2024 Reading Roundup

It was another quiet year for reading. I logged 23 books, though a few were rereads that I didn’t record the first time through and there were probably a couple more rereads that I didn’t officially track. I managed to read my yearly nonfiction book, plus 3 graphic novels, 2 horse girl books, and 1 short story collection. Here’s what I liked (and didn’t) from my 2024 reads.

Exhalation: Stories (Ted Chiang) – A collection of science fiction short stories by the author who wrote the story that the movie Arrival is based on. I really liked the author’s writing style and the stories were interesting and thoughtful.

Legends and Lattes (Travis Baldree) – If you’ve heard anything about cozy fantasy in the past few years, you’ve heard about this book in which an orc, tired of the adventuring life, settles down to open the first coffee shop her city has seen. I did enjoy the lower stakes plot and the characters were likeable.

Kill the Farm Boy (Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne) – This was the only book that I disliked as a whole when I finished it. It’s supposed to be a sort of parody of The Princess Bride that critiques fantasy genre tropes, but it tries too hard, so it doesn’t end up being funny and falls into the stereotypes it’s supposed to be subverting.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid) – At 79, Evelyn Hugo’s been married seven times and she’s ready to tell her story. The whole story. I picked up the book because it got positive reviews in internet book circles a few years ago and ended up liking it more than I thought I would.

Ask Again, Yes (Mary Beth Keane) – Another book that made the rounds on the internet. The plot follows two families whose fathers are both officers in the NYPD and how their lives become connected through the years. This was definitely a more serious read than some of the other books on the list, but I thought it was a worthwhile read.

The Invisible Library (Genevieve Cogman) – I discovered this book at my local library going up and down shelves looking for sci-fi/fantasy stickers on book spines. The premise is that librarians at a library that exists outside of time are tasked with protecting/collecting rare works of literature in alternate universes. On one such mission, a librarian and her new apprentice run into events that hint at a darker side of the library. Though some of the worldbuilding was a bit clunky, it was solid enough that I would read more in the series.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (Maria Semple) – An epistolatory novel about Bee, a middle schooler investigating where her mother Bernadette has gone after she disappears before a family trip to Antarctica. In general, I’ll give the book a positive review, because the parts satirizing the Seattle charter school parents and tech industry were funny. However, I found the “money will fix everything” attitude and breaking laws with few/no consequences annoying at times.

Lessons in Chemistry (Bonnie Garmus) – No self-respecting scientist I’ve ever met would unironically ask someone to pass the sodium chloride at the dinner table. That said, the struggles of a woman in STEM in the 60s still ring true today. Overall, I did like the book, I just think the main character in particular talks and acts like how someone who’s not a scientist thinks scientists should talk and act, which is not how scientists actually talk and act.

The Fifth Elephant and Night Watch (Terry Pratchett) – Still making my way through the Night Watch books. This time on the Discworld, Sam Vimes must travel to Uberwald, home to various dwarfs, werewolves, and vampires, as an official ambassador of Ankh-Morpock, to negotiate fat imports. Then, in Night Watch, the members of the City Watch remember a day years ago, when the Watch wasn’t what it is now, and Vimes does some time travelling. Pratchett’s as good as ever at blending elements of fantasy and science fiction with police procedurals and social commentary.

Making It So (Patrick Stewart) – I ended up with a copy of Patrick Stewart’s memoir, so I read it to see how Captain Picard came to the Enterprise. It was (surprisingly?) readable, and another book that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. I appreciate that he at least comes across as honest about the not-perfect parts of his life and doesn’t endlessly make excuses.

It Ends With Us (Colleen Hoover) – A romance book that went big thanks to TikTok. I don’t normally read romance, but on occasion I’ll pick up books that everyone was talking about a couple years ago to see if they live up to the hype (usually not, but some aren’t too bad). A mixed review from me for this one – some parts were handled well, others . . . were not.

Pumpkinheads (Rainbow Rowell) – A cute graphic novel about two high school seniors working their last day of their last fall at the pumpkin patch, getting ready for things to change, and not having regrets.

A Feast for Crows (George R. R. Martin) – He had a two-and-a-half-decade head start, but I’m catching up. This is where Martin had the brilliant idea to just . . . not talk about half his characters for an entire book. I’m not as bothered by this choice as some people, but you can’t deny it’s a bit of an odd decision. This is where you also start wondering how everything’s going to come to a nice, tidy conclusion in only 2,000 or so more pages.

Evvie Drake Starts Over (Linda Holmes) – My last book of the year and my last “the internet made me read it” book. It’s a Hallmark movie in written form. Not bad, but nothing I’m going to rave about.

Despite how it may sound, I did enjoy most of what I read in 2024; I just happened to pick up a number of books that were/are widely popular but normally aren’t the first books I’d reach for. Having said that, I borrowed another book from the library that the internet seemed to like. I believe it can be classified as a romance book, so we’ll see how it goes.

What I Read in 2023

2023 felt like another kind of strange year for reading. I read 38 books for the first time, reread another half dozen or so, and read some in print for the first time (originally read in webcomic form). I did read a single nonfiction book, plus two memoirs, three additional graphic memoirs, and a semi-autobiographical short story collection. There were 19 graphic novels, 4 romances, 2 short story/novella collections, an epistolatory novel, a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and only one vampire book.¹ Goodreads tells me that I read over 12,000 pages (first time reads only), the longest book was George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, and my most shelved book was Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

¹Nonfiction: Mother Tongue (Bill Bryson)
Memoirs: Lab Girl (Hope Jahren), Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner)
Graphic memoirs: Sunshine (Jarrett J. Krosoczka), Almost American Girl (Robin Ha),
    ¡Ay, Mija! (Christine Suggs)
Semi-autobiographical short stories: A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean)
(Science) romances: The Love Hypothesis, Love on the Brain, 

    Loathe to Love You (Ali Hazelwood), The Soulmate Equation (Christina Lauren)
Short stories/novellas: A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean), 

    Loathe to Love You (Ali Hazelwood)
Epistolatory (email) novel: Dear Committee Members (Julie Schumacher)
Vampire book: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (Stephenie Meyer)

Some notable reads:
A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords (George R. R. Martin) (A Song of Ice and Fire [ASOIAF] books 2 and 3) – Westeros is at war – there are too many kings and their armies are wreaking havoc across the continent. The Stark children are mostly missing, scattered from the Wall to King’s Landing. Meanwhile, Daenerys plots from across the Narrow Sea and something’s brewing north of the Wall. Despite their length and number of characters/plots, the ASOIAF books (to this point) are surprisingly readable and not excessively convoluted to follow. I’ve enjoyed this fantasy series so far.

The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) – The general consensus on this book is that the descriptive passages are magical, the plot somewhat less so. The premise is that there’s a travelling circus that appears, operates at night, and has the most incredible exhibits in its tents, then it disappears, perhaps not to return for years. The mystery of the circus is revealed throughout the book, and I do think the plot gets a little weird at the end, but the writing is worth it.

Daisy Jones & The Six (Taylor Jenkins Reid) – I’m a fan of mockumentaries, so I maybe shouldn’t have been as surprised that I liked this book as much as I did. Presented as an oral history, primarily featuring quotes from interviews of band members and those close to them, Daisy Jones & The Six follows the rise and fall of the band – how they came together, wrote a wildly successful album, and what led to them eventually going their separate ways. The author has talked about the story being inspired by Fleetwood Mac.

