Beginning Runner’s Handbook

Posted on October 26, 2011 by smellincoffee

The Beginning Runner’s Handbook: The Proven 13-Week Walk-Run Program
© 1999 Ian MacNeill
168 pages

As mentioned prior, I committed myself to an active lifestyle back in late August or early September, and began  a daily habit of exercise, choosing to go for brisk walks in the morning and evening.  I’ve been increasing the length and intensity of my ‘walk-outs’ steadily until this week, so my legs have been growing in strength and I’m so filled with energy that I wish to RUN — but I can’t. I’ve had to cut back a bit on my mileage because of runner’s knee: my joints simply aren’t ready for the intensity of running. Even so, I keep thinking about it and as a way of preparing myself and running vicariously, I decideded to check out The Beginning Runner’s Handbook, a thorough guide that includes a transition plan for walkers to condition themselves into becoming runners.

The Handbook reminded me in part of the Complete Guide to Walking in that it stressed the need for the exercise, the ease of taking up running, and devoted sections to gear, stretches, and so on. However,  its chapter on nutrition is more thorough than the Guide to Walking, and it contains information on common running injuries, their treatment, and their prevention. MacNeill also encourages cross-training, along with strength training, but the Runners’ Handbook isn’t written as much toward a goal of “total body fitness” as the Guide to the Walking. MacNeill’s strength-training exercises mostly target those muscles used in running, and cross-training is introduced as a way to keep active during running rest periods or injuries.  Because running is a more intensive activity than walking,  his schedule reccommends running three times a week and using the other days to rest and cross-training.

Altogether, a strong introduction to the subject. For those interested, I would reccommend both the Complete Guide to Walking and this Handbook: the walking guide is more thorough for fitness overall, but the running handbook is more detailed in nutrition needs and medical care.  Unfortunately, I can’t evaluate the program just yet, but it has received high praise on Amazon.

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This Week at the Library (25 October)

Posted on October 25, 2011 by smellincoffee

Oh, dear, oh dear. The number of books I need to review but haven’t gotten round to doing yet keeps increasing. Reviews outstanding: The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan; At Home in Mitford, Jan Karon; The Beginning Runners’ Handbook by Ian MacNeill, and Active Living Every Day are all owed reviews.  That last one doesn’t lend itself well to a full review, though, so I’ll just say here that it was written for people who are completely inactive and who need encouragement in just getting started.  While walking is the easiest activity to begin,  it isn’t the only one mentioned. The authors encourage complete couch potatoes to start stealing two minute walks whenever they can, work up to ten, and continue working up to an average of thirty minutes a day. That’s easier than you might think, because exercise can be enjoyable. When I’m 40+ minutes into my walking in the morning, I feel like I could conquer the world.

  At Home in Mitford is also hard to review, because it doesn’t have…a plot, as such. Not that it’s harmed by this: it just follows the life of some people in a charming little town for a year and a half. It’s…utterly beguiling — cozy, “home”y.   I also finished reading a book last night I’ve not yet reviewed, called The Rapture Exposed, and it proved to be most interesting and useful.  More later!

Today at the library I picked up..

  • God has a Dream:A Vision of Hope for Our Time, Desmond Tutu.  Last night I was invited to join a book club, and the November read is this. So I’ll read it this week, take some notes, and hopefully remember having read it a month from now. 
  • Clash of Wings: World War II in the Sky, Walter J. Boyne.  I have mentioned Boyne on this blog before, having used his The Influence of Air Power Upon History in many term papers. I owe a lot of my academic success to the man, frankly, and when I saw a Boyne book sitting in the library I had to check it out.
  • Sharpe’s Company, Bernard Cornwell. 
  • The Astral, Kate Christensen. On display, this novel’s cover caught my attention. I’m not committed to it, but some of the characters sounded interesting. A poet is kicked out of his apartment when his wife realizes some of his older poetry reveals he had an affair in his youth, and he loses everything and isn’t quite comfortable with his lesbian daughter and cult-following son. My guess is he learns to stop taking things seriously and learns to love his oddball kids for who they are.

I have that history of math/science book I picked up last week still waiting my attention, and I’m struggling (!) to get into The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The opening story in this volume isn’t nearly as enticing as the others.

