Inside the mind of a thief

Posted on August 5, 2018 by smellincoffee
This is a related video for A Burglar’s Guide to the City. It’s an interview between a Plano City police officer and a three-time offender (Michael Durden) about his experience breaking into homes.  According to the interview,  Duren was a ‘thief’ and not a home invader — he avoided running into people, carefully casing homes and limiting his time there to five to seven minutes.  In the video he answers questions about what attracts or deters him from a home,  how he might obtain entry, and how he prioritized targets inside.   I took some notes for those who are curious but not interested enough to watch a 40 minute video.  (I live in high-crime county, so  security issues are never far from my head!)  
 A news story about the interview can be read here.  

NOTES:

  • A well-kept home with a nice fence indicates a target worth robbing.  Durden avoided poorly-kept or ill-maintained homes.
  • Older burglar alarms rely on a wired connection to the telephone system which can be easily cut. Wireless or cellular systems are a stronger deterrent.
  • Simple devices that remotely turn on lights or play sounds on certain triggers (like someone knocking on the door) are a deterrent.
  • Cameras which face down at an angle can be defeated with a cap;  cameras at face level are better for identification, but should be concealed. 
  • Active, nosy neighbors can deter a would-be burglar, as can a car left parked in the driveway.
  • Speaking of neighbors, if  you’re out of town for a few days you should ask one to collect your papers/mail. A full mailbox and a driveway littered with papers are an obvious sign that no one is home. A poorly-kept house in a wealthy neighborhood may also give away the fact that its owners are on vacation.
  • Burglars or package thieves can  case neighborhoods by jogging or walking. 
  • Cul de sacs are generally harder for a burglar to operate in: with no through traffic, he’s more likely to be spotted as a nonresident. 
  • Transparent doors that allow a good view of the home are attractive but incredibly foolish. Would be thieves can case the inside, looking for  potential entrypoints, the presence of people, or the alarm system, simply by approaching the home and knocking. 
  • For the same reason, windows should be closed and shuttered if no one is at home, as they allow for studied surveillance of the interior.  
  • Lights left on when no one is at home might deter a potential thief,  but said lights should not be left on in the rooms near front/back entries, as they make it easier for thieves to look for security vulnerabilities. 
  • Small dogs, even the yappy kind, won’t stop a home invader. Larger dogs probably will. Interestingly, dogs often give away the presence of an owner by looking for them once they become alarmed. 
  • Inside the home, the primary target for Durden was the master bedroom, as he focused on jewelry and cash.  If the home was obviously expensive but little jewelry was out, that indicated the presence of a safe.  Safes are often ‘hidden’ in the closet. A better place would be the attic or garage, hidden among tools. 
  • Care should be taken about personal information, like drivers’ licenses,  checkbooks, etc;  a passing-through thief can use the documents or the information in them to committ identity theft later. 

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Artemis

Posted on August 4, 2018 by smellincoffee

Artemis
© 2017 Andy Weir
320 pages

“This is a results-oriented profession. The moon’s a mean old bitch. She doesn’t care why your suit fails. She just kills you when it does.”

Jazz Bashara only wanted to engage in a little industrial sabotage to make a quick buck. She didn’t intend to poison her entire hometown.  But that’s the Moon for ya.    Andy Weir’s potent mix of hard science, space exploration, and a smart-aleck central character make a return with Artemis,  in which a perfectly innocent criminal enterprise leads to a mob war. A heist novel in space,  Artemis’  most attractive element is right there in the title: the city of Artemis,  whose technical designs and economy Weir planned out before he wrote the novel.  Artemis is an intriguing look what an established lunar colony might actually look like, and readers explore it through the eyes of a young petty criminal, a woman named Jasmine (“Jazz”) Bashara, who knows its systems as well as she knows its underbelly.

Jazz is an interesting character in her own right, an Arabian near-native of the moon.  Artemis restricts immigration by age,  but she arrived at age six with her master-welder father and together they forged a new life for themselves. Although Jazz didn’t follow in her father’s footsteps — she accidentally destroyed his shop and livelihood, long story  — her welding background proves useful when she escalates from smuggling to sabotage. The book’s plot is inseparable from science and technical reality,   but Weir also explore social structures.  There’s no police force or prisons,  just a constable, but  ne’er do wells do meet retaliatory justice: a pedophile might be beaten by a crowd of incensed parents, for instance, or a wife-beater might have every blow inflicted on his wife imposed on him by the constable. Although I doubt I’ll see a lunar colony in my lifetime,  the amount of imaginative and detailed knowledge that went into Artemis made it a fascinating place to explore and accidentally cripple.

Readers of both novels may grouse that Jazz sounds a little too much like Mark Watney.   That’s actually fine by me, because they’re both amusing to spend time with. Besides, Jazz moved to a frontier town when she was six,  she was raised by a single father and spent her youth working with him in his welding shop, and all of her friends are working-class guys.  Is it really that shocking that she sounds like a guy?

I enjoyed Artemis completely, and if they make a movie of it  I’ll be there when it opens.

Related:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein.  Another lunar-colony story, this one inspired by the American revolution.
The Martian, Andy Weir.  A favorite read from 2014.

