Mark: Recently Read List

• War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges. Depressing sombre realist book about war.

• Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn. Funny epistolary novel and progressively lipogrammatical - really great achievement and very original and creative.

• The Digital Divide - ed. somebody or other. Arguments for and against social networking and the internet in general, collection of essays from 2000 on. Some great stuff, some I only skimmed.

• The Cartoon History of the Universe vol I, II, II - Larry Gornick. Great books! The big bang to 1492, I can't wait for the rest of it.

• Don Quixote - Cervantes. Been meaning to get to this for a while now. It's long, bawdy, funny, strange, engrossing. The first half especially is really episodic, but the second half I found more of a whole. Lots of great metafictional elements in the second part which was totally unexpected and surprisingly modern and amazing, laugh-out-loud at many points.

• Rad Dad - dispatches from the frontiers of fatherhood - ed. Moniz. Great anthology on the politics of parenting from fathers' perspectives.

• The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery. Took me a little bit to get into this but it is beautiful and satisfying. Ooh and I even got the Anna Karenina references (before they were explained, I mean).

• BikeSnob: Systematically and Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling - BikeSnobNYC. Meh, his blog is better as it is more focussed.

• How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read - Pierre Bayard. I still can't figure out if this is one big joke or not. Yes I did actually read it. Insightful, penetrating insights into criticism.

• What matters most is how well you walk through the fire - Charles Bukowski. Tall Matt told me about Bukowski and then I saw this used somewhere. It was my bathroom reading for a while, somehow appropriate given his unglamorous approach to life. Nice and straightforward and then sleazy and bitter and dark and twists your brain a bit.

• Cooking for Geeks - Jeff Potter. Great introduction to food science and geekiness, could have had much more in it. I'm going to go make a jar of lemons preserved in salt, what a great thing to have in the fridge.

• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - Larsson. Great finale.

• The Girl Who Played With Fire - Stieg Larsson. Second in the trilogy. I liked this one better than the first, the characterization just gets better. More violent, more dark. Still suffers from some ham-handed plotting, like the first one, but great all the same.

• The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins. Really great.

• An Anthropologist on Mars - Oliver Sacks. Great book, better than Awakenings and easily as good as Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

• Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi. Saw the movie of this a few years ago at a Mystery Movie showing and it was really great so I picked up the graphic novel at a garage sale; it doesn't disappoint, very intimate and forthright memoir about growing up confused in revolutionary Iran.

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Steig Larsson. Long time since I've read a crime thriller. Pretty good, I'm curious to read the rest of the series.

• In Defence of Food - Michael Pollan. What a great book, this is now my new "get it whenever I see it used and give it to people" book.

• The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova. Great successor to Bram Stoker's Dracula (which I've read but isn't in this list, I guess it was too long ago). A bit long and it all seemed to come to a galloping conclusion a bit quick after all the build-up.

• Worlds Enough and Time - Dan Simmons. Not too bad collection of 5 long stories (novellas?). Hit and miss.
  

• The World Without Us - A. Weisman. Kind of an odd premise (what if all of humanity disappeared tomorrow? via say a global epidemic or the rapture or something?) with a simple answer (nature would take over really fast, obviously) but exploring this question takes the reader to some amazing places. Underground ancient cities in Turkey, Chernobyl, Korean DMZ, untouched coral reefs, nuclear waste dumps...

• South of the Border, West of the Sun - Murakami. Beautiful, meditative.

• Free-range Kids - Lenore Skenazy. Funny, cheerful comments on getting your kid to be more independent, self-reliant, adaptable, safe, capable, etc etc.

• The Coming Anarchy - Robert Kaplan. Collection of essays from the late 90s. Unfortunately any political science discussion pre-9/11/2001 can seem a bit dated but most of this stuff is still pretty prescient. Very much steeped in realism (as opposed to idealism) and proportionalism (as he defines it, the willingness to accept some evil in order to further greater good).

• Jack of Kinrowan - Charles de Lint.

• Atonement - Ian McEwan. Wow, fantastically crafted.

• Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life - Roald Dahl. So-so collection of stories, highlights are Danny Champion of the World and Mr Feasey.

• Exact Fare Only: Good, Bad and Ugly Tales of Public Transit - ed. Buday. Great collection.

• 'Tis - Frank McCourt. Pretty good memoir but not as good as the first one (Angela's Ashes) as it has less pathos. Covers the rest of the author's life starting with his 20s.

• How to Cook Without a Book - P. Anderson. This is representative of a whole bunch of cookbooks I've been reading lately, including things like The Inquisitive Cook and The Improvisational Cook (which is totally snooty and not particularly helpful). I've been trying to become a better cook and look beyond what recipes can offer, basically cultivate the skills and knowledge so that recipes become, by and large, superfluous - i.e understand how to make a good stir-fry, soup, stew, etc. So difficult! But a little rigour (by that I mean choosing what to focus on) and notes on the kitchen cabinets has gone a long way.

• I Am Legend - Richard Matheson. The novella of the title and a bunch of short stories, mostly pretty good. The novella is orders of magnitude better than the movie, which totally ruined the ending.

• Why Evolution is True - J. Coyne.

• Thinner Than Thou - Kit Reed. Somewhat amusing but also somewhat disappointing. Set in a distopian future USA in which worship of body image has replaced conventional religion, some of the portrayals are interesting, like the anorexic teenager, but some are downright offensive they are so bad, especially of the overweight people.

• Anarchism for Beginners - can't recall. Not a bad Beginner's book. Suffers from poor translation (things like, present and past tense mixing all willy-nilly) and odd organization in some parts.

• Non-violent Communication - Marshall Rosenberg, and a bunch of NVC pamphlets on parenting.

• The No-Cry Discipline Solution, and The No-Cry Potty Training Solution - Elizabeth Pantley. Great parenting author.

• Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt. Boy do the Irish ever hate the English, and boy are they Catholic (at least 60 years ago they were).

• Shelf Monkey - C. Redekop. Pretty hilarious, tons of in-jokes for people knowledgeable of the writing scene.

• Death on the Ice - Cassie Brown. Straightfoward telling of the Newfoundland sealing disaster in 1914.

• The Lecturer's Tale - James Hynes. Brilliant academic satire with a touch of the gothic supernatural. A mediocre academic gains a mysterious power that thrusts him into the middle of department power games between the classicists and the cultural theorists. Great fun.

• The Long Way - Bernard Moitessier. Beautiful, personal book about one of the great solo sailors. This is about the around-the-world solo race in 1968 when he decided not to finish (after going around once) and continued another half-way around to hang out in Tahiti. After finishing this I went back to skim parts of Godforsaken Sea (see below) about modern round-the-world solo racing and the contrast is striking. Moitessier and his ilk had no satellite, no radio, they were truly independent and their boats were not built for massive speed, and he went around at about 40 degrees south to avoid the worst storms and ice and stay safe. In the modern races they all blast around as far south as they can in horrific weather, taking horrific risks.

• Mud, Sweat and Gears - Joe "Metal Cowboy" Kurmaskie. After the last book a nice cheerful bike touring book.

• The Long Emergency - James Howard Kunstler. Very depressing book about life during/after peak oil. Coincidentally the day I finished reading this I saw news that Venezuela has massively increased its estimates of proven oil reserves and they now (claim to) have more than Saudi Arabia. Which probably delays peak oil for at least a little while.

• Killing Time - Caleb Carr.

• Nurture Shock - Bronson and Merryman. Great summary of some really important recent studies on childhood development. Finally sociologists and psychologists are starting to look at how normal kids, as opposed to pathological cases, develop, and are finding some great things that overturn common assumptions. Like, you have to talk to kids about race instead of ignoring it, it is natural and in many ways a good thing that teenagers argue with parents, you can and should teach kids self-control, and most imporantly (though I've read about it before) how praising kids harms self-esteem and you need to emphasize effort over rewards and innate ability. Thoroughly backed up with research.

• The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood. Really nice and enchanting, interesting concept. Usually I'm not much into "old person reminiscing" type of stuff, I once tried to read The Stone Angel and had to put it down after about three pages, but this all works great and moves along nicely.

• What Might Have Been - ed. Roberts. A book of 12 counterfactual historical essays (i.e "what ifs"). Some great, some depend on your area of interest. I can see the appeal of this particular genre.

• The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles.

• Self-made Man - Norah Vincent.

• Sacred Country - Rose Tremain. Fantastic timeless novel. It has that dreamy hypnotic quality that reminded me of 100 Years of Solitude.

• The Mother Dance - Harriet Lerner. I skipped the sections about daughters and siblings, since Luke isn't and doesn't have.

• The Anthologist - Nicholson Baker. Really great and much like his earlier stuff, filled with surprising turns of phrase and quirkiness and metaphors that pop and whatnot. More plot than most, which isn't saying much.

• The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan.

• Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky. Finally got around to this nice Penguin translation sitting on my shelf. What a great book, not at all what I expected from a long Russian novel; very gritty and psychological. The cat-and-mouse game between Raskolnikov and Porfiry is astounding writing. Only after reading it did I learn about the double meanings in all the characters' names, so look that up before you read it (ie. Raskolnikov is from "raskol" meaning "a schism" or "dissent", Razumikhim is from "razum" meaning "reason", etc).

• Growing Pains - Emily Carr. Very personal and interesting autobiography.

• Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey. Great dense and funny writing. The strengths of the book are the writing and the wonderful characterizations. It's the kind of book where the writer is so good they don't really need to show off it's just always clear how great they are handling it all. Fantastic ending that you'll never see coming in so many ways.

• Chekhov's plays. OK I admit I skipped the earlier (less interesting) two. The final four are puzzling and intriguing. Plot, unimportant. Characters are not heroic or evil or anything. Emotions are never rage, passion, mostly pretty blase. Just relatively normal people muddling through their lives and trying to find some meaning in it.