In addition, I finished The Age of Reason Begins last night, so…that is joining the stack of books I’ve yet to review. I’m going to take a week-long break from the Story of Civilization series because frankly, I’m a little tired of reading about European wars. Two centuries of Catholics and Protestants frothing at the mouth, and burning each other’s homes has taken its toll on me…and that’s not even counting the 30 Years’ War. Oy.  But next week I’ll probably start The Age of Louis XIV.

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Sharpe’s Battle

Posted on October 23, 2011 by smellincoffee

Sharpe’s Battle
© 1995 Bernard Cornwell
304 pages

“You did what, Sharpe? A duel? Don’t you know dueling is illegal in the army?”
“I never said anything about a duel, General. I just offered to beat the hell out of him right here and now, but he seemed to have other things on his mind.”

Spring 1811, and Captain Richard Sharpe has gotten himself into trouble. At first he was merely lost, but when he stumbled upon a strange band of French troops dressed in grey and led by a man in wolf costume, he earned himself a mortal enemy. Brigadier Loup is a vile French commander who seeks to terrorize the Spanish population into obedience, using even rape as a weapon. This does not sit well with Mr. Sharpe. Cornwell’s heroes may live for battle and not think twice about punching  priests who’ve got it coming, but as a rule they don’t abide rape. After Sharpe executes the offenders, their master Loup vows vengeance — and gives to our valiant greencoated riflemen something we’ve not before witnessed, defeat. Tasked with babysitting a regiment of Irishmen thought to be more loyal to France than Britain, and threatened with a court of inquiry for executing prisoners,  Sharpe faces the death of his career. Salvation can only be found in a spectatular act of heroism, like the slaying of the Wolf,  Brigadier Loup, whose ferocity has made him a legend among his English and Portugese enemies. Thus begins an exciting story with one of the most personal fights in the series serving  as a conclusion.

Although American schoolchildren are taught the history of England, that history tends to leave off abruptly after 1789, and England appears thereafter only when foreign affairs make it relevant to American history. Thus, the Napoleonic wars are a complete unknown to many of us, and the Peninsular War which British children may be expected to recite facts about might as well be existent. Cornwell’s Sharpe series is essentially giving me my education in that regard, as I read his books and various historical articles for context.      When the story picks up, the British army seems to moved beyond its safe fortifications and has tempted Napoleon’s eagles into battle.  Sharpe’s duties don’t allow him a place in battle, but — being Sharpe — he finds his way into the thick of things regardless.  Sharpe’s Battle focuses more on the movement of armies than other books in the series, and the villain is irredeemably evil, but admittedly interesting. He strikes Sharpe as a pagan warlord, holding a cross of wolves’ tales to inspire courage in his men and fear in his opponents’. Cornwell plays a wicked trick on the reader in turns of drama, leading Sharpe into what may be a desperate trap and then moving to Wellington while the reader is left  frantically wondering “What will become of Mister Sharpe?!”  Battle is intense throughout, and another solid hit for the series.

Next up: Sharpe’s Company.

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The Planet that Wasn’t

Posted on October 17, 2011 by smellincoffee

The Planet that Wasn’t
© 1976 Isaac Asimov
237 pages

Isaac Asimov routinely penned science essays in various magazines, and given his eagerness to publish books, often produced collections of said science essays. The Planet that Wasn’t is one such collection, covering pure science as well as science’s perception in society. The title essay refers to the speculated planet of Vulcan, which was thought to exist between Mercury and the Sun, proposed as a way to account for Mercury’s slight orbital deviation. Vulcan could never be found, because it did not exist:  our entire understanding of physics had to change (from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s relativity) before Mercury’s orbit was truly understood.  After some initial astrophysics,  a brief series of essays takes us from the versatility of carbon to biochemistry, and Asimov devotes a chapter to the working of the gallbladder, cholesterol, and high blood pressure. The latter essays move from science to its relationship with society: “The Nightfall Effect” addresses the notion that human beings can only settle outer space on other planetary bodies, and not space stations, while “The Flying Dutchman” tackles UFOs.  My favorite essay is “The Bridge of the Gods’, which addresses the physics of the rainbow and treated me to a history of optics.

Enjoyable as ever, but I would say that…being an Asimovophile.