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Versatile Blogging Award

Posted on August 3, 2018 by smellincoffee

Sarah of All the Book Blog Names Are Taken has nominated me for a Versatile Blogger’s Award, the acceptance of which means I have to share seven facts about myself and then nominate seven other people.   Strangely enough when this award was making the rounds ten years ago I was tagged then, too,  and since I’ve kind of done it before I’m just going to list facts about myself  and…not nominate anyone.  Vive l’anarchie!

1. Despite being a lifetime resident of a very deep-south state, I don’t have a southern accent. At least, not in public. At home the drawl surfaces, but then it’s competing with whatever voice I’m playing with at the moment. Certain potable beverages may also illicit a drawl.

2. I’ve been fascinated by language in general since I was a kid, and somewhat comically tried to teach myself Italian from a book in 2nd grade. My childhood library still has that same book.  While I’ve never learned Italian, I have a good elementary Spanish and still retain a little of my college German. I’m currently working on the Spanish with DuoLingo.

3. One of my stranger hobbies is collecting, listening, and memorizing folk music. For obvious reasons I tend to focus on the Anglo-American traditions.  This hobby came from my being exposed to and enchanted by the music of the American Civil War at reenactments.

4. I can’t swim. The first time I ever went to a beach was in May 2017, when I stood in the surf of St. Augustine, feeling the sand shift beneath my feet and thinking I get why people become beachcombers now.

5. I’ve been a Trekkie since I spent three weeks in traction at age 7, unable to read and consigned to watch television all day long from my hospital bed. My favorite series is Deep Space Nine, unrivaled for grand storytelling after the first couple of seasons. Back in the early 2000s my interests in PC gaming and Trek converged to make me the member of a trek-themed gaming clan, StarFleet.   I still have a few friends from those nights — nearly  twenty years ago now — when we’d stay up late fighting ship-to-ship battles in ST: Armada.  The game had a sequel made,but

This is an actual screenshot from a buddy of mine and I winning a match of Armada against two other players. Judging by the in-screen chat,  we must have been up to mischief. (I was using the handle, “InnocentBrownBag”.)   This would be circa…2001/2002.   

6. I’m a lifelong shutterbug, something that runs in the family.  When I began using reddit last year, it was its user-contributed photographs which drew me in. 

7. I’m an active PC gamer, and have been since I saw a display computer at WalMart running SimCity 2000.    I mostly play older games, however, with the exceptions of The Sims 4 and GTA V.    I have two gaming computers (for different generations of games) and have considered finding a 32-bit Windows 98/XP machine to run legacy titles, but I don’t have desk space currently.  My ‘favorite’ titles are varied, but the most surprising would be Star Trek Away Team (2001). It was not a ground-breaking game, or one with remarkable production quality, but as a young Trek fan the ability to choose my own away team, with different mission developments depending on the people I chose,  was extremely fun.  I was used to the squad-based strategy from Commandoes,  and can still remember  sequences of actions needed to play mission ten successfully. (That mission could be unwinnable based on the order in which you chose your team, because the first two members were instantly separated from the rest, forcing you to solve the first part with your third and fourth choices, and specific gear was needed to rescue them.) I was so into this game I used to write fanfiction about the crew.

Actual screenshot from mission ten of ST Away Team.  
Posted in General | 5 Comments

Machine Man

Posted on August 2, 2018 by smellincoffee

Machine Man
© 2009 Max Barry
277 pages

Who knew crushing your limbs in the industrial machinery at work could be so addictive?  When Charlie Neumann accidentally crushed his leg in a fit of absentmindedness and was fitted with state-of-the-art prosthesis, he could only stare in dismay. This was state of the art?  Combing his engineering mind, his company’s resources, and his ability to fixate on a project beyond all reason, Neumann promptly built a better leg. Then, realizing it would work better as a pair, he decided to recreate his accident and crush the other leg.  When his employer, a research-and-production firm caught on, they didn’t fire him and sue him for abusing his insurance and using company materials to make himself a pair of super-legs. Instead, they promoted him.   This has potential, they said. An entire product line. Better Legs! Better Skin! Better Eyes!   We can rebuild him, WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!

Too bad they were kind of evil.  Machine Man is the fourth book by satirist Max Barry, who has previously had fun with novels mocking corporate culture and advertising.  Machine Man definitely has humor, primarily in its main characters’ utter obliviousness to social cues and his often deadpan responses,  but it’s not absurdist fiction like that that PG Wodehouse. Instead the humor softens what otherwise might be a somewhat horrifying tale of a man who serially butchers himself, awakening the interest in a morally dubious company and empowering them to get even more dubious. Things get rather out of end, with one of the endgame chapters involving a fight to the death between two cyborgs, both of whom are increasingly schizophrenic.  One character winds up as a brain-in-a-box, which takes us to “I have no mouth and I must scream” territory.  While I’m labeling this science fiction, given the contents and transhumanist interest,   I don’t know if the nerve interfaces mentioned here were based on any then-current research;  the first that I know of was announced in 2016.

