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5. Peace - Gene Wolfe

6. Don’t Make Me Think - Steve Krug

7. Midnight Robber - Nalo Hopkinson

8. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin

9. Generosity - Richard Powers

10. The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience - Kirstin Downey

11. Where the Girls Are - Susan Douglas

End of 2009 Books

Backlash - Susan Faludi - This book was amazing. Well written, well researched, and terrifying. Faludi convincingly argues that not only did the 1980s show a cultural backlash against the progress made in womens’ rights in the 1970s, but that the same pattern has been visible historically every time women have made social progress.

Seed to Harvest - Octavia Butler - actually 4 books (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, Patternmaster)

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Witness to Roswell - Thomas Carey/Donald Schmitt - for book club. This book argues that extraterrestrials really landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. While I wasn’t fully convinced that that’s the case, the book did put up a pretty compelling argument that something really weird happened there, and was covered up by the military.

A Tour of the Calculus - David Berlinski - kind of like if Tom Robbins were teaching Math 152

The Atrocity Archive - Charles Stross - This book had me at “Turing-Lovecraft Thesis”. A neat science fiction book seamlessly integrating otherworldly horrors with the day-to-day responsibilities of a government sysadmin.

2010 Books

1. Concrete Jungle - Charles Stross - the sequel to Atrocity Archive. A shorter, lighter book but still a good time.

2. The Tao is Silent - Raymond Smullyan

3. VALIS - Philip K. Dick - this book is intense! Even crazier than your average Dick book.^* Dick’s main character in this book may or may not be a hallucination of the narrator (Dick himself), who may or may not be schizophrenic, having had a mystical experience (identical to one Dick himself actually had) that either is a hallucination that means he’s crazy or an insight into the nature of the universe.

4. Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

*tee hee^**

**I am 12.

Several of these are from the science fiction course my partner Jesse is teaching this semester; I decided to read along with the syllabus. Getting (back?) into scifi has been really rewarding so far, and I feel inspired to check out more science fiction writers (suggestions? leave a comment!).

• The Soloist - Steve Lopez - For book club. A Los Angeles journalist’s true account of his friendship with a schizophrenic homeless man who is also a brilliant musician. Brings up a lot of difficult, unsolved issues about the best ways to help people who are severely mentally ill.
• Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - A sci-fi novel about creating a computer program that can read and understand literature. The book itself is fairly literary in style — and occasionally a little overwrought (the protagonist is kind of emo, and named after the author(!)) — but does pursue some interesting ideas about the role of literature in the formation of a personality. As with most sci-fi that deals directly with Artificial Intelligence, I was irked by the implausibility of the programming process; I know I should be able to suspend my disbelief, but for some reason I have a hard time with that.
• Orphans of the Sky - Robert Heinlein - Is this Hisland?? Women are basically invisible in this young adult adventure story set in a society (in space!) where women are literally property. This book is kind of hilariously bad, actually.
• Nudge - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein - A sensible, engaging economics text. The basic premise is that many economists analyze the world as though everyone always acts totally rationally — but in real life, humans don’t think through every decision that carefully, and are influenced by default options/where on the shelf a product is/what it seems like everyone else is doing. The authors propose a philosophy of “libertarian paternalism”: they believe people should be able to make their own choices about almost everything (hence libertarian), but that since people will be influenced by the way the choices are framed and structured, governments (or other organizations) should try to structure the defaults and the presentation of the options so that people will be more likely to choose a “good” option (hence paternalism). I like their combination of sensible economic analysis with acknowledgement that people are human and influenced by subtle “nudges” whether they consciously realize it or not. And it’s always fun to read books by University of Chicago economists who use restaurants I know in their examples :).
• Her Smoke Rose Up Forever - James Tiptree Jr. - OK, so this is a short story collection, and I’ve only gotten to a few so far. But so good. Tiptree was actually a woman writing under a pen name, and her stories have something of a feminist slant. They combine imaginative explorations of gender, sex, and technology with emotional nuance and an incredibly compelling writing style.
• Gateway - Frederik Pohl - From the seventies. Alternates the protagonist’s space explorations (using an ancient technology that humans don’t understand) with his sessions with an electronic psychiatrist; explores issues of choice and agency.
• Engine Summer - John Crowley - This book is a lot of fun! Like Gateway, it depicts a society of humans making use of technology left over from a more advanced civilization; however, the tone and attitude are completely different. Where Gateway depicts a barren earth and a bleak future focused on capitalism and scarcity, Engine Summer describes a happy group living commune-style, who have forgotten what money even is, and traces the protagonist’s coming-of-age journey in lyrical terms. This book really draws you into its world — and its world is a fun place to be!
• Murder Yet to Come - Isabel Briggs-Myers - A mystery novel written by one of the originators of the Myers-Briggs personality typing system. It’s fairly cheesy — almost a parody of the traditional British country-house mystery — but includes some fairly sophisticated fleshing-out of the characters’ personalities, which makes it a pretty good read. It’s fun to guess the characters’ types, and their respect for each others’ differing skills and interests links thematically to the objectives of the Myers-Briggs system (Gifts Differing is Briggs-Myers’s most famous book).
• Neuromancer - William Gibson - Ick. I know I’m supposed to like this book — it’s cyberpunk! I’m a hacker! — but this is the second time I’ve read it, and I just can’t get into it. The technology is inconsistent, and the author fails to explore its potentially interesting social ramifications; the characters are bland, and their motivations uncompelling; and the plot, which is supposed to be epic, just didn’t seem to mean much.
• Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ichiguro - Another sci-fi book. I loved this! This is a gripping, suspenseful, emotionally powerful tale. It’s really well-written, and it’s a subtle take on some very interesting and difficult social and ethical issues.
• Skinny Legs and All - Tom Robbins - For book club. As a story, it’s a fun read, with some magical realism thrown in (like a can of beans that ponders religious history). But it’s a little overwritten, and longer than it probably needs to be. Robbins explains his metaphors in detail and tries to use the book to convey some somewhat dubious philosophical ideas, saying that a lot of what humans do is just a “veil” over the real truth. (Not very pragmatic of him!)

