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Here is some commentary on reads since 2015.

Author Title Comments Pub Read
Carl Zimmer At the Water’s Edge

The full title says it all: At the Water’s Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea.  This was a tough read, not because of all the scientific words (but there are many) but because of the many genetic concepts described.  It was worth it.  Novel diction and stuff: Libys (fish), acouchi (rodent), siren (eel shaped salamander), Sir Richard Owen tutored Queen Victoris's children and (in 1841) coined the word dinosaur, the earliest tetrapod fossils of ichthyostega were found on a North sea island because of a failed balloon trip to the north pole, dipnoan, stratigraphy, palimpset, exaptation, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (well its's 70% correct), Turing patterns in biology, mesenchyme, apical, George Oster at Cal gets a mention, olm (cave salamander), somite (embryonic precursor to vertebral column), homeotic and hox and homobox and heterobox genes, ruminants have lysozymes in their guts but we only have them in our blood and tears, Sonic Hedgehog proteins, pocket gopher cheek pouches are external and furred, DNA enhancers, correlated progression, Acanthostega was deaf but had fish-like pressure sensors, a Sargasso Sea frogfish grasps kelp like a monkey in a tree, porolepiform, cladogram, parsimoniously, apomorphy, synapomorphy, autapormorphy, symplesiomorphy, Bichir (long fish with many dorsal finlets), bowfin tuna have lungs to oxygenate their hearts while swimming hard near the surface of the mid-ocean, amniote, caecum, author says plumbing was a more important invention than blades, beaked whales have two axe blades for teeth, kangaroos have springs made of tendons in their legs that return 90% of the energy from the hop landing compression, Franciscana dolphin, dolphin talk is initiated by vibrating monkey lips near the melon, Hawaii U. has developed a dolphin sign language, condyle, dasyurids, porcpoisson (pig-fish) is the French source word for porpoise, ophiacodontid, gorgonopsian, venjukoviamorph, dentary, creodont, condylarth, artiodactyl, preissodactyl, mesonychid, archaeocete, plantigrade, the Andrewsarchus was an early carnivorous tetrapod as big as two lions, antechronical, whales pump up the blood pressure around their ears in deep dives to maintain ear isolation under pressure, Pakicetus is likely the oldest whale fossil yet found, five toed horses are rare and were reveared by the Romans and Greeks, some species of axolotl can lose their external gills if the temperature is right, some shrimp have slabs of photoreceptors on their backs to sense thermal vent glow, retinal tissue consumes 100 times as much energy as the same weight of any other body tissue, blind mole rats use coded foot thumps to communicate, symphysis, some boas have little stumps of legs, yapok, hull speed, anthracobunid, sirenian, acetabulum, remingtonocetid, Ambulocetus, Rodhocetus, Tankracetus, Gaviocetus, Dalanistes, basilosaurid, baseball vertebra allow whale tails to dip, doctrinaire, hippos once climbed the alps, relative (to body size) brain size is a better gauge of relative intelligence than discrete size, dolphins had higher EQ than hominids two million years ago, socialization and food diversity drives EQ (Encephalization Quotient), subtracting blubber weight (which need not be minded) improves cetacean EQ, reptiles moved back to the sea 16 times, punctuated equilibrium, and mosasaur.



The images are straight out of the book.   To the left is a cladogram of the origin of Tetrapods.  To the right is a provisional phylogeny of whales.

2018 2/24
KJ Parker Saevus Corax Captures the Castle His friend must protect the castle to save her "son" and Saevus must take it to save his "friends", so he does it without much violence and finds out the reason for the blackmail and ends up seeing his not so dead wife who has been brainwashed against him, so he gets even with his mother-in-law.  Our hero mutters "not giving a stuff" so I wonder if KJ is Aussie.  Novel diction: combe, tailboard, springal (an active young man), goyle (ravine), curtain wall, metalled road (early asphalt), holm oak, pintle, hypocaust (sub-floor heating), chape, pavis, eclogue (short pastoral poem), ogive (pointed arch), suppositious, meretricious (attractive but without value), precentor, introit, cornelwood (a hard dogwood used for javelins), dock leaf, cartulary, gazeteer (a geographical index), hessian string (sisal), pipeclay, and leat (mill feed trench). 2023 2/24
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Busy Body Everybody hates the safety inspector, especially for making murderers take down their Christmas lights.  Novel diction: tcha, Merchant Ivory [films] view, crinklies, and taking the waters (bathing in a hot spring). 2010 2/24
Jaime Green The Possibility of Life What, where, when and how is life?  Jaime cites many authors I have read (Sue Burke mentioned three times), including science and science fiction writers.  She doesn't cite Nuevel but says something about aliens being dug up in parts.  The possibilities seem endless and rare at the same time.  How could we communicate with ET's when we still have several ancient languages that haven't been translated yet?  Novel diction and stuff: retcon, synthetic bacteria, 5044 exoplanets discovered so far, astrometry, ethnography, Caltech made a short film of bees stealing NASA equipment, dolphin embryos have legs, thylacine, cuscus (animal), xeric, mulefa, alien epigenetic evolutiion, Star Trek alien Alfa 177 was a dog in costume, not all exoplanets are likely to have abundant iron for plant photosynthesis (ours is churned up by plate tectonics), Circe the dolphin gave her trainer a tine ot for not definning her food, therolinguistics, MacGuffin, shibboleth, Kardashev scale of technology, technosignature, Oumuamua was a visiting asteroid that sped through the solar system, Frank and Sullivan pessimism line, Stapledonian timescales, Venusian phosphine PH3 detection has been discounted, solaristics, logogram, semiotician, and the pulsar map symbol. 22023 2/24
Richard Dawkins Climbing Mount Improbable An anti-creationism thesis, this book gives several details (including computer simulation) for step wise evolution for spider webs, molusc shells, eyes, arthropod segmentation and the fig tree/fig wasp mutualism.  Novel diction and stuff: pensée, Gradgrinian, designoid, pitcher plants contain maggots and their insides have more oxygen than their outsides, mason bees build pots, compass termite mounds all line up north-south, biomorph, Blind Watchmaker is author's program, garden cross spiders make eight different kinds of silk from eight different glands, spiders eat their webs to recycle the silk, cribellate spider webs are made with hackled threads, spiderweb spokes are not hackled nor gluey, spiders first strand ends in a kite to pull it to a distant fixing point, spiders make a vee first then a wye for the first three spokes, the initial spiral of a spiderweb is replaced by a final sticky spiral, male spiders pluck a web or mating line to greet a female, some New Guinea spiders build a ladder web, Pasilobus spiders reel in prey, bola spiders throw bolas, MoveWatch and NetSpinner are spider web algorithms, Darwinism is erroneously thought of as a process of chance but natural selection is determined by success not chance like the mutation component, fillip, tapir noses grasp leaves, saltation (macro-mutation), intermediates are not labeled by biologists and the a or b speciation blurs the truth, aerial plankton, Cal developed a wing evolution model, colugo, Atlantic flying fish, flying squid, hatchet fish flap their fins in flight, freshwater snails breathe air, stoneflies sail, there are nine basic eye types, butterflies have simple eyes in their genitals, English light switches go down for on, cup eyes, the nautilus has pinhole eyes, Nielson and Pelger eye evolution program, jumping spiders scan a long strip of retinas, scallop eyes are like reflecting telescopes with chromatic aberation correction, ommatidium, Ampelisca eyes are single chambered, some crustaceans have fiber optic eyes, there are three species of four-eyed fish, Blind Snailmaker program, the Spirula's shell is internal, Algorithmic beauty of seashells book, trachymedusae, most animals have segments that evolve separately, haltere, telson, arthromorph, tagma, homeotic, antennapedia, uropod, kaleidoscopically restricted embryology enhances evolution by closing off unfruitful paths, evolution of improved evolvability, bucket orchid, there are around 900 fig species and 900 fig wasp species, Turing's code breaking was key to the allied victory in WWII but he was forced to take hormones to "cure" his homosexuality and committed suicide because of it, figs are in the mulberry family and ficus genus, you need a lens to see a fig wasp, female fig wasps are impregnated before birth, banyan trees are strangler figs, hyperparasite, some fig wasps have winged and unwinged males, dioecious, male fig trees make their figs seem female to fig wasps, and vicarious selection. 1996 1/24
KJ Parker Saevus Corax Deals With the Dead He does save us (if you are part of his team that recycles battlefield leavings) despite the worst efforts of money controllers in the guise of religions and superior forces.  Novel diction: bodkin (thick needle), fratchety (argumentive), effete, dissipate, sybaritic (self-indulgent), truckle (small barrel-shaped cheese), alembic, aconite (wolfsbane), bowser (tanker), rapprochement resumption of harmonious relations), rine (ditch), myrmidon (powerful lackey), wodge (wad), poncy, fascines (sticks used to cover marshy ground), and clent (steep hillside). 2023 1/24
Patrick Rothfuss The Narrow Road Between Desires The fantastical best is Bast, who is a fae contrast.  He cons children at the lightning tree, and then risks his life to set some free.  The preface says "you might not want to buy this book" because it is a rehash of the Lightning Tree which I enjoyed years ago...but this is one of the best short stories ever; it is much more wild and wicked and wise...wait, that's what Rothfuss says of his boys Oot and Cutie in the author's notes.  Novel diction: widdershins (CCW=unlucky), deasil (CW=lucky), embril (made up word for seeing charms), ordal (out-portion), gemling and dennerling and raum and trow (fictional fae creatures), azzie (slang for assizes), and nadgers. 2023 1/24
Johnjoe McFadden Life is Simple A treatise on Occam's Razor and how it shaved dogma and cut through to experimental science and elegant mathematical models.  It starts with an escape from the anti-pope in Avignon on a galley of the HRE, cites the razor's rise in Vinci, helps simplify the solar system, encourages scientists to find simple solutions, and ends with Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS).  Novel diction and stuff: 14th–century friar William of Ockham said that for an explanation entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, oblate, planetes is Greek for wandering stars, there are seven days in the week because the ancients added the sun and the moon to the five eyeball-able planets, Grosseteste in 1225 determined that the colors of a rainbow were due to refraction, transubstantiation, scientia, tonsured, unraked, reportatio, quadlibets, fideism, calumny, Avignon had no sewers and was renown for its stink, Popes issue bulls, Dulcinites, Jesus' purse argument, rebec, Landini, Samos proposed heliocentricity in 250 AD but (idiotic) Aristotle squashed the idea, Tycho Brahe had a silver nose, seigneurial, Kepler's mom was imprisoned for being a witch and died shortly after he got her out, nuncio, Galileo is the father of experimental science, principle of Galilean invariance, Boyle missed meeting Galileo by one day and is also considered to be the father of experimental science, publishing Newtons Principia was delayed because the Royal Society had used up the budget on an unsuccessful book on fishes. Trevithick built the first steamer car called the puffing devil in 1801, a torpedo fish is like an electric eel, Galen discovered nerves in the 4th century, electricus is Latin for amber, Ben Franklin's kite was not struck by lightning (which could have killed him) but the charge in the clouds was transferred to his key in a jar, electrophori, Alfred Wallace wrote to Darwin and about natural selection before Darwin published his book that he'd worked on for ten years (they remained friends for life), Wallace's Sarawk law and the Wallace line, trumpery, Mendel studied physics under Doppler, haplodiploidy in eusocial male insects, naked mole rats are blesmols and not rats, pseudogenes, use it or lose it is as important as survival of the fittest in genetic evolution, Einstein's dad was an EE, Noether theorem, Weyl gauge theory, principle of least action, law of conservation of leptons, our universe has evolved to be good at making black holes, maybe there is a DNA for the universe, and Occamstrasse. 2021 1/24
Janet Evanovich Going Rogue: Rise and Shine Twenty-Nine Connie and Vinnie take turns being hostages, but, with help from Rangeman and the three dweebs, Stephanie Plum saves them both.  Novel diction: pignoli (a cookie) and dilly dilly. 2022 1/24
Paul Nurse What is Life? A nice mix of science and philosophy from a Nobel prize winner (with several anecdotes about meeting other Nobel prize winners) with emphasis on the cell (his specialty, derived from wee1 brewer's fission yeast).  Novel diction and stuff: Schrodinger wrote a book also titled What is Life? with respect to thermodynamics, nerve cells can be several feet long and an egg yolk is one cell, cell membranes are two molecules thick, Mendel used over 10,000 pea plants in some of his experiments, Mendelism, 14 chromosomes in peas, 46 chromosomes in humans, 400 chromosomes in Atlas blue butterflies, 22,000 human genes, if all of your DNA was stretched out end to end it would reach to the sun and back 65 times, Darwin's poetic, grandfather believed in evolution, broccoli (cabbage, cauliflower, kale and kohlrabi) is in the mustard family, life eats, reproduces, evolves and has evolved traits that persist, kinase cdc2 has persisted for a billion years, Pasteur determined that it was bacteria that fouled fermentation, 100 to 1000 chemical reaction occur simultaneously in cells (whereas a chemical plant may have only tens of reactions), 2000 invertase molecules to the width of a fine hair, phenomena of life are reactions catalyzed by enzymes which are 3D polymer proteins built principally of five elements (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphorous, life uses just 20 different amino acids, 40 million protein molecules in a yeast cell, (organelle) compartmentation allows diverse and contrary reactions within a cell, substrates hold enzymes, molecular motors cleave chromosomes, a ribosome builds 300 amino acids per minute, our mitochondria produce our body weight in ATP every day, mitochondrion, phosphorylation, cyclin, cells use information to regulate themselves, technologists are studying use of DNA for data storage, only a fifth of our genes are normally turned on and others are only turned on sporadically, repressors and activators, in E coli a certain sugar binds with a repressor protein to repress its repression of digestion of that sugar, cells contain oscillators, some oscillators measure time in plants or enable rhythmic walking or flying in animals, wetware is fluid and hardware is static, cross-generational epigenetic inheritance is rare in mammals, if the first two cells of a sea urchin are split apart they will grow in to two perfect half sized sea urchins, signal molecule gradients help define a cell's growth plan, Turing's reaction diffusion model helps explain module shaping in life, life is messy and imperfect but survives, amounts of CDK and cdc2 grow with cell growth and are key to cell reproduction, some NGO's blocking GMO development are preventing world good (like getting vitamin A from golden rice), knowledge and not idealogy should drive the common good, synthetic biology, the author proposes that a virus is alive when it is active in a host cell and not alive when it is inert outside of a host, and life may have begun with primitive enzyme and protein building RNA inside a lipid bubble at hydrothermal vents.  Nurse's definition of life: a self-sustaining chemical and physical machine built around information-encoding polymers that have been produced through evolution by natural selection. 2020 12/23
Paco Calvo Planta Sapiens A discussion about the possibility that plants are sapient.  The author is cautious but presents several good arguments for vegetable intention.  The last couple of chapters devolve into a diatribe about phytoethics: a vegetarian cares about animal treatment but what about the carrots and peas?  Novel diction and stuff: Mauritus has many odd animals, author works in the MINT (minimal intelligence) lab in Spain, shy plants and Venus fly traps under anesthetic don't react to touch and seeds don't germinate, bacteria and mitochondria can also be anesthetized, heliotropic, Cornish mallow kept in the dark for days still predicted where the sun would rise, phytomelatonin, contractile properties in plant motor organs are like muscles, wild plants are better subjects for plant perception study, 0.00016 percent of our eyeballed data is brain processed, zooxantellae, tulip mania (like in Burke's Dual Memory), spadice, biosemiotics, Darwin wrote a paper on climbing plants which included the term circumnutating, telegraph plant, eyes of different kinds have evolved over 40 times, cruel vines grab pollinator's tongues, pollinium, Hyderabad leaning palm tree, zoocenterism, walking palm, yakushimensis, tomatoes release canibalism inducing chemicals when attacked by caterpillars, more starch grains remain on the sunny side of a plant through the night which pulls the plant in that direction, abscisic acid is a stress hormone for signalling stoma dilation, GABA is annother signal acid, there is cross talk between root and shoot, phenotypic plasticity, the plant lexicon includes over 1,700 volatile cocktails which are "smelled" by the same and different species of plants and animals, American sea rocket plant, Arabidopsis detects wavelengths of neighbors to adjust growth direction strategy, mimosa habituatoin can last 28 days, a touch by a bee makes a flower breathe faster, phytonervous, Liz Van Volkenburgh of UW "xxxx", the brain sees a concave face as convex, tench, some plants eject salt, seraphic, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer and daughter of poet Lord Byron, surface tension automatically makes bee hive cells hexagonal (no bee intent), octopus arms are ganglionated, skopotropism, phytosemiotics, affordance, plants have no image forming organs and animal eyes have retinas or chambers, a Cal squirrel experiment found some to be more bolshy, gloxinia breeding reduced genetic diversity whilst increasing coloration diversity, delectation, some GMO plants have escaped and gone feral, anthropophilia, anthophilia, a plant might be like a locked-in patient (cognizant but incapable of communication), auxin, carbon nanotubes embedded in leaves can detect ethylene and other stress signals, cyano and regular bacteria express genes differently from night to day, zap and zip is used to detect consciousness in coma patients, phytosentience, and flat pack fast growing timber will not offset green house emissions like a mature forest despite political hype. 2022 12/23
Rhys Bowen Murphy's Law Molly flees Ireland where she has left a less-than-noble for dead, meets a woman who asks her to take her place escorting her two children to New York (because of TB), and upon arrival gets caught up in a murder investigation that she barely survives solving.  A pretty good yarn.  Novel diction: brilliantine, doorstops of bread, and assize (court). 2011 12/23
Rhys Bowen The Amersham Rubies A short story wherein Molly Murphy quickly determines that the stolen rubies are fakes by the black marks on the victims neck. 2011 11/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin:There Goes the Bride Aggie solves the murder of a step-daughter on the morning just before her wedding to an unenthusiastic James. Novel diction: his side of the church (same age), naice, real ale, et à bientôt (see you soon).

Susan Burke Dual Memory An ExtraT (author's term for an ET from our own solar system) inhabits a PDA and helps an orphan artist defeat a hospital island's invaders. The novel is a work in dualities: the protaganist, Tonio is a man but with many feminine qualities; the island leaders, Thules, are caring doctors but cruel; the independent machine and ExtraT, Par, revises his memory from time to time to become more animate; Tonio loves art despite not being educated in it or even literate and seems to know more about it than the other artists on the island (who are endowed by ExtraT traders); and Dr. Wirosa's name is often followed by "they" (for Thules but, seemingly, also for just him, as in "Wirosa is a lot of things, but deep down they’re truly good").  The book ends with Par naming his progeny Apolloodorus (after a spidery crater on Mercury).  Novel diction and stuff: quiddity, chiaroscuro, invideous, vanitas, soap bubbles freeze in the arctic air.

A few days later a crossword had the clue "commercial add on term" with the answer being xtra ∴ ExtraT's are ET's containing commercial terms!  Then there is Par, who resides in a PA (Personal Assistant - so what does the R stand for?  Resident, radical, robot).  Par is average except in golf where it is a pro par - above par - following that course, Par is above par for a brain in a box.  What of Thules?  Besides living in Thule (the Romans' most northern of climes), its a Triumph tulip (all the characters' names in this novel are names of tulips).  And director Dr. Wirosa - another tulip but also a hybrid savoy (Italian royalty - so maybe he's a "royal we") cabbage.  		2023 11/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin: A Spoonful of Poison The vicar's wife laces jam with LSD but the handsome widower is the one to watch out for.  Aggie, jealous of Toni's success, publicity and youthful good looks decides to set her up with her own detective agency and chase Sylvan.  Novel diction: dib dib whatever, dowager's hump, window tax, gamin (street urchin) cut, dreck (trash), rood screen, and stacked heels. 2008 11/23
MC Beaton & RW Green Death of a Traitor A good page turner this.  Hamish and his one shot DS save the good people of Lochdub from a blackmailer's cache, suss out a not-so-Polish pet beating spy, and give the credit to Jimmy Anderson who, from his hospital bed, promises to never drink and drive again.  Novel diction: Scotsmen formed the French Gardes Écossaises, cromach (shepherd's hook), besom (broom of twigs), evron plant or cloudberry, Crannog (artificial island), braw (fine), whin (gorse), I'm that hungry I could eat the hooves off a scabby donkey, I've a mouth like the bottom of a budgie's cage, get your skates on laddie (life's wearing and you're a long time dying), Battenberg (checkered) reflective markings, bung a few Garibaldis on the biscuit plate, did a bunk, a royal stag has 12 points and a monarch has 16, seaweed hollandaise, marcinek, wuzetka, piernik, angry daffodil, and a barefoot paddle in the sea. 2023 10/23
Jonathon Losos The Cat's Meow, How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa A herpetologist's book on her second love.  Domestication of cats began somewhere between Egypt, Crete and Turkey 10,000 years ago with the housecat's closest relative being the African wildcat (although Asian kitties have Asian wildcat in them too).  Novel diction and stuff: moggies, cats are semi-domesticated and easily go feral, domestication of dogs has led to many genetic differences from wolves but housecats are not very different from wildcats, 50% of dogs are pedigreed but only 15% of cats (due to cats being lose outsiide and choosing their own mates), adaptive radiation, ailurological, cats interact with other cats without meowing and meow primarily to people, barkabulary is better understood than meow-cabulary (which is cat specific - no universal cat language), lions are jointly raised, male cheetahs hang together, cat chowders act communally like lions, some ancient crocodiles lived on land and had hooves, kodkod, oncilla, jaguarundi, rusty-spotted cat (weighs only three pounds), caracal, serval, marbled cat, margay (whose ankle joints can swivel 180 degrees for descending trees), sand cat, tigrina, clouded leopard (three species now), intestines are longer and the brain smaller in a housecat vs. a wildcat, South American cats have 36 chromosomes but others have 38, terminological, the Scottish wildcat is the same species as the European wildcat and is more threatened from cross breeding with housecats than from predation or poaching, there are both North and South African wildcat species (as well as European, Asian and Chines Mountain wildcats), speciation is no longer based on interbreeding but genetic differences, hybridization tends to hide evolutionary change, the earliest pet cat was found in a 9500 year old grave in Cyprus, commensals, a ferret is a domesticated pole-cat, cartonnage, Egyptians mummified crocodiles, snakes, baboons, monkeys and lots of cats, Egyptian military expeditions retrieved cats from the enemy and called Phoenecian sailors "cat thieves", some Egyptian cat paintings have them wielding knives, Vikings sailed with cats, novenary, the Tamrra Maew is a 14th century cat treatice, cats average 43 mutations (per birth) and humans 40% more, Meowingtons cat website, pelage, cobby,  pinnae, squittens (cats with a genetic deformity which causes a partial formation or complete absence of the radius bone making it resemble a squirrel) and Perians and Manx and Scottish Folds have serious health issues, the Asian leopard cat is immune to feline leukemia, DNA testing has reduced Persian PKD from 35% to 20%, outcrossing, Secret Life and Cat Watch are BBC shows using kitty cams, catio, cat allergies are due to Fel-D-1 protein in cat saliva and Purina makes a kibble that reduces it by up to 50%, there are very large black housecats in Madagascar, affiliative, kittens bcome friendlier if handled often and by multiple people, neotony, a kitty litter usually has multiple paternity, baculum, miw or miu means he or she that mews, there was no such thing as a Viking helmet with horns, an M is required on the forehead to be a tabby, agouti is a technical term for ticked hair, totoiseshells and calicos are all female as the coloration gene is sex associated, eumelanin, and phaeomelanin.  Cat breeds named: Singapura, Munchkin, Egyptian Mau, Persian, Abyssinian (friendliest), Siamese (most fetching), Balinese, European Burmese (most playful), American Burmese, Skogkatt or Wegie (Norwegian Forest cat), Sokoke, Ragdoll, Devon Rex, Bengal (with rosettes), Savanah (half Serval), Somali, Sphynx, Tonkinese, Russian Blue, Havana Brown, Japanese Bobtail, Chartreux, LaPerm, Scottish Fold, American Curl, Korat, Ocicat, Colorpoint (caterwaulers), Oriental, Thai, Lykoi, Donskoy, Chausie, Safari, Caracat, Serengeti (some of which are black with ghost spots), Toyger, Maine Coon (weigh about 28 pounds, are the least talkative and are known to like swimming),and Snowshoe. 2023 10/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin: Kissing Christmas Goodbye Agatha solves a poisoning just in time to avoid hemlock doctored toothpaste.  Toni learns to drive and is befriended by a nice guy that's just a bit too old for her and, instead, becomes an item with Bill Wong.  Agatha's Christmas dinner is almost ruined by Roy's over-zealous use of a snow machine rented by he and Charles, but everyone laughs off the smashed window and has a good time.  Novel diction: pushbike, Aertex blouse, hooded eyes, totty, gurt (great), an atheist is someone no invisible means of support, mangelwurzel, undergardener, feeling off-colour, cloth head (fool), Christmas cracker, chestnut soup, and brandy butter. 2007 10/23
Kin'nosuke (AKA Sōseki) Natsume I Am A Cat

A tale of a kitty cat with no name, reluctantly taken in by his master: of who the cat says in chapter 1: "For if it's possible to sleep this much and be a teacher, why, even a cat could teach."  No name (who reads his master's diary) and his feline friends have a very low opinion of humanity.  In chapter 2 no name says "but since heaven has not seen fit to dower the human animal with an ability to understand cat language, I regret to say that I let the matter [master's inability to discern that a postcard picture was of me] be" and there is a haiku stating that “on spring days cats read books or dance.”  However my dimwitted master [not Cat Stevens but Al Stewart I guess] seems not to understand, for he looked puzzled and said to himself, “Can this be a Year of the Cat?”  [a bit later]  If I went to a barber and had my face shaved, I wouldn’t look much different from a human.  Had I the time to keep a diary, I’d use that time to better effect; sleeping on the veranda.  I am deeply grateful to my master. What’s more, I take every opportunity to show the respect due to his perspicacity. I do not get particularly angry with O-san’s ill-treatment of me, for she does not understand why I am as I now am. But when, one of these days, some master sculptor, some regular Hidari Jingorō, comes and carves my image on a temple gate; when some Japanese equivalent of the French master portraitist, Steinlein, immortalizes my features on a canvas, then at last will the silly purblind beings in shame regret their lack of insight.  Concentrated in the tip of my tail there is sufficient of the spirit of chivalry for me to take it upon myself to venture upon knight-errantry.  Cats walk as if on air, as if they trod the clouds, as quietly as a stone going light-tapped under water, as an ancient Chinese harp touched in a sunken cave.  In surprising ways my master knows himself, and would with absolute humility accept that not a tear need fall if a botched wooden statue is left undecorated to rot away in some dark back-corner of a sculptor’s shop. But when a statue is superbly carved, when its basic quality is noble, then no effort should be spared and no time wasted in ensuring that it be given gilding of appropriate splendor.
Novel diction: takadiastase (an enzyme derived from koji that helps digest starches), rhodomontade (bluster associated with tomcat Rickshaw Blacky), sasanqua (a camellia), purblind, thanatophile, scurrilities, phiz (facial expression), indurate, empyrean, navvy (road or canal excavating laborer), pansophic
1911 10/23
Edited by HawaH The Poetry of Yoga A collection of yoga related poetry with plenty of zen, especially from HawaH and Swami Ramananda, but almost completely lacking in rhyme and meter. 2014 10/23
Mary Oliver Dog Songs A collection of poems by a Pulitzer Prize winner who loves her dogs. 2013 10/23
Old Possums Book of Practical Cats TS Eliot TS Eliot is a master poet and he wrote a book of only cat poems (with one or two dogs thrown in) that includes The Naming of Cats [is a difficult matter], Gumbie Cat, Growltiger's Last Stand, The Rum Tum Tugger [is a curious cat], The Song of the Jellicles, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, Old Deuteronomy, Of the Aweful Battle, Mr Mistoffelees, Macavity: The Mystery Cat, Gus: The Theater Cat, Bustopher Jones, Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat, The Ad-dressing of Cats, and Cat Morgan Introduces Himself. 1982 10/23
Henry Beard Zen for Cats Things Having a Dog Nature (Bao-wao): mud, toadstool, cinderblock, thunder, fleas, and alarm clock.  Things Having a Cat Nature (Miao): law^n, daffodil, toss pillow, mist, fireflies, and wind chimes.  Butsuneko Shingyo: The Teachings of Buddha's Cat.  Nekoka no Roshi: The Zen Master Cats.  A dog has entered the front yard unbidden. This grave affront to the honor of the household cannot be tolerated.  Ninja-gaku: The Art of the Silent Attack.  Hikkurikaebana: The Art of Demolishing Formal Flower Arrangements.  Spring winds blow - Plum blossoms fly by - At the speed of smell. 1997 10/23
Henry Beard Poetry for Cats Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy, Kubla Kat and other timeless poetry written by cats.  Beard picks almost all of my favorite brief poems to spoof...and a few that seem a bit long in the cat tooth. 1994 10/23
Henry Beard Advanced French for Exceptional Cats Wonderful cat picture book.  Picture this:  I am the cat.  Le chat, c'est moi.  I am descended from notable cats.  Je descends de chats eminents.  Le Chat d'Aristote, Cléopâtre, Confucius, Leonardo, Einstein, Seurat et Freud.  It is absolutely essential that fish be fresh.  Il est absolument nécessaire que les poissons soient fiais.  I nap, therefore I am.  Je fais un somme, donc je suis.  I am inside, and I want to go out.  Je suis dedans, et je veux sortir.  I am outside, and I would like to come in.  Je suis dehors, et je voudrais rentrer.  The return to one's territory after a prolonged absence should be as nonchalant as possible.  II faut qu'après un éloignement prolongé l'on fasse son retour au territoire de la façon la plus nonchalante. 1992 10/23
Henry Beard French for cats I purr.  Je ronronne.  I do not "fetch".  Je ne "rapporte" pas.  Perhaps there has been some misunderstanding.  II y a peut-être eu un malentendu.  Remove yourself from my nap place at once.  Sortez de l’endroit où je fais mes sommes immédiatement. 1992 10/23
Mark Reibstein Wabi Sabi “Poor Wabi Sabi!  [A simple brown cat.]  So ordinary!” 2008 10/23
Deborah Coates Cat Haiku Happy haiku and nicely inked cat drawings from a dog loving author (this book is not listed with her other works on her web site). 2001 10/23
Zachary Auburn (Pres. of the Am. Assoc. of Patriots) How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety Also Talk to Your Cat About...EVOLUTION, ABSTINENCE, ONLINE SAFETY, DRUGS, PUBERTY, POSTAPOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL and SATANISM.  Cat tongue in cheek satire featuring some nicely photo-shopped purrtriotic cat pics.
 2016 10/23
Calvin Trillin Dog Fight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse The title says it all.  Examples (2009-2011): the Mitt gambit and the Obama mamba.