All in all,  I enjoyed this. Of course, I like the author — I’ve read most of his previous novels, albiet ten years ago.  I have a certain fascination with the idea of ‘augmented humanity’, even as most of my being recoils at the idea of it. Barry’s combination of humor, emotional drama, and the able use of the company as an amiable villain made it a swift and engaging read. 

Related:
Latest developments in prosthetics, from The Independent. 

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Reads to Reels: Ready Player One

Posted on August 1, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Redbox technician hadn’t long placed copies of Ready Player One in my local machine before I eagerly rented one. I experienced the  book a few weeks back, enthralled by the story and Wil Wheaton’s delivery of it,  and so launched into this with a stupid grin on my face as the move rolled to Van Halen’s “Jump”. It didn’t take me long to realize this wasn’t the story I’d  experienced, but knowing that adjustments have to made for the sake of different mediums, I  resolved to enjoy it nontheless. 

  As a movie it’s a perfectly fun action-adventure thriller with a bounty of pop-culture references.  The acting is fine, and the production seamessly integrates live-action scenes and characters with pure-CGI ones, since the characters themselves spend most of their time within a computer-generated gameworld called the Oasis.  For those who haven’t read the book,  Ready Player One is set in the near fuure in which everything has gotten worse: poverty, unemployment, the environment, pick your poison. What has improved is massively multiplayer online games, and the only one that matters is the Oasis.  There players can appear  however they like, and visit planet after planet of adventures and activities.   Aside from eating, sleeping, and excretion, everything is done in the Oasis.     When the creator of the Oasis dies, his will invites the entire world to a treasure hunt. He’s hidden an Easter egg somewhere in the Oasis,  accessible only to those who find three concealed keys guarded by riddles and challenges.  The reward? Control of the Oasis and trillions of dollars.  Not bad.

While I’m actively resisting the urge to compare the movie too much for the book,  that is in fact the whole purpose of Reads to Reels: to comment both on adaptions’ worth in themselves and as re-tellings of literary originals.  The broad outline of the RPO novel and movie are the same, as are its characters — but the story told is much different. The movie opens with a drag race,  something oddly out of place in the novel’s  fantasy-questing theme. The entire atmosphere of the book — the massive revival of eighties culture inspired by global study of Halliday’s own fixation on his childhood — just isn’t there.  Those who watch the movie without reading the book will probably find the eighties soundtrack a little odd, because there’s nothing to explain it.

In fairness to the movie, though, the author helped with this screenplay and the mediums of book and cinema have different demands. A big-budget production couldn’t have a plot with a lot of pondering over intricate riddles and fooling with text-based games, let alone a sequence where a character has to log into a TRS-180 and play Zork. It’s a lot easier to sell a race laden with T-Rex and King Kong as obstacles instead of an eight-bit arcade game as the challenge, I get it.  Ditto for the emphasis on action drama (the lead characters are in mortal peril for pretty much the entire movie), instead of Parzival’s  relationships with his friends, the turmoil their bonds undergo, and the growing realization that a planet lost in the Oasis is just..wrong.  Instead we get action-adventure and then we’re hit with the reality/unreality moral  with all the subtly of a baseball bat.

While Ready Player One is a fun action movie, one I wouldn’t mind watching again,  it doesn’t succeed as an adaptation of the original for me.

On a side note,  I was amused that my mental image of the villain, casting him as Ben Mendelsohn, proved to be on the nose, as he appears here as the big bad. (I was mostly inspired by his performance in The Dark Knight Rises.) I didn’t care for the characters in-game avatars, particularly Art3mis, but that’s subjective. I imagined her as the hero of Dungeon Siege: 

 
 The producers went a…different direction. 
 That’s not a cartoon of the character, that’s how the character actually looks  Kind of like a cat.
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Among the Wild Cybers

Posted on July 31, 2018 by smellincoffee

Among the Wild Cybers
© 2018 Christopher L. Bennett
 256 pages

In the not-so-distant future, humanity’s exploration of the cosmos has begun in earnest — driven in part by the plight of Earth, with collapsing ecosystems forcing outward movement.  Among the Wild Cybers is a collection of previously published short stories, set in various phases of a sparefacing race’s evolution — from pioneering lunar colonies to faster than light travel in the 24th century.  Evolution is the word to use, because not only are new kinds of societies being constructed, with unique cultures on colony worlds and space habs, but humans are changing themselves directly, through both genetic modification and cybernetics.   Readers are dropped into the middle of things for each tale, with backstory information filtering in as the story (typically mysteries, with some dramas and a touch of action) unfolds. This approach works well most of the time, although there is a helpful historical overview in the back for the reader who still feels left in the dark.

I know Christopher L. Bennett as a Star Trek author,  and the only one I know of that puts real scientific consideration into the worlds, species, and technical dilemmas that he creates.  That and the prospect of reading about genetic supermen made this an easy sell for me.  If you’re at all interested in artificial intelligence or transhumanism, there’s plenty of interest here,  in part because Bennett doesn’t go for easy answers.   While there are cyber intelligences present in the stories,  Bennett’s characters indicate these are rare. Most attempts at creating a genuine metamind fail, as the creation either goes insane or sinks into silence. Even the machine intelligences which do exist can’t simply be  downloaded and transferred at whim.    Bennett’s premises succeed in some very intriguing tales, especially in the title story “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele”, about cybernetic creatures with the ability to evolve. There’s also beauty here, particularly in the story, “Caress of a Butterfly’s Wings”.  

