The 2012 Fifty Book Challenge

[dp]

1. Legs by William Kennedy 318pg
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 276pg
3. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte 407pg
4. The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte 281pg
5. Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson 354pg
6. Is Voting for Young People? by Martin P. Wattenberg 225pg
7. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel 497pg
8. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson 505pg
9. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 245pg
10. The Skin by Curzio Malaparte 344pg
11. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 880pg
12. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut 192pg
13. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway 154pg
14. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck 276pg
15. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 181pg
16. Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot 350pg
17. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace 321pg
18. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier 296pg

A collection of journal entries, letters, and a memoir all written by Picasso's first significant muse/mistress/whatever you wanna call her. It was interesting, but Gilot's account of her experiences with Picasso are much more interesting and perceptive. With Gilot, you start to feel like you've met Picasso, Olivier mostly talks about all their friends and the different things they all got up to.

[dp]

1. Legs by William Kennedy 318pg
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 276pg
3. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte 407pg
4. The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte 281pg
5. Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson 354pg
6. Is Voting for Young People? by Martin P. Wattenberg 225pg
7. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel 497pg
8. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson 505pg
9. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 245pg
10. The Skin by Curzio Malaparte 344pg
11. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 880pg
12. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut 192pg
13. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway 154pg
14. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck 276pg
15. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 181pg
16. Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot 350pg
17. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace 321pg
18. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier 296pg

A collection of journal entries, letters, and a memoir all written by Picasso's first significant muse/mistress/whatever you wanna call her. It was interesting, but Gilot's account of her experiences with Picasso are much more interesting and perceptive. With Gilot, you start to feel like you've met Picasso, Olivier mostly talks about all their friends and the different things they all got up to.

[dp]

1. Legs by William Kennedy 318pg
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 276pg
3. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte 407pg
4. The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte 281pg
5. Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson 354pg
6. Is Voting for Young People? by Martin P. Wattenberg 225pg
7. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel 497pg
8. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson 505pg
9. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 245pg
10. The Skin by Curzio Malaparte 344pg
11. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 880pg
12. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut 192pg
13. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway 154pg
14. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck 276pg
15. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 181pg
16. Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot 350pg
17. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace 321pg
18. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier 296pg
19. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang 208pg

I had heard this book reviewed by NPR some time ago and picked it up the other day at Half Priced Books on a whim. I read it all today in one (briefly interrupted) sitting. I think it might be the first book by a female author that fully and thoroughly moved me. I felt like the entire book is a crescendo, and the first part I found not so enjoyable, but the further it went the better it got.

Besides The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and this most recent book, I can't think of a single book of fiction written by a female that I've read (surely there must be some...?). Anyone have any female fiction writers they really love? I need to expand.

[Zac Miley]

Flannery O'Connor is quite the popular female fiction author.

[lilo]

1. Agatha Christie - Miss Marple & Mystery (collection of short stories)
2. Kerry Greenwood - Urn Burial
3. Anna Stothard - The Pink Hotel
4. Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
5. Martina Cole - The Runaway
6. Agatha Christie - Detectives & Young Adventurers (collection of short stories)
7. Nancy Mitford - Love In A Cold Climate
8. Kate Morton - The Distant Hours
9. Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
10. Benjamin Law - The Family Law
11. Kerry Greenwood - Blood & Circuses
12. Anonymous - A Woman In Berlin
13. Mulgray Twins - No Suspicious Circumstances
14. Jon Richardson - It's Not Me, It's You
15. Neville Shute - A Town Like Alice
16. Richard Llewellyn - How Green Was My Valley
17. Chloe Hooper - The Tall Man
18. Kate Grenville - The Secret River
19. John Ajvide Lindqvist - Let The Right One In
20. Dodie Smith - I Capture The Castle
21. Wilkie Collins - The Woman In White

22. Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
I liked it a lot! Very cute and funny and silly, and reminded me that there's more to Austen than P&P.

23. Stella Tilyard - The Tides Of War
Pretty silly. I read it because I saw the Orange Prize longlist, and since the books I've read that won the Orange Prize (We Need To Talk About Kevin, Small Island) have been excellent, I thought I'd get a head start on this year. Sadly there's a lot of dross.