 2012 10/23
Robert Sears The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump The author puts Trump quotes into somewhat poetic order but could have introduced more meter and rhyme...and humor.  Excerpt: People are constantly attacking my hair, I think it’s very unfair, Imagine if I made that statement? It would be the electric chair 2017 10/23
MC Beaton & RW Green Death of a Laird A Hamish Macbeth short story: a terrible storm strands Hamish at a sporting lodge on Loch Naglar where the laird has gone missing - Hamish finds him in a boot and finds the killer on high.  Novel diction and stuff: Scotland has 30,000 lochs, skivvy, skirlie tatties smell braw, jings, smokie pie and gin swagger. 2022 10/23
John Scalzi Starter Villain A sagging substitute teacher inherits a crime organization with typing cats and talking dolphins and a competing organization that meets at and partially destroys the Bellagio Hotel.  Como no?  Novel diction and stuff: toxoplasmosis, Eames chair, staganography, bespoke (custom made), cis woman, chaebol (South Korean family run conglomerate), oppositional, ad hominems, and Mary Kowal's cat (Elsie) communicates via a button board. 2023 10/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin: Love, Lies and Liquor James drags Aggie to the seaside resort of his childhood only to find it worn down, threatened by sea surge and murder but saved by a storm driven window shard.  She swears off of James by the end of this episode but...who knows. Novel diction: barbecues are for Yanks, Aussies and islanders, Barbour coats [are still made from waxed cotton], let down the window [in the car], blowsy appearance, eye veil, [slip on] espadrilles, corniche (cliff-edge road), tooth mug, glasshouse (military prison), Snoth-on-Sea, pillock, duckboards and tatty (worn). 2006 10/23
Mark Kurlansky Salt The author explains how salt impacted the world from 3000 BC in China until today.  Novel diction and stuff: an adult contains about 250 grams of NaCl, mummies were salted and some had onion eyes (only royal mummies were preserved with natron salt), holy salt often accompanies holy water, Chinese writing and salt gathering date back 4,000 years, soy beans can be yellow, green, purple, black or brown, vegetables take two days to pickle in a jar as lactic acid evolves while yeast is held at bay by salt, hydraulic engineer Li Bing water gauge statues date back to 0 BC, in 200 AD the Chinese used bamboo and mud piping to transport natural gas from brine wells to salt evaporation boilers and by 1100 AD sophisticated bamboo mained water to affluent homes, Egyptians salted foul (including duck, geese, pigeons and pelicans) and put salt into leavened bread and brine soaked olives, in 2800 BC Egyptians were trading for salted fish with Sicilian Phoenicians, a 40,000 camel caravan hauled salt to Timbuktu, Celtic alpine salt mines date back to 1300 BC, Gaul is Roman for "salt people" and Celt is Greek for same, Celts once were in all of Europe and much of Asia (there are 1000 BC Celt mummies in Uyghur region of China), Celts invented salt cured ham and chain mail and the three foot long iron sword but were subsumed by the Romans, Rome subsidized salt and olives except during the Punic Wars, the word salad is derived from Romans salting greens, lovage (parsley like herb), rue (aromatic evergreen) garum (Roman fish sauce), spikenard (bitter-sweet herb), Venice was not part of Rome and originated from lidi (sand bars) and their salt administration was key to their mercantile expansion, Ibiza was a large Genoan salt producer, Xanadu is actually Shando which was visited by teenage Marco Polo, lasanon (Roman cooking dish and root word for lasagna), the Parma city state conquests included all 31 salt sites in Italy to supply their prosciutto (from whey fed pigs) and parmigiano production, erbette (chard-like veg), parmesan cheese has only a one year life in wheel form, Genoa was occupied by Rome, Carthage, German and Muslims, Genoa salt production in Provence and Sardinia stole the Mediterranean salt market, the Cradona salt mountain was mined by Wilfred the Hairy in 870 or so, Giovani Cabato became John Cabot when he switched allegiance from Genoa to England, Basques were the first whalers and were renown for their ship building which was based on overlapping hull planks as learned from the Vikings and sailed 1,000 miles out to sea to acquire cod to salt, Normans are Vikings, Basques (like Vikings) may have been in North America before other Europeans, salt was once used to cure leather, clean chimneys and solder pipe, the Celtic duchy of Breton was exempt from French salt tax, Dylan Thomas was from south Wales, paludier (peasants that were allowed to produce salt), Irish corned beef made with Breton salt was a mainstay of the British navy, Zeeland peat salt poachers threatened dikes, finnan haddie is Scottish smoked salmon, surströmming (fermented herring) was a Swedish army staple, in 1300 the German Hanseatic league ridded the Baltic of piracy and conquered the salt market, the huge Dutch herring fleet was well armed but lost the war with England, Charle DeGaulle said that nobody can bring together a nation with 250 kinds of cheese, the French call the channel la manche (the sleeve), nef (an elaborate table decoration in the shape of a ship for holding such things as table napkins and condiments), a 1268 French cook book included salted coot, the Lorraine in 1776 was famous for brine springs and surkrut, Tuscans used salt corks in the Camargue, Roquefort is made with moldy bread in moldy caves, Collioure is Catalan and famous for salted anchovies, salt mines made Salzberg wealthy, sinkwerk, the Wieliczka salt mine has a grand hall, one pood is 36 US pounds, there are 96 zolotniki in a pound and 1/3 in a lot, bigos (Polish stew), which is Anglo-Saxon for salt works, sward (bacon rind), collops (bacon slabs), annatto seeds are used to dye butter, in the 18th century England anchovy sauce became known as ketchup or catsup but the American love-apple catsup has no anchovy in it, Cheshire forests were denuded for salt making fuel, zipa (Chibcha monarch), Castliean Hernan Cortez first conquered the Aztec salt works, the silver patio process was developed by the Spanish in Mexico, Bermudan cedar sloops were once the fastest vessels in the Caribbean, the British did not allow Cuban salt to go to the colonies and sold them subsidized Cheshire salt to depress local salt making and completely blockaded salt imports in 1775 and (post independence) established an embargo after the Treaty of Paris, the Battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought on Breed's Hill, Cape Cod windmills were called saltmills, France once punished suicide by salting and imprisoning the corpse, gabelle (French salt tax), oing (salted pig fat), Cape Codders invented roll-away sheet metal roofs that greatly improved salt works in their climate, Penns avoided salt tax by trading it for black market whiskey which led to George Washington squelching the whiskey rebellion, the British burned down Washington DC in the War of 1812, the Erie canal brought Oneaga salt into competition with the slave labor salt of Kanawha, Fulton did not invent the steamboat (Newcomen did) but built the first steamboat company on the Ohio and Mississippi, Union ships blockaded the South primarily to interrupt salt importation and the Union navy continually destroyed southern salt works, iniquitous, pyroligneous acid (wood vinegar), a 2500 BC salt works mound was discovered in the Louisiana bayou, New Orleans was the third largest US city in 1841, insalubrious, brine shrimp and bacteria turn salt flats green and red and improve salt crystal formation efficiency, a clerihew is a short comic or nonsensical verse, typically in two rhyming couplets with lines of unequal length and referring to a famous person, Birdseye invented flash freezing and 250 gadgets, Gandhi led a salt rebellion that attracted thousands to join him on a trek to British proscribed salt flats, a body floats in the Dead Sea like an air mattress, Mount Sodom near Jericho is made of salt, the Shen Hai brine well was 33000 feet deep in 1835, Chinese buses fueled from a giant natural gas bladder on the roof still operate, iodized salt isn't kosher, leitmotif, socker-saltad, fauvism, the "big bastard" is any Sicilian scuba diver who drives salmon through and into net "rooms", Morton was the first to douse salt with calcium silicate as an anti-caking agent and iodine to counter goiter and brain disorders (at the request of the U.S. health department), 51% of U.S. salt consumption is for deicing roads, Avery Island peppers are now only grown for seed and most of Tobasco peppers are grown in Central America but the island salt and oil extraction are still ongoing, Kauai (and all of Hawaii) was once called Atooi by the British, kigsall (salted pork) and Guérande salt marshes. 2002 10/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon The Raisin Detective Agency solves three murders with a celebration in Spain.  Novel diction: misery-gut, cream tea, mimsy, hurr, boot sale, tattersall, prattled, Peter Pan collar, her indoors, she was so wet (gaga over a man), load of cobblers, poacher's pocket and cheese plant. 2005 9/23
LE Modesitt, Jr Councilor Book 2 in the Grand Illusion series.  Also sped read and also full of too much routine: every meal, every drink, every drive, every day.  The newly elected councilor marries and carries forward a bill for military control of the secret service and survives another attack (this one using a steam cannon).  Novel diction: burgher's delight (which Modesitt disdains). 2022 9/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance Agatha's neighbor and lead detective in her new agency, Emma, accidentally poisons an Irish assassin while stalking Charles and Agatha, only to be done in by a killer (who was after her ex-estate) lying in wait in Aggie's cottage.  Novel diction: waxed coat, rumbustious, ginny (like an old woman), "but so naff", wellie throwing competition, and bateau mouche. 2004 9/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin's First Case Dogsbody Agatha is sent to tell off a client accused of murder but her intuition tells her that he is innocent.  She barely survives this short story of outing the culprit and is rewarded with a PR company and a posh flat in London. 2015 8/23
Irene Pepperberg Alex and Me Alex the African Grey parrot, the smartest bird known to mankind, passed away in 2008.  He lived near Tucson for a while but mostly at Purdue and Harvard.  He could tell you how many blue blocks or green balls were on a plate (up to seven), the material (matter) of several different items and that something was different or persistent, taught himself the concept of none and to spell nut, taught other parrots, liked Haydn and disco and California Dreamin, and loved his owner despite her trying to maintain a scientific distance.  One time Alex asked a stranger (in a waiting room) if he wanted a nut, then if he wanted a banana, and then said "well, what do you want?"  After a toy parrot didn't respond to Alex' bid for a tickle he said "you turkey."  Neither of these two outbursts were taught but learned from eaves dropping.  Alex and Griffin would alternate "green" and "bean" for fun.  Koko sent condolences.  Dr Doolitlle's African Grey was named Polynesia. Parrots squint and blush when tickled on the neck.  Alan Alda interviewed Alex for a TV show.  Novel diction: formant. 2008 8/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House Aggie and Paul go underground to dig up a revolutionary diary desired by a murderous history don named Peter Frampton.  Included is a trip to Bag End in Hebberdon.  It's Charles at the finish with Agatha as the prof professes his guilt and suicides as the police (including Sgt. Evans) arrive.  Aggie saves Paul from being buried alive only to have her bouquet of thanks be tromped on by Paul's wife, Juanita.  The last line has Agatha saying that she is going to start up her own detective agency.  Novel diction: Burberry jacket, lay the ghost, tripped off, car off the road (not running), maquillage, Gorth (a fictitious planet that, in spelling, is close to Gor), fosseway, nouvelle cuisine, Roundheads and Cavaliers (English civil war), palladian window, it's life but not as we know it Jim (quoting Star Trek), black de rigueur, in a handbag, tea-dress, go off with shingles, allotment (a small patch of garden), got up the nose of people, tailback (pile-up behind an accident), sent off with a flea in your ear, odds and sods and rabbiting on. 2003 8/23
Jonas Jonasson The Prophet and the Idiot A rather dim-witted culinary genius is cheated of his inheritance by his diplomatic brother but finds consolation when he crashes his camper into that of a doomsday prophet and then parks it in an influencer's boat house.  They set straight the prophet's high school flame, the idiot's brother and the idiot's father (who is the asshole of the Condors) and gather up a billion dollars with a bit of help from the influencer's beau, Obama and Ban Ki-moon. 2023 8/23
Sylvain Neuvel For the First Time, Again The final book in the Take Them to the Stars series has Lola work with Samael and an alien to put the orb and necklace on a space probe to Pluto which seems to have foiled the alien invasion (in the first epilogue).  Novel diction and stuff: apoptosis, the alien passes kidney stones during metamorphosis, an infinite number mathematicians walk into a bar, the first orders a beer, the next orders half of a beer, the next orders a quarter and the next is cut off by the bartender who hands them all two beers and says, "Guys, know your limits", two random variables were talking in a bar and they thought they were being discrete but I heard them continuously, dev (mythological creature), a reference to Twins where Arnold lifts the Caddy to silence the car alarm, as dark as cow guts, I wonder if Venus and Mars or LOLA make Sylvain's short list playlist, AltaVista, eight feet tall aliens, some how Lola knows that Deutch Marks won't exist in a few months, emo dark, Frelighsburg Quebec for poutine, Pluto was named by an eleven year old girl named Venetia, heimtückisch (insidious), kidbei (Assyrian ground lamb with wheat, pine nuts and middle eastern spices), Ultima Thule (furthest place and once the name of a Kuiper belt object), some of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes were aboard the New Horizons probe, X-37 Space Plane, Joseph C Sharp's invisible weapon (silent microwaves can be sensed by the human brain as sound), Nesili is the Hittite language, plumery, bia-n-pt is Egyptian for iron from the sky, and manumit.  Alien sentences (she also speaks a little German): Het braghah shaht.  Saa shiinseh shreh,  Hagh shahghasht huh.  Shyesecht het? 2023 8/23
Sylvain Neuvel Until  the Last of Me A treasure hunt finds the orb that works with a necklace.  Aster helps with Voyager, breaks the rules and gets done in by a rueful Samael who puts the necklace to the orb to signal an alien invasion.  Novel diction and stuff: UCI did research on CFC's, the writing on the necklace is Akkadian (which seems odd for an alien artifact), googles (packaged vanilla cakes with cinnamon bits) and banana flips (banana custard filled packaged taco shaped cakes), sizar (at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge a sizar is an undergraduate who receives some form of assistance such as meals), pistre (Egyptian coin), shisha (molasses-based tobacco product heated in a hookah), Ganymede is larger than Mercury, kudurru (boundary stone used by the Kassites of ancient Mesopotamia), nomenklatura (a select list or class of people from which appointees for top-level government positions are drawn, especially from a Communist Party), kannab (name given to the cannabis plant by the ancient Persians), Uighurs (a largely Muslim ethnic minority group based mainly in the westernmost Xinjiang region), contubernium (a quasi-marital relationship in ancient Rome between a free citizen and a slave or between two slaves), Torysh (a valley in Western Kazakhstan also known as "The Valley of Balls"), Russian tortoises were the first beings to circle the moon and return alive, and minium was a cleric's red pigment and the root of the words illuminator and miniature. 2022 8/23
Sylvain Neuvel A History of What Comes Next A sci-fi story about alien saviors in or midst set among true rocketry events from WWII through 1961.  Thankfully, the pace is much faster than in Ken Follet's Century trilogy, but the Neuvel humorous spirit isn't reached until the fantastic notes following the conclusion.  Novel diction and stuff: biritch is similar to bridge, windmills sawed lumber for the Dutch navy that led to Dutch prosperity, heiden is a Dutch pagan, percipient, slyakot (muddy snowmelt), the Maqlu is an acient Akkadian text on witchcraft, kibsu is Akkadian for path and radi kibsi follow the path, hama-zan is Persian for all women and might be origin of Amazon, peltasts carried wicker shields and javelins, gorytos is a large quiver, Amazonian molly fish are gynogenesitic, Quwe was a kingdom in Solomon's time, Julia Child developed a shark repellent for the US Navy while she was in the OSS, Virginia Hall is a superhero, X20 Dyna-soar Spaceplane, Zib was a Russian acronym for Substitute for Missing Bobik (astro-dog), one Russian space dog was given to the Kennedys and Jack called the puppies pupniks, a silo explosion in Vandenburg blew the doors off and rained debris down as far away as the golf course, the viking's Kiev Rus empire included much of northern Europe and Asia, and Dr. Hans Seuss discovered that C14 is diminishing in the atmosphere (by dilution with burned fossil fuels which are so old they contain no C14). 2021 8/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate A new curate is too beautiful to believe and ends up being the death of himself and some more folks that Agatha gets to close to.  Her neighbor John gives her an engagement ring but it's not real.  Duck races and dandelion wine bring the town together and drive the Morris dancers mad.  Novel diction: myxomatosis, crazy-paving, car park (parking lot), COP is derived from Constable On Patrol, surplice, jumble sale (rummage sale), whist drive, dog's dinner (confused mess), mean (miserly), faggots (pork shoulder and pig liver meatballs). 2003 8/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came Agatha sees a frozen woman in a wedding dress float past her under a bridge and goes on to barely survive the chilling end of the story (with the aid of her new neighbor, a handsome, but robotic, crime novelist).  Novel diction: demist (instead of defog), Selkirk was the real Robinson Crusoe, Joseph Pilates developed his exercise system while interned in WW1, recce, string vest, remaindered, tiddly, the doorbell went again, the day was dry but misty, rub along (get along) and trestle-table. 2002 7/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell James' cancer is cured with a secretive stay at a French monastery while Aggie is left to root out his disappearance and the murder of his mistress.  Novel diction: fish-wife, pretty small beer, clumpy boots, poky (small and cramped), bits and bobs, Zimmer frame, sod's law, raddled, estuary English, stacked a dishwasher, biro (ballpoint pen) and ten-denier tights. 2001 7/23
Rob Eastaway Maths on the Back of an Envelope Although I didn't learn any new tricks except for the rule of 72 (which is really the rule of 69), this was a jaunty read with British witticisms and "wrong ballpark" anecdotes.  Novel diction: Fermi question, the average human body temperature is actually 98.2 degrees F, Zequals and faff. 2019 7/23
Agnijo Banerjee and David J. Darling Weird Maths: At the Edge of Infinity and Beyond It's a book about math so it's quite logical and I understood every word of it, and yet, I understood almost none of it.  Plus, it's not related to Weird Science at all.  Novel diction and stuff: bullae, adamantine, Lincos (a language based on math), quaternion, quartic, polytopoe, polychora, kata and ana (directions in the 4th dimension), the retina can perceive light down to 290 nms but, In adults, the crystalline lens blocks all UVA up to 400 nm, Senet (an Egyptian dice game), Pascal was a Jansenist, Champernownes constant, Bailey Borwwein Plouffe formula (for any one digit of pi), hotchpotch, Liouville quantum gravity (LQG), Koch snowflake, the Sierpiński sieve has a dimension of 1.58, the box dimension of a lung surface is 2.97 (almost a 3D object), Fatou dust, Feigenbaum constant, the distribution of matter in the universe is [nearly] fractal, Toto drummer Porcaro's drumbeats are fractal and not perfect like a robot's giving them more texture, quadrivium, trivium, maqam, anechoic, non-prime numbers are composite, Ulam spiral, Euler prime generating polynomial, Riemann hypothesis, harmonic series, Russell's paradox, renormalisation, projective geometry, TREE(3), Rayo's number, Abaham's number, myriad (Latin for ten thousand), tetration (order after addition, multiplication and exponentiation), pentation, tritri, googology, salad number, Peano arithmetic, homeomorphically, oodleverse, first-order oodle theory, quantum Hall effect, topological quantum fluid, the Brouwer fixed point theorem says that no matter how much you stir a glass of water one molecule of H2O will remain in the same place, the hairy ball theorem says that no matter how many times you brush it one hair will remain standing on end, the ham sandwich theorem says that no matter how you make one there is always a way to cut it with a simple plane such that both halves have the same amount of bread, ham and mustard, Euler polyhedra formula, homeomorphism, unknot (a noun), and unlink (also a noun), 2018 7/23
Alessandra Viola & Stefano Mancuso Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence A brief botany lesson that, in the end, unfortunately lacks scientific studies on root communication, calculation, memory, emergent behavior or swarm behavior.  Novel diction and stuff: plants comprise 99.7% of Earth's biomass, plants have more than 20 senses, plants manifest a swarm intelligence, cosmogonies, Hadith, the great classifier, Linnaeus, maintained that plants sleep, Darwin wrote six volumes on botany including the fundamental The Power of Movement in Plants and declared plants intelligent, myrmecophelia, lability, autotrophic, windweed, plants are each a colony, phototropism, phytochromes, cryptochromes, phototropins, decidduous trees incur vegitative rest in winter, Haberlandt hypothesized that plants epidermal cells act like lenses, plants use millions of different BVOC's (Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds) to communicate, plants exude methyl jasmonate to say that they're not well, roots taste for desireable salts and nutrients and their associated gradients, an insect must touch two of the three central hairs on a Venus fly trap within 20 seconds to trigger the trap, nepthene (pitcher plant) interiors are the smoothest things in nature and symbiotic ants maintain that smoothness, there are over 600 species of carniverous plants, protocarnivore plants kill insects but don't digest them directly, a Brazilian cerrado violet traps nematodes with specialized underground leaves, plants use mechanosensitive channels for a sense of touch, Mimosa pudica leaves curl up if touched by other than rain or wind, many flowers close up on pollinators for a while to ensure a good coating, climbing plants with tendrils that curl up on touch are outpacing non-climbers, phonobiology, hypogeal, plants sense humidity even at a distance, plants sense gravity and EM fields, gravitropism, some pines exhibit crown shyness, plants cooperate with kin, rhizosphere, plants and fungi exchange chemicals to set their intentions as do plants and bacteria (via the NOD factor), mitochondria likely originated from an intercellular symbiosis with bacteria, extending nitrogen fixing bacteria symbiosis from legumes to other food crops could be a huge boon, some plants invite enemies of herbivores via volatile chemicals and some reward the saviors, ancient corn contained caryophyllene to attract nematodes to fight off diabrotica bacteria but lost this trait and it had to be added back into GMO's via an oregano gene, allogamous, autarkic, monoecious, cleistogamous, consangineous, entomophilous, ornithophilous, chiropterophilous (like Joshua trees and other desert plants), Marcgravia evenia has sonar dish shaped leaves to attract bats, some plants use primates or marsupials or lizards as pollen vectors, site fidelity, lupine tints it's flowers blue after a pollinator visit, many orchids mimic pollinators including shape and color and texture and pheromones, most green or unripe fruit is full of toxins and some are deadly, Colossoma macropomum is a frugacious fish, some plants germinate in anthills, elaiosome, ineluctable, physicochemical, the root tip is an area of intense electrical activity, even a small plant may have more than fifteen million root tips, root tips form a network and display emergent behavior, nictinasty, pedicel, peduncle, plant leaves tend to take on an embrionic position at night but this behavior lessens as the plant ages, plantoids, Greenternet, phytocomputer, and we know less than ten percent of plant species.  From the internet: Growing roots are well known to generate electric fields around their extending apices where their magnitude is maximum. Such fields are changing when roots are subject to gravitational stimuli and are tightly linked with the polar transport of auxin, which controls root growth, tropism and root navigation. Moreover, they affect protein distributions, conformations and activities and play an important role in regulating endocytosis and the cytoskeleton. Plant roots have gravity sensors in each cell at the root's tip, which are comprised of dense particles called "statoliths" (as in jellyfish) that enable the roots to determine which way is down. One aspect of plant memory is epigenetics, where the plant, in response to a stimulus, undergoes histone and chromatin modification leading to changes in gene expression. Plant  circadian rhythms are controlled by genes associated with different spatial times that are activated when an environmental cue for that time is present. 2015 6/23
The Wood for the Trees


















 		 Richard Fortey



















 		 A British paleontologist of renown buys Grim's Dyke and chronicles it's history and nature by month (especially it's wood management for profit).  A very fun and interesting read despite having to look up a word on every page!  Novel diction: red slug, crab spider, peacock butterfly, red kites have a mewing call (they mew), purple thorn moth, blood vein moth, rotifer, froghopper, parisitoid wasps introduce a virus into their hosts to retard the host's immune system, hymenopterans, noctuids, ichneumonoid, biological diversity is enhanced through management of the wood or else it would succumb to beetles, harlequin longhorn beetle, the silpha atrata beetle injects snails with a venom to make them more digestible, dor beetle, rove beetle, elytra, chaffinch, whitethroat, fieldfare, infusoria (microscopic freshwater organisms), leatherjacket, pooter (a glass jar used for collecting small insects), fallow deer, muntjac deer, hymenopterist, coleopterist, dipterist, lobster moth, pug moth, cockchafer, barbastelle bat, serotine bat, Myotis bat, noctule bat, pipistrelle bat, noctuid moth, tree creeper, jenny wren, brimstone butterfly, magpie toadstool, basidia, ascomycetes, smoothcap, haircap, wrinkled peach mushroom, cep (an edible saprotrophic basidiomycetous woodland fungus), webcap, brittlegill, dead man's fingers, saffron drop bonnet mushroom, candle-snuff fungus, sulphur polypore fungus, melick, cuckoo-pint, whitebeam, straw bristle moss, wood bristle moss, fork moss, thyme moss, silk moss, fairy heads, crestwort, veilwort, gromwell, resupinate (inverted or seemingly turned upside down, as the flowers of most orchids and the fruiting bodies of certain fungi), peduncle, cupule, knarry, enchanter nightshade, ploughman's spikenard, dog's mercury, convolvulus, buckler fern, pelargonium, pinchbeck, pry (small leaved lime), thorow wax plant, candytuft, spurge, goldilocks buttercup, speedwell, coumarin, woodruff, ground elder, pink chime, raceme (flower cluster), celandine, dog violet, estover (necessaries allowed by law, as wood and timber to a tenant), arboriculture, draw shave, carr (waterlogged wooded terrain), frass (the droppings of insect larvae commonly associated with wood boring species), spiles, shives, molly mallet, flammer (an iron splitter used with a molly mallet), bodger, scragging, beetle and wedge, shouldersticks, jim-crack [nature of a pole lathe], underdog (one of two sawyers using a two-handed saw who is under the log in a saw pit - the other is the top dog), woodbooty (archaic term for leavings allowed to be taken by woodcutters in a private wood), marquetry (inlaid work of variously colored woods or other materials), woodward, shid (a piece of firewood four feet long), bavin, assarting (the act of clearing forested lands for use in agriculture or other purposes), felloe (a segment or the whole rim of a wooden wheel to which the spokes are attached), cruck (one of a pair of curved timbers forming a principal support of a roof in primitive English house construction), pannage (the practice of releasing livestock-pigs in a forest, so that they can feed on fallen acorns, beechmast, chestnuts or other nuts), beech-mast (the edible nuts of the beech), noyeau (liqueur made of brandy flavored with fruit kernels), hanger (a wood at the top of a rise with drooping branches), shaw (small thicket or wood), snowclone (a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants coined as a neologism in 2004 and derived from journalistic clichés that referred to the number of Inuit words for snow), traction engine (steam powered tractor), Catherine wheel (archaic torture device), demulcent (agent that forms a soothing, protective film when administered onto a mucous membrane surface),  abscission (the shedding of various parts of an organism, such as a plant dropping a leaf, fruit or flower), crizzling (tiny cracks and hairline fractures that form in glass and feel wet or even greasy to the touch), Montero hat, fugacious (fleeting), flash lock, lighterman, shout (flat bottom boat that plied the Thames), entrepôt (a port, city, or warehouse where goods are imported to be stored or traded for re-export), burgage (a tenure whereby burgesses or townspeople held lands or tenements of the king or other lord, usually for a fixed money rent), chausses (medieval armor of mail for the legs and feet, or tights worn by men in medieval times over the legs and feet), bordar (a person ranking below villeins and above serfs in the social hierarchy of a manor, holding just enough land to feed a family or about 5 acres), flint-knapping, conchoidal (of or relating to a mineral or rock surface that is characterized by smooth, shell-like curves), stoup (basin), Tournai font (font used in baptism), quoin (a solid exterior angle, as of a building), stretcher (brick laid lengthwise) and header (brick laid with short end showing), polder (to reclaim an area of ground from a sea or lake by means of dikes), rother (ox), coulter (a cutting tool such as a knife or sharp disc that is attached to the beam of a plow that makes a vertical cut in the surface), notional, vill, saddle (a cut of meat consisting of the entire loin from both sides of the backbone), misericord (a small projection on the bottom of a hinged church seat that gives support to a standing worshipper when the seat is turned up), bowyer, Barbour jacket, penumbral (shady), prelapsarian (characteristic of or belonging to the time or state before the fall of humankind), procerity (tallness), gurn (distorted facial expression), excrescence, besom (broom made from twigs), offcut, cipher (person or group of people without power and used by others for their own purposes), hived off, tickety-boo, wiffly-piffly, yaffle (the cry of the green woodpecker), bodge (slang for shoddy work), museology, Jethro Tull championed mechanical aids for farming, chapmen (peddlers), billycan (lightweight cooking pot), holloway (a road or track that is significantly lower than the land on either side), bote (an old word that means compensation or payment which can refer to getting wood for building or burning, fixing farm equipment, or repairing a house), villein (a free common villager), feoffee (a vassal granted a fief by his lord), fiddly, and nous (intelligence or common sense). 2016


















 		 6/23


















 
Tove Danovich Under the Henfluence A journalist's adventure with backyard pet chickens, chicken shows and chicken rescue with some discussion of chicken behavior and the chicken industry.  Novel diction and stuff: taming animals changes their genetics, dogs can raise their inner eyebrows but wolves cannot, wild rooster alarm calls travel from clique to clique as does the "alarm's over" call, chichslap, biddies, piqué coat, deodar cedar, happy chickens purr, papilla, uropygial, chicken dust comes from new feather sheathing, eggs and guano come out of the same cloaca vent, nibbling, the US Postal Service mails chicks, bees, scorpions, snails, goldfish and other cold blooded critters, tidbitting, roosters have hackle and saddle feathers, chickens have discrete alarm cries for aerial predators and for terrestrial predators, battery cage, hens have individual songs to announce the laying of an egg, and it takes only 47 days for a commercial meat chicken to reach six and a half pounds. 2023 5/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam Aggie and Charles vacate to a gloomy village haunted by faeries and stumble into a couple more murders and again almost get killed in the solution.  Novel diction: hips and haws (hawthorn berries), felt pudding hat, take the mickey out of a tourist, oatmeal sofa, hacking jacket, tumuli (burial mounds), load of waffle, crackling open a packet, Scotch egg, gawp, a flea between the ears, chimbley, jogtrot, winkle him out, splutter, scarper, and rozzer. 2000 4/23
Jonathan Safran Foer Everything is Illuminated Meaningful and meaningless vie for thematic prominence in this Russian translated story of Nazi atrocity in the Jewish quarter (outside of the human three-quarters) of shtetl Trachimbrod on the Polish-Ukraine divide, and of the strange love affairs between a girl that rises just-born from a tragic wagon crash into the Brod river, her adoptive 80 year-old father and her husband who gets a saw-blade stuck in his head.  There are many lines about sadness but the best is this oneZZ: "she was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infininte spectrum."  Near the end the writing takes an odd tilt with mixed up words, words ran together, a page long run of periods and the final sentence unended: "I will" (no period).  Novel diction and names: pestiferousness, tallit, fontanel, shapka, schmendrik, klezmer music, mandel bread, yoidle doidling, Shabbos, Yankel, Didl, Shanda, Shloim, Lilla, Bitzl, Safran, Sofiowka, Yoske, Feivel, Itzik, Kolker, Tzvi, Rivka, Avra, Zosha, Anshel, Tova and Lista. 2002 4/23
Ben Fountain Brief Encounters With Che Guevara A good collection of short stories evolving around political strife in Venezuela, Haiti and Austria with prose like "cradled the unformed dream and wondered who to give it to", "head carried with the bearing of a twelve point buck", "he declaimed Marxist rhetoric in the deep rolling voice of a river flowing past giant boulders", "her emotions were skidding around on a sheet of ice, a ig jackknifed trailerful of ire and angst careening through the traffic of a normal day", and "Thursday was hot and sluggish, the sky hazed over with a scum of cloud the color of congealed bacon grease."  An ornithologist would rather stay captured to interfere with Weyerhauser's deal with Venezuelan rebels to timber the nesting site of near-extinct crimson-capped parrots.  A special forces soldier returns from Haiti a bigamist (he married a Haitian Iwa while on mission).  An old fisherman swipes a shipment of cocaine and wonders who he'll gift with the proceeds.  An eleven-fingered child prodigy can't take the strain of  Austrian antisemitism and the freakishness of her hand and playing so she cuts it off.  Novel diction and stuff: cordilleras, mingy, manakin bird, rubato, revanchism, agnostic display of wood rails, concientizado, wifty, basuco, oilbird echolocation, psittacidae (holotropical parrots), moiling, fuddle, allopreen, lunked [up on one elbow], fritanguera, redound, mizzly, rachitic, blan, zazou, leaf doctor, zobop, Hector Hyppolite, hieratic, yaws treatment, exfill, rowled, deckle, logy, nassaus (golf wager), chutter, zedi (Mauritian Creole), golf cultured countries are biased towards democracy, dhoob and seangoon grasses, chèvrèt (shrimp), bourret (waste silk), griot, tap-tap fleet, paysan, salonist, sonoroty, glacis, bengaline, and feuilleton (brief story). 2006 4/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wykhadden Aggie finds a new beau investigating more murders surrounding her and wears an engagement ring for a couple of chapters before messing it up.  The crazy lady did it and Agatha gains another cat for her cottage.  Novel diction: Babycham (a sparkling perry or pear wine), box-room, form (criminal record), Scotch broth, welter, naff off, publican serving Hook Norton, and biscuit-coloured linen suit. 1999 4/23
Malcolm Gladwell What the Dog Saw A collection of New Yorker magazine articles including the title essay about Cesar Milan (the dog whisperer uses body language to manage people and pack mentality to manage dogs).  Novel diction and stuff: Ronco (GLH-9, Chop-o-matic, Dial-o-matic, the Showtime Rotisserie and the Electric Pasta Maker) pitchman Ron Popeil got the real story from people in the middle and made his products the star of the show, Rons dad said of the Pocket Fisherman "its not for using, its for giving", the pitchman's turn is that perfect moment when he asks for the money, psychophysics, Cortez introduced tomatoes to Europe, tzimmes (stew made from carrots and dried fruits), the 28-day pill cycle is not ideal (fewer menstruation is healthier), use of GnRHA instead of the pill might reduce breast cancer by 95%, ethologist, when leashed dogs meet they look at each other's owners to decide whether the other dog is friendly, mordent (rapid alternating notes), creativity is either conceptual or experimental per critic Galenson, shtetl (village), the quarterback problem, and the structured interview. 2009 4/23
Petr Beckmann A History of Pi An opinionated (i.e. "the UN is a grotesque assembly of bent hacks", "Roman achievements are a myth", "Newton is the greatest scientist of all time" and "Euler is the greatest mathematician of all time") read on the history of pi (which wasn't called pi until William Jones and Euler in the 1730's).  Novel diction and stuff: epsilonics, unicity, lune, quaestor, nilometer, Babylonians and Egyptians used a pi of 3.14 in 3000 BC, Aristotle was a poor mathematician and scientist and his erroneous writings held back both for over a 1000 years, Greek pharaoh Ptolemy II married his sister and founded the Library of Alexandria, Euclid's Elements is the best selling textbook of all time, Heron of Alexandria designed water clocks, water turbines and two-cylinder water pumps in the 1st century AD, Pliny wrote that there were Indians without mouths that subsisted by smelling flowers, Sicilian Archimides of Syracuse was killed by a Roman soldier, Turks breached the walls of Constantinople with guns in 1453, François Viéte (aka Vieta) was first to formulate an infinite (radical) series for pi and coined the math terms coefficient and negative, John Wallis was the first to develop a rational series for the value of pi, both Vieta and Wallis decyphered enemy missives during war, Leonhard Euler wrote 886 books and developed many formulas for pi (including a quickly converging series based on Machin's arc-tangent method), Da Vinci devised that a cylinder with width r lays down a track in one revolution that has the same area as its circle, Appolonius circles are almost an art form and are now used in magnetic field analysis, Newton used the binomial theorem to develop a quickly converging formula for pi, Euler was completely blind when he wrote his famous treatise on celestial mechanics, transcendental numbers are irrational and not roots, Carl Friedrich Gauss used lattice theory to estimate pi, Legendre proved pi and pi squared irrational, and Lindemann proved pi transcendent. 1970
 4/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham Aggie and Charles snoop out a hairdresser whodunit: Aggie gets wired and knocked around and when everything comes out in the wash, Charles takes the credit for the solution.  Novel diction: Calor gas and tow-path. 1999 3/23
Juli Berwald









 Spineless









 An ocean PhD discusses her adventures with jellyfish with a modicum of biology but a dearth of scientific methodology.  Novel diction: ctenophora, cnidae, hydrozoa, amphipod, murre, siphonophore, Chironex fleckeri is the most venomous jellyfish, Mnemiopsis is a comb jelly that does not suffer genetically from being hermaphroditic, Beroe ovara prey on comb jellies by conveying them into its mouth that it zippers shut (it also can invert itself and is bioluminescent), JEDI (Jellyfish Ecology Data Initiative), jellyball, kreisel, planula, jellyfish polyps may stay in polyp form for decades before strobilation (fruiting) of one to sixty eyphyra, podocyst, jellyfish pump ions in or out of their mesoglea to control buoyancy, jellyfish grow well even in low oxygen environs, kuragedo is the way of the jellyfish, spotted jellies [and upside down jellies which also employ cassiosomes (exuded mucus balls filled with stingers)] host symbiotic algae, the polyps of most jellyfish species have yet to be discovered, only about 2,000 of the estimated 300,000 jellyfish species have been documented, jellyfish have four-way symmetry, rhopalia, nemerteans, medusabilism (jellies can digest animals outside of their mouths via their oral arms, comb jellies re believed to be the most ancient animal, jellyfish bell flaps make them the most efficient of all swimmers, the passive margin flap is found on all flying and swimming animals, peplum, Robojelly scientists are striving to make it run on hydrogen that it extracts from seawater, Medusoid is an android ephyra, the Venus girdle is a long thin transparent comb jelly, Tiburonia granrojo or big red is a large warty deep sea jelly, Atolla wyvillei has red legs and puts on light shows, many siphonophores are bioluminescent, ostracods and some other sea creatures exude bioluminescent blobs or shed bioluminescent body parts, the much smaller male anglerfish latches onto a willing female and is subsumed and lives within the females anatomy, the E-jelly lights up like a true jelly to excite reactions in field studies, only an eighth of the estimated two million sea species are documented, Aequorea victoria has a green glow using luciferin and calcium to fluoresce blue luminescence, aequorin, apoaequorin, mCherry and mTangerine (jellyfish proteins used as gene markers), some jellyfish sense light without any eyes, Tripedalia is a box jelly with great eyesight with four sets of boxcar arranged eyes with the middle eyes having lenses and color receptors (although the focalpoint seems off), jellyfish eyes are special purpose with distributed set members having special purpose (directly connected to a motor action), statocyst, jellies steer by paddling harder on one side, jellies have a sense spot on the top of their bells called a touch plate with cilia that detect current and some sounds, jellynauts strobilated in space swim wrong and can't recover, jellies have stinging cella at the end of their cone mouths, hydromedusa, stolon, some medusae can bud off new medusae from their underbellies, turritopsis, totipotent, a jelly shunt is when excessive jellyfish slime feeds a bacterial bloom, jelly falls are mass die offs of jellyfish, forty trillion salps were drawn to the surface by an eddy near Australia in 2008, medusivory, sea nettles check comb jellies that eat oyster larvae and eggs, a jellyfish community's reach and footprint are what they supply and demand, giant jellyfish can weigh 500 pounds, Rhopilema esculentum, butterfish and file fish eat medusae, nudibranchs eat jellyfish polyps and preserve complete functioning units (such as man-o-war stingers by aeolids) in their bodies, there are 124 MPA's (Marine Protected Areas) in California waters, jellyfish oral arms are lined with mouthlets, giant jellyfish podocysts can last six years and choose when conditions are favorable to polyp and reproduce, porins, jellyfish stings contain hundreds of different proteins, a jellyfish stinging cell is only 2 to 250 microns long, cnidoin, an electric charge releases proteins which pull in water to charge up a stinging cell to 150 atmospheres before release of a dart attached by a cord at an acceleration of 5,000,000 gees, the single-use stinger is triggered by a combination of smell and sound and more stinging is ramped up by a prescribed change in that smell and sound, each stinger cell contains cilia that vibrate at trigger frequencies, anemone mucus has been used to repair mouse cochlea in the lab, labneh cheese, slicha, Eilat corals don't bleach when temperature rises like all other corals whose symbiotic algae leave them to die, acidification makes coral soft but doesn't kill them, statoliths are grains of gypsum incorporated into statocysts that jellies depend upon to tell up from down, Fungia coral, squirrel fish, and coronet fish. 2022










 3/23
Terry Brooks Child of Light Kid lit with hundreds of grammatical errors and redundancy disguised as deep thinking.  What happened to Terry? 2021 3/23
Adrian Tchaikovsky Children of Memory An existential romp with a pair of ravens evolved on an ecologically challenged planet of Rourke who exist as a pair (a puzzler and a solver).  The story takes place on Imiri, a partially terraformed planet that was reached by an ark ship.  The author challenges us to decide whether the ravens, the computerized Kern derived from an ant farm, and the Imiri simulation, and a Nod-ule extracted from the sim, are truly sentient.  Novel diction: dolorously, pareidola, louring, colloquies, ontogeny, teratogens, myxomatosized, gnomically, lambency and mould (British and Australian for mold). 2022 2/23
Suzanne Simard








 		 The Mother Tree









 		 This autobiography from our age's leading dendrologist and sylviculturist focuses on plant relations via fungi and is one of my favorite reads in years.  The author, from the Monashee Mountains, dresses the story with comfortable Canadian idioms, French exclamations, indigenous common plant names, indigenous people's philosophies, and her family life in rural British Columbia (photos from 1925 through 2015).  She struggles with condescending male peers, consumption by academic ambition and associated marital stress (including driving 9 hours every weekend so that her husband can live in Nelson while she earns tenure at UBC in Vancouver), and the mismanagement of old growth forests.  Novel diction and stuff: the wood wide web structure is similar to brain structure with nodes and hubs, trees use neurotransmitters (glutamate is in our brains and moves between trees via the WWW), the forest is wired for sentience, sweeper tree, caulk spikes, pancake mushroom, cut-block, cruiser vest, Simard Mountain, whiffletree, peavey, drop foot disease, devil club plant, petit point plant, foam flower, coralroot, flammulated owl, separate trees root graft to share phloem, pussytoes, you look skookum too, Stryen Creek, switches of bluebunch wheatgrass, pinegrass, tuques, ericoids, monotropoid, arboral, arbuscular, slide alder, crowberries, pogey (unemployment benefits), Cariboo Mountains, Hartig nets, cystidia, feller bunchers, glyphosate (Roundup), senesced, hydraulic redistribution by roots, foliar, enchytraeids, pauropods, there are 90,000,000 critters per teaspoon of soil, mycorrhizal fungi threads from root tips may invade the gut of soil organisms, Arnebrant discovered that m. fungi convey nitrogen from alders to pine, whiskey jack, Haida Gwaii, phloem and xylem form the two way hiway for water and sap, turgor pressure, there are lots of biting bugs in BC, UCD does Suzanne's carbon isotope lab work, m. fungi host beneficial bacteria and transfer other beneficial bacteria from one species of tree to another, phyllosilicate clay, shambolic, cordilleran, couloir, 1,000 year old aspen root systems, tree well, the roots of the majority of pines in a stand are grafted together, fungi associated with multiple trees are more successful, lede, butter-and-egg flowers, brush (as a verb), wildfires in Canada produce more carbon dioxide than their autos, snowberry, felt like a bag of hammers, genet, red osier dogwood, a radical is a tiny primordial root, tuercules (clusters of m. roots covered in fungal rind), roots are the sink and fungi apices are the source for electrochemical generated pulses, a grandmother tree is also called a wolf tree, beargrass, fascicles, increment corer, cheatgrass, knapweed, burdock, ecotone, budworm (scourge of firs), pistol-butted trunks, penchė, hamburger stew, dripline, sea rocket, tutting, thrush (yeast overgrowth of mouth and tongue caused by chemo), kissing clasp, stickhandled, essential photosynthesis elements include iron, copper and aluminum, chainė, some dimunitive English yew trees are thousands of years old, yew cambium may glow purple when exposed, yews are connected by arbuscular mycorrhiza (most trees are connected via endomycorrhizal fungi), rosy twisted-stalk, hypsometer, a real live snitch, lenticels, nitrogen15 from salmon shows up in tree rings (providing historic salmon run data), Secwepemc, Kwseltknews, Salish, Sinixt, complexity science, amabilis fir, bolete filter, pinnate structure, cedars can reproduce by layering wherein branches touch the ground and take root (a new tree breaks away once established), trees recognize their kin on the WWW and establish preferential connectivity with them.  Suzanne has beaten cancer and continues to document her research on MotherTreeProject.org.      Quelle tristesse!  Mon Dieu!  Bien sur!  Et voilà!  Vive la forêt!! 2021








 		 2/23








 
Oliver Sacks An Anthropologist on Mars This sequel to the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is about Sack's encounters with brain injured and autistic people with unusual abilities despite difficulty with socialization: an artist who goes colorblind, another who paints detailed scenes of his home town in Italy from boyhood memories, another who paints detailed city-scapes after but a quick fly-over, an operating surgeon, and another who is a standing professor of livestock management.  Novel diction: achromatopsia, alexia, agnosia, anosognosic, anomaloscope, anaglyph, anomia, amblyopia, refrangible, opponens theory, Land's Retinex Theory, prestriate cortex, SQUID medical scan, chromatophene, ischemic, ibuprofen can cause dyschromatopsia (color shifts in vision), blob vision s, interblob, hemianopia, qualia, dipsomania, optic chiasm, diencephalon, witzelsucht, hebetude, scrupulosity, rhinencephalon, olfactory memories are neurally indellible, antinomianism, phylogenetically, echolale, euphonious, mnemotechnic, fluctuant, apocope, jamais vu is akin to deja vu, Touretters may react 6 times as fast and in a smoother fashion, chorea, agnosic, labile, fluorescein angiography, phlegmatic (meaning stoic), Pickwick syndrome can be caused by obesity, veridical, camera lucida, coenesthetic, raptus, quotidian, palimpsest, donkey shoes, asylums contain people in the back ward, echolalically, neuromodule, mimesis, enactive, phenylketonuria, sensorimotor, and haiku-like phrases. 1995 1/23
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death Agatha is conned into returning to work to PR spring water from a neighboring town and gets overly involved (again) with the investigation of the murder of the water council president.  Excerpt: "Agatha reflected that the older she got, the shorter got the summers and the longer and darker got the winters."  She falls for a Guy and almost gets bumped off but is saved by a Cotswold companion.  Novel diction: hacking jacket, Hermes scarf, jersey dress, bastard country house decor, hair-cord fitted carpet, slurry (meaning slut), Savoyard voice, lobelia, house-room, yonks (meaning years), anachronistic, bell-push, muzzy, wash-hand basin, lowering skies, puntload, shirtwaister, liberty print dress, ticked off (meaning scolded), hammer horror movie, mews house and wog. 1998 1/23
David MacNeal










