Reading List

One of the reasons I maintain this page is that I like talking about books I’ve read or (especially) am reading. So if you’ve read one of these and you’d like to talk about it, feel free to send me mail. (If you know me in real life, feel free also to ask to borrow any of the paper books.)

Recently read

These are books I’ve read in the recent past:

• Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut. This is something between a rambling novel and a collection of essays. That’s not quite right, though; that makes it sound as though it aims for one or the other of those and misses, whereas in fact it aims for something else and strikes the mark. It’s told in something approximating the first person much of the time, and Vonnegut the author, Vonnegut the fictional character in his own book, and people in his real life and his fictional creations get mixed together in a relaxed and natural way. It also has quite a lot of nice old-fashioned moralizing. Here’s some of it:

  ‘Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.’ (p. 190)

  ‘I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!’ (p. 240)

• The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester, about a major contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary who worked from his cells in the Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane. (I’m not sure this book is available in the US yet; I picked up a copy in Heathrow Airport.)
• Threesomes: Studies in Sex, Power, and Intimacy, by Arno Karlen. I saw this referred to in Marjorie Garber’s Vice Versa. It’s out of print, but I ordered it through amazon.com, and they eventually found a copy. The topic is exactly what you would expect from the title. It’s primarily based on interviews the author did over the span of a couple decades. (Since it was published in 1988, that means Karlen started work on it in the ’60s, and some of the writing seems consistent with that.) I’ve just started it, but so far it’s interesting and worth reading.

  [Later notes: There’s some odd stuff in there about same-sex male connections in threesomes; it seems like Karlen is trying to minimize their importance. Actually, he says he just hasn’t been able to find out much about their occurrence, despite some trying, and concludes that they are actually fairly rare. Well, that hasn’t been my experience. :-) But in any case, the core of the book is the words of Karlen’s informants, and they ring true and have a lot to say. And much of Karlen’s commentary makes a lot of sense, too; he just seems to have some funny patches here and there.]

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain.
• What is Marriage For, by E. J. Graff (hardback ISBN 0807041149; paperback ISBN 0807041157). Graff says her motivation for writing this book was to figure out what her (not legally recognized) marriage to her female partner meant, and to make a case for legal recognition of same-sex marriages, but that led her on a long trip through the often surprising history of marriage. In short, what we in the 1990s think of as a ‘traditional’ marriage has only been around for a few decades, and marriage is not for the same reasons at every time and in every place. An excellent read, even if the topic of marriage squicks you (as it does me — my parents were married :-). Graff’s writing is delightfully clear.

  [O]ne thing I find annoying about the book is that although there are endnotes, they aren’t referenced in the text (i.e. there are no superscript numbers to tell you ‘there’s a citation for this quote’ or ‘here’s some more evidence for this claim’). I wonder if that odd decision was imposed on Graff by her publisher.

  [Later notes: Actually, the main thing I find annoying about the book is her vociferous opposition to poly marriage, which turns up later in the book. She seems to be trying to debunk the right-wingers’ slippery-slope argument that once you let same-sex couples get married then anything goes. I’ve got a lot I’d like to write about that part of the book; perhaps I’ll expand on this later.]

• The Portrait of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, on my Pilot. I’m actually reading this in MobiBook format, but it’s also available in plain Doc format, and in plain text at Project Gutenberg.
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein (ISBN 0312863551). This is something of an SF classic, but I’d never read it. (Much of it comes off as really dated when read in the ’90s, especially the sexism. But it’s a good story and an influential book.)
• The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America’s Race in Space, by Eugene Cernan and Don Davis (ISBN 0312199066). Cernan flew on Gemini 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17. I found this a pretty interesting book. The writing isn’t very good (it has that ghostwritten feel to it), but the material is really interesting, particularly the stuff about NASA internal and external politics of the time, and it certainly manages to make spaceflight feel real. Interestingly, it devotes very little space to the most famous events of the time (e.g. the Apollo 11 landing and Apollo 13’s near disaster); Cernan and his co-author provide just enough information about them for context, and focus on what Cernan actually lived through.

  By the way, you get little hints throughout the book of Cernan’s less than stellar (IMHO) politics, including photos of him with his good friend Spiro Agnew. :-)

• Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (on my Pilot palmtop). OK, so I read this in my first year of college French; I like it, and I’m reading it again. Sorry for not including a link, but I can’t remember where I got it.
• The Unbearable Bassington, by Saki (H. H. Munro), available for the Pilot at www.macduff.net
• Cinnabar, by Edward Bryant. (New York: Bantam Books, 1977. ISBN 0-553-10599-X.)
  I first encountered Ed Bryant when he came to the university where my father taught English for a seminar or something. I read Cinnabar in preparation for meeting him, and really liked it. (It’s listed here because I’m re-reading it now.) Then I really enjoyed meeting him and learning from him about writing, and teaching him about computers. (This was back in the early 80s when most people’s interface — mine, anyway — to a computer was a DECwriter paper terminal or if they were lucky a glass TTY, terminal rooms were decorated with line-printer pictures of Mr. Spock or Snoopy, and many well-educated people had never touched a computer keyboard.)