Mistborn: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages (Brandon Sanderson) – Less of a commitment than The Stormlight Archive or The Wheel of Time, Mistborn was a good introduction to Sanderson’s work. The (first) trilogy takes place in a world where plants are brown, ash falls from the sky, and mists come at night and certain people, Allomancers, can use metals to gain different abilities. The first book is overall a heist novel, the second is more political, and the third turns philosophical. The world is built well, with varied characters, though the conclusion is a bit deus ex machina-y.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Café (Toshikazu Kawaguchi) – An interesting take on time travel, where patrons of a café are allowed to go back in time, but only at one table in the café that they can’t get up from, and their stay is limited to the amount of time it takes a cup of coffee to get cold. The books are translated from Japanese, so the writing doesn’t always flow perfectly, but that’s not necessarily a negative for a translated novel.

The Sandman: Season of Mists and A Game of You (Neil Gaiman) – The Sandman continues with Morpheus taking a trip to Hell to see his ex, only to find the realm abandoned and having to deal with the consequences of that, then New Yorker Barbie travels to her magical dream realm to save it from the Cuckoo. A step removed from the real world, as befits the Lord of the Dreaming.

Sunshine (Jarrett J. Krosoczka) – It’s about a camp for children with cancer and their families, so of course it was going to be sad, but also poignant. Based on the author’s actual experiences.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Promise, The Search, and The Rift (Gene Luen Yang) – After Aang saves the world, Team Avatar still has a lot of work to do. Aang and Zuko must figure out how to rule a Fire Nation colony in the Earth Kingdom, Zuko looks for his mother, and Toph faces her family. The author did a good job continuing the story and portraying the characters.

Star Wars – Heir to the Empire (Timothy Zahn), The Courtship of Princess Leia (Dave Wolverton), the Jedi Academy trilogy (Jedi Search, Dark Apprentice, Champions of the Force) (Kevin J. Anderson) – The Star Wars books I read in this year featured the emergence of Thrawn, Han chasing Leia to a planet of force witches, and Luke’s quest to establish an academy to begin teaching the next generation of Jedi. Everything was readable, if nothing spectacular.

Top Ten _____ [books, general fiction]

Over the past 18 years or so, I’ve read somewhere around 800 books. Just for fun, I thought I’d look at some of my favorites, starting with fiction, and see if anything interesting emerged. In this batch of books, I’ve excluded science fiction/fantasy and YA/children’s, which I plan to go through separately. I’m not a huge fan of romance/thrillers/mysteries, so aspects of those genres don’t feature heavily in the list below. Books are listed in reverse alphabetical order by author’s last name.

Our Town, Thornton Wilder – A play about everyday life in a small New England town at the beginning of the 20th century. Its intentional simplicity and sparseness emphasizes the message, and in many ways is the message.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker – An epistolary tale told by Celie, an African American woman living in the south in the 1900s, about the struggles and abuse she faces. At times violent and explicit, it’s nevertheless a powerful story.

Cannery Row, John Steinbeck – On a street lined with sardine canneries, characters go about their lives in Monterey, California during the Great Depression. I chose Cannery Row over something like The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men for being slightly less depressing than Steinbeck’s typical work.

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger – A coming of age story filled with angst and alienation in which nothing much happens. Holden is, objectively, kind of annoying, but with reason, and there’s a particular mood that Salinger effectively captures.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee – Set in Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of Scout Finch growing up with her brother Jem while her father Atticus defends a black man accused of raping a white woman.

Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan – When Rachel Chu travels to Singapore with her boyfriend Nick Young, she doesn’t expect to meet a bunch of crazy rich Asians. (Are they crazy rich? Or crazy and rich? Probably both.) It’s a ridiculous and completely fun read.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), Gabriel García Márquez – Magical realism at its finest; the book follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo, and explores the ideas of fate and inevitability.

City of Tranquil Light, Bo Caldwell – Based on the author’s grandparents’ experiences as missionaries living in China during the first half of the 20th century. The writing treats the characters and setting with care, resulting in a lovely read.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen – Poor Mr. Bennet has five daughters to marry off in early 19th century England. Despite many misunderstandings and preconceived assumptions, will any of the Bennet women find love? Absurd at times, with memorable characters.

If you’re counting, that’s nine books for a top ten list. I couldn’t decide on a tenth, so here are some honorable mentions: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), Dracula (Bram Stoker), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) (arguably the first science fiction novel), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë).

The list is pretty balanced in terms of gender – four female authors and five male authors. The oldest book is Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813; the newest is Crazy Rich Asians, published 200 years later in 2013. Most of the rest of the books cluster around the mid-1900s. There’s one book (One Hundred Years of Solitude) not originally published in English. One Hundred Years of Solitude is also the longest book by page court, per Goodreads, and Cannery Row and Our Town tie for the shortest (though by word court I would guess Our Town is shorter because it’s a play). And lastly, like only players with last names beginning with B scoring for the Revolution, five¹ of the nine books have titles that start with C.

¹Six if you use the original Spanish title for One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Top Ten Books of 2022

In total, I read 47 new books in 2022, plus a few rereads, making it my biggest reading year in a few years. There were some disappointments, but I didn’t completely hate anything I read, though I came close once (see the dishonorable mention at the bottom). In no particular order, here are ten of the best standalone books or series I read last year. I do normally read a greater diversity of authors/genres, but the year’s reading was definitely skewed by over a third of my books coming from the Star Wars and Star Trek universes and a combination of Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman.

1. The Camera, Ansel Adams – An explanation of the mechanics behind how (film) cameras physically operate, which was interesting and enlightening, and still relevant for digital photography.

2. Star Wars: X-Wing (1-4), Michael Stackpole – The first four X-Wing books (Rogue Squadron, Wedge’s Gamble, The Krytos Trap, and The Bacta War) form a complete story arc about Wedge Antilles leading Rogue Squadron after the events of the original Star Wars trilogy. Although the Death Star(s) have been destroyed, the Empire still controls large parts of the galaxy so the Rebel Alliance, now the New Republic, continues to have work to do. X-Wing is often recommended as a good place to start in Star Wars literature, and I agree, because it’s well written, with a coherent and compelling plot and a strong cast of characters.

3. Guards! Guards! (City Watch books), Terry Pratchett – Years ago, I tried a couple of Discworld books but didn’t really get into them. This time, I started with Small Gods, a standalone novel, then moved to the City Watch books that feature Sam Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in their quest to fight crime in their fair city. The City Watch books are urban fantasy police procedurals with a strange cast of characters ranging from trolls and dwarves to gargoyles and golems. So far, I’ve read Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, and Jingo, and enjoyed them all.

4. The Sandman (vols. 1-3), Neil Gaiman – Decided to pick up the comics after watching the well-received Netflix adaptation. It’s on the darker side of what I normally read, but the plot and characters are really good, and deeper than you might expect. Hard to summarize without giving away plot points, so I’ll just say it’s about Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming (aka the Sandman), and his interactions with humans, gods, and other creatures.

5. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte – All the characters are terrible, and it’s (technically?) a love story, so naturally I thought it was great.

6. Dracula, Bram Stoker – Liked how the plot unfolded and the different viewpoints and styles of storytelling. It gets weird at times.

7. The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin (English translation by Ken Liu) – The first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. This one also gets weird, but it’s aliens this time, not vampires. When scientist Wang Miao starts playing a virtual reality video game called Three Body, he gets caught up in extraterrestrial events started years earlier by Ye Wenjie during the Cultural Revolution.

8. The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard, David A. Goodman – Mostly I got a kick out of reading about Captain Picard’s life and seeing how the book lined up with what’s revealed about him in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

9. Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin – I finally made it through the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire. Solid epic fantasy, and there are already tons of characters and plot threads, but so far it seems manageable, with not too many signs of the corner Martin will later write himself into.

10. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – Something has gone wrong with Armageddon, and demon Crowley must work with angel Aziraphale (don’t worry, they’re friends) to fix things. I think it’s funny. I originally tried to listen to the audiobook, but missed a lot and later went back and read it.

 

Some other enjoyable reads: Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen); The Odyssey (Homer, Fagles translation) – I’ve read a prose version (The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin) and didn’t realize how much of The Odyssey isn’t about Odysseus’s odyssey; The House in the Cerulean Sea (T. J. Klune); Jurassic Park (Michael Critchton) – not markedly better or worse than the movie, which I’d say is a pretty good adaptation; Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir) – very entertaining, if a little farfetched sometimes, and I didn’t love the main human character (Rocky was great). Also, Weir doesn’t write dialog particularly well. Inner dialog is fine, but anything two people would actually say, out loud, to each other, not so much; Federation (Star Trek) (Judith and Garth Reeves-Stevens); Women of the Silk (Gail Tsukiyama); Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein)

Books I wanted to like more than I did: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Charles Yu); The Midnight Library (Matt Haig); Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler)

Dishonorable mention: Ready Player Two (Ernest Cline). Ready Player One barely held together with its riddle contest plot, so Ready Player Two was not set up for success with an unlikable narrator, various inappropriate actions performed by said narrator, Wikipedia info dumps every other page, and a worse riddle contest plot. Also, the riddles weren’t riddles. I expected it to be bad before I started, and it still managed to be an even greater disappointment.

Summer Reading [2022, part 2]

The second half of my summer reading activities:

Free space

Read a book with an epic journey – Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson
- A quick reread before going to the library. When orphan Maya is sent to South American to live with her twin cousins, things aren’t as great as she thinks they will be, but then she meets a boy with a secret and begins to explore the Amazon.

Borrow a puzzle or game

Massachusetts puzzle

Take a walk

Frog in a pond, taken while on a hike

Read a book with a library in it – The Midnight Library, Matt Haig
- An exploration of the concept of the different lives you could have had if you’d made a different decision somewhere along the way. It’s always interesting to see the changes between lives, but I think it’s hard to pull off in a way that’s not predictable, which The Midnight Library kind of was, unfortunately. It’s not bad, but not great either.

Read a novel set in the Great Outdoors – Miracles on Maple Hill, Virginia Sorensen
- Another reread. Fun to hear about a family experiencing the seasons out in nature in the Pennsylvania countryside, but the language romanticizes some of the realities.

Read an author new to you – Fan Fiction, Brent Spiner
- Part memoir, part mystery novel, Spiner sets his book in the middle of filming Star Trek: The Next Generation. While filming, he starts getting creepy stalker letters and must figure out what’s going on. The writing’s a little rough, but the appearances from the other main cast members are entertaining.

Read a book with “path” in the title – The Road, Cormac McCarthy
- I’m substituting “road” for “path.” In a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by an unknown disaster, a father and son walk for days looking for some place they can survive, scavenging food and supplies as they go. This was a good book, in a haunting way.

Listen to an audiobook – Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
- Angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley have been on Earth to make sure their respective overlords’ plans are fulfilled, but after thousands of years, they’re kind of friends now? As Armageddon approaches, it’s not going as planned, and it’s up to them to sort things out. I enjoy both Pratchett and Gaiman, so I found this book funny, if a bit bizarre.

Read a book set in the future – Federation (Star Trek), Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
- Star Trek is set in the 22nd century and beyond, which is currently the future. In Federation, both Kirk’s Enterprise and Picard’s Enterprise-D get tied up in a mystery that seems to revolve around the inventor of the warp drive, vital to the decades of space exploration that have since occurred. Federation somewhat conflicts with the second TNG movie, but can kind of work around it, and taken by itself, is a solid crossover event with the characters you know and love.

Read a book set in the past – Star Wars: X-Wing: The Krytos Trap, Michael Stackpole
- According to the opening text, Star Wars takes place “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. . . .” which I’m taking as canonical proof of being set in the past. The X-Wing novels follow the adventures of Rogue Squadron, led by Wedge Antilles, as they work with the rebellion to rout out remnants of the empire. At least the first four X-Wing books are genuinely good (the writing isn’t stellar, but it’s pretty strong), not just “good despite being what could be considered fan fiction.”

Read a book with a supernatural creature – Dracula, Bram Stoker
- I’ve read Frankenstein a couple times, but not Dracula. I liked the different perspectives it was written from and how the characters put together who/what Dracula was. It did get kind of weird at times, but I don’t mind weird.

Read a book someone keeps recommending – Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy Kaling
- If by keeps recommending you mean I listened to the Office Ladies podcast more than once, and they kind of had to recommend Mindy Kaling’s book. It’s a light, fun read, about growing up as the child of Indian immigrants and how she came to be a writer/actor on The Office, among her other accomplishments.

As a low-maintenance summer reading activity that goes a little beyond the usual “read x number of books or minutes,” book bingo was a good idea. It helps to get people reading books they otherwise might not pick up, and is more flexible than a checklist since people can aim for a single line of five squares or for filling out their whole card (which is what I did).

Summer Reading [2022, part 1]

This summer, I did not get to participate in the Summer Game with the Ann Arbor District Library, but my local library had their own, albeit smaller, summer reading event. Part of their summer reading was book bingo, which I more or less completed with only very minor creative license taken. The first twelve of twenty-five bingo squares are below; the second half will be in the next post.

Read a nonfiction nature book – Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver, Jill Heinerth
- This was a pretty interesting look at the incredibly dangerous sport/hobby of cave diving. It covered some of the techniques used, advances in diving technology, and descriptions of trips to dive caves in Florida, Mexico, and Antarctica, so it’s nonfiction and takes place in nature.

Attend a library event
- I’m counting the library book sale as an event. There aren’t a huge number of events for adults, and a good number of them involve knitting, so the book sale was my event.

Read a book by an author [with something in common with you] – Women of the Silk, Gail Tsukiyama
- Set in rural 1920s China, Women of the Silk follows a group of women working at a silk factory and the bonds they form as WWII approaches and the country is invaded by the Japanese. I liked this book, and it gave some insights into China’s history.

Read a book with an animal – How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu
- I have a list of mostly sci-fi/fantasy books to randomly select from if I’m looking for something to read, and this was on the list. The main character/author, a time machine repairman, lives in his time machine with his nonexistent dog and depressed computer while looking for his father, who is lost in time somewhere. Throughout the book, you learn about the science fictional universe the author lives in and how the time machine was invented. The concept was good, but this didn't end up being a super engaging book for me.

Read a memoir or biography – The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard, David A. Goodman
- Hear from the Captain Picard himself about his childhood on a French vineyard, journey to and through Starfleet Academy, and time aboard the USS Reliant and Stargazer before taking command of the Enterprise. I really enjoyed reading this, and seeing how it led to and lined up with events from The Next Generation.

Borrow a museum pass
- We have borrowed museum passes before, but we didn’t this summer. However, we went to a local nature area for an outdoor art exhibition. Close enough.

Reread a book – Blind Descent, James Tabor
- In the quest to find the deepest cave on Earth, teams led by American Bill Stone in Mexico and Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk in the Republic of Georgia rappel, tunnel, dive, and worm their way through darkness hundreds and thousands of feet underground. I reread this because Jill Heinerth (Into the Planet, above) was involved in at least one scouting trip in the Mexican cave system and I couldn’t remember if any of the other cave divers she worked with were in this book.

Read a book set in your home area – Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
- Nominally set in Concord, Massachusetts, Little Women describes the lives of the March family in the 1860s, their everyday goings on, shenanigans with their neighbor, dreams of becoming artists and writers, or of marriage and starting families. It’s a classic.