 		 Bugged










 		 This book Bugged me because, although full of interesting arthropodal factoids, it is written by a journalist who deemed the journey more important than the destination.  Novel diction and stuff: dermestid beetle, scutellum, urticating, elytra, one discovered subterranean Atta texana (fungus-farming termite) nest could hold two football fields, there are 16,000 species of ants, myrmecologist, epicuticle, edaphologist, polyethism, nociceptor, orthokinesis, [orthoorganic chemistry from a podcast], trophallaxis, neuropils, tachykinin (neuron chemical that promotes aggression in fruit flies), tusked wetas, instar, tree lobster (a stick insect that was once thought extinct), arbovirus, Walter Reed determined mosquitoes were the primary vector for yellow fever, UCI is bioengineering malaria resistant mosquitoes, Ohio State is developing micro-needles based on mosquito probosci, denim pine is the reult of a fungus carried by bark beetles, cryonite, frass, thigmotaxis, pyrethroid is axonic, cockroaches have evolved to dislike the taste of the bait in Roach Motels, HCn introduced as a pesticide in 1886, vedalia beetles were imported from Australia to California to fight off citrus scale bugs, Carl Linnaeus advised the use of predatory insects in 1752, encyrtid wasps, entomopathogen, codling moths, carbaryl, an 1848 Scientific American article suggested burning peat to get rid bed bugs, Egyptians burned sulphur for fumigation in 2500 BCE,neonics, linalool, silphids are burying beetles, phorid fly, the majority of insect related fatalities in the US are from wasp stings, Indians used carpenter ant jaws as sutures in 3000 BCE, propolis, myiasitic maggots, shtickle, deathstalker scorpions are the most poisonous of arachnids, astrocytic, ziconotide is a snail venom peptide used in pharmacology, RoboRoach is an on-line seller of cyborg bug kits, pronotum, biohybrid, UC Berkeley based polypedal labs make insect robots with gecko feet, DARPA funds development of MAVs (Micro Airborne Vehicles), moths with adopted implants tied to balloons enable remote controlled flight, RoboBees,a camera with 180 microlenses offers an 180 degree view, biomimicry, tokoyo mushi means insects of the everlasting world, pebrine, sericulture, fibroin, azuki sweet bean, carminic acid, lac, mustache is a Japanese unit of length that is roughly ten feet, some termites taste like strawberry cheesecake, entomophagy, mopane caterpillars, eating insect chittin can cause kidney stones, catmint, Coventry cathedral features bee generated music, anama is a nickname for reiki flowers that bees visit to make Greek heather honey, Thymomelo is a Greek thyme based honey [and thymol is the antiseptic component in thyme honey], apiculture is the last chapter but with no mention of Stamets saving the American honeybee, hastri are clay honeybee pots, in Hamlet the word bug is used to mean ghost, goat moth larvae have 1400 muscles which is three times that of humans, and MothGenerator is a Twitter app that generates emoth images and names from text input. 2017










 		 12/22










 
Mary Szybist Incarnadine This Szybist's collection is all about the imaginings of Mary at Annunciation (paintings and writings on the angel Gabriel telling Mary she would be the virgin mother of the son of God), including one poem from a grassroots' view and another full of happy ideas.  The Update on Mary tells us that she wonders if she would be a better person if she did not buy so many almond cookies and macaroons, that she falls asleep on her yoga mat, and watches clouds, even at night.  I suggest skipping Gabriella at the Donkey Sanctuary (too morbid).  I didn't really understand the structures of It Is Pretty to Think or Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body but How (Not) to Speak of God is cool in it's sun ray shape.  Annunciation at Fender's Blue Butterfly with Kincaid's Lupine includes a line I liked: "the flutter of page in a text someone turns".  Novel diction: incarnadined (made the color of flesh), nekton and bluecap salmon. 2013 12/22
Natasha Trethewey Monuments

Black and white colored onto pages, images translated into words, from the macabre to the ordinary, this book of poetry makes one reflect on the slow acceptance of inter-racial relations.  Natasha was a two term Poet Laureate of the United States and a Pulitzer Prize winner.  She likens herself to a flounder, flopping from the white side to the black.  Domestic Work includes a line I liked: "a choir of clothes clapping on the line."  Expectant includes "nightlife, a steady insect hum."  I found the rhyme and meter enjoyable in Countess P's Advice for New Girls.  My grandmother Marie would have agreed that misuse of lay for lie would be a stumble (Storyville Diary) and my father Chuck might have agreed with "I've learned to keep my face behind the camera."  Theories of Time and Space: "still hidden in a photo are the times before and after and what is past the edges where the crop is sowed with purpose."  In Flood: "The great river all around, the barge invisible beneath their feet, they fix on what's before them: the opening in the sight of a rifle; the camera's lens; the muddy cleft between barge and dry land - all of it aperture, a captured moment's chasm in time."  Torna atrás (From Albino and Spaniard, a Return-Backwards Is Born - see image of 1790 painting to left): "and you might see why, to understand my father, I look again and again at this painting: how it is that a man could love - and so diminish what he loves."  Novel diction: catalpa tree, marcelled hair and tulle, grafanola, blues parlando, miscegenation, exegesis, nosotos and logos, lacuna, blackamoor, undine, casta paintings, calidad, palimpsest, mexico means mixed blood, castizo, morisca, chicqueador, quadroon, pentimento, cartouche, shooting wild means filming without sound, hard rain is the devil beating his wife, steatite, manumitting, and obelisk (or dagger, †, is a manuscript mark for tenuous).
2018 12/22
Tracy K. Smith Life on Mars This Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection is an elegy for Tracy's father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, and includes a poem on i (the imaginary number) and dark matter.  Gus is in there too, on a leash, like uncle Bob's cow dog.  I enjoyed Universe ("How mean our racket seems beside it.  My stereo on shuffle.  The neighbor chopping onions through a wall") and Challenger ("She gets herself so wound up.  I think she likes it.  Like a wrung rag, or a wire wrapped around itself into a spring").  Many of the poem titles are gleaned from David Bowie albums (who, obviously, was born on Mars). 2011 12/22
Paul Stamets and others

 		 Fantastic Fungi


 		 The book form of the same-titled movie, this collection of brief articles reads more like an op-ed than a scientific paper and spends too much time on psychedelic mushrooms.  Info: mushrooms are produced by only a tenth of fungi; 99.999% of all organism species are extinct; hippopotamus sweat is the best sunscreen; fungi taxonomy is so confusing that only 150,000 of three million fungi species have been described; a single mushroom may release 30,000 spores per second; the Varroa destructor mite is the chief vector for passing viruses to honey bees and can be controlled by fungi; most mycelia are not salt tolerant; most purchased seed is now dusted with beneficial fungi; lion's mane fungi can help with neuropathy (per Stamets); in theory, fungus can live forever; agarikon is the longest lived mushroom; if you squeeze the root tips of conifers they smell like mushrooms; every plant that has been tested has emphytic fungi between it's cells; mycelium survive total dehydration (just add water); penicillin may have won WWII; azurescens is the most potent of psylocibin mushrooms.  Novel diction: sporulate, entomopathogenetic, mycoremediation, ecotoxicological, polypores; shelf fungi, endophytic and entheogen. 2019

 		 12/22

 
Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim Chemistry for Breakfast

This follow up to Komisch, alles chemisch is a beginners guide to chemistry by the science show host of maiLab and The Secret Life Of Scientists on YouTube and Quarks and MAITHINK X – Die Show on German TV.  Her father and brother and husband are all chemists too.  Her father inspired her to read product labels, verify product claims and develop relationships...all with the knowledge of chemistry.  Novel diction and stuff: adrenocorticotropic, chemism, fluoropatite, fluoride in toothpaste coats the teeth with an acid barrier, saponification, nocebo, gas molecules comprise only 0.1% of the volume of our atmosphere and move at 620 mph, ebullism, dimers, 85% of chemistry students follow their masters with a PhD, touch screens are made from indium in oxide fibers, lanthanides, actinides, smart phones use Gorilla Glass made with aluminosilicate, dropping a cell phone on its corner is worse for the screen than it landing flat, lithium ion batteries last longer if they don't get low, caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, electron gas, thioacetone is the stinkiest gas, cyclodextrins in air freshener sprays catch odorous chemicals, ghrelin is the "hunger hormone", theobromine in chocolate acts like caffeine, unsaturated fats are usually kinked and liquid, cis is kinked and trans is unkinked (unless you're in SF), denaturation, bourbon vanilla is from Madagascar, oxytocin is the "cuddle hormone" and has a nice shape for printing on t-shirts, acetaldehyde, and most organism proteins are made from just twenty basic amino acids.

[image to left is chemical diagram for oxytocin]
2021 11/22
Henry Gee












 		 A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth










 		 The geological beginning of life and evolution on through to the new.  After impact with Theia, the Earth had rings for awhile.  he earliest known life forms on Earth are putative fossilized microorganisms found in hydrothermal vent precipitates, considered to be about 3.42 billion years old which became was bacteria and then cyanobacteria.  Then came the Great Oxidation Event.  Then an archaeon became a cell nucleus.  Fronded Ediacaran biota like rangeomorph all went extinct along with it's likely subkingdom Vendoza.  Fungi are 900 mllion, seaweed 1,200 million and sponges (which need very little oxygen) are 8000 million years old (sponge proliferation and carbon caching increased oxygen concentration on Earth).  A live sponge pushed through a sieve under water can pull itself back together.  Echinoderms have 5-based symmetry but in the Cambrian they were also bilateral and triradial.  Tunicates have tunics of cellulose (which is only elsewhere found in trees).  Flowers arrived at the height of the dinosaurs.  Twenty mammal lineages went extinct with the dinosaurs.  Homo erectus existed for over 2 million years (and lived in Java until 100,000 years ago),  Bread is 23,000 years old (hardly stale at all).  There are two pathways to photosynthesis: C3 and C4 (its not really explosive).  Figs are habitats for wasps and yucca for moths.

Novel diction: Bangiomorpha (red algae - first known sexually reproducing organism), Ourasphaira (billion year old fungus - only a fraction of fungi species have been named), Rodinia (Neoproterzoic supercontinent), fossick (to search), Opabinia regalis (an aquatic Cambrian with 5 stalked eyes and a probiscus with claws), onychophorans (velvet worms have legs and shoot chaotic protein goo), radula (mollusk teeth), Yunnanozoon lividum (stem vertebrate with basket-like pharyngeal skeletons), Cathaymyrus (ancient version of the extant lancelet), tiddler (three-spined stickleback), hydroxyapatite (bone, tooth and enamel), eurypterids (sea scorpions that could grow to 8 feet long), shagreen (sharkskin), Arthropleura (8 feet long millipede), Dunkleosteus (armored fish that grew to 29 feet long), acanthodians (early shark-fish), Lauerntia (N.A. craton or mantle), Prototaxites (24 feet tall lichen), liverworts (very ancient non-vascular plant with 9,000 extant species), cladoxylopsids (extinct 25 feet tall reeds related to ferns), Lepidodendron (a club moss group that grew to fifty meters), Elpistostegalians (early lobe-finned fish), pentadactyl (five-toed), early many-winged insect flight, lycopsid forests (source of most coal and small club moss species survive), allantois (fetal membrane below the chorion  in many vertebrates), pelycosaur (amniotic theraspid), Tethys Sea (a giant pangean gulf), Eryops (very early amphibian), therapsids (mammaliaformes), dicynodont (sabertooth ugly tetrapod), cynodonts (had furry whiskers and differentiated teeth), Lystrosaurus (at one time 9 out of 10 animals on Earth was one), Tanystropheus (20 foot long-necked marine reptile), Drepanosaurus (arboreal reptiles), Northern tuatara (of the order Rhynchocephalia is a triassic survivor in New Zealand and is sometimes called "the living fossil"), squamates (lizards and snakes), Erythrosuchus (semi-erect like a crocodile), Draco (extant gliding lizard genus), pterosaurs did not flap but sailed and quetzalcoatlus was a giant one, yi (small bat-like dinosaur), the dinosaur/avian once-through air system features air sacs in hollow bones, paraceratherium (giant hornless rhino), argentinosaurus (biggest dino ever), hadrosaurs had rookeries, aerial plankton, haramiyids, microraptor was a bi-plane, hyomandibular, stape, malleus, cloth eared, squamosal (bone), multituberculate, arctocyonids had hooves and canines, andrewsarchus, titanoboa (bus-sized snake), basilosaurus (extinct whale), disphonicly, euarchontoglires, paranthropus (nut cracker man), giganttopithecus, thrawn (crooked or ill-tempered), spinney (a few trees), and floresiensis (dwarf humanoids that hunted dwarf elephants).		 2021












 		 11/22












 
Maggie Ryan Sandford













 		 Consider the Platypus













 		 The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men aft gang agley...except that men evolved from an ancestor shared with rodents, making mice our closest kin besides primates.  This book is full of evolutionary lessons given in the form of vignettes starring some rather quirky critters.  Maggie prefers the river rather than the tree of life because evolutionary history is muddied with convergent evolution and oddly saved genomes.

Novel lessons: a group of platypuses is a paradox or puddle, platypuses have electroreceptors in their bills to detect prey like a shark,  platypuses (which have been around for 110 million years) and solenodons (which have existed for only 65 million years) are the only venomous mammals, Aussies call platypuses mallagongs, [baleen whales can smell a bit but not toothed whales], giraffes can hum even though they don't have the FOX gene for speech, moths taste through their feet, the 400,000 beetle species make up about a fourth of all living species, Denisovan and neanderthal genes comprise 5% to 7% of the homo sapien genome, dolphins have individual names for each other, beef protein signals our bodies to make more muscle (beefing up), whiptail lizard babies are all genetically diverse clones (females have 32,000 chromosomes but males only half that), hoatzin (barking ruminant birds with claws on their young wings) are called stink birds because they belch methane, there are 3,500 species of mosquitoes, mosquitoes prefer beer drinkers, the neural crest hypothesis entails that a reduction in (embryonic) neural crest cell proliferation and migration is a core genetic mechanism of early domestication (say what), wolves became dogs about 40,000 years ago, dogs are red-green color blind, the Chinese character for cat is mao and looks like a cat (sort of), felis silvestris (Asian wildcat) is the Eve of all house cats and is extant, sponges have neuron genes but no neurons, [some glass sponges are 9,000 years old], African clawed frogs are polyploidy (retained diverse gene pool) which allows for fast adaption to environmental changes,  birds have a small genome with about a billion base pairs (we have 3 billion and the marble lungfish about 133 billion), lungfish are not fish, disease avoidance drives evolution more than sex or food, sloths have the largest single poop to body size ratio, bonobos don't get SIV (simian HIV), scientists grew an alligator snout on a chicken (which worked because they are closely related - so when you call someone a chicken, watch out for their bite), gharials have an air pot or ghar on the end of their snout for blowing romantic bubble noises and their snout continues to grow longer and narrower throughout their entire life, crocodilians and turtles and tortoises do not have sex chromosones (sex is determined by incubation temperature), a barn owl's asymmetric skull allows for improved spacial awareness, there are 3,500 species of spiders and all of them have hydraulically activated legs, a kiwi's nostrils are near the tip of its beak, an axolotl can grow back tails and legs and eye lenses, bees share an electric language with flowers [opposing static charges between a flying bee and a nectar-full flower cancel out, marking the flower as spent], naked mole rats and elephants are cancer-free, naked mole rats' lips close behind their their teeth (which are as ugly as those of an aye-aye), there are 1,00 species of (hardy) tardigrades, the green sea slug photosynthesizes, the vampire squid [a detritivore which utilizes balancing statocysts and light emitting mucus to escape predators] is actually an octopus, octopus and squid edit their RNA in a single animal's lifetime, octopus ink contains toxins that mute the taste receptors of predators and can even kill the octopus if it doesn't get out of the cloud, octopus muscles are hydrostats (like our tongues),  and octopus arms are individuated. 

Novel diction: meroblastic, grolar, rostrum, adaptive radiation, baculum, transposon, LUCA, synapsids, diapsids, archosaur, tapetum, hypercarnivory, demosponge, colloblast, ctenophores, clade, bilaterians, charybdis, homologs, orthologs, teleosts, nightjars [can sing 1900 notes a minute], neoave, ploidy, glyptodont, xenarthran, scute, fennec, tenrec, micro-RNA, peacock spider, cribellate, tun state, epigenetics, lophotrochozoa and hemimastigote.    		2019













 		 11/22













 
Thomas Cathcart

























 		 Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar
























 		 Philosophies described using philogagging (jokes relating to philosophy).  I've forgotten the philosophy lessons but I enjoyed the jokes.  Here are a few.

Moses, Jesus and a bearded old man are playing golf.  Moses drives a long one which lands on the fairway but rolls directly towards a pond.  Moses raises his club, parts the water, and the ball rolls safely to the other side.  Jesus also hits along one towards the pond, but just as it's about to land in the center, it hovers out over the water and Jesus chips it onto the green.  The bearded old man's drive hits a fence and bounces onto the street, where it caroms off of an oncoming truck and back onto the fairway.  It's headed for the pond, but it lands on a lily pad, where a frog snatches it into his mouth.  An eagle swoops down, grabs the frog, and flies away.  As the eagle and frog pass over the green, the frog drops the ball, and it lands in the cup for a hole-in-one.  Moses turns to Jesus and says "I hate playing with your dad." [Metaphysics]

Alvin is working in his store when he hears a booming voice say "Alvin, sell your business!"  He ignore it but it happens again and again with the voice adding "sell your business for 3 million dollars and take it all to Las Vegas and put it all down on one hand of blackjack."  Alvin gives in and he's dealt 18 while the dealer is showing a 6.  The voice says "take a card!"  It's an ace.  The voice says "take another card!"  Alvin is getting nervous but does as told.  Another ace.  "Take another card!" He goes with the roll and, boom, another ace.  The booming voice says "un-f-ing believable!" [also Metaphysics]

An Irishman walks into a Dublin bar, orders three pints of Guiness, and drinks them down, a sip at a time from each glass.  He orders 3 more.  The bartender says "they'd not get so flat if you'd be ordering 'em one at a time."  The man says "I know but I have 2 brothers that are away in the states and Australia.  When we parted we all agreed to drink this way to remind us of yesterdays.  One stout is for me and the other two are for me brothers."  He does this regularly over several months until one dayhe comes in and orders only 2 pints.  The bartender serves him sadly and says "my condolences."  The Irishman says " Oh no, it's fine.  I just joined the Mormon church and I had to quit drinking." [Illogical reasoning]

Holmes and Watson go camping.  Holmes wakes up in the middle of the night, nudges Watson awake, and says "look up in the sky and tell me what you see."  "I see millions of stars Holmes" says Watson.  "And what do you conclude from that Watson?"  "Well, astronomically, there are millions of galaxies and billions of stars.  Astrologically, saturn is in Leo.  Horologically, it a round 3 am.  Meteorlogically, it looks like it will be  abeautiful day.  Theologically, God is all powerful and we are but atoms in hiscreatioin."  Holmes looks at Watson and says "Watson, you idiot, someone has stolen our tent!" [Inductive reasoning]

A New Dehli policeman is interrogating 3 Sadars who are becoming trained to become detectives.  He shows the 1st a photo for 5 seconds and asks "how would you recognize that suspect?" The Sadar says "easy, he only has one eye."  "Egad, man, that's because I showed you a profile!"  Same test for the 2nd who replies "easy, he has only one ear."  After berating the 1st 2 Sadars he brings the 3rd into the room and gives him the same test and after some thought he replies "the suspect wears contact lenses."  The policeman says "that's interesting - let me check the file."  He goes to his office, checks and returns, and says "that's amazing.  You are correct!  How did you deduce it?"  The Sadar says "easy, he can't wear regular glasses because he only has one eye and one ear." [Epistomology]

Nurse to doctor: there's an invisible man in the waiting room.  Doctor to nurse: tell him I can't see him.  [also Epistomolgy]

A professor is polishing an ancient lamp when, poof, a genie appears.  The genie grants him a wish but it must be for great wisdom, great beauty or 10 million dollars.  The professor quickly chooses wisdom and, poof, the genie disappears.  The professor's assistant witnesses the whole thing and sees the professor shaking his head and asks him what is the matter.  The professor says "I should have taken the money."  [Ethics]

A Rabbi is golfing on Yom Kippur and prays to God for a hole-in-one.  He drives the ball and it goes farther than he has ever driven before and lands on the green and rolls into the cup.  An angel asks God "it seems like this rabbi was goofing off, so why did you grant his wish?"  God replies "who's he gonna tell?" [also Ethics]

A man asks God about time and money, to which he replies :eternity is as a second to me and a million dollars a penny."  The man asks "God, may I have a penny?"  God says "just a second." [Relativity]		 2007

























 		 10/22

























 
Peter Wohlleben The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World This German forester's take on trees is that they only truly live when in a forest sharing nutrients, information and defense with other trees, including those of other species, via the World Wood Web, roots and aromatics.  Novel information: lobster eyes are the basis for a space telescope; plants distinguish between their roots and the roots of other plants; trees share food with other trees that include competitors and old stumps; sometimes trees die in unison; in undisturbed forests the tree community works together to maintain the health of the forest; acacia trees vent ethylene to ward off giraffes from themselves and their neighbors, so after giraffes bite into a modified bad tasting leaf, they skip several trees before resuming their nibbling; a bitten leaf emits a slow electrical signal through the tree (one third of an inch per second) that, after recognizing a pest's saliva, asks for certain scent release to attract predators and for production of toxins to make the leaves less desirable; all but farm plants exchange chemical and electric pulse signals through their roots and via mycelia, and loners are more at risk of infestation; a 220 hz crackle from grain roots causes other root tips to head toward the sound (plants can hear); beech trees equalize their forest via root based exchange and are more productive when planted together; bird cherries test the genetic makeup of pollen and dries up a tube if the pollen is undesirable, no matter if a tree produces thousands of cones or millions of seeds in its life the total is based on the odds of just one child reaching adulthood, some trees wait several years between seed production to optimize health and profundity, the author believes that plants feel pain, mimosas are particularly sensitive plants, plants generate ultrasonic vibrations in response to water flow interruptions,fungi cell walls are made of chitin like insects, fungi make plant hormones to bend roots to their will, bicolored deceiver is an oak fungus, tree vessels are 0.0008 to 0.002 inches in diameter, bubbling and vacuuming are required in addition to capillary action and osmosis to lift liquids high up into trees, the tree canopy supports half of Earth's animal diversity, alders have air ducts in their roots and cork in their bark for respiration when leaves are gone and/or when roots are swamped, a 9,550 year old spruce was coppiced which is like torture to a tree, roots store "knowledge" in their roots where chemical engine cells are retained, contrary to timber industry claims older trees grow faster than young ones, chaffinches, forests relay water from the coast inland, the pinesap is a predatory plant and cow wheat steals nutrients from spruce trees, three conifers are deciduous (larches, bald cypress and dawn redwood), trees compare day lengths and count sunny days so they must remember, walnut trees ward off mosquitoes, when tree roots and crowns are trimmed for transport is like giving a tree a lobotomy, ivies and lichens can be 100's of years old and moss doesn't die when it gets dry, Fishlake is home to a one-hundred-acre aspen, birch limbs whip their competitors on windy days, beeches can travel a quarter mile per year via seed dispersal, some seeds are activated by temperature, as a survival mechanism trees have more genetic diversity within their species than do some families of animals, blood pressure in humans rises in conifer forests and lowers in oak forests, trees exude carbon dioxide at night, forest floor light is green tinged, and red leafed trees are mutants that fail to mature properly.  Novel diction: oribitad (moss mite), [sclerotised, pteromorphae, ptychoidy,] phytoncide, nun moths, pine loopers, conifer sawflies, honey fungus boot laces and betulin. 2015 10/22
Neal Asher The Soldier Too futuristic for a fun read, this book is full of sci-fi jargon, cyborgs and aliens, but the Captain Cog still smokes a pipe (a la Commander Grimes) and his companion is a Trike.  Novel diction: arcology, nacreous, inchoate, glister and reification. 2018 9/22
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage Aggie's wedding to James is interrupted by the arrival and demise of her estranged husband.  The wedding is off...for now.  Novel diction: avuncular, denier, busy Lizzies, plummy voice, the rump of Serbia, verger, spiv, pukka, pernickety, Aga saga and dusty tea. 1996 9/22
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley An antic ambler (militant rambler) gets spaded and another is stoned.  James Lacey and Agatha go undercover with police blessing and murderous funding, then stumble into the prevention of a 3rd murder, and wind up engaged.  Novel diction: raffish, wittered, profiroles, gimlet (small auger), seccy (security guard), Speedwell (or Veronica), boat ceiling, y-fronts, "get knotted" (go away), bandbox (hatbox) fresh, crumpet (adjective for a pretty girl). 1995 8/22
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener Agatha cheats again, this time she agrees to go back to PR work in exchange for an "instant garden" to enter into a Carsely competition.  A rival for James's attention wreaks havoc on all of the gardeners, including changing the labels on Raisin's plants.  Miss Fortune ends up upside-down with her head in a pot (goldfishing was her undoing).  Novel diction: toerag, Coltness Mix (a dahlia), Rigoletto (pincushhion gardenia), tombola stall (fundraising drawing), pilchard (sardine), morris (a dance), fash (worry) and mondaine (worldly). 1994 8/22
Brian Clegg Gravitational Waves The story behind the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) which makes the finest measurements in history (1/10,000th the width of a proton).  Vulcan was once thought to be a 10th planet opposite Mercury but Einstein's general relativity corrected for Mercury's orbit and Vulcan was obfuscated.  The universe was opaque until 380,000 years after the big bang.  Reflected light is polarized.  The 1st LIGO event was recognized on 9/16/2015.  Novel diction: quantum non-demolition and ekpyrotic. 2018 8/22
Janet Evanovich The Recovery Agent A cross between Stephanie Plum and Indiana Jones but not as funny or mysterious.  A quick read, nonetheless. 2022 8/22
Matt Parker Humble Pi - When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World Anyone who loves math (engineers, surveyors and gamblers) aught to enjoy this book [look how I snuck in a English/math error already] factorially!  Italian vs. Arab miles put Columbus on a long haul, Swedish vs. Amsterdam feet put the Vasa into museum overhaul, and non-specific specific gravity led to the Gimli glider fall [ain't that poetic].  Digital errata include overflow, reset, Null names, divide by zero and the Y2K38 disaster (when Unix time counts down to naught). 2019 7/22
David Rosenfelt Silent Bite Any Carpenter #22 has our semi-retired hero resolve a set-up because he likes Zoey (a Novia Scotia Duck-tolling Retriever) more than the defendant. 2020 7/22
Yogi Berra The Yogi Book Inspiration for Yogi-isms revealed. 2010 7/22
Harvey Araton Driving Mr. Yogi Ron Guidry wore a cap with this book title on it because he came to adore Yogi and became his ride for traing camps and other outings in Yogi's senior years. 2012 7/22
Emma Byrne Swearing is Good for You Emma swears that foul language avoids violence and is universally useful for stress and timbre.  Tourettes occurs in one out of two hundred children (in the TS chapter Emma says that uncontrolled swearing is the exception, and not the norm for TS and that when it is prevalent it only ostracizes the victims more.)  Novel diction: ineffable, othering, blancmange, catastrophizing, womble, flatbagger, copolalia, coprographia, copropraxis, unvoluntary, antipodean (for Australia and New Zealand), precocial, altricial, tuple, language of the stews, corpus (collection of words and phrases), ovary overflow (South African for an attractive man), and lagom (the Swedes pride in being moderate). 2017 6/22
ARRR Roberts Dr. Whom or  E. T. Shoots and Leaves Roberts puns are ARRRghuably funny.  Dr. Whom and his crew (Linn and Prose Tailor) travel through time in the not-so-Wellian TARDY (disguised as a police call box) to correct historic solecisms.  They mis-navigate the Icetanic to sink the Titanic (whilst ridding  the Earth of malevolent machinic Cydermen) and they foil the evil Garleks with the help of a trans-dimensional necktie but leave saving a tarantella gal from the confines of a super-dimensional diving bell helmet for post doc work. 2006 6/22
MC Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet The 2nd Agatha Raisin book features more unsavory characters, including killer vets and gossiping club women.  Raisin is 50-ish and a bit more wrinkled than the prunish Plum but she is just as bad at staying safe and wrecking cars. 1993 6/22
MC Beaton Agatha Raising and the Quiche of Death Mrs. Raisin (never divorced) retires from PR to a Cotswold cottage and amateur detection.  Her bakery quiche seems to kill a fair judge but the batter thickens.  She makes friends with a real DI and makes googly eyes at her new neighbor. 1992 6/22
Merlin Sheldrake















 		 Entangled Life
















  		Fungal stuff: bacteria live in fungi, LSD and psilocybin come from fungus, fungi meld with many other fungi even if not sexually compatible, either truffles mate may be maternal, some fungi hunt nematodes, manna (in the bible) is desert truffle, fungi communicate with chemicals to fungi, plants, bacteria and animals, fungi live deep beneath the ocean and in coral reefs, if a hyphae was as thick as an arm it could lift a bus, mushrooms inflate with water (perhaps with explosive force), the song "gathering mushrooms" is polyphonic, opsins are in mushrooms and animal eyes, fungi can detect texture finer than the grooves in a CD, fungi may use electric or hydraulic communication (I wonder if this might be piezoelectric like in neurons), hyphae pores can act like logic gates, mycelial organisms have "sub-brains" (like flatworms and octopuses), a 2 billion year old fossil appears to be a fungus, Betrix Potter was a mycologist, erratics are untethered lichens that blow around like dust, penicillin was once a lichen, a 9,000 year old lichen lives in Lappland, no one knows when lichen first evolved, yeast is a crucial 3rd partner in lichens, lichens are dynamic and change partners over time, zombie fungi live in insects and control their actions, some fungi carry viruses that effect host behavior, 90% of plants depend on fungi, fungi might be the magic dust that revives plants in the Shire (LOTR), fungi transport phosphorous (and other chemicals?) in water via dynamic microtubule motors, plants that like more types of fungi spread faster than pickier ones which explains why certain trees spread more abundantly to the poles after the last ice age, a plant can become 2 species by 2 individuals (or groups) choosing to cooperate with 2 (or more) different fungi, mycelial fungi restoration is as complex as gut microbiome restoration after antibiotics, walnut trees deposit toxin to ward off plant competition and some fungi help disperse the toxin, yet to be understood is mycelial fungi transport of plant RNA, morels farm bacteria, infochemicals might be shared through mycelial networks, plants and fungi use electrical signalling, glutamate and glycine pass through mycelial fungi networks and through plants and animal brains, there is a kerosene fungus that lives in jet fuel tanks and there are several coal fungi, 75% of cultured fungi are grown in China, hippe3 invented the injection port method for mycelial cultivation, termitomyces mushrooms are a delicacy and grow to a meter in size and have yet to be domesticated, Ecovative grows fungi for building things and sells Grow-It-Yourself kits, MushLume sells lamps made from fungus, Stamets is a fungi scientist who is trying to use fungi to save bees and is the model for the navigator on Star Trek Discovery,  genetically engineered yeast are making spider silk, multiple genomes may exist in one mycelium, the ghost mushroom is bioluminescent, mammal high temperature blood mitigates fungal pathogens and might be why they survived dinosaurs (reptiles and amphibians are much more vulnerable to fungi), one plant microbiome includes a fungus that houses a virus that allows all 3 to live in hot soil, hyphae locate each other by playing catch with aromatics (one sends while one receives and then they switch around), swarming supracellular mycelia can fuse together in guilds and share genetic materials, mushrooms form from the crowd behavior of mycelia but it is not understood what directs the mushroom formation, hyphae network flow periodically reverses which enhances distributional effectiveness, some hyphae ripple with contraction to act as a pump, and electrical stimulation can increase mushroom yield.
Other stuff: viruses can live inside of bacteria and even inside of other viruses, basilisk lizards can walk on water, molds are amoeba (not fungi), a human nose out performs dogs' in detecting certain odors, orchid bees collect scents, Lagotto Romagnolo is a specialized Italian truffle dog breed, oxane smells like sweaty mango, shoots and leaves use 20 different senses to explore their environment, mycoheterotrophs (plants without photosynthesis) include Voyria (that has blue flowers), monotropa, candy canes, snowplants and all orchids (at some point in their lives), infraterrestrials make up half of Earth's biomass, trees are 60% of all living mass, a crash in concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused the carboniferous rain-forest collapse, the alcohol dehydrogenase 4 enzyme  evolved before humans split off from simians to become 40 times better at digesting alcohol, tree shrews consume fermented nectar in the frothy flowers of the Bertram palm and gruit ale is fermented from bog nettle.
Novel diction: terroir, anastomosis, rhizomorphs, phycomyces, mycobiont, photobiont, crutose, foliose, squamulose, leprose, fruticose, lichening, map lichen, symborg, entheogen, fingolimod, cathinone, neuromicrobiology, involution, wood wide web, gut grain axis, compost bath, peroxidases, enzymatic combustion, mycofabrication, mycotecture, reishi, turkey tail mushrooms, agaikon, amadou, scrumping, enterococcal, arbuscular, ectomycorrhizal, mycohetertrophy and enfleurage.		 2020
















  		6/22
















 
Randall Munroe How to Invent Everything It really does what it says it will do...and with some humor thrown in.  I could of done without logic, music and NAND gates but it met the goal of providing concrete knowledge (cement and concrete are in part 10).  Novel language: montgolfier (meaning hot air balloon) and limelight (in that it means being lit by the burning of quicklime). 2018 5/22
LE Modesitt, Jr Isolate The first in a new gaslamp Grand Illusion series and the first of his novels that I chose to speed read due to its detailed daily routines.  The many political and corporate assassinations only added to the steamee punk pall lingering over the empath and isolate aides' romance (which was not for sussies).  I enjoyed the made up homophones (like Kuhrs lager).  Novel diction: gladius, ashlar, barong, guayabera, battology, dunnite and frit. 2021 5/22
MC Beaton Death of a Green-eyed Monster Priscilla and Elspeth aren't as jealous of Hamish's fiance as is her crime boss.  Published posthumously, this still has the same feel and plot characteristics of the previous Macbeth tragedies.  I will miss Marion.  Novel diction: clootie, skirl, tackety boots, wood anemones, cuckoo flowers, char (a fish), skivvy, Hogmanay, Cullen Skink, cranachan, corrie, drookit, bahookie, dook, dulse, slange var, "haud your wheesht" and doolally. 2022 4/22
MC Beaton Death of an Honest Man The victim is so honest that everyone hates him and Hamish is confronted with a host of suspects...and loses another bobby to the castle.  Novel diction: "rummel roond the gums", skelpt, haircord, panto, dosh, hoodie crow, woad, shinty, "dinnae fash yersel", coley (a fish), dipsomaniac, kȕmmel and samphire. 2018 4/22
Tom Holt (aka K J Parker) A Practical Guide to Conquering the World After Orhan and Nokter comes Felix, the luckiest of them all.  An interpreter (who claims it's a knife's-edge different than being a translator) talks his way through battles with minimal injury and maximum gain and retires as an unintended prophet in the holy city built by an ill-used but prosperous actress left over from book two.  Novel diction: periphrasis, teredo, precentor, opoinjay and long sheet (targets), at the butts, corvée, flammiger, brick clamp, scruple (as a unit of volume), gurnard, demotic, bunce (luck), chevauchée, hardstanding, combe (like cwm), brashwood and intercessor. 2021 3/22
Tom Holt (aka K J Parker) How To Rule An Empire And Get Away With It An actor is commanded to imitate the dead emperor and handles the role quite well.  The same enemy (but no engineering Colonel) is even bigger and meaner now, so it takes a bit of deception and guile to save the citizens (it doesn't hurt that his leading lady and empress is the wife of the enemy commander).  The bad man is Ogus (which sounds a lot like the bridge convention used to ask for points and key cards in response to a preemptive opening).  Novel diction: proscenium, thaler (Roman coin), deckle [edged], ravelin, mamelon, mangonel, pellucid, paunching [a rabbit],  bindweed, lorus, divitison, dalmatic, buskin, architrave, serried, banjax, passim and habergeon. 2020 3/22
Tom Holt (aka K J Parker) Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City A disrespected minority becomes Colonel in charge of an iron age army corps of engineers and is left to lead the effort to defend a walled city against terrible odds (the fleet can't get back to home port and the army is wiped out in an ambush).  He saves the day because of his practical leadership and invention (it also helps that he is the enemy commander's childhood besty).  Orhan gets called "Orphan" for only so long, as he quickly proves he is the smartest in the room.  Novel diction: aketon, baulk [of lumber], porphyry, onager, ropewalk, spinney, bounden, sear (part of a trebuchet release mechanism), soakaway, pavis and fleuret. 2019 3/22
MC Beaton Knock- Knock, You're Dead Verra short story.  Don't answer the door when you hear a a knocker (antique hunter). 2016 3/22
MC Beaton Death of a Liar Hamish rues disbelief to find the liar on the ground.  He vanquishes the Quebecois and gains a new policeman.  Novel diction: aspidistra, Puffa jacket, immuring, Belfast sink, beetle drive, acidulous, "lappysiching" (Lapsang Souchong) tea and rocket (arugula). 2015 3/22
MC Beaton Death of a Policeman Blair hates Macbeth and sends a handsome young copper to spy on him but the Lothario bites it instead of Hamish (who is wanting to trade his comfortable constable for a date).  Novel diction: sporran, sententiously, myxomatosis, right taking, croissantified, Irn-Bru, cock-a-leekie soup, broom (change making new boss), tirling pin (risp), Orkney chair, JCB (earth moving machine) and harridan. 2014 2/22
MC Beaton Death of Yesterday An amnesiac is murdered and the pub goers are sketchy on her memory.  Lugs and Sonsie take a liking to the prize winning chef that is the new policeman in Lochdub (and his feedings).  Novel diction: cambric blouson, droochit (drenched), trachalt (disheveled) and omertà. 2013 2/22
Janet Evanovich Game On Alternatively titled Tempting Twenty-eight, this book has us wait almost to the end before Stephanie's car gets exploded (Lula inherits Plum's bad juju for most of the story but gets it right in the end). 2021 2/22
Becky Chambers To Be Taught, If Fortunate In this novela, a Go-Fund-Me spaceship takes astronauts on a 20-year voyage to a extra-solar-system with several planets and moons teeming with life.  They get there in a state of torpor and they use gene tweaks to enhance strength and/or radiation resistance to scout the orbs. 2019 2/22
Becky Chambers Record of a Spaceborn Few The Exodan let a dystopian Earth generations ago and have learned to repair, reuse and recycle.  The central plot of this book is for cadaver composting.  Becky loads another chamber with a shot at death, migration and ambulation.  The author lived for a time in Scotland and Iceland which influences Kip and Ensk (intergalactic languages.  She inherited a passion for xenobiology and star-gazing.  Novel word: eyas. 2018 1/22
Becky Chambers A Closed and Common Orbit Book 2 of the Wayfarers series has reset Lovelace installed in a body-kit by the crew's tech friend, Pepper.  The story line alternates between Sidra (nee Lovey) growing into her kit and the young Pepper (nee Jane 24) growing into her body (with the help of a shuttle AI named Owl).  The GC treats AI's poorly and a hot Pepper and una Sidra frio sespire to save Owl from confiscation.  Becky balks at bigotry by bridging banned bot bodying. 2016 1/22
Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet Book 1 of the Wafarers series introduces us to the GC, filled with alien species (humans are lowly newcomers), and a tunnel ship crew.  The crew survives a hostile act during their biggest warp hole tunnel building job, except for the sentient Lovey AI, who must be reset.  The mixed crew includes a feathered friend, a viral navigator and a buggy baker.  Novel diction: squick and ambi (fictitious power source). 2014 1/22
MC Beaton Death of a Kingfisher A faerie glen goes commercial only to be the site of several murders, including the blue bird.  The guilty meet their comeuppance except for two juvenile delinquents.  Novel diction: chav, pokerwork sign, mince and tatties, lest my jewel I should tine, big yin, destrier, plenishings, epergne, ringing of their bridles, Dlama Shealladh (second sight), lone shieling, billycan and sair dunt. 2012
 12/21
MC Beaton Death of a Sweep The sweep is only one of many who succumb to a ego-maniacal killer, but Hamish is saved by the cat (again).  It's 2011 and Hamish still uses a mini-camera and film development and a mini-recorder (no smart phone).  Novel diction: lovat, targes, Belfast sink, overweening, rummel [rummel, rummel round the gums], brass nail (prostitute), close (narrow path), the noo, glaikit, anglepoise lamp and muckle. 2011 12/21
MC Beaton Death of a Valentine A young tart gets an explosive valentine and only Sgt. Hamish can figure it out, despite his love sick constable's roofies.  Novel diction: thole (abide), Benares brass bowl, agony aunt, Lammas (first of August), Lugh (Celtic goddess), skirl, numptie, dinnae greet (don't cry), dauner, girning and ruched. 2010 12/21
MC Beaton Death of a Witch Loch Dubh already has Angus the seer and Elspeth the visionary, so why would they need a witch who dispenses spanish fly?  She's dead and nobody admits to her treatments but Hamish figures it out and, despite his best efforts, gets promoted to Sgt. again.  Novel diction: teuchter, bampot, prossies, bollocking, tannoy, havering, kent (passed tense of ken), zimmer frame, sleekit, wheesht, like chalk and cheese, thocht, tumshie, bothy, burns were in full spate [tumbling down the hillsides, their peaty gold water flashing in the sun], petal (as a term of endearment and ghillie. 2009 12/21
Sy Montgomery