  The book is a collection of short stories set in Cinnabar, the city at the center of time. The writing style, and some of the subject matter, reminds me a bit of Bradbury. Some of the stories are sweet, most are at least somewhat disturbing, but they definitely fulfil the wish Bryant expresses in the introduction: ‘first, that the reader find in this story collection a sum greater than the simple addition of the individual pieces; and second, that at one point or another, the reader will wish that he or she were in the city where these tales are set.’

  The story I most remember is ‘Hayes and the Heterogyne’, in which a college student, sixteen years old and very virgin, is accidentally caught up in a time-travel experiment and brought to Cinnabar, where he is initiated into sexuality and exposed to some very new (for him) ideas by sex worker Tourmaline Hayes and her lover Timnath Obregon, the mad (well, ecclectic) scientist who created the time machine. Obregon (who is male) is the ‘heterogyne’ of the title, having borne a child.

  OK, so it’s not an incitement to revolution, but the depiction of an approach to sexuality — and many other things — radically different from the one my culture taught was a pretty big deal to the young, thoughtful, alienated adolescent I was, and it’s still pretty nice. It hadn’t occurred to me until just now, but I think this book may have been my first conscious exposure to the idea of consensual, loving non-monogamy. Anyway, it’s worth a read, if you can find a copy (it’s out of print), and if you know any young, thoughtful, alienated adolescents, give them a copy if you possibly can.

  At www.catch22.com, there’s a brief bibliography of Bryant’s works.

• At the Earth’s Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (available for the Pilot at www.macduff.net, although I actually read it in a different format).
• For a change of pace, Fanny Hill, by John Cleland (available for the Pilot at www.macduff.net). I think pornography is particularly entertaining in flowery eighteenth-century prose. (Warning: much of this book is very disturbing to modern sensibilities, especially the convention that the women often pretend to resist sex when they actually want it, so the sex appears coercive. Ick. I think it was only around the 70s or 80s that that notion started to disappear from mainstream pornography, and good riddance.)
• The Alienist by Caleb Carr (ISBN 0553572997). I really like historical fiction, and I’m really interested in psychology (and forensic medicine), and this is a very nice package of both. It’s a psychological murder mystery in which reforming New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt and photojournalist Jake Riis play supporting rôles. September 1998
• Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium by Carl Sagan (with an epilogue by Anne Druyan; ISBN 0345379187). Yes, there’s a lot of Sagan and Druyan on this page. :-) A collection of essays, including some written very shortly before Sagan died. (I cried a bit when I was reading that one.) The essays are uneven in content and tone, but this is definitely a good book to read. September 1998
• Sacred Clowns by Tony Hillerman (ISBN 0061092606). Just after finishing Unnatural Exposure, above, I mentioned to my housemate Lisa (/’li z@/, not /’li s@/) what I wrote above about not usually reading much mystery, and she promptly lent me this book (and another Hillerman, which I haven’t gotten to yet). I read it on the plane on the way to a conference on the wrong coast — trees should not look like that! — and quite enjoyed it. September 1998
• Unnatural Exposure by Patricia Cornwell (ISBN 0425163407). This is one of Cornwell’s series of Kay Scarpetta mysteries, in which Scarpetta is chief medical examiner for Virginia, and gets involved in various murder cases. I haven’t read mysteries much until recently (although my father was a mystery fiend), but I really enjoy Cornwell’s books. (I hope her understanding of the other various esoteric subjects that show up from time to time in her books is better than her understanding of Unix and computer networking, though. :-) August 1998
• Pledge of Allegiance: The Americanization of Canada in the Mulroney Years, by Lawrence Martin. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, Inc., 1993.) ISBN 0-7710-5663-X. Summer 1998
• Truckers, by Terry Pratchet. A popcorn book (but a nice one) about these small critters called nomes that live under the floorboards in Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) and what happens when they discover the Store is About to End. (Bargains Galore preserve us!) Summer 1998
• The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes (on my Pilot palmtop). Ecclesiastes is kind of fun, because it’s where lots of commonplace English phrases come from, so I’m constantly saying ‘Oh, that’s where that saying came from!’
• The Biblical book of Exodus. The first half is pretty interesting, but the second half is all about how many loops the curtains of the tabernacle had to fasten them to each other and what sorts of cloth Aaron’s robes were made of.
• Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (available for the Pilot at www.macduff.net).
• The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame (available for the Pilot at www.macduff.net). The language in this is quite lovely; I’d read it (or at least parts of it) as a child, but I’d forgotten the richness of the prose.

