Category: Books & Learning

At the beginning of the year, I set some outlines for some reading I’d like to accomplish in 2010. These goals represent not only book titles, but, in some cases, areas and concepts I’d like to explore. There’s some philosophy and some science in here, as well as some classic novels I never seem to get around to reading. Let’s see how it’s going.

Okay, I confess. I know that A User’s Guide to the Universe edged out The Drunkard’s Walk in this poll about which science title I should read next, but in true me fashion I ended up purchasing all four books. And when the package arrived and I scanned the first pages of each, I found it entirely impossible to put Mlodinow’s fantastic surveying romp through probability, chance and statistics down. I read the first 100 pages in one sitting.

This is the kind of book I unqualifyingly recommend to everyone. Most things I read and like have audience segments. I can’t really recommend Dumas to my friend who really loves YA novels; I don’t think David would be into Jane Austen. But this book? Read it, read it, read it.

At this point I feel like I could easily write a computer program to write a passable Austen novel. Sure, she’s droll and she invented an entire genre; she made social commentary where social commentary was otherwise essentially impossible for someone of her gender and station.

All good. All well-written. All in all an easy and quick read. The good guy generally wins. The good girl always does. The good girl then serves to deliver slightly heavy-handed moral allegory. Not that the morals are in any way not those that we should strive for–it’s just a bit of a pretty picture.

With the early arrival of “magnolia season” here in town, I’m looking ahead to the year’s bounty in terms of things I can heat up a lot and force oil out of. Yep, it’s almost time to take the big ol’ Portuguese alembic copper pot still off of the shelf.

The great hurdle with distilling your own essential oils is obtaining knowledge.

This is unfortunate, because mistakes are not always benign in this craft and I could sure use a strong guiding hand. Distilling the wrong kind of cedar can make your lungs bleed. Being a doofus about your condenser setup can get you exploded.

It took me nearly a year to complete Borge’s collection of short stories called Ficciones. This compilation, cited often as the best introduction to the Argentinian writer’s oeuvre, has about 20 stories, written in the mid-20th century, that range between fantasy and satire, psychological thriller and eerie psychosis.

Borges thrives in describing off-kilter dream states. He explores sacred geometries—labyrinths, rhombuses—through which his characters move toward heroic or anti-heroic transformation. Weird stuff. Captivating, strange, difficult.

My personal library’s science section is looking downright pathetic. Unlike other subjects—like modern fiction and history—for which new releases find their way to me effortlessly, my science books just keep staling and aging over there, sadly. And there are far too few of them in general.

Please vote on which recent science release I should read next! You’ll notice a cosmology-physics bent to these titles—that’s because the fields intrigue me, a lot.

The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition collection of The Sagas of the Icelanders is imposing both for its physical dimensions (hint: doorstoppish) and its content. These prose stories, written down sometime around the 14th century or so based on happenings in the 10th century, are a mix of actual things that happened and (hopefully) apocryphal bloodbaths that surpass any horror movie I’ve seen in terms of very messy body count.

Frank Delaney’s most recent novel is a misty-sweet race through softcore Irish political history, country farms and criminal intrigue. We watch a father’s obsession turn into a son’s fate, in the framework of the Vaudevillian traveling show of the novel’s title character.

This book is charming: Delaney knows how to woo his Ire-phile gaga American audience, and he’s keyed right into his early-1930s setting.

Curiosity. I have it. The frightful 8.8 magnitude quake that jolted poor Chile last Saturday sent out reverberations: the threat of tsunamis all through the Pacific world. As it happened, I was scheduled to spend the weekend at my friend Emma’s family’s house in the misty, spruce-studded hills just above Cannon Beach. The tsunami was scheduled to reach that part of the Oregon coast at right around 3PM local time. I needed to see what this looked like.

It looked like nothing. Too subtle for humans to notice, but very much there. The water changes caused by the far-flung tsunami were merely a foot or so along the western edge of Oregon, but the fluctuations were very real.

It’s attention-grabbing and serenely beautiful. Last week the early waxing slice of a young moon cradled a softly glowing, faint disk of the future full moon. I noticed it on my walk home and David burst into my library a quarter hour or so later, insisting that I should “really look at this.”

I was running late to a book club meeting, so I left David with my camera and exhortations to photograph the thing, which he did, admirably.

We know that the brightness of the moon comes from reflected sunlight, and it’s fairly well known that earthshine—sunlight reflected from the earth—can sometimes cause the night side of the moon to be faintly lit.