Reading post: Books from the tall bookcase by the front door

October is over, so it's time for another reading update. In October, I chose seven nonfiction books from seven of the eight shelves of the tall bookcase next to our front door. I also found various spooky books to read in between the serious books. This is how the reading month went. 

1. The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower. I started reading this years ago (it was published in 1978), but couldn't get past the first few chapters. I thought it seemed interesting, though, and this time I pushed on and finished. It's a quirky little book: a portrait of the (quirky) (but aren't they all) physicist Freeman Dyson and his (quirky) estranged son George Dyson, who at the time the book was written was living in a treehouse in British Columbia and building a giant kayak. Most of the book is about hanging out with George in the wilderness and traveling with him by kayak. I don't know what readers are supposed to get out of the book or what it all means. I think that's the point. I looked up George Dyson -- he eventually became a science writer and gave TED talks, so, a more or less normal person. Freeman Dyson died three years ago. I enjoyed spending some time with them, and I am keeping the book. However, I moved it to a different shelf in the bookcase. Before, it was with some books about physics, but now it is by some memoirs of the natural world.
   
   1a. Spooky book: The Witch Boy by Molly Knox Ostertag. A graphic novel with a trans theme. Not at all scary.
   
   
2. The Desert Year by Joseph Wood Krutch. Another quirky little book, from 1952, this is Krutch's story of the sabbatical year he spent in a rental house outside Tucson. In the last chapter he muses about returning to Connecticut, but Wikipedia tells me he ended up relocating to Tucson permanently, dying there in 1970. I wonder what he would think if he could see Tucson now, as we did last March. It's still nice, but the population has gone from 77,000 in 1950 to a little over 1 million today. Anyway, I enjoyed the book, although less so Krutch's philosophical musings. I preferred it when he focused on the birds, lizards, spiders, insects, toads, bats, and plant life of the Sonoran Desert, as well as the rock formations, weather, and stars. Although I'm familiar with a different desert, the Mojave, I could relate to Krutch's descriptions easily. There's just something about the desert. A couple of pages in the next-to-last chapter of this hardback edition were uncut, so no one before me had ever read it all the way through. I'm keeping this -- it's a treasure.
   
   2a. Spooky book: Nantucket Hauntings by Blue Balliett. Very scary -- recommended!
   
   
3. The Coming Quake: Science and Trembling on the California Earthquake Frontier by T. A. Heppenheimer. I bought this after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, but never read it. More's the pity, because when I finally did read it, this month, I found it to be horribly out of date. The book was published in 1988, with a little update in 1990 that refers to the '89 quake. But that was 33 years ago. Scientific views on earthquakes have changed, as I learned when I googled some of the people Heppenheimer interviewed. The book is still interesting, but I have a few quibbles: (1) the font is terrible, (2) there should be more diagrams explaining seismology terms to a non-geologist reader, and (3) the long, dense chapters would be easier to read if they had subsections. Google told me that Heppenheimer died in 2015 at the age of 68 -- so he'll never see the "Big One" hit Southern California. He seemed very worried about that in this book. I guess I'll keep this for reference, though I do think I should read a more up to date book too.
   
   3a. Spooky book: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. Not even the tiniest bit scary, but some enjoyable discussions of how to perform spells.
   
   
4. The Birder's Bug Book by Gilbert Waldbauer. Like the squid book that I read last month, this book was a present from my older sister (a Christmas present, in 1999). So it was time to read it. And what a delight it was! The beautifully designed book was published in 1998, so it may be a little out of date, but I doubt if much has changed in the world of insects, other than the worldwide decline of both birds and bugs. The book is an exhaustive description of bugs that birds eat, how bugs avoid getting eaten, bugs that eat (parts of) birds and how birds avoid them, and bugs that eat (parts of) people and how people fight back. It also contains a brief overview of all the insect families and a brief, sad chapter on how birds and insects are disappearing due to human activities. I wasn't kidding when I said, last month, that this book sounded kind of Halloween-ish. The descriptions of the disgusting and weird things that bugs do were mind-blowing. Waldbauer is a bird-loving entomologist, so he knows his subject very very well. And he's still alive! He's 95 years old. Wouldn't he be fun to meet and talk to? I guess reading this book is the next best thing. Definitely keeping this.
   