• Cancer: 101 Solutions to a Preventable Epidemic - Dauncey et al.

• Lullabies for Little Criminals - Heather O'Neill. Really great first novel about a messed-up teenager. Just about every page she comes up with an amazing metaphor or turn of phrase that makes you sit up and your eyes pop open and you have to read it again; very cool to find a book like that.

• Selected Declarations of Dependence - Harry Mathews. Mostly Oulipian poetry and short prose, some cool ideas.

• The Human Country - Harry Mathews. Has Country Cooking, which is awesome, and some other wildly different stuff. Some excellent, some not so much.

• Awakenings - Oliver Sacks. I had been anticipating this book for a while and found it kind of disappointing. It strives to walk the line between medical journal article and popular interest and almost manages to succeed, but the preponderance of medical jargon (despite the contextual explanations and glossary) is still really annoying. Some of the appendices and front- and back-matter to the patient histories are very illuminating and moving, some of them not so much. Similarly for the patient histories, which seem to all blur together after a while. Meh.

• The 900 Days: the Siege of Leningrad - Salisbury. Apparently the definitive book on arguably the biggest tragedy of WW2. It sure is epic and detailed, though it annoyed me how it seemed to get scantier and more rushed as the whole saga got towards the end.

• Kitchen Confidental - Anthony Bourdain. Pretty cool book, and I learned some great cooking tips.

• The Portable Henry Rollins. Mr Rollins is a beautiful, scary man. Great hardhitting compilation of his best stuff from previous works.

• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Murakami. Lovely little book encapsulating his style nicely.

• Losing Confidence - Elizabeth May.

• A People's History of Science - C. Conner. Great survey of science from aggresively anti-elitist perspective. The "modern" section is, perhaps unavoidably, disappointingly skimpy but the earlier sections are excellent if somewhat eurocentric.

• The Guinea Pig Diaries - A. J. Jacobs. Good, but not as good as his previous two books. A series of smaller-scale experiments (as opposed to his year-long bible experiment, see below); including: posing nude, outsourcing his life, banning multitasking, being his wife's slave, following George Washington's rules for living... some others I forget.

• Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson and some other guy. Really powerful, excellent book. The way charities should be run.

• The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake - Bawlf. New evidence suggests more details about Drake's landfall(s) on the northwest coast during his circumnavigation; great story of the voyage and circumstances surrounding it.

• Empire of the Bay: The Company of Adventurers that Seized a Continent: THe History of the Hudson's Bay Company - Peter Newman. Too many subtitles. A great story, I was disappointed that it spent lots of time on "fun characters and amusing incidents" and not as much on the general overviews and trends, so at times I felt crucial background information was lacking. Like on the rise of the NorthWest Company, the penetration into the interior of the north, the outposts (such as Hawaii). And not too much about the 20th century. But still a really good book.

• The Mammoth Book of How it Happened: Eyewitness accounts of history in the making from 2000 BCE to the present - ed. Lewis. Not as great as you'd think, some real gems in here but lots of ho-hum stuff.

• Publish and Perish - James Hynes.

• Vanishing, and other stories - Deborah Willis. First book by friend-of-a-friend. Concise and subtle, very nice.

• Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health - Smith + Lourie. Already revamped most of our toiletries (due to pthalates, antibacterials) and tupperware (due to BPA) due to this book. And reaffirmed our almost total commitment to organic food (due to pesticides) for feeding Mr Man.

• Solaris - Stanislaw Lem. Loved it. Lem is so different.

• In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed - Carl Honore. Ironically, a quick read. Could have been better. Each chapter on a topic is "here's a quick explanation of Slow X! here's some trendy folks in New York who are trying Slow X! here the author amusingly tries Slow X and raves about it!".

• Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys. A "prequel" to Jane Eyre that I think is fairly successful at sketching out the prehistory of Mrs Rochester's first (crazy) wife. Carefully crafted, sparse, elegant.

• Punished by Rewards: the Trouble with Gold Stars, As, Praise, and Other Bribes - Alfie Kohn. Pretty much demolishes the behavioralist "do this and you'll get that" style of parenting (and teaching,management) that pervades our society. Basically every study ever done shows that rewards/praise/etc undermine intrinsic motivation, work only in the short time and make things worse in the long term, and he marshalls all the evidence effectively, clearly, and candidly. He also goes on to show alternatives (in the classroom and at home), which basically are giving kids collaboration, content, and choice. Very important parenting book!

• Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte. Well about as different from Jane Austen as apples from oranges, like the other Brontes this one is wild and emotional and turbulent (and kind of annoyingly amateurishly plotted) and fantastical subtle deep characters.

• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen. Lovely, prim, mannered.

• A Long Way Gone: memoirs of a boy soldier - Ishmael Beah. Pretty much as the title says. This poor guy got caught up in the Sierra Leone civil war and spent a few years killing rebels (many of them other boys), living in the jungle, addicted to coke, etc etc, as a young teenager. Quite the read.

• Our Inner Ape - F. de Waal. Really interesting discussion of violence and empathy in apes (chimps, bonobos).

• The Backwash Squeeze & Other Improbable Feats: a newcomer's journey into the world of bridge - Edward McPherson. Amusing journalist-infiltrates-world-of-bridge book. More about the people and tournaments than about bridge itself, you won't learn too much about the actual gameplay.

• The Drunkard's Walk; how randomness rules our lives - Leonard Mlodinow. A bit chatty and example-heavy but still a great layperson's introduction to perception of randomness.

• Exact Fare Only 2: Good, Bad, and Ugly Trips on Public Transit - ed. Ian Cockfield. Collection of creative non-fiction about transit use(rs). Really fun, short enough so that each item is individually memorable (mostly).

• Beachhead - Jack Williamson. As recommended by Arthur C. Clarke (see below). Good hard sci-fi about the first manned mission to Mars. Excellent science, the characters and motivations were a little hit-and-miss, to say the least, but the story moves alone quickly, almost too quickly really.

• Blink - Malcolm Gladwell. Heard a lot about this book, it didn't blow me away but is an interesting quick read. Very much too short, every point/section could have easily been twice as long to really flesh out his points. He didn't really expound any new ideas or synthesize things in ways I haven't seen before, but he found some really cool examples of unconscious cognition and decision-making that will really get you taken aback.

• Greetings, Carbon-based Lifeforms! Collected Essays of Arthur C. Clarke. Very hit-and-miss, it would be much better as a selected essays volume, some of this stuff you can definitely skip. But for every 10 not-so-interesting ones there's a really great one with some neat ideas and/or interesting stuff about him. Like how he spent WW2 designing ground-controlled approach systems with primitive radar, very cool.

• If Not Now, When? - Primo Levi. Somehow uplifting novel about Jewish partisans in eastern Europe in WW2. Great writing.

• Peter Mark Roget - a biography. This is the guy who made the Thesaurus.

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime - Mark Haddon. Great, but too short.

• The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa. The author really looks like an old roommate of mine (Michelle). Subtle and gentle book about a professor who has lost his long-term memory and his housekeeper, and mathematics. The author carefully talks about the actual math instead of referring to it generally and the effect is really good.

• The Comforters - Muriel Spark. From England in the 60s, the main plot is prosaic if interesting but the subplot is a really quite engaging metafictional angle.

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers. Wild memoir, I guess you'd call this creative non-fiction, great writing and pacing and characters. Very creative metafictional elements which blend really well into the story.

• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization - Nicholson Baker. A wonderfully-textured look at the descent into madness characterizing the beginnings of WW2. He structures it as a series of short (not more than a page) vignettes, exceprts from offical documents, speeches, diaries, etc. It illustrates how the Allies were complicit in crimes against civilians, eg. how Britian carpet-bombed Germany before Germany bombed Britain, etc.

• I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb. Good fiction about identical twins, and paranoid schizophrenia. Found the dialogue lacking but the characters were good and certainly grew on me.

• What's Going On in There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life - Lise Eliot. Really cool book about the neurology and physiology of brain development. Doesn't shy away from the technical details and really can be helpful for parents wondering about what they are doing that could affect the brain. Chapters on the different senses and a good discussion of intelligence.

• Worried All the Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It - D. Anderergg. Not a self-help book at all, really, though the title sounds like it a bit, a pretty nice analysis of the reasons and ways parents seem to feel excessively anxious about bringing up kids. Lots of subtle but simple ideas, like the trend to fewer kids means parents are more cautious about them and less experienced overall as parents, that have interesting and resounding impacts.

• The Year of Living Biblically - A.J.Jacobs. Man this guy sure takes things seriously when he gets a book idea. A pretty lightweight exploration of faith crossed with a pretty scholarly exporation of the minutiae of the bible. He manages to keep it interesting all the way through.

• The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck. Wow, totally engrossing novel. I really liked the alternating voices, the personal and the general interleaving. Very political, almost overtly so, but not forcibly.

• Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck. Short little book, a novella really. Hard to get into for that reason, but still powerful and evocative.

• The Winter of our Discontent - John Steinbeck. A random pick off the shelf, a quite interesting read; lovely characters. He's a good writer, perhaps I'll finally get around to reading what Steinbeck I have.

• Sointula - Bill Gaston. Lovely prose. Always fun to read locally set fiction and know many of the locations. I've camped on the beach that Tom spends most of his time on.

• 84 Charing Cross Road & The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street - Helen Hanff. Fluffy little book for book-lovers, and lovers of London.

• Our Babies, Ourselves, and Kids - Meredith Small. Anthropologist writes about how child care differs cross-culturally; very interesting and practically a must-read for new parents to inform oneself about worldwide childcare practises.

• Ignorance - Milan Kundera. I kept getting deja vu reading this, little scenes and ideas kept making me think I've read it before, but I haven't. Possibly that's the mark of a good writer. Interesting little book.

