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foobart and I forgot that today is a holiday. It doesn't matter for him, since he has work he needs to get done today whether it's a holiday or not, but I'm wishing I hadn't woken up at 7:30 to come sit in an empty office. Guess I'll go run some errands now.| Finished | Author | Title | Thoughts | |
| 8/20/04 | Sue Townsend | Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years | The usual Adrian Mole fun; this time he's 30 and a single father, still in love with Pandora who is now an MP. I found this one a lot less amusing than the others I've read, although the ending was rather nice. | |
| 8/21/04 | Jeremy Williams | Don't They Know It's Friday? | Well, I wouldn't recommend it for fun summer reading, but this book -- which was given to us at our staff orientation -- has been handy for learning the basics of life & business in the Gulf. I refer back to it all the time. | |
| 9/1/04 | Lee Smith | Fair and Tender Ladies | Beautiful book. It's written as a series of one Appalachian mountain woman's letters, from her first letter to a pen pal at around the age of 12 to the letter she is writing when she dies. They follow all the twists and turns of her life as her hopes and dreams die and change and grow over the years. | |
| 9/7/04 | Donald Knuth | Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About | Fun book. It's the transcript of his lecture series at MIT on religion and computer science. Knuth is a witty speaker and it was interesting to hear him discuss what he learned during a sabbatical during which he studied the Bible using stratified (semi-)random sampling, by doing an in-depth study of one verse of each book of the Bible. | |
| 9/14/04 | Charlotte Bronte | Jane Eyre | Penguin Stoopid Classics told me how the book ended in one of the first footnotes, so I was unreasonably annoyed with the book the whole time I read it. Nice prose, but Bronte's a bit too Romantic for my tastes. | |
| 9/19/04 | George Eliot | Silas Marner | I loved this book! I've never read any George Eliot before, but now I am moving on to The Mill in the Floss. The writing is beautiful. | |
| 9/21/04 | Huston Smith | Islam: A Concise Introduction | This is an excerption of the chapter on Islam in The World's Religions, which is a great book on religion. It's nice to read something on Islam by someone who isn't Muslim (so for whom it isn't self-explanatory) but who speaks of it with admiration and respect. | |
| 9/23/04 | Azar Nafisi | Reading Lolita in Tehran | Wow. I got a bit bored with her ramblings about the authors her students are reading, but the descriptions of life in post-Revolution Iran are really amazing. I plan to write more of my reflections on this in a future post. | |
| 9/25/04 | Neal Stephenson | Zodiac: An Eco-Thriller | I like Neal Stephenson, but this didn't measure up to Snow Crash. It has taken me a week of reflection to work out why he might have done why he did just after his house blew up, and it shouldn't take a week to work out the narrator's own thought process! | |
| 9/27/04 | Philip Dick | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | I very much enjoyed this book. I've never seen Blade Runner, but from what I read it's only loosely based on the novel, which is really very philosophical and thoughtful. I like Mercerism. | |
| 10/1/04 | Cory Doctorow | Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom | Fun book! The upbeat cyberpunk writing style reminds me of Snow Crash, and in fact the novel contains a cute homage to Sushi-K. Best of all, since Cory Doctorow is a big EFF nut, you can download his book for free. | |
| 10/9/04 | Dan Brown | Angels & Demons | Sigh. As a thriller it's pretty good, and once I forced myself to get a few hundred pages in, I didn't want to put it down. But you'd have to ask foobart how many times I flung the book across the room in aggravation before that. Note to self: do not read trashy novels about subject matter you know and care about. | |
| 10/10/04 | Sinclair Lewis | Babbitt | This may be the most slow-paced book I've ever read, but it was pretty amusing. My favorite part was Babbitt's campaign to boost Sunday School attendance by forming the classes into "armies" and pitting them against each other to recruit new members. | |
| 10/11/04 | Haber & Strahan, eds. | Science Fiction: The Best of 2003 | Most sci fi collections seem very hit-and-miss, but this one was uniformly very good; the stories are both original and well-written. There was only one story in here ("Legions in Time") I didn't enjoy. | |
| 10/12/04 | Bernhard Schlink | The Reader | The big "mystery" in this book is really not very mysterious, but the clarity of the prose and the thoughtfulness of the author save the day. (As you can tell from my dates of completion, I couldn't put it down!) | |
| 10/14/04 | I.A. Ibrahim | A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam | One of the free books given out at the Qatar Center for the Presentation of Islam. I would not recommend it, but you can read it online by clicking on the title if you must. | |
| 10/15/04 | Mahmood Murad | A Brief Look Upon Islam | The other free book given out at the Qatar Center for the Presentation of Islam. I would not recommend it. | |
| 11/13/04 | {Khan & Al-Hilali, translators} | The Noble Qur'an | If you want my thoughts on the Qur'an, you're just going to have to read my endless Qur'an updates, darn it. | |
| 11/13/04 | Michael Cunningham | The Hours | Brilliantly (and only occasionally self-consciously) written book about three women and Mrs. Dalloway. Now I really ought to go read Mrs. Dalloway. | |
| 11/22/04 | Isaac Asimov | I, Robot | Fun book of short stories. I wanted to reread it after seeing the movie, which (though enjoyable) doesn't really follow Asimov. | |
| 11/24/04 | Isaac Asimov, ed. | Microcosmic Tales | A hundred very short sci fi stories. Not the greatest collection, but it's kind of fun to have a book of stories you can read while brushing your teeth. | |
| 11/28/04 | Mark Haddon | The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Fast-paced and funny mystery story narrated by an 15-year-old boy who is something like the autistic version of Adrian Mole. It's not the most mystierous mystery, but a good read nonetheless. | |
| 12/10/04 | John Knowles | A Separate Peace | Sooo sad! But a very well-written book. One of our English classes was reading it. | |
| 12/13/04 | George Stetten | Weissenbaum's Eye | Cyberpunk novel written by a robotics professor at CMU. Very intriguing, although it's sometimes hard to follow all the threads at once. Available here. | |
| 12/24/04 | Yann Martel | Life of Pi | Thoughtful novel about a boy and a tiger in a lifeboat -- or maybe the existence of God. It's hard to say. I don't think I agree with Martel's point (if I understood it) but it really makes you think. | |
| 12/28/04 | Neil Gaiman | Neverwhere | I ::heart:: Neil Gaiman. It took me a while to get into this book, but once it got rolling I loved it as much as other Gaimans. Extra bonus: a couple characters are rats. |
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