24. Jim Thompson - The Killer Inside Me
This was SO good. READ IT.

25. Mandy Sayer - Love In The Years Of Lunacy
A very, very silly book. I embarrassed my boyfriend terribly when he kindly went to to library to pick it up for me, because the cover is typical Mills & Boon. Ha! It was interesting because it was about a period in Australian history which I know a little bit about, but the ending was SO silly.

26. Belinda McKeon - Solace
Another Orange Prize longlister. Pretty good though, very lyrical and moving.

27. Karin Altenberg - Island Of Wings
Again, one from the longlist. I really liked it though, it was beautifully written and made me want to travel to the Outer Hebrides IMMEDIATELY.

28. Emma Donoghue - The Sealed Letter
A very silly Orange Prize longlister.

29. Robert Frank - The Return Of The Economic Naturalist
I picked this up because I'm studying economics at university, and any way to help me get my head around the concepts is good! Added bonus is that it's written by the same guy who wrote my textbook.

30. Caitlin Moran - How To Be A Woman
This was great! I read it pretty quickly, giggling the whole way through. My boyfriend asked me what was so funny and I was like "nah, you're a boy, you wouldn't get it.."

31. Jonathan Coe - The Rotters' Club
Very good, very English. I'm going to read the sequel to this next.

[bigdirtyfoot]

Jeremy: Thank you for the tip on Bad Science. I will definitely check it out - it'll be good to see some contrasting science from what I have been researching lately.

14. Confessions of a Crap Artist, Philip K Dick, 246 pg.

This book is unlike the other PKD I have read so far. I wouldn't classify it as science fiction, because it is more of a general fiction story than anything. The closest Dick gets to science fiction in this book is a group of wackos that predict the end of the world and have regular seances. The story is about a young man, Jack Isidore, who believes in several crackpot ideas. Isidore believes that the earth is hollow and that sunlight has weight. During a difficult period of his life, his sister and her husband (Fay and Charlie Hume) take Isidore under their wing and let him stay in their house. He pays them back by taking care of their two children and doing housework. Fay is an unlikable character from the get go. She is selfish, pushy, pompous, lazy, etc. Charlie is fairly likable but he gets sent to the hospital early in the book. There are other characters that I won't describe here because to do so would spoil some of the plot development.

This definitely wasn't my favorite PKD book, but I did enjoy it. For some reason I was able to identify with Jack Isidore very closely. Maybe I believe in crackpot ideas and am a bit crazy myself, but I am okay with that. I really liked that the book switches perspectives with each chapter. One chapter is written from Isidore's point of view, the next is Fay's, and so on with each main character. This made it really easy to see that each character had a totally separate opinion and retelling of the actions that happen in the book. I wouldn't recommend this as a first PKD book, but if you have read a lot of them it is definitely worth checking out.

[bigdirtyfoot]

15. Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson, 284 pg.

For me, this is Robert Anton Wilson at his best. If "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is non-fictionalized fiction, then "Prometheus Rising" is fictionalized non-fiction. Of course, there are elements of this type of thinking and writing in all of RAW's works that I have come across so far. Things that are considered "real" versus "not real" are constantly juxtaposed with each other in his work. But unlike "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," which is my favorite RAW book, this book is a tad more grounded in what most people would consider reality.

"Prometheus Rising" focuses on the eight circuits of consciousness model that Timothy Leary proposed in the 20th century. Essentially, the first four circuits are what the majority of Earth's population operate with, while consciousness is striving to elevate people to the last four circuits. RAW goes into great detail to explain each circuit and provides a list of exercises for the reader at the end of each chapter. The book, as usual for RAW, is absolutely hilarious at times, thought-provoking at other times, and just downright stupid occasionally.

I would highly recommend reading this book if you are interested in consciousness or any of RAW's favorite topic areas - conspiracy, reality tunnels, evolution, and the like.

[dp]

1. Legs by William Kennedy 318pg
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 276pg
3. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte 407pg
4. The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte 281pg
5. Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson 354pg
6. Is Voting for Young People? by Martin P. Wattenberg 225pg
7. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel 497pg
8. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson 505pg
9. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 245pg
10. The Skin by Curzio Malaparte 344pg
11. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 880pg
12. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut 192pg
13. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway 154pg
14. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck 276pg
15. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 181pg
16. Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot 350pg
17. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace 321pg
18. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier 296pg
19. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang 208pg
20. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky 320pg

Effectively a book-length interview David Lipsky did with David Foster Wallace over a period of 5 days as they lived and traveld together in the last days of David Foster Wallace's book tour for Infinite Jest. It's subtitle is "On the Road with David Foster Wallace".

