That's right, reading day. I haven't read a book in a two months. Having all of our books still packed makes it difficult to find the few I haven't yet read and more difficult still to contribute to DG's book exchange (see, still haven't forgotten).
Instead, I have been chipping away at the 3626 pages in Tor's short story bundle. 828 pages in and I discovered one thing: I detest short stories that are actually excerpts of books. Fortunately, after reading more about each book, I found that none of them interest me much. Still, it's frustrating to pulled into a story only to have it abruptly end. For the actual short stories, they have been mostly good. I'm not used to constantly having to figure out the world in which the story is set, so that has been a bit challenging. Not a bad thing, but different from what I am used to doing.
Along with many short stories is something else I have wanted to include here previously: links to longer-form writing on the web. Unfortunately, I don't read many in a month and the ones I do read I forget to save the link. Therefore, what follows is what I did remember to record over the past year along with some notes from each. Some of these are "long" in the twitter sense; you could read them in a few minutes. I just didn't want my list to be even shorter.
Why Do 26 Million Checked Bags Go Missing Every Year?
Notes:
- "You should always put your name and contact information on the inside and the outside of the bag." -- Paul Behan
- "Many of those cameras concealed in ceilings at airports do not work or are not monitored on a daily basis." -- Scott Mueller
- And in a cost-saving move, carriers have stopped checking fliers’ bag claim checks at the airport exit, meaning "anyone can walk in off the street and walk out with a bag."
Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger
- Just six days after the leak of 6.5 million LinkedIn password hashes in June, more than 90 percent of them were cracked.
How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad
- Many great quotes from old advertisements.
Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win
- Not interested in the politics part. Instead, but interests me is that the most important part of the Obama campaign (and likely the Romney one, but I have seen less information about that) were the number crunchers. As someone who jumped on the sabrmetrics bandwagon and is interested in "big data" things, it is fascinating watching it spread and seeing how useful it is for everything.
- A fascinating look into the challenges, and joys, of researching a rare disease.
- Although a rare disease is rare, rare diseases themselves are rather common: "Peeper’s condition is extremely rare—but in that respect, she actually has a lot of company. A rare disease is defined as any condition affecting fewer than 200,000 patients in the United States. More than 7,000 such diseases exist, afflicting a total of 25 million to 30 million Americans."
Corn stories must especially fascinate me. Here's two of them:
Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food
Why Do We Eat Popcorn at the Movies?
- "I was a young Marine scout sniper, definitely his type. And for a single, unforgettable afternoon, Orange County’s most notorious serial killer coaxed me into a place from which many didn’t escape."
What books and stories, dead-tree or digital, have you read in the last month?
I finished The Brother's Karamozov! I'll put up thoughts about it sometime...
Still working on A Memory of Light. I'm in the middle of the Last Battle, so I'm getting there.
I look forward to the paperback edition coming out. I'm too cheap to buy the hardcover.
As am I, fortunately I am a fond of my local county library system.
Dude, that's like halfway across town!
I thought the Last Battle chapter was really, really good. I won't say more for now since you're not finished, but yeah, that chapter was something.
atta boy, sean.
Still working on The Black Count, although I recently picked up a volume of Alastair Reynolds short stories, Galactic North. I haven't read any of his Revelation Space stuff, so this will be my introduction.
Wife is a huuuge fan of Reynolds. I am also a fan, but she gets the books and then I read them after she's done. Revelation Space didn't do much for me (I would probably like it more now), but the rest I dug immensely.
Took on a few stories from Tor's huge free download short story collection while on vacation. I liked John Scalzi's Old Man's War books, so I read his shorts first; "After the Coup" reminded me very much of Laumer's Retief books. Started in the Harry Turtledove stories next, and haven't gotten that far yet.
I have a long way to go until I get there since the stories are in alphabetical order by the author's last name.
THIS. Excerpts are NOT short stories.
Still enjoying the Tor collection, though.
I've purchased a few books the past few months, but they're not really reading.
The Crossley ID Guide: Fantastic photo-collages and a large book make this more akin to a complete version of what John James Audubon did with his watercolor series. This is art to look at, portraits of the birds to enjoy and to use to get familiar with species before going into the field, not afterwards trying to tie field marks to sight.
