It’s…er, been a while since I did a monthly update.

Science Survey

Doing well! The science survey for 22 is completed,  with sixteen titles fulfilling my twelve categories. I’d like to finish the year with at least 20 science titles, so we’re not done quite yet. Interestingly, this is the first year I haven’t tweaked the categories, though I am thinking about it seriously.  I want to include Oceanography in the future, but I haven’t decided if it will coexist with Geology, or  kick Thinking Scientifically out to join the second-string “Wildcard” squad. 

Added this month:
– The Hacking of the American Mind, Robert Lustig (Psychology/Neurology/Cognition)
– Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, Steve Koonin (Climate/Weather). Review in the works. I’m trying to look at Koonin’s sources to figure out how on the level he is.
– Ocean Anatomy. Julia Rothman (Geology & Oceanography). This is a mostly-graphic introduction to the world’s oceans and their inhabitants. Presumably intended for younger readers, it nontheless had fair bit of information that was new to me, and the illustrations were charming.
– Is This Wi-Fi Organic? A Guide to Spotting Misleading Science Online, Dave Farina (Thinking Scientifically)

Reading Dixie

Yeaaaah, this is…not a thing this year.  I still intend to read the rest of my library’s Rick Bragg holdings, but Pat Conroy will wait until 2023, I think.

Classics Club

I’ve read two books in eight months, which is somewhat less than ideal, shall we say? In the spring I read Gone with the Wind (timed it with tornado season because I love tempting fate), and more recently I finished The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.   To the few who don’t know its story, it’s about a fellow named Arthur Dent who is rescued from the destruction of Earth to make room for a space-highway by virtue of his buddy Ford Prefect, who as it turns out is an alien with a gift for hitchhiking. Absurd adventures ensue. I enjoyed it enormously at the beginning, but the longer it goes on the more my brain transforms into this chap:

I like silly — readers know how much I love P.G. Wodehouse and Lemony Snicket — but the end drifts into inanity for me.

Climbing Mount Doom:

Since March, I’ve read 13 of my TBR titles. A lot of them were ebooks, though, so the Pile of Doom that lives on my headboard bookcase has not diminished dramatically.  

New Acquisitions
I bought two science books that will be very appropriate for October,  shall we say, so – no spoilers.  I also purchased two books I read in high school: Disaster! by Dan Kurzman is a history of the San Francisco earthquake and fire; it was my introduction to the subject and one I remember fondly, so I want to revisit it. I may use it for a trilogy of books on early-20th century San Francisco, including another re-read favorite (Good Life in Hard Times) and Herbert Ashbury’s history of the SF underworld, The Barbary Coast.  The second buy was Sam Stavinsky’s Marine Combat Correspondent,   a memoir of a Post reporter turned Marine.  I’d never read a war memoir before finding this in Walmart back in 1999 or so,  and it led me to other memoirs like William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness. (That, in turn, led me to his The Glory and the Dream, a 1400-page history of the United States from 1932 – 1972. I read this as a ninth or tenth grader. Needless to say I was a strange child.)   Marine was one of the key books (along with Albert Marrin’s The Airman’s War) that formed my early knowledge of WW2. I’m nearly done with my re-read of it, so look for it soon.