A book set in your dream vacation destination – Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
- Apparently my dream vacation is to the moors of England (I didn’t have anywhere else to put Wuthering Heights). Like Pride and Prejudice, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, in spite of (or because of?) Heathcliff and Cathy’s awfulness.

Take a photograph in nature

Mushroom

Read a book under 200 pages – Hard Reboot, Django Wexler
- On a future Earth riddled with malware that infects any civilized human’s brain implants in seconds, the planet is mostly only good for giant robot fights. A visiting scholar gets conned out of money she doesn’t have by one of the robot pilots and must figure out how to settle her debts before her university sponsors find out. This was a quick read, but with fairly well-developed characterization, setting, and plot, though the ending was a bit predictable.

Read a book over 400 pages – A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
- Now a TV phenomenon, GoT started out as one of those really thick fantasy novels with tons of characters, long battle descriptions, and a new plot thread on every page. I’ve only read the first book, but it’s been good so far.

2021 Life of an Engineer book awards

It was another quiet year for reading, but I did end up finishing 17 books, for an average of 1 or 2 per month. As the clearest indication that the pandemic had finally gotten to my brain, I read the 4 main books in . . . the Twilight Saga. I did not read them when the books and movies first came out, but I thought I’d see if they were really as bad as people now claim. (Spoiler: they aren’t, but they’re not good either.)

Best nonfiction
Light: Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting (5th edition) by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, and Paul Fuqua. In this (again) uncontested category is an instructive guide to lighting for photographers based on the physics of light. It doesn’t give you step by step directions to light a vase or your Instagrammed breakfast, but it explains why and how you might want to light something a certain way depending on where it is, what it’s made of, and what you want it to look like. Informative and well written, with plenty of example photos.

Best fiction
Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan. This last book of the “Crazy Rich . . .” trilogy picks up 2 years after China Rich Girlfriend (and 4 years after Crazy Rich Asians) with the Young family fortune at stake after Nick’s grandmother has a heart attack. It’s as ridiculous as the previous two books, and is overall a fun read. Several threads from the earlier books get tied up, and it’s a satisfying ending to the trilogy.

[Runners up – Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Similar stories of unmarried daughters looking (or not) for love in early 19th century England while dealing with their dysfunctional families, gossipy neighbors, and various vapid acquaintances. Having made it through my entire public school and college career without reading any Austen, I ended up listening to Persuasion (the Spotify recording by Cynthia Erivo) and reading Pride and Prejudice in 2021. I was pleasantly surprised that both were better than I expected.]

Best YA fiction
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix. This was an interesting read. It takes place in an alternate 1983 London where a group of magical booksellers keep watch over the city, making sure the myths and monsters of the Old World don’t intrude into the New. While the right-handed deal with the intellectual side of things, the left-handed patrol and fight in the field. When the booksellers (left-handed) Merlin and his sister (right-handed) Vivian find that their jobs intersect with Susan Arkshaw’s search for her father, the three must figure out who Susan’s father is and what he (and Susan) has to do with recent Old World activity threating to disrupt day to day life in London.

Best science fiction
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin. Unrelated to the above. I’ve read very little non-YA science fiction by female authors and Le Guin’s works are classics, so I finally picked up The Left Hand of Darkness. It has a D&D adventure/Star Trek exploring strange new worlds feel to it as it describes the Terran Genly Ai’s first contact with the planet Gethen and his quest to convince them to join the Ekumen, a United Federation-type body where the Gethenians will be able to share in the knowledge of the other planets in the Ekumen. Ai’s experiences are interspersed with stories and lore from Gethen that build on the world that Ai discovers. This might be my pick for the best book I read in 2021, and I’ll leave it at that.

Most vampires
And the award for the Most Vampires goes to . . . the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn). [Warning: Spoilers ahead.] If you somehow don’t already know, Twilight is about Bella Swan falling in love with the vampire Edward Cullen, choosing him over the werewolf Jacob Black, and the 2,000 pages of drama that ensues. It’s actually not the worst thing I’ve read, and my main complaint is that Bella might be the most boring character in the history of characters. For vast swaths of the novels, her defining characteristics appear to be 1) she’s really clumsy and 2) she’s really pale. She otherwise seems to have virtually no hobbies, treats her human friends horribly whenever she deigns to spend any time with them at all, and generally whiles away her life cooking for her father Charlie and pining after Edward. If you can get over that, the plot isn’t awful and the unfolding of the vampire/werewolf lore and the action scenes are pretty interesting.

From Page and Screen, part 1

2020 was a weird year in many ways, including media consumption. The library was closed for a large portion of the year, then was opened for contactless pickup, which meant that you had to request specific titles. I usually choose my books by browsing the shelves, so I ended up reading a couple of library books before the initial shutdown, some books from the library bookstore that I bought but hadn’t gotten around to, and one book that I requested in the summer, plus reread books on my bookshelf. Similarly, I borrowed some movies early in the year, then mostly watched TV shows on Netflix. Because of this year’s circumstances, I read/watched a much lower number of items than previous years, so I’ll try and summarize everything in one two post(s).

Books:
Lock In, John Scalzi – The standalone prequel to Head On. In this sci-fi mystery, FBI agents Chris Shane and Leslie Vann investigate a murder that gets complicated. Relatively quick, enjoyable read.

China Rich Girlfriend, Kevin Kwan – Sequel to Crazy Rich Asians. The adventures continue, and range from China to California as family drama, scandals, and accusations abound. Not quite as good as Crazy Rich Asians, but still highly entertaining.

Star Driver, Lee Correy – Mass market 80s sci-fi novel about inventing a space thruster that defies Newton’s third law. The author is a scientist, so the technobabble (e.g. “we recalibrated the quantum phase shifters to eliminate nanoscale elemental degradation in the lateral reactors”) isn’t awful, but the main female character largely plays the role of the love interest. Overall not terrible, but not great.

Mountain Madness, Robert Birkby – A biography of Scott Fisher, describing his adventures in the mountain climbing business leading up to the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Well-written (the author has hiking/guiding experience), with good pacing.

Dragonsbane, Barbara Hambly – Mass market 80s fantasy novel about a witch and her husband on a quest to slay a dragon. It was actually (thankfully) much less ridiculous/vapid than I was prepared for based on the bookstore shelf it was on. There was a good bit of depth and nuance, and the characters grow on you as the story goes on. I was pleasantly surprised.

Seven Summits, Dick Bass, Frank Wells, Rick Ridgeway – Two middle-aged/kind of old well-off businessmen seek to be the first to climb the highest summit on each continent. Interesting read, especially the chapters about the Vinson Massif in Antarctica.

Wayward Son, Rainbow Rowell – Sequel to Carry On, which was based in a Harry Potter-esque magical England; Wayward Son answers the question “what happens after you defeat the enemy and win the war?” Apparently, go on a vacation and road trip through the American west. I like the concept, and the individual events/disasters that occur, but my biggest issue is how phenomenally unprepared and astonishingly unaware the main characters are. They’re supposed to be smart. They have phones. It’s the 21st century and the internet exists. One of them has been to America before. And yet everything they stumble across is like Newton discovering gravity to them. It’s America, not a galaxy far, far away.

TV shows:
The Office – With the number of pranks, field trips, and shenanigans that go on, it’s a wonder Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch ever sells any paper. I find the show funny, and yes, ridiculous at times, but it’s not as far-fetched as some critics claim.

The Great British Bake Off – I think the best seasons are a few years into the show, when they had kind of figured things out and still had the original judges and hosts. But it’s a show all about baking, with minimal drama, so I’ll keep watching and enjoying it.