What I’ve been reading this summer:

• Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day – Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin: One of the main takeaways from both this book and my own experience is that it helps your search ranking a lot to have a lot of indexable pages with different titles and content — like a blog! In fact, many of the visitors to this site come through the blog first, since there’s a lot of interesting content there for searchers to find. Other than that, the book mostly covered the technical basics that I already knew — page titles, h1 tags, etc. — but it’s nice to be reassured that I’m not missing something crucial.
• Shop Class as Soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford: For book club. This is basically a polemic about how the author finds his work repairing motorcycles more satisfying than the white-collar jobs he’s tried, and he thinks everyone should consider the value of manual labor. Even though I agreed with some of its points, I found this book very frustrating, mostly because I thought it was intellectually dishonest and lazy. The author rails about the pointlessness of academia, yet is trying to write an academic treatise; it seems like he gets around this hypocrisy by not doing a very good job of organizing his argument and applying academic rigor, as though writing a sloppy philosophical book is his rebellion against the problematic institution of philosophy. He critiques all white-collar jobs based on a soul-sucking cubicle drone experience; and while such jobs certainly exist and aren’t beneficial to anyone, Crawford doesn’t put in the thought to consider whether this problem applies to all white-collar jobs, a particular type of them, or just some small random subsection. While this book’s assertion that manual labor and vocational education are undervalued in our society is well worth exploring, I don’t think Crawford does a very good job writing about it.
• Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman: My partner Jesse is a teaching assistant for a course in Science Fiction this fall, so I decided to read along with some of those books; this one we read aloud in the car during a summer roadtrip. It’s an early feminist utopia (written in 1915!) about a remote land that’s been populated only by women for the last 2000 years (they reproduce through parthenogenesis). The writing style is engaging, and I was impressed by the sophistication of feminist ideas Perkins Gilman had almost a century ago (though also somewhat depressed by how little has changed in society in some respects, sigh). One of my main critiques would be that she doesn’t distinguish the characteristics of her general social utopia (progressive education, communal child-rearing, no war or conflict ever) from those that she thinks would naturally follow from a land of women specifically — we don’t get much of a sense of how a similarly isolated and progressive-minded “Hisland” would be different. But her points about many of the supposed “defects” of women actually resulting from their societal disadvantages and oppression are spot-on. Overall a fun and thought-provoking read (and not too long).
• The Second Sex – Simone De Beauvoir: Early feminist theory; De Beauvoir is one of the first thinkers to systematically analyze the “othering” of women in society (the default person is male, and woman is just a counterpart to him, defined by her relation to him while he has his own status). 700+ page monstrosity, so this was my major reading accomplishment for the summer (OK, so I like really abstract beach reading). De Beauvoir tries to say basically everything there is to say about women — and comes pretty close, with sections/chapters like “The Data of Biology” (she starts with insects and works up), several historical chapters, “Myths: Dreams, Fears, Idols”, “The Young Girl”, “The Lesbian”, “The Married Woman”, “The Mother”, “Prostitutes and Hetairas”, “The Woman in Love”, “The Independent Woman” — and I am only naming a few. While it’s sort of more like a huge infodump than one argument running throughout the book, each chapter is jam-packed with interesting thoughts and analysis.
• Ubik — Philip K. Dick: Another book from the science fiction course. I thought it would take longer to read, but I got engaged in the story and blew through it in a day — oops! I don’t want to give spoilers, but this is a fun, creepy, trippy thriller/mystery/dystopian fantasy. Recommended for spending an afternoon creeping yourself out for the fun of it.