Zac, I read most of Flannery O'Connor's collect stories last year and enjoyed some, but kinda got tired of them read back to back, they seem to all have a similar pacing and format.

[dp]

1. Legs by William Kennedy 318pg
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 276pg
3. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte 407pg
4. The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte 281pg
5. Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson 354pg
6. Is Voting for Young People? by Martin P. Wattenberg 225pg
7. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel 497pg
8. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson 505pg
9. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 245pg
10. The Skin by Curzio Malaparte 344pg
11. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 880pg
12. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut 192pg
13. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway 154pg
14. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck 276pg
15. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 181pg
16. Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot 350pg
17. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace 321pg
18. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier 296pg
19. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang 208pg
20. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky 320pg
21. Snow by Orhan Pamuk 426pg

Picked this up on a whim knowing he's won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pretty good overall.

[dp]

1. Legs by William Kennedy 318pg
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 276pg
3. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte 407pg
4. The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte 281pg
5. Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson 354pg
6. Is Voting for Young People? by Martin P. Wattenberg 225pg
7. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel 497pg
8. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson 505pg
9. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 245pg
10. The Skin by Curzio Malaparte 344pg
11. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 880pg
12. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut 192pg
13. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway 154pg
14. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck 276pg
15. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 181pg
16. Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot 350pg
17. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace 321pg
18. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier 296pg
19. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang 208pg
20. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky 320pg
21. Snow by Orhan Pamuk 426pg
22. Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges 129pg

A collection of some of Borges's writings. I absolutely loved it. I will reading a lot more of him.

[Jeremy]

1. Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams - 229pp [ebook]
2. I Am Legend by Richard Matherson - 180pp [ebook]
3. The Drowned World by JG Ballard - 158pp [ebook]
4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding - 248pp [ebook]
5. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre - 338pp [ebook]
6. Galactic Human Handbook: Entering The New Time: Creating Planetary Groups by Sheldon Nidle and Jose Arguelles - 157pp
7. The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery - 407pp
8. Tasmania; A Natural History by William E. Davies Jr. - 236pp
9. Complexity: A guided tour by Melanie Mitchell - 368pg [ebook]
10. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams - 306pp [ebook]
11. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle - 108pp [ebook]
12. Free Will by Sam Harris - 66pp
13. Australian Freshwater Ecology: Processes and management by Andrew Boulton and Margaret Brock - 244pp
14. Arguably by Christopher Hitchens - 800pp [ebook]

A large selection of essays, columns and reviews (although far from comprehensive). I'd read some of the more famous ones before, and also most of the ones from www.slate.com, but many others were new to me.

I found the first section, which was mainly literary reviews, somewhat difficult to get through; the main problem being that Hitch references a very broad amount of work quite specifically, so although I'd heard of many of the authors he mentions, I didn't really know enough about them to understand the points he was making. It seems that many of these reviews could only be correctly understood by somebody who had either read as much as Hitch, or read the works as they were mentioned.

I faced this problem a little in the political essays too, but it was not so bad because most of the stuff he talked about was much easier to look up (stuff like the fact that Saddam Hussain and Al Qaeda were not enemies, and collaborated in fighting against the Kurds in Northern Iraq prior to the current war, for example - I had always accepted the lie from anti-war protesters that misinterprets the US intelligence report that found that Hussain had rejected Bin Ladin's offer of working together to fight the US).

Even with these problems though, I think just the way Hitch writes - his language - is compelling and beautiful. It was really after I finished reading and went back to reading a very interesting science book by Matt Ridley that I really noticed how rich and enjoyable Hitch was - not in what he was saying, but how he said it.

It's a shame he never wrote fiction. He says in Hitch-22 that when he was young he wasn't good at it, so decided he couldn't do it, but I think he would have been amazing. Anyway I highly recommend this book, or just browsing his work online, where I'm sure most of these have been published. I frequently laughed out loud, had my mind changed on some issues, and was inspired to read particular books and authors.

