What have you read lately?

[Hegemony]

At times Capwell Wyckoff (I suspect a pseudonym here) sounds almost like a local booster. 

It sure does sound like a pseudonym, but I guess when you have an actual name like that, you don't need a pseudonym.

"Albert Capwell Wyckoff (February 21, 1903 – January 10, 1953) was an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and a writer of juvenile fiction, most notably the Mercer Boys series and Mystery Hunter series."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Capwell_Wyckoff

(I see his wife was named Edna Mae Deakyne — quite a family for names!)

[apl68]

At times Capwell Wyckoff (I suspect a pseudonym here) sounds almost like a local booster. 

It sure does sound like a pseudonym, but I guess when you have an actual name like that, you don't need a pseudonym.

"Albert Capwell Wyckoff (February 21, 1903 – January 10, 1953) was an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and a writer of juvenile fiction, most notably the Mercer Boys series and Mystery Hunter series."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Capwell_Wyckoff

(I see his wife was named Edna Mae Deakyne — quite a family for names!)

That's amazing.  Thanks for the link!  It goes to show that it's always worth checking an author's name at Wikipedia, even if you figure the author's going to be too obscure to have one.

I see that he served as a Sunday School missionary in the Arkansas Ozarks.  So he did indeed have a background of experience in our state.  I'm now curious to know more about his memoir about that work.  Since he did church work in Arkansas within the last century, there's probably not more than three degrees of separation between us....  I found out last year that there's only one degree of separation from Charles Portis.  Population-wise, it's not that big of a state.

[Vkw10]

An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, by Helene Torsten, translated by Marlaine Delargy. A friend who loves cozy mysteries recommended these stories of a Swedish octogenarian who deals with little problems in a rather permanent manner. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[ab_grp]

Next up looks to be The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Leonard Mlodinow; Sean Pratt).  A friendly colleague recommended it years ago, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet, so might as well listen.

I finished this one a few days ago and am not sure how to categorize it.  It covers a lot of people and ideas from probability.  The biographical parts are more amenable to narration than are the many, many numbers in the book.  The narrator has a somewhat quirky way of pausing.  For example (I'm making this up): "Bernoulli was the type of writer......       who.....   could make the most improbable idea sound realistic."  When reading really long numbers, this got very annoying.  As a person with a strong quant background, I did not enjoy the mathy parts because of this.   But even though it is written at a pretty basic level, and I think the explanations are pretty good, I don't know that a lay person would be interested in it, either.  What is strange is that I heard the author being interviewed on a podcast, talking about another book he wrote (written about Stephen Hawking, with whom he has co-authored several books), and he was so fascinating to listen to! I wondered why he didn't just narrate this one.  I think he has narrated some of his other books, so I might see how that worked out.  This narrator just didn't do it for me.  The content was very good, though! 

Next, I wanted something a little lighter.  I picked up a few such books on sale and just finished listening to one: Orphan X: Evan Smoak, Book 1 (Gregg Hurwitz; Scott Brick).  I guess it's the first book in a series (unfortunately) about a nowhere man, a deadly killer trying to protect "innocents" from other very deadly killers and so forth.  Everyone is very brutally skilled and (did I mention it?) deadly.  It was extremely trope-y and not that entertaining.  The narrator did a good job with it for what it was.  If someone were unfamiliar with this genre, perhaps it could be a good beach read.  I read tons of these types of books in high school and as a young adult, and this one had nothing new to offer.  It just reeks of some kind of power fantasy for the insecure.  The author's name sounded familiar, so I thought maybe I had read some of his books a while back, but they look to be too recent for that.  Maybe I am being too harsh, but ugh.

Since I think the pendulum swung a bit too far to the lighter side, I am going to try The Fall (Albert Camus; Edoardo Ballerini).  I haven't read that one, and it's generally good ratings, although one rater called it a "waist of time."  Caveat lector?

[apl68]

I've only ever read Camus' The Plague, but if you're looking to swing the pendulum back from "too light" I'd figure any Camus will do.

[mamselle]

+1 to Camus; "Huit Clos" (No Exit) is another fun one.

On randomness in a wider context, see Rabbi Kushner's "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People" from the 70s.

M.

[ergative]

+1 to Camus; "Huit Clos" (No Exit) is another fun one.

On randomness in a wider context, see Rabbi Kushner's "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People" from the 70s.

M.

