Osho
I read widely and in most genres but romance and westerns. Here you'll find my reviews since 2007, with a few reviews of previously read books as well.
In 2012, I completed an "authors of the world" challenge, reading a book for every country (and a few other entities) by someone who'd lived there for at least two years. I expect to tag these books by challenge and country in the near future. I'm still refining my list by adding books that better meet my challenge criteria.
The Cat in the Cradle (Loka Legends #1)
This YA fantasy with a gay adolescent protagonist manages to do a pretty good job of fantasy as well as its coming of age theme. The hero needs to take the risk of acknowledging his love in order to fully find and use his magical powers. The fantasy elements hold together pretty well, though I didn't feel entirely identified with the main characters, perhaps because the narrative told rather than showed. A little sexist decision-making toward the end annoyed me, especially since the female oligarchs wielded considerable plot-changing power. It also struck me as too easy that
(show spoiler)Still, it's nice to see a matter-of-fact treatment of homoeroticism in a YA fantasy.
Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh
This reads something like a blog, and recounts some of the author's experiences teaching young women in Phnom Penh to make zines.
The Selfish Gene
Perhaps the best use of the audiobook medium I've heard for non-fiction, with Dawkins and the narrator switching back and forth to indicate quotes and footnotes.
The central motif is the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), which Dawkins explains and explores throughout. It reminded me very much of the only perpetual SimLife scenario I was ever able to construct, which included only wolves and sea turtles but ran indefinitely.
Some sections seemed oversimplified; there is what seems like an over-reliance on game theory modeling, which is highly stripped of other variables and makes some assumptions that seem to conflate money with procreation as a reductive explanation of all evolutionary behaviors. These may be useful preliminary models, but seem lacking in real explanatory power.
I'd have liked to hear Dawkins's thoughts about left handedness and homosexual/bisexual behavior, both of which are present in animals as well as humans, and persist over the history of species.
A useful and very depressing book for anyone involved in international aid, loans, or service. I'll consider grouping it with a book about the Grameen Bank and something about best practices in international aid for an advanced course on ethics and hope.
Birds: Mini Archive with DVD
Title: Birds: Mini Archive with DVD
Author: Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
Publisher: Harper Design
Year: 2011
288 pages
A pleasing collection of bird paintings. It's interesting to compare these rather stiff renditions with sometimes-inaccurate body types to those more lifelike portraits painted by Audubon. The book comes with a DVD of the images, which is fun. Also fun is reading the end matter, since the names at the time of initial publication sometimes don't correspond with contemporary common name, genus, or species.
Hmm....
Speaking of buggy, Goodreads links appeared in German when I looked at the Feedback page just now. I wasn't logged in because I no longer have an account there. Bug? Hack? Reloaded and it reverted to English.
Still no sitewide announcement? For shame.
We knew going into this that it wasn't likely to advance the storyline much, since it covered much of the same time as the fourth book. However, it does complicate the plot nicely and fill in a lot of the simultaneous action. I'd argue also that, as does the long "camping" scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the drawn-out nature of the narrative here conveys to the reader the enormous stretches of time it takes for non-fictional action to occur (such as moving an army across a country through the snow). With enough contract negotiation to make Fifty Shades of Grey look speedy and impulsive, A Dance with Dragons reinforces the importance of alliances and agreements, and adds several factors other than strength of arms or strategic leadership that influence the outcomes of a conflict. One is bankruptcy, and its collateral implication that if your enemy outbids you or can pay the bills, s/he can buy your army (or your bank). Since Westeros has no Jews to slaughter, I'll be interested to see whether House Lannister declares war on the Iron Bank of Braavos to obliterate its debt. Another strategy, revealed at the end of this installment, is catapulting disease-ridden corpses over the enemy's parapets. Also, letting your dragons torch your own city doesn't do wonders for your popularity.I continue to enjoy Tyrion and Arya most. I find Daenerys increasingly annoying. Identity and loyalty to ideals are key themes, strongly stressed.
Let's get to winter already.
There are books you acquire by intent, and books you are given. This falls into the latter category. Cute enough poems that remind one somewhat of Archy and Mehitabel. Illustrative kitty photos. Marciuliano writes the Sally Forth comic strip, so he's a practiced writer and most of these poems aren't clunky. A 1-bath book.
An excellent use of pastiche, with many very wordy pages broken up through the use of both photos and photo-based illustrations. The narrative was engaging and the images really brought it to life. A great addition to your graphic memoirs/non-fiction shelf.