The Warbler Guide: Extensive detail into a single (diverse) family of birds that have drastically different plumage as they pass through my yard in the spring and fall. I strongly recommend getting the Audio Companion if you get the book, because it's really changed the way I listen to bird songs (not just warblers). I just wish that there were similar volumes available for sparrows and... other groups of birds. (Nothing else outside of warblers and sparrows are broad enough in what I will encounter. Shorebirds maybe but I hardly see any where I am.)
The Stokes Field Guide: OK, mentions a lot of minutia that interests me at times. I bought this one first out of the three because it came with a CD with some bird songs on it. I'll probably use this one least going forward of all the Field Guides I have.
Others I've owned for longer:
Sibley: basically the authority.
National Geographic: The best before Sibley came around.
Peterson: My first bird book (Eastern US). Not great (Owls are heads only?), but it's small so I take it into the field more than the others. Mine's a bit dated, but I'm still looking more for birds that aren't so rare but that I've overlooked in the past.
Audubon: My second field guide. Photos, one or two per bird, in a glossy front. Some are not good. But the back half of the book is all text and gives better descriptions of each species' behavior and other interesting details.
Stan Tekiela: Field guide to MN birds, appropriate for beginners or children. A simple guide that came with Two CDs (although I wish I'd be able to listen without his narration). Only hits about 100 or so species and I'm curious about some of the species selection.
Wild about Minnesota Birds: also good for kids. Less on ID and more on learning about the birds, discusses nesting, feeding, shows egg photos. Nice big picture of each species. I bought it for my kids, but I actually do refer to it for some things that the others don't touch.
Two months worth*, but still - I read! Also, I too read some short stories this month.
The Rendezvous and Other Stories Patrick O'Brian - This isn't quite what I expected, though there are certain stories that hint at the greatness of his later novels. Necessary for the O'Brian completest, but not for most everyone else.
The Life of Pi Yann Martel - this was good, even better than expected. Haven't seen the movie yet but will definitely add it to the que.
The Chicago Way Michael Harvey - this was a fun, quick & easy read. Nothing spectacular
Coraline Neil Gaiman - Haven't seen this movie yet either, *ducks as spooky reaches for a headslap* but the book was crazy, creepy and awesome.
The Graveyard Book Neil Gaiman - I really enjoyed this one too. Pretty good reading for a "children's" book and I loved meeting Nobody.
The Day Before America William MacLeish - This one got a little preachy, but interesting reading nonetheless.
Next up will be another Gaiman book: Stardust, if only because we already have it at home.
*not sure I haven't claimed some of these before, but I so rarely participate that I figured it couldn't hurt to share them anew.
I've only read a few of O'Brian's books; too worried I'll get sucked into Aubrey/Maturin again (not that I didn't absolutely love the whole series)
That definitely didn't happen with this collection - not nearly to the level of the Aubrey/Maturin novels (those that I've read anyway).
I felt Firefly-sad when I finished reading 21. Or I guess I should say I felt Aubrey/Maturin-sad when I finished Firefly/Serenity.
I really never got into Life of Pi. It took me two tries to finish it, and I didn't really enjoy it either time. My opinion clearly differs from a lot of people out there. The things I didn't like about the book were the same things I didn't like about the movie, but the visuals were amazing.
Listened to The Graveyard Book as an audiobook (Gaiman reads it himself) and that was pretty cool. He's consistently at the top of every "must-hear audiobooks" list that I've seen, and it's easy to see why, he has a real gift for storytelling.
CH's appearance below reminded me that I've read most of The Deadly Writers Patrol - Issue 9. Some very compelling stuff in there, even if you haven't been a member of the armed forces.
Glad you're finding some worthwhile stuff in there, CoC. I'm happy to send copies to other interested parties.
I saw Coraline in the theater and enjoyed it, but I'm embarrassed to admit I haven't actually read any of Gaiman's books. Any recommendations about where I should start?
Start anywhere you like - I haven't read a bad one yet. The guys here introduced him to me by way of American Gods. It was awesome. Now I'm just basically working my way down that list on the Author page.
I've got just a few pages left of Huck Finn. It's still hilarious, but I'm amazed that my mind remember certain sections that were only about 4 pages long (and someone had turned them into a major portion of the book), and forgot other sections that were forty or fifty pages in length. I loves me some Mark Twain.
I also read The Long Gray Line about the West Point class of 1966. It was extremely interesting to see how Vietnam affecting everything about their lives even for those who never even went into combat. I'm always a sucker for microhistory, and Rick Atkinson is a great story-teller.