 		 Best American Science and Nature Articles, 2019



 		 PHILIP BALL: A Compassionate Substance, REBECCA BOYLE: The Search for Alien Life Begins in Earth’s Oldest Desert discusses bacteria that live in inhospitable places, PETER BRANNEN: Glimpses of a Mass Extinction in Modern-Day Western New York discusses how the archaeologic record infers a mass extinction, CHRIS COLIN: This Sand Is Your Sand, DOUGLAS FOX: The Brain, Reimagined, is  an incredible discussion of how the nervous system is electro-mechanical and piezo-electric, CONNOR GEARIN: Little Golden Flower-Room: On Wild Places and Intimacy, BEN GOLDFARB: The Endling: Watching a Species Vanish in Real Time, GARY GREENBERG: What If the Placebo Effect Is Not a Trick? discusses real health benefits of placebos and a gene that predisposes people to the placebo effect, JEREMY HANCE: The Great Rhino U-Turn, HOLLY HAWORTH: The Fading Stars, EVA HOLLAND: Saving Baby Boy Green, APRICOT IRVING: The Fire at Eagle Creek, ROWAN JACOBSEN: Deleting a Species, BROOKE JARVIS: The Insect Apocalypse Is Here discusses the continuing loss of insect mass around the globe, MATT JONES: No Heart, No Moon, KEVIN KRAJICK: The Scientific Detectives Probing the Secrets of Ancient Oracles, J. B. MACKINNON: You Really Don’t Want to Know What It’s Like to Be a Right Whale These Days, BILL MCKIBBEN: How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet, REBECCA MEAD: The Story of a Face, MOLLY OSBERG: How to Not Die in America, JOSHUA ROTHMAN: Why Paper Jams Persist is an engineers look into the science of resolving copier paper jams, JORDAN MICHAEL SMITH: The Professor of Horrible Deeds, SHANNON STIRONE: Welcome to the Center of the Universe, LINDA VILLAROSA: The Hidden Toll discusses why black mothers and babies in the United States are dying at more than double the rate of white mothers and babies, ED YONG: When the Next Plague Hits (and it did), and ILANA YURKIEWICZ: Paper Trails: Living and Dying with Fragmented Medical Records. 2019





 		 12/21





 
MC Beaton Death of a Gentle Lady There was nothing gentle about Mrs. Gentle or her offspring.  A Russian inspector doesn't help Hamish as much as dumb luck.  Novel diction: fusty, folly (fake castle), keek, lovat, shoogly, escalope, petticoat tails, plash, ben and but (of a croft house), moquette ,Chinese whispers, cosh, tippenny, usquebae or usquebaugh. 2008 11/21
Bethany-Kris & Erin Ashley Tanner Madame Moll The Maccari's name their first boy Marquise (which contains quise which is like queso which is cheese and evokes Mac and Cheese).   Neeya Pivetti isn't killed when her limo is blown up (which is obvious if you have seen the "s/he got blown up" escape on Psyche, Outer Banks, etc.).  In the epilogue, Mac and Melina have another son, Luca, and a daughter, Bella. 2017 11/21
Jonas Jonasson Sweet Sweet Revenge A genius decides to have a go at a start-up that exacts revenge.  He has plenty of customers and is doing quite well, until...a young couple that have been ill used by a prejudiced man happen to meet, fall in love and apply to Sweet Sweet Revenge for a job...and make quite a job of it (with the help of an African medicine man and a retiring policeman.  A very fun read!  Novel diction: vastervik and mzunga. 2020 11/21
Sofia Segovia
 The Murmur of Bees Translated from Spanish, this story doesn't have ghosts like many Latin novels, but it does have a hair lip boy who talks to bees.  A land owning family in Mexico survives the depression and the Spanish flu only to have the patron killed by an ungrateful tenant farmer.  It's a decent story but some episodes of feelings take dozens of pages.  Okay to speed read this one. 2015 11/21
Bethany-Kris & Erin Ashley Tanner Gangster Moll Book 2 in the Pivetti Syndicate series has more than just sex and is fast paced with bombing, shooting and kidnapping.  To save pregnant Melina, Mac is forced to torture a cappo's son and shoot his good-for-nothing father.  When a shooting occurs at the Pivetti mansion, nobody inquires into the health of the guard dogs...which seems odd, considering that the Pivetti's love dogs almost like family.  Novel diction: kitten heels. 2016 10/21
MC Beaton Death of a Maid The maid doesn't do dishes, windows or (really) any housework because she is so good at brownmail (like blackmail but with favors for ransom instead of money).  But the maid gets done in and everybody has motive.  Novel diction: donkey jacket, parp, lum, barmie noddle, blow the gaff, pipped at the post, and bampot. 2007 10/21
MC Beaton Death of a Dreamer Effie is addled believes that a Jock is in love with her and her dream becomes permanent.  Hamish is kept company in bed by his wildcat and lop-eared dog.  Novel diction: chukkies, chatelaine, keek, bap, shuh-shuh-ga and scarpered. 2006 10/21
Bethany-Kris & Erin Ashley Tanner Gun Moll In this crime romance novel, a soldato becomes a made man after meeting the perfect gun moll and Mr. and Mrs. Pivetti.  A good read but maybe a bit too ribald to recommend to family.  Novel diction: bodycon dress, sorella, goomah, cafone, stolto and more than 60 Pivetti 's. 2016 9/21
Rhys Bowen Evanly Bodies In this last book in the series Evan finally marries Bronwen.  They save Jamila from a pre-arranged marriage and solve a case of three re-arranged marriages.  Novel diction: ciggyd, berk and ffordd. 2006 9/21
Rhys Bowen Evan Blessed Evan saves Bronwen from a vendetta.  Novel diction: rack railway, marquee tent, pinny, and "round the twist". 2005 9/21
MC Beaton Death of a Bore An awful script-writer gets mothballed and it takes all the highland intuition Hamish can muster to place Elspeth in a jam which she and her tape recording of the murderer's confession survive via a fiery production...but it's Hamish's confession that makes Elspeth faint.  Novel diction: ructions, chap the door, keffy and shinty matches. 2005 9/21
MC Beaton Death of a Poison Pen Elspeth's school chum, in one-up-woman-ship, tries to seduce Hamish but is side-tracked by Elspeth's jealous journalism colleague.  Besides, it's kismet when it comes to Hamish, Elspeth and detective work.  Novel diction: swots, ahint, golf umbrella,skeandhu, glaikit and teuchter. 2004 9/21
MC Beaton Death of a Village A small seaside village is hoodwinked by holograms, two 90-year-olds solve nursing home murders and Lugs almost dies of love of cheese.  Hamish fakes nervous exhaustion to avoid promotion and Elspeth.  Who ever heard of leggety and dunt?  Just scotch it. 2003 8/21
MC Beaton Death of a Celebrity There's nothin' worse than a newswoman who'll stop at nothin' to get a story, except for the guilty party that does her in.  Novel diction: sevendenier, pulley (for a clothes rack), lang, ghillie, ochone, dumfounert, thon and feart. 2002 8/21
MC Beaton Death of a Dustman The village goes green but the dustman discovers that the recyclables include lots of dirt which becomes his undoing.  What's an entrechat? 2001 8/21
MC Beaton A Highland Christmas Hamish saves Christmas.  Novel diction: crabbit, pokerwork, michty-me, raddled and chipolata (sausage). 1999 8/21
Kameron Hurley The Light Brigade Another Trumpy dystopian future when soldiers go to war via light beaming but one grunt, who also travels through time, saves 2 million from Sao Paulo. 2019 7/21
Bill Bryson The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island A 20+ years rehash with more f-bombs and fewer humorous anecdotes; though, the way Bryson weaves in trivia, pubs and people keeps it a jaunty read except for his faulty "the last person you want solving a problem is a highway engineer."  Big Ben rests within the Elizbeth Tower.  Arthur Conan Doyle wrote twenty books on spiritualism.  The Oxford museum held the last stuffed dodo but a curator had it burned as it was too musty.  There's a moss that only exists in Stanford and on a Cornish footpath.  Cal gave Parkinson a visiting professorship for his "work expands to fill the time allotted".  Novel diction: yellapurum, Branston pickle, eve-rest, coir, folly-scattered, brow (meaning hill), tiffin, orangery, gasometer, chine, kissing gate, stonking, souk, anchoress, flytipping, articulacy, hagiographer, strapline, ostracod, oik, kyle (as in the Kyle of Durness), neeps and firkin. 2015 7/21
Bill Bryson Notes From A Small Island Everything you need to know about Britain in a handbook, including village ratings (mostly based on architecture, rail schedules, pubs and local hiking trails).  What's the difference between a village and a hamlet?  One's a play by Shakespeare.  Durham is a must see - take my car.  For the benefit of foreign readers, I should explain that as a rule in Britain no matter how many windows there are in a bank, post office or rail station, only two of them will be open, except at very busy times, when just one will be open.  Bill hates Oxford architecture but I saw a show that lauded its Danish curved plywood furniture and the vastness of the pre-stressed concrete dining hall.  Novel diction: pot plants (instead of potted plants), pootle, twee, bosky, tuck shop, stair-rod, kursaal, parlous, hosepipe, pinfold, sarsen, tonged rondel of bread rolls, trouser turnups, relict, feverfew, avuncular, machicolated, wooftah, naff, stallholder, lilo, verger, pitmen, walpamur, epicerie, hoiked and yobbo. 1993 7/21
John Grisham Sooley Somali Sooley rises above the rim in the US before failing the draft - whilst gang rebellion at home results in his father's death and family's refugee encampment.  It's a sad ending. 2021 6/21
Sue Burke Immunity Index I'm glad I was vaccinated before reading this fictional account of a Trump-y prez inflicted virus and anti-virus pandemic, despite the heroines' cloned immunity and ectopic pedazo of mammoth. 2021 6/21
L Ron Hubbard Hurricane A pulp fiction golden oldie that packs a lot of mayhem into 50 pages.  Unfortunately, the era's color and gender bias spoils the read. 1937 5/21
Rhys Bowen Evan's Gate Evan can't solve an abduction because it didn't happen, so he resolves a 25 year old cold case disappearance instead.  He goes out of bounds, but, unlike Hamish, isn't reprimanded.  2004 5/21
MC Beaton Death of an Addict Hamish (Scottish for James) becomes George in a covert drug sting and gets jilted for his trouble.  The murder is but a cameo and is solved in a trice. 1999 5/21
A Guide for Occupants











 		 Bill Bryson













 		 Bill's human biology research is interesting but the book comes to a dead end.

Novel info: our DNA stretched out would reach Pluto, DNA can survive for thousands of years, we contain over a million different proteins, we have 37 trillion cells, 3 million hair follicles, 6 million sweat glands and 4 types of skin sensory corpuscles, it is a paucity of pigment that gives us eye color, we grow about 25 feet of hair in a lifetime, our hairlessness allows cooling sweat for endurance in heat, lab tests prove that ankle scratching is the most satisfying, the brain can hold 200 exabytes of information, our neural axons may have 400,000 dendrites each, the brain actively keeps us one fifth of a second in the future, despite myth we use all of our brain, taste buds are replaced every ten days, we have taste buds on the tongue, mouth roof, throat and gullet, orange juice dyed red tastes like cherry, a quarter of our blood is in the liver, an eighth of the living have 13 pairs of ribs and people with Down's often are missing a pair, bone grows back, a seventh of us lack the palmaris longus muscle that helps keep the palm tensed, crucifixion nails must go through the wrist to support a person, we have Henles in the thumb, eye, uterus, abdomen and kidneys, all animals have about 800 million heartbeats in a lifetime, young cat owners get asthma less, cigarette filters do not reduce tar, french fries make up one fourth of American vegetable intake, hibernating animals need a couple of hours sleep per day (and bears don't truly hibernate), we dream in or out of REM sleep, body clocks exist in the brain, heart, kidneys, lungs and pancreas, babies in the womb yawn, and all geckos are female and offspring clones.

Novel diction: doyenne, squamae, sebum, ephelides, erythema, melasma, glabrous, horripilation, anthropometry, dermatoglyphics, adermatoglyphia, accrine, apocrine, isovaleric, methanediol, callosum, sulci, gyri, telencephalon, pellucidum, habenular, accumbens, fovea, choroid, sclera, puncta, achromatopes, saccades, pinna, ossicles, stereocilia, cacosmia, palatoglossus, geniohyoid, vallecula, deglutition, bechic, opiorphin, amylase, ptyalin, lysozyme, cadaverine, bilirubin, fibrin, leptin, ghrelin, glycogen, glucagon, trypsin, lipase, amylase, itenerarium, sesamoid, osteocalcin (which buoys our spirits), nuchal, chemokines, neutrophils, granulocytes, basophils, prostglandins, eosinophils, atopy, ileitis, cicatrizing, nares, alveolar macrophages, sternutation, brucellosis, choline, adipocytes, hyponatremia,  pylorus, fundus,chyme, borborygmi, villi, alveolates, ascomycetes, basidiomytes, hypnagogia, hypnic jerk, suprachiasmatic,amyloid, prion, hypocretin, ectopic, gastrulation, puerperal, eclampsia and preeclampsia, douloureux, nociceptors, poliomylelitis, neuromyasthenia, Elizathkingia, thogotoviruses, zoonotic, yaws, hemagglutinin, neurominidase, apoptosis, and our basic 8 amino acids: isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, threonine and valine, 		2019













 		 5/21













 
Rhys Bowen Evan Only Knows Evan on vacation with bride to be Bronwen saves his father's murderer Mancini from a 2nd Swansea conviction.  Novel diction: matin and git. 2003 5/21
MC Beaton
 		 Death of a Scriptwriter The good people of Dreary Drim have a TV shoot but the scriptwriter and the striptease are struck down by other means.  Hamish cozies up to the wrong women and is left waiting for Priscilla (again).   Novel diction: ponce about, looking frit, don't greet (don't weep: Scot.), sententiously, pathic, cheil, Crivens, ghillie, shinty and shirty. 1998
 		 4/21
 
Ross D E MacPhee End of the Megafauna A tale of wonder accompanied by color plates of real near time beasts. 2019 4/21
Janet Evanovich
 		 Fortune and Glory: Tantalizing Twenty-Seven Stephanie Plum, with the help of Lula, Grandma, Ranger, a skip, and Gabriel Rose (a covert recovery agent whose own series starts in July) foil the mob and blow up a treasure trove of diamonds.  Car fires, Cluck in the Bucket, donuts, family food and funeral home showings in the new story evoke the previous series of comedy.
 		 2021

 		 4/21

 
LE Modesitt, Jr Fairhaven Rising Beltur's niece and daughter slaughter the evil axis armies as Fairhaven takes the high ground. 2021 4/21
Amanda Hocking The Ever After More Norse, more horse, more coarse action at the end. 2021 3/21
Rhys Bowen Evans to Betsy Bronwen gets giardiasis, Betsy gets precognition, and Evan gets a Beltane (Calan Mai) hare. 2002 3/21
MC Beaton Death of a Dentist This time Hamish makes use of the highland telegraph (gossip) to find a hole in the story...then gives the credit away for some scotch.  Novel words: acidulous, fash, teuchter and uisge. 1997 3/21
Amanda Hocking The Morning Flower Book 2 of the Omte Origins trilogy: Ulla travels to a Norse island to find out the truth about her family and is whisked away to a fantasy land.  Novel diction: ikat, eldvatten, gräddtårta, candidiasis, økkspill (dart-like game with axes), kasteren axe, trag, hemosterin and gliocyte. 2020 3/21
Amanda Hocking The Lost City Book 1 of the Omte Origins trilogy: Ulla is interned at a troll college and spends her spare time searching for clues to her parentage.  Novel diction: whinge, hnefatafl (viking chess), tillräckligt (enough), triskelion, troglecology, ex nihilo nihil fit, cervid, peurojen, deckle, ombré, kuguar, akutaq, dökkt, geitvaktmann and pleather. 2020 3/21
Frans de Waal


 		 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? The author explores the many ways scientists and philosophers assess intelligence and consciousness.  Many animals use tools, many recognize faces, many see themselves in a mirror, some have politics and some have complex communication skills.  Dogs are smart and cats are not, but cat owners (per a study) are smarter than dog owners.  Novel diction: chronesthesia, autonoesis, ethology, tranche, kittiwake, haptic, theriomorphic, rapprocchement, triok, dognition, chimpion, saltatory, hominization, humpback bubble nets, triadic, lobtailing, coral trout, musth, wanna nut, matriline, anthropodenial, brachiator, igNobel Prize, jumping spider cognition (they learn how to pluck other spider's webs through trial and error), and goldfinches were once cruelly kept chained to tiny thimbles so that they would fetch their own water. 2016


 		 2/21


 
Lawrence M. Krauss A Universe from Nothing Nothing new in this physics book except for some philosophizing on the flat universe, "something will always arise from nothing", and a bit of info on virtual particles (the brief appearance of which modifies electron orbits in atoms). 2012 2/21
Desert Heat J.A. Jance Joanna get's Bisbee when the Cochise County sheriff dies after trying to atone for being black mailed by the bad cops that conspired to kill Joanna's husband and smear her family name.  1993 2/21
LE Modesitt, Jr


 		 Quantum Shadows


  		The only developed, and maybe cyborg, character, Raven (aka Corvid Corvyn and Stafie Corbin) conducts a compact electrobike tour of the Ganymede orient that culminates in a battle of destroyers vs. the lone wolf of the sub quanta.  Novel diction: Kutkh, impermite (Nate Schachner technovelgy: electron-stripped, impenetrable, fabulously heavy element), stedora (fictitious hat), hornbeam, ashlar masonry, "sadin over a chiton" (Modesitt reversal of linen underdress and wool tunic), lutelin (fictitious instrument), narthex, quoin, trishula, lancia (a Black Desert Valkyrie's weapon), thobe, alim (to know Islam), coywolf (true hybrid), halakha (the way in Judaism), ratiocinative, daeva, athornan, aash, atashkadeh, sheermal, Kaaba, opuntia, Mavrodaphne, pastitsio, hulijing, salaryman, ziran, Ahuramazda, Niflheim and qubit-based AI (scientists today believe that quantum bit neural networks might enable future AI to attain consciousness). 2020


  		2/21


 
Rhys Bowen

 		 Evan Can Wait

 		 Evan Evans doesn't wait for the new leggy DI to solve the case since Bronwyn's ex is on the line and he strikes pay-dirt in an old slate mine.  A tape of an intriguing side story is as burnt as the perp by the end but a not-missing masterpiece survives.  Novel diction and more Welsh: stewed tea, chacun à son goût (to each their own taste), dogsbody (menial), conkers (chestnuts), settle (high-backed bench), elevenses, hyoid, stodge (heavy and hard to digest food), toad in the hole, ha'pth (idiot - from half penny worth, I guess), fach (dear girl), ble ryt ti (where are you), cariad (darling), cigydd (butcher), diolch yn favor (thank you very much), iechyd da (pronounced yacky dah - cheers), or gore (okay), and Pobl y Cwm (Welsh TV show - People of the Valley). 2001

 		 2/21

 
David Rosenfelt The K Team I guess Rosenfelt is getting tired of Andy Carpenter so he relegates him to a couple of cameo appearances as his wife forms a detective service with Marcus and ex-K-9 Simon Garfunkle and his partner.  Marcus and the dog provide the muscle and save the day. 2020 1/21
David Rosenfelt Dachshund Through the Snow Andy gets a bit chippy, quotes "Cousin Vinnie", resolves a Christmas gift by New Year's Day and solves the case a little later.  Dachshund and Dad are happy about it.  Novel word: probative. 2019 1/21
David Rosenfelt
 Bark of Night
 Carpenter nails another perp, Marcus obviates an Andy/Cappo meeting and another innocent dog is saved.  Novel diction: emesis, amephrotane and NYU Violets. 2019
 1/21
Fredrik Backman Anxious People This is a story about sad thoughts on the day before New Year's eve but it's not as much of a Saab story as some of Backman's other efforts.  It's also a story about bridges, a poor bank robber, cops that relate, a host, hostages, a frog, a monkey and an elk.  It's also a story about idiots and character building.  I hadn't hear the old joke: two Irishmen, lost at sea net a magic lamp and one uses their only wish to turn the sea to Guiness; so the other says, "look what you've done...now we'll have to pee in the boat." 2020 1/21
Carl Hiaasen
 		 Tourist Season
 		 The Wiley tree hugging terrorist presses the Keyes to progress until his penultimate wave of the red bandana.  At times, a bit too cruel and too disparaging of police and piece work, I got what I wanted...a homespun Floridian detective story.
Novel diction: benzophenone, "he's stick", pickerelweed, streel, snook, buitre (Sp.), oolite (>ooid), gumbo-limbo and sea grape trees, and Miami being Fort Dallas in the 1800's.		 1986
 		 12/20
 
David Rosenfelt Muzzled The Andy Carpenter team saves a dog and humanity again.  The plot was no mystery but the wry wit makes it another page turner. 2020 12/20
MC Beaton Death of a Macho Man Hamish works outside of the law to solve two murders and save Priscilla via his highland lie detector, hill race winnings and finagled transport but is too late to save buxom Betty.  Too many women fall for Hamish for him to be a true heart...unless he gets another fine Scottish dog. 1996 12/20
Rhys Bowen
 Evan and Elle The Evans get a taste of french cuisine but the chef's tortured past burns it all down.  Evan Evans figures most of it out.  Novel diction: byre, hollyhocks, escob annwyl, fach (fem. for bach), or gore, cariad, siarad cymraeg typyn butch, plane tree and aga stove. 2000
 12/20
Robin Wall Kimmerer













 		 Braiding Sweetgrass













 		 Breathe in the scent of sweetgrass and you will remember.  The folklore, story telling and (even) the preaching is pretty good in this book but I enjoyed the botany lessons the most.  I didn't know that pecans come from a pecan hickory tree and I was unaware of butternuts and mast fruiting.  I did know that trees talk using pheromones and that fungi connect them.  I learned that Witch Hazel trees bloom out of season and spit shiny black pearl seeds twenty feet to land like elfin footfalls.  A water lily moves oxygen from new leaves to old leaves via the rhyzome (so the flow is forced - not osmosis).   Rhyzbium bean bacteria fix nitrogen symbiotically.  There is a silk for every kernel in an ear of corn.  The three sisters of American agriculture are corn, beans and squash (the corn provides a scaffold for the beans, the beans provide nitrogen and the squash covers the ground to retain moisture).  Fields planted with all three produce more than if planted separately [but I wonder if such might be practical in commercial farming which gets huge production gains from specialized fertilizers and pesticides].  Cattail pith, root and fruit are edible, the leaves are good for matting and twine fiber, and the seed puffs are good tinder.  Lichen is comprised of only one algae species but 20,000 different fungal companions and can be made into lichen "noodle" soup.  There are bioluminescent mosses.  Rain has multiple voices - water dropping from some mosses and plants generate unique sounds due to biochemicals that effect liquid viscosity and surface tension.  Salamanders sense the Earth's magnetic field.  Asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together because bee and human eyes perceive purple and yellow via a common cone.

Potawatomi grammar is one of animacy (70% of it's words are verbs) and sounds like wind through the pines.  The inanimate are human made things and everything else is alive (like a bay with it's currents and inhabitants).  If a maple is a she, and not an it, perhaps she will be given more respect.  I agree with Robin when she says that language is a dwelling place for ideas that do not exist elsewhere.  A language perpetuates a culture and, unfortunately, many tribal languages are in distress or on the brink of extinction.  Hopefully some Potawatomi words will survive in English, along with reverence for the land.  Robin writes of the moral covenant of reciprocity: taking gifts from nature demands a relationship that allows a giving back (not a transaction).  She loves the land and her gardens...and they love her back.  This is expressed in an annual Thanksgiving Address where the people's minds become one and join in prayer for harmony with the earth.  She sings to a fire as she touches match to tinder, for the wood is a gift from the trees.  When she takes a piece of sweetgrass she gives a gift of tobacco.  The sweetgrass grows better when it is properly harvested [for basket weaving] as opposed to being left alone.  Robin writes of the terrible pollution of the Solvay waste beds but hopes that phytoremediation might return vitality to the lake.  She imagines vanquishing the Windigo (her avatar of selfishness).  She named her daughters Larkin and Linden.

Novel diction: metaphoray, puhpowee (the force that raises mushrooms quickly), yawe (animate word for to be), phytochromes, makaks, eutrophication, oligotrophic, euglenoids, petioles, aerenchyma, circumnutation, adventitious, heterotroph, "brain tanning",  autotroph, bozho (Indian hello), vasculum, salal, ethnobotany, redd, poikilohydric, soredia, shakebolting, sclerophylls, hyporheic, "sprickley sound", ilbal, oncolites, camas flowers, and shkitagen (fire conk).		 2013














 		 11/20














 
Terry Brooks The Last Druid The last Shanara book ends with the good guys and gals winning and the future left open ended.  I'll still be hoping for another season of the Shanara TV series. 2020 10/20
MC Beaton Death of a Nag Macbeth takes a dreary vacation whence he is used by superiors (Skags) to solve a murder and is mystified by romance and life after death.  Novel diction: fruit machine [slot machine], laldy [thrashing or vigor], state of chassis [where the world has been reduced to the bare bones that hold it together] and towser (large dog or large, rough and energetic person). 1999 10/20
JC Eaton Ditched for Murder Phee is back and so is her engaging aunt.  Unfortunately, there is little detective work in this Arizona retirement town murder mystery but there is much familial disfunction. 2017 10/20
Rhys Bowen

  		Evanly Choirs

 		 Evan Evans gets even with the choir director.  Novel (and Welsh) diction: annwyl gyfellion (dear friends), cor meibion (choir of sons), diolch am hymmy (thank goodness for that), diolch yn fawr (thank you very much), iachyd da (cheers - pronounced yachy dah), noswaith da (good evening), plisman (policeman), y parch (the minister), ydych chi'n siriad Cymraeg (do you speak Welsh), toffy nosed, all apeak wellah, fender (fireplace), laver bread made from seaweed, and presermon prunes. 1999

 		 10/20

 
MC Beaton
 		 Death of a Charming Man In book 10, Hamish Macbeth solves the murder of a philanderer in a Drim part of his northern highlands beat, and is happy to be demoted, unengaged and warmed by his reinstalled wood burning stove.  She passed in 2019, so there's limited MC Beaton's but more Marion Chesney under her real name and other pseudonyms: Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward, and Sarah Chester. 1995
 		 10/20
 
Richard Feynman
 		 Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
 He didn't really want his share of the Nobel prize in quantum electrodynamics because of the unwanted attention it would bring and having to hobnob with royalty...but he got talked into it.  This is an entertaining book because Feynman is a genius, hobbyist and prankster: his safe-cracking studies helped the Manhattan Project get to critical documents when safe owners were unreachable, he played instruments in award winning groups, his art sold, and he was usually happy about it all.  Stuff: mudeo, ofey and Esalen. 1985

 10/20
M M Chouinard
 		 The Dancing Girls
 		 A swift alpha of a Fournier series from a man-disliker's perspective: the resultant W.o.W. a-oedipal avatar vs. femme fatale murder mystery is unsolved by detective (nee Lieutenant) Jo.  The story is dark and twisted with an intentionally unsatisfied finale that leaves you wanting for more.  I made a note of the Lieutenant's name and found out that jo has a definition: Scottish for sweetheart (alteration of joy); therefore, Fournier is now a sweetheart detective. 2019
 		 9/20
 
Oliver Sacks






 		 The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat




 		 Narrative essays on individual neuralgia: the title character had damage to his occipital lobe, the lost mariner was without present memory but was keen on anything pre-1945, the disembodied lady had hands like lumps of clay but recovered, the man who fell out of bed lost proprioception with his leg, hands is similar, phantoms are reimagined missing limbs, on the level is about a Parkinson's patient who helps engineer an eyeglass-mounted level to offset loss of inner ear balancing, eyes right is about a patient that could only see and believe in things on her right and would spin around to find things on her left, the president's speech is about emotionless patients that judged the emotion of a presidential speech from the word selection and usage, witty ticcy ray is about a Tourette's subject that was cured but missed the energy, cupid's disease is another emotion deficit case, a matter of identity, father-sister, reminiscence, incontinent nostalgia and a passage to India are about old memories arising after amnesia, the dog beneath the skin is about heightened sense of smell that comes with some brain injuries, murder is about total amnesia and painful return of memory after a brain injury, Rebecca, walking grove, twins and autist artist are about idiot savants.  This book gave me headaches and insomnia because of the tragedy and the diction it contains:epigraph, Bosendorfer, Humean, mammillary bodies, hebetude, afferance, labyrinthctomised, hemiplegia, diplegia, athetotic, gnosis, faradisation, fulgarate, tabes, aphasia, agnosia, aprosodia, glioma, hypermnesia, ebriety, enantiomorph, hebephrenic, consecution, hyperosmia, amusia, diplopia, novena, uncus, ictal, mnesis, praxis, oculogyric, myoclonus, polydipsia, satyriasis, oneirophrenia, uncinate, rhinencephalon, paraphillia, epicritic, macrosomatic, fossa, osmalgia, veridical, salacity, photism, aedificium, benison, orison, dysphonia, ramify, significand, personeities, breviaries, and missal. 1970






 		 9/20






 
Alan Weisman


 
 The World Without Us

 		 A discussion of what might happen on Earth if all humans disappeared suddenly: from cities (except glass) being eaten by flora to the repopulation of flora and fauna, from the corrosive demise of petropolis to the eons it takes to degrade plastic and landfill newspaper, from the jungle rains eroding away Roosevelt's Panama Canal to his everlasting image on Mount Rushmore, from dogs unable to compete to cats taking away the weasel's niche, from the recovery of endangered species to the radioactive decay of nuclear power plants.  New stuff: shtetl, miombo, mbula, megalonyx (Jefferson's fossil discovery), Tucson Desert Laborotory and metaphysics sculpture studio, nurdle, passerine, coppicing, reaves, bulbul, moanalo duck, bobolink, chornobyl is Ukrainian for wormwood, qiviut (musk oxen wool), semiotician, ceibas, sprue, pisonia, corallines, and fever tree. 2007


 
 9/20


 
Robin Stevenson
 The World Without Us
 A story about Tampa teens and death: pseudo-overdose, suicide survival, drowned sibling, anti-death-penalty activist parent, reincarnation, purgatory, heaven, hell, goth darkness, black holes, fear of the dark and glow-in-the-dark stars. 2007
 
 9/20
 
Rhys Bowen



 		 Evan Help Us



 		 Evan Evans solves another murder, has 50% more woman trouble and preserves the innocents of his village.  All in a day's work for this Welsh bobby.  Novel diction: bwich y saethau (bow of the arrows), [col], yr wyddfa (Snowdon), sut yrch chi (how are you), bwlch y moch (the pig's butt), nos da (good night), glydr fawr (big ram), cawl (stew), the myth of Beddgelert,  Llanfairpwllgwyngeyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (longest town name meaning St. Mary's church in the hollow of white hazel near the rapid whirlpool and St. Tisilio's church near the red cave), chapatti, horse brasses, willow pattern plate and sooty tern. 1998



 		 8/20



 
Rhys Bowen
 		 Evans Above
 		 Mamba Day, 2020: Eureka!  This Welsh detective story reads a lot like a Hamish Macbeth novel.  It has unpronounceable locations, undecipherable dialect, British foreign words (Welsh), woman trouble, and great story telling.  I'm sold!  Novel diction: bach (small), eisteddfod, sut wyt ti (how are you), bara brith bread, eccles cake, "deed to goodness", rock bun, lached da (good lads), and Brains beer. 1997
 		 8/20
 
Malcolm Pryce

 		 Aberystwyth Mon Amour
 		 Another Welsh detective, Louie Knight, and a smarter child, solve the case of the missing essay.  The plot revolves around a true Welsh military blunder in 1960's Patagonia.  Novel diction: Rio Caeriog, woad, menhir, bore da (good morning), coracle, surplice, basque, assiette, stick of rock, cob = horse, gateaux, marram grass, pong = odor, ludo set, ninetynine cone, cartographer's folly, prynhawn da (good afternoon), chwarae teg (fair play), 2nd detective rule: watch after your shoes, avuncular, anglepoise lamp, snook, whinegeing, ha'p'orth, windcheater and ristretto. 2001

 		 8/20

 
Ewart Hutton

 		 Good People

 		 Italian-Welsh SD Glyn Capaldi solves a mystery in Dinas.  This sometimes crass detective story involving sex crimes has an intricate plot and good character development but not as much Welsh as I would have liked and the ending lacked action.  Novel diction: swish (n), brogue, tabard, abattoir, dingle, cwm (a well known hangman word used repeatedly in this novel), raddle, faff about, echt, a rook is a crow, toerag, lamp (v), petechiae, hyoid, pederasty, milk float, tump, prat, encaustic, pseudohermaphroditism, wellingtonia, roadside verges, and crack willows. 2012

 		 8/20

 
JC Eaton
 		 Booked 4 Murder
 		 I read this because of the similarity of the author's pseudonym to MC Beaton.  Although almost as humorous as a Hamish Macbeth book, it lacks the depth of characters and prose.  Still, it was a fun jaunt (like a Plum novelette, but not quite as silly).  Novel words: tchotchkes and "deeper than the mud in Missouri". 2017
 		 8/20
 
MC Beaton
 		 Death of a Travelling Man In his 9th adventure, recently promoted Sgt.Hamish Macbeth is awarded a constable under his command that drives him crazy with his zealous cleanliness but happily leaves him for Lucia Ferrari after Hamish resolves, free of any townspeople exposure, the murder of a blackmailer.  Novel words: malaprop, sibilant, burns (being Scottish creeks), wheest, "in a fair taking over", bampot, frowsty, havers and veriest. 1993
 		 8/20
 
Doug Engstrom Corporate Gunslinger In the future, legal claims are arbitrated via duels and Kira is well trained in both pistol and bocce ball.  A strange concept is handled well enough for a good read.  Novel wording: flop sweat, trilby hat, and doof. 2020 8/20
Paula Guran (ed.)










 		 Rock On











 		 You slog through this collection of Sci-Fi's "greatest hits" of rock and roll until you get to Bear and Kihn.  It includes Howard Waldrop's “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” wherein juvenile delinquents vie at doo-wop and get a rise out of audience and UFO; F. Paul Wilson's “Bob Dylan, Troy Johnson, and the Speed Queen” wherein a copyist travels back in time 100 years with folk-rock records and kills the Speed Queen between sets in front of Bob Dylan while his music gets ripped; in Edward Bryant's “Stone”, a starlet burns out when the emotion engineer turns it up to eleven; in Lawrence C. Connolly's “Mercenary”, the hero takes action against a rockin' shape shifter; in Elizabeth Hand's “The Erl-King”, a pact with the King stops a Lie; in Bradley Denton's “We Love Lydia Love” an axe wielding double grip's gal gets too drippy from the chippee; in Graham Joyce's “Last Rising Son” a jukebox pushes the buttons; in John Shirley's “Freezone” the last rocker flees a raft of sins; in Elizabeth Bear, “Hobnoblin Blues” Loki becomes uncategorical before turning the world on it's ear; in Greg Kihn's “Then Play On“ a grave harpist provides a home to an auto occupying guitarist; in Michael Swanwick's “The Feast of Saint Janis” a dystopian America resurrects Janis Joplin over and over just to feed her to the crowds; in musician Charles de Lint's “That Was Radio Clash” long hair people get a do-over; in Pat Cadigan's “Rock On” a good synner is used forever; Poppy Z. Brite's “Arise” is about musician's who fake their deaths only to become wraiths; Marc Laidlaw's “Wunderkindergarten” has brain serum injected into toddlers who grow up to be rockin' rebels and retire early; Caitlín R. Kiernan's “Paedomorphosis” is amphibious; David J. Schow's “Odeed” has the mixer push it to eleven to make the fans disappear; Graham Masterton says that Jimi Hendrix was a true “Voodoo Child”; in Bruce Sterling “We See Things Differently”, the continental congress has fallen and the intercontinental caliphate intends to keep it that way; in Alastair Reynolds “At Budokan” robots, giant robots and T'rexes take center stage; in Del James “Mourningstar” the lead singer makes a sacrifice for the band; in Lewis Shiner's “Jeff Beck”, a so-so guitarist gets his wish to play like Jeff Beck and gets sick of all the imperfect music he used to love; in Lucius Shepard's “...How My Heart Breaks When I Sing This Song...” a distopian future teen couple free an android soul; in Norman Spinrad's “The Big Flash” a goth band pushes it to the brink.