My first college French class spent a semester working through and discussing Huis Clos. I loved it. Somehow it just really resonated with self-important, all-in-black REAL FRENCH!-loving 18-year-old Ergative.

Currently Absolutive and I are reading Disorientation, by Elaine Hsieh Chou, which is a pitch-perfect skewering of the following things:

1. The miseries of being an Nth-year PhD student
2. The difficulties of being an Asian surrounded by well-meaning-but-actually-kind-of-racist people who keep talking about 'your unique background'.
3. White people who love/fetishize Asianness with varying degrees of self-awareness
4. Hyper-sensitive leftists who get tangled up in their internal struggles rather than engaging meaningfully with real issues
5. Chasing trends in academia, pros/cons of
6. Is it all bullshit, anyway?
7. Dumb people making hilariously bad decisions.
8. Existential despair

It sounds like heavy going, but it is a SCREAM. It is exactly the kind of academic satire (except it's not? really? satire?) that I haven't seen properly done since Dear Committee Members.

I haven't finished it yet--don't even think I'm at the halfway mark--but the first 36% or so is so outstanding that I recommend it wholeheartedly. Even if the remaining two thirds don't live up to the start, the start is superb.

[downer]

If you are not entirely sanguine about the future of humanity, then

What We Owe The Future
William MacAskill

will engage you.

If you are entirely sanguine about the future, then you should also read it.

The good news is that MacAskill thinks that humans will probably survive.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Secrets of the Nile by Tasha Alexander
New and #16 installment in the "Lady Emily Mysteries" series

[FishProf]

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, in Audiobook form, read by the author.

Amazing, odd, and delightful, per usual.

[apl68]

Fiesta and Images.  These are grade school and middle school readers from the 1970s that I recall using at school.  I mentioned awhile back that I collect these old readers.  Reading class was always my favorite.  When I got ahead in my assignments and got bored, I'd find older readers left on shelves in the classroom and read those as well.  I've spent many years keeping an eye out in thrift stores and such for old readers that I remembered. 

After collecting a fair number of them I had a dry spell that lasted for several years.  That broke a couple of weeks ago when I found no fewer than four readers I remembered at the same place for about $3 each.  I've been browsing Fiesta and Images in the evenings.  Eventually I'll get around to the others.

I find myself recalling a lot about these readings that I'm seeing now for the first time in over 40 years.  They had stories and excerpts from longer works that tried to offer something for every interest.  These 1970s readers tried to incorporate a notably broader range of ethnic and racial diversity than the older readers did.  The contributing writers weren't necessarily as diverse, though.  Anyway, I like finding long-ago books like this.  It's like becoming re-acquainted with old friends.

[apl68]

Men Against Time:  Salvage Archaeology in the United States.  This is one of several popular-level works on archaeology that Robert Silverberg wrote, while not otherwise occupied with the science fiction that he is best known for.  "Salvage," aka "rescue" archaeology is where archaeologists try to perform surveys or digs of sites threatened by road building, new reservoirs, and other landscape-altering developments.  Silverberg describes how archaeologists, government agencies, and private developers cooperated to salvage all sorts of sites from 20th-century America's orgy of infrastructure and other development.

The book gives a real appreciation for just how much archaeological heritage the nation has.  Early inhabitants of North America may have had sparse populations in most places, but over the millennia they still left an awful lot of traces of their activities.  It also gives an appreciation for how much archaeologists have accomplished, often in sub-optimal conditions, in extending our understanding of the prehistoric past.  At the same time, it's hard to read this 1960s book without bearing in mind the controversies regarding the large numbers of human remains that the archaeologists have collected. 

Most moderns have little problem with digging up long-ago remains, since they feel little sense of kinship with peoples of earlier eras.  In our hyper-individualist society the rising generation, with their widespread abandonment of permanent relationships and raising families, and increasing tendency to become estranged from parents, seems to be giving up on the whole idea of kinship, period.  The descendants of the nation's earlier inhabitants are another matter.  They tend to regard all human remains found on their ancestral lands, no matter how ancient, as their direct ancestors.  Though that's not always correct--archaeology often indicates that their ancestors were living on land appropriated from earlier cultures in at least as ruthless a manner as anything any European colonists ever did--anybody who's not radically estranged from all kin and predecessors can understand why they feel like they do.  Earlier American archaeologists were also pretty brutal about treating any and all native burials--even the most historically recent ones--as fair game.  The profession still has its work cut out for it in trying to build bridges with communities who, with reason, regard them as no better than the reckless amateur souvenir hunters and artifact sellers that professional archaeologists consider the bane of their existence.