Some of the tales:

  •   “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele”: a scientist on a colony world fights to defend a variety of cybernetic lifeforms which evolved from human probes
  • “Aspiring to be Angels”:  a troubleshooting-trainee and her boss investigate an incident where an attempt at creating a superhuman machine intelligence has somehow rendered the human developers insane.
  • “No Dominion”:  which is the only story not to share a history with the rest, death has been defeated.  This makes murder investigations  a little more complicated.
  • “The Weight of Silence”: , a woman who is rendered blind and deaf by an explosion aboard her ship must, groping along with her similarly disabled shipmate,  find a way to communicate with one another and somehow put themselves into a position to be rescued.
  • “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide”:   the human crew of the ship Arachne is pulled from stasis by furious aliens, who want to know why they murdered 88,000 of their people.
  • “Caress of a Butterfly’s Wings” witnesses an act of sacrificial love toward a perceived enemy by an augmented woman sailing through the stars.

As is usual for Bennett, there are annotations at his website .(Look under Original Fiction / Original Short Fiction for the rest.) You can also read a version of the historical overview there.

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Books, meet data!

Posted on July 30, 2018 by smellincoffee
Data: 2008 – 2017

So, it turns out that turning ten years of book-reading data into a 15-item line graph is..kind of anti-climatic.   Most of the items just kind of blend together, and the only things that leap out are (1) history’s uncontested place as the big kahuna;  (2) that massive spike in religion and philosophy in 2009 that was never repeated;   and (3),  science’s slow descent and then recovery. That was something of a bust, so let’s look at something more…fun.

Data: 2007-2017
In mid-2010, Star Wars had a comfortable lead over Star Trek books, something like 10 to 2. Then that year, I read thirty Trek books and it was never a contest from then on.  

Nonfiction | Fiction Breakdown

From May 2007 to the end of  2017, I read…1,749 books.     The majority (62%) of that is nonfiction.  Fiction has varied over the years, but at most it’s never been more than 53%.

2007:   36%
2008:   42%
2009    38%
2010    53%
2011   53%
2012    33%
2013    31%
2014    40%
2015    35%
2016    37%
2017    25%

How about…science reading, broken into the categories I use for my report card? 
Data: 2007-2017
You can see why I adopted the scavenger hunt approach in 2017:   there’s a lot of pooling in biology and anthropology that would be more exaggerated were “Flora and Fauna” not a separate category.  Appearing on this list but not in my report card is “General”, because there were Asimov science-essay collections that would run the gamut.

That’s probably enough fun with MS Excel for one weekend. We’ll try it again in 2027..


Posted in General | 14 Comments

We the Living

Posted on July 28, 2018 by smellincoffee

We the Living
© 1936  Ayn Rand
528 pages

 

“I fear for your future, Kira,” said Victor. “It’s time to get reconciled to life. You won’t get far with those ideas of yours.”
“That,” said Kira, “depends on what direction I want to go.”

Ayn Rand fled the nascent Soviet Union at the tender age of twenty,  and by way of introducing herself to the United States literary scene, she wrote a novel denouncing both God and the state. It is slightly autobiographical;  at least, it’s the closest she ever came to writing the story of her life.  Featuring young Kira Argounva, a would-be engineer whose ambitions are smothered by the nascent totalitarian state of the Soviets,  it examines the impact that  said states can have on the lives  of the people under their command. Two other characters are quite prominent — an ardent young Communist officer (Andrei Taganov,) and an embittered enemy of the Soviets (Leo Kovalensky), desiring nothing but to escape.   Through their lives we see not only the results oppression can have on the oppressed, but the soul-deforming  effects that oppression has on its instigators.

The Argounva family has been rendered impoverished by the Bolkshevik triumph, losing their factory and shop under the new economic rules. Seeing her relations turned into near-vagrants through political malice, Kira already has good reason to hate the Soviets.  Her family’s previous status also marks she and her cousins as pariahs, however: the ticket to success in the new state is to become a member of the Party, and even if they were willing to play the part they’re not allowed.  They are,  in Kira’s frustrated words later in the novel, forbidden to live — and forbidden to escape, as Kira learns when she and a free-spirited boyfriend named Leo are picked up by the secret police.  Kira and Leo are both rebels, but while she simply endures what the Soviets throw her — refusing to give in or give up, even swallowing her pride and working for the government  so she can escape–   Leo slowly withers.  I mostly liked Kira for her name (reminded me of another Kira with far more personality)   A key member of the story is Andrei Taganov, someone who shares much of Kira’s outlook on life, but believes in the Soviet cause.  He and Kira are lovers, and he offers crucial assistance to her — but perhaps the most interesting part of the novel is witnessing his inner turmoil as the growing Soviet state’s moral deformity is revealed, both  its  pervasive corruption and the tyranny that outstrips the worse crimes of the tsar.