New words and trivia: mullions, dishabille, ormulu, arabesque, a unibrow is a sign of a warlock, a snout is a cigarette, kissing-gate, houngan, dvergar, Bear is actually Elizabeth's middle name, Charles de Lint has an album out named Old Blue Truck, chador, myomolecular, catachrestic, hypnogoguery, shoggoth, carezza, interlarding, infatudynamics, coterminous, roadbones, yonks, majolica, the glass harmonica was invented by Ben Franklin, putsch, Baby Bellingcooker, Robin Trower was in Procul Harum, Thomas Jefferson had children with a black woman and only freed them at the end of his life, schnorrers, shlock, schwatzers, and gevalt.		 2012











 		 7/20











 
Alan Dean Foster Quozl "Harey" (long-eared, furry and over-sexed) ET's travel to Earth in a generation ship, burrow into a mountain gorge in Idaho in the 50's, make human friends in the 60's, come out in Disneyland in the 70's, and become accepted around the world by the 80's. 1989 7/20
Alan Dean Foster Sagramanda In Burroughesque manner, several separate narratives intersect with the most natural one prevailing (all set in a futuristic India with held-over antiquated customs). 2006 6/20
Celeste Ng Little Fires Everywhere A Payton Place telling of a photographer and her daughter who are befriended by their landlord in the provincial Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland.  Despite both the landlord and the photographer being busy bodies who ruin lives, they don't prevent their children from making the novel a pretty good read. 2017 6/20
Edward McPherson The Backwash Squeeze Subtitled A Newcomer's Journey Into the World of Bridge, this book is really about that journey and not about bridge.  I was hoping for a lesson on the Backwash Squeeze but it's not really there.  Vulnerable in Hearts covered the same ground on the history of contract bridge but with variance on the Bridge Table Murder and less description of duplicate tournaments.  According to McPherson, Cal has shown that playing bridge improves the immune system.  He also claims that Snoopy was proclaimed a life master in 1997.  Page 38 lists (but does not describe) some interesting bridge vocabulary: Baby Blackwood, elopement, grand slam force, ruffing finesse, wish trick, psychic lead, phantom sacrifice, nuisance bid, Morton's Fork Coup, isolating the menace, kibitzer's make, kiss of death, Gum Wrapper Coup, and the Winkle. 2007 6/20
Kim Michele Richardson





  		The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek




 		 This is not a book for the soft hearted.  It is the bluest book ever written.  Not off color blue but of-color blue.  19-year-old Cussy Marie "Bluet" Lovett, nee Carter is one of two coloreds in Troublesome (her skin is light blue and her lips and nails darker blue due to a rare genetic methemoglobinemic condition).  Her life in the Kaintuck hills is cruel, with children dieing of starvation or in child birth, and leadership filled with hate of peculiarities.  Her Pa gives her away to a man that busts one ear and one arm and dies of heart failure while raping her.  Her mule, Junia, is her only protector until a good man proposes...but the sheriff invalidates their marriage, breaks the mans leg and puts him in jail for four years.  For a while, she takes methylene blue from old Doc that makes her white but the side effects are terrible and she can't let it deny her book delivery to the needy hill folk; "thinking about [my white pride and] the burdens my folks carried, and the grace they carried them with made me feel smaller".  But blue isn't the only color in the book.  The language is more colorful than Twain and scenes are painted with prose: Junia raised her upper lip and nibbled the breeze with tall, talking teeth; creek waters rippled over stone, the murmurs swirling around the cove, as damp breaths of fog pressed down; spring winds knotted old winter grasses, and the scents of budding bloodroot, geranium, wild dogwoods, and creeping laurel sweetened the mountain air, but an uncomfortable crawl fouled my skin; teacher Winnie Parker pushed through the doorway with a flared skirt of eight scruffy young'uns circling her; the warm spring day dropping behind the hills, a cooling curtain quivering on its tail; the hills trotted out the boldest colors this autumn, blushed in scarlets, pumpkins and golds.  Novel diction: diddles and bee panther. 2019






  		6/20






 
Linda Nagata The Last Good Man Near future private security firms are at war utilizing autonomous robots.  Fast paced with a riveting conclusion but with a bit more violence than I would have liked.  Novel diction: profligacy, mediot, riad, calamansi juice, and clerestories. 2017 5/20
Janet Evanovich
 Twisted Twenty-Six
 Stephanie, Lula, Connie, Morelli and Ranger are up to their old tricks when Grannie's new (old mafioso) husband kicks the bucket and his La-Z Boys want the widow to give up "the keys" (which turn up at the end but are only important because it puts the family in peril).  Steph single handedly saves the day despite losing her extensions, her dignity and (as usual) her car. 2020
  		5/20
 
John Scalzi The Last Emperox The conclusion to The Interdependency Trilogy has plenty of court intrigue, some salty language and a few "good ones" but closes abruptly. 2020 5/20
Donna Tart





 		 The Goldfinch





  		Reviews of The Goldfinch compare it to works of Dickens ("where you can't boil down to pure 'good' or pure 'bad'...") and call it a modern classic.  I only read it because Erin Morgenstern made it seem like everyone has read Donna Tart novels.  This is a long, well written book with a bit of action in the first and last chapters and a lot of inaction in-between.  The action bits are really reactions and the inaction bits don't happen, they are related (told by a character or read in a newspaper).  In this literary quagmire, the beginning and end are intentionally unoriginal (the real Goldfinch survived the explosion that killed its dutch Delft master and, in this novel, when recovered, it is with many other "important" stolen pieces of art).  The author describes The Goldfinch (which, painted on wood, is manacled to a shelf via a fine gold chain) as doomed to always return to the same place.  I enjoyed the sugar sandwiches and the furniture repair shop, "where without even realizing it you slipped sometimes into 1850".  I finished the book on the same day that Amazon Prime Video posted the 2019 movie version...it was okay.
Novel diction: consanguinity, Pierrot, tasseled splats, tiger maple, ebonized, chlorotic, nekulturny (Russian for uncultured), souk, doddle, gluing-and-cramping, a-taunto, aethorous, fubsiness, vermeil, Cohiba smoke, drypoint, vanitas, scumbling, muladhara, renunciate, antiquaire, "knocker in the trade", ochreous, satsangs, oliebollen, carillon, pastose and chiaroscuro.
 2013





 		 5/20





 
Linda Nagata Silver The avatars fight the new terror to a standstill but it escapes to it's home where it seeks to "re-start the game" which would kill the inhabitants.  The "one" avatar develops allies and together with the terror's ex (the godess) they save the day.  Edges was slow but Silver is quicker. 2020 4/20
Linda Nagata Edges In the future people can live as ghosts in a computer and copy themselves into animate avatars. One such captures an alien Berserker-like space destroyer, picks up some homies, and heads off to rediscover extra-solar humanity only to be waylayed by another space terror. 2019 4/20
Erin Morgenstern




  		The Starless Sea





  		If you look into a mirror while holding an open book, and there is another mirror behind you, you will see a story in a story in a story, ad infinitum.  The author calls this overlapping narratives (at least one of her characters does).  Despite the lengthy dive into a Baumesque underworld, the book is fast paced (partly due to the interweaving of very short fairy tales and mysterious vignettes).  The hero discovers an ancient book in his university stacks that features events from his childhood.  This leads him to a costume party, a door destroying secret society, and portals that include paintings of doors that open into another world filled with books, bones, bees, caverns and cats.  The author says that cats are guardians but mostly they do nothing in this book except for one uppity Persian.  One door closes as a sea of honey consumes volumes of ended stories and another opens to an untold future (probably a sequel).  The author claims that a story is change and one never ends as long as it is still told.  In one final paragraph she writes: I remember wondering if this story was an analogy about people who stay in places or relationships longer than they should because they're afraid of letting go or moving on or the unknown, or how people hold on to things because they miss what the thing was even if that isn't what that same thing is now.  In her acknowledgements she thanks a scent shop for her inclusion of smells in her writing.
Novel diction: vetiver, key bow, psychometry, agnostopagan, chignon, meet-cute, coupe glass, bibliomancy, widow's walk, bee's knees cocktail.		 2019





  		3/20





 
Adrian Tchaikovsky
 		 Children of Ruin

  		This sequel is faster paced and edgier than it's predecessor.  This time the virus is used on Octopuses (which Adrian prefers to call Octopi despite knowing it to be improper) which lose their home world to a microscopic invader from the neighboring planet of Nod.  Dr. Kern returns as a brain-in-a-box to save the day.  If you ever wanted to know what octopods with enhanced cognition would be like, then this is the book for you.  Novel diction: quoditia, cephalothorax, cryptobiotic, bespoke, haruspex, urticate, doyenne, moddable, and qualia. 2019

  		3/20

 
Adrian Tchaikovsky
 		 Children of Time

  		Religious radicals derail Dr. Kern's experiment and her nano-virus is exposed to invertebrates instead of on the monkeys that didn't make it down to hre quarantined terraformed planet.  Ages pass and humanity is pared down to a few survivors in ark ships and one of these runs afoul of the spider planet.  If you ever wondered what might have happened on Earth if insects and arthropods became sentient, then this is the book for you.
Novel diction: abseil, conurbation, numinous, apposite, hemolymph, lazar house, counterpane, apostate, recusant, mendacity, monandry, lich, autolysis, fripperies, and book lung.		 2016

 		 3/20

 
David A. Sinclair











 		 Lifespan












 		 Harvard Professor Sinclair is the preeminent authority on aging which he convinced me is a disease...and he says that a cure is ten years or less away.   Despite leafing through layers of lab reports and lingo, I found the book fascinating.  Cutting to the chase, here is what the doc is doing to increase his health span: daily 1 gram of NMN, 1 gram of metformin, 1 gram of resveratrol, a dose of vitamins D, K2 and aspirin; he minimizes intake of carbs, meat and sugar, often skips a meal, and exercises;  he has a phlebotomist draw blood for analysis every month; he doesn't smoke, avoids microwaved plastic, excessive UV exposure, x-rays and CT scans, and keeps his BMI at 23-25.

Novel diction and stuff: stickybeak (Aussie term for an overly curious person), oncogenes, antagonistic pleitropy, the American chameleon lizard is evolving a longer lifespan on remote Japanese islands, histones, loss of NAD as we age causes decline in sirtuin gene activity (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide), TOR (target of rapamycin) is another longevity gene, autophagy, AMPK (metabolic control enzyme), hormesis, genetic dark matter (the human genome is not really completely mapped yet), DNA helicase, sirtuins convert euchromatin to heterichromatin (silent genes), genistein, histome deactylase (HDAC) is coded by SIR2 to prevent DNA transcription to RNA, ICE mice (Inductible Changes to the EPigenome) are activated with tamoxifen, cells become ex-differentiated due to epigenetic noise, endothelial cells, "We have reduced mortality more than we prevented morbidity" wrote Eileen Crimmins, ischemic heart disease, geroncognesis, smoking raises cancer risk 5 times but being 50 raises it a 100 times, intentional asceticism (i.e. intermittent fasting), carnitine, metionine restriction or decreased consumption of branched-chain amino acids improves metabolic health (eat less meat, even good meat), exercise leads to longer telomeres via hypoxic response (exercise to the point where you can't speak without pausing for breath, i.e. HIIT), brown fat, "saw-na" vs. "zow-na" vs. being a snicklefritz, rapalogs are being sought to act like rapamycin but with less toxicity, goat's rue, metformin, resveratrol (but it would take the equivalent of 1000 bottles of wine a day...), xenohormesis, NR and NMN, Hayflick limit (cell division limit), cytokines released by senescent cells cause unhealthy inflammation, inflammaging, senolytics (such as quercetin from capers and kale) can eliminate senescent cells, senomorphic, junk DNA (retrotransposons) are rendered silent by sirtuins else cells start to transcribe endogenous viruses, Barbra Streisand twice cloned her dog, TETs (Ten-Eleven Translocation Enzymes) and OSK factors, hemolysis, if you're a G6PD carrier fava beans can kill you, Gluten is a poison if you have celiac disease, pharmacoepigenetics, human epigenome, genome, biome and proteome, without health sensors we know more about the health of our cars than of our own bodies, biosensor rings are being made by InsideTracker, melomys, Royal Society motto is Nullius in Verba (take nobody's word for it), Steven Pinker: "Most people agree that life is better than death.  Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty.  Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger.  Freedom is better than tyranny.  Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination.  Literacy is better than illiteracy. [ We have all of those things in greater plentitude today than we did a hundred years ago, so how could anyone not say that the world is not getting to be a better place?]", teosinte, leghemoglobin, CRISPR-modified crops should not be banned, skillbaticals, tardigrades, cnidnarians, melaleuca tree and banksia flower.		 2019












 		 3/20












 
Lisa Randall


 		 Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs

 		 A somewhat speculative description of a potential dark matter disk pervading the middle of the Milky Way spiral that could shorten the "up and down" bobbing cycle of our galaxy to where comet perturbation might closely coincide with extinction event periodicity.  An interesting read when Lisa discusses dark matter models and astronomic measurement.

Stuff from the book: strong CP problem, LUX (a dark matter detection experiment), CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search), EDELWEISS (Experience pour Detector Les Wimps en Site Souterrain), fiducial volume, core-cusp problem (mass distributed towards the edge is cuspy), missing satellite problem (not enough dwarf galaxies orbiting bigger galaxies), the too big to fail problem (massive galaxy prediction failure), GAIA probe, Hipparcos probe, boffins, and rapidification. 		2019


 		 2/20


 
Hank Green
 		 An Absolutely Remarkable Thing A social media star's fame (due to alien robot adoration) is puzzling enough but after she dies the book ends with her knocking on her best friend's door. 2018 2/20
Lee Smolin



  		The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum
  		A very philosophical take on physics and the divide between realists (Schrodinger's "beables" camp) and anti-realists (the Copenhagen observables camp).  The author discusses several alternatives to the Uncertainty Principle of quantum foundations including the Pilot Wave theory, Many Universes theories and Spontaneous Collapse theory but ends by saying none are complete and urges new physicists to continue challenging the mainstream instead of being limited by convention.  Bohr was a son of a physiology professor, brother of a mathematician, father of six professors (one also earning the Nobel prize and another representing Denmark in the Olympics).  Schrodinger developed his equation while on vacation with his girlfriend, while his best friend, mathematician Hermann Weyl, stayed at home with Mrs. Schrodinger.

Novel diction: complementarity, twistor theory, quantum information theory, quantum teleportation, and "it from [qu]bit".
 2019



 		 2/20



 
Lisa Randall









  		Knocking On Heaven's Door








  		Randall is German for Edge of the Universe but in this book she stays at home (with visits to CERN in Switzerland).  She scales reality, particles and the cosmos.  She goes into great detail about the construction of the CERN LHC (Large Hadron Collider).  Lisa is a modeller and, with other CERN physicists, theorized an energy and decay mechanism for the Higgs Boson which turned out to be close enough for the LHC to discover the particle in 2012.  The depth, breadth and clarity of this book makes it a must for anyone who enjoys being on the cutting edge of science.  I might be a bit biased towards her since she studied a bit at Berkeley and likes the Grateful Dead.  I learned a few things, including M-theory being the best string theory that addresses quantum gravity, most of the mass of a proton is not in its quarks but in the binding energy that holds them together, and that quantum mechanics only holds together if masses are explained using a huge fudge factor called "fine tuning" (making the hierchal problem one of the biggest challenges to the underlying description of matter in that masses are so much different than what is expected from the weak energy scale - something Randall has addressed in an earlier book, Warped Passages, on extra dimensional gravity reduction across two branes and an intermediate bulk).  The hierarchical problem can be restated as the question of why the Higgs mass is so much smaller than the Planck mass.  The dipole and quadrupole magnetic fields of the LHC exceed 8 Teslas but "despite the massive energy in the beams, the energy of the individual bunch collisions involves little more than the kinetic energy of a few mosquitoes in flight."  The smallest black holes are the hottest and radiate the most efficiently; Randall's calculations and cosmic astronomy confirm that small black holes do not live long and the potential creation of one in the LHC is not the concern that a stop law suit speculated.  Lisa quotes Yogi Berra on page 206: "[it's] tough to make predictions, especially about the future."  The process by which elementary particles acquire their masses is the Higgs Mechanism whereby they interact with the Higgs field via the Higgs Boson.  The Higgs field permeates space and is responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking.  Lisa closes with discussion of dark matter and dark energy (which torns out to be a segue into her next book).

Novel diction: Kaluza-Klein particles and technicolor force.		 2008









  		2/20









 
Richard Panek
  		The Trouble With Gravity Panek stricken thesis on physical contraversy surrounding a grave subject that ends with "we don't know what gravity is"...eh?  Novel diction: demiurge, scholium, shibboleth, proprioceptive, and Kepler's friend Wacker von Wackenfels. 2019
  		1/20
 
Alan Dean Foster

 		 The Flavors of Other Worlds

 		 Short stories: Unvasion is about aliens taking over Earth through free commerce; The Man Who Knew Too Much is addicted to black market knowledge chips that can be transferred directly to his brain via his contraband eSnood; Perception is about pity from a slime creature; Chilling is an Icerigger sequel; Consigned is about an aquatic alien aeronaut; Cold Fire is absorbed by an Inuit; Pardon Our Conquest tells how ambassadors cede victory to a outgunned alien invader to ease their absorption into the Commonwealth; That Creeping Sensation comes from giant insects in an overly oxygen rich dystopian future; Rural Singularity tells of an idiot-savant yokel; Seasonings are used by A.I. to passify humanity; Our Specialty Is Xenogeology's hard rock team is commanded to leave well enough alone; Ten and Ten is about trying to teach sign language to a cuttlefish; Valentin Sharffen and the Code of Doom is about a shocking video game. 2018


 		 12/19


 
John Scalzi The Dispatcher In this alternative Chicago the murdered disappear and reappear alive at home, giving accident victims a second chance, as long as someone will murder them...enter the Dispatchers.  Ala film noir, there is a lot of gray area for an intriguing detective story.
 2016 12/19
Sue Burke

  		Interference

 		 240 years after Semiosis, a second mission is sent from dystopian Earth to Pax.  The coral plains come alive with sentient EM wave control and attack the Earthers via their brain chips and the Pacifists via methane fires.  Stevland uses his radio crystal set to remote control a mission lander to defeat the coral.

New diction: menarche and myrmecophyte.		 2019

  		12/19

 
Ken Liu (editor)





 		 Invisible Planets- Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

  		This well edited venture into Chinese Science Fiction reads well in translation and segues smoothly from story to story.  The forward and author notes preceding each set of works reminds us not to just read the dystopian future as that of a Chinese state but that of any world citizen's.  In Chen Qiufan's The Year of the Rat, unemployed college graduates are recruited into a genetically-modified-monster-rat eradication force and undergo the travails of soldiers at war and ultimately vanquish the enemy; in The Fish of Lijiang, a depressed man goes on robotown retreat and is enlivened via a casual acquaintance, and in The Flower of Shazui, a young woman who sells body films (think "live action tattoos") with the aid of a bullet-proof-remote-controlled-unitard-puppet-suit helps a professional friend reverse a knife wielded by her violent pimp.  In Xia Jia's A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight, a child named Ning grows up under the strict protection of the robotic Monk in Ghost Street and only learns after he and an ancient robotic carnival are raized by demolition spiders that he’s real; in Tongtong’s Summer, he and his bed-ridden grandfather are enriched by Ah Fu telepresence in a remote controlled simulacrum of a robot, and in Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse, an ancient and delapidated robotic Dragon-horse is assisted by a bat on his flight to heaven.  In Ma Boyong's The City of Silence, complicated codes are used to evade the communication controls of an intrusive and ultra-authoritarian state (which allows only "healhty words" including numbers like 1984).  In Hao Jingfang's Invisible Planets are descriptions of alien worlds with peoples that are two-faced, about-faced, evolved, mutated, tall-storied, temporal, rotational, substitutes or tin-eared multi-octavers; in Folding Beijing, the city morphs and lets awake only one of three caste neighborhoods at a time.  In tang Fei's Call Girl, the call is to the effemeral.  In Cheng Jingbo's Grave of the Fireflies, the stars are dimming and spacefarers seek out the last asyla in the universe.  In Liu Cixin's The Circle, an assassin ruins an empire by helping them build a computer out of an army of men that turn in weapons for white and black flags to generate OR, NOR, XOR, XAND gates; in Taking Care of God, the aliens that seeded the Earth return to visit and, though poorly treated, let us know that we're better children than their four other homicidal legacies.  2016





  		12/19





 
LE Modesitt, Jr
 The Mage-Fire War Saga of Recluce 21:a young magic familial group is gifted an endangered border town which they protect better than the Earps but at the cost of townspeople and a father/black mage. 2019
 11/19
Alan Jasanoff







 		 The Biological Mind






 		 All you need to know about your brain (although the author says that we still don't know enough to really say how it works despite recent advances in fMRI).  I enjoyed most of Jasanoff's book, especially his fictional account of himself as a disembodied brain, but his lengthy discussion of abnormal psychology was depressing.  Computers are surpassing the gate count of the brain's 10E13 neurons but without the analog enhancement of each from brain chemicals.  The brain is part of the body (with reciprocal communication and energization via organ generated chemicals) and environment (with an MB/S sensory input rate that exceeds the best internet speeds to date).  "Chemicals and electricity, active signalling and passive diffusion, neurons and glia are all part of the brain's mechanisms."  Phreonologist Paul Broca had a collection of 432 brains.  Lord Byron's brain was a whopping 4.9 pounds.  Gauss's brain got mixed up with Dr. Fuchs' 3 pounder.  The brain bank at McLean Hospital holds over 7,000 in Rubbermaid deep freeze containers.  Schrodinger postulated a universal consciousness embodied in statistical motion of atoms while von Neuman held onto an abiotic computer analogy.  The smart gray parrot Alex (in a chapter on animal brains and brain power) said "You turkey!" after people or things that displeased him.  Using a ramp, studies revealed that people leaning to the right or straight up were unaffected in dimensioning; whereas, people leaning to the left underestimated the height of the Eiffel Tower and the weight of an elephant [perhaps this is why some accuse socialists of seeing a leaner future].  "Our senses remain active even in sleep and under anesthesia..."  Two-thirds of subjects were willing to painfully shock strangers when encouraged to do so in a laboratory setting [an aspect of environmental impact on thinking].  Lobotomies were performed on thousands in the 1960's, including Rosemary Kennedy and Evita Peron.  Paralyzed Cathy Hutchison can move a robotic arm via 96 micro-electrodes implanted in her cerebral cortex.  A Berkeley imagery reconstruction project has generated blurry movie images via brain fMRI of a movie watcher.

Novel diction: chryselephantine, neuronocentric, neuroelectricty, glia, astrocyte, hyperemia, fontanelles, optogenetic, Ig Nobel Prize, amativeness, affordances, dystonia, adenosine, pyramidal tracts, equanimous, attentional, xeroxlore, MIN/MAX (early teaching machine), tendentious, alienist, endogenous, phosphenes, reinnervation, nootropic, racetams, and the ka & ba & akh.		 2018







 		 10/19







 
LE Modesitt, Jr Endgames Imager Portfolio 12: a young non-imager king overcomes fraternal intrigue, chapel impropriety and royal pavane. 2019 10/19
Richard Panek
  		The 4 Percent Universe History of astronomy and cosmology that leads to determination of the age, dark energy % and dark matter% of the universe (13.75 billion years, 73% and 23%, plus or minus).  An excellent book that just happens to mention UC Berkeley 67 times.  Novel diction: irruption, peregrinations, BITNET, Cardassian model, Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico, bongo beating Richard Feynman, Guth realized inflation in a universe ten septillion times the volume of what we see then our part of the universe would appear to be flat (omega=1), 2011
 
9/19
 
Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne Kill the Farm Boy A fantasy spoof of The Princess Bride, sword and sorcery, and faerie.  A bit juvenile and a bit predictable at times (one wonders why this work required two authors), but nonetheless a fun read.  Novel diction: boscage, orrechiette, farfalle, grimoires and frontbum. 2018
 9/19
Yahtzee Croshaw Will Save the Galaxy for Food An out of sorts space pilot gets a gig that has him impersonating a space pilot story writer that is hated by his peers and has him at odds with a powerful don and the Earth's president because their kids are on board for the whole ride.  The science is pitiful at times but it's still a good romp.  Novel diction: maisonette, satsuma and gynoid. 2017 8/19
Carlo Rovelli






  		Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity



  		Like many physics books, this one includes physics history, and cleverly goes further by citing ancient poets, philosophers and mathematicians, as well as modern scientists, to add credence that this latest theory of almost everything makes sense.  Quantum gravity is a field wherein resides everything in granules of foam (probability clouds) threaded on loops with minimum size and separation bound by Planck length and time.  "The world, particles, light, energy, space and time - all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields."  Super symmetry is not required (and super symmetric particles haven't yet been detected) and all the math fits for quantum mechanics (granularity, indeterminism and relationality) and general relativity (mass shaping spacetime) and work is underway to complete this potential GUTS theorem with the incorporation of thermodynamics.

Novel diction and stuff: divulgation, incipit, calqued, obscurantism; [in spacetime] there isn't always a 'before' and 'after' between two events in the universe; Lev Landau calls Einstein's General Theory of Relativity [and the gravity field] the most beautiful of theories; the gravitational field is space; Einstein relied on the math of Carl Friedrich Gauss (the prince of mathematics) and others for a mathematical description of space to which he added the effects of mass (that curves spacetime) to develop his field equation () just before Hilbert did; Einstein's Nobel prize winning work on the photoelectric effect led to quantum mechanics; quantum mechanics does not describe objects - it describes processes and events which are junction points between processes; because of quantum repulsion (resistance against shrinking past the Planck length determined minimal universe size) the Big Bang is now being thought of being more likely a Big Bounce;  the universe diameter is 10 to the 120th times the Planck length.		 2014






 		 8/19






 
Michael Wall
 Out There An Aussie biologist discusses extra-terrestrial life: what it might be like, where it might exist, and how we might find it.  Since Dr. Wall has a graduate certificate in science writing from UCSC there is banana slug sex in the book.  Novel diction and stuff: dandle, dinasauroid, fungus species with dozens or even thousands of different sexes, and loaf-of-bread-sized satellites operated by the SF company Planet. 2018
 8/19
Ivan Doig The Sea Runners A fictional account based on a true story of four indentured Swedes who flee mistreatment by canoeing over a thousand miles from Russian America (Alaska) to Oregon in the 1850's.  The prose is unusual and fits the time period.  Novel diction: salal, promyshlennik, fängelse, pood, williwaw, hibble-bibble, moil, sozzled, spraddled, hagbag, potlatch, ouzel, and the thimble (chance). 1982 8/19
Keith Laumer Reward for Retief I enjoyed the Retief stories so I was surprised that I'd missed one.  Unfortunately, this last episode (number 15) is a very confusing and repetitive journey through a side step dimension where reality and the imaginary clash (but not the dignitaries dickies). 1989 8/19
Anil Ananthaswamy The Edge of Physics Although a bit out of date this was an interesting discussion of cosmological physics, physicists and observation.  Hubble was a snob that only talked to his observatory aides when playing bridge.  The Hubble constant is being fine tuned but seems to be accelerating.  In a heavy fog, precipitation on redwood needles can create a rainstorm under the tree.  Novel diction: stope, Cherenkov cone, sidereal time, nunatak, sastrugi, firn, rodwell, non-evaporative getter, bolometer and stupa. 2003 7/19
Terry Brooks The Stiehl Assassin
 In book 3 of the Fall of Shanara, romance between the blade and the princess heats up an otherwise cold story of a Stiehl armed evil sorceress and northern invaders.  Dwarf fierceness and technology stave off the invisible vikings.  A cliff hanger trap ends this part of the four book series. 2019 7/19
Gregory Berns How Dogs Love Us Subtitled A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain, How Dogs Love Us is the story behind training two dogs to voluntarily enter an MRI scanner wearing earmuffs and sit perfectly still through the noisy scans while reacting to cues.  The scan results show that dogs have a theory of mind and cognate.  Novel diction includes feist, brindle and olfactory bulb. 2013 6/19
Michael Rubens The Sheriff of Yrnameer What do you get when you cross Blazing Saddles with Spaceballs?  That's a summa spicy meatball?  No!  You get a fun filled action packed spoof titled The Sheriff of Yrnameer! 2009 6/19
Sy Montgomery The Good Good Pig Before Sy-ing about octupi she wrote about her pet pig who grew from a runt to 750 pounds before dieting back down to 700.  Christopher Hogwood is smart, friendly and adventurous.  A really "good pig" book. 2006 6/19
Mark Sullivan Beneath a Scarlet Sky Pino Lella is a teenage hero during the last years of WWII in northern Italy.  The story is compelling and packed with emotion and action.  This was such a great read that I may put Sullivan's Private series on my reading list later.  Novel diction: massif and névé. 2017 6/19
Alexander McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Mama Precious Ramotswe makes herself into the best private detective in Botswana.  The cases are short, opinions gently expressed, and humor intermittent (such as " a government of constipated people would get nothing passed") making for a quick read but I can't imagine reading all 19 books in the series. 1998 6/19
Paula Guran (ed.)


 		 The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016
 		 “Binti” by Nnedi Okorafor tells of  Namibian earth salving a scarred relationship with Meduse aliens.  “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” by Aliette de Bodard has a intergalactic Vietnamese empire seeking a past princess to help stand off an invasion.  In “Gypsy” by Carter Scholz a Sierra Nevadan is one of the crew on a high risk interstellar flight.  “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” by Usman Malik has a Pakistani-American seek out his late grandfather's distant weaving only to forget it.  “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear” by Bao Shu is a well written and well translated life story in an alternative China (with reversed historical trends).  “The Last Witness” by K. J. Parker is a tall tale about a man who can go inside people's heads and remove memories...for a fee...until the ability catches up to him.  “Inhuman Garbage” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a well started lunar detective story that runs out of air.  “The Bone Swans of Amandale” by C.S.E. Cooney has a faerie rat and the Pied Piper avenge faerie swan murders.  “Johnny Rev” by Rachel Pollack is set in a convoluted world traveled by ghosts and magics.

Novel diction: cangue, hematocrit, immiserate, calligram, faience, voussoir, kilim, chiaroscuro, weal, empyrean, maquillage, netsuke, teraph, caduceus and repoussé.		 2016



 		 6/19



 
David Braun National Geographic Tales of the Weird Old news from a not so weird collection of Nat Geo oddities (9,000-year-old trees 5,000-year-old moss and a 400-year-old clam).  On the theme of cephalopods there is reference to Humboldt Squid and Dumbo Octopuses. 2012 5/19
Sy Montgomery


 		 The Soul of an Octopus


 		 Breathe a Sy of octopi as you read this well written narrative of interaction with octopuses and the marine biologists that study them.  Octopuses have copper in their blood (not iron), three hearts, brains in their arms, chemoreceptors in their suction cups, remember those that visit them, solve puzzles, escape even the most octopus proof tanks and die after reproduction at about 3 years old (unlike anemones which can live forever).

Novel diction: aquarist, envenomate, papillae, iridophores (supplement chromatophores for camouflage), hectocotylize, ligula, statocysts, glancing (slime feeding), noetic, cephalotocin, chelonian, gorgonians, basket star (which looks like a snowflake), baltemia, shanny, and nidamental.
Fishes: permits, capelin, chromis, discus, cooters, goosefish, lilith, Geophagus, arowana, tarpon, gunnel, pout, lumpfish, grunts, mutton snapper, burrfish, snipe fish, chimera, killies, and fallfish.		 2015



 		 4/19



 
Sylvain Nuevelle The Test This novella is a departure from the giant robot books; it's still sci-fi, but it's dark sci-fi. 2018 4/19
M.C. Beaton Death of a Hussy,
Death of a Snob, Death of a Prankster, Death of a Glutton		 Hamish outwits an Italian-Scott detective in book 5 and discovers the truth behind a bonnet flare up.  In Book 6, Hamish must deal with a possessed Fiat truck on a wee dismal island.  In Book 7, amid wives tales, impractical jokes, and afamilial haunt, Priscilla and Hamish solve the murder and get the tell of the tape for the heat.  In book 8, a woman eats herself to death (with a little help), Hamish takes credit for solving the crime and is just about to make things good with Priscilla when he gets a PC house guest.

Novel diction: gohl, gars me grue, ceilidh, masses of dosh and gelt, whinge, poncing, gormless, pot plant, cheil, irritating old cove.		 1990 through 1992

 3/19 & 4/19
M.C. Beaton



   		Hamish Macbeth Omnibus

 
 		 This omnibus of the first four Hamish Macbeth stories (Death of a Gossip, Death of a Cad, Death of an Outsider, and Death of a Perfect Wife).  In book one you know who the victim will be in the first few pages but Hamish (the sole bobby of the wee Scottish town of Lochdubh) takes things easy and reels in the truth via the time worn police tradition of sorting out fish stories over tea and sandwiches.  The detection is minimalistic but a hundred pages allows Marion Chesney enough room for heartfelt character study.  In book two, the lanky redhead grouses about with two thousand pounds of poached egg layers and detects the cad cadaverer, freeing Priscilla for his attention after a poor outing in her uncle's suit.  In book 3, Hamish takes on substitute duty at the end of a crooked rail line in Cnotham, where witches so muddy the waters that suspicion of a churning cauldron of isopods requires detective play by Macbeth to get the big city murder investigators to the last act.  In book 4, a new body busies herself into a host of causes contrary to peace in Lochdub and has Hamish visiting enough of the citizenry to locate the majority of Dead-O cans that were provended locally long ago due to the arsenic personality of that "perfect wife".

Novel diction: wallies, scunner, baps, lovat, wine gums, seed pearls, cratur, compèring, marrow vegetable, aggro, twee, I aye hae, crinoline, fash, bint, thole (v.), quangos, vetch (bot.), convolvulus (bot.), glaiket, moquette, lolloping.		 1985
through
1988

 		 3/19



 
Anil Ananthaswamy

  		Through Two Doors at Once

  		Anil brightens the "great smoky dragon" [John Wheeler] of quantum mechanics annals with interesting asides such as Einstein hiking the Maloja Pass with Marie Curie and her daughters in 1913 and crediting Emmy Noether with the mathematics that underpin much of modern physics.   The double slit is still core to current quantum science, including the recent quantum eraser experiment which had time traveling results (a photon "knows" how to act like a particle or a wave before it's distant entangled partner "which-path" information is established or destroyed).

Other novel diction: epistemic, QBism, psi-ontic and bloviating.		 2018


 		 2/19


 
Alan Dean Foster Relic Three legged aliens treasure and preserve the last human specimen until, with his help, humanity is restored.  This is an entertaining quick read.  Novel diction: chary and conurbation. 2018 2/19
Janet Evanovich Look Alive Twenty-five Stephanie and Lula are made to work at a Deli that Vinnie receives from a bond bailer.  The manager's get abducted until its Steph's turn and she stumbles upon a rescue.  2018 2/19
David Rosenfelt Rescued A semi-inspired Carpenter sinks his canines into a criminal conspiracy once again. 2018 2/19
Terry Brooks Street Freaks Terry would brook no more Shanara so he wrote a stand alone sci-fi novel about genetically and/or mechanically modified youths who rise up against the evil corporation that uses them as lab rats.  Terry's simple-speak approach comes off as juvenile without a fantastic setting. 2018 2/19
Janet Evanovich Hardcore Twenty-Four This Plum of a story features headless corpses, zombies, a boa constrictor, a professional demonstrator fugitive named Zero Slick and a cameo by Diesel.  The usual car totaling, junk food eating, granny gun toting, mortuary viewing, outrageous Lula outfits and Stephanie mangling is also included at no extra cost. 2017 1/19
Janet Evanovich

 Turbo Twenty-Three

 Steph and Lula go bounty hunting and their perp's stolen ice-creamery semi discharges a corpse dipped in chocolate and nuts.  Steph solves the case by getting overly involved and nearly killed by the Bogart Bar clown but the Morelli and Ranger posse gets her out of the mortuary ice box before she becomes a corpsickle herself. 2016


 1/19
Fredrik Backman Us Against You In this sequel to Beartown the rivalry with Hed waxes and wains and rural Swedes demurely accept change and differences. 2018 12/18
John Scalzi The Consuming Fire Book 2 of the Interdependency continues this entertaining but increasingly predictable tale of intergalactic intrigue. 2018 12/18
Janet Evanovich
 Tricky Twenty-Two
 Stephanie does not contract the plague but the story is plagued by all the usual Plum doings: her car explodes, she gets nicked up, she eats donuts with Lula, she's off again/on again with Morelli, and she solves a criminal case faster than the police (and FBI, CID and Homeland Security) and another. 2015

 12/18
David Reich





















 		 Who We Are and How We Got Here




















 		 Despite the professorial tone, this is an interesting book based on recent DNA testing of archeological remains that makes you wonder.  The ability to use microchips to separate microbe DNA from human DNA in old bones has led to an explosion of archeological data.  The data refutes pre-2009 migration theory and provides a somewhat blurry (due to several mixing episodes) improvement in modern human dispersal and linguistic roots.  Recombinant stretches of DNA are limited in number so we are related to a smaller fraction of the ancestors as we climb the family tree (fig. 1).  Africans have essentially zero Neanderthal DNA while the rest of the world has about 2%.  Neanderthals went extinct due to the infertility of hybrid progeny.  Some of our basic evolution was centered in Eurasia (not all in Africa).  Native Americans are distinctly related to ancient northern Europeans (fig. 2).  Natural events such as ice ages, formation of a glacier from the alps to the mediterranean, the sudden arisal of the congo river and a devastating pre-Vesuvius eruption, fomented cycles of segregation, recovery, funneled expansion and interbreeding among early humans (fig. 3).  "And archaeological evidence shows that one-meter-tall 'Hobbits' also persisted until around this same time [50,000 years ago] on Flores island in Indonesia."  Petrous [dense inner-ear surrounding] bones preserve DNA longer than any other ancient source.

         
                          Figure 1                                                   Figure 2                                                  Figure 3

Coincidence: Reich, like Yong, quotes Walt Whitman's poem, “Song of Myself,” which contains the line "I am large, I contain multitudes”.
 2018





















 
 12/18





















 
Jonas Jonasson
 
 The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man The suitcase money runs out, so Allan and Julius escape in a hot air balloon, crash in the Pacific Ocean, get saved by a North Korean freighter, escape Korea with the briefcase containing 4 kilos of uranium, start a coffin business, escape the neo-Nazi that is angered by a coffin mix-up, and travel to Africa to gain tips on the clairvoyance business where they confiscate 400 more kilos of uranium bound for Korea (all of which they give to Merkel).

 		 2018
 		 11/18
 
Janet Evanovich
 		 Notorious Nineteen, Takedown Twenty, Top Secret Twenty-One The dwarf, a butcher, an industrialist, a giraffe and a Russian hit man feature in Plum stories 19 to 21.  Every one of these involves her car blowing up, her apartment being invaded, her grandma attending a funeral home showing, her inability to commit to Morelli or Ranger, and eating junk food with Lula.

  		2011, 2013, 2014
 11/18
L. E. Modesitt Jr. Outcasts of Order
 		 Recluce 20 continues the story of a young black mage who courts a healer, a smith and a white.  They flee oppression together until a duchess ets them up for the next book. 2018 10/18
Fredrik Backman Bear Town Teenage hockey team mates, testosterone and tragedy make this his longest sob story yet.  Nobody seems to have Saabs in this book; besides, most athletes hide their tears and drive Volvos. 2016
 9/18
Fredrik Backman The Deal of a Lifetime A short Saab story about a mogul who finally does a good deed.
 		 2017
 		 9/18
 
Terry Brooks The Skaar Invasion The 32nd Shannara novel and the second of the The Fall of Shannara series.  Brooks will not brook another Shanarra series, hence the series title.  Druidic Paranor is restored but evil is afoot.  An Ohmsteed is working on the weather...I guess that will quell the invisible vikings in the next episode. 2018 9/18
Daniel H Wilson Robocalypse
 		 Archos, Nth edition computer program passes the event horizon, suborns household and military robots, declares war on humanity, and holes up in a radioactive a-test site in Alaska.  Archos' cyborg experiments backfire, and, with the help of brave resistance fighters and freed robots, people prevail. 2011
 		 8/18
 
Ed Yong

















 		 I Contain Multitudes
















  		I guess that the title was taken from Whitman's: "Do I contradict myself?  Very well then...I contradict myself; (I am large. I contain multitudes.)"  The subtitle, The Microbes Within, is a bit more descriptive.  The microbiome of each person includes millions of species of bacteria and billions of different viruses (mostly healthful phages that help maintain the balance of bacteria).  The same is true for many animals, although simpler animals tend to have fewer species of bacteria.  Some animals have incorporated bacteria DNA into their own make-up, allowing simplification of their biome.  A diverse biome is healthier in humans than a restrained one.

