Category Archives: Books

Book Log – The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

curt_holman‘s read-bag review piqued my interest in this book, primarily due to my casual interest in circa 1900 technology and entrepreneurship.

Here’s Curt’s synopsis of the subject: “This lively history text follows narratives on two tracks, primarily (but not exclusively) based in Chicago. Track One depicts the tumultuous planning, construction, implementation and aftermath of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (technically the “World Columbian Exposition”), primarily from the point of view of chief architect Daniel Burnham. Track Two recounts the horrific practices of H.H. Holmes, a charismatic doctor, landlord, pharmacist, fraud and serial killer.”

The catch is that I’ve little interest in (and somewhat of an aversion to) crime stories, which the second track definitively is. So I was jerked between being fascinated in a good way and repulsed in a bad way as the story jumped between the tracks. I considered just reading the story of the fair, but the book is well written and engaging enough that skipping sections felt wrong. Kind of like seeing candy in a bowl and being unable to stop eating until you get that sick feeling once the bowl is empty.

But aside from the sugar-crash, it’s a good read. I learned a few things about good old Chicago’s history, which I miss just a little bit more than the other cities I’ve lived in.

Book Log – The Man With Two Left Feet

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The Man With Two Left Feet by P.G. Wodehouse

Another Wodehouse collection of short stories available from Project Gutenberg.

Quote from a Jeeves and Wooster story, Extricating Young Gussie.

New York is a large city conveniently situated on the edge of America, so that you step off the liner right on to it without an effort. You can’t lose your way. You go out of a barn and down some stairs, and there you are, right in among it.

What’s odd about this Jeeves and Wooster story is that Jeeves plays almost no part in it, aside from a few “yes, sir”s and “What suit would you like to wear?” As such, it really isn’t a Jeeves and Wooster story except in name. It’s as if Wodehouse had the idea for a story but couldn’t be bothered to invent some new characters to tell it. Odd, that.

Otherwise, standard issue Wodehouse.

Book Log – The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

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The Man Upstairs and Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse

A fine collection of a-musing short stories.

My favorite quote, from the short story Ahead of Schedule:

“Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his specialty, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money. All he wanted was a chance.”

Book Log – Warren Buffett: An Illustrated Biography of the World’s Most Successful Investor

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Warren Buffett: An Illustrated Biography of the World’s Most Successful Investor by Ayano Morio (translated from original Japanese version)

I picked this up at Berkstock, intrigued by how a Japanese graphic novelist would view Buffett’s story. Would he have Warren performing Matrix-like kicks to the face of competitors? Would he have an energy pulse exploding from his hands into the ticker machine, causing prices to rise or fall at will? Who knew?

Turns out, it’s a fairly simplified version of Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, with pictures, which have little to add to a story with few (or rather, no) action sequences.

Which anyone could have guessed; On the back of the book are a bunch of raving quotes… about Buffett himself, rather than the graphic novel.

Book Log – Love Among The Chickens

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Love Among The Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse
[via Project Gutenberg]

A Ukridge story, another of Wodehouse’s eccentrics. Clueless city-dweller attempts to start a chicken farm with no notion of how to raise chickens. He for some reason figures that if you can incubate an egg in 1 week by setting it at temperature X, you should be able to incubate it in 2 weeks set at temperature 1/2 X…. silly stuff like that.

An okay Wodehouse, of novelette length.

Unread Books Meme

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What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Lots of Books

Book Log – Emma

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Emma by Jane Austen

“That is the case with us all, papa. One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
~ Emma Woodhouse

“You are very fond of bending little minds; but where little minds belong to rich people in authority, I think they have a knack of swelling out, till they are quite as unmanageable as great ones.”
~ Emma Woodhouse.

I think the strongest effect of having read this novel is a strong desire to watch Clueless again. I had forgotten that Emma was the source material for the movie, and I found it very entertaining to consider the particulars of the adaptations made from one to the other. All in all, I believe I’m fairly impressed with the translation.

The second strongest effect is that I really want to incorporate the phrase to own the truth into my conversation.

The third strongest effect is that the concept of overt and formal class distinctions is jarring.

The fourth is that this is a amusing read of a very foreign culture.

Book Log – Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

The second illustrated autobiography of a unusual childhood I’ve read this year, Fun Home is a humor and sorrow filled read. Bechdel, author of the popular Dykes To Watch Out For comic, is extremely adept at creating a mood and atmosphere. The downside is that it’s a melancholy mood that lingers long after you’ve put the book down, but while you’re reading it, it is terribly engrossing.

This is basically the story of Bechdel’s family as affected by the distant and troubled father. There are many parallels drawn between their lives and the classic literature her father obsessively reads. If nothing else, I am left with a feeling of inferiority in my aptitude for literary analysis.

Extremely well drawn, extremely well told.

Accomplishment, Thy Name is This Past Weekend

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Man, I’ve got an accomplishment buzz.

The garage? I went medieval on the garage.

Things I cleared out or quarantined for disposal:

– The desiccated corpse of a rat
– 5 Advanced D&D Dungeon Master Guides, 2 Fiend Folios, 3 years worth of Dragon Magazine, 4 AD&D Player’s Manuals, Basic D&D sets 1, 2 and 3, and an inch worth of paper comprising characters and hand made, graph-paper dungeon maps made in the early to mid 80’s, various non-D&D RPG paraphernalia (Paranoia, Gamma World, Twilight 2000)1
– A dozen comics compilations: B.C., Heathcliff, Garfield, and others I don’t even recognize anymore
– The dredges of my grandmother’s Sci-Fi paperback collection
– My college footlocker, complete with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off sticker

Things discovered and not thrown out:

– Wedding dress (worn once)
– Wedding night nightgown (worn once)
– 6 jillion Georgia Shakespeare sweatshirts
– a 3 gallon bucket filled with crayons (needs to be returned to Imagine It! Children’s Museum)

There’s a wheelbarrow with Tools With No Home that will require some shelving, and a 5×8 foot area full of stuff that needs to be 1-800-GotJunk’d, but otherwise it’s a work of art.

steakums unloaded 3 garbage bags full of baby girl clothes off on two friends expecting 3 girls between them.

I cleared off 4 or 5 shelves of books in our IKEA IVAR shelving to make room for putting our computer center there, and making the kitchen eating area free of computer desk induced clutter.

Most of the books will be put up for sale in our planned May 24th yard sale, and those that don’t go then will be paperbackswap’d or trashed.

If we can keep up the momentum, we’ll be clutter-free in no time. Or rather, 5 or 6 weeks. Which is no time on the geologic scale.

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1 Lest you think I bought all these, they came out of a bunch of boxes that belong to my brother that he left when he moved out. By the look of things, all of his friends left their D&D and other gaming stuff to him, probably when they were de-cluttering.

The steady drip… drip… drip… of a book

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I came across DailyLit via unclutterer.com.

Essentially, you can buy an e-book (looks like they’re around $5), but it comes to you in little email installments, at a frequency you set. This is for people who don’t have time to read a book, but do read lots of email everyday. You almost fool yourself into reading a book.

The catch seems to be that they don’t have much in the way of selection, only about 750 titles available. But, you could knock out one of the 422 public domain classics for free.