Community – A study group at Greendale Community College becomes more than a study group. Although later seasons suffer from cast turnover, firings, and cancelations, the show has some of the best parody/spoof episodes.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (A:TLA) – Rewatch when it came to Netflix. Still great.

Parks and Recreation – Similar to The Office, but takes place in the parks and rec department of Pawnee, Indiana. Also funny, and the characters and plot are arguably more well developed than in The Office.

The Legend of Korra – Not as bad as some people make it out to be in comparison to A:TLA, but not as good as A:TLA. I found the characters less likeable, and the plots can be a bit all over the place, though the villains are generally more complex and the series raised some interesting points.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The show is riddled with bizarre plots, bad CGI, and Deus ex machina moments, and why does the flagship of the Federation lose shields/suffer engine failure/come seconds from losing life support so often? Anyway, once you get past all that most of the plots are well-written and the characters are interesting.

Schitt’s Creek – It took really until the end of season 2 for me to get into it. After finishing the show, I don’t know that it was entirely satisfying, but it had its moments, and “A Little Bit Alexis” was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.

Grey’s Anatomy – Basically a soap opera set in a hospital. I’m a fan, but the number of marriages, divorces, pregnancies, deaths, and other major traumatic events that happen at/to this hospital is seriously concerning. Also, the musical episode is horrible, so naturally I loved it.

2019 Life of an Engineer book awards

Honestly, I didn’t read that much last year. I read less than half the number of books as movies I watched, which doesn’t even include the 7.5 seasons of The Office I watched on Netflix. But there were still a few good books I wanted to mention.

Best nonfiction:
In this basically uncontested¹ category, the winner is In Search of Bacchus, by George M. Taber². In this book, Taber visits twelve of the major wine producing countries around the world and gives a brief overview of the development of the wine industry, including wine production and tourism, in each. The book’s a little niche but gives a decent overview of some of the big players in the wine market. I actually think it would have gone well with the wines class I took at Cornell.

¹Apparently the only other nonfiction I read last year was two nature photography books.
²Taber is also the author of Judgment of Paris, which I read in 2017 and would also recommend.

Best fiction:

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan. When Rachel Chu travels with her boyfriend Nick Young to Singapore for his childhood friend Colin Khoo’s wedding, she meets his family of crazy rich Asians and enters a whole new world. I both read the book and watched the movie last year, and I liked both for different reasons. The movie was a visual spectacle (I expected nothing less) and the book was a tangled web of siblings, cousins, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, friends, roommates, children, grandchildren, and everything else in between. It’s a light read, but fun, and the interactions between the scores of characters are highly entertaining.

Head On, by John Scalzi. Crime mystery novel set in an alternate or near-future Earth where members of the population stricken by a flu-like virus become consciously “locked in” to their bodies and operate humanoid robots (threeps) to navigate the physical world. The book follows FBI agents Leslie Vann and Chris Shane as they investigate the death/possible murder of a Hilketa player. Hilketa is a new sport played by humans controlling sword- and hammer-wielding threeps. The goal is to decapitate a specific opponent and carry their head through the goalposts. The concept and characters are interesting and the plot is plausible enough.

Best graphic novel:
Hey, Kiddo, by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. A graphic memoir based on the author’s experiences being raised by his grandparents while his heroin-addicted single mother comes and goes as she spends time in and out of rehab. As he grows up, his grandparents provide some measure of stability and encourage his artistic pursuits. It’s a story of growing up amidst addiction and navigating often shifting familial relationships.

Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson. The evil Lord Ballister Blackheart has the services of shapeshifter Nimona thrust upon him as he seeks to avenge himself against his nemesis Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin. Havok reigns as Blackheart and Nimona’s plots don’t always go according to plan, and though the science fiction/fantasy parody mashup mainly remains light on the surface, there’s a depth to the story as well.

Best young adult fiction:
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, by Jenny Han. (Also P.S. I Still Love You, and Always and Forever, Lara Jean, the other two books in the trilogy.) The plot centers on what happens after Lara Jean’s private, never-to-be-sent love letters get sent to various boys from her past and present. At its heart, it’s a boy meets girl story, but it’s also about friendship, family, growing up, and enough other things that it’s not just bearable to read, but pretty good.

2018 Life of an Engineer Book Awards

Back for the first time in this format since 2014. In total in 2018, I read 65 books, split 21/44 between nonfiction and fiction. I read more fiction, but you’ll see more nonfiction below because I was on a quest to find young adult fiction that wasn’t about finding true love, and I was . . . not very successful.

Best nonfiction:
Winner – The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown – How nine Americans rowed for a medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. A look into post-depression America, a time when you could still pay for college by working in the summer, pre-WWII Germany, and collegiate crew.

Nominees – The United States of Soccer, Phil West – A history of MLS. All references to the Revolution can be summed up as “and then they lost the MLS cup final.”

Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly – Basically the less dramatic, longer, more detailed version of the movie (women at NASA doing math before, during, and after the space race).

No Way Down, Graham Bowley – An account of several days on K2 in 2008 during which 11 climbers died. Engaging, in the style of Into Thin Air and The Climb¹, but written by a non-climber, which lends objectivity; however, the lack of personal experience with the subject shows.

Apollo 8, Jeffrey Kluger – The tale of how three men came to spend Christmas of 1968 orbiting the moon. Kluger is also Jim Lovell’s coauthor for Apollo 13 (originally Lost Moon).

¹Dueling accounts of the 1996 climbing season on Everest by Jon Krakauer, a client with mountaineering experience on one expedition, and Anatoli Boukreev, a guide from a competing agency.

Best supporting nonfiction²:
Pitch Perfect, Mickey Rapkin – A (slightly) more serious look at college a cappella than the movie.

The Pixar Touch, David A Price – The story of how Pixar came to be and the development of computer animation.

A Well-Ordered Thing, Michael Gordin – The life of Dmitri Mendeleev, the creator of the periodic table.

Leonard Bernstein, Allen Shawn – Have you ever wanted to know about the life of the perhaps the most famous conductor of the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts? Here’s the book for you.

²Books listed here are good, but you would either need a strong interest in the subject to read them or be willing to plow through some less captivating writing.

Best fiction:
The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss – Similarly to Dune, this book starts out slowly, then you get really into it. I read a large chunk of this book on the train to/from Chicago in August. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy – the second came out in 2011, and the third is yet to be released. The first book ends in a not-too-cliffhanger-y way, so I’m planning to wait for the third book to be published before reading the second. This book is hard to describe without spoiling anything, so I’ll just say it’s good.

Best science fiction:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K Dick – The book Blade Runner is based on. I also read Man in the High Castle, and I like this book better, but I can see how Man in the High Castle has more potential for a full TV series.

Year Zero, Robert Reid – A Hitchhiker’s Guide style romp through the universe featuring music-loving aliens, space travel, and . . . vacuums and copyright law?

Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View – A retelling of A New Hope by characters ranging from droids and stormtroopers to jawas and the cantina reprobates.

Best YA fiction:
Turtles All the Way Down – John Green’s latest book. I was on a search this year for YA fiction that wasn’t all about falling in love (i.e. “boy meets girl,” or its cousins, “those two people who hate each other are actually in love,” “turns out that one guy you’ve known forever and is your best guy friend is in love with you so let’s date,” and “hey there we just met three minutes ago in the grocery store but we’re meant to be together forever”). Turtles All the Way Down does include the relationship angle, but it’s a book discussing mental illness that has a relationship in it, not a love story in which one of the loveably quirky characters has OCD.

Best pictures:
The Complete Guide to Nature Photography, Sean Arbabi – Really. It’s got great pictures.

Now a major motion picture³:
Pitch Perfect – See above.

The Princess Bride, William Golding – Same storyline as the movie, but with a different flavor of Golding’s humor.