The prefatory material provides a useful introduction and places the work in the context of the author's life and other works, reporting as well on contemporary literary responses.Particles (Kanika): Very short poems, often taking the form of a dialogue or near dialogue between paired opposites, generally ending with a reply that provides a twist of perspective and rebuke or statement of contentment with the second entity's experience. My favorite:
81. Beyond All Questioning
'What, O sea, is the language you speak?'
'A ceaseless question,' the sea replies.
'What does your silence, O Mountain, comprise?
''A constant non-answer,' says the peak.
The problem with rhyming translation, even of a rhymed original, is that where the rhymed original's word choice at its best seems inevitable and the rhyme simply a serendipitous confirmation, the translation sounds, as many of these do, jangly and forced (despite Radice's use of some slant rhymes). These are structured song forms, but they are more clangy than lyrical in this translation.
Why "sea" is lower case and "Mountain" upper, I couldn't say.
Jottings (Lekhan): This collection is typically more haiku-like in feel, though more explicit in the poems' messages (sometimes to the point of banging one over the head with their moral, though this is mostly true only of the abstract poems). The nature imagery is more pronounced, or perhaps more obvious here. This may be due to the use of repetitive imagery across multiple poems. Stars, moon, sun, clouds, mountains, ponds, ocean, flowers, trees, and a musical instrument called the veena) recur, as does the theme of love (though these love couplets seem to me to be the weakest poems in this set). The emphasis on light and darkness compels one to read this as a group of albas and nocturnes.
4.
Dreams are nests that birds In sleep's obscure recesses
Build from our talkative days'
Discarded bits and pieces.
110.
My pilgrimage does not aim at the end of the road.
My thoughts are set on the shrines on either side.
Sparks (Sphulinga): Less enjoyable, perhaps because many of the poems are abstract, religiously inclined, or appear to be invocations, salutations, or valedictions. As a group, they seem more occasional and specific than universal in their address. Those that remain focused on image and sensation are generally repetitive of the previous two collections, or unsubtle. There are many setting suns, faded cloud, ending roads, wilting flowers.
73.
The sea wants to understand
The message, written in spray,
That the waves repeatedly write
And immediately wipe away.
82.
That travelling cloud
About to disappear
Writes only its shade
As its name on the air.
The appendices include Tagore's explanation of the provenance of many of these short poems, interesting notes about the production of a handwritten collection using aluminum plates, thoughts on short poems, and the history of the creation of Lekhan; thoughts about Japan and the "extreme economy of self-expression"; a recollection by the woman who rules the lines on the aluminum plates; thoughts on modern English poets; and a different version of a poem.
All in all, well worth reading, but I'd still like to see an unrhymed version, especially of my favorite, Lekhan.
The "dark secrets" of the title are, as one might expect, ethico-legal. However, they're about attribution of scientific discovery, order of precedence in publication, and the sometimes-nefarious behavior of institutions rather than dark secrets in the style of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Henrietta Lacks, or the infection of children with Hepatitis B. It would be a good text to have graduate students read in order to understand why some professional ethics codes are very specific about the requirement for discussions of authorship and attribution. It might also be a good one to have faculty read with the preventative question, "What seemingly innocuous behaviors might we be engaged in that could lead to faculty and students having discrepant understandings of our relationship and work together?"
A YA novel that is delightful in and of itself for its story, language play, and relationships. However, knowing that Rushdie wrote it for his son while he was in hiding, and why he was in hiding, adds additional levels to the reader's appreciation.
An interesting graphic novel/autobiography (or, perhaps, graphic short story/short "essay"). It's more disjointed than many, but I found that this storytelling/storyshowing style underscored the protagonist's cognitive differences and evoked in the reader a similar frustration about communication. I would think that many kids who were seen as weird or different by others, while seeing themselves as unique but not extraordinarily weird, would empathize with her. In some ways, this is "Suzuki Beane Goes to School (And How Other Children and Schools Destroy One's Spirit)."
A novella slotted between the first and second Septimus Heap books. It's fun to read after finishing the series because it reminds us of Septimus's vulnerability, and Marcia's affection and concern for him. It also pokes fun at DomDaniel, which is never unenjoyable.
The Cuckoo's Calling
Harry Potter's appeal made more sense to me when I realized that the core of the novels was the detective/mystery genre, so I assumed Rowling would give us something in this arena at some point. Here, a noirish/hard-boiled detective and a pretty good mostly-closed room mystery. As was the case in the later Potter books, Rowling's conclusion is more complex than necessary and relies on more luck and circumstance than I prefer, but it's better than many in its genre and adds societal elements such as class, assumptions based on presumed identity and status, and critiques of paparazzi techniques that recollect those around the time of Princess Diana's death as well as the more recent hacking scandals.