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Complete Guide to Walking

Posted on October 17, 2011 by smellincoffee

Walking Magazine’s Complete Guide to Walking for Health, Weight Loss, and Fitness
© 2001 Mark Fenton
261 pages

In late August or early September, I woke up early one morning, donned my wide-brimmed straw hat, and set off for an early-morning walk around my neighborhood. I found the jaunt an excellent way to wake up in the morning, and since I needed to get active, I made the morning walk a routine of mine. Now, over a month later, I’m walking well over five miles a day and am enjoying much stronger legs and an abundance of energy. Since I anticipate making this a lifelong activity, I decided to see if there was any literature on the subject. Walking Magazine’s Complete Guide to Walking for Health, Weight Loss, and  Fitness is as complete and enjoyable an introduction to the subject as I can imagine, and a definite recommendation to those interested in becoming more active or in losing weight.

Author Mark Fenton begins by explaining the benefits of walking as an exercise: it’s easy to do, it can be done anywhere, and it requires essentially nothing in the way of special equipment, only a pair of sensible shoes and the will to do it. Walking is a fundamentally natural exercise, so it’s easy to start and maintain. Fenton takes the reader through a year in the life of a walker, beginning with weekly program of ten minutes per day and slowly ramping up to a desired average of thirty minutes per day.  A few weeks in, Fenton dedicates a chapter to walking for weight-loss, and explains the basics of metabolism. One of the best points he makes in the book is that diet alone is not a sustainable way to lose weight: as your weight decreases, so do the amount of calories that you need. To keep losing, the dieter must cut out more and more calories from their diet, which is unsustainable given the basic needs of the body — and the sheer distastefulness of not being able to eat anything. Those who eat moderately and exercise can continue to lose weight  or maintain a healthy weight throughout their life simply by increasing the intensity or length of their workouts. I can attest to this, because I have been consistently losing weight every week in the past month+ since I started walking, without drastic changes to my diet. (Although, I lost a lot less that week I enjoyed a piece of my friend’s fresh out-of-the-oven cheesecake…) Although weight loss will be a side effect of a healthy walking habit, Fenton’s goal with this book is broader than that. He aims toward total body fitness, and so also advices strength-training exercises. In the early months, these are introduced to strengthen one’s “core” to complement the walking, while exercises in the latter half of the book are intended to work muscles that aren’t active through walking alone.  A few months into the habit, the author suggests it may be time for new shoes — and dedicates a chapter towards useful walking gear, like how to dress for inclement weather. He also advocates cross-training, and ends with a chapter on “racewalking”.

I give the book high praise for its organization and presentation: Fenton is a passionate, thorough, and useful guide. Visually, it’s quite appealing, though I found the fact that all of the pictures featured fit twenty-something females in flattering attire rather amusing. I suppose that’s proof to this being the product of a magazine, as is perhaps some mild product-placement in the gear section.  I’ll be referring to this book in later months when I do more strength training.

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Posted on October 16, 2011 by smellincoffee

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Illustrations by Richard Lebenson
Afterword by Fred Strebeigh
© 1987, The Reader’s Digest Association.

‎”You? Who are you? How could you know anything about the matter?”
“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.”

Lately I’ve been wanting to read a good mystery, but put down a police novel after realizing I’m rather tired of books that begin with dead bodies. I wanted a mystery with some class, with some dignity — a gentleman’s mystery, like Isaac Asimov’s Black Widow puzzlers.  Finding no one who could recommend such a work, I decided to examine the most legendary detective in literature: Sherlock Holmes. This handsome volume of twelve stories met my taste exactly, and I am licking my chops at the prospect of having fifty more such stories to read in other volumes.

There are few people in the industrialized world who would not recognize the name Sherlock Holmes, I imagine. His profile — a deerstalker hat and pipe — are cultural icons, as his saying, “Elementary, my dear Watson…” Holmes is is a brilliant and ruthlessly logical detective residing in Victorian London, whose clientele ranges from the dregs of society to kings. Regardless of social status or wealth, all who come to Holmes see him as their last possible hope. He only asks that his cases present him with a challenge, and he masters each with his impressive powers of observation, taking in every fact and producing bewilderingly accurate analysis based on that.  Twelve of those stories are chronicled here by Holmes’ lone friend and companion, Dr. Watson:  “A Scandal in Bohemia”, “The Red-Headed League”, “A Case of Identity”, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”, “The Five Orange Pis”, “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”, “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”, and “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”.