[dp]

1. Legs by William Kennedy 318pg
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 276pg
3. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte 407pg
4. The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte 281pg
5. Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson 354pg
6. Is Voting for Young People? by Martin P. Wattenberg 225pg
7. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel 497pg
8. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson 505pg
9. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 245pg
10. The Skin by Curzio Malaparte 344pg
11. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 880pg
12. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut 192pg
13. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway 154pg
14. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck 276pg
15. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 181pg
16. Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot 350pg
17. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace 321pg
18. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier 296pg
19. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang 208pg
20. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky 320pg
21. Snow by Orhan Pamuk 426pg
22. Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges 129pg
23. Open City by Teju Cole 259pg

I read this for the same reason I read Leaving the Atocha Station, favorable reviews from NPR and the New Yorker. I had a general feeling throughout of "so what?" although in retrospect I read the book very quickly in just 3 days, and in total one sitting each day, so it must have been captivating I suppose. It was well done overall, but I feel this similarity it has with other contemporary novels I've read, such as Atocha, and also All is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, in that it feels like the product of the MFA Creative Writing world (although I don't think Teju Cole is exactly from this world). I've read a number of short stories and such that seem to come from that "world" and they never get past a certain point for me. I never hate them, but I never love them.

Does the idea of getting a Masters is Creative Writing seem strange to anyone else? Some of the books I've enjoyed most in the last year have been Malaparte, who was a journalist and diplomat (and outspoken political man who spent many years in prison) and Ivo Andric who was a diplomat as well. Don't you to some degree have to live a life in order to write about life? Atocha, Open City, Nothing is Lost all involve a lot of talk about the academic world, college and graduate school and post-grad work. These writers write about this because that is all they know.

I did not intend to write that much, and I realize thoughts were formed as I typed them, but I should say more about each book from now on because it really helps me form my thoughts about them.

[Zac Miley]

Zac, I read most of Flannery O'Connor's collect stories last year and enjoyed some, but kinda got tired of them read back to back, they seem to all have a similar pacing and format.

No doubt. Zora Neale Hurston and Sarah Orne Jewett, are also pretty popular, if you're still looking for female authors. I'm not a big fan of either, though.

Your thoughts on the MFA world are fairly spot on, I think. I'm currently going for a BFA in Illustration and Painting, and have discussed with a lot of people that benefits and dangers of going directly from a BFA to an MFA program - most people discourage it, because the academic world is really just a creative vacuum. It's too easy to make meaningless (albeit interesting, sometimes) work while in school. I think the best example, if looking for a reason not to get an MFA, is Hemingway, as I'm sure you're aware. I'm a big fan of his, though.

Currently reading Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (I think)

[dp]

1. Legs by William Kennedy 318pg
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 276pg
3. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte 407pg
4. The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte 281pg
5. Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson 354pg
6. Is Voting for Young People? by Martin P. Wattenberg 225pg
7. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel 497pg
8. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson 505pg
9. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 245pg
10. The Skin by Curzio Malaparte 344pg
11. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 880pg
12. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut 192pg
13. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway 154pg
14. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck 276pg
15. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 181pg
16. Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot 350pg
17. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace 321pg
18. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier 296pg
19. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang 208pg
20. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky 320pg
21. Snow by Orhan Pamuk 426pg
22. Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges 129pg
23. Open City by Teju Cole 259pg
24. The Avian Gospels: Book One by Adam Novy 275pg

[Jeremy]

1. Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams - 229pp [ebook]
2. I Am Legend by Richard Matherson - 180pp [ebook]
3. The Drowned World by JG Ballard - 158pp [ebook]
4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding - 248pp [ebook]
5. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre - 338pp [ebook]
6. Galactic Human Handbook: Entering The New Time: Creating Planetary Groups by Sheldon Nidle and Jose Arguelles - 157pp
7. The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery - 407pp
8. Tasmania; A Natural History by William E. Davies Jr. - 236pp
9. Complexity: A guided tour by Melanie Mitchell - 368pg [ebook]
10. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams - 306pp [ebook]
11. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle - 108pp [ebook]
12. Free Will by Sam Harris - 66pp
13. Australian Freshwater Ecology: Processes and management by Andrew Boulton and Margaret Brock - 244pp
14. Arguably by Christopher Hitchens - 800pp [ebook]
15. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley - 405pp [ebook]

A very interesting book about evolution, especially evolutionary psychology, and the phenomenon of positive feedback arms races - the text book example being how cheetahs and gazelles get faster and faster over generations while the difference in speed between them stays the same (see Alice Through The Looking Glass ).