Like 1984, We the Living does not have a tidy, happy ending.   The image of a boot stamping on a human face forever is absent, however; instead, we encounter a mixture of tragedy and glory.  This is achieved because certain characters had already gotten the only victory that mattered: they knew themselves, they believed in themselves. Even if they died, they died free and not as befuddled drones or anxious cattle.  Although I wasn’t especially interested in the two main characters — Andrei’s moral struggle is more compelling than Leo’s slow abandonment of a worthwhile life, and Kira only gets really fascinating when she’s been robbed of every support,  and is alone in the wilderness —     the themes really are eternal, and I’m not surprised that the Italian fascists attempted to stop the book and its  unauthorized movie adaptation from being spread under their watch, since fascism and communism differ not a jot or a tittle in their methods and depravity,  only in what they advertise is worth killing for.

I have the Italian film  on the way, hopefully with English subtitles.

Related:

  • The Revolutionist,   Robert Littell A novel about a Russian immigrant to the United States who reutrns to Russia to participate in the civil war and is crestfallen to survive long enough to see the revolution begin devouring its children.
  • The Gulag Archipelago,  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.   While focused on the prison system, offers a look into the incredibly oppressive atmosphere of the Soviet union.  Recommended reading for any one  with a tendency to start sentences with “There should be a law…”
  • “Why The Worst Get On Top“, F.A. Hayek. Essay printed in The Road to Serfdom. Available online via the Foundation for Economic Education.
  • 1984, George Orwell.
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What I Read in 2010

Posted on July 27, 2018 by smellincoffee

At last we come to 2010, the last year I never kept a list for.   At 184 items, it’s my second-highest year. This was the year historical fiction really arrived, driven by Bernard Cornwell and C.S. Forester. but with a little help from Alison Weir.   The largest change, however,  is the massive spike in Star Trek reading as I decided to catch up on the new Treklit.   History finally overtook science,  pursuing its destiny as queen of the shelves..

Biography

  • Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger
  • I Am Spock, Leonard Nimoy
  • Yours, Isaac Asimov; Isaac Asimov
  • American Infidel, Orvin Larson
  • Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality, Frances Gies
  • Nehru: The Invention of India,  Shashi Tharoor
  • The Life of Elizabeth I, Alison Weird
  • The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, C. Northcote Parkinson
  • Frank: The Voice, James Kaplan

Classics and  Literature

  • The Bhagavad Gita, trans/interpreted Stephen Mitchell
  • The Iron Heel, Jack London
  • A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  • The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, Martin Seymour-Smith
  • The Roman Way, Edith Hamliton
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain

Fantasy, Horror,  and Speculative

  • Hitler’s War,   Harry Turtledove
  • The Magicians, Lev Grossman
  • The Man with the Iron Heart, Harry Turtledove
  • The End of the Beginning, Harry Turtledove
  • West and East,  Harry Turtledove
  • Christine,  Stephen King
  • The Good Guy, Dean Koontz
  • HP and the Chamber of Secrets Audiobook
  • HP and The Prisoner of Azkaban, audiobok

General Fiction

  • The Best American Short Stories (2008)
  • Murder at the ABA, Isaac Asimov
  • The Last Juror, John Grisham
  • Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, Lemony Snicket

History

  • The Gangs of New York, Herbert Ashbury
  • Lost Discoveries, Dick Teresi
  • 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann
  • North Korea: Another Country, Bruce Cumings
  • Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
  • Africa: A Biography of the Continent, John Reader
  • Memories of Old Cahaba, Anne Gayle
  • The Other Side of Selma, Dickie WIlliams
  • The World Through Maps, John Short
  • Chainbreaker’s War, ed. Jeanne Winston Adler
  • Citizens, Simon Schama
  • La Belle France, Alistair Horne
  • Heroes of History, Will Durant
  • Don’t Know Much About Geography, Ken Davs
  • Working IX to V, Vickie Leon
  • The Birth of the United States, Isaac Asimov
  • Disease Fighters Since 1950,  Ray Spangenburg
  • The Spanish-American War, Albert Marrin
  • Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant
  • The Life of Greece, Will Durant
  • Caesar and Christ, Will Durant
  • The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley
  • America’s Hidden History, Kenneth Davis
  • What Went Wrong?, Bernard Lewis
  • The Mother Tongue, BIll Bryson
  • Britain: At the Edge of the World?, Simon Schama
  • Mapping Human History, Steve Olson
  • The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson
  • Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese

Historical Fiction

  • The Lady Elizabeth, Alison Weir
  • Captain Horatio Hornblower,  C.S. Forester
  • Young Hornblower, C.S. Forester
  • Commodore Hornblower, C.S. Forester
  • Lord Hornblower, C.S. Forester
  • Hornblower and the Hotspur, C.S. Forester
  • Hornblower and the Crisis, CS Forester
  • Captive Queen, Alison Weir
  • Give Me Back my Legions, Harry Turtledove
  • Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, C.S. Forester
  • Sharpe’s Eagle, Bernard Cornwell
  • Empire, Steven Saylor
  • Innocent Traitor, Alison Weir
  • True Grit, Charles Portis
  • Heretic, Bernard Cornwell
  • The Last Kingdom, Bernard Cornwell
  • The Pale Horseman, Bernard Cornwell
  • Lords of the North, Bernard Cornwell
  • Sword Song, Bernard Cornwell

