better known in England as a comedic actor. For some reason, it seems like a ridiculous number of British comedians are Oxford- or Cambridge-educated, and they write as well as they act.

Anyhow, Laurie's The Gun Seller is a witty spy novel. I enjoyed it but found that the very British delivery sometimes got in my way. Good stuff, but I was glad when it was over.

The properties that sometimes emerge from large collections of very simple objects can be mind-blowing and fascinating. I was first introduced to them by Hofstadter's "Prelude, Ant Fugue" in Godel, Escher, Bach and I've often viewed Minsky's Society of Mind in the same way.

Johnson does a great job of making emergent behavior approachable to a popular science reader. He touches on the structure of cities, the "intelligence" of an ant colony, and more. This is well-written and interesting material.

For my job, I live and breathe music discovery, playlist generation, and digital media management, so it isn't very surprising that I didn't find much in David Jennings's book that was new to me. There are some decent references here, and the chapters about music discovery (and the different ways different groups of people achieve it) are pretty good. I'd love to go on for pages about this, but that probably wouldn't go over well at RhymesWithNose.

I'd seriously consider giving this to a new hire in my group if they had no background in music discovery, and I guess that's a recommendation.

The leader of my book club wanted to choose a "classic", and as a group we picked The Great Gatsby. It's an excellent book—far be it from me to suggest otherwise. However, universally-liked books don't make for very good book club discussions, and this selection resulted in a fairly dull meeting.

I enjoyed revisiting Gatsby, in large part because I really didn't get it when I was forced to read it in high school. As an adult with a bit more of an appreciation for the historical time period in which the novel is set and for the class boundaries that still permeate the United States, I liked it a lot more.

Not as good as Bloodsucking Fiends, but still a lot of fun. I think my Christopher Moore immersion is done, but I definitely plan to get back to him eventually.

Bloodsucking Fiends is significantly better than Practical Demonkeeping, and I'm starting to really like Christopher Moore's fantasy/horror/humor mashups. Good stuff.

I liked this better than Singularity Sky but not as well as Glasshouse. I think I'm just not that into Charles Stross's writing. It's decent scifi, but he will never be a favorite.

After reading Letter to a Christian Nation, I recommended that my book club read The End of Faith. This turned out to be a bad move. Where Letter is terse, polished, and hard to argue with, Faith is a pedantic mess. Harris makes most of the same points in both books, but this one is dull and unconvincing, especially at the end where Harris seems to be arguing that the whole world should convert to Buddhism.

Read Letter to a Christian Nation, but skip this one.

I first read this novel in college, and I enjoyed it but didn't become a fan of Christopher Moore. Since then, I've watched his fan base expand, and I've read many positive reviews of his novels, but until now, I didn't revisit his work.

I'm glad I did. Practical Demonkeeping is darkly comic fantasy, and it is funnier than I remember it. I'm interested enough to request a couple more of Moore's books from the library.

Tim Ferriss has managed to be very successful financially, while ensuring that his businesses need very little of his attention. This has afforded him the opportunity to travel the world living a life of adventure and leisure. In this book, he claims that you can do it too, and if your primary motivation is to not work much, it may be possible to follow his advice successfully.

I agree with some of Ferriss's points. In particular, I agree that the American dream—saving up a bundle of money so that you can quit working at age 65—may not be the best plan. Instead, I love his suggestion of having a few mini-retirements while you are still young enough to do something adventurous and possibly life-changing. Having children makes that a little difficult, but as a personal example, I fully intend to take a couple of whole summers off while my kids are still living at home. One will probably be a cross-country road trip. The other...who knows?

I've been a fan of Matt Ruff since Sewer, Gas, & Electric, and I've read all of his novels. They are all very good, and no two are alike. This one is an interesting cross between SG&E and Set This House In Order. It has fantasy elements like the former, but it also has a psychological bent like the latter.

Bad Monkeys is riotously fun ride, with twist after twist after twist. You are never quite sure whether you should be rooting for the protagonist, and it's to Ruff's credit that you do so all the way to the end. The final revelations may not be as satisfying as one might like, but the journey is still well worthwhile.

In a nutshell: categorization is hard. Libraries have struggled with it for centuries, and we continue to struggle with it today. Whenever you are forced to choose a single label for an object or concept, it becomes hard to find by way of all the other labels you could have used. With computers and databases, things are considerably easier, because you can tag things in as many ways as you can imagine and then retrieve them with a simple search. Sometimes, you can even get masses of people to tag things for you, which can save you a lot of effort.