Current reading

• The Topping Book: or, Getting Good at Being Bad, by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt (ISBN 0963976354). This is an excellent, informally-written, intelligent introduction to topping in BD/SM, by the authors of The Ethical Slut (which I’ve read and highly recommend) and The Bottoming Book (which I haven’t read). It doesn’t have a lot of practical detail about technique (how to swing that flogger), but it has a lot of really good, sensible stuff about taking care of yourself and your partners, physically and emotionally, and lots of examples of scenes the authors have heard about or participated in. Good stuff.
• Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by David D. Burns, M.D. (ISBN 0380718030). This is a self-help book on overcoming depression and associated problems like low self-esteem, procrastination, and anxiety. A friend of mine strongly recommended it, saying it helped her get rid of the last traces of her depression, and I bought a copy for another friend of mine, and decided I’d read the book myself while I was at it.

  A lot of it is good, solid, useful common-sense, and I can easily see how some of the exercises would be helpful. The book does tend to generalize quite a bit (thus-and-such always means X, it never helps to do Y; that sort of thing) and I think it sometimes oversimplifies, but overall (well, I’m a quarter of the way into it so far), it seems useful.

• The King James Bible — currently, the book of Leviticus (on my Pilot palmtop). I’m not religious, but I’ve never read the Bible, and it’s a pretty important book. I’ve started it several times and not gotten very far, but since I can carry it in my pocket all the time, it’s easy to make slow but steady progress. (Actually, Leviticus is fairly tedious, so it’s not that easy. :-)
• Henry and June, by Anaïs Nin (ISBN 015640057X). This is excerpts from her diary which I presume were released as a movie tie-in. (It’s been here for ages; maybe if I can find my copy I can actually move it to the ‘Recently read’ section.)

Recommendations

• Great Apes, by Will Self. Simon Dykes is a perfectly normal London artist who wakes up one morning with the sudden delusion (perhaps brought on by a drug binge the night before) that he is human, and that everyone else in the world used to be human. He is in bed with a mate of his, and he finds her chimpanzee form so panic-inspiring that he needs to be subdued and committed to a mental hospital. He finds ordinary chimpanzee social interaction deeply disturbing, and persists in the delusion that he is human, but under the care of the famous therapist Zack Busner (at least partly modelled after Oliver Sacks), he becomes well enough to leave the institution. He comes home to live with Busner and his pack, and over the course of the book slowly and imperfectly manages to reconnect with his chimpanzee nature and with the chimps around him. A very good read.
• The Dog With the Chip in His Neck: Essays from NPR and Elsewhere by Andrei Codrescu (ISBN 0312168195). If you’ve ever heard poet Andrei Codrescu’s commentary on NPR, you know how wryly insightful his pieces are and how rich his language is, making obvious connections discreetly obvious. When I saw this book I jumped at a chance to have some of the essays in print form that I always wish I had on tape when I hear them. Astonishingly enough, they come through quite well even without his erudite Romanian accent and his deadpan but musical cadence. Many of the essays are very short, little gems of perceptive and poetical irony. You should read them.
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (ISBN 0345409469). This book is basically about why humans are drawn to supernatural explanations for things (including quite a bit on UFOs), and what science has to offer to help us make our way in the world around us.

  (My own personal pet phrasing of the reason why people are drawn to supernatural things like astrology and alien abductions is that the human brain is designed for finding patterns — in fact, it’s so good that it finds patterns even when there aren’t any.)

• Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (ISBN 0345384725). This is about how our prehistoric development as a species has shaped our culture and psychology. As a general rule, I’m sceptical of biological explanations of human behaviour, but there’s a lot of valuable and fairly convincing stuff in here, and a lot of interesting things about other animals as well.
• The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt (ISBN 1890159018). A great introduction to (a certain subset of) polyamory and open relationships. Don’t have time right now to write a full review, but I really recommend this book for advice on how to make sexually-open relationships work. I’m struck by how many people new to the poly community say this was their introduction to polyamory (and that they really liked it and found it useful). I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody who was particularly uncomfortable about sex, though.
• Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer (ISBN 0195069056). I borrowed this from my friend Jillian, who had it as a textbook in a class. It’s the first volume of what’s intended to be a multi-volume cultural history of the United States. The main theme of the book is that different regions of the US were settled by different groups of people from different areas of the British Isles (e.g. Puritans from East Anglia to the Massachusetts Bay; Cavaliers from the south and west of England to Virginia), and that many (not all) of the cultural differences among U.S. regions are connected to the communities that settled in the various regions. The four section on Massachusetts Bay and the Puritans, Virginia and the Cavaliers, Pennsylvania and the Quakers, and the back country and the North British borderers. It was fascinating reading; I love history, and I particularly like cultural histories like this, about people’s everyday lives.