Humor

  • Asimov Laughs Again, Isaac Asimov
  • Lamb, Christopher Moore
  • A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore
  • Potatoes are Cheaper, Max Shulman
  • Rally Round the Flag, Boys!, Max Shulman
  • Barefoot Boy with Cheek, Max Shulman
  • I Was a Teenage Dwarf,  Max Shulman
  • The Stupidest Angel, Christopher Moore

Law and Disorder
  • Under and Alone, William McQueen
  • Casino,  Nicholas Pileggi
Mysteries and Thrillers

  • The Mao Case,  Qiu Xiaolong
  • The King of  Torts, John Grisham
  • The Devil’s Punchbowl, Greg Iles
  • A Whiff of Death, Isaac Asimov
  • The Confession, John Grisham
  • The Chamber, John Grisham
  • Conspirata, Robert Harris
  • The Brethren, John Grisham
  • The Summons, John Grisham

Plays, Poetry, and Language

  • Sand and Foam, Khalil Gibran
  • The Infernova, S.A. Alenthony
  • Stories Behind Words, Peter Limburg

Politics and Civic Interest

  • Red Emma Speaks, Alix Kate Shulman
  • A Power Goverments Cannot Suppress,  Howard Zinn
  • The Geography of Nowhere, Jim Kunstler
  • The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
  • Weapons of Satire, Mark Twain

Religion and Philosophy

  • Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
  • A Guide to the Good Life,  William Irvine
  • The Emperor’s Handbook, David and Scot Hicks
  • Dinner with a Perfect Stranger, David Gregory
  • The Year of Living Biblically, AJ Jacobs
  • The Ethics of Star Trek, Judith Barad, Ed Robertson
  • Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr
  • Strength to Love, Martin Luther King Jr
  • Plato’s Podcasts, Mark Vernon
  • Reading Judas, Elaine Pagels and Karen King
  • The Art of Happiness ns a Troubled World,  TenzinGyatso 
  • The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science and Nature

  • The Tyrannosaurus Prescription, Isaac Asimov
  • It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes!, Jerry Dennis
  • The Private Life of Plants, David Attenborough
  • The Trials of Life, David Attenborough
  • The Life of Birds, David Attenborough
  • Dinosaur Laves, Jack Horner
  • The Roving Mind, Isaac Asimov
  • Stiff, Mary Roach
  • African Exodus, Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie
  • Spook, Mary Roach
  • Packing for Mars, Mary Roach
  • Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallaghter
  • The Naked Lady Who Stood On Her Head, Oliver Sachs
  • The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking
  • The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sachs

Science Fiction

  • Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne
  • Contact, Carl Sagan
  • Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
  • The Complete Robot, Isaac Asimov
  • The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton
  • The Lost World, Michael Crichton
  • Timeline, Michael Crichton
  • The War of the Worlds, HG Wells
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

Society and Culture

  • American Nerd, Ben Nugent

Star Trek and Star Wars

  • The Lives of Dax, various
  • Millennium Falcon, James Luceno
  • Tatooine Ghost, Troy Denning
  • Hard Contact, Karen Traviss
  • Revenge of the Sith, Matt Stover
  • The Reunion, MIchael Jan Friedman
  • Death in Winter, Michael Jan Friedman
  • Tales of the Dominion War, various authors
  • Quotable Star Trek, ed. Jill Sherwin
  • Greater than the Sum, Christopher Bennett
  • Stargazer: Three, Michael Jan Friedman
  • STDS9: Betrayal, Lois Tilton
  • Dynasty of Evil, Drew Karpyshyn
  • The Buried Age, Christopher Bennett
  • A Time to be Born, John Vornholt
  • Provenance of Shadows, David R. George
  • Gods of Night, David Mack
  • Mere Mortals, David Mack 
  • Lost Souls, David Mack
  • Full Circle, Kirsten Beyer
  • Unworthy, Kirsten Beyer
  • Distant Shores, various
  • Worlds of DS9 Vol I, various
  • The Good that Men Do, Martin and Mangels
  • STDS9: Fallen Heroes, Dafydd ab Hugh
  • Warpath, David Mack
  • A Singular Destiny, Keith RA Decandido
  • Taking Wing, Martin and Mangels
  • Orion’s Hounds, Christopher L Bennett
  • Zero Sum Game, David Mack
  • Kobayashi Maru, Martin and Mangels
  • The Kobayashi Maru, Julia Ecklar
  • Losing the Peace, William Leisner
  • Beneath the Raptor’s Wings, Martin and Mangels
  • Seize the Fire, Michael Martin

Travel and Adventure

  • Into the Wild, John Krakauer
  • The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto Guevara
  • A Walk Across America, Peter Jeknins
  • Travels with Charley,  John Steinbeck
  • Walking towards Walden, John Hanson Mitchell
  • Stephen Fry in America, Stephen Fry
  • A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson
Posted in General | Tagged | 6 Comments

What I Read in 2009

Posted on July 27, 2018 by smellincoffee

Continuing in my attempts to make 2007 – 2010 legible in terms of the books I read, below is everything from 2009.  At 218 books, it stands as my biggest year on record, and the closest I’ve come to rivaling it was in 2010 and 2016, when I managed 184 and 181 books respectively.  The big trend this year was an intense interest in religion and philosophy, which counted for nearly three times as much as its competitors, history and science. Speaking of which, they were still tied, each with 22 books.