I read this book several months before writing these notes, so I'm almost certainly not being fair to it here, but I remember finishing this book thinking that there wasn't much of interest beyond what I'd already learned from using flickr and reddit.

The Road is a bleak post-apocalyptic road-trip novel. McCarthy's narrator is a father who, with his son, is trekking across an American wasteland looking for signs of hope. Along the way, they pillage root cellars on abandoned farms, looking for anything edible, and they try to stay away from bandits on the road.

My book club chose this because it won the Pulitzer, but none of us ended up liking it. I hated it a lot less than most of the members, but it was still a tough read. In the post-apocalyptic genre, I liked Fiskadoro better, and Riddley Walker best of all.

I had a lot of doubts going into the final installment in the Harry Potter series. The most recent books in the series wandered around a lot, leaving a lot of threads dangling and leaving me wondering whether or not Rowling could possibly come up with a satisfying ending.

Well, for the most part, she came through. Most of the plot lines I remembered were resolved adequately, and this book moves more fluidly and evenly than any since The Prisoner of Azkaban. I'm glad it's over, but I can definitely say that I enjoyed the ride.

Supposedly I read this in high school, but I sure didn't remember it. I picked it up again after Lisa read it for her book club. I don't have much to say about this classic American novel other than that it's a great read.

If you are like most people, you have too much clutter in your life. As Walsh defines it, clutter is anything in your living space that doesn't add value to your life (and if you think about it deeply, that's probably most of your stuff). Reading this spurred me into a frenzy of decluttering, in which I discarded stacks of old magazines that I'll probably never go back to, a bunch of small kitchen appliances that we never use, and more. I filled several giant "contractor-size" garbage bags from my office/music-room alone.

It's hard to keep on top of the clutter, but Walsh's book certainly puts you in the right mindset.

Nicholas Christopher is one of my favorite literary fantasy authors, in large part because of his terrific novels A Trip to the Stars and Franklin Flyer. I rushed to the bookstore when I heard that The Bestiary had been released, and I promptly devoured it.

Although I didn't enjoy quite it as much as the aforementioned books, it was still worthwhile.

The War of Art is about achieving bold creative goals. In a clever play on Sun-Tzu's The Art of War, Pressfield focuses on overcoming "Resistance" (the enemy), and his book offers some real insight into the kinds of things that block forward progress (naturally, it also provides techniques for working around them). Pressfield accomplishes all this with short, zen-like chapters. There's definitely some solid psychology here.

A lot of artists and writers seem very passionate about this book. It's not earth-shattering, but it is worthwhile, and I may revisit it at some point.

I started running last Fall but had to take a break from it because some alignment issues in the bone structure of my right foot caused an painful injury that took me several months to recover from. After my podiatrist recommended "SuperFeet" over-the-counter orthotic insoles, I was able to run again — without pain.

A couple of months later, I started getting more serious about running, and I went looking for advice about building a training program and learning to run longer distances. Bob Glover's book was the most promising guide I could find on Amazon.

It's a solid, though overly long, reference. It probably has everything you'd ever need to know about running, but it's not the most accessible guide.

[Note: By September, 2007, I was up to running six miles at a 9:30 pace. Unfortunately, a four-month-long antibiotic-resistant sinus infection knocked me out of my exercise program.]

This was a "quick read" book selected by my book club. It's a harrowing true story of a mountaineering expedition gone badly wrong, and it is indeed a quick read.

I was put off by Simpson's self-aggrandizement. It was unbelievably stupid to get into such a predicament. He's extraordinarily lucky to be alive to talk about it.

This was a "quick read" chosen by my book club. It's a straightforward murder mystery with wisecracking investigators and buxom babes. The narrator is exceedingly fond of bad puns, which is cute at first but wears thin after a while. I didn't like the book very much, but that's in large part because I don't care much for mystery novels in general.

The author, Glenn Ickler, lives in Hopedale and joined us for the book club discussion, which made it hard to have an open discussion, but it was interesting to hear him talk about his "retirement career" writing mystery novels.

I borrowed the box set of Maus I & II from Lisa's brother. It's probably the most engaging graphic novel I've ever read. The subject matter (Nazi concentration camps) is difficult, but handled exceptionally well. Maus is a terrific tribute from son to father.

