The Getting Clever Project

 I actually had a really good January. I only read eight books, light for me. But I had lunch with a friend I hadn't seen since last May and went to three art exhibits. And I went to three educational sessions. So I feel like I'm coming out of hibernation mode.

Rabbit, rabbit!

The end of April was difficult for me. It was the one-year anniversary of my nephew's passing and also the anniversary of my sister's death. I was in a funk there for a couple of days. But I think I'm coming back. I was worried about my neighbor who broke some bones in his neck. I hadn't been able to get an update on his condition. But he's back home and doing well, which is a relief.

It's the little things that make me happy - I finally coaxed a bloom out of my "Christmas" cactus. I hope I've finally found the right combination of sun and water for it. It does throw off new leaves every so often but the blossom has been hard to achieve.

Books: I liked Donna Leon's Give Unto Others. A decent description of COVID's impact and an interesting if minor case. It's odd the way people from Brunetti's past are aging but his immediate circle is not. And Leon also addressed Brunetti's questionable use of his coworkers. I also read Little Black Book by Kate Carlisle, the latest in a cozy mystery series abut a bookbinder. Utterly improbable but a fun read. And I'm about halfway through The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel, all about women astronomers, mostly at Harvard, who did a lot of the grunt work in classifying stars. A woman paid for most of the research as a memorial to her husband, too.

I've started watching Season 3 of Bosch on IMDBTv. I loved the first two seasons but then let the show drop. I'm enjoying it, though. Titus Welliver is as perfect in the role as I remember.  I should see if Michael Connelly has more books out.

Have a great week, everyone!

I gave top marks to 24 books. Looking back, I picked these ten.  They weren't necessarily written in 2017; it's when I read them. They are arranged by author. There are five fiction and five nonfiction, totally by accident.

The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly (mystery). Harry Bosch on another cold case, centering on LA's Arts District.

Tough choices, keeping it down to just 10. But these are worth the reading.

 The Peripheral by William Gibson

 If I know a book is part of a series, I usually try to start reading close to the beginning of the series. I broke that rule for these, with varying results.

 Spread the Word by William Safire. This is the 500th book I’ve added since I started using Goodreads to track them in October 2012. It’s a collection of his columns “On Language” in the New York Times from the late 90s. While some of the examples are dated, it’s still a fascinating read. He had a gift for playing with language. I love when there are words about words. Take Paradiorthosis, a correction that is itself incorrect. Next time a guy tries to mansplain to me, I’ll throw that at him. Or Kakistocracy, government by the worst people. I think that should be illustrated with a picture of the current Congress. Or Linguaclips, the technique of abbreviation, clipping long words into short ones, and clipping those into initials and acronyms. I could go on. A great book for people who enjoy reading.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman. This is a well-written, well-researched book that will open your eyes. After the first few chapters, I disabled Location on my apps and Facebook and started turning off my cellphone when it wasn’t in use. The amount of data we willingly share on line is staggering, but you might not know what happens to it next. When you sign up for an online dating service, for example, that data is sold, often in realtime. We are commodities, bought and sold to advertisers. Then there’s what hackers and organized crime does with the information. Hackers can access your computer cam and sell photos of you online. With the Internet of Things (communicating devices) gaining speed more and more of our world is subject to intrusion. His final chapters detail some solutions that governments can take, that corporations and coders can take, and that we as individuals can take. Mr. Goodman did an amazing job making this technical subject accessible to regular readers.

Clam Wake by Mary Daheim. I’m generally a fan of Mary Daheim’s cozies. I’ve read all the Alpine mysteries and most of the Bed & Breakfast series. This was a weaker entry. Renie and Auntie Vance in particular were grating. The way she harped on all the drinking was weird. The mystery was fun, though slight, and the location descriptions were excellent.

 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s fairly audacious for an author to even try to unify 70,000 years of human history. Yuval Harari does it in this beautifully written, challenging, fascinating book. He puts his arguments together and then takes just that one step farther that makes you reevaluate conventional wisdom. He starts with the premise that human civilization is based on the ability to believe in imaginary things and to agree on them as a group. The groups got larger through history and we unified our imaginary agreements into larger and larger systems, such as money and religion. He and his translators did a wonderful job keeping the reader interested through some difficult chapters.