• The Road - Cormac McCarthy. Nice brooding dark little book. Apparently they're making it into a movie.

• Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages - Ammon Shea. Very nerdy man completes very nerdy feat. If it didn't take a year I wouldn't mind doing something like this. Perhaps I'll read a shorter dictionary, like the Oxford Canadian I have (one large volume). Shouldn't take more than a month.

• The Serpent's Coil - Farley Mowat. Can't say I knew much about deep-sea salvage before I read this, very interesting book.

• Wild Swans - Jang Chung. Fantastic book, disarmingly honest.

• Operating Instructions - Anne Lamott. Not really a parenting book though it is a diary of her son's first year of life. Quite funny.

• a whole bunch more parenting books

• Seizing the Enigma - David Kahn. Good book, authoritative.

• The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer - David Leavitt. Somewhat underwhelming biography of Turing. Unlike the author I'm not convinced every piece of scientific writing Turing produced was filled with allusions to sexuality issues (I'm overstating the point a little bit, but Leavitt puts a lot of work finding such allusions that could have been better spent on other issues; allusions which seem stretched some of the time).

• The Counterfeiters - Hugh Kenner. Dense and thoughtful piece of criticism about our tendency to emulate and improve the natural world through reproduction (counterfeiting). Lots of weird stuff about Babbage, Turing, Darwin, Buster Keaton, Jonathan Swift, Andy Warhol.

• A Cook's Tour - Anthony Bourdain. Entertaining world tour of strange cuisine. Amusing, not bad writing, I'm interested in reading his bestseller Kitchen Confidential.

• a whole bunch of parenting books - What to Expect, Baby's Best Chance, Gentle Baby Care, the New Father, etc.

• The Golden Spruce - John Vaillant. Not the Golden Bough, or the Golden Fleece. Spruce. A very engrossing story, the chronology and arrangement of the various bits of the story (history, the Haida story behind the tree, Grant Hadwin's story, discussions of logging on the coast) was a bit strange at times.

• Two Solitudes - Hugh McLennan
  

• I am a Strange Loop - Hofstadter. What can I say - another decade, another engrossing Hofstadter book. This one is much less wide-ranging and more focussed than previous (except perhaps Fluid Analogies) as it is his attempt to clearly explicate the theory of consciousness that lies at the heart of GEB (but gets lost in GEB in all the other wonderfulness). In that goal I would say that he is short of completely successful, as it oftentimes feels like he is waving his hands madly and piling analogy onto analogy in lieu of providing a concrete explication of his thesis, but many parts of the book explore pretty specific aspects of his theory, like the chapter with ideas about one personality being "shared" in low resolution across other minds. Like all his books it is wonderfully engaging and it is more personal and introspective than GEB. His explication of Godel's incompleteness theorem is much more accessible than in GEB and in some sense this book is a kind of "GEB Lite"; but I think GEB is more entertaining and worthwhile overall and it almost seems redundant to read this book too. Perhaps the ideal order would be to read this book as a primer for GEB before reading GEB itself (and then Godel's theorem in GEB will make more sense). I also have to comment on the fact that Hofstadter is the most typographically-obsessed writer ever: like most of his books he hand-edits the whole thing to make the typesetting spectacular; there is not a hyphenated word at a line break in the whole book, and every paragraph is edited to ensure nice spacing, no orphan lines or anything. He even does this in the endnotes! And his indexes (indices?) are fantastic; I like to think that most people don't appreciate a good index but Knuth introduced me to the satisfaction of a great index. Lovely.

• Walden Two - B. F. Skinner. The well-known 20th-C behaviourist's utopian novel describing a model community based on using behavioural science to promote a viable community. This book apparently inspired many real-life utopian experiments, some of which are still extant. An interesting and pretty well-thought-out utopian vision. Somewhat sexist in odd ways. From the perspective of 60 years later it was a little optimistic in its views of the family and childbearing. These utopian books are very interesting and i'm going to have to seek more of them out, i was very intrigued with Island and Utopia (see below somewhere).

• The Tribe of Tiger: cats and their culture - Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. I thought (judging by the cover) that this was mostly about housecats but it's only about 1/3 housecats and the rest lions, tigers, and pumas primarily. Interesting and personal insights into the behaviour of members of the cat family. "Culture" here is defined as "socially transmitted information", which cat groups, especially in the wild, have in abundance, like most social animals.

• The Beothuk Saga - Bernard Assiniwi. I was intrigued by the Beothuks when visiting Newfoundland last summer and this eloquent saga is a great story of them. It is a historical novel retelling their history, incorporating known events and people. Sometimes a bit utopian and moralistic but full of detail and great characters and very nicely structured, reminded me of Vancouver (below) but better structured.

• Free Software, Free Society - Richard M. Stallman. Finally digested the collected thoughts of the guru of free software. Essential reading for anyone developing publicly-useful software, I figure...

• The End of Faith - Sam Harris. Hits hard and spares no punches. Very brave and thoughtful, I had few issues with some of his analyses and admired what he had to say, if a lot of it is very general. The last chapter, on providing rational basis for meditation and "mysticism", is very provocative if at times misleading. Most of his hardest hitting stuff is against extremism and fundamentalism, not much to say about the many moderate religious currents. How come a fatwa hasn't been pronounced on his head? It is hard to imagine a book like this gaining currency even 20 years ago.

• The Shipping News - Annie Proulx. Quite an astounding piece of fiction about Newfoundlanders. Great characters and vivid and nervy writing... everything moves along at a brisk pace while still being thoughtful and atmospheric.

• The Story of Esther Costello - Nicolas Monsarrat. Fast-paced drama about a deaf/blind child, quite nervy.

• Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood - Naomi Wolf. Personal, raw, revealing, instructive, a combination of instructive and expose reportage with intimate details. A very telling portrait of how mothers and motherhood are let down in the US of A, and much of what she reports also applies to Canada - though of course we have with public health care and different (better) status of midwifes here. A fantastic read for anyone about to become a parent ...

• Birth: the surprising history of how we are born - Tina Cassidy. Almost required reading for anyone about to give birth, and very engrossing and interesting. Mostly it's a history of how (mostly male) obgyns have had various bizarre ideas over the last few hundred years as to how we can make birthing better.

• Kim - Rudyard Kipling. A Box of Matches - Nicholson Baker. I love Nicholson Baker's books. This one is right up there with Mezzanine (see below somewhere), a perfect little gem of life and observations. The bit about Fidel the ant is genius. In a spooky coincidence, the protagonist's wife is named Claire and son is named Henry (see The Time Traveller's Wife, below). In general, his books are fairly plot-free and focus on minutiae and trivia, almost stream-of-consciousness, with very precise and vivid descriptions and characterization.

• The Expectant Father - A. Brott and J. Ash. Of the many baby books we've been browsing through, this one deserves mention because I've actually read all of it and it is specific to my situation. A very good and helpful book, a bit US-centric though.

• People of Terra Nullius: Betrayal and Rebirth in Aboriginal Canada - Boyce Richardson. As recommended by Rhyall years ago. Slightly dated now as it talks about the then-current situation in native land claims, etc, and there have been great strides since publication (1994), such as the Ni'isga Treaty and the UN passing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (vote: 143 for, 4 against: those opposed: Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand). But overall a fascinating book containing many diverse and interesting stories of different first nations and their particular struggles. So many problems caused by unclear treaties, lack of treaties, bargaining in bad faith, railroading, corruption, bribery... but it really seems the native communities hit bottom in the 20s-60s and are now starting to come out of it by asserting their rights.

• Collapse - Jared Diamond. Quite the most terrifying book I've read in a while. But there are elements of hope in his message, and it is good to see just what the world is facing in the coming decades.

• The Pianist - Wladyslaw Szpilman.

• Cradle to Cradle - McDonough and Braungart. Rethinking design in a totally ecological way. Most "eco-friendly" designs still fall into the cradle-to-grave mentality of product lifespans: what if products were designed from the ground up with their entire lifecycle in mind, and, instead of being discard, or at best "downcycled", at the end of their lifecycle, they were designed to be "upcycled": turned into nourishment for something new, of equal (or greater?) quality? A quote:

  To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things - products, packaging, and systems - from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.

  While a few stabs have been made in this direction, this book is kind of a manifesto and user manual towards rethinking industrial processes. Really fantastic read.

• Illustrated History of Canada. This massive tome has kept me busy for a few months. Much better than the previous history (a few books down), it has many illuminating insights into everyday lives of settlers, farmers, citydwellers, especially pre-20th century.

• The Man Who Loved Bicycles - Daniel Behrman. Very idiosyncratic and uneven screed; at times somewhat painful, at times lovely, like when he waxes lyrical about memorable bike rides or about transit in cities.

• Every Second Counts - Lance Armstrong. Lance's two books are an interesting read as the man certainly does not like to live a boring life. Lots of interesting stuff about cycling and surviving cancer. A little too much stuff about being a rich famous person.

• It's Not About the Bike - Lance Armstrong.

• The Golden Ratio - Mario Livio. History and interesting applications of the golden ratio (phi); nontechnical and pretty interesting. Learned more than a few things I didn't know about phi...

• The Island of Lost Maps - Miles Harvey. Book centered around a prolific cartographic theif in the 90's, talks about map dealing, collecting, history of cartography, and all sorts of interesting topics, but not enough to really satisfy your curiousity in any one area. The book started as an article and it kind of shows, it feels like there just isn't enough there. Still pretty interesting.

• Tales of an Empty Cabin - Grey Owl. A really interesting, if slightly disjoint, collection from Canada's first naturalist. Very vivid and lovely writing, great portraits of trappers and beavers and canoemen.