I read this for book club but unfortunately had to miss the discussion (I was away on vacation). I've never read Allende before, but I was very pleased with my first encounter.

Ines of My Soul is a historical novel featuring Ines de Suarez, a Spanish conquistadora who participated in the conquest of Chile. It's engaging and very well written (the language is beautiful). I'm looking forward to reading more of Allende's novels.

Welcome To Oz is a photo-editing book for people who are very serious about photo editing. It contains a handful of tutorials that highlight complex multi-stage Photoshop manipulations. For an artist who considers original photos raw-material-to-be-manipulated-beyond-recognition, it could be an eye-opening text.

I am more than willing to play with tonal and color balance to achieve an effect with my photos, and I'll occasionally dodge and burn, but I generally prefer to stick to non-destructive editing. I didn't take much away from this book that I will put into practice, but it was still fun to read.

This is a well-written popular science book about the psychology of happiness, and Gilbert does a good job explaining why we humans are horrible at predicting what will make us happy. It's a fascinating insight into the human condition and an enjoyable read.

This is a book I never would have read, had it not been chosen by my book club. It's a horrifying autobiographical work written by a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide. It opened my eyes to some of the atrocities that took place there, and for that it was worthwhile.

On the other hand, it's a work of blatantly pro-Christian propaganda. The author attributes her survival to direct intervention by God, and there are several scenes where days of intense prayer lead to some insight or rescue. I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who could survive such an ordeal, but spare me the evangelism, please.

I went through a brief period when I thought that it might be worthwhile to add Java to my programming toolkit (I've since recovered, thank you). This is a solid guide, written in a manner that makes the big concepts easy to remember. It's a little bit slow for an experienced programmer, but it's a solid jumpstart.

Religion is a huge problem in the world today, and a good part of the problem boils down to the fact that religious fundamentalists believe that any one who does not share their specific branch of fundamentalism is wrong and their lives are inherently worth less. Harris builds from this and points out how much of a problem this poses, not just in the Middle East, but also in middle America.

Letter to a Christian Nation is a fairly elegant work, to which I found myself nodding regularly in considered agreement. It's much better than his larger work The End of Faith.

Adobe Lightroom is the best software I've seen for organizing and editing digital photos for printing, and at the time of reading, this is the best guide to the software. Recommended.

For me, the "Head First" style of writing/teaching is a little hit or miss. I absorb material well enough from "normal" textbooks, and I find it easier to mark up a normal textbook for future reference. For this material, the highly stylized, very energetic, very repetitive format is a good match.

Design Patterns are a hard concept to teach. Usually good programmers pick them up through years of experience, and it is obvious to them why they should be used. To a novice, Design Patterns are a bunch of jargon that kind of makes sense but doesn't have an obvious purpose.

If you've tried to read the GangOfFour book and been unable to stay awake, this book could be the remedy.

I have read a few of Bill Bryson's books before, and I generally enjoy his self-mocking wit. I didn't feel the need to read any more after the excellent A Walk In the Woods, but when my book club chose this memoir, I was happy to oblige.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself is assembled in large part from articles Bryson wrote for a British Sunday newspaper, and it suffers from the pastiche effect. Bryson tries a bit too hard to find Americanisms that will sound quirky to his British readers. It's enjoyable, but forgettable.

I didn't save my notes on this book, but I remember it for having nothing memorable in it. It contains decent photo-editing advice and nice pictures, but not anything you can't get from any other digital photography book.

I've now read three versions of this book, aimed at three different versions of Photoshop, and I'm convinced that Kelby's books in the "for digital photographers" series are the best single-volume guides to using Photoshop for digital photography. Since the features of Photoshop change with each release, it is important to read the version that's matched to your version of the software.

I find Kelby's sense of humor a bit annoying, but he mostly limits it to brief chapter and section introductions. The meat of the instruction is very clear and to-the-point, and it usually includes all the details you need to achieve a similar result. Most of the photographs aren't great art, but they illustrate Kelby's points well.

I'm looking forward to Kelby's volume on Lightroom.

In this book, Bogle goes over much of the same territory covered by David Swensen in Unconventional Success. He shows in no uncertain terms that actively managed mutual funds are a surefire way to get inadequate returns on your investments. By putting your money in a market spanning index fund, like the Vanguard S&P 500 index Bogle himself created, you will see substantially better long-term returns than more than 90% of all mutual funds.

