read as many books as possible, starting with all the books I own but haven't read

I got this book for Christmas, but it’s taken me a while to getting around to reading it. I’ve read the other books in the Septimus Heap series, and I think I like this one the best. Some of the characters are purely good, and some are purely evil, but the characters that are gray areas, like Marcellus Pye, are the most interesting. (I hope I haven’t given too much away here.)

Life has been pretty unsettled on this end for the last month, and this book was the perfect escape. I didn’t read it in one sitting, but read some each evening. I caught myself thinking about it at work a lot- I couldn’t wait to get home and read the next section! I’m still trying to decide how this series compares with Harry Potter. Right now I’d say it was not as good, but Physik is up there with the HP books’ quality. I highly recommend this book, but read the first two books in the series first, or else a lot of it won’t make sense.

Sage, Angie. 2007. Septimus Heap Book Three: Physik. Harper Trophy Books, New York.

I heard about this book a while back on Marketplace, and immediately got in the very long queue to check it out from the public library. Eventually I went online to check my status on the waiting list and found that they had reserved it for me a month before, and I never got it. I really need to get my dog to stop answering the telephone, I think. (We’ve been getting collections calls for someone who has racked up huge amounts of library fines, so sometimes the library robo-dialer gets hung up on.)

This book is very good; I would rank it up there on my bookshelf of essential world-view changing books. The principle behind the book is that the author went to some of the richest neighborhoods in the US, and then knocked on people’s front doors and asked them how they got there. Amazingly, people actually talked to him!

The book is divided into six chapters, each with an over-arching theme distilled from his interviews. Within each chapter are “nuggets” of advice and a story to go along with them. This book is inspiring; at the same time it makes me feel horribly inadequate. I think to myself, “There’s no way I can possibly do all the things those people are doing!” but then I think, “why not? Who says I can’t do all that?”

I heartily recommend this book. I’m even going to keep my eye out for a used copy so I can have my own.

D’Agostino, Ryan. 2009. Rich Like Them: My Door-To-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America’s Richest Neighborhoods. Little, Brown, and Company, New York.

I got this book from the library because I heard a review of it on APM’s Marketplace, and the concept sounded really intriguing. The book was exactly as it was billed, a chronicle of Harry Truman’s road trip the summer after he left office.

The problem with the book is in the execution of the concept. The author set out to recreate the road trip and follow in Harry’s tire tracks (instead of footsteps). He would often make comments such as, “here I stopped to take a picture of [landmark],” but neither a picture of the original landmark in 1953 nor the current state of the landmark was given. The book also tended to go off on tangents, such as Harry’s involvement in Project Blue Book and a Ku Klux Klan member’s sensational trial for murder in Richmond, Indiana, none of which really seemed to have anything to do with his road trip, except that he drove through Richmond, Indiana, and past Dayton, Ohio. My husband suggested that perhaps the author was trying to pad a thin manuscript, but I think a better route would have been to pad the manuscript with “then” and “now” comparison pictures. As one who grew up riding the backroads like US30 and US40, I’m always interested in the history of time before expressways. But oh well, I guess I’m just a backseat driver.

Algeo, Matthew. 2009. Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip. Chicago Review Press, Chicago.

This book can’t decide whether it is going to be a comedy book, or an actual office advice manual. As it stands, the book leaves me vaguely unsatisfied, wondering whether it is teasing or if I truly am woefully un-hip for wearing pearls or stockings to work. Sorry, Mr. Flocker, but sometimes people who work for non Manhattan or LA companies have to dress a little more conservatively than you’d like. Another disconnect was when the writer used British slang (snog, shag) to describe office life in America. Huh?

Flocker, Michael. 2006. Death by Powerpoint: A Modern Office Survival Guide. Da Capo Press.

This book is a quick read. The description of the burning of Columbia is rather compelling. The book has some ironic humor at the end when you read all the rumors flying about recognition of the Confederacy by European powers even down to the final days of the war.

Miers, Earl Schenk, ed. 1987. When the World Ended: The Diary of Emma LeConte. Reprint edition. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

I don’t have much insightful to say about this one. I inherited it from my grandparents. The ways of categorizing mushrooms were pretty interesting; I didn’t know what the names of all the different parts of a mushroom were, or that you could make a “spore print” to identify them. I’m still going to be a little nervous whenever I eat mushrooms for a while, though. My husband did find the book helpful in identifying some club mosses at his grandmother’s place.

Shuttleworth, Floyd S. and Herbert S. Zim. 1967. Non-Flowering Plants: Ferns, Mosses, Lichens, Mushrooms and Other Fungi. Golden Press, New York.