Novel factoids follow.  Every person aerosolises around 37 million bacteria per hour.  An open hospital window is healthier than a closed one.  Dog dust suppresses allergens.  Oxalate is found in beetroot, asparagus, and rhubarb, and at high concentrations, it stops your body from absorbing calcium, which congeals into a hard lump sometimes forming into kidney stones.  Human breast milk stands out among that of other mammals: it has five times as many types of HMO as cow’s milk, and several hundred times the quantity (even chimp milk is impoverished compared to ours).  However, even though rural villagers have more diverse gut microbiomes than urban city dwellers, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have even more diverse communities: since we diverged from our fellow apes; the human microbiome has been slowly contracting.

Even the most concentrated probiotics contain just a few hundred billion bacteria per sachet.  That sounds like a lot but the gut already holds at least a hundredfold more. Gulping down a yoghurt is like ingesting scarcity.  Given all the important roles that bacteria play in our bodies, it should be possible to improve our health by swallowing or applying the right microbes. It’s just that the strains in current use may not be the right ones.  So, perhaps a smarter approach to making probiotics is to create a community of microbes that work well together.  A team cultured a woman’s gut
bacteria and removed any that showed hints of virulence, toxicity, or antibiotic resistance. That left a community of 33 strains that, in a fit of whimsy, was dubbed RePOOPulate. When mixture was tested on two patients with C-diff, both recovered within days.

As well as thwarting dengue virus, Wolbachia stops mosquitoes from carrying the Chikungunya and Zika viruses or the Plasmodium parasites
that cause malaria.  Scientists are raising Wolbachia incorporated mosquitoes, releasing them, and finding that their brethren are only to happy to take in the Wolbachia.  It is conceivable that in the near future mosquitoes will stop being a vector for malaria, dengue, Chikungunya and Zika.

Novel diction: metagenomics, Micropia, biogeography of the human microbiome, microbe-associated molecular patterns, choanoflagellates, psychobiotics, bacteriocytes, bacteriomes, bacteriophages, human milk oligosaccharides (HMO's), B. infantis, dysbiosis, microbomania, sussed, holobiont, hologenome, symbiogenesis, diktat, bolus, bracovirus, eff, and gateau.		 2016

















  		8/18

















 
Jane Hirshfield



 		 Ten Windows (a sequel to Nine Gates)



 		 Subtitled How Great Poems Transform the World this book seeks to show how poetry transforms the reader and, when multiplied, the world.  The first chapter, Kingfishers Catching Fire, includes excerpts from Gary Snyder's "Riprap" and Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" and exposes us to the eyes and ears of poetry - here the eye words that describe the physical evoke a larger vision and enhance the vision with emotion, and the ear words, through alliteration, shared consonants, diphthongs, alternating vowel sounds and interior rhyme, enhance the emotion of the poem in song.  Chapter 2 is full of flowery prose on how poetry speaks to the reader.  Chapter 3 is haiku.  Chapter 4 is on hiddeness (the unseen may be integral and/or key to the seen or might remain in shadow).  Chapter 5 is on uncertainty (overtly stated or a fuzziness that engenders thought).  Chapter 6 is on windowing (a word or phrase external to the rest of the poem that shatters or enlightens).  Chapter 7 is about surprise("the emotion of a transition not self-created).  Chapter 8 discusses American poetry and "plain-speak".  Chapter 9 transforms.  Chapter 10 ends with paradox and soda crackers. 

New diction: poïesis, tropism, amanuensis, contrapuntal, shikantaza, proleptic, pellucid, koan, solutio, reification, imagistic, opprobium, muntin, staling, dialectical, synecdoche, villanelle, ghazal, priapic eros, paratactic, metonymic and ontological.		 2015




 		 8/18




 
John Scalzi
 Head On
 Sequel to Lock In, a Hayden FBI agent investigates mis-doings among the Helkita League (like soccer but goals are scored by beheading opposing remote controlled threeps).  A cat makes it a true Scalzi novel. 2018 8/18
Fredrik Backman
 		 My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry This story only has Renault, Audi and Taxi but is still the grandmother of all Saab stories.  Almost 8 Elsa, when not in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, delivers her granny's apology letters to the loveable misfits in her building.  A good book despite the tears.
 		 2013

 		 8/18

 
Fredrik Backman Britt-Marie Was Here A Saab story about a mild mannered ex-housewife who receives help finding herself from the remnants of a ghost town and soccer.
 		 2014
 		 7/18
 
R.J.Theodore
 		 Flotsam
 		 A steam punk sci-fi novel with a cracked up planet that floats around in pieces, five races created by five gods, an attacking alien insectoid race, a salvage team crewing a steam powered airship for our heroic captain.  Cliff hanger ending assures a sequel. 2018
 		 7/18
Andrew Tomes Are trees socialists? "Are trees socialists" is a web article that discusses complex mycorrhizae/tree source/sink relationships.
http://feedthedatamonster.com/home/2015/6/26/are-trees-socialists		 2015 7/18
 
Sue Burke

 		 Semiosis

 		 Terran and Glassmade settlers struggle to find balance with alien vegetable intelligence.  Filled with the hope of bamboozling bamboo brains and floral chemicals, this is a good story infused with botanical optimism.  Sue is now on my "must read" list.
Novel diction: catabolism, mycorrhizae and zoochory (via indirect reference).		 2018

 		 7/18

 
Sylvain Neuvel Only Human
 		 Book 3 in the Themis Files trilogy has Eva becoming a fictitious Ekt freedom fighter which ends up saving her adopted parents and Earth.  The book ends with an alien salutation: Eyaktept eket ontyask atakt oyansot ot.  Eyantsant eps. [I'll let you know if or when I have a translation.] 2018
 		 6/18
 
Janet Evanovich
 		 Sizzlin' Sixteen, Smokin' Seventeen, and Explosive Eighteen Stephanie, with the help of Rangeman and hobbits aplenty frees Vinnie from a ruthless Bulgarian mobster but bail bonds office is burnt down in 16.  A body is unearthed during office reconstruction and the office bus burns up (along with a few of Steph's cars).  Thank goodness that a Ferrari is used for bond so that Vinnie can use it to compensate the mob for filling a don's car with horse manure.  Steph goes to Hawaii but her boys fight there so she returns early only to accidentally get involved in an international hacking scheme but she out fights a hired killer and wins the day..."babe!"
 		 2009 thru
2011

 6/18
Dewey Lambdin
 The French Admiral
 Book 2 of the Alan Lewrie series wherein Mister Lewrie survives land battles with Colonial rebels and French regulars,earns a promotion, and is informed that his grandmother has sued for his re-inheritance and is cleared of rape charges.
Novel diction: phyz, loomhint, fasine, gabion, feldwebel, tittuping and parbuckles.		 1990
 
 5/18
Bill Bryson


 		 Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society Summaries of writings by prolific Fellows (FRS); some historic (Newton, Boole, Franklin, Darwin), some neo (genetics, string theory, climatology), and some philosophical (rationalism vs. emperialism, creationism vs evolution, fossil fuels vs. renewable energy responsibilities).  A chapter on engineers was too civil for my taste (I guess the RSF isn't as mechanical as it used to be).  Note - a conclusion chapter is hidden in the addenda.
 		 2010


 
 4/18


 
Elizabeth Moon Into the Fire Book 2 of Vatta's Peace has spaceship wreck survivors hospitalized for a fictitious disease and the Vatta Company comes to the rescue.  This is a good read, full of suspense and intrigue. 2018
 4/18
Dewey Lambdin The King's Coat

 		 Book 1 of the Alan Lewrie series wherein Mister Lewrie survives naval battles with French, Spanish and (rebel) American warships, yellow fever, nasty officers and assorted ladies.

Novel diction: futtock shroud, preventers and parrels [rigged], weather earring, flogging sail, footrope, scantling, camel, black strap, cup-shot, loblolly, langridge, fugleman, sybarite, fubsy, jear bitts, slyboots and quoin.		 1988

 		 4/18

 
David Rosenfelt Collared
 A baby and a border collie are abducted from a genetics company founder who arranged to put the blame on her ex with the help of a drug tycoon but Andy Carpenter and crew best them both without much court shenanigans. 2017
 4/18
Alec Baldwin

 		 You Can't Spell America Without Me A funny lampooning of Donald Trump by his SNL portrayer.

 		 2017

 		 3/18
 
 
Ian M Banks

 		 The Hydrogen Sonata
 		 Bank's swan song in the Culture series (he passed away suddenly), the story involves a female alien agent of a soon to sublime race who has two extra arms grafted onto her body so that she can play the hydrogen sonata on the eleven string (both are so hard to play that experts believe that the author was playing a joke).  With the help of a Cultured ship's avatar and extra dimensions, she foils her own government's attempt to screw up the subliming.

Novel diction: scrue [of rock], foveae, arbite, effete, immanentising, asceticism, lacunae, ruched [material]		 2012


 3/18

 
Duane Knudson Fundamentals of Biomechanics Text book on biomechanics including how muscles cooperate and antagonize; includes methodology for examining sports movements and training.
 		 2007
 		 3/18
 
L. E. Modesitt Jr. Mongrel Mage
 		 Recluce 19: A young black mage matures quickly after his escape from and war with a brutal white mage supported regime.
 		 2017
 3/18
Christopher Burns Noggintwisters: The Great Puzzles Large and Small A nice collection of logic puzzles, many of which I'd seen before or were purely algebra, but fun nonetheless.
 		 2015
 		 2/18
Benjamin Franklin





 
 Autobiography






 
 By the same wife he had four children more born there, and by a second wife ten more, in all seventeen, I the youngests son and youngest but two.  The Pennsylvania governor lies to Ben about supporting his printing career, including having him go to London to gather unpaid for equipment..."but I think I like a speckled ax best"...my son and I, on the way to London from Falmouth, only stopt a little by the way to view Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, and Lord Pembroke's house and gardens...postmaster general, House member, army colonel; facilitator of libraries, academy, poor hospital; invented the Franklin stove, chimneyed street lamps, lightning rod, street sweeping...his poor Richard says: A little Neglect may breed great Mischief: adding, for want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the Enemy; all for the want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail.

A printing house is called a chapel because Caxton, the first English printer, did his printing in a chapel connected with Westminster Abbey.

Born to be a printer, Benjamin Franklin's usage is so succinct as to include quaint verbage that saves room in type set, such as 'd for ed, stopt in lieu of stopped, and chuze in lieu of choose.  Other novel diction includes apparitor, conventicles, burthen, riggite, nuncupative, furze, necessitous, crimp (shipping company agent), captious, pi (complete disorder), emolument, abbé, and Mickle.		 2006







 
 2/18







 
L. E. Modesitt Jr. Assassin's Price Imager Portfolio 11:  The Rex is assassinated and his mature son balances young love, governance challenges and royal betrayal to satisfaction. 2017 2/18
Nathaniel Charles Brahms Trapping of 1 μB atoms using buffer gas loading My nephew's doctoral thesis well describes cold magneto-optical trapping of Lithium, Copper and Silver atoms and the associated lab equipment challenges.  The math is beyond me but I still got some insight into atom trapping and I got to add some more words to my ken: ergodic, biconic and etaloning.  And I thoroughly enjoyed the appendix on building a cryogenic fast opening valve. 2008 1/18
Alan Dean Foster Strange Music

 The latest Pip and Flix novel has our hero traversing a pre-steam technology planet and communicating in sing-speech with his native guide to save a princess.

Novel diction: souk, coloratura, threnody		 2017
 		 1/18
 
Prof. Brian Cox























 		 Human Universe



to





 		 Just have a look at something – the smallest, most trivial little thing – and enjoy trying to figure out how it works.  That is science.

Astronomers use a distance measurement known as a parsec – which stands for ‘per arcsecond’. This is the distance of a star from the Sun that has a parallax of 1 arcsecond. One parsec is 3.26 light years.

Using standard candles with known intrinsic brightness, the expansion of the universe has been measured using redshift to derive Hubble's Constant: H0 = 67.15 ± 1.2 (km/s)/Mpc. For every million parsecs of distance from the observer, the rate of expansion increases by about 67 kilometers per second.  [The expansion of the universe is now used to estimate its diameter at 91 billion light-years.]

Hydrogen atoms consist of two particles – a single proton bound to a single electron. Protons and electrons have a property called spin, which for these particular particles (known as spin ½ Fermions, named after Enrico Fermi himself) can take only one of two values, often called spin ‘up’ and spin ‘down’. There are therefore only two possible configurations of the spins in a hydrogen atom: the spins can be parallel to each other – both ‘up’ or both ‘down’, or anti-parallel – one ‘up’ and one ‘down’. It turns out that the parallel case has slightly more energy than the anti-parallel case, and when the spin configuration flips from parallel to anti-parallel, this extra energy is carried away as a photon of light with a wavelength of 21cm.



Cox gives a overview of the Standard Model Lagrangian which describes quantum field theory:
 2015





















 		 1/18
























 
Lev Okun

 Energy and Mass in Relativity Theory E≠mc2, but rather E0=mc2 or E2=(mc2)2+(pc)2 is the gist of this book with quite a bit of other nuclear physics and math thrown in to keep it scholarly.  Mass does not increase with velocity.  Velocity has a relativistic effect on mass. 2009 1/18
Ian M Banks Matter
 Culture book eight has a steam punk king assassination witnessed by a prince who flees to alien realms to seek allies whilst his Special Circumstances sister meets him half way and then they fight aliens.

Novel diction: mersicor [charger], caude and lyge, unkiltered, trous, furtle, unge or crile, roasaoril [plantations], silse [cloud], coarse-bonce [bumpkin], oublietting, [engines] blattering, bravards, [dramatically] off-piste, sedulity, afap (typo?), adit		 2008
 1/18
Gardner Dozois (ed.)










 		 The Book of Swords










 		 A nice sword and sorcery short story collection.  K J Parker - The Best Man Wins: an old disgraced soldier come blacksmith forges a sword for a youth and teaches him to fence himself in; includes Ultramar, Aelian for “across the sea" (and an oil company with the best cliient I ever had in Forrest Hunter).  Robin Hobb (Megan Lindholm) - Her Father's Sword: forging makes a strong man mad.  Ken Liu - The Hidden Girl: the Hidden Girl is trained to kill from the 5th dimension but develops a conscience.  Mattthew Hughes - The Sword of Destiny: some of us are just not destined for magical adventure.  Kate Elliott - "I Am a Handsome Man," Said Apollo Crow: a muderously false lethario flubs a job from Caesar to steal a sketch book from the seeing Honeyed Voice suffragette.  Walter Jon Williams - The Triumph of Virtue: Goodman Quillifer is run over by the fleeing attacker of the emperess' lover's wife and is too successful in his subsequent investigation.  Daniel Abraham - The Mocking Tower: prince Aus and his thief mingle in a village adjacent to the shifting tower of his father's soul-sword and the Imagi Vert while old Au gardens.  C. J. Cherryh - Hrunting: The great sword Hrunting never failed a true hero except for Beowulf and Unferth’s grandson seeks to reclaim it from the Grendelskjar.  Garth Nix - A Long Cold Trail: Sir Hereward and his magically animated puppet chase a murderous godlet through the snow.  The puppet crafts a haiku instead of a gigue for a near-sighted God-Taker bearing knight.  Calvary emergence allows for retreat.  Ellen Kushner - When I Was a Highwayman: a gay blade lives with a grifter in Riverside and a lean summer leads him to highway robbery.  A little blood letting cures his ills.  Scott Lynch - The Smoke of Gold is Glory: an old thief recalls a long ago match with riddlesong, venom, and stone with three of his cronies in a dragon lair.  Rich Larson - The Colgrid Conundrum: a thief and his accomplice carry a "puzzle-box" to a lock breaker who negotiates assasination as her price.  Elizabeth Bear - The King's Evil: the brass Gage, Deadman and Dr. Lady Lzi wade onto a dangerous tropical hornets nest to free a corpse-king.  Lavie Tidhar - Waterfalling (A Guns and Sorcery Novelette): Gorel crosses a wasteland in search of Gorrel, his lost homeland, and more of his Black Kiss addiction until the falls.  Cecilia Holland - The Sword Tyraste: The evil King kills the sword maker and his son.  Vengeance and an evil sword become a brother's reward.  George R. R. Martin - The Sons of the Dragon: a Game of Thrones prequel; royal incest vies with church doctrine.

Novel diction: chevauchee, hayrick, mandiritto, volte, stramazone, jiedushi, pagoda tree, bhikkhuni, apsaras, erhus, arhats, erb, figmentia, arrogate, winkled, denarius, fug, farrago, meiny, simnel, galliard, rowelled, busk, small beer, cremello, younker, custrels, trulls, fuff, slattern, howster, horse pistol, carcanet, stew-dwellers, brehon, pabbi, sjaund, draugr, nithing, skjalds, riven, gallimaufry, morphew, megrims, toque, periapt, gaud, mangonel, glossolalia, knarr, undernmeal, destrier, septon, godswood, leal, samites, and wroth.		 2017












 1/18
Dennis E Taylor All These Worlds Bobiverse #3 is the end of the Others and Earth but humanity survives on multiple planets across the Bobiverse. 2017 12/17
Dennis E Taylor For We Are Many Bobiverse #2 replicates Bob across the galaxy just in time to save a sample of sentients from destruction by the Others.  Bob has great grandchildren but they are spread over a 100 light years of space. 2017 12/17
Dennis E Taylor We Are Legion (We Are Bob) Bobiverse #1 starts with a death that turns a computer icon into a brain in a box that pilots a space ship.  Like Sylvain Neuvel, Dennis E. (not Denise) is a programmer that enjoys pushing Sci-fi trivia into space opera.  A fun read. 2016 11/17
Ian M Banks

 
Look to Windward

 
This Culture book seven title comes from Eliot's poem, The Waste Land (as does the title Consider Phlebas, from the first book of the series).  A triumvirate tri-pedal association is organized by a Culture drone.  One is a fallen soldier reunited with his soul-mate but it turns out not to be his wife who had to leave him for dead on a caste war battlefield but an old general who shares his "soul-saver" (a little finger sized device that stores a personality or two in a solid state matrix).  Another is a composer that abhors his home system's caste system.  The third is tact incarnate.  Banks ponders life after death and immortality against a backdrop of cosmic remorse.  The major and general are joined in the soul saver by awakening memories of a nefarious and inclusive plot and an interdimensional nano-scale super bomb revealed in memories of training inside a Chtorr evoking kilometer sized telekinetic dirigible-like behemothaur that grows motive organisms and can plug into animals via stems (and implied brain roots).  The plot is uncovered by a poet residing in a fellow behemothaur that urges him to investigate the death throws of the trainer.

The novel is peppered with references to multi-light-year spaceship journeys, ordinary things like grazing animals, soaring birds, gondolas, bridges, furniture, party goers, nature and song mixed with musings on being.  It contains many zen-like passages like this description of the end of a funeral procession: "a silvery field shimmered in the air where the man's body was, then shrank to a point and vanished."

Novel diction: eructation, disseisor, poeglyph, and orrery.		 2001


 
 11/17


 
Michael Pollan























 
The Botany of Desire






















 
"Yet evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events, and in the evolution of the potato my reading of a particular seed catalog on a particular January evening counts as one of them...

"The big thing the dog knows about—the subject it has mastered in the ten thousand years it has been evolving at our side—is us: our needs and desires, our emotions and values, all of which it has folded into its genes as part of a sophisticated strategy for survival...

"Through the process of coevolution human ideas find their way into natural facts: the contours of a tulip’s petals, say, or the precise tang of a Jonagold apple."

Pollan says in his prologue that plants developed organic chemicals to attract or repel animals because of lack of locomotion [but plants move, albeit slowly, via growth and spawning] and so desired human transport.

The first chapter begins with barefoot, Swedenborgian, land owner, Johnny "Appleseed" Chapman, who spread apple trees throughout the northwest via seed (not grafts) which generated mostly "spitters" which were still good enough for making applejack.  Some of the wild trees became the forebears of Delicious American apples.  "A century ago there were several thousand different varieties of apples in commerce; now most of the apples we grow have the same five or six parents: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, Macintosh, and Cox’s Orange Pippin.  Breeders keep going back to the same well, and it’s getting shallower."

The second chapter is about tulips (including the Semper Augustus, the greatest of 17th century tulip breaks which were eliminated along with the causitive virus), nature’s tropes.  "For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty."  Tulips originated in the Ottoman Empire, flourished in Dutch tulipomania and, after genetic manipulation, returned to the Turks to garnish lavish parties and harems.  "A theft lies behind the rise of the tulip in Holland."  Tulips, like apples, do not come true from seed—their offspring bear little resemblance to their parents.  "For Dumas the black tulip was a synecdoche for tulipomania itself, an indifferent and arbitrary mirror in which a perverse consensus of meaning and value came briefly and disastrously into focus."

Chapter three is about cannabis (as Dutch as the tulip due to the influence of the Amsterdam pot cafes) with a meme detour.  THC, like naturally occuring anandamide in the brain, causes short-term memory loss (and chocolate slows this process).  "The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we’re to get through the day and get done what needs to be done.  'Awakening to this present instant,' a Zen master has written, 'we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant.' Yet we can’t get there from here without first forgetting.  It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know...that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world...wonder."

The fourth and final chapter is on the potato.  Really, potatoes (albeit Monsanto genetically engineered and patented NewLeaf potatoes)?  Although the book is well written, it wanders into metaphysics and abstracts quite a bit, diluting the treatise.  "If the lumpish potato was base matter, bread in the Christian mind was its very opposite: antimatter, even spirit."  Some of the asides are unusual though: "...plant breeders have developed a luminescent tobacco plant by inserting a gene from a firefly."  "Once a transgene introduces a new weed or a resistant pest into the environment, it can’t very well be cleaned up: it will already have become part of nature."  Pollan says that the NewLeaf is healthier than a Russet because of all of the toxic chemicals used in Idaho potato farming.

Novel diction: bowdlerizing, heterozygosity, butternut tree, pachysandra, floraennui, iconography, enjambment, desiderata, panapathogen, impious, muntins, quotidian, allée, parterre, neem tree oil, chthonic, and Malthusian logic.		 2002























 
12/17























 
Jane Hirshfield
 
 The Heart of Haiku
 
 A synopsis of Bashō haiku.  This poor 17th century Zen Budhist poet is credited with thousands of works and many methods to enhance the art.  Haiku (lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables) should evoke a season, be inspired my an image, include synaethesia and simultaneously point to the world and self.  Karumi is lightness, sabi is an alloy of beauty and sadness, wabi is the beauty of ordinary things and wabi-sabi is the Zen spirit.  Tanka adds two lines of 7 syllables to haiku and is renga when the two parts are by different authors (more stanzas can be added in a hot sake party game effort).  At its best haiku describes the vast and the minute in a simple natural scene in a way that allows the reader to interpret the physical and inner meanings. 2007
 
 
 11/17

 
Arthur Conan Doyle





 The War in South Africa, Its Cause and Conduct




 Sir Arthur claims that Britain paid for South Africa and paid the white inhabitants for the emancipation of their slaves but the evaluation was all done in Europe without buy-in from the Afrikanders.  Much of the land was "left it untenanted, save by the dwarf bushmen, the hideous aborigines, lowest of the human race."  Boers populated the wide lands with a British allowance to Dutch law but when farms became vulnerable to tribal attacks the British annexed the area for the residents safety (this required 25 soldiers).  Independent states were established but treated as colonies.  Kruger became president for 15 years and there things festered.  Imperialistic Boers violated British treaties and British taxpayers had to foot the bill for peace forces (gold and diamonds weren't yet discovered).  The gold rush of 1886 put Boer dominance in jeopardy.  Doyle asks Americans how they might have reacted to a rebellious Dutch government in 1849 California.  The Anglos became distraught with paying almost all of the taxes without having a vote (invoking "the general rule that white men who are heavily taxed must have some representation").  The oligarchical Boer administrators got fat on their biased rule.  Incidents of maltreatment erupted and gross import of arms and munitions were discovered.  Guerrilla warfare lead to deprivation and one mans refuge was another's concentration camp.  The latter part of the book is Doyle justifying British treatment of Boer guerrillas, prisoners, displaced civilians, and conspirators (all of which he considers noble but resulted in many deaths from measles); the Boer's, of course, were vile, shot from under white flags and continuously murdered Kaffirs.

Novel diction: sjambok, suzerainty, obloquy, seriatim, peculation, franc-tireur, spoliation, cant, calumniating, calumny, sluit, spruit		 1902







 11/17
Amy Stewart Wicked Plants

 Journal-like entries on poisonous plants with a few associated anecdotes.  Reading this book might keep you out of every garden and make you wonder how animals survive grazing.

Three words new to me: ergotism, lathyrism and uritication.		 2009

 11/17
Winston Chrurchill




 London to Pretoria by Way of Ladysmith



 Churchill's own telling of his adventures during the Boer War excluding the portion of his escape abetted by British sympathizers (to protect their identity since this narrative was published before the end of the drawn out guerrilla portion of the war) and with expansion of his time as a commissioned officer after his escape.  Churchill's style is typical of the period with long-winded British bravado and diction.  He, like other Royal combatants, gloried in the Empire and nobility of war, including trivializing great loss of human life for honorable achievements.  The story is often bogged down in martial details (even more so than Millard's accounting).  Churchill managed to keep his newspaper job whilst commissioned (despite a law being enacted prohibiting such due Churchill's prior pan of the Indian Company he had enjoined).  He might have learned a political lesson because in this book he praises the military and its leadership even in the throes of retreat and defeat.  He espouses the quality of life when it is at risk but his tasks seem to keep him well away from the danger of the front lines.  The British eventually root out the Boer.

Novel diction: votaries, cumbrous, enteric, inexpugnable, commissariat, laager, fillip, zarp, durbar, iodoform, cantonment, glacis, gymkhana, donga, rooineks, jingo, sangar, redounds, redan, nullah, presentiment, coign, re-entrants, crotchets, jibbing, field-cornet, Creusot shells, Majuba Day, Atbara zareba		 1902





 11/17
Candice Millard
 Hero of the Empire
 Subtitled, The Boer War, a daring escape, and the making of Winston Churchill this historical account of Churchill's news correspondence adventure in southern Africa focuses on his drive for notoriety and respect in his capture and escape from the Boers.  It is a brief story, though, that is extended with more telling of British military incompetence than I would have liked.  I learned that it is unwise to march into a well defended salient and that the British did not walk the talk of fighting to achieve equal rights for colored Africans (native Africans and large Indian populations remained in the fetters of discrimination after the Boer lands became British colonies, allowing for the development of apartheid in the later independent Republic of South Africa). 2016

 11/17
Ian M. Banks
 Excession

 Culture series book five (oops, I should have left this one skipped) is a long convoluted story featuring an unexplainable phenomenon that pops into our space and there is a race to claim the associated technology that ultimately ends up in an arms race won by the Culture that pacifies the despotic Affronters and carries off an eccentric ship with its loved ones into an other-space.  I read all 480 pages and I still don't know what it was about.  But I enjoyed the Britishness of some of the ship Minds. 1996

 11/17
Clive Cussler




 Serpent





 Book one of the NUMA Files features heroic marine scientists Kurt Austin, Joe Zavala, Gamay Trout and Nina Kirov.  After the disappearance of several archaeologists who found Columbian relics in Africa and Asia they seek to expose the evil conspiracy.  Leaning on a fanciful Arizona Romans find three develop an archaeological sting with a fake Old World relic "discovered" in the Tucson desert but the bad guys are on to them and it ends in a bust. Meanwhile, Gamay and Mayan Dr. Chi escape tomb raiders via limestone caves of Monterey.  Then they delve into the mysteries of the secret 5th voyage of Columbus (aka Chris Colon) and the 500 year old murderous Brotherhood covering it up.  They dive on the wreck of the Andrea Doria to retrieve an ancient tablet that was the reason for its sinking by the Brotherhood years ago.  That leads them to the Phoenician-Mayan tomb of Columbus, a treasure, and the dammed end to the Brotherhood.

Novel diction: hashshashin, thugee, chicleros, cenotes, torleta, autorimessa

"Founded by Dr. Clive Cussler, the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) is a non-profit, volunteer foundation dedicated to preserving our maritime heritage through the discovery, archaeological survey and conservation of shipwreck artifacts." - www.numa.net		 1998





 10/17
Marcus Chown Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You The first half of this book is an interesting discussion of quantum theory along with uncertainty, wave interference, entanglement, colocation and multiple universes.  The second half is well written but is very similar to other discussions of cosmology - I wish he had kept it small all the way through. 2005 10/17
John Lescroart Dead Irish Book one in the Dismas Hardy series.  This multiple homocide story with a sad sack character study is a bit dismal but at least Dismas is an SF Giants fan. 1989 10/17
Ian M. Banks Inversions Culture series book six (oops, I skipped one).  This is a medieval tale joined by an apparent alien Dr. Vossil.  It is told in couplets with the doctor and a guard captain alternating as lead character.  Its a good novel with great dialogue, a final plot twist and some scattered ideology. 1998 10/17
Alan Dean Foster Empowered This short story is about a superhero with absolute control over plant life who seeks to do good but is brought down by litigation.
10/17
Yuval Noah Harari





 Homo Deus






 Professor Harari is on a safari.  He describes the rise of humanism and the fall of fundamental religions.  But attempting to realise the humanist dream will undermine its very foundations by unleashing new post-humanist technologies.  Harari describes modern brain science and technologies that make individualism less of an ideal.  He describes the potential of algorithms to become agents that make our decisions for us.  The new humanistic projects of the twenty-first century will be the gaining of immortality, bliss and divinity.  Techno-humanism agrees that Homo sapiens as we know it has run its historical course and will no longer be relevant in the future, but concludes that we should therefore use technology in order to create Homo deus.  According to Dataism, King Lear and the flu virus are just two patterns of data flow that can be analysed using the same basic concepts and tools.

Fun facts: In 1917 Marcel Duchamp took an ordinary mass-produced urinal, named it Fountain, signed his name at the bottom, declared it a work of art and placed it in a Paris museum.  A company named Bedpost sells biometric armbands you can wear while having sex that collects data such as heart rate, sweat level, duration of sexual intercourse, duration of orgasm and the number of calories you burnt to evaluate your sexual prowess.  As of early 2016, the sixty-two richest people in the world were worth as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people (half of the world's population).  Most scientific research about the human mind and the human experience has been conducted on people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies.  A company called ‘No More Woof’ is developing a helmet for reading canine experiences; the helmet monitors the dog’s brain waves, and uses computer algorithms to translate simple messages such as ‘I am angry’ into human language.		 2016






 10/17
Elizabeth Moon Cold Welcome Book one in a planned four book Vatta's Peace series is an excellent lifeboat and cold weather survival story.  It is a real page turner and one of her better novels.  I'm glad her family reinvigorated her output. 2017 9/17
Terry Brooks The Black Elfstone Book one in the The Fall of Shannara finale series.  Siblings with uncontrollable wish song magic, druid intrigue and a mysterious enemy army lead to the sinking of Paranor.  But the Blade remains to perhaps save the day by book four. 2017 9/17
Nick Lane






























































 The Vital Question






























































 How do bacteria relate to complex life?  Mitochondria and chloroplasts derive from bacteria and through endosymbiosis have left their bacterial essence to become members of eukyrote cells.  Woese's ribosome study gave us the three trees of life (bacteria, archea and eukyrotes).  Martin predicted that complex life arose through a singular endosymbiosis between two cells only (fig. 1).  Life became powered by protein gradients across membranes (proticity).  The vital question is really two: how did bacteria and archea join and how did they gain proticity?  The answers address complex life traits: the nucleus, sex, two sexes, and the distinction between the immortal germline and the mortal body.  Today, biology is information, genome sequences are laid out in silico, and life is defined in terms of information transfer.  Bacteria and archea have existed for about 4 billion years and eukyrotes a mere two billion years.  ‘Standard’ natural selection did not lead to a polyphyletic radiation after the Great Oxygenation Event.  All plants, animals, algae, fungi and protists share a common ancestor – the eukaryotes are monophyletic.  We don't see multiple origins of eukaryotic traits in bacteria.  If it happened once, why not twice (in 4 billion years)?  Nick thinks it was just a random and improbable stroke of luck.  Are retrotransposons, plasmids and viruses alive?  Redox moves electrons and protons creating huge voltage potentials across nM membranes and spin in the ATP synthase "motors" (fig. 2).  "The ATP synthase should be as symbolic of life as the double helix of DNA."  "The evolution of chemiosmotic coupling is a mystery."  Nick believes that there is sufficient evidence to disallow a primordial soup.  "There is no necessary relationship between the formation of RNA and a soup, but soup is nonetheless the simplest assumption, which avoids worrying about complicated details like thermodynamics or geochemistry."  Nick discounts life creation energy from lightning or UV (the first is insufficient and the second is too destructive).  Alkaline hydrothermal vents are formed from the 90°C off-gassing of olivine+water reactions and the waste products of this serpentinisation are key to the origin of life.  Alkaline hydrothermal vents provide exactly the conditions required for the origin of life: a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, and constrained in a way that permits the accumulation of high concentrations of organics.  Organics such as nucleotides can theoretically concentrate up to more than 1000 times their starting concentration by thermophoresis, driven by convection currents and thermal diffusion in the vent pores.  In the absence of oxygen [as was the case in the Hadean oceans 4 billion years ago] the mineral walls of alkaline vents would have contained catalytic iron minerals, likely doped with other reactive metals such as nickel and molybdenum (which dissolve in alkaline fluids).  The formation of organic matter from H2 and CO2 is thermodynamically favoured (it is exergonic) under alkaline hydrothermal conditions, so long as oxygen is excluded (and needs only a specific kinetic stimulus to make useable organic chemicals and avoid immediate breakdown to methane gas).  In some places [at alkaline vents] there is a juxtaposition of fluids, with acidic ocean waters saturated in CO2 separated from alkaline fluids rich in H2 by a thin inorganic wall, containing semiconducting FeS minerals (see fig. 3).  This is an experiment going on right now [in Nick's lab and, because olivine and CO2 are common on exo-planets,] on as many as 40 billion earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone.  Why did life make membranes if the vents provided that proton exchange pathway for free?  To avoid equilibrium (proticity death), the energy potential must drive a pump and/or have a leaky membrane (see fig. 4).  Weak membranes leak hydrogen ions both ways but with a sodium antiporter you get selective ion movement, more power and a reason to form a less permeable membrane and freedom from the vent (see fig. 5).  Complexity appears to have been achieved by serial endosymbiosis.  [I wonder if Nick and his team might go back to the world of 2 billion years ago and look for a situation that might have encapsulated many bacteria and archaea and eventually dwindled down to eukaryotes.]  Introns space out exons (and here I thought it was Shell stations).  At the origin of eukaryotes, the endosymbiont unleashed a barrage of genetic parasites upon the unwitting host cell.  "These proliferated across the genome in an early intron invasion, which sculpted eukaryotic genomes and drove the evolution of deep traits such as the nucleus [and sex]."  In the early eukaryotes bacterial introns were invading an archaeal genome, with very different gene sequences. There were no adaptive constraints; and without them, nothing could have stopped introns from proliferating uncontrollably.  It seems likely that the first eukaryotes suffered a bombardment of genetic parasites from their own endosymbionts. The nucleus keeps ribosomes at bay and gives the spliceosomes the time required to cut out superfluous or injurious introns prior to translation and reproduction of genes.  The nucleus likely evolved from random excess limpid bags in the cell to neater arrangement that still allowed transport through the nuclear wall.  Sexual origin is an enigma but statistically sex and two sexes provides for variance in DNA and stability in ova mitochondria, allowing for step-wise competitive capability enhancement in complex organisms.  A low threshold for free-radical leakage rate gives a high aerobic fitness and a low risk of disease, but at the cost of a high rate of infertility and poor adaptability.  A high threshold gives a low aerobic capacity and higher risk of disease but with the benefits of greater fertility and better adaptability (see fig. 6).   Death is the ceasing of electron and proton flux, the settling of membrane potential, the end of that unbroken flame.
         
                             Figure 1                                                                 Figure 2                                               Figure 3

          
                               Figure 4                                                              Figure 5                                          Figure 6

Fun facts: Some plants like the sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) are even capable of thermoregulation, sensing changes in temperature and regulating cellular heat production to maintain tissue temperature within a narrow range.  In every millilitre of seawater, there are ten times as many viruses, waiting for their moment, as there are bacteria.  Methanogens get the energy and all the carbon needed to grow from reacting H2 with CO2.  Antioxidants are not especially good for you and do not diminish aging.
 2015































































 9/17
Robert Silverberg A Hero of the Empire I decided to read this short story because the title is so similar to the current best seller about Churchill.  This story is about an exiled Roman who saves the empire from Islam by having Mahmud of Arabia Deserta murdered.
9/17
Neil deGrasse Tyson








 Astrophysics for People in a Hurry








 Often light and airy this cosmological essay has a heavy start with the hot Big Bang, cools a bit, gets cosmically dark for awhile (dark matter in Zwicky's fast moving sticky Coma galaxy cluster and dark matter haloes in Rubin's spiral galaxy works), then darker still (supernovae observations transform Einstein's Lambda into repulsive dark energy), then brightens into real matter (like Technetium which shouldn't exist in stars but does), rounds out and explores invisible light, and ends up waxing philosophical.

Cool earthly trivia from the book:

"Two varieties of sodium lamps are common: high-pressure lamps, which look yellow-white, and the rarer low-pressure lamps, which look orange. Turns out, while all light pollution is bad for astrophysics, the low-pressure sodium lamps are least bad because their contamination can be easily subtracted from telescope data. In a model of cooperation, the entire city of Tucson, Arizona, the nearest large municipality to the Kitt Peak National Observatory, has, by agreement with the local astrophysicists, converted all its streetlights to low-pressure sodium lamps."

"...the white paint used for telescope domes features titanium oxide, which happens to be highly reflective in the infrared part of the spectrum, greatly reducing the heat accumulated from sunlight in the air surrounding the telescope. At nightfall, with the dome open, the air temperature near the telescope rapidly equals the temperature of the nighttime air, allowing light from stars and other cosmic objects to be sharp and clear."