Julie and Julia, Julie Powell – Haven’t seen this movie; the book is part ingredient hunting, part New York apartment living, part labor-of-love/hate cooking, and part slice of life.

Hidden Figures – See above.

Ready Player One, Ernest Cline – 80s references galore. The movie deviates pretty far from the book, and I actually think the movie ending is better than the book’s. Fairly light/quick read.

³All the books listed here have been adapted for the big screen. If they’re not listed elsewhere in this post, they’re good, but not one of my absolute favorites for the year.

Read This, Not That

As promised, here are some of the most interesting/amusing/engaging books and movies I read and watched in 2017.

Book (nonfiction)

Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber (Daniel Charles) – If you’re a ChemE, you’d better know about the Haber-Bosch process¹. Turns out Haber was a very interesting person. He was German and Jewish, took part in developing chemical warfare during WWI, had a conflicted personal life, often struggled to gain recognition, and, yes, figured out the reaction to synthesize ammonia. [Bosch did the scaling up to the full industrial process.]

Promised the Moon (Stephanie Nolen) – Noteworthy because it looks at a different aspect of the space race. Instead of starting with the Mercury Seven and going through the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, this book is about why/how women didn’t get to go into space.

Called Again (Jennifer Pharr Davis) – It’s about a woman trying to break the speed record for hiking the Appalachian Trail. Of course I had to read it.

Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine (George Taber) – The Judgment of Paris is the event that is regarded as the first time California wines were officially ranked more highly than French wines. While the Judgment itself is only a small portion of the book, the rest is a fascinating narrative of the development of wine production in California.

Soccernomics (Simon Kuper/Stefan Szymanski) – There aren’t many books about soccer, and while this book focuses mainly on the economics of the Premier League (I’d have liked to see more about MLS, but the league’s only 20+ years old now, so there’s much less data), there are a lot of interesting points about picking players, the effect of coaches, fanbases, and much more.

Book (fiction)

Attack of the Theater People (Marc Acito) – Shenanigans abound as a group of aspiring actors struggle to find work in New York City.

City of Tranquil Light (Bo Caldwell) – Loosely based on the author’s grandparents’ experiences as missionaries in China during the early 1900s.

The Cardturner (Louis Sachar) – From the author who brought you Holes comes a book about . . . bridge. No knowledge of bridge necessary. And yes, a book about a card game played largely in senior centers is interesting.

Movie (musical)

Into the Woods – I was pleasantly surprised by Disney’s adaptation of Sondheim’s musical. The set provides another dimension to the performance that can’t be achieved on stage and they manage to insert some lighter scenes into what could be a very dark second act. There are some roles and songs that are cut or reworked, but not so that Disney can insert their own material, so I’m not mad about it.

Rent – Another solid movie adaptation of a stage musical. [Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t particularly like it (46%), but they seem to mainly be complaining about the director. IMDb likes it fine (7/10), and Amazon really likes it (4.5/5).]

Movie (live action)

Pitch Perfect – I finally saw Pitch Perfect last year. It’s got college shenanigans + a cappella. What more could I ask for?

Hidden Figures – Snuck this one in on the last day of the year while I was home. Again, this looks at the space race from a different perspective than the typical progression to the moon. Instead, it highlights the roles three women played at NASA behind the scenes. They play up the dumb white male a bit at times, but I don’t mind. This movie also contains what might be my favorite quote from a movie I saw last year, spoken by Octavia Spencer’s character Dorothy Vaughn: “FORTRAN is a new and exciting language used by programmers to communicate with computers. It is exciting as it is the wave of the future.” Yes, Dorothy, I agree completely.

Movie (rewatch)

Mary Poppins – It’s a classic. Nothing else to say.

Fantasia – This is the movie that every elementary/middle school music teacher puts on for movie day in music class. I think this was my first time actually watching the whole thing.

Movie (animated)

Wreck-It Ralph – A bit of a different take on the idea of having the setting be inside a video game. It’s not all about gathering points or advancing through levels; there’s an actual plot besides that. I liked the characters, the animation is fun, and there’s even a bit of a twist at the end. Good job on this one, Disney.

Sing – The premise of the movie is American Idol for animals, and you can guess most of the plot from there, but the point of it isn’t the plot. Sing contains over sixty songs, ranging from opera and classical to 2016’s top 40 hits, and they’re incorporated well, which is really the strength of this movie. There are also a couple really funny scenes.

Moana – Yet another retelling of the classic Disney princess story, but it’s done well, and there’s a chicken in it.

(because animation) The Good Dinosaur – Plot is straightforward for a Pixar movie, but the soundtrack and animation are fantastic.

(because it’s Pixar) Finding Dory – It’s Pixar. There are a couple really great moments in the film, but the disregard for physics in some of the scenes is nearing Hobbit goblin cave levels.

¹3H₂ + N₂ ---> 2NH₃, in the presence of a metal catalyst and at high temperature and pressure.

Minutes, Miles, and Numbers

This is the time of year when I divulge how much little I biked, practiced the clarinet, read, and wrote last year. I did, however, watch a fair number of movies and TV shows. And yes, I really do keep track of all this information, because I like numbers and it makes it easy to give book/movie recommendations, which I was recently asked to do, so there.

Because of my tendency to leave for my class that was a mile away from my office five to ten minutes before class was scheduled to start, a few early December bike rides meant I rode my bike in every month of 2017. I only rode once in the months of January, February, and March (twice out of necessity, once on an unseasonably warm day to the farmer’s market), but once counts. In July alone I covered over a hundred miles on twenty-two days. A lot of those were short rides between my office and apartment, with longer rides across Ann Arbor on the weekends. My highest single day distance was 16.5 miles, on a day when I went grocery shopping and visited two library branches and the mall. Over the whole year, I biked 105 days (29% of the year) and rode 467 miles (about the distance from Boston to Washington, DC).

Biking mileage for 2017 by month

Since my return to concert band, I’ve been practicing the clarinet on my own again. I tried/try to be reasonably consistent about practicing. Looking at the graph below, there must have been something hard about our third and fourth concerts last year to get me to practice that much in March, but I don’t remember what. I definitely also took a break over the summer when I didn’t have any concert band music to work through.  Practice total for the year: 73 hours.  This doesn't include playing for fun, band rehearsals, or concerts.

Time spent practicing clarinet in 2017 by month

I also watched 62 movies, including close to two dozen musicals, and read 61 books, roughly a quarter of which were nonfiction and three quarters were fiction. I spent my summer reading research papers. My brain could take only so much educational material. Coming soon – a post with some of my favorite books and movies I watched last year.

Finally, I’ve been writing (or not writing) here for over five years now. The picture below sums up five years of writing.

Graph of blog posts vs month for the past five years
(Click to enlarge)

#SummerInIthaca2015

It was the hottest of times, it was the most humid of times. It was the season of sunshine, it was the season of thunderstorms, it was the epoch of mosquito bites, it was the epoch of muddy hiking boots, we had work every weekday, we had no problem sets on weekends – in short, it was summer. Summer in Ithaca to be precise, and all of us in the apartment were doing research or working, not taking classes, so our nights and weekends were free for all the shenanigans and misadventures we could devise. And devise them we did.

I’ve written about most of the things we did, but I also wanted to compile a chronological list as well as record some of our other accomplishments.