Speaking of artifact hunters, my father has told me of an elderly church member who dug up and sold pots and such as a youth in the 1930s.  Like many of these amateur pot hunters, he was from a poor family that needed the money they could get from finding and selling such things.  He once told Dad of digging up an impressive jar that turned out to be the burial vessel for an infant.  Seeing that he had inadvertently become a grave robber troubled him for the rest of his life.

[ergative]

+1 to Camus; "Huit Clos" (No Exit) is another fun one.

On randomness in a wider context, see Rabbi Kushner's "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People" from the 70s.

M.

My first college French class spent a semester working through and discussing Huis Clos. I loved it. Somehow it just really resonated with self-important, all-in-black REAL FRENCH!-loving 18-year-old Ergative.

Currently Absolutive and I are reading Disorientation, by Elaine Hsieh Chou, which is a pitch-perfect skewering of the following things:

1. The miseries of being an Nth-year PhD student
2. The difficulties of being an Asian surrounded by well-meaning-but-actually-kind-of-racist people who keep talking about 'your unique background'.
3. White people who love/fetishize Asianness with varying degrees of self-awareness
4. Hyper-sensitive leftists who get tangled up in their internal struggles rather than engaging meaningfully with real issues
5. Chasing trends in academia, pros/cons of
6. Is it all bullshit, anyway?
7. Dumb people making hilariously bad decisions.
8. Existential despair

It sounds like heavy going, but it is a SCREAM. It is exactly the kind of academic satire (except it's not? really? satire?) that I haven't seen properly done since Dear Committee Members.

I haven't finished it yet--don't even think I'm at the halfway mark--but the first 36% or so is so outstanding that I recommend it wholeheartedly. Even if the remaining two thirds don't live up to the start, the start is superb.

Welp, we finished it. The last third or so deteriorated a bit, losing its wit and snap and getting a bit heavy handed. But overall I think it's a terrific book, and I'd be very curious to know what people think of it. (Oddly enough, I just yesterday interviewed a prospective grad student who was in almost the identical situation as our PhD student heroine in this book, and looking to change programs because of it.)

[mamselle]

After collecting a fair number of them I had a dry spell that lasted for several years.  That broke a couple of weeks ago when I found no fewer than four readers I remembered at the same place for about $3 each.  I've been browsing Fiesta and Images in the evenings.  Eventually I'll get around to the others.

I love early 'readers,' teaching anthologies, etc. (I collected several of mine, too...) My range has strayed towards the very early ones, including hornbooks and primers (being raised in Ohio, we all learned about the McGuffey Readers, of course).

I think both the Philadelphia Free Library and the Boston Public Library include them in their rare book collections as special sub-collections (their websites have links, I think).

Just to tempt you further...

M.

[apl68]

After collecting a fair number of them I had a dry spell that lasted for several years.  That broke a couple of weeks ago when I found no fewer than four readers I remembered at the same place for about $3 each.  I've been browsing Fiesta and Images in the evenings.  Eventually I'll get around to the others.

I love early 'readers,' teaching anthologies, etc. (I collected several of mine, too...) My range has strayed towards the very early ones, including hornbooks and primers (being raised in Ohio, we all learned about the McGuffey Readers, of course).

I think both the Philadelphia Free Library and the Boston Public Library include them in their rare book collections as special sub-collections (their websites have links, I think).

Just to tempt you further...

M.

I've got a couple of late-edition, later-grade McGuffey's myself.  I also ran across some leftover "Dick and Jane" readers in my grade school days.  They'd been phased out at least a few years before my cohort came along.  Though I'm just as glad we didn't grow up reading them in class, they were kind of fun for casual browsing.

Not sure if I've told this story before--when I was still in college, I continued working with Dad and my brother in the summer.  In the summer of 1988, we were hired to block up most of the big windows at our town's grade school to improve energy efficiency.  It was part of the grant that finally got air conditioning for the buildings (Even that far back, summer already lasted about five months out of the year--classrooms were often terribly hot in September and May). 

In one classroom I discovered a batch of old 1960s readers that included at least one story that I recalled quite vividly from childhood.  I still sometimes wish I'd swiped one of them when I had the chance, given that they were almost certainly only going to be thrown out sooner or later anyway.