"...alien life forms from Europa would be called Europeans."		 2017










 9/17
Ian M. Banks
 The State of the Art
 Culture Series Book 4 is actually a short story compilation plus a novella that you can skip.  The short stories range from a smitten ent to Culture garbage accidentally landing on Earth.  The novella has a character from book 3 named Sma trying to convince a Culture citizen to give up his intent to become an Earther.  Sma discusses what makes beauty with the highly intelligent ship but it doesn't buy it. 1991 9/17
Ian M. Banks Use of Weapons Culture Series Book 3 - Our hero, Cheradenine Zakalwe, is a battle strategist who infiltrates a pre-contact civilization to extract his previous partner in Culture Contact Special Circumstances work.  We are kind of left wondering what was the point of the extraction, the war and the Culture involvement. 1990 9/17
Ian M. Banks The Player of Games Culture Series Book 2 - Our hero, Jernau Morat Gurgeh, is a game master.  The Culture convinces him to represent them in playing the game Azad (which is also the name of the associated pre-contact civilization that is pretty brutal and biased towards its 3rd gender).  The ruler of the Azad intergalactic empire is ruled by the winner of a periodic Azad game contest.  Despite murderous cheating on the part of the number one seated player (the current ruler of Azad), Gurgeh survives the firestorm and wins the game. 1988
 9/17
L. Ron Hubbard



 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Collection



 Short stories: Beyond All Weapons, Strain, The Invaders, The Crossroads, Borrowed Glory, The Devil's Rescue, Danger in the Dark, The Room, He Didn't Like Cats, The Great Secret, Greed, If I Were You, A Matter of Matter, The Professor Was a Thief, The Tramp, When Shadows Fall.  Beyond All Weapons tells the story of a futuristic martian colony's unsuccessful rebellion against a [force field] shielded Earth and the evil North Pole regime.  Using a merchantman spaceship filled with cigars, engineers and extra-velocity-fuel, the rebels flee to Alpha Centauri, getting to close to the "wall of light" along the way.  Strain is about Saturnite torture.  The Invaders is about a heavy world technician who is assigned to de-worm a Black Nebula planetoid mine that has been under attack by monsters for 75 years.  The Crossroads has an old farmer's horse pull a carftful of vegatables towards town but they get inerrupted at an cross-dimensional-nexus and become filthy rich for moments and near death the next before BEM's fix the interchange and poof, farmer and horse get to mosey home.  Borrowed Glory has an angel give everything (youth, beauty, riches, love) to an old woman for 48 hours on a bet that it would make the old lady happy even after the lapse.  But she commits suicide before her love also reverts back to 66.  The Devil's Rescue is about the last man alive in a lifeboat near antarctica and is saved, while briefly aboard the Flying Dutchman, by beating the devil at Yahtzee.  Danger In the Dark has Billy buy a south seas island that comes with an angry 75-feet tall god.

Novelette diction: graps, cavil, raccil, juice wand, thick green britt, spavined, maunder, dolorously, purblind, topee
8/17
Leonard Mlodinow










 Euclid's Window











 Leonard is a Cal post-grad physicist but respectfully includes works from Cal Tech and Princeton in this heavy tome (its short but the subject matter of Witten's M- theory (based on 11 dimensions containing strings/branes) where space and time do not exist gets pretty heavy).  Pythagorus' older friend Thales is credited for originating the critical thinking of geometry (Greek for earth measure) and for recommending that Pythagorus visit Egypt.  Pythagorus mythologically was born of a virgin, had a vigil on a mountain, walked on water and returned from the dead...Jesus!  One of his students, Hippasus, was assassinated by the Pythagoreans for speaking the unspeakable: the length of a square's diagonal was irrational!  Roman emperor Justninian squelched the Pythagorean Society because he didn't like their long beards and hair, drug use and un-Christian beliefs.  Euclid's 300BC Elements on 13 parchment scrolls were survived by later editions and, in book form, remains a broadly read document on plain geometry.  Ptolemy III stole all of civilization's greatest writings for the museum at Alexandria that endured longer than any other center of learning and produced Archimedes.  Christians tore asunder the library and its last great scholar, Hypatia.  Rome and Greek logic fell into the dark ages which limned after Charlemagne revived science and the University of Bologna was established in 1088.  The plague slowed things down and it wasn't until 1370 that a clock struck 24 even hours in Paris (at Palais and Horloge) and macaroni and cheese was invented in Britain.  Whence came Oresme, the graph, the area under a curve and his Galilean Relativity.  200 years later Rene Descartes survived his mother at birth, grew up in a hospital, went to law school and slept in late every day of his life.  Rene chanced to meet mathematician Beekman while employed by the Dutch army (even though the war was on hiatus) and went on to publish Fermat's coordinate system as his own (which we still call Cartesian Coordinates despite the evidence to the contrary).  He used the coordinate system to simplify the definition of most geometric shapes (using equations with x and y instead of words).  He was very careful not to mimic Galileo and get imprisoned by the church so Discourse on Method took him 33 years to write.  Descarte was killed by a Swedish winter tutoring the Ice Queen - Sweden and France have kept his skull as a museum piece to this day.  Infinity symbol's Robert Walis considered Indian mathematicians works in restating Euclids 5th postulate.  Napolean's hero, Gauss, adds hyperbolic curvature to space in 1792 and his student, Riemann, gave us elliptic space curvature using differential geometry in 1854.  In 1905 Einstein made time and space relative (and speaking of relative it was interesting to read that Albert's son, Hans Albert, became a professor of civil engineering at Berkeley).

The two images make up a geometric Pythagorean proof.  The overall squares are of the same area.  Remove the four equal area triangles from both figures and you must be left with the same total area with the first figure containing two squares of area a2+b2 and the second figure containing the square with width equal to the hypotenuse and area of c2.

2001











 8/17
David Rosenfelt Twelve Dogs of Christmas Rosenfelt is fine form with another great Andy Carpenter line (addressing a detective on the stand): "So let me see if I can sum up. She shot Mr. Hennessey, called herself from his house and then ran home to take the call, pausing to strip naked and dispose of her clothes somewhere you couldn’t find them, wiped the gun clean of prints and hid it in the basement rather than disposing of it with the clothes, washed her hands, got dressed, and then called 911? Is that the official police theory?"  As for the story, all that matters is that Pups ends it innocently with a snide "Lawyers" remark.
7/17
Alan Dean Foster Oshenerth A diver drifts off into an alien undersea world where she is magically transformed into a merperson to join in warding off an attack of crabs.  I guess Foster wrote this because he is an avid diver but the novel was a slow juvenile read with an oceanic dilution of plot.
7/17
Iain M. Banks




 Consider Phlebas




 Culture Series Book 1 - The Iridan empire clashes with the Culture empire.  Iridans are three legged giants and the Culture is led by machines.  Amidst the galactic space battle our hero, Bora Horza Gobuchul, the Changer from the asteroid Heibohre, leads a clandestine mission to secure a Culture [robotic] Mind that has learned to transcend hyper-dimensional space while underground.  Horza escapes drowning in a sewaged cell, attack from a Culture battleship that emerges from the sun, EVA in a power-exhausted spacesuit, conscription by pirates and time spent with that ordinary crew in the spaceship CAT (Clear Air Turbulence), temple lasers, megashipwreck, canibalism, Damage (emotional poker with a pot full of credits and Lives), Orbital (aka Ring World) destruction, hovercraft run-over, fusion engine generated plasma and steam, hurtling through laser blasted space dock walls, reunion with the Culture's ace agent, and battle with not-so-allied Iridans through tunnels spanning the core of a Dra'Azon Planet of the Dead allowing for..clickety-clack.. acceleration to the mega-train-wrecked and drone damaged climax.

Nicely coined sci-fi such as "stars around it wobbled and brightened in the lens effect of an imperfectly adjusted warp motor in cancel mode" permeate the empirical Culture story telling.  I'm putting the entire series on my must read list.		 1987





 7/17
Sylvain Neuvel Waking Gods Book 2 in the Themis Files.  Sylvain packs a lot of action into this episode with a dozen more robots, alien DNA and genocide, and a test tube baby hero.  The mysterious stranger winds some good yarns and the Quebecois refrains from swearing in French.  I have one criticism though: when Rose finds out that she got help getting into Berkeley she calls it the U. of C. instead of Cal (she could have just said that she was glad to be a Golden Bear). 2017

 7/17
J.K. Rowling
 A Casual Vacancy
 There is nothing magical about this tragically depressing muggle chacter study.  Set in pompous Pagford, far Yarville, and the common Fields in-between, the story embarks with kind crew coach and parish councilor Barry Fairbrother passing from a stroke on the golf course, works through his ghost writing of literally everyone's sins, and dismally ends with rowers completely swamped by ruers.
7/17
L.E. Modesitt
 Treachery's Tools
 Tenth in the Imager Portfolio series with Alastar and Alyna in charge of the L’Excelsis Imageisle Collegium and providing counsel and covert muscle for the Rex in defeating rebellious High Holders and traitorous militias.  Westisle imagers join the rebellion and die along with 3 from the Collegium.  Two of the Collegium imagers have left school for reasons unrelated to the rebellion but get apprehended and blackmailed by the rebels who are completely destroyed including the Rex's brother who has murdered several of his won (and the Rex's) family members.
6/17
John Scalzi



 The Collapsing Empire


 The Interdependency series book 1: Wu clan Cardenia becomes Emperox after the death of her father and brother and barely survives an assassination attempt by the rival Nohamapetan clan who covertly support rebellion on planet End based on their incorrect belief that End will become the new galactic hub for "the flow" but Flow Physicist Marce is sent from End to Hub to inform the Emperox that End will also be cut off from the other planets because collapse of "the flow" and the Empire are imminent.  End might not become the new galactic hub but it is the only truly habitable planet in the empire since Earth was lost to "the flow" long ago.  "The flow" is the author's wormhole-like way of getting around the speed of light - spaceships can enter and exit at certain places and ride in the flow to bypass most of the space between ports.  Kiva Lagos is a foul mouthed space captain that sleeps around the universe but generally does the right thing and ties the extra-planetary-operas together. 2017



 6/17
Ray Kurzweil
(Sun Systems founder)


















































 The Singularity is Near























































 The Singularity is Near is a 2004 thesis paper on the exponential growth of technology and the incipient "singularity" (Vernor Vinge adopted the term in 1983 to mean the point in time when computers become smarter than people and technology growth appears almost vertical).  I am skeptical about futurists who extrapolate technology growth to specific outcomes (every ten years someone says we will have fusion power in ten years but we're still waiting) but Ray writes well and even quotes Yogi Berra: "the future ain't what it used to be."  Ray discusses six epochs: 1) physics and chemistry, 2) biology and DNA, 3) brains, 4) technology, 5) the merger of human technology with human intelligence.  [Ray says this will happen in the next few decades but he doesn't discuss damping factors such as supply and demand or the full gambit of legislation].  Ray paints a picture of a friendly robot brained future with foglets to simulate real reality (nanobots that could even model Yosemite in your backyard).  [Ray uses Pi as an example of incompressible data but Pi has often been mathematically described in repeating patterns.  Ray mentions evolution defying the 2nd law because it is not a closed system but recent studies show life's dynamically stability is in accord with the law.  It seems like Ray is equating computational power (computations per second) with intelligence - we still haven't made a machine as smart as an ant (although we're coming close to a electronic flatworm brain).]  Mr. Kurzweil discusses college experiments in nano-computing and even describes computation at the atomic level.  He suggests that Moores law will continue and that we will reach the singularity by 2045 by using conservative estimates of human computation measurement at 1EE17 CPS (Computations Per Second) and conservative numbers for projecting future non-biological computation speeds.  This "conservative" method rings of the old methods to determine how many alien civilizations that "must" exist in the universe and is subject to numerous error sources.  Despite this, Ray's predictions have been relatively correct for the last 10 years or so.  The section on brain scans and reverse engineering the brain are fascinating.  Ray discusses cloning of individual cells in the body as a means of extending life span.  He moves onto a discussion of self-replicating nano-machines including biologic based and hybrid constructs.  There is a potential for extreme competition from such that could threaten life so broadcast communication to the cellular automata is critical to avoid destructive mutation (although such might be subject to software viruses).  Ray discusses using nano-technology for environmental clean-up but ten years after he wrote this book there are reports that inert nano-particles (used in the cosmetics industry) are becoming a serious environmental pollutant (aggregating in fish).

The book is a longer read than I expected because of the many interesting references that I have been compelled to investigate on the Internet, like nano-thin P-V (re-energized at MIT along with regenerative organic P-V's in solution) and bubble fusion (disproved at Stanford).  Ray talks to Molly 2104 and Molly 2004 throughout the book to provide a layman's glimpse of the future.  Kurzweil has a vision of the future where we are all filled with nanobots: some replace our digestive processes, some replace blood, platelets, lungs and heart (being motile enough to go outside for a breath of air and deliver it to every cell), some replace hormone producing organs, skeleton, and parts of the brain.  Nanobots will make (some of) us amortal and our cyborg brains (with embedded VR phones) and morphable bodies will allow us to compete with super AI robots.  Tbe Drake Equation for the number of radio-transmitting civilizations = N × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × fL is often computed to indicate millions of ETI's but I appreciate Ray providing reasonable term values and bases with a result of just one (us).  He then discusses using quantum entanglement or wormholes for FTL communication (and says that quantum entanglement is already being used in cyphering).

"Obviously, the cerebellum requires continual perceptual guidance from the visual cortex. The researchers were able to link the structure of cerebellum cells to the observation that there is an inverse relationship between curvature and speed when doing handwriting—that is, you can write faster by drawing straight lines instead of detailed curves for each letter.

"These 12 pictures of the world constitute all the information we will ever have about what’s out there, and from these 12 pictures, which are so sparse, we reconstruct the richness of the visual world [in reference to the human optic system].

"...emotionally charged situations appear to be handled by special cells called spindle cells, which are found only in humans and some great apes...

"Complexity theorist James Gardner...conjectures that it is specifically the evolution of intelligent life that enables offspring universes [in the multi-verse].

"[In] the “holographic universe” theory, the universe is actually a two-dimensional array of information written on its surface, so its conventional three-dimensional appearance is an illusion."

I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.
                   —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1773

Ray describes himself as a patternist, a resolution of the material and spiritual in future technologically enhanced life.  If one instantaneously replaces oneself with a copy then one ends and another begins, but if the replacement is slow, like in the continuous cell by cell and protein by protein replacement in our human bodies, then the pattern continues throughout with no discrete interruption and there is continuance of self (and self-consciousness).  So when man designed nano-constructs enters our bodies and replace cell functions we will continue even if our brains are peppered with the things.  Ray writes "the broadcast architecture is impossible in the biological world, so there’s at least one way in which nanotechnology can be made safer than biotechnology. In other ways, nanotech is potentially more dangerous because nanobots can be physically stronger than protein-based entities and more intelligent."  We can imagine a gray fog of auto-re-creating nano scale carbon and silicon constructs that might rise up and eat us all.  So I guess what we might need is friendly and secure remote controlled auto-created nanotechnology that is pervasive and can buffer other and potentially hazardous auto-created nano-technology.  Ray describes it like this: "A phenomenon like gray goo (unrestrained nanobot replication) will be countered with “blue goo” (“police” nanobots that combat the “bad” nanobots)."  Perhaps we can carry software that is impervious to remote hack and manages itself and its nano-bots with little need of our attention.  Maybe this will be in the form of some kind of healthful good smelling pixie dust that is spread in the air with gentle continuous supplemental inflow from new pixie dust canisters and intermittent blow down to absorbent containers that are recycled at nano clean and reset facilities.  I wonder what concentration of auto-created-nano-constructs might be able to flood the air and water and solid surfaces and if the constructs might damage the liquids and/or solids in our life cycle systems?  I think I agree with Ray when he says "in the end, it is only technology—especially GNR (genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics)—that will offer the leverage needed to overcome problems that human civilization has struggled with for many generations."

"It is precisely my thesis that machines of the 2030s and beyond will be of such great complexity and richness of organization that their behavior will evidence emotional reactions, aspirations, and, yes, history...Fundamental to this thesis is that as we apply our intelligence, and the extension of our intelligence called technology, to understanding the powerful patterns in our world (for example, human intelligence), we can re-create—and extend!—these patterns in other substrates. The patterns are more important than the materials that embody them."

In Ray's graphs of exponential growth of complexity and order he leaves out the big bang...he also says that only primates and monkeys physically gesture but dogs make all sorts of gestures (although they don't practice in front of a mirror as some primates have done).  He says the same about recursion but gray parrots seem to piece words together into phrases.  One of the companies that Ray discusses was Nanosolar that promised nano-based solar panel production but went bust after $400 million in investments and little output.  When it comes to human advances (especially with nanobots), Ray has left out the retarding factor of FDA approval: while experiments on rats can remain apace, profits that drive technology require human trials and public demand - these factors should greatly extend Kurzweil's timeline, pushing out the first amortality from 2050 to 2150 or later.  Ray even mentions this directly so I guess he is wishing legislation will change: "...we...need to streamline the regulatory process. Right now in the United States, we have a five- to ten-year delay on new health technologies for FDA approval (with comparable delays in other nations). The harm caused by holding up potential lifesaving treatments (for example, one million lives lost in the United States for each year we delay treatments for heart disease) is given very little weight against the possible risks of new therapies." Ray gave a reference to MIT’s OpenCourseWare which is claimed to allow anyone to take MIT classes for free...I tried it, but, for the classes I was interested in (like nano-technology), one has to buy the text books, which looked expensive on the OpenCourseWare website.  There are many free lectures on the site but often with gaps in the text book usage.

New diction: epigenetic, stochastic, connectionism, backpropagation, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, confabulations, engineered negligible senescence, autologous, angiogenesis, diamondoid, respirocytes, microbivores, protofibrils, prosodics, vasculoid, proteomics, biocyberethics, proactionary principle, neuromodulators.
/17
L.E. Modesitt Recluce Tales
 Short stories set in the Recluce universe.  There are a couple of stories in the book that are outstanding and a few that really only help flush out the Recluce timeline. 2017
 5/17
David Rosenfelt
 Outfoxed

 Bookie 14 in which Andy Carpenter has to give up sports betting as his adopted son is quoting book at school.  They have to sit in 35 yard-line seats instead of the family 45 yard-line box and in the commoners concession stand line they are threatened by mafia muscle prompting Andy to go after Petrone.  After a bunch of mob hits including Willie's old prison pal Russo, Andy and team prove their tech client innocent allowing a reunion with a Tara Foundation prison program dog.
5/17
John Scalzi Miniatures A collection of amusingly absurd very short Sci-fi stories.
5/17
Ken Follet




















 Edge of Eternity





















 I ought to simplify this synopsis (some day).

Book 3 of the Century Trilogy is another 1,000 page tome and involves the grandchildren of the primary characters of The Fall of Giants.  Maud's granddaughter, Rebecca, discovers that her husband is Stazi and throws his cherished matchstick model out the window and, with the aid of two Berlin border Vopos, he retaliates by breaking her younger brother's guitar.  Lev's grandson, George, is a half-black Harvard law school graduate who gets on a Greyhound bus to peacefully protest southern segregation.  George's bus ride next to pretty Maria goes smoothly until they are beaten and fire-bombed by a mob while Alabama state police stand-by until they call out "you've had your fun, now go home."  Grigori's granddaughter Tania extracts an old typewriter from a box of cat food and types up a two-page issue of Dissidence for her handsome colleague, Vasili, to copy for distribution at the Mayakovsky Square poetry session where they are arrested.  Tania's politico twin, Dimka, and her uncle General Volodya, get her out of a KGB jail.  Dimka and Tania sink the Dissident typewriter but Tania still gets sent to Cuba.  George is hissed and cheered at his graduation ceremony and afterwards George is offered a job interview with Secretary General Bobby Kennedy.  George helps out Jack by escorting the Marquands to Bobby's White House office so that Jack can avoid a photo with an inter-racial couple.  Hans blocks Rebecca from getting another job and then his colleagues erect the Berlin wall to keep her from "illegally emigrating".  Maria loses her virginity to President Kennedy.  Bobby tells George to see MLK to distance Martin Luther from his lawyer who the FBI accuses of being communist.  Ethel is daymed into the House of Lords and this time on the Parliament stairs Fitz shakes hands with her grandson.  Bernd is severely injured during his escape from East Berlin with Rebecca.  Dimka covertly ships nuclear missiles to Cuba which the CIA discovers prompting the famous Kennedy Cuban missile crisis speech on black and white TV.  Walli escapes East Berlin twice with a guitar and a gunshot wound, leaving behind a pregnant Karolin.  George gets his left arm hurt twice in his passive attendance of civil rights meetings (symbolic of left wing struggles, I guess) and Kennedy pushes for legislation to end segregation and pseudo-legal black vote inhibition in the south.  Cousin Willi joins the Plum Nellies (nee Guardsmen) in a bar gig with fifteen years old Dave Williams in Hamburg but a jealous guitarist rats out under-age Dave and they all go back to England.  The evening that Dimka kisses Nina at an after-work gathering he has a son with his new wife Natlaya and they name him Grigor.  Tania's influence keeps prodding Dimka to support reform but he cautious and does not make much progress.  Jasper Murray, makes 50 pounds betraying family secrets to the press so he can fly to Washington DC in time for MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech (he makes 25 pounds for his coverage).  Walli meets Evie's boyfriend, and subject of Jasper's article, pop music star Hank Remington.  MLK's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Sunday school gets fire bombed killing several children and the southern police have no suspects.  Lenny loses the Plum Nellies because he is too old fashioned and they record a hit single (written by Hank) and appear on TV without him.  Dave is amped and vamped despite leaving school and leaving home.  The Plum Nellies are almost goners but Walli writes a hit song about missing his daughter.  Tania visits Vietnam where the Viet Cong manipulate the Americans and Soviets to their end purpose.  Kennedy is assassinated and George goes to console Maria.  Johnson gets an anti-segregation and equal rights bill passed but does poorly with Vietnam.  Tania visits her dissident friend in Siberia, gives him a meal and underwear and sneaks his writings into a literary fair in East Germany.  Dave sees legal discrimination in a London gay bar with his drummer and then experiences better relations with Beep Dewar in America.  Jasper betrays Willi and publishes an article about Walli's Berlin-walled-offed separation from Karolin and Alice.  Karolin marries a clergyman and Walli goes wild with groupies.  Dave flies to England for Lady Eth's funeral and upon his return to SF he finds that Beep has succumbed to pot, LSD and Walli (and so ends Plum Nellie...for awhile).  Walli gives his first political speech.  Dave buys a Napa vineyard for $55,000 and starts his own TV show.  Jasper gets drafted and survives two years with US Ranger war criminals in Vietnam which gives him cause to join the anti-war bandwagon.  George is still hoping for Bobby to win a presidential race against Johnson and Nixon but Bobby and MLK are killed, Johnson doesn't run and we get Tricky Dick until the Watergate scandal.  Dave pushes his sponsor to allow an inter-racial kiss (on the cheek) to air and it turns out to be the right thing to do.  Lev contritely meets his son Volodya at his brother Grigori's death bed.  The pope is Polish.  President Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor attend George and Verena's wedding reception.  George gets a seat on the Congressional intelligence oversight committee.  Vasili finishes a fictitious novel about Pat Nixon's 24 hours in Moscow and makes a play for Tania which just chases her away to Poland where Lec Walesa's Solidarity union is repressed by the communist government and Tania's short term Polish boyfriend turns out to be a traitor.  Tania finally succumbs to Vasili's wiles.  Walli beats the "horse" (heroin) and meets his daughter.  The Soviet Union economy becomes untenable when they start taking out western loans to pay the interest on western loans so they stop support of the Warsaw Pact nations.  The Berlin Wall falls not because of Reagan, SDI, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Solidarity or activism but just because of money.  Epilogue: Maria marries George when she retires at sixty and George cries when Obama is elected.
5/17
Ken Follet


 Winter of the World

 Book 2 of the Century Trilogy begins with Maud writing for a gossip magazine entitled The Democrat where she lampoons Hitler but I can't say what happens after because I decided to skip ahead to book 3 and move this long novel down on my "to read" list (probably behind Follet's Pillars of the Earth).



Ken Follet

 The Eye of the Needle Hitler's most trusted spy's wake of death and destruction is a thin trail to be followed by a British history professor who volunteers for MI5...but it is beauty that slays the beast.  This welcome quick 300 page read is a decent intermission before tome 2 in the Century Trilogy.
3/17
Luisa Espinel
 Canciones de mi Padre
 The daughter of Frederico Rondstadt wrote this 1946 University of Arizona dissertation on Mexican/Arizona folk music including student tunes, danzas and Italian influenced picaresque tunes from Todillas (one to three performer musical plays).  Love, rattlesnakes, firewater, Herod and Judas make it into the lyrics but I couldn't get the family to listen to Linda Ronstadt's album of the same title on the way to Petie Ronstadt's concert at his cousin's Tucson Street Fair.
3/17
Arika Okrent












 In the Land of Invented Languages









 "A zippy trip through the history of man's attempts to overcome the curse of babel."  Esperanto is the most commonly spoken artificial language and it is even sung at Esperanto congresses.  There were many other artificial languages developed at the turn of the century (some quite bizarre) but the effort fell out of vogue with the intellectuals when English became the dominant international language with the solidification of the British Empire.  A snippet tells of the survival of Simplified English in some foreign broadcasts (limited words and no passive voice).  The book gains feeling during the sometimes blissful history of Semantography despite Karl Bliss' grumpy disappointment with the successful use of his symbols (retermed Blissymbolics) to teach children afflicted with cerebral palsy (as opposed to use as an ideographic universal language transcending words).  Loglan ends in a split with the birth of its "illegitimate" (according to Brown) child language of Lojban which survives trademark legal battles between Loglan's Brown and Lojban's Bob and Nora LeChevalier (Brown's ex-wife married Bob in a Lojban ceremony).  Brown also invented a boardgame "Careers" (marketed by Parker Brothers) where winning is based on reaching monetary, fame and happiness point goals.  Loglan was supposed to be based on logic to test the Whorfian premise that language limits thinking, so shouldn't Star Trek switch character names between Spock and Whorf?  Klingon is the only invented language to retain trademark status (mainly because noone wants to fight the Paramount lawyers).  Laadan has words that sound like proper nouns in P. C. Hodgell's Kencyrath series (like rathom and ramimeth).  Tolkien developed several languages with proto-language history as the defining quality of his fantasy races in his latter Lord of the Rings.  The appendix lists 500 invented languages which is indicative of the lure of linguistics and the imagination.

Novel diction: opuscule, utopy and ergativity.

I wondered if Arika knew about mp3's of songs in artificial languages (like Sylvain Neuvel's mp3 of the Ewok celebration song) and she gave me this link: William Weir and linguist Arika Okrent (who has a first level certification in Klingon) discuss the origins and meanings of constructed languages in song.  It includes We Will Rock You in Klingon.  In the comments of this podcast site is a Youtube link to a Shatner movie in Esperanto.
3/17
Mark Twain
 Pudd'nhead Wilson
 The story was written in 1893 but takes place around 1850 in a fictitious town in Missouri.  Pudd'nhead is actually the second smartest man in town.  A 1/20th black slave woman swaps her child with her master's and 20 or so years later she blackmails her own son with that secret.  Angelo and Luigi, twins from Italy, are experienced in tomfoolery.
3/17
Fredrik Backman


 And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer And Longer
 A short novella in which Noah is transported by his grandfather to places unknown and must find his way home with a map, compass and imagination.  Grandpa believes in math and Noahnoah.  "Grandpa always calls him 'Noahnoah' because he likes his grandson’s name twice as much as everyone else’s"...and says...“Have I ever told you about the time I went to the doctor, Noahnoah?  I said, ‘Doctor, Doctor, I’ve broken my arm in two places!’ and the doctor replied, ‘Then I’d advise you to stop going there!’ ”  In a hospital room, son Ted almost startles Granpa out of the tiny round square in his brain (which has been getting smaller).  The dragon in the square sneezes a slew of bitty notes into the air and Grandpa tells Noah that those are his ideas and that they have been blowing away for awhile now.
3/17
David Rosenfelt


 Who Let The Dog Out?


 Book 13 Excerpt: "I don’t talk to Laurie about Ricky’s baseball-soccer decision, because the coverage has given me an idea. And to make it work, I need to go drink some beer."  Andy still does his best work at the sports bar.  Dog Zoe is stolen from the Tara Foundation and her chip leads Andy and Willie to a murder and diamonds.  Several chemists are murdered to cover up their recipe for ice.  A jewel thief framed for one of the murders is exonerated when Andy and team uncover a terrorist plot to invade Ashby, Maine (the arms dealer is also a diamond smuggler who had the ice machine competitors offed).  The afterword includes a blurb on Rosenfelt's Dogtripping about his move to Maine with 25 Goldens...thank goodness that Maine was saved for his Retreivers.
3/17
P. C. Hodgell


 The Sea of Time



 Book 7 of the Kencyrath.  Jame's mission leads her sledge caravan across the desert to the temporal sea of tears where she slays a giant crocodile and makes it's highly valued armor her own.  They escape the 3,000 year old fall of Tishoo, losing their trade goods but not all of their lives.  Jame returns to score a winning goal in a cadet rugby contest that maims a few horses.  The numerous and miscellaneous gods are represented and appearing everywhere.  Kendar voice can cause Kencyrath to obey and blood bonding causes loyalty and servitude...and now we find out that male Kendar can nurse children when the mother is unavailable.  The storytelling hieratically switches from Jame to Tori and does some back story interweaving with previous novels in the series with more wolver component.  At one point Jame is walking around with a temple in her pocket due to the effects of The Change (which also causes some trees to uproot and walk about except for the valuable ones that the King's men have anchored down).  The Change passes and well armored and mounted Jame defeats late Knorth Lord Gerridon's haunt which halts the Karnids' storming of Kothifir's Undercliff.  Jame is ordered home to Gothregor.
3/17
Ken Follet












 Fall of Giants









 Fall of Giants is 1,000 pages long and set in Wales, England, Russia, Germany and the U.S.A.  We learn about World War I through the senses of several people that are related by blood, sex, marriage, nobility and governance.  Follet tells about how ignoble senior nobility was at that time.  The noble Fitzherberts and laboring Williams are mostly Welsh but Lord Fitz of Aberowen is married to a Russian Tsaress, Bea.  Fitz discretely has an illegitimate son with maid Ethel Williams.  Fitz's sister Maud secretly marries good mannered Herr Walter von Ulrich who is ordered back to Germany to fight the French and British and whose command is finally defeated at the Marne when the U.S. enters the war.  Fitzherebert visits Russia with Bea just before the war, accompanied by an American presidential aid Gus who witnesses Russian foundry worker Grigori defend a peasant girl Katerina from a vicious police molestation.  Grigori had earlier seen Bea supporting punishment of peasants including his family.  Grigori's brother Lev impregnates Katarina, almost gets caught stealing and uses Lev's freedom money to flee poor Russia for rich America; Lev gets married to Olga, a Russian mobster boss' daughter, then gets caught cheating and is forced into the army to a mission which abets the Welsh Rifles in Russia whose ranks include Aberowen Pals Sergeant William "Billy Twice" Williams, brother of Ethel Williams.  Ethel's brother works Fitz' coal mines and the front lines of Major Fitz' zealous but ill-managed command of the Welsh Rifles.  Billy Twice is heroic in battle and becomes a sergeant and the Aberowen Pals are sent to Siberia to support resistance to Lenin's Bolshevik take over after Fitz and Bea flee the killing of her family in Russia by peasants who also get the land from the government.  Billy uses code to send military information to his sister Ethel who acquires a nice house in London to raise Fitz' son and becomes a coeditor with Fitz' sister Maud.  Billy gets a court-martial sentence of 10 years reduced to 1.5 years time served thanks to Ethel's journalistic crusade against the improper war in Russia.  Grigori becomes a soviet hero helping Lenin to rise but barely able to save Lev from Lenin's secret police who execute anyone who even inadvertently hears an opposition speech.  Billy marries Ethel's boarder, has a boy and gets elected to Parliament alongside his sister Eth (nee Ethel).  Eth(el) gets some satisfaction out of looking Fitz in the eye as an equal politician and forces Fitz into shaking hands with their son on the Parliament stairs.

More details here.

Novel diction: bannickers, banksman, onsetter, hock, mulligatawny, peripatetic, equerry, tantalus [the tantalus being a silver container with decanters of brandy and whiskey], firedamp, afterdamp, benison, extempore, knout, canaille, Taffy (as an insult), palliasses, puttees, volteface, pusillanimity, ebullient, exiguous (from TV while I was reading the book), spinney, cloche, gewgaws, scurrility, and sententious (from a Shakespearean example of scurrility usage).
3/17
P. C. Hodgell

 Honor's Paradox


 Book 6 of the Kencyrath series.  Jame survives her second year as cadet and graduates by fighting her brother to a draw in a final contest.

Novel diction: trock (to give and receive reciprocally as in trading chores), hobbledehoy, mewed up, and mummery.
2/17
P. C. Hodgell










 Bound In Blood








 Book 5 of the Kencyrath series.  Unlike book 4, this episode isn't all that exciting except for an author's game called Gen that sounds like a blind game of Stratego (you have to memorize all of the piece positions after set-up and then flip them over) but with hazard cards for hazard evaluation instead of the mine rules.  You create your own hazard cards and they can be quite fantastic and/or alien.  The story has Jame help a colleague with willow foot root removal, ride her ivory armored and fanged equestrian rathorn to divert a stampede that saves an adversarial tribe (she learns though that the tribe harbors a more likeable secret matriarchal society) and play capture the flag with aggressive cadets and castle phantasms.  Jame finally renders an ancient coat infused with a malevolent spirit that is held fast by blood in the coat fabric; she watches while tendrils keep the phantasm from escaping a fireplace pyre.  The tendrils are formed of the spirits of hair of many ancestors that have been used to mend the coat over the millennia: "it was a hair-loom, not just an heirloom" (I kid you not, its right there on page 273).  The next day we bought an Aireloom bed and its pretty nice.

What Jame says about the Kencyrath game Gen:
The Gen pieces were smooth, flat, river stones about two fingers' width across, and one thick. On their bottoms were indicated their rank or status: one commandant, three ten-commanders, three five-commanders, and twenty-four cadets—in essence, three ten-commands and a master-ten. Added to these were four hunters, four hazards, and one flag. The goal of Gen was either to capture this last or to end play with a higher count of survivors than one's adversary. Strategy and tactics were called for, but also memory: once the pebbles were in place, the player had to remember what each one of them represented, as well as what one deduced about the opposing pebbles by their movement and effect.
– Jame's narration, Bound in Blood,
"Chapter XIII: A Day in the Life", VI

2/17
Lois McMaster Bujold






 Penric's Demon, Penric and the Shaman, and Penric's Mission




 Three fantasy novellas filled with magic, mysticism and medieval terminology.  Any really good fantasy should incorporate demon possession at the beginning and Lois does not disappoint.  Pen's possession has a dozen previous lifetimes and a host of spells (some fit for garderobe talk).  Benighted at a local castle and set upon by rascally nobility he escapes via sorceried use of the demon hot foot and unbuckling and eventually finds his way to a seminary.  Now Learned Penric, he assists a Locator in finding a fugitive shaman who ultimately receives Pen's ethereal and mountain climbing aid in freeing two other shaman souls.  Time passes and Pen is commanded to carry a missive into foreign territory where he is discovered, brain bashed and ensconced in an oubliette.  Demon ensorcled trepany relieves his edema and makes a blinded general and a spy see reasonably.

Diction includes garderobe (castle privy), benighted (overcome by nightfall), impiety (perceived lack of proper respect for something considered sacred), severally
(separately or individually; each in turn)
, withal (as well, nevertheless), withy
 (a tough flexible branch of an osier or other willow, used for tying, binding, or basketry)
, cobochon (shaped and polished but not faceted gemstone), loured (looking dark and threatening as a stormy sky), frank (mark of postage or allow to pass freely), jink (sudden quick change of direction), ambit (scope, extent, bounds, reach), plinth (stone base), peculation (embezzlement), attainted
(
subject to attainder
, the forfeiture of land and civil rights suffered as a consequence of a sentence of death for treason or felony; or affect or infect with disease or corruption)
, postpandrial (after meal), frisson (a sudden strong feeling of excitement or fear), traduce (
speak badly of or tell lies about someone so as to damage their reputation)
, gull (to fool or a gullible person), postilion (a guide that rides on a coach horse), ossify (to harden a position)...
2/17
David Rosenfelt
 Hounded

 Book 12 has another friend put in jail and fighting a conspiracy.  This time a little boy comes attached to the dog that stays at Andy's house during the trial.  By the by, Edna (Andy's secretary) is coming off of a crossword competition performance high but still has enough energy to help watch the kid.  Andy's team finds the poison pill trail and an organized criminal debt pays off big at the end of the tale.  Then Andy marries Laurie at the sports bar with Tara as the maid of honor and they adopt Ricky.
1/17
David Rosenfelt
 Unleashed

 Book 11 has voir dire questioning (so do the other ten but its the first time I noticed this legal term).  How many assassinations can Rosenfelt fit in one story?  The bad guys frame Sam (Andy's accountant/hack master) and, of course, while Sam awaits trial in jail, with Tara consoling Sam's dog Crash, the Carpenter team up-ends the heavily armed and cold-blooded terrorist conspiracy, saving the day and making the FBI look good.
1/17
Lois McMaster Bujold
 Amoeba


 Five early short stories: 1) an alien comes to a harried housewife's door to trade bio-statis field generators and a focus enhancer beam for ammonia and bleach, 2) the neat neighbor lady drives a man to drink (and sell her household goods when she is gone for a day), 3) a trans-dimensional garbage chute and reversal of fortune, 4) a dream machine recording star has writer's block until the physical world bumps into her, but her gentleman friend's mendacious reassurance and a henchman's solopism gets her through the no harm, no foul situation and back to her pseudo-reality, and 5) mortuary affairs reclaim space battle corpses.  The afterword includes a nice brief on the cover art by Caryn Babaian who uses sketching to help teach community college biology.
1/17
Lois McMaster
Bujold		 Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen The 15th in the Vorkosigan saga involves a 60-ish royal redhead who wants to retire to have a second round of family life (in this future birth is ex-vitero and with the right genes life expectancy and physical fitness can extend past 100).  I hadn't seen the word sororal (sisterly) in print before but its easy enough to deduce its meaning but not so with uxorial (wifely).  Lois calls the story risible but it read more like an opium dream.
1/17
Fredrik Backman A Man Called Ove Sweet sentimentality (like Swedish fish) fills this sob Saab story of a good man and his struggles with feelings, people and a couple of cats. The book was made into a chick flick.
1/17
Addy Pross



 A Roadmap Toward Synthetic Protolife

 Dr. Pross must be a decent bloke as he responded to my email with an attached article that expanded a bit on the lab problem of synthesizing life (thanks Addy).  It reaffirms DKS as a new lab launch point.  Here is an excerpt.

"That principle, governing all material change, whether in the ‘regular’ physicochemical world or the replicative world, may be formulated as follows: systems will tend from less stable (persistent) to more stable (persistent) forms, or, more concisely: nature is directed toward more persistent forms."
1/17
Addy Pross







 What is Life?  How Chemistry Becomes Biology




 I found this book to be well written and informative.  It thoroughly explains a new hypothesis on the chemical origins of life: whence the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) might have been a complex muddle of chemicals which is still reacting today in the form of life.

Life is complex, diverse and unstably homochiral (right handed sugars and lefty amino acids) while the inanimate is understandably uniform, law abiding and stably heterochiral.   Life appears to be teleonomic despite the arisen physics of an objective universe.  Systems chemistry is a holistic approach that allows for populations of chemical species and networks.  In this study an alternative to the second law of thermodynamics is postulated: Dynamic Kinetic Stability (DKS).  The precursors to life, like life itself, are thermodynamically unstable, especially after the evolution of metabolic function, but multiplied and survived as part of their DKS.  A sequence of replication, mutation, complexification, selection, evolution, given the right medium, indicates that abiogenesis is not only a possible reaction outcome but a probable reaction outcome.

