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I never got very far with Gravity’s Rainbow last fall, but I think that was in large part because it’s too bulky to toss in my purse when I go to work — this year, I started reading while riding/waiting for the T, and apparently I spend a fair amount of time doing that, as I’ve finished two books recently with very little time spent reading in non T-related settings:

The Other End of the Leash, Patricia McConnell

This was a Christmas present from my parents; the author is an animal behaviorist who addresses human misconceptions about canines from a perspective that is part hard science, part personal experience. She contrasts canine and primate behavior: e.g., primates love hugging, while canines find it kind of weird; loud primates get high social status, while canines don’t really respect loudness; etc. I was pleased to take some of this information to my dog job, where I practiced not looking dogs in the eye in order to appear non-threatening. (Successful.)

The Mind’s I, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

This was a Christmas present from my favorite philosopher of science; it’s a collection of stories, essays, etc. that are primarily thought experiments on the nature of “selfdom” or “mind” (including, e.g., the paper in which Turing proposes the Turing test, some science fiction about robots and putting minds in new bodies, Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” counter to Turing’s arguments), each followed by “reflections” by the editors. I read my first Richard Dawking in this book, and found his analysis of living organisms as “survival machines” for genes compellingly reductionist (I always have a weakness for reductionist arguments). The editors advocate a more-or-less materialist view of the mind, including some fairly convincing arguments against mind-brain dualism; essentially, their position (counter to the position of some of the essayists) is that consciousness comes from a system behaving in the way that a brain behaves. And also, I suppose, minds are tricky, tricky things that no one really understands, but they’re probably just made of neurons and not some amaterial “soul”.