Reading post: Books from the dining room bookcase

July has ended, so it is time for another reading update. In July I read books from the bookcase in our dining room. I pulled out ten and... put half of them back without opening them. Those I did manage to read are as follows:

1.  Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis. A sort of memoir of his early years, focused on how he lost his Christian faith as a child and then regained it in his early 30s. I was doing pretty well until the last few chapters, where he explains how religion came back to him. There he lost me. Too many concepts that were unfamiliar to me, so vague, so elliptical -- I just couldn't follow his arguments. Which was a bit disappointing, since that was what the whole book was leading up to. I think I'll keep it, though, for now anyway, in the little section of the bookcase devoted to religious books.
   
   
2. Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines by David Haward Bain. I bought this book when I was in grad school and studying Tagalog -- I was interested in all things Filipino and wanted to know more. So, 30 years later I get around to reading it. And it was a slog. For some reason Bain thought it would be a good idea to retrace the path taken by Col. Frederick Funston in 1901 when he captured the Philippine insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo. It wasn't a good idea, and the book doesn't make much sense. Bain writes well, but Candice Millard he's not. The book is much too long, with many unwanted details. So many times I wanted to reach into the book and tell the author, "Stop that! I don't want to hear about that. Tell the story!" I would have given up on it, but it occurred to me that it's about the same period in American history that I'm currently reading about in Presidential biographies (McKinley, T. Roosevelt). So I stuck with it to learn more about those times, but I'm not sure it was worth it. I'm keeping it for now, because I have so few books about the Philippines, but I don't recommend it.
   
   
3. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics by Gary Zukav. This is another grad school purchase, from when I was hoping to understand quantum mechanics. I don't know why I didn't read it until now -- it's delightful! I really enjoyed it, even though I got kind of bogged down in the chapters about subatomic particles. I tried to determine whether it's now hopelessly out of date, and I have decided that it's not, though of course there have been many advances in physics since 1979. But I don't think these advances have proved Zukav's book wrong, they've just added to our knowledge. Don't quote me, though. Anyway, I now understand Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics much better than I did before. Which isn't saying much. But still -- it was a fun, though challenging, read. Keeping it.
   
   
4. Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary by K. M. Elisabeth Murray. Another book I've had sitting around for a long time -- it's a discard from the Palo Alto Public Library. I'd dipped into it a few times, but never read the whole thing. I'm glad to have read it, and I plan to keep it, though it belongs on my crowded biography shelves, not in the dining room bookcase. But you know, it's not the book I wanted it to be. The first few chapters, about James Murray's early life, are interesting, as is the last chapter, but the middle chapters, about the endless negotiations with the Oxford University Press "Delegates," were very boring. I wanted to hear more about the dictionary! About the words! Who cares about the pointless arguments of a bunch of old men, 150 years ago? Not me.
    

I almost read a fifth book, The Japanese Mind by Robert C. Christopher. I got about 200 pages into it before I said, OK, enough. I just can't do it. The book was kind of interesting in the beginning, though it didn't tell me anything about Japan that I didn't already know, but as it went deeper into politics and business, I zoned out and finally closed the book. After all these years sitting on my shelf, it's going to Goodwill.

Of the books in the stack that I didn't even start to read, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner looks good -- I just didn't get to it. So it goes back in the bookcase for now (I might do a modified version of this challenge next year). The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas looks interesting. Back in the bookcase for another year. Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain might be worth reading, but I'm going to move it to the fiction bookcases in my bedroom. The Science of Harry Potter by Roger Highfield looks mildly entertaining, so I may give it a shot -- some other year. Soviet but not Russian by William M. Mandel looks, frankly, dull, but I'm going to keep it a little longer. I can give it away next year, or the year after...

Moving on to August, during this month I plan to read books from the high shelf in the living room. Though this may seem like a limited book collection (DVDs take up about a third of the space), the percentage of books in it that I haven't read is large. About a third of these are books I inherited from my father (some are from Rocket Boy's father), and I've never read most of them. A lot of books about Russia...

Since I only read four of last month's pile of books, I decided to choose just five books for this month and see if I can make it through them. Three of these belonged to my father (the two books about Russia and Great Harry). Of course I also have to finish reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and whatever the next book for the book group turns out to be, and get the kids started in school, and go back to my novel, and all that. We'll see how it goes...