6/13 – Sat. – Buttermilk Falls State Park
6/20 – Sat. – Taughannock Falls State Park [same link as above]
6/24 – Wed. – Princess Ida (Schwartz Center)
6/26 – Fri. – Rockwood Ferry concert (arts quad)
6/27 – Sat. – Museum of the Earth
6/28 – Sun. – Lick Brook Falls
6/30 – Tues. – violin/piano concert (Schwartz)
7/1 – Wed. – 4th 1st of July fireworks (slope)
7/3 – Fri. – Cascadilla Gorge Trail
7/9 – Fri. – alumni hockey game (Lynah Rink)
7/10 – Sat. – Racker Center rivals (hockey) (Lynah) [same link as above]
7/16 – Thurs. – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Plantations)
7/18 – Sat. – Cayuga Trail/chimes concert
7/21 – Tues. – Klez Project (Schwartz) [same link as 6/30]
7/24 – Fri. – Mutron Warriors concert (arts quad) [same link as 6/30]
7/25 – Sat. – Treman State Park
8/1 – Six Mile Creek/The Small Kings concert (Taughannock)
8/15 – Lab of Ornithology
8/19 – blueberry picking (Grisamore Farms)
8/24 – Buttermilk Falls State Park

Additionally, I read the following:
The Naked Mountaineer (Steve Sieberson)
Two for the Summit (Geoffrey Norman)
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (John Boyne)
Reservation Blues (Sherman Alexie)
Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert)
Migraine (Oliver Sacks)
The Astronaut Wives Club (Lily Koppel)
Carrying the Fire (Michael Collins)
If I Fall, If I Die (Michael Christie)
Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson)
Train Dreams (Denis Johnson)
A Walk Across America (Peter Jenkins)
The Wayward Bus, Burning Bright, Sweet Thursday, The Winter of our Discontent, and Travels With Charley (John Steinbeck)

Watched the following:
28 episodes of The Walking Dead (Seasons 3 and 4 minus a few episodes)
9 episodes of The Astronaut Wives Club (Season 1, minus the first episode)
Season 3 of Sherlock (still can’t decide if my favorite scene is Sherlock getting shoved to the ground/head-butted/punched in the face all in the same night or the pub crawl)
Mean Girls

Tried a couple new recipes for peanut butter chocolate oatmeal muffins and white chocolate brownies

Went rock climbing half a dozen times

And collectively, in the apartment, grew mold on the following:
potatoes, peaches, tomato sauce, onions, oatmeal muffins, raspberries, bread, broccoli, and clementines

$9.03

In an effort to apply the knowledge gained in my two introductory economics classes avoid giving the Cornell Store any of my parents’ hard-earned money, I bought all my books for this semester on Amazon or from Ithaca’s only cooperatively owned bookstore (Buffalo Street Books). Due to the Cornell Cartel’s Store’s manufacturer-suggested pricing, with added contribution to the Buy the Dean a Drink fund, I got all the textbooks I needed for my ChemE classes for less than the Cornell Store was charging to rent a used copy of the book.

The liberal studies class I signed up for mainly because it fit in my schedule didn't have any books listed with the Cornell Store, but when I went to the first lecture, it turned out that we did indeed require books. Nine of them, in fact. We had the option of buying the books online from the bookstore and having them delivered to class, buying them from another source, or using the books on reserve at the library. I prefer to have my own copy of the texts, so that meant the bookstore or Amazon.

Because I obviously have nothing better to do with my time, I found all the books on Amazon and cataloged their titles, prices, and ISBNs. Then I compared the prices on Amazon to the bookstore prices. The bookstore sold the whole course pack at list prices for $137 while the books on Amazon cost about $115 (16% cheaper). However, Amazon would charge tax (about 8%) while the bookstore did not, and the bookstore would deliver to the lecture in time for me to do the first book reading, compared to five to eight days for an Amazon delivery. Furthermore, the books on Amazon were not uniformly 16% cheaper but ranged from list price to over 20% cheaper.

Naturally, what I ended up doing was buying the first four books we needed from the bookstore because they were all either list price or 15 cents cheaper on Amazon. I ordered the last five books from Amazon a few days later. I saved $9.03.

2014 Life of an Engineer Book Awards

I ended up reading 51 books in 2014 (and rereading 4 more), which totaled over 17,000 pages according to Goodreads. I finished at least one book in every month of the year except February and read the most books in August. For the second year in a row, I didn't read any truly awful books, mainly because I wasn't taking any more writing seminars and didn't have a horrible summer reading book assigned. As always, though, there were some books that were better than others. I decided to give out some book awards completely made up by me.

The What Am I Reading? award
The Colour of Magic (and The Light Fantastic) by Terry Pratchett. The best way to describe what I’ve read of the Discworld series so far is a fantasy version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While there’s no Vogon poetry or a restaurant at the end of the universe, Discworld takes places on a rotating disk carried on the backs of elephants on the giant turtle the Great A’Tuin and includes imaginary dragons and the Luggage. So yeah, it’s weird . . . but good. Really.

The That’s Worse Than Vogon Poetry award
Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo. In this Newbery Medal winning children’s book, Flora’s mother vacuums up a squirrel (Ulysses) that survives and writes poetry and thinks about food a lot. I’m willing to suspend belief about a lot of things (see above) but the squirrel poetry was kind of contrived (and not very good). I also didn't particularly care for any of the characters and the storyline wasn't very developed or engaging. Granted, I’m about a decade older than the target readers, but I remember other books (The Tale of Despereaux and Because of Winn Dixie) by the author as being better.

The I Actually Can’t Pronounce Any of These Names award
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. Turns out the history of Middle Earth was pretty complicated. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who’s not a Tolkien fan but there’s a lot of backstory and I found it interesting, even if it took me three tries to get through it.

The “Houston, we have a problem” award
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. For a storyline frequently found on “The 10 Most Confusing Movies” list, I didn't think the book was that strange (again, see above). Until I reached the end. Besides the brief foray into “What Am I Reading?” territory, most of the science and story made sense. Apollo 13 got home on the computing power of a pocket calculator. Discovery in 2001 gets in trouble because their computer is artificially intelligent. Computers: friend or foe?

The Stavromula Beta award
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. You might only get this award if you've read both American Gods and The Hitchhiker’s Guide, but I thought American Gods was pretty good. It’s about the fight between old and new mythological beings and was a bit hard to get into but the characters were well done.

Most disappointing book:
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. I really liked Musicophilia, another of Oliver Sacks’ books, but this one just wasn't as engaging.

Best book of the year:
Dune by Frank Herbert. Everyone has this book on the “Must read” list of science fiction, so I checked it out of the Cornell library over Thanksgiving break. When I started, I didn't think the plot was that great, and there were a bunch of characters wandering in and out. Then I kept reading, and the plot kept developing, and I thought “I want to know what happens next.” The characters turned out to be more complex than they seemed originally (though maybe ironically, the main character is the one I found to be the least well written), and the plot was detailed without dragging on and on. Definitely a science fiction must read.

Everything else I read:
Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
The Emerald Mile, Kevin Fedarko
Along for the Ride, Sarah Dessen
Giant George, Dave Nassar
The Boys of October, Doug Hornig
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling
Dealing With Dragons, Patricia C Wrede
Friction, E.R. Frank
The Garden of Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Rama Revealed, Arthur C. Clarke
Ranger's Apprentice: The Royal Ranger, John Flanagan
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling
The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene
Roads, Larry McMurtry
Loop Year, John Sheirer
The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Animal Farm, George Orwell
2061: Odyssey Three, Arthur C. Clarke
Schroder, Amity Gaige
My Name Is Not Easy, Debby Dahl Edwardson
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
Dragon and Thief, Timothy Zahn
Earth Unaware, Orson Scott Card
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Should I Go to Grad School?, Jessica Loudis
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
Eleanor and Park, Rainbow Rowell
The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
Flyboys, James Bradley
The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger
A Tale of Two Cities: The 2004 Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry and the War for the Pennant, Tony Massarotti
Denali's Howl, Andy Hall
Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham, J.R.R. Tolkien
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling

The View from Saturday (and All the Other Days)

When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite books was The View From Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg, who also wrote From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, another book I really liked. I’m not sure why I liked it so much, because it’s about a middle school quiz bowl team, sea turtles, and tea parties, and not mountain climbing or ukulele playing goats*. But I recently (last year?) found The View From Saturday at either a book sale or picked it up for free and reread it, and I still liked it.