Biography

  • Frank Sinatra: An American Legend, Nancy Sinatra
  • Out of my Life and Thought, Albert Schweitzer
  • Buddha, Karen Armstrong
  • Boss of Bosses, Joseph F. O’Brien and Andris Kurins
  • Jesus, Marcus Borg
  • Robert Ingersoll, David Anderson
  • Cicero, Anthony Everitt
  • With the Old Breed, Gene Sledge
  • Black Edelweiss, Johann Voss
  • China Marine, Gene Sledge


Business and Economics

  • Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner


Classics and Literary

  • The Book that Changed my Life, Roxanne Cody and Joy Johannsen
  • Familiar Poems, Annotated, Isaac Asimov
  • The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
  • In the Beginning, Isaac Asimov
  • The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain

Fantasy, Horror, and Speculative

  • The Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan
  • In the Presence of Mine Enemies, Harry Turtledove
  • The Titan’s Curse, Rick Riordan
  • Demon in my View, Amelia Atwater-rhodes
  • Colonization: Aftershocks, Harry Turtledove
  • The Battle of the Labyrinth, Rick Riordan
  • Homeward Bound, Harry Turtledove
  • Shattered Mirror, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
  • The DaVince Code, Dan Brown
  • Magic, Isaac Asimov
  • The Last Olympian, Rick Riordan

General Fiction

  • Only Begotten Daughter, James Morrow
  • Gump and Co, Winston Groom
  • Jesus, Deepok Chopra
  • Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Gospel According to the Son, Norman Mailer
  • The Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket
  • The Reptile Room, Lemony Snicket
  • The Wide Window, Lemony Snicket
  • Jennifer Government, Max Barry
  • The Miserable Mill, Lemony Snicket
  • The Austere Academy, Lemony Snicket
  • The Ersatz Elevator, Lemony Snicket
  • Company, Max Barry
  • The Vile Village, Lemony Snicket
  • The Hostile Hospital, Lemony Snicket
  • Syrup, Max Barry
  • The Carnivorous Carnival, Lemony Snicket
  • The Slippery Slope , Lemony Snicket
  • The Grim Grotto, Lemony Snicket
  • The Penultimate Peril, Lemony Snicket
  • The End, Lemony Snicket
  • Kokoro, Natsume Soseki
  • Marx in Soho, Howard Zinn
  • Skipping Christmas, John Grisham
  • Ford County: Stories, John Grisham


Historical Fiction

  • Imperium, Robert Harris
  • Pompeii, Robert Harris
  • Enigma, Robert Harris
  • Archangel, Robert Harris
  • Roman Blood, Steven Saylor
  • Arms of Nemesis, Steven Saylor
  • The House of the Vestals, Steven Saylor
  • The Venus Throw, Steven Saylor
  • Catalina’s Riddle, Steven Saylor
  • Roma, Steven Saylor
  • A Murder on the Appian Way, Steven Saylor
  • Last Seen in Masslia, Steven Saylor
  • A Mist of Prophecies, Steven Saylor
  • A Gladiator Dies Only Once, Steven Saylor
  • Caesar’s Judgment, Steven Saylor
  • No Less than Victory, Jeff Shaara
  • The Triumph of Caesar, Steven Saylor


History

  • Mysteries of the Middle Ages, Thomas Cahill
  • How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill
  • Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Thomas Cahill
  • The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill
  • Desire of the Everlasting Hills,  Thomas Cahill
  • The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
  • Then Discoveries that Rewrote History, Patrick Hunt
  • Rubicon, Tom Holland
  • The Sons of Caesar. Philip Matyszak
  • The Great Warming, Brian Fagan
  • Persian Fire, Tom Holland
  • Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade, Brian Fagan
  • The Moscow Option, David Downing
  • A People’s History of American Empire, Howard Zinn
  • A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
  • The Great Journey, Brian Fagan
  • The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
  • Islam:A Short History, Karen Armstrong
  • Medical Firsts, Robert Adler
  • A People’s History of the American Revolution, Ray Ralphael
  • A History of the Arab Peoples,  Albert Hourani
  • The Japanese Experience, W.G. Beasley
  • Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire, Isaaac Asimov
  • An Honorable German, Charles McCain

Humor

  • Waiter Rant, “The Waiter”
  • Barrel Fever, David Sedaris
  • Darwin Awards III, ed. Wendy Norcutt
  • Saints Behaving Badly, Thomas Craughwell

Mysteries and Thrillers

  • The Ghost, Robert Harris
  • The Associate, John Grisham
  • The Return of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov
  • The Quiet Game, Greg Iles
  • Third Degree, Greg Iles
  • Turning Angel, Greg Iles
  • Sleep No More, Greg Iles
  • Ricochet, Sandra Brown
  • Casebook of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov


Politics and Civic Interest

  • Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College, Gary Gregg II
  • The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama
  • Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy
  • The Zinn Reader, Howard Zinn