In many ways, I thought that this book was a better epilogue for the Harry Potter books than the epilogue that JKR wrote for Deathly Hallows. When I was a kid, I was never satisfied with “And they all lived Happily Ever After;” I needed to know exactly how many kids Cinderella and Prince Charming had, and what their names were. That is the function of the epilogue of Deathly Hallows. Her Beedle The Bard is more like an Appendix, explaining a lot of concepts in further detail. It is like reading the footnotes of a textbook and getting a reward of a hidden scrap of information that makes you think- “Oh, I think I get it now!”

In this way, the footnotes to the story are some of the more interesting and more puzzling bits. Rather than enlightening, they only lead to further questions. For example, in “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart,” footnote #3 mentions a Hector Dagworth-Granger. Is he a relative of Hermione, or is this a Mark Evans red herring? Another footnote that at once tells too much and too little is #1 in “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart,” which makes mention of a “Sack of Bouncing Bulbs.” What are bouncing bulbs, and how does one put them to unsavory purposes?

I was thinking of how to categorize this book, and it is interesting that in writing the fairy tales, JKR’s voice is much more like that of Angie Sage’s books than in Harry Potter or traditional modern fairy tales. (Is that an oxymoron?) Beedle the Bard and the Septimus Heap books do not use as much the old-style fairy-tale language like in The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye or Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13.

Finally, one last parting thought and I’ll stop. Does anyone else see any parallels between the Warlock in “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart” and Fitzwilliam Darcy? I’ll leave it to you to compare and contrast, rather than spoil things for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

Rowling, J. K. 2007. The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Scholastic Inc., New York.

This book is a tongue-in-cheek How-to-Guide on how to feed and care for dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles. It lists diet suggestions (cat food to herds of lambs), housing requirements (anywhere from a simple dog crate to an aviary 13,000 ft tall for the Quetzalcoatlus), breeding protocols, and locations to buy them.

My favorite parts of the books are the little touches. Mash uses non-standard translations of the dinosaurs’ scientific names, to comic effect. It seems that he takes the names and goes for the most outrageous combinations in the dictionary, like when I took my second foreign language and we always translated the word for “hit” as “smite,” because it sounded cooler. Mash tucks little jokes into the text, many so subtle that I’ve probably missed a bunch. For example, on the Dsungaripterus (p.35), he suggests that in order to distinguish friends from door-to-door salespeople, “Tell your friends to whistle a well-known tune, like ‘My Way’, ‘I do like to Be Beside the Seaside’ or John Cage’s ‘4’33” (tacet)’.”

The one drawback to the book are the little icons indicating suitability (or not) for the dinosaurs for various situations. These were hard to remember what they were; I had to flip back and forth a lot to the key. (But perhaps that was the point.)

How does the book compare with my gold standard of satire, Molvania: a Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry? It is good, and had many good chuckles here are there, but it was not hilariously bizarre like Molvania was. The author does have a very dark sense of humor.

Robert Mash. 2003. How to Keep Dinosaurs. Second Edition. Weidenfield and Nicolson, London.

This was given to me last week by a friend of mine. It’s a good quick read. I liked the irreverence of the heroine; the book reminded me most of The Ordinary Princess by M. M. Kaye, except for older kids and up through adults. They are both anti-fairy tales, in that they openly disassociate themselves from the traditional fairy tale conventions. It has a quasi-fairy tale ending, in that the enchantments are broken at the end and you could believe everyone lives happily ever after but it doesn’t end with a wedding. The author does cleverly leave room open for a sequel, though. All in all, I highly recommend it.

Patrice Kindl. Goose Chase. 2001. Puffin Books, New York.

I received this book from my dad several years ago. It’s taken me a long time to finish it. I started reading it when Anastasia was born, which was two years ago, but it got set aside when things got crazy. I picked it up again 6 weeks ago. It is a very good book, but it is slow going because it is so long.

The point that the author makes in the book is that the Americas were a bustling populous place before Columbus arrived. This leads to a little bit of bias in the author’s focus on the “superstar” cultures like the Aztec, Maya, and Inka. He doesn’t talk about the Pueblo tribes or the Pacific Northwest or the people in the Southeast US, which is disappointing, but I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere.

My only annoyance with the book is his tactic of playing a sort of bait-and-switch game. He spends time talking about the history of a culture, using old and out-dated models, and just as I roll my eyes and say “but that’s not what current research says,” he suddenly switches and says “But that’s how we used to see things; this is how we see things now.” He could have freed up some space in the book by cutting to the most recent research first.

Charles C. Mann. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. 2005. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.