• A Short History of Canada - Morton. Not a bad history, a little bit "prime-minister-did-this-political-party-did-that" for my liking, but well written and fairy short, as the title implies. Disappointingly sketchy on pre-Confederation.

• Anne of Green Gables - L.M.Montgomery. Since we just visited PEI for a while.

• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Murakami. Very odd but strangely compelling and gripping book, all about being aimless. Thanks Amy!

• Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town - Stephen Leacock. This and the one below I read while cycling across Canada, them being quintessentially Canadian books that they say every Canadian should read (or at least be aware of). I really enjoyed Sunshine Sketches, quite fun and fresh and it sure didn't seem dated at all.

• Who Has Seen the Wind - W.O. Mitchell. Classic book about a boy growing up in the Depression. Really atmospheric.

• A Complicated Kindess - Miriam Toews. Really good, the climax was not terribly well-drawn.

• The Canada Trip - Charles Gordon. Entertaining travelogue about driving across Canada (of course) and back. Nice, kind of Bill Bryson-ish, if not hugely memorable.

• Cuba and the Night - Pico Iyer. Breathily atmospheric love story set in Havana, dripping with local detail and character. Castro's Cuba in the late 80s and early 90s is a strong supporting character.

• Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino. A thoroughly fantastic collection of fabulist stories about the evolution of the universe, and life on earth, told from the point of view of various disarmingly-normal characters. Really interesting and very different, Calvino truly is a master of the form.

• Looking for La Bomba - Richard Neill. Amusing book by a journalist who goes to Cuba for a year with the goal of learning bass and playing in a son band. Nice portraits of life in Santiago.

• Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for a New Millennium - ed. Thomas Zung. Took me a while to get through this one. While the other writers' contributions are mostly good, and much of Fuller's writings are quite strong and interesting, I just got tired of trying to wrap my head around Fuller's hyphen-word-combining and sticking "omni-" in front of every other word to make it sound more profound, and let's not talk about his lack of scientific method. Having to decipher every other sentence can get pretty tiresome when it's a full book of them. When he sticks to not speculating about unverifiable things and cogitates about things like the educational system and politics, he is excellent.

• King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the man who saved Geometry - S. Roberts. Interesting biography of Coxeter; though he didn't exactly have the most fascinating life (he wasn't like an Erdos or anything) the author does well to tie him in with major mathematical issues of the 20th century, like Bourbaki and New Math. I found quite a bit of the math content poorly explained, it was confusing to me, when I already know much of it, so I can't imagine how a nonspecialist would find it. One thing that annoys me is The Great Man Theory: popular presentations of science as driven by shining geniuses carrying 95% of the creative burden and virtually no recognition of the thousands (millions?) of people who aren't as flamboyant or central but nevertheless produce the vast majority of the intellectual work that is done. For example, I was looking at Coxeter's publications list (included in the book as an appendix) and it occured to me that his rate of publication, at least, is no greater than, for example, my supervisor's, or many other "normal" academics I know. Of course Coxeter's work is more central than my supervisor's, probably (hopefully Frank won't take offense if he reads this :) ). But the impression the average reader could get from reading a book like this (any several other science biographies I've read) is that Coxeter was the only person putting pen to paper doing geometry for about 60 years. In general this is not the fault of the great scientists themselves, and they work as hard as anyone to counteract that perception. Newton himself said "if I have seen farther than others it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants" - great quote.

• Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer. I liked it, primarily because Krak is a good writer - I think the best parts were the two chapters on him climbing Devil's Thumb - that was pretty cool. While Mr Alexander Supertramp's story is intriguing and puzzling, as Krak points out he is not the first (and certainly not the last) starry-eyed youngster to project their ideals onto the romantic north. He just happened to die and get lots of media attention. Krak certainly seemed to wring out of it all the deep meaning and insights on American views of the untamed wilds that he could; without that and decent writing it wouldn't have been as interesting.
  

• The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger. Oh god wow what an amazing book. Go read this right now. A fantastic sci fi romance... though really it's just a romance with some hard sci fi crucially structuring it.

• The 100-Mile Diet: a year of local eating - Smith + MacKinnon. Story of a Vancouver couple's one year of eating nothing produced more than 100 miles from their home. Very inspiring, good recipes too. Metric peeve: I wish they didn't use miles, I'm not sure why that was chosen. There could have been much more to the book, it seemed too quick and light in many places.

• The End of Oil - Paul Roberts. Very nice, if short, investigation of the current (2005) state of the energy economy and our prospects in the near to middle future. Which is of course depressing.

• The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick. Reliably odd. Neat alternate history set in the 60's after Germany and Japan have won WW2 and partitioned the globe between them. Set in occupied San Francisco and Colorado.

• The Amateur Marriage - Anne Tyler. Another good one from her. A little more serious than some...

• Anna Karenina - Tolstoy. I liked the train motif that sort of bookends the book.

• Touching the Void - Joe Simpson. Another ice lit (sort of) classic. Well written, taught and doesn't talk down. Wouldn't like to have been either of those chaps. From the accident to the end you're pretty much guaranteed to read it in one sitting.

• The Serpent and the Rainbow - Wade Davis. Gosh he's a good writer - precise and well-paced. He's kind of the John le Carre of ethnobotanists. Recommended for anyone wanting to know about Haiti.

• The Power of Logical Thinking - Marilyn vos Savant. Mostly stuff from her column, pretty entertaining. She has a knack for explaining sophisticated reasoning in quite simple terms in her brief answers.

• Stalingrad: the Fateful Siege 1943-43 - Antony Beevor. Account of the brutal battle of Stalingrad. Nicely comprehensive I think, sometimes a bit wooden and impersonal in his writing, though quite sympathetic to all involved, soldiers and citizens.

• The Path Between the Seas: the creation of the Panama canal 1870-1914 - David McCullough. Excellent history of a fascinating tale. The characters are larger than life - I don't think the world will ever see another Ferdinand de Lesseps - and the history couldn't be more involving. There's scandal, heroics, political machinations, a revolution (the story involves the creation of the country of Panama) and amazing engineering. Well written and a great read!

• South: The Endurance Expedition - Shackleton. For some reason I like the "Ice Lit" genre. This one is good; though not as well written as Scott's (see below somewhere) the story is just way more hair-raising (instead of infused with the impending sense of doom as Scott makes mistake after mistake). The chapter about the boat journey is marvelous. Still are a far cry from Worst Journey in the World (see below somewhere). Shackleton's writing is sometimes a bit plodding and pedantic, but it does the job.

• Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon - Daniel C. Dennett. A fantastic book, well written and researched and quite admirable. He doesn't shirk the tough questions and leaves little to be challenged.

• Vancouver - Cruise and Griffiths. A nice sweeping historical novel. I found it tailed off a bit towards the end, the last story seemed a little underthought. Nicely connected up, though not too much, and some great characters.

• Guerilla Gardening - D. Tracey. Decent enough info about guerilla gardening, though it isn't a topic you can write that much about.

• The Fermata - Nicholson Baker. Not for children, or the easily offended. His fantastic writing style and nifty ideas save it.

• Doomsday Book - Connie Willis. Wow. Won't forget this one for a while.

• Better Living: the pursuit of happiness from Plato to Prozac - Mark Kingwell.

• Impossible Things - Connie Willis. Two books by the same author in a row... must be a record. Good short story collection.

• Passage - Connie Willis. Great story, amazing plot twist 2/3 through...

• Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie. Fantastic, reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

• How to Cheat at Everything - Simon Lovell.

• The Pillars of Hercules - Paul Theroux. Another excellent travel book from Theroux. For those who haven't read him he's fantastic: for example, he goes to Cairo and instead of visiting the pyramids he visits a writer in hospital who has just been stabbed by a fanatic. Standard tourist sights are the last things on his mind when he travels; he goes low-tech, local, and scrupulously avoids traditional sights and especially other tourists. He's very openminded. He's the type who will go to the one city that the guidebook says "avoid this place, there is nothing of interest". And he's a really good writer.

  Pet Peeve that he commits: a journey that should be one-stage he does in several bits (well, two bits in this book); he goes home over the summer and comes back to resume approximately where he left off. Very annoying. Also committed by Bill Bryson in the one about England.

• The Seville Communion - Arturo Perez-Reverte. Excellently laid-back "thriller" (though it's mostly character-driven as opposed to action). Unlike hacks like Dan Brown, Perez-Reverte has a great sense of pace and tension and lets his characters develop and drive the conflict.

• Under the Big Top: a Season with the Circus - B. Feiler. Good read, better written than Circus at the Edge of the Earth (below) and more intriguing just because it is a large circus that is featured. Since the writer actually joins the circus (as a clown) instead of just talking to people and looking in from the outside, we get all the dirty secrets from the inside: sex, drugs, crime, illicit liaisons, shady pasts, financial dealings, accidents, etc.

• Homage to Catalonia - Orwell. A reread! Having just been in Barcelona for a while and learned more about the Spanish Civil War it was interesting to read about how it was back then.

• Dictionary of the Khazars - Milorad Pavic. Great non-linear bit of literature. Bursting with surprising images, metaphor, ideas...

• The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, trans. Richard Burton. Read this while travelling in Spain so it was very cool to read while touring Andalusia and places with rich Moorish history. I found it surprisingly easy to read and pretty funny and entertaining. Very cool. This translation is more faithful to the originals as it doesn't include Ali Baba and the 40 theives, Sinbad, Aladdin's lamp, etc which apparently are later additions.

• The Crossword Obsession - Coral Amende. A nice history and guide to crosswords. It tends to drag a bit in the interview sections, but overall gives a very nice insight into the people, especiallythe fun task of crossword construction.

• Riding the Iron Rooster: by train through China. - Paul Theroux. Excellent book, about how he spent a year (1986-7) in China travelling around. Very good on two points: how the Chinese had, even at that time, distanced themselves from Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and the naive imperialistic takeovers of Tibet and the other autonomous regions.