"Life is not a thing but a process."  Although individuals exist and are a survival advantage, and synergy exists but is not required for all individuals, life is really the community of all living things and the DKS of life is dependent on the aggregate.  Viruses may lack metabolism but are integrated into the overall network of living things, so perhaps they are also life.  The definition of life from Addy: a self-sustaining kinetically stable dynamic reaction network derived from the replication reaction.
1/17
Clifford Pickover
 Immortality

 Another romp around a theme that might include amortality.  The book is a collection of scientific thoughts on immortality and is heaping with great quotes to help get you thinking.  Cliff suggested this book because I liked his Drugs, Sex, Einstein and Elves and it is almost as free flowing despite the gravity of the theme; it is an enjoyable read with many interesting tidbits and intriguing quotes sprinkled thoughout (especially those hidden at the end of the notes and references sections and one reference to spindle cells).  In the "about the author" section, Cliff indicates that one of his next book topics will depend on reader response to a list: 1) Matrioshka Brains, 2) Carolingian Renaissance, 3) pareidolia and Marian apparitions, 4) Gram-schmidt orthonormalization, 5) Phyllodocida, 6) Turangalila, 7) factorion 40,585, 8) Egil Skallagrimsson, 9) aposiopesis and asyndeton in literature and life, 10) calipee, and 11) Olaf Sporns' connectome.  I chose calipee.  How about you?
1/17
David Rosenfelt Leader of the Pack In book ten, Marcus mangles the mafia, the doggie detective devices are delinquent and the bad guys only kill 50,000.
1/17
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Danger! and other stories
 This short story compilation starts with a fictional narrative intended to warn England of the risk of submarine warfare against commercial shipping which was prophetic for 1915.  The stories then become more fantastic and even manic but slow at the end to a nice little Indian story.  Edwardian English diction includes scapegrace, dingle, dukker, choomer, mort, chal, furze, distrait, beck, deal chair, truckle-bed, wicket gate and billy-cock hat.
12/16
David Rosenfelt One Dog Night
 In book nine Tara gets another live-in companion and Andy frees Tara's original owner from a partly underground deadly high level conspiracy.
12/16
Janet Evanovich Eleven on Top, Twelve Sharp and Lean Mean Thirteen Steph gets lucky again and survives kidnappers, killers, grave robbers and gangsters (with a little help).
12/16
Janet Evanovich To The Nines and Ten Big Ones Book nine has Stephanie surviving a partially on-line psychotic killer competition and the family remaining in good humored disarray.  Book ten has her surviving a gangland contract and Sally the cross dresser acting as Valerie's "Kloughnish" wedding planner.
12/16
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mandilow A Briefer History of Time

 A brief on physics history, relativity, the four forces, quantum mechanics and string theory.
12/16
Lilith Saintcrow

 Roadside Magic and Wasteland King
 Book 2 and 3 of the Ragged and Gallows series stretch the blighted plot from the sidhe realms of Summer and Unwinter to pierce the veil to the fall and spring of Halves Jeremiah Gallows and Robin Ragged (who are robed in chantments and armed with magic lance and spell song).  Well seasoned with fae denizens and vocabulary, the fairytale twines around the mortal world and the in-between (like the Gobelin market, dwarve halls and the Dreaming Sea).  The more-than-real to real scene changes include clever short asides of fae influences on mortals.
12/16
David Rosenfelt New Tricks and Dog Tags Waggy is supposedly from man-made genetic material but still gets along with Tara in book 7.  In book 8, Milo the police dog is a thief, a hero and a biscuit bonanza for Tara.  Conspiracies are uncovered, Andy and company survive murder attempts and the clients' dogs are happy to have their owners freed.
11/16
Patrick Rothfuss The Slow Regard of Silent Things The foreword says you might not want to read this book, the afterword explains that it is not a proper story and should have been trunked, and it might not be for everyone, but its a fresh novelette that brings life to the inanimate and the shyest of beings.
11/16
Patrick Rothfuss
 The Wise Man's Fear
 Book 2 in the Kingkiller series (no king killing yet).  Kvothe goes to school, survives multiple adventures and earns a reputation including a bad foretelling from a faerie oracle.  This is a tome of a novel but it runs like the favorite at Pimlico.  I guess that I will learn to play Tak which is the author's game played in his rowdy pubs and elitist mansions and is sold on the Internet.
11/16
Luke Mastin



 The Physics of the Universe (Difficult Topics Made Understandable) Luke has written and published a nice web site that discusses relativity, black holes, the big bang, quantum mechanics, and abiogenesis in reasonable language: https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com
11/16
Clifford Pickover
 Surfing Through Hyperspace
 A brief jaunt through 4-D Euclidean space makes one think out of the tesseract (4-D box).  Cliff notes that 4D beings could see all of 3D space including the insides of objects (since they can view from "out of plane" using the 2D analogy).  His "Not-X-Files" agents hunt down 4D beings who appear in our space in 3D sections and can disappear unless nabbed in a hyper-trap.
10/16
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
 Beyond the City


 This is a free book from project Gutenberg.  Set upon a cottage field turned over to three new homes sharing a tennis court, with good old English dialogue, which includes pot shots at Robert Browning and the Victorian woman's plight and suffrage.  The romantic hopes of two daughters and two sons are temporarily interred into a family plot but civility finally prevails.  Some of Doyle's Beyond the City very velvety Victorian vocabulary that was novel to me: tompion, zenana, seamew, chloral, arnica and defalcation (plug for the muzzle of a gun to keep out dust and moisture, the part of a house for the seclusion of women, seagull, trichloroacetaldehyde which was mixed with water as a sedative, a toxic herb which was used in a highly diluted form to ease swelling, and misappropriation of funds held by an official).
10/16
John C. Wright One Bright Star to Guide Them This is a short story about battling evil creatures of the dark ages in modern Brighton and Dover with a talking Holy black cat named Tybalt.  Pretty good jot.
10/16
Janet Evanovich Visions of Sugar Plums Stephanie dreams about seizing Sandy Claws from his helpers with the help of a super hero and the usual cast.  Maybe Janet ate too many Christmas cookies when she cut out this cute little seasonal novella.
10/16
Clifford Pickover
 Archimides to Hawking
 This is a set of multi-page historical blurbs on our world's most memorable scientists and their discoveries with interesting snippets on the age of each discovery, some topical quotes and disparate "conversation starters".   The International Astronomical Union General Assembly rates the importance of many scientists by the size of the lunar crater assigned to their name (I doubt that I will ever crater).  A to H is better than his Math Book (equally full of equations) and is a thought provoker (albeit with a encyclopedic bent).  Cliff includes a blurb on a Hawkings "law" that says each equation included in a book halves its sales, dooming A to H and the Math Book to oblivion.
10/16
Patrick Rothfuss

 The Name of the Wind

 A blast from the (recent) past and I am back with Bast, the young pan in the Rothfuss short story, The Lightning Tree, from a month ago (fortunately that pre-read didn't ruin anything for this Kingkiller Chronicle book 1 other than showing us that Kvothe is Bast's teacher).  Kvothe first learns the name of things from a guy without eyebrows named Aberny (the eyebrow-less guy was Burns in the Sleeping Giants).  Kvothe (pronounced like quoth...the raven "Nevermore") is an inn keeper who is mysteriously strong and tells his life story to The [royal] Chronicler.  This was another book with a chronicler that I couldn't put down (the other was Sleeping Giants which is written up just below).  Its a wonderful story with wonderful characters, physical and spiritual growth, challenges, journeys...and magic.  Kvothe is a gifted and orphaned gypsy boy who survives hard streets to rise up in an arcane academy.
10/16
Sylvain Neuvel


 The Sleeping Giants


 A wonderful novel.  I got this book (based on a recommendation on the internet) before Judi and I left for Montreal to celebrate our 21st anniversary and I started reading it on the next to last day of our visit only to discover that the author is a Quebecois and lives in Montreal (he responded to my email with recommendations for poutine cafes in our Griffintown location).  Sylvain is a doctor of linguistics (and programmer), and a primary character in the novel just happens to be a Quebecois linguist who gets the girl and because his legs get crushed under the bumper of the girl's jealous special op's ex-boyfriend he gets to drive the legs of a giant alien (Grendizer inspired) robot (the girl gets the top).  The interplay of military queries and diary philosophy reminds me of David Gerrold's Chtorr series - in fact, this is the best science fiction novel I have read in 20 years just because of fun and wit projected in the journal narrative and dialogue.  The next book in the series is due out in early 2017 (it will probably beat the publication of David Gerrold's supposedly finished 5th Chtorr novel).  Sony bought the movie rights before Del Rey bought the rights to this book and its pending sequel.  I pointed out a couple of minor flaws in Sylvain's website and he replied that he'd fixed one and would get to the rest after he finished an interview (since book 2 is already with the editors he must be working on book 3).  Sylvain's web site has all sorts of fascinating stuff on linguistics (although the demo of his Whole Word Morphology program is still pending).
10/16
Bill Bryson





 A Short History of Nearly Everything



 Bill writes about the Big Bang, Earth's composition, the unlikelihood of life, cells and DNA, evolution, the rise of humanity and closes with a note on the extinction of species.  There might be as much as 100 trillion tons of bacteria living underground in subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems (or SLiME for short).  Some bacteria are very hardy and scientists resuscitated 250-million-year-old Bacillus Permians that was trapped 2,000 feet deep in a Carlsbad salt deposit.  Of 30 billion estimated species that have lived on Earth, fossil records have been discovered for only about 250,000 (95% of these are from under water and almost all fossils are very partial): scientists are patching together the tree of life with only spotty evidence for some x %.  Species extinctions have been somewhat cyclical due to global warming, global cooling, changing sea levels, oxygen depletion in the seas, epidemics, giant methane leaks from the seafloor, meteor and comet strikes, hypercanes, huge volcanic upwellings, catastrophic solar flares, and man-made species-cide.  Extinct species include guinea pigs the size of rhinos and rhinos the size of two-story houses.  And yet, that still leaves many species alive and we have "discovered" only about 3% of them.  There are species committees for Spermatophyta (chrysanthemums), Pteridophyta, Bryophyta, Fungi, and others, all reporting to the Rapporteur-General.  They better work fast as, thanks to mankind and nature, 10's of thousands of species disappear annually.  All of this life is made of cells that have been compared to complex chemical refineries and vast, teeming metropoles.  Cell propagation depends upon DNA and proteins.  Evolution and differentiation depend upon genetic mutation which generally occurs due to once in a million DNA replication errors (called Snips).  "[Proteins]...allow themselves to be phosphorylated, glycosylated, acetylated, ubiquinated, farneysylated, sulfated and linked to glycphosphatidylinositol anchors, among a rather lot else."  Even though we have transcribed the human genome, we don't really understand how it works...most seems like filler and all of it is interdependent with almost no "words" standing on their own.
10/16
Terry Brooks The Sorcerer's Daughter The evil sorcerer and a shape shifter get their due.  The sorcerer's daughter finds true love at the cost of first love.  This Shannara novel seemed formulaic.
9/16
Clifford Pickover
 Archimedes to Hawking
 This beats the Math Book because it gets more physical (physicists can beat mathematicians with one arm behind their back....given the right connectivity and wrong uncertainty).  Diamond (ice) would make the perfect chip (strategically doped with boron for semi-conductivity) because of its strength, high heat conductivity and low electrical conductivity...maybe De Beers will make diamond wedding rings that double as hand held computers some day.
9/16
Clifford Pickover
 The Math Book

 A chronological collection of one page blurbs on mathematical discoveries.  Primes, positions, geometries, ratios, infinities and the infinitesimal progress from imaginable to only computer enhanced comprehensibility over human history.  What will self aware computers do with math in the future - will they formulate a GUTS equation that is the universe?  Then will we not exist only in the mind but also in a silicon chip?  Or maybe on a tortilla chip with a little guacamole?
9/16
Clifford Pickover

 Spider Legs


 An odd Sci-fi horror story co-authored with Piers Anthony.  The pycnogonids (sea spiders) are horrific and I accept the science (fiction) behind their colossal state but the Xanthian characters are a bit naive (naming the ferry boat captain Calamari highlights their artificiality); perhaps this was an attempt at juxtaposition but it comes off more like "just a position" and doesn't quite feel right.  The plot, Newfoundland setting, and relationships with physical difference acceptance make the novel a fairly good read in spite of the youthful characters and unbelievable ending.  [I saw a sea spider at the Montreal insectarium.]
9/16
David Rosenfelt
 Dead Center, Play Dead
 In book 5, Andy Carpenter doesn't make it to trial this time but he manages to get another innocent killed before resolving another serial crime.  The dog is fine.  The wheel of fortune also survives (the one in the story doesn't involve Pat Sajak or Vana White).  Book 6 is a remix of the conspiracy formula but this time it includes a retrieval of a golden witness and Andy logging a felon.
9/16
Janet Evanovich

 Hot Six, Seven Up, Hard Eight

 Stephanie had another car burn up, solved another mystery, had Joe Morelli say he'd marry her and helped Granny get a driver's license.  Three new characters are introduced:  Moon Man, Dougie the Dealer and Bob the Dog with Bob being the smartest of the bunch.  Steph doesn't have the heart to shoot an 80-year-old mobster.  Ziggy, Benny and Ranger don't need a key to enter Steph's apartment.  Steph's sister moves in with her parents along with her two kids (one of them acts like she's a horse just like in Janet's bio).  In #8 Steph gets burned but Ranger makes things even, with Morelli abiding.
9/16
Clifford Pickover




 Drugs, Sex, Einstein and Elves



 A strange title but it is apt for this jumble on thinking and Proust.  Many scientists believe that the mind must be freed from the limits of language (via drugs, meditation, art or disassociation methodology) to conceive new thoughts about the universe.  Some cultures have no words for colors, some have no tense or no verbs: scientists conjecture that these odd language users brain works differently.  The logophiliac author is interested in computer writing, odd writings lacking certain letters, writing using strange word selection rules and utter amphigory.  He restates that English is a most useful language because of the specificity of it's 800,000 words (many borrowed from other languages) despite the fact that even a very smart and educated person is likely to use no more that 60,000 words (7.5%).  DMT is produced by the pineal gland and by some south american plants (concentrated into the drug ayahuasca for psychodelic trips) - CP says that DMT may allow psychonauts to think abstractly and "get past the edge of possible understanding in such far-flung fields as multidimensional superstrings, parallel universes, loop quantum gravity, motivic cohomology, Langlands’ Functoriality Conjecture, large and inaccessible cardinals, and non-abelian reciprocity."  CP says that DMT users and Bonnet People (macular degenerates and optopalegics) often see elves with pointy hats and suggests that this might be a connection with other realities or dimensions.  Eminent people often have children with mental problems and/or alcoholism and the genes for schizophrenia might be closely related to genes for creativity.  Since everything can be expressed in numbers (genetic codes, people, events, the universe) and Pi contains every possible combination of numbers, we are all in Pi (for some its apple pie and for others its rhubarb pie).  Einstein's brain was missing for years before being discovered in a mason jar under a beer cooler in Kansas and his eyes that were in a New Jersey vault for years are now in hiding.  Will computers attain consciousness?  Let's get Einstein's parts to look into it.
9/16
Issui Ogawa
 The Next Continent From 2010 and in classic science fiction form, this Japanese author details out a moon base mission like an entertaining engineering specification.
8/16
Paula Guran (ed)

 The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015
 A collection of Sci-Fi novellas.  Yesterday's Kin by Nancy Kress is about space-borne spores and extra-solar humans who have long lost cousins on Earth (okay but not something to write home about especially if you have to pay for interstellar postage).  The Lightning Tree by Patrick Rothfuss is about a young Pan "working" at a village inn and conducting his juvenile business at the lightning tree (a pretty good yarn).  Dream Houses by Genevieve Valentine is gross (definitely skip this cannibalistic space story).  The Mothers of Voorisville by Mary Rickert is demonic and engrossing (you might skip this one too).  Claudius Rex by John P. Murphy is sarcastic detective noir with a cranial AI twist (fun Sc-Fi).  In Her Eyes by Seth Chambers is about a bendy shape shifter and the fella lucky enough to know her many forms.  The Churn: A Novella of the Expanse by James A. Corey is about future Baltimore and its seedy under-belly and reads just like 1920's Chicago but with a couple of comments about space being the way to get out of the racket. The Things We Do for Love by K. J. Parker is set in the iron age when a thief can't shake his witchy woman nor understand love.  Where the Trains Turn by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen is a Finish product about a seemingly psychotic boy who really knows that trains transcend tracks and chuff dread.
8/16
David Rosenfelt



 Open and Shut, First Degree, Bury the Lead, Sudden Death

 Andy Carpenter isn't as funny as Stephanie Plum even if he is also working for law and order in New Jersey.  In book one, he interrupts a tryst with his investigator to become unseperated but becomes exunseperated just before ruining his old family life.  He's grumpily ironic and kinda funny.  Instead of a gun toting granny he's got a dog named Tara (so he can't be all bad).  In the courtroom his questioning is more like witness manipulation but judge Hatchet sustains it.  When it comes to extracting the truth, Carpenter nails it, even at interpersonal expense.  In book two Andy wonders if he can get a sarcasm patch to help ween him off and wonders how his secretary makes not doing any work look so professional.  She needs to be professional because book 2 is another set-up job to solve and co-workers are in jeopardy.  The Jersey shore makes Andy see the ocean as half empty...but his stories are full..of sarcasm, suspense, plot twists and...dogs.  The back cover of book 3 has praise from Janet Evanovich: "Absolute fun...Anyone who enjoys the Plum books will enjoy this novel."  Jerseyites really stick together (and seem to use the word skippee)!  That's okay because I found out that the Tara Foundation in Rosenfelt's novels is real (he's saved over 4000 dogs from the pound) with 12 of them in his own house (and Winnebago).  I thought Rosenfelt would stick to the successful "make fun of Jersey" format in book 4 but it starts with a brief visit to L.A. where he can use his experience as a film company manager to take jabs at Hollywood (and my beloved Lakers)...then back to the formula (including sports, Jersey, frame-ups, sarcasm, dogs, murder of another innocent employee and a late plot twist).
8/16
Jared Diamond
 Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies
 Chapter 1 reminded me of Sapiens but Chapter 2 delved into the authors special knowledge of Polynesia and extrapolation of islander 500 year history to propose profound pivotal events in more ancient Eurasia.  Eurasia was blessed with a broad Mediterranean climate zone that allowed the spread of the Fertile Crescent annuals farmer package of wheat and barley along with early domestication of cows, pigs, goats and sheep.  The Eurasian sedentary and populous community catalyzed invention.  The widespread Eurasian animal husbandry led to a fertile ground for disease and human immunity development, leading to the smallpox and measles pandemic in the Americas shortly after Europeans got there - which blazed their trail to conquest.  Multiple European states drove invention to use more competitively than historically unified China which dissolved her powerful fleet in the 1400's whereas Columbus was able to find a patron state on his fifth try.  The book is a bit academic but still a reasonably fun read from this Bruin professor.
8/16
Jonas Jonasson


 The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

 Somewhat like The Orphan Master's Son at the onset but in Soweto (not Korea) and not dark.  A coincidence arose in chapter one where Jonas mentions Leopold II enslaving the Congo just like in the Tarzan movie I saw with the Gardner's last week.  Another coincidence occurs when Jonas discusses Ras Tafari - I've a Rastafarian friend with a wonderful Rottweiler named Irie.  A South African girl prodigy survives apartheid and coincidence positions her to secretly facilitate Botha's a-bomb development and to learn Chinese.  Meanwhile, Holger 1 and Holger 2 (number 2 didn't exist officially) lost mum and da to a familial and inept vendetta with the King of Sweden.  The girl's three Chinese friends arrive in Sweden in an a-bomb crate.  The girl and Holger 2 watch over the bomb for 20 years when they finally manage to send it off to the president of China.  Then they have a baby and live happily ever after.
8/16
Jean Johnson
 The V'Dan, Book 2 of the Salik War series 1% science fiction, 1% supernormal, 1% Hawaiian and 97% internecine squabbling over Jungen marks.  This was as silly as when the president of E&L made the piping department head wear long sleeves to cover his tattoos acquired in USN service.  Book 1, The Terrans, was less of a diatribe and more entertaining.
7/16
Janet Evanovich High Five
 Stephanie Plum, the bombshell bounty hunter, brings down Uncle Fred's killer with a little help from her pistol packing grandma.
7/16
Celia S. Friedman Legacy of Kings A dragon queen or two, desert sheiks, witchery united and a grand finale.  Okay.
7/16
Jonas Jonasson
 Hitman Anders and the Meaning Of It All A female ex-priest and a male ex-receptionist practice give and take with the help of hit man Anders and Swedish criminality, and eventually marry and settle down in a little fishing hut.  Their journey is full of witty irony and improbable luck similar to that of the 100-year-old man.
7/16
Jonas Jonasson


 The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared A long title for such a fast paced novel.  Jonas says that once he had the title he just had to write the story.  I can't give away any of the plot or action as that might ruin the punch lines strewn throughout Allan's incredible life story (yes, it's fiction) and his centenarian adventure.  I am sorely indebted to my dad for recommending this book (the soreness is in my ribs and belly from laughing so hard) - thanks Dad!
6/16
Celia S. Friedman Wings of Wrath
 Possessed dragon riders, a pregnant queen's quest and the death of three more protagonists.
6/16
Michael Pollan











 The Omnivores Dilemma







 Corn (Zea mays) is dependent on human action for proper seed germination and it has been so for milennia.  Corn (and only a few other plant species like sugarcane) generates C-4 compounds from photosynthesis (instead of C-3) which is a big advantage in sunny, dry climates.  Ancient Mexican stories described the populous as corn people.  We are corn.  North Americans contain enough carbon-13 (the same C-4 characteristic of corn causes accumulation of the carbon-13 isotope) to evidence a complete food chain (i.e. processed foods and corn-fed omega-3 deficient beef and salmon) dependent on the modern hybrid #2 corn food system.  The explosive growth of commodity corn past international demand is due in part to re-purposed WWII ammonium-nitrate synthesis and the policies of Rusty Butz (Sec. Ag. 1976).  Since we are corn, and corn is fed petroleum based nitrates, we are also oil (a barrel per cow).  The current oil bubble may be nothing compared to the potential corn bubble since corn is grown throughout the US with 50%+ subsidy and unrecoverable loans (unless, perhaps, we swap HFCS for mass quantities of resistant [non-nutritive] starch and better managed ethanol before subsidies move away from cheap food).

Pollan writes "five blocks from Whole foods...in Berkeley...People's Park today is the saddest of places, a blasted monument to sixties' hopes that curdled a long time ago...People's Park marked the 'greening' of the counter-culture...and, eventually, to the rise of organic agriculture and businesses like Whole Foods."  Pollan then describes how "organic" is mostly just as industrial as any other foods with unenforceable soft legal language, corporate consolidation, animal cruelty and no energy savings, but with more polyphenol production, and negligible synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use.  He also claims that converting all corn fields to well-managed polyculture pasture might reduce greenhouse gas emmissions by a third in the US (much more than any solar power program and with tastier and more healthful food in the result).  He then visits a couple of holonistic farms and extolls the virtues of their complex grass based ecosystems, and the attended food and animal health enhancements.

Pollan's book has a 3rd section on hunter-gatherers but I got enough of that from Mr. Harari.  He takes an aside to poke fun at old diets including the chew-chew diet popularized by Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator.  The diet talk is a segue from hunter-gatherer to modern food views: veganism vs. animal management and species survival.  The book ends with a social dinner of wild El Dorado morels, wild Sonoma boar, wild Berkeley bread yeast, a tart of a neighbor's Bing cherries and several bottles of home made wine.
6/16
Celia S. Friedman Feast of Souls
 Magicians and dragons (who eat souls), witches, a holy lineage (protectors) and mad kings round out the cast which is large enough to survive the death of three major characters.
6/16
Yuval Noah Harari















 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind














 Multiple species of humans coexisted for millennia but the population explosion of Homo Sapiens consumed the other species (through dilution and/or homicide). The rise of Homo Sapiens communities with stabilizing myth and depressed individualism led to dramatic megafauna extinction and agrarianism; then came governance, money and religion.  The incongruence of good and evil in war torn monotheism (regardless of the polytheistic content such as saints and spirits) has led to interfaith acceptance: "Syncretism, in fact, might be the single great world religion."  I am impressed not just with Harari's command of history but with his writing skill: Harari's original is in Hebrew and he later translated it to an enjoyable English read.  The illustrations are also worthwhile.

Zheng He's flagship of 1432 next to that of Columbus
6/16
Elizabeth Moon
 Crown of Renewal
 The fifth and final novel in the Paladin's Legacy series.  The bad guys get it.  Humans, mages, gnomes and elves live happily ever after.  She leaves some mystery at the end which might be resolved later in Finding Dorrie (Dorrin Verrakai is a primary character who completes a quest and becomes a demigod but at series end she is left to seek out her calling...or a sequel).
6/16
Lynne Truss





 Eats, Shoots & Leaves




 A panda eats, shoots and leaves.  No one was injured in the Panda encounter but we've to point with more precision and when it comes to the all important apostrophe, Lynne writes, "if you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."  This seems more than grave but surely the Apostropher Royal, Sir D'Anville O'M'Darlin' will insure the apostrophic balance.  Ms. Truss also decries, after describing the modern allowance of reduced comma usage, "people who put in all the commas betray themselves as moral weaklings with empty lives and out-of-date reference books".  My morality might be imperiled by an extraneous traitorous comma, but its okay because I'm American and not held to the standard of the King's English.  Sir Roger Casement; however, being Irish, was held to the standard, and "hanged on a comma" in 1916.  Lynn also reminds us that "there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation - but for many it may be too late."  Perhaps that is why the annotators at C. F. Braun and Co. (circa 1980) would not allow me either a colon or semicolon in any company documents and published instructions on how to end a list reference with a period.  Followed by the list (for Carl's sake!).  At least I wasn't sucked into the ellipsis (or as Lynne Truss calls it, "the black hole of the punctuation universe").  This book is fun, brief and to the point!
6/16
Adam Johnson





 The Orphan Master's Son



 The anonymous and robotic orphan master's son, Jun Do, survives archetypal training, travel and made-up heroics to gain the family and name of Ga, including Sun Moon, the woman that is literally tattooed on his heart, before he turns the tables on his fearless leader to satisfy his existential quest.  Set in a putrid, inhuman, brain-washed and senseless North Korea (with a jaunt to Texas) this long story will leave you hollow and wondering if you should next read Schindler's List.  Kim Jong-un (aka Baby Face) got mad at Sony for The Interview and he will boil when he gets wind of this Stanford professor's depressing fictional rendering of his DPRK.

From the urban dictionary: Ga (Guh), adj. Originating from the youth of South East Washington DC, it is the most creative yet simple term to refer to someone as dumb, retarded or a jackass.

From Wikipedia: Gallium (elemental symbol Ga) has no known natural role in biology.
6/16
Elizabeth Moon
 Limits of Power

 The fourth novel in her Paladin's Legacy series.  It had been several years since I read the third novel but it came back in a flash as Ms. Moon's writing is the kind that stays with you.  She weaves her craft with middle age characters and intrigue.  She writes great soldiers (being one herself).  I've enjoyed every book that she's ever written.
5/16
Hope Jahren


 Lab Girl



 Two chapters into Holy Sh*t, the history of swearing, I stopped because I didn't want to read about Abraham's oath to sacrifice his son (I almost enjoyed the first chapter about tawdry Roman graffiti on Pompeii latrine walls).  I  started reading Lab Girl and right out of the chute (in the introduction) the author relates her 4-year-old day dream of Abraham stabbing Isaac with an extended slide rule.  I kept on reading and it wasn't that bad.  Lab Girl is a quick read with many interesting botanical blurbs and humorous dialogues with her homeless employee/colleague (but unfortunately it also riddled with her manic fits).  On her professional web site I found an interesting journal entry about identification of an ant robbery caste.

P.S. My mom's book club enjoyed the book immensely and Mom came away from the meeting with several pages of quotes.  The botany blurbs fared well.
5/16
Wilkie Collins
 Woman in White This story first read as an English periodical serial, then it was edited and published in book form in 1860 to become a best seller.  Wilkie's battle with laudanum addiction merited several pages in the Drugged volume and set the character for Mr. Fairlie in Woman in White.  His brilliant Victorian prose makes the read delightful but makes what might be a 100 page mystery, five-fold.  A typical Wilkie posing: "Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine boys and girls now as our seniors were, in their time?  Has the great advance in education taken rather too long a stride; and are we, in these modern days, just the least trifle in the world too well brought up?"
5/16
Brian Aldiss

 Cryptozoic!

 Written in 1967, this novel has long been on my list to read.  Time travel is invented in 2090 but it is really mind travel as the body stays in a clinic with a plasma drip.  Book 1 is about an artist hanging out in the past seeking inspiration only to be crushed by the realization that the mind-traveler grocery store owner is a better artist.  Part 2 starts with a trip back to 2093 and induction into a dictator' program involving killing mind-travelers in the past and ends with a dialogue about time actually traveling backwards with "The Dark Lady" jumping into their mind-travel locale to confirm such and to celebrate the death of a time-traveler which is actually his birth (far out).  Aldiss is from Devon, England and writes with interesting English diction.
4/16
Alexandra Horowitz

 Inside of a Dog (What Dogs See, Smell, and Know) The book explains doggy-ism from the point of view of an animal behavior scientist and her dog Pumpernickel.  I knew dogs lived in a world dominated by smell (I often refer to it as smell-o-vision) but did not consider all of the implications of how a dog perceives the world (with differences from humans in perspective, senses and mindfulness) and how domestication has made dogs different from almost every other animal (they don't really exist as a species separated from humans).  The book is an easy read and effective (or affective) in making one think more about enjoying dogs behaving like dogs.
4/16
P. C. Hodgell

 To Ride a Rathorn

 Couldn't put this one down.  All of the convolutions seem to come together and the action is fast paced.  It seems an odd coincidence that Jame deals with a new phantasm named the White Lady just after I started reading Woman in White (I usually read 2 books in parallel).  Another game of the gods of coincidence is that there is a carnivorous sheep (the kaliram) that has mutated on Adiamante's Old Earth that uses a mind blast to paralyze prey and the rathorn is a carnivorous horse with ivory horn and armor that can also stun people with telepathy.
4/16
L.E. Modesitt Adiamante
 Telepathic environmentalists restoring post-apocalyptical Earth survive a revengeful attack from twelve (impenetrable  and immutable) adiamante space ships while espousing their theory of unantagonistic governance.  A brief but substantial read.
4/16
Peter Daempfle

 Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience and Just Plain Bunk
 This book focuses on scientific thinking with the goal of increasing STEM student population (through acquisition and retention).  In the beginning of the book the author discusses philosophical analysis and seems to have predicted Trump by quoting "thus, when a person is illogical, cannot reason, or cannot consider key points in the argument, the debate is useless."  Later he writes "...this has led to an explosion of increased belief in pseudoscience, bad science and outright lies about science.  Information is freely given now as never before with little guidance and grounding in a largely scientifically illiterate public.  As discussed earlier, the declines in science literacy endanger public health and decision making.  All of this stems from an increased reliance on the media curriculum" - basically blaming TV and the Internet for the "dumbing down" of society.  He goes on to write that "there are many threats to science; one major roadblock to to its progress is an elevation of the nonintellectual."
4/16
P. C. Hodgell

 Seeker's Mask


 #3 in the Kencyrath series is a bit weird in parts (weirdingstrom mists, walking trees, moving castles, sands that turn to seas and back, and wolf-men), is a bit convoluted in parts (political hierarchy, religious manifestations, a clandestine women's world and inter-species chivalry), and is a bit fun in parts (a frog god catching flies, bats in the belfry and in people's shirt, and a mischievous sneeze breeze specter named Old Man Tishooo).  For fans of fabric there are phantasms that peer out through tapestry warp and woof.
4/16
P. C. Hodgell
 God Stalk and Dark of the Moon
 #1 & #2 in the Kencyrath series.  The first book is a bit confusing with dozens of gods and monsters, a thieves guild, political intrigue and Jame fresh from an otherworldly venture and suffering amnesia but it gets clearer and the second book is a page turner as Jame fights with and against phantasms while her twin brother leads a host of a few thousand knights against a savage horde of millions (guess who wins).
3/16
Richard J. Miller


 Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs
 Part technical pharmacology and part ancient to recent history about the discovery and actions of brain drugs (pharmaceuticals, street drugs, religious hallucinogens, smoking, potables, etc.).  Story telling includes Schumann, British poetry, impersonated first person narrative, ancient religion, stealing the tea plant from China and a letter about laudanum found in an antique book.  One chapter on stimulants describes that several xanthine psychostimulants are found in coffee, tea, kola and chocolate with caffeine being one found in all four preparations (studies show that caffeine reduces fatigue and increases cognition, confusion and anxiety).  A typical tech excerpt (after discussing ATP and P1 receptors in the brain): "P1 adenosine receptors represent the major sites of action of caffeine and related methylxanthines" or (in a later paragraph) "the actions of hallucinogens, antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs involve these same important neurotransmitters...following their release as neurotransmitters, biogenic amines are taken up again into nerve terminals using specific reuptake transporter molecules, each with their own unique expression pattern and substrate quality".
3/16
Amy Stewart The Drunken Botanist Everything you ever wanted to know about the growing, history and taxonomy of the plants used to make and/or flavor wine, beer and booze.
3/16
Ralph Macchio Samurai Cat
 3 book series from Epic Comics in which a sword wielding and armored cat dispatches monsters, demons and Uzi toting pig warriors to avenge his lord.
3/16
Janet Evanovich
 One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to get Deadly, and Four to Score Stephanie Plum, her family and associates are pretty funny.  Heigl does a good job in the film adaption of One For the Money (which includes excerpts from the other books in the series to flush out the characters) so I had to give some of the original novels a read.
3/16
Alan Dean Foster
 The Force Awakens and Luana Novelizations: the first for the latest Star Wars movie and the latter his first novelization for a movie that the internet referenced as "a movie you should die before you see" (Alan says that he took some liberties on Luana to make it his own female Tarzan story and The Force Awakens is as close to the movie script as was his first star wars novelization for which he gave author credits to George Lucas because it seemed right).
2/16
Alan Dean Foster The Deavys
 Come on, it might be juvenile fiction but you gotta love Pithfwid as the feline familiar and a twin-and-a-half that floats above the bed!  Alan Dean Foster can write anything!
2/16
Gini Koch
 Touched by an Alien Sci-fi romance with questionable science but with an unexpectedly quick pace.
1/16
L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Solar Express LE's latest about the relationship development between a moon based astronomer and the rocket jockey who investigates an alien space artifact.
1/16
J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith The Silkworm


 Now his PA is becoming a detective too.  I can't wait for the next novel in the series (hopefully with less gore).
1/16
J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith The Cuckoo's Calling

 Awesome detective.  I never read Harry Potter but JK creates great characters.  I needed an English to English dictionary at times.
12/15
Paula Hawkins The Girl on the Train Twisted NY Times best seller with kind of an eh ending.
12/15
David McCullough The Wright Brothers Really about the Wright family.  I didn't know that Orville and Wilbur invented the wind tunnel to come up with reliable wing geometry.
12/15
David Gerrold Space Skimmer
 Harsh planet Streinveldt bred Mass, the only one of his breed with the vision to look beyond its dreary skies.
11/15
Bill Bryson One Summer: America 1927 Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and President Calvin Coolidge.  A good yarn about an odd year in US history spun by Bill Bryson (whose book, A Walk In The Woods, was turned into a rather slow movie)
11/15
Elizabeth Moon Moon Flights
 Short stories that just fly by.
11/15
John Ringo

 A Hymn Before Battle

 Book 1 in the Legacy of the Aldenata series...it's very gory so I don't know if I'll make it through all 5 books (or the numerous spin-offs) but it is well written and a good page turner.  It's fun to read about the 2000 version of a high tech future with "the latest 20-inch flat screen monitors" and FTL spaceships...old Sci-Fi is still good it just requires acceptance of more than futurism (who doesn't still love Burroughs and Verne).
10/15
Rudy Rucker
 Postsingular

 I had this on my must read list for a decade and I finally got to it and was bit disappointed (I was hoping for something like Rudy's Ware series but this was more like Rudy the mathematician takes Peyote in Big Sur and dreams up nanobots, multiple dimensions and ESP forced on the world by corrupt government...oh well).
10/15
Lilith Saintcrow Trailer-park Fae Well written fantasy with minimal plot but I think it has room to grow as Lilith develops this Gallow and Ragged series.  I look forward to the next episode.
10/15
Daniel James Brown The Boys in the Boat Awesome story (except for Cal getting beat by the Huskies in multiple crew championships)!
10/15
Anthony Doerr All the Light We Cannot See A blind French girl and an Nazi orphan brought together by radio.  A fast read but an unsatisfying end.
9/15
David Gerrold

 A Covenant of Justice, Book 2 of The Trackers series A good conclusion to the series.  Space vampires and bad-ass trackers, then...(from 1994).
8/15
Mark Miodownik Stuff Matters If you're an engineer you'll enjoy this well written and narrated story about the material science of some common (and some not so common) stuff.
8/15
David Gerrold

 Under the Eye of God, Book 1 of The Trackers series A good read full of David Gerrold whit and philosophy.  Two bad boys track down a badder bounty hunter (from 1993).
8/15
John Scalzi
 The Human Division More in the Old Man's War series
7/15
L.E. Modesitt Heritage of Cyador Another great read in The Saga of Recluce series (2015).
7/15
Robert L. Wolke
 What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained Nothing really about Albert but this is still a good read about the science of cooking (2015).
6/15
Terry Brooks The Darkling Child Another Shannara book and still a fast paced fantastic fantasy read (2015).
6/15
Warren Fahy Fragment
 Life from the evolutionary path of the mantis shrimp (which isn't really a shrimp).  Full of creative life-forms.  I guess a movie is in the works (Fahy is a screenwriter).
5/15
John Scalzi Lock In People living in machines and other people's bodies due to a crippling disease makes a detective's job complicated.
5/15


"The naves were appalled at being kept from the choir by such a rood screen."
- Solomon Tall 11/25/2023

"The Danish breakfast chef told some Sunday morning diners, who were in a rush to get to church, to stick around for the evil skeevers."
- Solomon Tall (8/11/2023)

"The anti-vaxxers in Florida should be reminded of the proud Cape Canaveral booster record.'"
-Solomon Tall (12/27/2021)

"Young aspiring authors study the 3 R's (reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic) but they don't need an A in math to succeed."
- Solomon Tall (1/28/2022)

"If you read a lot into what you read, then a lot of what you read will be what you read into it."

- Solomon Tall (7/5/2021)
"You can't always book a cover by it's judge said the fair maiden taking orders mostly for blue ribbon quilts."
-Solomon Tall (2/1/2017)

"The great thing about reading heavy tomes in the e-book age is the seeming lack of gravity in the effort."
-Solomon Tall (12/7/16)

"The only thing worse than buying a book and realizing that you've read it before just as you get to the good part is then remembering that it wasn't really all that good any ways."
- Solomon Tall (7/8/2016)

"The secret to cooking a book is to wilt the leaves and thicken the binding with a reduction of red octopus ink."
- Solomon Tall (6/26/2016)

"There's nothing better than a fine yarn unless you're a sheared sheep in winter."
- Solomon Tall (8/16/2015)

more Tall-isms here

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