I fell for Doyle’s style of writing immediately; there’s such elegance to his prose that I found myself reading aloud simply for the pleasure of it. The stories, too, offered much variety: although there are a few corpses scattered here and there, these aren’t death-mysteries. Some of them do not even involve legal crimes. Although a friend told me that Doyle wrote these stories in such a way as to invite the reader to solve them before Holmes, I scarcely think this possible: while the detective’s feats of logic are easy enough to follow in retrospect, and readers versed in literary tropes may guess at solutions, Holmes’ concrete evidence is often information the readers are not privy to, or can’t possibly grasp the significance of. This doesn’t in any way detract from the pleasure of following Holmes’ footsteps, and the stories are more varied than most modern police-detective mysteries I’ve read.

The book itself is well-done: the sepia-toned illustrations complement each piece nicely, the font is simple and stylish, and the book ends with a piece from Smithsonian on the widespread cultish following Holmes has. That following is part of the reason why I thought of Doyle’s detective when I itched for a mystery: Isaac Asimov was a devoted Sherlockian,  mentioning him in his Widowers stories and writing an essay analyzing Holmes’ skills as a chemist.

When I return to the library this week, my first stop will be fiction — D for “Doyle”!

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Pathways

Posted on October 12, 2011 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Voyager: Pathways
© 1998 Jeri Taylor
438 pages

Star Trek Pathways throws Voyager’s entire bridge crew (save Captain Janeway) into an alien prisoner-of-war camp where tenants are expected to fend for themselves, Andersonville-style. While Commander Chakotay, Commander Tuvok, Lieutenants Paris and Torres,  Ensign Kim, Neelix, and Seven establish a shelter for themselves, survive the harsh surroundings, and attempt to find a way out, they tell stories to pass the time — stories about themselves, the stories of their lives that brought them to Voyager. Because Jeri Taylor helped produce the show, and wrote this novel while Voyager aired, Pathways (and its sister volume, Mosaic) enjoyed the exceptional status of being regarded as canon, if only temporarily. 

While the metaplot that holds the stories together isn’t much (they build a transporter to escape, ho-hum, but Janeway uses an interesting little trick to guide the group to safety), but the stories themselves deliver more character development than we were able to see on the show. They answer questions — how did Chakotay and Torres come to join the Maquis? Why did Tuvok enter Starfleet, resign it, and then begin a second career years later?   What was the accident that led to Tom Paris’ disgrace and imprisonment? — and add depth to the relationships of the characters, especially Chakotay and Paris. They’re introduced as characters with bad blood between them, but Taylor’s story shows that this isn’t true from Paris’ perspective — it’s very well done, especially given how strong the bond between those two is in the Voyager relaunch. Seven doesn’t have much of a story to tell — as she says, “My parents sang ‘Happy birthday, Annika. Then the Borg took us.” —  so Kes visits Neelix in a dream and tells her story in that way. I didn’t like Kes in one of the first episodes I saw her in, so she’s never really grown on me — but even so, I enjoyed her here.

The book would have been most enjoyable during the series’ run, but if there are any Voyager fans or readers out there who’ve not read this one, by all means look for it. Considering the strength of the Voyager relaunch — it has met universal praise from readers at TrekBBS — Pathways can still serve as an intro to the characters for those just getting into the series.

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Sharpe’s Fury

Posted on October 12, 2011 by smellincoffee

Sharpe’s Fury
© 2006 Bernard Cornwell
337 pages

Winter 1811: most of Spain lies under the flag of the Emperor Napoleon, and the British army has beaten a retreat to a fortified corner of Portugal. Cadiz, the last city of the sovereign Spanish, is under siege.  While Richard Sharpe has no business being there, a mission to blow up a bridge right under French noses didn’t go exactly as he planned, and he found himself washed down the river following history’s wake — right into Cadiz, where he enters the service of the Duke of Wellington’s brother involving a little domestic derring-do. Most book heroes would be content with surviving what Sharpe survives,  and more would consider their task done if they manage to do what Sharpe accomplishes by the book’s midpoint — but Sharpe, being Sharpe, manages to get himself involved in a battle where the odds are more against the valiant redcoats than they’ve ever been.