Thirty Tomorrows: The Next Three Decades of Globalization, Demographics, and How We Will Live by Milton Ezrati. I’m not a fan of the book. I thought the title was deceptive. Most of the book looked backward at history, rather than looking forward. While it was extensively researched, few of the examples were after 2010. Technological and political developments over the past five years have made some of his theories obsolete. Some of the chapters were contradictory. No matter how much the US “jawbones” other countries, it can’t change their monetary policies. He underestimates the impact of job losses and changing demographics

The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory by Michael S. Malone. A poor choice of title and an ultimately flawed book. It’s not about human memory, it’s about the devices we’ve created to store information for us. I wanted to title it “From Stones to Skins to Silicon: the epic story of our mnemonic devices.” As a reporter in Silicon Valley, he had a great seat for the development of computers. He’s excellent on those chapters. He’s a little shaky on early history.

 Two books are work-related, the other was fun.

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore. This is the 2014 update to the marketing classic, with new and timely examples. The author discusses and analyzes the challenges of bringing high tech products to market. He starts by clearly explaining his terms and how he sees the issues. The crux is how to make the jump from a niche to a wider market. I found the discussion extremely helpful. I think his ideas apply to intangibles as well as tangible products. It changed the way I thought about some of the Internet collapses we’ve seen over the past few years. Even if you aren’t in the field, the business insights are worth reading.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. This was an interesting discussion of getting people to return to your product, whether it’s web content, an online game, or something tangible. He uses the model of Trigger => Action => Variable Reward => Investment to describe his ideas. The power of variable rewards comes from differences each time the user clicks. The difference can just be more or different photos (as on Pinterest). Investment can be time, not just money. He also offers exercises to apply his process to the reader’s project.

In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe. I was fortunate to receive an ARC for this book. In 1900 a teenaged Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris. Already there or soon to arrive were Derain, Vlaminck, Rousseau, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Paul Poiret, Diaghilev and of course Henri Matisse. The first decade of the 20th century changed the world for art, cinema, dance and fashion. The author keeps the focus tightly on culture – there isn’t much mention of political or scientific events. I learned a great deal about this remarkable decade and the development of Fauvism, Cubism and Modernism. She makes a persuasive argument that the development of cinema had an important effect on artists of the period. It is well written and interesting.

 Destroyer Angel by Nevada Barr. This is a good thriller featuring my favorite Park Ranger and some resourceful women. It's rather more bloody and violent than previous Anna Pigeon books and there's less focus on the national park system.

Game of Mirrors by Andrea Camilleri. Inspector Montalbano is dealing with explosions near empty warehouses, an amorous neighbor, and the usual annoying reporters, in between delectable meals. I received an ARC of this book. The characters are old friends now. The series does not need to be read in order. Reading the Inspector Montalbano series often makes me hungry, with the culinary descriptions. The story is mostly carried forward by conversations. Worth reading!

The Corsican Caper by Peter Mayle. Wonderful writing, the food descriptions made me hungry, but I must agree with others that it's novella length at best. No mystery or suspense either.

Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid. This rewrite of the Jane Austen classic is part of a series updating Jane's books. Instead of diaries and dances in Bath, it's Facebook, smartphones, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The heroine Catherine still gets carried away by novels, but here it's Twilight. Catherine stills learns the lessons from the original novel. I like Val McDermid and she took a good approach to the rewrite, it just didn't work for me. I wasn't that fond of the original. Some scenes felt authentic, especially the frenzy for cellphone connection, but generally I don't think it translated well to modern day.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. This book was hugely popular when it first came out but I'm only now reading it for the first time. Dinah is a minor character in the Bible, sister to Joseph and daughter of Jacob. Her story as well as those of Leah and Rachel are center stage. Jacob and Joseph as well as the other men don't come off very well in this version. I liked the instances where religions collided - that's true to the era and the area. It was a good read.

The nonfiction book of the week is When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning. This was an entertaining and enthralling read. After the Nazis burned books, librarians held massive book drives to send books to soldiers. Hardcovers ultimately proved too heavy. Thus was born Armed Services Editions: small, lightweight, literally designed to be "pocket books." The stories about soldiers reading them under all conditions and in all theatres will move you. Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Katherine Anne Porter's short stories are two unlikely authors that soldiers adored. I think the ASE program might have been the reason my father went into publishing after the war. Certainly many soldiers ended with a deep love of reading. It helped raise American literacy, too.