Religion and Philosophy

  • Stoic Warriors, Nancy Sherman
  • The Book of Ecclesiastes, Tremper Longman III
  • A World Waiting to be Born, M. Scott Peck
  • Mythology, Edith Hamilton
  • What the Buddha Taught, Walpola Rahula
  • Ten Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You, Oliver Thomas
  • The Roman Mind, Edith Hamilton
  • The Compleat Gentleman, Brad Miner
  • The Art of Happiness,  Tenzin Gyatso
  • I to Myself, Henry David Thoreau
  • An Open Heart, Tenjin Gyatso
  • Here if You Need Me, Kate Braestrup
  • Mere Christianity, CS Lewis
  • Ethics for a New Millennium, Tenzin Gyatso
  • Transforming the Mind, Tenzin Gyatso
  • The Words of Martin Luther King Jr, Coretta Scott King
  • The Universe in a Single Atom, Tenzin Gyatso
  • The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu, Wayne Dyer
  • Abounding Grace, M. Scott Peck
  • Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, Wayne Dyer
  • Wicca for Beginners, Thea Sabin
  • Here I Stand, John Shelby Spong
  • Wisdom of the Ages, Wayne Dyer
  • The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell
  • Selected Essays, Michel de Montaigne
  • The Great Transofrmation,  Karen Armstrong
  • The Road Less Traveled,  M. Scott Peck
  • The Faith Club, Ranya Indliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner
  • God’s Problem, Bart Ehrman
  • The Third Jesus, Deepak Chopra
  • Further Along the Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck
  • Blue like Jazz, Donald Miller
  • Socrates Cafe, Christopher Phillips
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
  • You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to be Right, Brad Hirschfield
  • The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton
  • Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar, Thomas Cathcart
  • The Great Divorce, CS Lewis
  • Drawing Down the Moon, Margaret Adler
  • Finding Your Religion. Scotty McKlennan
  • Reclaiming Virtue, Ray Bradshaw
  • Walden, Henry David Thoreau
  • Aristotle’s Children, Richard Rubenstein
  • The Essential Koran, ed. Thomas Cleary
  • Who Needs God?, Harold Kushner
  • Alternative American Religions, Stephen Stein
  • Becoming the Answer to our Prayers, Shane Claiborne
  • A History of God, Karen Armstrong
  • Taming the Mind, Thubten Chondron
  • The Philosophy of Humanism, Corliss Lamont
  • The Wisdom of Harry Potter, Edmund Kern
  • Our Chosen Faith, Forrester Church
  • I Sold my Soul on eBay, Hemant Mehta
  • The Consolations of Philsoophy, Alain de Botton
  • Love and Death, Forrester Church
  • Humanist Anthology, Margaret Knight
  • The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Mark Forstater
  • For Everything a Season, Philip Gully
  • The Best of Robert Ingersoll, Robert Greely
  • Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh
  • When Religion Becomes Evil, Charles Kimball

Science

  • Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman
  • The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, Peter Quamen
  • Evolution for Everyone, David Sloan Wilson
  • The Sun Shines Bright, Isaac Asimov
  • The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov
  • Real Life X-Files,  Joe Nickell
  • Frontiers II, Isaac Asimov
  • Through a Window, Jane Goodall
  • Our Inner Ape, Frans de Waal
  • A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
  • Asimov on Astronomy, Isaac Asimov
  • Black Holes and Baby Universes,  Stephen Hawking
  • Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne
  • Anthropology for Dummies, Cameron Smith and Evan Davies
  • Dolphins, Jacques Yves-Cousteau
  • The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
  • Death by Black Hole, Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Flim Flam!, James Randi
  • Beautiful Minds, Maddalena Bearzi, Craig B. Stanford
  • The Cosmic Connection, Carl Sagan
  • The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins

Science Fiction

  • The Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov
  • The Time Machine, HG Wells
  • Gold, Isaac Asimov
  • Brave New World, Aldhous Huxley
  • Pebble in the Sky, Isaac Asimov
  • Asimov: The Complete Stories, Volume I, Isaac Asimov
  • In the Footprints of God, Greg Iles

Society and Culture

  • Deer Hunting with Jesus, Joe Bageant
  • Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh
  • American Mania, Peter Whtbrow
  • The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby
  • To Have or to Be?, Erich Fromm
  • In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honore
  • Fates Worse than Death, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor,  Sudhir Venkatesh


Star Trek and Star Wars 

  • Darth Bane: Rule of Two,  Drew Karpshyn
  • Yoda: Dark Rendezvous, Sean Stewart
  • Jedi Trial, Daniel Sherman and Dan Cragg
  • Shatterpoint, Matt Stover
  • Heir to the Empire, Timothy Zahn
  • Star Trek: Spartacus, T. L. Mancour
  • Sarek, AC Crispin
  • Star Wars: the Force Unleashed, Sean Williams
  • Dark Force Rising, Timothy Zahn
  • The Last Command, Timothy Zahn


Technology and Society

  • Amusing Ourselves to Death,  Neil Postman


Travel and Adventure 

  • Lost on Planet China, J. Maarten Troost
Posted in General | Tagged | 9 Comments