Bogle explains this much more clearly than Swensen, but he doesn't quite give you everything you need. He suggests that asset allocation among different asset classes is important, but he doesn't write at all about target percentages or rebalancing, whereas Swensen is much more explicit in that area.

I'm following a buy-and-hold strategy in my retirement investments, using Vanguard index funds and ETFs where I can (my 401k doesn't make them available, so I'm fudging things a bit there), and I'm trying to use new contributions to rebalance rather than incur extra fees (and churn) by explicitly rebalancing. I'm confident that Bogle would approve.

It frightens me to no end that this book was the first place I saw so much of the evidence for global warming. It's horrifying how little scientifically accurate reporting has been done on the issue in the mainstream press. The evidence and the consequences of global warming, caused primarily by manmade CO2 emissions, is absolutely compelling, and Al Gore has done a great service by compiling it into both a documentary film and a very readable and understandable book.

If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, you should. And install some fricking compact florescent light bulbs or buy a Prius already.

The photos in this book are quite nice; they serve as examples of why photographers shouldn't put away their camera when light levels are low. Frost presents a handful of useful pointers on shooting particular kinds of subjects, like fireworks or the moon, but mostly the advice is: use a tripod, be a little bit smart about interpreting your camera's meter, and bracket, bracket, bracket.

Quite a lot of the book is dedicated to details that only matter if you are shooting film, so there wasn't as much here for me as I had hoped.

Lee Frost is presumably a very good photographer, but you wouldn't know it from the handful of photos in this book. He admits that he's a newcomer to digital manipulation in Photoshop, so it's odd that he'd write a book about creative Photoshop manipulations.

The result is mixed. The text instructions are weak, probably because Frost has so little Photoshop experience. On the other hand, I got a handful of good ideas for effects to attempt in future projects, and with Photoshop knowledge gleaned from other books, I think I can get good results.

I can't recommend this book, but I'm glad that I borrowed it from the library.

At my suggestion, my book club chose Cat's Cradle for the February selection. I was nervous about it, because although it's my utmost favorite book, several people I've recommended it to have hated it.

The reactions of the book club members spanned a wide spectrum. Those who disliked it mostly didn't care for the scifi elements and the lack of character depth. Those who enjoyed it thought it raised interesting questions about morality, religion, government, and the human condition. The two of us who loved it the most had both first read it at about age 15 (about 20 years ago for me). Everyone liked it more in retrospect after talking about it.

Since it has been nearly ten years since the last time I read it, I brought more to it this time, and I enjoyed it as much as I always have. I found some new favorite passages, including the very timely "The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do." I better appreciated how McCabe and Bokonon got lost in their play-acting, and how much government is in the business of giving people meaningless things to talk about and fight over so that they don't notice the horrible conditions they live in. For the first time, I noticed Vonnegut's subtle musings about free will.

Cat's Cradle is a deceptively simple book. The plot is easy to follow and the chapters are mostly just a few paragraphs each. It has, however, a tremendous depth. It paints a humanist viewpoint in a hilariously satirical manner. Every time I read it, I laugh out loud at every second or third page, and I regularly marvel at the terse, subversive cleverness of Vonnegut's writing.

This book has been on my to-read list since it first came out. I might not have got around to it, except that my friend Chris gave me his copy after he finished it. I read the first few pages and I was hooked.

Freakonomics is a popularization of Steven Levitt's academic work, in which he applies economic tools to interesting societal issues. By finding clever ways to organize raw data, he manages to tease apart the factors that contribute to a situation and he's able to explain what's really going on.

The results have generated some valuable controversy. Levitt has a knack for asking questions that give rise to answers many people find distasteful or inconvenient. For example, he has shown that drops in crime rate are more attributable to a decrease in unwanted babies after Roe v. Wade than to better policing. The idea that an increased abortion rate leads to lower future crime rates is horrifying, but it appears to be true. He's also shown that parents have much less effect on their children than they'd like to believe.

There are many taboo subjects that need to be discussed and understood, and Freakonomics isn't a bad start.

This is a rather run-of-the-mill rehash of all the usual beginner's photography advice. The photos are very nice, but the text isn't worthwhile if you've done any reading about photography.