The last chapter of the book puts forward the case for sexual selection and a red queen arms race either within and between genders as the explanation for the growth in human brain sizes - which I recall Richard Dawkins makes the case for in The Blind Watchmaker too. I found this section most interesting in light of a particular debate on modified, and he does go through the various alternative theories, although bone marrow doesn't get a mention . He does talk about the lack of correlation between diet and brain size though, but the strong link between social behaviour and brain size - ie. animals that are highly social have big brains, and animals that are not social have small brains. This is a pretty telling link that probably demonstrates that even if diets changed as brain sizes did, there was nothing preventing diets from changing prior to the evolution, and it was the growing brain leading to the changing diet, rather than the diet leading to the growing brain - ie. the causation is the other way around.

I did think he brushed over the tool theory too much. Lewis Wolpert's book on evolutionary psychology and religion (Six Impossible things Before Breakfast) deals with this theory much better, and I've always found it compelling that humans are the top species in the world on only two traits - intelligence and finger dexterity. The argument that this demonstrates a connection is not addressed in Ridley's book.

Still he does demonstrate the complexity of the question, the fact that all hypothesis for explaining brain size are controversial, and to say that one particular theory is widely accepted would be a stupid thing to say.

The other point I took from the book is the strength of evolutionary psychology and the fact that all of human behaviour can only be understood through the light of evolution (to paraphrase Theodosius Dobzhansky). He destroys a lot of feminist and social science theories about human behaviour and gives compelling evidence for a lot of behaviours being evolved. By this, I don't mean that he's putting forward a "nature" genetic deterministic argument, and he addresses the cliché of the nature/nurture false dichotomy, but evolution has created the frame work with which our instincts interact with our environment. Or another way of putting it would be to consider points on a graph where one axis is genetics and evolution and the other is environment. If you take away one axis you lose half the information about each point, and can no longer see where it is - you need to take both axis into account for every point.

Anyway it's a very interesting book, and comes recommended, for biology students and interested laymen (laypeople?) alike.

[Jeremy]

1. Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams - 229pp [ebook]
2. I Am Legend by Richard Matherson - 180pp [ebook]
3. The Drowned World by JG Ballard - 158pp [ebook]
4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding - 248pp [ebook]
5. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre - 338pp [ebook]
6. Galactic Human Handbook: Entering The New Time: Creating Planetary Groups by Sheldon Nidle and Jose Arguelles - 157pp
7. The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery - 407pp
8. Tasmania; A Natural History by William E. Davies Jr. - 236pp
9. Complexity: A guided tour by Melanie Mitchell - 368pg [ebook]
10. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams - 306pp [ebook]
11. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle - 108pp [ebook]
12. Free Will by Sam Harris - 66pp
13. Australian Freshwater Ecology: Processes and management by Andrew Boulton and Margaret Brock - 244pp
14. Arguably by Christopher Hitchens - 800pp [ebook]
15. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley - 405pp [ebook]
16. The Godfather by Mario Puzo - 447pp

I have become aware that I hadn't read much fiction lately, and randomly chose this from our bookshelf. I'll start by saying that the movie is much better, and especially the dialogue of the movie - for example in the book the Don instead says; "... on my daughter's wedding day" instead of "today, the day of my daughter's wedding" and the phrase "I'll make him a deal he can't refuse" only appears in the last few pages. The writing style is boring and unskilled. The book is just a description of events with no attempt at prose.

However what really bothered me is the philosophy. The book starts with the quote "Behind every fortune is a crime" (Balzac) and then tells the story of the criminal justice system failing to deliver justice. This theme is then played out over and over through out the book, including explaining how "The Godfather" got into crime. Every criminal behaviour in the book that is carried out by the family is in response to crime and injustice. The Godfather makes his fortune not through crime, but through meeting out justice when society doesn't. The family is constantly portrayed has creating fairness and stability. Palm Beach changes from being full of conmen, standover men and panhandlers to being crime free when they move there. All police and politicians are portrayed as corrupt and greedy, while the Corleone's just want what's best for their children and justice. It's no surprise that the final anecdote - how Albert Neri was kicked out of the police force - repeats this theme of the injustice of the justice system.