Maybe it had something to do with the point in my life around middle school where I decided that I didn't like fantasy books (don’t ask me why) and preferred reading realistic fiction. I have since progressed on to reading anything, including the fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings, most of the Harry Potter series, and this summer, American Gods and the start of the Discworld series, as well as my lease and software agreements.**

On a tangentially related note, I also just realized that the bus scene in The View From Saturday is a lot like the opening of Park and Eleanor, which I just read for fun because young adult novels are marginally easier to read than my organic chemistry textbook. Both scenes are about the new kid trying to find a seat on a bus with already established seating. I rode the bus to and from school for nine years straight (fourth to twelfth grade) and kindergarten on occasion (back when there were still more students enrolled in half day than full day kindergarten). People sat in different seats every day and the only year my stop was at the end of my driveway was fourth grade. Then there was the late bus, which was only obligated to drop us off within a mile of my house and preferred to leave us to walk home from the end of the street. So I've done my time on the school bus.

Finally, the point of this post was not to discuss my weird reading habits or bus stories (I've got more for another time), as interesting as they may be. What I actually wanted to talk about was the view from my dorm room, which I get every day, not just Saturdays. (See the connection?) I moved to the fifth floor of the same dorm I lived in last year, to the suite that is as physically far away from the laundry room (in the basement) as possible. On Tuesday when I did laundry, I counted and it took over 300 steps to get to the laundry room. Multiply by six and that’s what it takes to get clean clothing.

To recap: what I wanted to do was show some pictures of the view from my room but I did so in the most complicated way possible. And here are the pictures taken through my window.

The Cloud that Ate Ithaca: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Pre-winter at its finest

Good morning, Cornell University.

*Note that I have not actually read a book about ukulele playing goats.
**Note that I do not recommend the last two for leisure reading.

At the Library Again

In the over two years I've spent at Cornell, I have not studied at the library once. Over the summer, however, I did make use of the library to fill my free time by borrowing a number of books to read for fun. Apologies to more sensitive readers for using the f word.

Unfortunately, my experience was that the Cornell library system did not have every book I searched for. I guess the books I was looking for must have been extremely obscure or wildly unpopular. Probably both.

I got my book recommendations from online lists I stumbled upon and out of the books I managed to hunt down at Olin Library, I didn't hate any of them, but some were definitely better than others. Some of my favorites:

2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke) – I read the whole Odyssey series, but the first book was the best. I enjoyed the whole series, but if you’re not a big science fiction fan and/or don’t have time to read an entire series, at least read the first one. Although the movie shows up on multiple “Most Confusing Movies of All Time” lists (yes, I do spend too much time looking up random stuff on the internet), I didn't think the book was confusing at all.

Discworld, Terry Pratchett – There’s an entire series of Discworld books, and this summer I read the first two, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. If The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (one of my favorite books) is science fiction humor, the Discworld books are fantasy humor. There was adventure, weird characters in a strange world, and utter ridiculousness.

Our Town, Thornton Wilder – The last play I read was The Importance of Being Earnest, in the spring of my junior year of high school. So it’s been awhile. I really liked the descriptions of life in a small New England town, probably because I did most of my growing up in a small-ish New England town.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell – Along with Brave New World and We (Yevgeny Zamyatin), Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered one of the most influential dystopian works. I have not read We, but I ended up liking Nineteen Eighty-Four more than Brave New World. There wasn't any particular glaring failure of Brave New World; I just like Nineteen Eighty-Four better overall.

It was a good summer in terms of books (and overall) and one of the reasons I wrote this post is because I forgot a picture in the last summer reading post I did. What trip to the library is complete without some penguins?

At the Library

Now that I have this thing called free time I've been frequenting the library to borrow books to read for fun. The Cornell library has a massive selection of books, but unless I want to end up with La Chasse des canards or Harvest of grief: grasshopper plagues and public assistance in Minnesota, it’s really hard to browse. Even with the Library of Congress Classification System categories, looking at call numbers starting with PR – a fraction of a floor of one library – only narrows things down to the entirety of English literature.

So I've been going with the call numbers for random book recommendations in hand and this summer I've read a mix of science fiction, young adult fiction, and more “classic” novels.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke when I picked up Rendezvous With Rama at a library book sale a couple years ago. Over spring break, I finished the Rama series and this summer I've started on the Odyssey books. Thusfar I've read 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two. There are definite similarities in the two series – space travel and alien life being a couple of the themes that have made an appearance in all of Clarke’s books I've read so far. One kind of cool thing is that Clarke wrote about using Jupiter’s gravity to accelerate a spaceship deeper into space in a kind of slingshot maneuver, which is exactly what the Voyager probes did, before Voyager 1 or 2 launched. [I read a book about the Voyager probes last summer, and while it wasn't terrible, I was hoping for more about how the probe was designed and run and things that happened on its journey and the author focused more on exploration in general.]

My first library trip this summer, I went in looking for 2001 and was wandering the shelves in the English literature section when I found Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works. I decided not to pick up any Sherlock Holmes at the moment and instead went with The Lost World, in which a newspaper reporter, an academic, an adventurer-type, and an overbearing professor explore a remote mesa in South America, where, the professor claims, there are dinosaurs. I found part of the ending a bit anticlimactic but overall the story was interesting, with plenty of action in the second half of the book.

Moving on from dinosaurs to pirates, I borrowed a young adult book titled Pirate Cinema by Cody Doctorow as a quick read. The pirates in this book do not sail the seven seas, but instead illegally download things from the internet and stay in abandoned buildings. It was a less dense read than some of the other books I've been going through, and the storyline is rather relevant to today’s technology-filled world. The general feel of the book reminded me of The Thief Lord with laptops.

Finally, to round out my selection of two dystopian novels, two novels based in England, and . . . aliens, I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This book considers a world where people are raised from birth to have a particular intelligence, social class, and job. They cannot imagine being happy doing anything other than what they have been conditioned to do and if they ever start becoming unhappy, there’s a pill that can fix that. Brave New World is one of those books that’s on lists of “100 books everyone should read” and that comes up periodically on Jeopardy! and trivia quizzes, so I figured I should actually read it. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't want to live in the world Brave New World describes. So far I've liked everything I've borrowed from the Cornell library system and haven’t had to suffer through dutifully enjoy titles such as Feed and The Life Before Us that have been past summer reading assignments. I’m currently working on Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with the first two of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels still to come. If anyone has any book recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments.

1189

Among the other things I meant to write about and didn't was the fact that last week I came to the 1772^nd page of a book and finished reading its last (the 1189^th) chapter. It was a book that took a very long time to finish, but it was a very good book. There were battles, journeys across deserts and oceans, visions and prophecies predicted and fulfilled, and even a left-handed judge who wasn't properly checked for weapons and who killed an opposing ruler by plunging a dagger into the enemy king’s stomach. And then the king’s intestines fell out.

Upon completion of the 1772^nd page of the Bible, I decided to go back and start again at the beginning. This time I’ll be reading chronologically. Hopefully it takes me less than six and a half years this time. Reading fairly regularly, I got through the New Testament in nine months (October 2013 – June 2014) and that was about one third of the Bible, so there is light at the end of this tunnel. Projected ETA: 2.25 years.