   4a. Spooky book: The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen. Not spooky! A romance novel! One of the lovers is an undertaker and the other kills the undead. But still, not even the teeniest, tiniest bit spooky.
   
   
5. Colorado's Iceman & the Story of the Frozen Dead Guy by Bo Shaffer. Without giving too much away, I'll note that my husband is mentioned a few times in this book, and I have met Bo, the author. I have also visited the Tuff Shed in Nederland that houses "Grandpa" (or used to), and Trygve (his grandson) sometimes calls us from Norway. I have not, however, attended Frozen Dead Guy Days, formerly held in Nederland and now moved to Estes Park, along with "Grandpa." I used to have a restraining order against someone who lived in Nederland and I interpreted that to mean that I should stay out of Nederland. He died in 2009, but by then we had moved to Ridgecrest. Anyway, it was interesting for me to read the story from Bo's perspective. He does a pretty good job with the material, though I feel as though the tale cries out for a real writer, someone who could give a better sense of how deeply weird the whole thing is. This is probably the best we'll get, though. Keeping it.
   
   5a. Spooky book: The Way of the Bear by Anne Hillerman. Not a spooky book, a mystery, but it had some scary bits, even though I guessed the murderer(s) within the first 50 pages or so. A pleasant interlude.
   
   
6. The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. A beautifully written discussion of the oceans of the world. I learned a lot from this book, even though it was written 74 years ago. I'd love to read an update, but sadly Carson died in 1964. This edition does include an appendix with some interesting updates that she wrote in 1961 -- when I was a toddler. Yeah. She's better known for Silent Spring, about the ravages of DDT, but I don't really want to read that. Nor, to be honest, do I really want to read about the oceans of today, so scratch what I said above. There was a New Yorker article recently about what the Chinese fishing industry is doing to the oceans, and, well, I can't get it out of my head, so awful. But this book is very sweet, because fewer terrible things had happened in 1950. I'll leave it there. Of course I'm going to keep this.
   
   6a. Spooky book: Gallows Hill by Darcy Coates. Definitely a spooky book! Excellent choice for Halloween reading, and it even had a happy ending.
   
   
7. The Yangtze Valley and Beyond by Isabella Bird. Nope. Nope. Nope. Couldn't do it. It would have been a stretch to finish this 500+-page book by the end of the month, but I ended up only reading two chapters. I was given this book by my friend Z'bet, back in 1997 (I think), because she and I went to China together in 1986 and she thought I'd enjoy it. It was first published in 1899 and from a historic standpoint it's fascinating, but I don't know. I found it so boring I could hardly keep my eyes open long enough to read three pages at a sitting. I'm tempted to get rid of it, but since it was a gift, and since every review I've read of it has been glowing, I think I'll keep it a while longer. Maybe at another time I'd enjoy it. But not now.
   

OK, October is over!

In November we leave the living room (finally) and move on to the office, or as we call it, the desk room. There are many many books in here that I haven't read, and never will read, because they're Rocket Boy's boring technical books. Things like Remote Sensing for GIS Managers and C Programming Using Turbo C++ and A Primer of Multivariate Statistics. They're mainly his old textbooks.

One area appeals to me, though, and that's the shelf that Rocket Boy installed above the closet, to give me space for some of my books in this room. It holds books about rhetoric, linguistics, Old English, reading, and writing. Some were my textbooks, but others are books I picked up along the way. They're too dry for me to get through a lot in a month, but I've picked out a few to try. I'm not going to include a photo of the books because I'm so unsure of what I'll get through. This month I will also be reading a very long Presidential biography, so I have to leave time for that.

Only one more month after this one! What a crazy reading year this has been.