In this book, Kelby takes the reader under his wing and gives dozens of pearls of wisdom about digital photography without going into all of the physics and optics and electronics that make them true. It's a quick read, and it's full of good advice. I took away a few new tips about proper camera height when shooting portraits, techniques for taking good panoramas, some new thinking about what lenses I "need", and many other bits of good advice were reinforced. I don't particularly like Kelby's sense of humor, but this book is full of good material for beginner and intermediate photographers.

I've been shooting my digital photos in RAW format for more than two years now. In that time, I've used Nikon Capture, Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Camera Raw to process them, but until I read this book, I thought Camera Raw was the weakest of the three. Now I get the best results with it, and it's my software of choice for getting good images from my RAW photos. Between Lightroom and Camera Raw, I will probably never again use the Nikon software.

Fraser's book is comprehensive, understandable, and accurate. It's very realistic about which edits should be done in a RAW intepreter and which should be left to Photoshop. If you use a Digital SLR camera, you owe it to your photos to shoot RAW and to read this book.

Dan Simmons's latest novel takes on the legendary Franklin Northwest Passage Expedition. For the first two-hundred pages, it's unclear whether it's a straight fictionalization of the ill-fated expedition or a work of fantasy. Simmons drenches his work in historical accuracy, and it's a wonderful read. From the history books (or, in my case, wikipedia ), we know that no one survived the expedition, that the crew was very likely stricken with lead poisoning from poorly-tinned canned food, and that they likely resorted to cannabalism at the end.

Simmons weaves all of these details into his reimagining of the expedition, and he adds a couple of twists that could (perhaps) be interpretable as hallucinations due to lead poisoning. Regardless of how firmly the novel is based in reality, it's a knuckle-whitening read. Good stuff.

As my retirement nest egg has increased in size, I've grown more concerned about the way that the money is invested. I've been drawn to the Bogle-esque and "Random Walk" focus on index funds, but I've been looking for guidance about which indices to pick and what constitutes appropriate diversification. Swensen's book holds the best answers I've seen to date.

Over the next couple of months, I am going to restructure my retirement investments to be fully invested in index funds and ETFs in six core asset classes: domestic equity, foreign equity, emerging market equity, real estate, T-bonds, and TIPs. I will pick target percentages that are close to the example portfolio given by Swensen, and I will rebalance at least quarterly to adapt to changes in the market. I'll primarily invest in funds offered by Vanguard (except in my 401k, where I have horrible mutual funds to choose from...there, I'll find the least evil and make up for it in my Roth IRAs).

And for the first time, I'll know what to do when bad things like market crashes happen. And I'll have confidence that I can meet my retirement goals.

Unconventional Success is a terrific book, but it's not an easy read. I suspect that many readers would be overwhelmed by Swensen's dense prose and the complexity of the financial discussions. I understood enough to find myself agreeing with the basic points. Five stars for content, three for the writing.

I'm not a fan of biographies and I have a weak stomach, so I never would have picked this book up if it wasn't for my new book club. As it turns out, the graphic details of 18th century surgery didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected (which may be due in some part to having watched two and a half seasons of House over the last twelve months).

Anyway, The Knife Man is a biography of John Hunter, the influential and groundbreaking British surgeon. It details his rise from assisting with dissections at his brother's anatomy school to being a celebrated champion of scientific medicine. Along the way, there are softball-sized bladder stones, torn achilles tendons, grave robberies, tooth transplants, gunshot wounds, and more. I was surprised and sometimes fascinated to learn about particular medical tidbits that were (and weren't) known in the 18th century.

But ultimately, I plodded through many sections of the book. In places, it's pretty dull and sometimes it's downright repetitive.

This book contains one or two relatively easy methods for getting great color from certain types of digital photos. The first is: convert to the LAB color space, sharpen the L channel with Unsharp Mask, and steepen the A and B channels with Curves. Done aggressively, it works wonders on images with subtle color variation, like photos of canyons. Done subtly, it works better than goosing the saturation if you want to make colors snap.

Beyond that, you're getting into some deep water, and the book contains a lot of the information you need to navigate those depths. Unfortunately, the writing is quite opaque thoughout most of the book, and the pages are laid out so as to be extremely difficult to follow at times (e.g., the photos and illustrations are often two pages away from the text describing them). Margulis and/or his editors need to reread their Tufte.

I give it four stars for having some bits of great content, and two stars for presentation.