Bernard Cornwell delivers yet another novel full of action and suspense, with his Napoleonic hero surviving treacherous priests,  plots of blackmail, several explosions, the uncertain loyalty of Spanish allies, and a dragoon-filled final battle in which he tracks a nemesis. As mentioned before, I like the books which set Sharpe and his chosen men alone by themselves, and this book offers plenty of that when our favored scoundrel becomes a secret agent of sorts.  Fury is another solid hit in this series.

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This Week at the Library (12 October)

Posted on October 12, 2011 by smellincoffee

After reading several tomes in Will Durant’s Story of Civilization series, I’m rather…full of epic history at the moment, particularly religious history, so I returned Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years for some lighter fare. I have three recent reviews waiting to be finished or written: The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan;  Sharpe’s Fury, Bernard Cornwell; and The Complete Guide to Walking for Health, Fitness, and Weight Loss by Walking Magazine’s Mark Fenton.

This week…

  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’m in the mood for mysteries, but I put down a Harry Bosch novel because I’m tired of mysteries that start with corpses. Aren’t there any authors who write non-murder mysteries?
  • The Age of Reason Begins, by Will Durant. It’s only 600 pages, practically an airport novel after The Age of Faith and The Reformation….and it begins with Queen Elizabeth, which is promising. Looking forward to the dawn of Science and the Enlightenment. 
  • Active Living Every Day, by…Steven Blair, Andrew L. Dunn, Bess H. Marcus, Ruth Ann Carpenter, and Peter Jaret.   I’ve started getting up early and doing an hour of brisk walking in the mornings, and do another 30 or so minutes in the afternoon. My goal has been to create an active lifestyle to be maintained the rest of my life, and so I’m doing a little reading to educate myself.  

I also have The Odyssey.

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The Good German

Posted on October 7, 2011 by smellincoffee

The Good German
© 2001 Joseph Kanon
512 pages

Berlin, summer 1945. The heart of the most infamous empire in history lies in ruins, battered by bombs and ravaged block by block by Russian artillery.  Its contents sacked and its people abused by the victorious Soviet army, nothing remains but rubble, piles of bodies, and broken spirits. The allies of World War 2 are meeting for the Potsdam conference, but such a story is not the reason why reporter Jacob Gesimar has come. Gesimar lived in Berlin years ago, before war forced him to exit, and he visits the sad metropolis not to gloat in victory or take in the spectre like a tourist, but to look for the girl he left behind. In the opening ours of the conference, an American body washes up on a Berlin lakeshore — the body of a man alive only hours before, who stood beside Gesimar as they flew into Berlin together. One man’s death is of no interest to the allies, but Gesimar works to solve the mystery of it by himself — if nothing else, there’s a story to be had.

The Good German is a busy novel, for the man’s death is not an isolated incident. More will follow, and as Geismar continues to work his way through an intelligence network of retired Berlin cops and black marketeers, he begins to realize there is a story of international proportions building around him — the start of another war, and he may perish with its opening shots. The “busy-ness” intensifies throughout the novel: plot twists and general action multiply with every chapter, but Joseph Kanon is spinning another mystery besides, having Gesimar ask more questions: how could the beloved Berlin of his youth have given itself over to be Hitler’s capital? How could his neighbors, good people all, become Nazis and willing participants in one of the most horrific exercises in human history, the Holocaust?  The questions lie over the setting like a cloud of dust, ever-haunting Jacob and the reader, especially once multiple plot threads converge and those questions become personal.

The Good German is definitely readable: the immediate postwar setting is unique. I don’t know of any other novels which take place so soon after the peace: Berlin is literally lying in ruins, and the Allies are only just organizing their occupation. It’s depressing, but more depressing is the fact that such savagery could rise in Germany, the land of “poets, thinkers, and storytellers”: barbarism from civilization.  The novel was best when Jacob grappled with these questions, as he did throughout. The bulk of the novel is its mystery, which turns the novel into an action-thriller by the end, but it grew so complicated that I lost interest.  The plot of a novel is almost like a musical piece: there are various elements at work — some subtle, some obvious — and pacing is critical. As the plot grows, the number of elements at play multiplies, and a good thriller may read like a jazz piece sounds — intense, active, exciting.  The Good German was so over-busy, though, that it seemed like noise by the time I was finished. I would still recommend it for the reflective aspects, however.

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