• Impossible Vacation - Spalding Gray. Fun, if a bit overboard on the crazy protagonist.

• The Master of Go - Kawabata. Beautiful and subtle portrait of a Go game. Nicely understated, kind of elegaic.

• Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books - Benabou. Great weird Oulipian book, lots of French literature references though.

• The Worst Journey in the World - A. Cherry-Garrard. OK not the best title but this is often at the top of people's Best Travel Books list and I can see why. Cherry-Garrard was on Scott's Antarctic mission, though the journey of the title is not the polar journey per se but rather a winter trip he and two others went on to find penguin eggs, and only survived by the skin of their teeth. It was so cold their teeth froze and shattered. An awesome book.

• The Equation that Couldn't be Solved - Mario Livio. A nice summary of Galois and Abel's lives and work, not written for specialists (i.e. combinatorics grad students) so it's a fairly easy read. It's kind of a tough subject and difficult to bring all under one roof, and understandably there's lots of connections he doesn't really have the space to follow up on, but it's very nice altogether.

• 1421: The year China discovered America - G. Menzies. A very nice job of tying together lots of disparate evidence to present a provocative thesis that certainly needs to be taught and known more. Unfortunately sometimes it is fairly clear that he's an amateur historian and sometimes leaps to conclusions from fairly sketchy evidence. You can't deny that his theories certainly tie up all sorts of currently unexplained evidence, though, and large parts of the voyages he is tracing are certainly well documented and corroborated by other scholars, if not well known.

• The White Company - Arthur Conan Doyle. Very nice evocative if overly romantic portrait of courtly and knightly life in the middle ages (1380s or thereabouts). Wonderfully written, archaic yet flows nicely and great to the ear.

  Christmas 2006

• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - John Perkins. Real-life story of economic consultant whose job it was to go to third-world countries, massage statistics to paint overly-optimistic forecasts of economic growth resulting from large capital projects, convince to take on huge IMF loans, and then be saddled by unpayable debt and thus be pawns of the US. Very interesting read. A little too short, much more detail could have been added in many ways.

• Gaudi: a biography - Gijs van Hensbergen. A nice thorough biography, though the writing was at times stilted and didn't flow to well. It had very nice coverage of his work and did a decent job of reconstructing his life (most correspondence, diaries, etc have been lost) from little information. Seemed to be well researched and I think it did a decent job of handling Gaudi's (many) contradictions, from archconservatism to staunch Catalan nationalism.

• A History of Reading - Alberto Manguel. Erudite and wide-ranging without being condescending; very nice. Cahpters on neurolinguistics, history of reading aloud vs silently, history of teaching reading, multiplicities of interpretations, visual reading, being read to, printing and bookbinding, private reading, the metaphors of reading in the rest of the world, librarianship, divination through reading, book theft, the author as reader, translation, banning reading, and many more...

• Chaucer 1340-1400: the life and times of the first English poet - Richard West. More about the events of the time in France, Italy and England, and how the attitudes of the time are relfected in Chaucer's work, than about Chaucer himself; the biographical details are few and far-between. Basically it's a primer for his work.

• At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien. Crazy book.

• Africa: biography of the continent - John Reader. This is a pretty all-encompassing tome, but considering the vast breadth of the subject it can't even hope to come close to being comprehensive, which the author cheerfully acknowledges. Instead he goes for coverage of representative events/civilizations/trends with indications as to how similar things happened elsewhere on the continent. A good general overview and perspective.

• Bringing Down the House: the inside story of six MIT students who took Vegas for millions - B. Mezrich. Fun fast-paced tale of a card-counting team.

• England, England - Julian Barnes. Not as good as 10 1/2 Chapters (see below somewhere), but still has its moments. Inconsistent.

• Germinal - Zola. Great book.

• Godel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse - Franzen. As a theoretician I had a decent enough background to appreciate this book, and indeed some sections were pretty cool. Definitely not for the layperson however!

• A Year in Provence - Peter Mayle. The first and (presumably) least "milk-the-series"-ish of his very popular Provencal books. Not bad and fairly amusing, though condescending (towards the Provencals, as well as the reader) and annoyingly snobbish and upper-middle-class-ish.

• The Journalist - Harry Mathews. Weird and Kafkaesque. I'm not sure I got the ending; though that is usual with Mathews. Cool book.

• The Circus at the Edge of the Earth: travels with the great Wallenda Circus - C. Wilkins. Great book.

• Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden.

• Open House - Scott Russell.

• Under a Jaguar Sun - Italo Calvino. Too bad he didn't finish the other two stories in this collection. As it is we get three brilliant stories about the senses, in the order taste, sound, and smell. Sound was the best ("A King Listens").

• Memoirs Found in a Bathtub - Stanislaw Lem. Excellent distopian absurdist sci-fi... well perhaps not sci-fi as such. Sort of speculative fiction.

• How Buildings Learn, and what happens after they are built - Stuart Brand.

• A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby. Good book, very different...

• The Car and the City - A. T. Durning. p>
• Why Things Break - M. Eberhart. An interesting personal view of materials science, focussing on the chemistry of fracturing (and not fracturing).

• The Know-it-all: one man's quest to become the smartest person alive - A Jacobs. Autobiographical account of the author's reading the Encyclopedia Britannica the whole way through - something I've thought of doing. Now I know how long it should take! (about a year, reading about 3-4 hours daily from what I gathered).

• Did Adam and Eve have Navels? Debunking Pseudoscience - Martin Gardner. Collection of his essays, most are really good if too short to adequately explore each topic.

• The Hard SF Renaissance - ed. Hartwell and Cramer. The follow-up to Ascent of Wonder (see below), this anthology covers the 90s in hard SF. Excellent collection with some great writing and analysis. Nobody is missing here and lots of excellent new voices. Almost 1000 dense pages so take your time...

• Red China Blues - Jan Wong.

• Civilization - Kenneth Clark. Based on a TV series. Should more accurately be called "A Personal View of

• Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino. Another wonderful book from Calvino. This is a great bathroom book as it can be read in small chunks.

• Go! More than a game - Shotwell, and Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go - Tageyama. Two Go books I may as well list together. Kageyama's is an excellent book I borrowed from a friend and I am going to have to find a copy for myself as I definitely want to go back to it again and work through many of the parts I didn't study as much as I could have. The first book, which I actually went through a while ago, is a very nice introductory book with a lot of history and context to the game as well as basic instruction. I think that together these two books, if well studied, would put anyone on the path towards being a competent Go player.

• Media Control - Chomsky. Nice little book.

• On Snooker - Mordecai Richler. Not bad, a bit erratic, and sometimes only saved by his fine writing skills. Tends to wander a lot.

• The Great Victorian Collection - Brian Moore. I think Brian Moore is incapable of writing a bad book, however bizarre the outline is. As usual this one is about a sort-of-ordinary person getting progressively beaten down and destroyed by something.

• The Character of Cats - Budiansky. Unlike other domestic(ated) animals, cats are virtually unchanged from their (still commonplace) wild relatives, and cat owners will understand their cats much better if they understand cats' behaviours in this light.
  

• Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps - B+A Pease. Interesting book about the biology and chemistry behind differences in behaviour between the sexes. Rather reductionist and simplistic at times, however...
  

• A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife - D. Quinn & T. Whalen. What a weird book. At times funny, bleak, inventive, bizarre.
  

• House - Tracy Kidder. Quite original nonfiction book that reads like a novel, about the building of a New England house from design to moving day. While there is lots of nice technical details, it takes a background position to the characters involved and the at times rather fractious three-way triangle between the builders, the architect, and the buyer, all of whom have different motivations and are constantly working at cross purposes. The position of the narrator is somewhat odd and I found it a bit distracting (no spoilers in case you haven't read it).
  

• G - John Berger. What a nice book. Beautiful writing, almost entrancing.
  

• Faster - James Gleick.
  

• Spoken Here: Travels among endangered languages - Mark Abley. Really nice travel/linguistics book.

• Fall of Hyperion - Dan SImmons. A great book from Dan, good to see he IS capable of finishing off a two-part series well (for a negative example, see Olympos). An excellent conclusion to Hyperion.

• Hyperion - Dan Simmons.

• Origami Design Secrets - Robert Lang

• Oulipo Compendium - ed. Harry Mathews.

• The Prince - Machiavelli. Just to follow up on the discussion in Kingwell.
  

• The World We Want - Mark Kingwell. A nice contribution to modern philosophy, in my humble opinion. He shuns easy answers and more simply tries to provide a historical context and four key historical views (Socrates, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Benjamin) of how to approach a modern conception of citizenship. I think it is important that people (including myself) engage in realistic and grounded sicussions of what we value in society and how to achieve, and how to break the cycle of striving for prosperity for the sake of prosperity.
  

• Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson. Despite a recurring feeling of having read this before, which I couldn't shake, I did enjoy this and it's a fun and quick survey of Britain.

• Maus I & II - Art Speigelman.

• Zazie in the Metro - Raymond Queneau (trans Barbara Wright). Comic novel that elevated Queneau into stardom. Fun and quick. Very Parisian I may add.

• Exercises in Style - Raymond Queneau (translated, heroically I may add, by Barbara Wright). Wonderful literary gem. Queneau takes a little anecdote and retells it a hundred different ways.

• Aeneid - Virgil, trans Fitzgerald. Finally completed the Iliad/Odyssey/Aeneid trilogy. A fitting conclusion, though not as gripping and timeless as the first two. Virgil intentionally imitates Homer, but also makes the poem relevant to his times. I think this latter aspect detracts from the poem overall, and can seem forced, but that's a minor criticism. A great poem.

• Olympos - Dan Simmons. Concludes the story started by Ilium (see below). Grand sci-fi. Unfortunately Ilium (the first in the series) is much better than Olympos, which concludes the story.