If you like microhistory and are intrigued by a Vietnam story involving the Minnesota Twins, you might like The Twins Platoon.
Ooh, sounds right up my alley. I'll at it to my list.
Mostly sci-fi short stories this month, with the Tor collection, as well as The Edge of Infinity which was a collection set within our solar system, everywhere from near-Earth to Neptune. Collections with a lot of different authors are sometimes hard to get into for me (mostly for the same reason that sean points out above). I picked out this collection because it had a bunch of sci-fi award nominees in it, plus a story by Elizabeth Bear, an author whose stories I've been trying to find for a little while now. Her story was very good, probably my favorite in the collection.
Right now I'm reading High Tide by Inga Abele, which is interesting but very ... sedate? I'm not reading this one in big chunks at all.
I also have Fun Camp by Gabe Durham burning a hole in my nightstand, I'm anxious to see if this as good as I've heard.
I also wanted to thank sean for the links. I always have a backlog of "I should read that" articles/stories/online books, but I always appreciate finding more.
Thanks. I encourage others to also record and share their interesting online stories or articles. Let's break this book stranglehold!
Last month I finished Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit, which I would put up there with Krakauer's better work.
Last month my friend Kevin Fenton published Leaving Rollingstone, a memoir about growing up in a small Luxembourgish village near Winona. I would say it's a pretty good book even if Pops Hayes didn't figure in the story and Kevin's message.
Right now I'm working on Andrei Gelasimov's Gods of the Steppe. I tore through Gelasimov's Thirst, a novella about a disfigured, alcoholic First Chechen War veteran and his comrades, so I'm really excited about his new novel.
The only book I read last month has to do with infant reflux, and that's also the reason I didn't read any other books. I won't review it unless anyone else here is in similar circumstances. But I have a couple other book-related things to share.
Eleanor & Park, which I read back in July, was in the news the other week due to a big kerfuffle in the Anoka-Hennepin school district. It's all rather amusing to me, because I thought the book was pretty tame and wouldn't have predicted it would have prompted such a controversy.
Is anyone else here a Dave Eggers fan? I am always interested in what he's up to, and he has a new book out called The Circle. The article, "Dave Eggers Made Me Quit Twitter," is somewhat about the book, and it's an interesting read in its own right.
Infant reflux is the bane of my existence. I'm pretty sure the bauble has it even worse than the trinket did. We've got him on ranitidine for it, and it helps some but not as much as I'd like and the addition of forceful spit-up from the nose this time around is the best part. Ugh.
We practically had to have The Boy sleep upright for his first several months, thanks to reflux.
Indeed, we had to do the same with the first one, but the bauble will sleep on his back. It's getting him to fall asleep that's the hard part, especially because he will, 100% of the time, need to be changed immediately following a feeding, which means laying him on his back way too soon afterward, guaranteeing painful spit-up. I know it goes away, and it has for the trinket, but its really, really hard not to get frustrated at 4 am when he just. won't. stop. arching.
Ugh, indeed. The book I read is Colic Solved, and it's by a pediatric gastroenterologist. Having been through it before, you probably know a fair amount already, but I found it helpful both for the basics on what's going on and for a thorough chapter on medications. Ranitidine was better than nothing, but now we're trying omoprazole. (He was first been on a compounded form, but now we're splitting a capsule and giving him the beads directly.) Sleeping flat became an impossibility, so he now has a crazy wedge and I'm able to put him back down right away at night, rather than holding him for 30 minutes or longer. (Tried both a swing and a bouncy seat before the wedge, but they were not all that helpful.) Because that 4 am frustration is a special kind of crazymaking.
yea, we did the wedge thing in a bassinet at the foot of our bed for the first couple of months. and lots and lots of extra laundry.
I'm convinced that the reason doctors (at least in our case) are reluctant to diagnose reflux is because they had "colic-y" babies and dammit, if they had to go through it without help then so will everyone else.
My wife had mentioned that one of the docs said something about an alternate drug. I wonder if omoprazole was it?
How the hell did we ever survive as a species?
I also wonder if there's limited motivation to do much given that the kid will outgrow it with or without medical treatment.
There's a lot of good info on medication here.
Re: Eleanor & Park - we had a discussion about it here. I went and picked up a copy for my wife in part because they banned it.
I totally missed that. Thank you! If you read it too, let me know.