The book doesn't just glorify The Mafia, it attempts to justify them. It argues that social institutions fail, and that Ayn Rand "individualism" is the answer. The attempted justification is best demonstrated at the end when Kay, the non Mafia observer in the book, learns of Michael true actions and leaves him, but then hear's the rational for his murders, and goes back to him. Clearly she accepts that what he did was actually the right thing, and in a sense she represents the reader. The story of how an Italian immigrant coming to America with nothing builds the strongest organised crime family in the country through his son has to be noted that he never commits a crime against the innocent, unprovoked or unjustified. Like Ayn Rand, this is a strawman. These authors can only make an argument for their anti-government philosophies by inventing a world where it would make sense.

[Jeremy]

So I watched the Godfather movie, and it turns out that the line "the day of my daughter's wedding" doesn't actually happen - it's a misquote like "Luke, I am your father". The dialogue still came across as better, although I think that was more to the actors credit, and the difference in mediums, since a lot of it is word for word. The movie is really compressed too - maybe half the story is cut out, but they did a good job on it.

[bigdirtyfoot]

16. God Knows, Joseph Heller, 447 pg.

I am so relieved to be done with this book. I didn't enjoy it very much - there were a few funny snippets here and there but for the most part I felt like I was force-feeding myself monotonous Heller prose. The book is the story of King David, slayer of Goliath, King of Israel, father of Solomon, husband of Bathsheba, etc. Heller attempts to modernize the story by adding some fiction into David's story. It just didn't really gel very well for me. This was one of those books that I found myself nodding off after about 30-40 pages, which is why it took me an entire month to read. I won't say it's a bad book, but having read it one and a half times now, I don't think I'll need to read it again. In my experience, if you're going to read Heller, you should probably just stick to his first novel, Catch-22. I'm going to continue reading the rest of his works, because I am stubborn, but each one has paled in comparison to his first.

[Jeremy]

1. Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams - 229pp [ebook]
2. I Am Legend by Richard Matherson - 180pp [ebook]
3. The Drowned World by JG Ballard - 158pp [ebook]
4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding - 248pp [ebook]
5. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre - 338pp [ebook]
6. Galactic Human Handbook: Entering The New Time: Creating Planetary Groups by Sheldon Nidle and Jose Arguelles - 157pp
7. The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery - 407pp
8. Tasmania; A Natural History by William E. Davies Jr. - 236pp
9. Complexity: A guided tour by Melanie Mitchell - 368pg [ebook]
10. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams - 306pp [ebook]
11. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle - 108pp [ebook]
12. Free Will by Sam Harris - 66pp
13. Australian Freshwater Ecology: Processes and management by Andrew Boulton and Margaret Brock - 244pp
14. Arguably by Christopher Hitchens - 800pp [ebook]
15. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley - 405pp [ebook]
16. The Godfather by Mario Puzo - 447pp
17. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami - 624pp [ebook]

An interesting book - translated from Japanese. There are two movies, which have a pretty significantly different background. Apparently the "Hunger Games" books have the same plot, but I haven't read those. There's debate about whether it's blatant plagiarism or coincidence.

The plot was rather absurd. Basically in a Communist Orwellian world, one class in each district of the country of East Asia is selected to go to an isolated place (in this case an island) and fight to the death. Towards the end this explained as a way of teaching people not to trust anybody, or something like that, but given only one person in each class that is selected learns the lesson, and the vast majority of students don't get selected, this seems rather spurious. There were all kinds of other absurdities. A girl gets septicaemia about 2 hours after being wounded. The hero picks an arrow off the ground and throws it at a guy on a roof, knocking him unconscious. I mention these because it feels like the book is really trying hard to be realistic and imagine how people really would behave given this premise, and I found the psychology mainly believable.

It was an entertaining read anyway, despite being so silly. I was also amused by what appears to be deliberate absurdities. The game is built on a philosophy of everybody being treated equally, but each kid gets a random weapon. A few gets sub-machine guns and other guns. One gets a set of sports darts, and another gets a bullet proof vest, but the "best" weapon is a banjo.

I do enjoy the kind of quirky language of translated books - how things are often said in an unusual manner. Without reading the original, and having a broad knowledge of that language, it's hard to read much into this, but I appreciated it nonetheless. Overall I'd say this was an entertaining and easy to read piece of pulp fiction.

[dp]

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A reread. Read it last August. I think it may be the shortest interval between first-read and second-read I've ever had. It happened the same way I re read Brief Interviews recently. I just wanted to check out some stuff near the beginning and ended up reading the whole thing.