• Hiroshima - John Hersey.

• Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss. Jolly manifesto about punctuation... ! While I question some of her logic, it's undeniably entertaining and has some great moments in the history of punctuation. Great quote: "To adopt George Bernard Shaw's use of the semicolon today would obviously be an act of insanity" (p. 117). Also noteworthy in that it contains a (highly) in joke about another book on this list: a reference to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (p. 138 item 4).

• Cigarettes - Harry Mathews.

• Wish You Were Here: the official biography of Douglas Adams - Nick Webb. Nice biography, definitely for "insiders". I'm not much of a biography fan but Adams was one of the 20th century's true visionaries and a great writer to boot.

• In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje. Very nice book; setting is Toronto in the 20s and 30s, focussing on the immigrant experience.

• A Short History of Progress - Ronald Wright.

• Greening the Garden - Dan Jason. A nice book on organic gardening, and political aspects thereof.

• Masters of Deception: Escher, Dalí, and the Artists of Optical Illusion - some editor. A very nice coffee-table art book about artists working with illusions in various ways, mostly modern artists including Dali and Escher and those they inspired. Some really excellent stuff in here.

• Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter. One of the few books that I've always wanted to reread, especially now that I have a background in theoretical computer science. I actually understand Gödel's Theorem now! I think this book is definitely better the second time around as you can have some idea of where it's going, and pick up on more of the self-referential tricks in the dialogues.

• On the Trail of Marco Polo: along the Silk Road by bicycle - Brady Fotheringham. A neat travelogue and not too badly written, though as most bike travelogues are, too short. Also he took a bus part of the way and flew chunks.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Called "one of the masterpieces of world literature" and I can see why. It's like one hundred books rolled into one, or at least that's how it felt after reading. Very amazing and engrossing.

• Off the Map - Mark Jenkins. Book about cycling across Russia from Vladivostok to Leningrad (in a group of 7). Interesting look at pre-collapse Soviet Russia. 800 miles of the route was through a part of Siberia with no road - fun cycling.

• Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing - A. S. Himelstein and J. Schweser. Cool book, nicely zine-like without overdoing. Gives a nice sense of 90's punk scene in the States (well, at least DC). Too short though. Why is every book I read either too short or too long? The last ten books I've read have never been the right length. Going backwards, we have: slightly too long (by about 10 pages, I think), too short, both too short (missed out some aspects) and too long, too short, too short, just the right length, too short.

• The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics - Dehaene. Very interesting read about the physiological and psychological processes involved in understanding numbers and doing mathematics. Lots of neat experiments and evidence about how good our mathematical abilities are even as babies and how standard education messes it up.

• Best of Temp Slave! - ed. Jeff Kelly. Collection from '90s zine about temping. Very fun book.

• Flames Across the Border: 1813-1814 - Pierre Berton. The second of two books about the (Canadian/American) War of 1812. As wars go, pretty amusing. Also depressing in that the entire war (started by the US) changed absolute nothing when it was over: no territory changed hands. Another great history by Berton: exhaustively researched, loads of primary sources well used, and great writing.

• Wordplay: Ambigrams and Reflections on the Art of Ambigrams - John Langdon. (Ambigrams are words so written so that they read identically both forwards as well as upside-down and backwards, like "NOON"). Contains many really nice examples of ambigrams (inluding the title) and Taoist reflections on them.

• The Invasion of Canada: 1812-1813 - Pierre Berton. Another great book of his. Focusses a little much on the battles and soldiers for my taste, and not enough on the rest of the population during the war. Now I have to go find a copy of Flames Across the Border.

• In Patagonia - Bruce Chatwin. Wonderful.

• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary - Simon Winchester. Fun book, a bit short on the interesting bits.

• The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks.

• Skipping Towards Gomorrah: the seven deadly sins and the pursuit of happiness in America - Dan Savage. Good book, good writer, nice read.

• Tlooth - Harry Mathews.

• Working Class Zero - Rob Payne. Can-lit, sort of Nick Horny style. Not terribly well written at times but still entertaining.

• Portrait of an artist, as an old man - Joseph Heller. Neat autobiographical meta-novel.

• Why Buildings Stand Up: the strength of architecture - Mario Salvadori. Very neat book. Highly recommended to anyone casually interested in architecture, it will make you see buildings (and construction sites especially, I've noticed) in a new light. He engagingly discusses all aspects of lots of different types of architecture, and includes discussion of social and economic issues in architecture.

• PR! A Social History of Spin - Stuart Ewen. Looked really interesting but turned out to be less so. It should have been titled "A Social History of a small part of the history of Spin, exclusive to the US". It always annoys me when US authors write like that.

• Searching for Caleb - Anne Tyler.

• Vox - Nicholson Baker. Strange and very vivid book about phone sex chat lines. Very intimate and well written. Can't recommend this guy's books enough.

• Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth.

  The next seven books I read over Christmas 2004. A nice little survey of world literature (which I only noticed while reading the last book): one book each from Russia, England, Italy, the US, Canada, and France, and each book quite representative of that country.

• Cancer Ward - A Solzhenitsyn. Apparently this, along with A Day in the Life of..., is one of his most accessible books, and it is certainly fairly easy to read and totally interesting. Has lots of detail about the economic system in the USSR in the early 50s and how much it had changed since the revolution. I found it quite interesting psychologically and as a different style of literature than I'm used to.

• Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier. Very nice book, dour and unmistakably English.

• Don Camillo's Dilemma - Giovanni Guareschi

• The Little World of Don Camillo - Giovanni Guareschi

• A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway

• The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

• Life: A Users Manual - George Perec. A fascinating and entertaining novel, brimming with ideas and great writing... it is rooted in the Oulipo school but has been quite rightly heralded outside of those borders.

• The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other essays on the study of language - Geoffrey Pullum

• The Advent of the Algorithm - David Berlinski.

• White Teeth - Zadie Smith. Highly recommended! Sassy, nicely written, superb characters.

• Angels and Demons - Dan Brown. Not recommended. Aside: why is everyone reading Da Vinci Code, about which I have seen nothing but mediocre to poor reviews? Answer: because most of the reading public appear to be sheep who need to be told by commercials what to read. Or else they don't like thinking. Sad. Postscript: a friend of mine starting reading Da Vinci Code and couldn't finish it because it was (in her words) "awful". And she is a fairly tolerant reader. She also recommends about half a dozen other authors who also do what Dan Brown attempts to do in Da Vinci Code, except they do it well.

• After Daniel - Moira Farr. A very touching and movingly written tale about the author surviving her partner's suicide... highly recommended.

• How to Read and Why - Harold Bloom. Nice work by very old literature guru. Bloom is a bit pompous and elitist in his choices of books but has some nice things to say, once he gets past raving about Shakespeare on every other page.

• Memoirs of an Invisible Man - H. F. Saint. I saw the movie (Chevy Chase) years ago and quite liked it, and the book it is (loosely) based on is super excellent. I like this book much better than the original invisible man, by H.G.Wells, as Saint takes much more care with some of the science and practical aspects (i.e. an amusing account of the invisible man's trials attempting to sew repairs to his invisible clothing with invisible thread, which he of course finds almost impossible to thread the needle with). The protagonist is also nicely human, with unappetizing morals (politically he stands as "selfish capitalist"). A great cat-and-mouse game as the feds try to track him down.

• The Englishman's Boy - Guy Vanderhaeghe. Excellent historical fiction.

• The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne - Brian Moore.

• Stet: an editor's life - Diana Athill.

• The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 - Pierre Berton. All of these Berton books are really interesting, this last one possibly the least of the lot though as there isn't really a major unifying narrative like their is for the railway books or Arctic Grail.

• The National Dream, The Last Spike - Pierre Berton

• The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole 1818-1909 - Pierre Berton.

• Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush 1896-1899 - Pierre Berton. The first Pierre Berton I've read, so far he certainly seems to deserve the accolades... wonderfully written and exhaustively researched history of the Gold Rush. His writing is almost lyrical at times and his love of the material is always evident. There were a few aspects of the story that I felt he didn't spend enough time on, namely the decline of the gold rush in 1899 and decline of the towns; the subsequent rushes that he barely mentions, the writers that so helped bring the gold rush(es) into popular imagination, like Robert Service and Jack London (even though they weren't there at the time their impact on the popular picture of the Klondike was huge), a few other things. However I totally recommend this book to all Canadians, and especially western Canadians, as the rush had such a great impact on the future development of all of Canada west of Winnipeg.

• Ilium - Dan Simmons. Big huge epic sweeping grand adventure sci-fi speculative fiction, super duper. Revolves around the events of the Iliad, which is a fine fine read in itself (See below)...

• Papillon - Henri Charriere. True story of French prisoner destined to beat the French penal system... amazing book, livid and engaging.

• Ladder of Years - Anne Tyler. I think I've discovered another excellent writer... another great book, well nuanced.

• A Patchwork Planet - Anne Tyler. Very nice book, very engaging, one of the few books I've read that spotlights old age with sensitivity and accuracy.

• Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons (opinions) - Kurt Vonnegut. Collected non-fiction, excellent read.

• The Corporation - Joel Bakan. Great read, succint and very well researched.

• Dude, Where's My Country? - Michael Moore. More applicable to Americans to read, but still most interesting, and generally better than the other one of his I've read, Downsize This!...

• The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer - Doron Swade. Nice book, interesting and easy to read. Babbage's story has a nice epilogue in that the author describes the project he directed to construct the only machine Babbage left complete plans for, his second (refined) Difference Engine, in 1991, at the Science Museum in London.

• The English Languages - Tom McArthur. Examines the different varieties of English throughout the world and discusses the question of whether English can be considered a family of languages more than a single language.

• Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players - Stefan Fatsis. Great book! Totally cool.
  

• Poor-bashing: the politics of exclusion - Jean Swanson.

• A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry. Gosh what a depressing book, good thing it's excellently written. I really enjoy his stark and simple writing style (contrast Arundhati Roy, below), it seems to make things stand out so much clearer and hit harder.

• Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: an American naturalist in Italy - Gary Paul Nabhan.

• Godforsaken Sea - Derek Lundy. Story of the most extreme solo yachting event, the Vendee Globe, from 1996/7, with its many disasters and rescues.

• The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy.

• Houdini! - Kenneth Silverman. Definitive biography of Harry Houdini.

• Watchdogs and Gadflies: Activism from Marginal to Mainstream - Tim Falconer. Profile of various Canadian activists, very good.

• How Reading Changed my Life - Anna Quindlen

• Making the Alphabet Dance - Ross Eckler. Compendium of results in logology (wordplay).

• The Vagina Monologues - Eve Ensler. Seeing the play for the second time running this Valentine's day. Possibly the most memorable play I've ever read... fantastic.

• If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino. This is a very unconventional book... the author all but reaches out from the pages and tweaks your ears in his mischeviousness. A staple of Oulipo literature.

• Battle Royale - Koushun Takami. Wicked. Great. Book. Japanese teenagers forced to compete in a hunt-to-the-death game.

• The Clouded Leopard - Wade Davis. Excellent book. Highly recommended. Davis is an excellent writer and presents things vividly. This one is a series of essays on various topics - ethnobotany, vanishing peoples - from all corners of the earth.

• Mysterious Stranger - David Blaine (yes, the magician)

• The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin

• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: the collected short works of Richard P. Feynman. Some good stuff in here, though I didn't like it quite as much as some of his other books (Surely You're Joking, etc).

• Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien. My mothers' copies from 1968.

• The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje. I really enjoyed this book - one of those ones that feels a lot larger than it is (it's actually a fairly quick read). Lots in it, beautifully written...

• Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver

• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America - Barbara Ehrenreich

• F**k, yes! - the Reverend Wing Fu Fing, M.D., Ph.D., D.D.S., L.L.D., D.V.D., and much, much more!

• The Pythons' Autobiography by The Pythons. Great book. Grad present from Mum and Dad when I got my MSc.

• Walking Since Daybreak - Modris Eksteins. Very good history, part autobiography, part family history, part history of Latvia in the 20th century, as centered around WWII. Helps to fill in the gaps in the history of WWII that we don't hear about too much in the West.

• What Is History? - E. H. Carr. Series of lectures on historical theory. Interesting if a bit outdated, I found some parts more relevant than others (though I am not a historian so what do I know).

• The Kid - Dan Savage. Great book, hard to put down...

• Envisioning Information - Edward R. Tufte. Beautiful book, composed largely of exemplary examples of information design and discussion of said examples.

• An Illustrated History of British Columbia - somebody

• Among the Believers - V. S. Naipaul

• Switch Bitch - Roald Dahl

• The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media - Norman Solomon

• Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

• The Search for the Perfect Language - Umberto Eco. Covers all sorts of attempts to return to the pre-babel "language of Adam" throughout the middle ages, philosophic a-priori languages, as well as language projects like IALs and Leibniz. Really cool.

• Language in Danger - Dalby. Very good book

• The Salmon of Doubt - Douglas Adams. Posthumous collection of a bunch of essays and the first part of a book he was working on. Some great stuff in the essays and the book looked promising... still, it felt a little invasive to be reading stuff like this after his death.

• The Mathematics of Juggling - Burkhard Polster. Required prerequisites are some non-trivial discrete mathematics - if you do have the background it's very interesting and some fascinating results and connections are presented. Wide-ranging and well written. Not essential for the recreational juggler, go pick up a site-swap guide or similar (e.g. Charlie Dancey's Encyclopedia of Ball Juggling) instead.

• War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells (for the second time since I was a kid)

• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut. Great book, in this one he attacks classism in general (as usual) and specifically inherited wealth.

• A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle (second time since long ago)

• Island - Aldous Huxley. Interesting book, written very late in his life (1962 I think). In it he sets out his utopian vision for humankind, and a very nice vision it is (with a few aspects I don't particularly agree with, such as overt mysticism and religiosity).

• Room Temperature - Nicholson Baker

• The World's Religions - Huston Smith

• A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters - Julian Barnes. What a great book! I got a copy of this in Amsterdam and finally read it upon getting back. Wicked book!

• The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank. Having just visited Amsterdam and seen the house she and her family hid in for over a year, this was an especially pertinent read. Very powerful book.

• Down and Out in London and Paris - George Orwell

• Family Matters - Rohinton Mistry

• The Code Book - Simon Singh

• Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: computer models of the fundamental mechanisms of thought - Hofstatder et al. In this book, a little more technical than his other ones that I've read, Hofstadter and his research associates present their various implementations of prorams that model anagolous thinking in microdomains. Very interesting stuff, lends concrete evidence to his claims in books like Gödel Escher Bach of how consciousness and creative behaviour emerge as a statistical consequence of small-scale behaviour.

• The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer.

• Cryptonomicon - Neil Stephenson. Great book, absorbing and well-grounded historically (not that I'm a WWII history expert).

• Generation X - Douglas Coupland.

• Wind, Sand and Stars - Antoine de Saint Expury. Excellent book. Kind of Joseph Conrad-y, except about aviation in the 30s, with digressions to his visits to Spain in the early parts of civil war and surviving in the Sahara after a crash.

• The Cure for Death by Lightning - Gail Anderson-Dargatz

• I, Rigoberta Menchu - Rigoberta Menchu

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

• Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II - John Dower. Excellent history, from what I've seen the definitive study of all aspects of Japan post-surrender.

• The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power - Travis H. Culley

• Biology as Ideology: the Doctrine of DNA - R. Lewontin. Series of Massey lectures on tackling science as a social institution.

• Fermat's Enigma - Simon Singh. Excellent historical account of Fermat's Last Theorem, from conception to solution (by Andrew Wiles). A great mathematical tale, and Singh doesn't skimp on the mathematical details - he explains them well to a lay audience and provides further details in appendices.

• High Fidelity - Nick Hornby. Quick read, great book, nice details.

• Moab is my Washpot: an autobiography - Stephen Fry. Lovely account of Fry's first 20 years, filled with lots of details on the English public school system which brought back memories (I having attended a Canadian private school modelled after English public schools for 5 years, and an English public school for a year).

• Technology in World Civilization - Arnold Pacey. Refreshingly non-Eurocentric.

• Why We Buy - Paco Underhill. Interesting but not that great book. Sometimes reads like an ad for his merchandising company.

• On the Beach - Nevil Shute

• The World Awaits - Paul Otteson

• Climbing Mount Improbable - Richard Dawkins. Great book, detailing how evolution via natural selection has slowly climbed several of the lofty heights of the mountains of highly improbable forms in nature, such as the eye (which has evolved independently at least forty times), spiders' webs, and others. Good for deflating creationists.

• Eunoia - Christian Bok

• Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language - Douglas R. Hofstadter. Wonderful wonderful book, a worthy successor to his previous books I've read: Gödel, Escher, Bach, Metamagical Themas, and The Mind's I (with D. Dennett). This ones focusses more thoroughly on the knotty issues surrounding translation, with forays into Machine Translation, AI, autobiography, and music. in GEB he uses his "dialogues" as a counterpoint to the book, in Le Ton beau he uses a series of translations of a witty little poem by the 16th century poet Clement Marot to highlight all of the thorny issues of translation that are covered in the rest of the book.

• There are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book - Robert Martin. A philosophical source-book of puzzles, problems, and paradoxes. Great fun to read and great conversation starter.

• Life of Pi - Yan Martel

• Downsize This! - Michael Moore (random threats from an unarmed American)

• Notes from Underground and The Double - Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Interesting books, highly psychological.

• Calvin and Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book - Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes was a bright light in the usually turgid world of the comics and I miss it. This book is a collection but also contains a lot of Watterson's writing and views on the comics themselves, himself as an artist, his fight against licensing the strip, and his views on the comics industry. If more artists making comics were like him the comics would be much much better.

• Future Shock - ALvin Toffler. Somewhat dated but still highly interesting sociological analysis of the accelerating rate of change in modern society. Very sweeping and thorough.

• The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - Baigent, Leigh, & Lincoln. Totally engrossing research on the Templars, the Grail and the origins of Christianity (i won't say more so as to not give away the surprising, but persuasively made, argument the book's authors are drawn to).

• There are Two Errors in the the Title of this Book - R. Martin. Kind of a sourcebook for philosophical puzzles and paradoxes and whatnot, very entertaining and informative.

• Pascal's Arithmetical Triangle - Anthony Edwards.

• You Are Being Lied To - ed. by Russ Kick.

• Out of Poverty (and into something more comfortable) - John Stackhouse. His basic thesis: people all over the world, no matter how desperately poor they are, are capable of lifting themselves out of poverty if they are given basic human freedoms such as control over their land, water, and air. Big aid, big government, and big capitalism all don't help much.

• Walden - Henry Thoreau. The American archetypical individualist and rugged pioneer type. Not the greatest writer but some interesting moments nonetheless...

• The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: the story of Paul Erdös and the search for mathematical truth - Paul Hoffman. Wideranging, good for a lay audience but has lots of mathematical curiousities. He also talks about Fermat, Gauss, Einstein, Gödel, Ron Graham, and other great mathematicians.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace. Nonfiction essays, on the topics of tennis, David Lynch, a caribbean cruise (the title essay - totally great), TV and American fiction, the Illinois state fair, tennis again, and poststructuralism. Universally excellent and great fun.

• Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco. The "Magical Mystical Tour". Bizarre book; didn't take as long as I expected.

• Roads to Santiago - Cees Noteboom. Literary travel book through Spain, by a noted Dutch author. Refreshing to hear historical parallels between Spain and a non-North American author (for once).

• Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell, a really really great book. Orwell's time in Spain clarified his politics and when he left he was a realistic convinced socialist, and remained so until his death. One of the most accurate portrayals of the Spanish civil war.

• Neither Here nor There - Bill Bryson. Funny travel book about Europe.

• The PoisonWood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver. Great book

• A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn. Excellent!!! US history from the point of view of the soldiers, women, blacks, poor, workers, immigrants, natives, and everybody else who is traditionally ignored in US history. From Columbus onwards... easily readable and hard to put down. Recommended for all US citizens and everyone else who has been affected by US policy, actions, history, etc, i.e. pretty much everybody.

• Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa. Semi-autobiographical book, highly amusing, last chapter seemed a little tacked on. Contains an amusingly anti-Argentinean bohemian (the aforementioned scriptwriter).

• The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner - Allan Sillitoe. British short fiction about the criminal elements of society. Read on a bike tour in July 2002, the idea being that long-distance running has something to do with long-distance cycling (turns out it wasn't all that relevant, but still a good book).

• In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson. on Australia. Read in two days at my friend Blake's house in Vernon.

• Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change - Guy Dauncey with Patrick Mazza. An excellent in-depth introduction to the subject. I also sent a copy of this to a member of the federal cabinet when Canada was considering whether to ratify the Kyoto Protocal (which they did, in September 2002).

• Northrop Frye - The Educated Imagination

• Women in Science - Vivian Gornick. Strongly written and personal account of invisible barriers to female academics, mostly in physics, chem, and bio.

• A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge. Nice, a little stodgy at times.

• The Peace War - Vernor Vinge. Engrossing, simple idea, moved along nicely. Fun to read.

• Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges. Borges rocks. Engrossing but a bit overwhelming; if I read it again i'll dip into it and read it at the same time as something else. I read this along with the next two during a train trip across Canada over Christmas 2001 and I finished the other two off pretty quick and then had nobody but Borges to keep me entertained... which he did, admirably, but it was a little daunting at times.

• The Lurking Fear and other stories - H. P. Lovecraft

• Biosphere Politics - Jeremy Rifkin. A social history of the enclosure of the commons and related trends... more interesting than it sounds, and an easy read.

• The Story of My Life - Helen Keller. Interesting views on the education system and it's failings at the time. I skipped parts of the section at the back entitled "Her Complete Letters", which are a bit repetitive and grating until she passes the teenage years.

• Lone Traveller: one woman, two wheels, and the world - Anne Mustoe. Written by a retired British schoolteacher who biked around the world with no previous bike experience.

• Miles from Nowhere - Barbara Savage. Story of her and her husband's around-the-world trip by bicycle in the 1970s. The worst drivers they encountered, and the worst attitude towards bicycles? The US in general, Florida in particular.

• The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell.

• The Ends of the Earth - Robert Kaplan. Journalism from places of massive and not-so-massive social upheaval. I couldn't buy into his theory of where it was all coming together, however, it all seemed a bit vague. Still, a really great read.

• Blue Sky Dream - David Beers. Personal account of the decline of the American dream, as seen through defense funding over the last 20 years.

• Why Buildings Fall Down - Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori. Written by two structural engineers but quite accessible, a fun book. The pictures are the best. Did you know that in WWII a B25 light bomber crashed into the Empire State Building in NYC? One of the engines went straight through and the other plummetted down an elevator shaft.

• The Knights of the Limits - Barrington Bayley. short fiction from a forgotten 70's practitioner. I read this largely as the result of a positive review on slashdot and I found a used copy. He's astonishingly mysogonistic (sp?), sexist, and short-sighted in some ways, especially since he was writing in the 70's, but there's some great ideas nonetheless.

• Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov. Possibly the only reason I read this (besides the reputed luridness) was the quote in the song by the Police, Don't Stand So Close To Me (for those who've forgotten, it's "It's no use, he sees her/he starts to shake and cough/just like the old man in/that famous book by Nabakov").

• Prison Writings - Leonard Peltier. Present from Rhyall and Elena. Nicely written, thoughtful and challenging.

• No Logo - Naomi Klein

• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley. Reminded me (for obvious reasons) of Farhenheit 451 by Bradbury.

• Paris in the Twentieth Century - Jules Verne. Not one of his best but amusing to see what things he accurately predicted and what things he totally missed the boat on. Plot optional, characters unmemorable. Nice and light.

• Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstadter

• Fast Food Nation: the dark side of the all-american meal - Eric Schlosser. The "The Jungle" for the next century, contains lots of dirt (literally) on the meat-packing industry, from inhumane treatment of workers to unsafe handling of food to environmentally destructive tactics to morally bankrupt politics to ... you name it, the meat-packing industry does it. Several of the most dangerous jobs on the planet, which are also some of the worst paid, are found in meat-packing plants. One of the reasons I'm happily vegetarian.

• The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran.

• Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman.

• Smoke and Mirrors - Neil Gaiman. Short fiction. A great collection, great variety and lots of unexpected treasures. I'll read this one again sometime. Saw Neil speak in Victoria and got the book there (and signed), very goth crowd - I was one of three people not wearing black.

• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad. Strange book, hard to like. But a cultural milestone so I felt it was important to give it a chance... details from it tend to stick with you for a while.

• The Ascent of Wonder: the evolution of hard SF - edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. A great anthology, one of the best I've read. Dense, comprehensive (something like 1000 pages).

• Silent Spring - Rachel Carson. The book that started the environmental movement in the early 1960s... interesting read, lots of chemistry and fun facts about your favourite toxic pesticides.

• The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll. Mildy annoying writing style but a really interesting story.

• The Devil: A Biography - Peter Stanford

• A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

• Inventing the Future - David Suzuki. Collection of essays with some loose organization... he's a good writer though sometimes he gets a bit emotional.

• The Double Helix - James Watson. Great piece of science writing, personal and evocative. About the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick (and very nearly by Rosalind Franklin).

• Divorce Your Car - Katie Alvord. The major arguments (and heavens there are a lot) against the personal automobile, and how-to manual that is very helpful for those with consciences wanting to make long-term commitments to less or no car use.

• The Essential Confucius. For a while I was trying to memorize the 64 sayings of the Book of Change.

• The Art of War - Sun Tzu. An interesting book, one of those "cultural milestone" books.

• The Iliad - Homer (trans. Robert Fagles). Excellent translation, totally awesome story, very very difficult to put down. Blood gore politics scheming gods blood war fighting blood !!! Recommended to everyone, a bit of background knowledge on classical mythology will help (though of course there's always the footnotes).

• The Odyssey - Homer (trans. Robert Fagles). See above for general raving comments - not as bloody but just as interesting as the Iliad. Had to read a couple books from it for a classical mythology class and read the whole thing. Totally neato.

• The Climb - Anatoli Boukreev. Alternate version of the events portrayed in The Climb (Krakauer).

• Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond. Totally engrossing take on ths history of civilizations that seeks to address the issue of why some civilizations come out "on top" (or at least conquering the others): the title summarizes the top three reasons. Contains vivid descriptions of Pizarro's butcheries of the Incas.

• The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker. Awesome book. Minutiae to the extreme.

• Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer. Good read. See The Climb, above...

• Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - John Ralston Saul. Didn't get as much out of this as I should as I'm missing some of the historical context he assumes.

• The Garden of Eden - Sharon Butala

• Country of the Heart - Sharon Butala

• The Chomsky Reader - Noam Chomsky. What can I say, it's Chomsky.

• Lord Valentine's Castle - Robert Silverberg. Generic fantasy book that is notable in that the main characters are jugglers (wee!). The treatment of the art is slightly inaccurate but better than most.

• The Diamond Age - Neil Stephenson.

• The Perfection of the Morning - Sharon Butala

• Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter. What a book!! This massive tome took me four months to read during a co-op term in Saskatoon in 1999, and I carefully kept it in pristine condition the whole time... upon return I lent it to my roommate who scuffed it up nicely. The part explaining Goedel's incompleteness theorem I had to read three times to figure it out. Anyone interested in clever math, AI, theoretical computer science, or abstract sciences of that sort MUST read this book, and most other people SHOULD. So many cool ideas... I need to reread this.

• Scott's Last Expedition - R. Scott (R.N).

• Much Depends on Dinner - Margaret Visser. Social history of food, highly interesting.

• The Doubter's Companion - John Ralston Saul. An irreverent critical dictionary... makes great breakfast reading. A sample definition begins: "A Big Mac: the communion wafer of consumption."

• Microserfs - Douglas Coupland.

• "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" - Richard Feynman.

• Dana Sobel - Longitude

• Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbach. Cool sci-fi historical revisionary fiction about the secession of California, Oregon and Washington from the US to create a new and interestingly progressive country. Pretty cool from what I recall. I should read the sequel.

• Coming of Age in the Milky Way - Timothy Ferris. A really really great history of astronomy/cosmology/physics by one of the best science writers around. Highly recommended to anyone in the area.

• Black Coffee Blues - Henry Rollins. Very depressing. I'm surprised Rollins hasn't committed suicide yet... but a highly memorable book (can't recall when I read it, it was a long time ago, but I still recall images from it in strange circumstances).

• Voltaire's Bastards - John Ralston Saul (Canada's homegrown intellectual critic of the establishment). Great book, awe-inspiring in scope... I need to reread this. Contains a great page or two summarizing why I dislike blue jeans: basically they turned from being a "uniform of non-conformity" into a "uniform of conformity". That and they're uncomfortable.
  I read this in 1996 on the bus to and from work at a co-op position at DND in Esquimalt.