Book Log

Here's a log of the books I've read since late 2003. More organized ratings of authors and books are on another page, and you can skip to its entries for individual books by clicking on the icons next to the entries here.

Reading now: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker

good 2008/08/12: The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker: Not quite what I was expecting; too much focus on nitty-gritty details. The last chapter leaves me realizing that I was more interested in something like The Blank Slate, so on I go to that!
good 2008/07/30: Fortune's Formula, William Poundstone: At no point was it especially clear what the "theme" of this book was, but it was enjoyable anyway.
great 2008/07/26: The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt: This was so frenetic and nutty, in a way I've never seen before.
great 2008/07/13: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace: Heh heh heh.
bad 2008/07/05: The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture, Fritjof Capra: I remember liking this book Way Back in the Day, but I can't stand it now. The author repeats the same hippie-targeted phrases over and over, with very prolix sentences that nonetheless fail to convey useful information.
good 2008/05/24: Villa Incognito, Tom Robbins: This one leaves me with the impression that Tom Robbins may be "Thomas Pynchon for Dummies."
good 2008/05/17: Sabbath's Theater, Philip Roth: Another raunchy ride from Roth
good 2008/04/04: Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland: There were a lot of loose ends. I didn't really get into it, but it was interesting and mostly well-told.
good 2007/12/29: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera: Kind of rambly and weird, but weird is good
good 2007/10/28: Letting Go, Philip Roth: Kind of overdramatic
great 2007/08/30: Girl with Curious Hair, David Foster Wallace: More of the same, with more of a popular culture focus than the DFW stuff I read earlier
good 2007/08/19: Carpenter's Gothic, William Gaddis: My first impression was rage at the unconventional grammatical organization, where it's not clear what's a spoken quotation and what isn't. It got better further in, but not enough to make up for the confusion.
good 2007/07/26: Licks of Love, John Updike: John Updike doesn't disappoint.
good 2007/07/19: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland: Pretty slick, though I was less able to identify with the characters than for Microserfs
good 2007/07/17: The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, Philip Roth: He couldn't avoid sticking in more of this self-referential stuff, eh? :-)
bad 2007/07/13: Mysticism and Logic, Bertrand Russell: After reading the first few essays in the book, I asked myself what I was getting out of the experience. Failing to find an answer, I set out for greener pastures. (I picked up the book because Everything and More cited it, and the title sounded interesting; that should teach me to live on the edge!)
good 2007/07/11: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, David Foster Wallace: I'm left wondering how much of this is intended satirically.
good 2007/07/07: World's End, T. Coraghessan Boyle: It had its gripping stretches, but in the end it wasn't all that satisfying.
great 2007/06/23: Microserfs, Douglas Coupland: Far out. For some reason, I had formed an internal classification of this book as typical empty nerdstuff. "We generate stories for you because you don't save the ones that are yours." Recommended by mpnolan.
great 2007/06/20: Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows: Some interesting insights with solid experimental results
great 2007/06/04: The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins: Yay for evolution. The parallels between better ways of enabling evolution and better ways of building computer systems are interesting... and squirrels are cool.
great 2007/05/23: Nexus, Henry Miller: I wasn't disappointed.
good 2007/05/15: The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins: Going in, I was feeling kind of guilty, since this kind of "preaching to the choir" subject matter is so popular among hapless fanboys. Nonetheless, there were some interesting arguments in here, and it's always fun to read Dawkins's prose. Makes me want to read more science-y books, in fact.
good 2007/05/06: The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick: There was some interesting stuff in here. It had a weird feeling of having been hastily written, like ol' PKD was under a tight deadline.
good 2007/04/25: Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon: Plenty of good stuff here, but not quite enough to justify the length
good 2007/03/02: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander: Interesting, though not especially well focused
good 2007/02/22: The Waterworks, E. L. Doctorow: An all right book
great 2007/02/13: Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace: Awesome. That footnote business required some out-of-the-ordinary place-saving apparatus for efficient reading.
good 2007/01/14: Closing Time, Joseph Heller: Kinda nifty
good 2007/01/07: Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller: I see the germ of the endearing qualities of Rosy Crucifixion.
good 2006/12/30: I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe: Agreeable enough, though it didn't have that special oomph.
great 2006/12/24: Oblivion, David Foster Wallace: Wild stuff.
great 2006/12/04: Plexus, Henry Miller: Now here's a ball of energy for you.
good 2006/10/27: The Counterlife, Philip Roth: More mind-blowing recursive fiction!
good 2006/10/06: Billy Bathgate, E. L. Doctorow: Mm, history-y.
good 2006/09/22: Rabbit at Rest, John Updike: So that's that.
good 2006/08/05: The Plot Against America, Philip Roth: Interestin'
great 2006/07/12: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace: I don't usually like books of short stories or things of similar form, but this one was super. With such great power to think of twisted ideas comes great responsibility.
good 2006/06/26: My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn: More interestin' stuff
good 2006/06/17: The Story of B, Daniel Quinn: Some thoughts worth thinking
great 2006/06/11: A Man In Full, Tom Wolfe: Quite good, though suspiciously similar to Bonfire
bad 2006/06/02: Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.: The combination of the subject matter and the "experimental" disregard for English grammar and layout drove me away from this before I got very far into it.
great 2006/06/01: Rabbit is Rich, John Updike: This was top-notch and a significant improvement over the first two Rabbit books.
good 2006/05/10: The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, Rebecca Goldstein: Interesting but uneven. I do wonder if the author is satirizing philosophers with some of the sections or if she really thinks that stuff is the bee's knees.
great 2006/05/03: The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe: That was pretty swell. It reminded me of DeLillo and Heller in particular. Who knows who influenced whom!
great 2006/04/24: David Copperfield, Charles Dickens: Great, but perhaps a bit longer than I would have liked.
good 2006/02/11: The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving: Not bad.
good 2006/02/06: Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman: It took a while to get started, but it ended up being reasonably good. It can't compare with American Gods, though.
great 2006/01/18: Operation Shylock, Philip Roth: This was quite good. I had to laugh when I finished reading it; the whole thing came together so well. I'm now nominating Philip Roth for Patron Saint of Paranoiacs. (Thomas Pynchon is the other main contender, as I see it.)
good 2006/01/02: Until I Find You, John Irving: Good, but not his best.
great 2005/12/20: Sexus, Henry Miller: They don't make 'em like this anymore, no sir. There sure was a lot of sex!
good 2005/11/26: On the Road, Jack Kerouac: Mildly interesting, but nothing too great. I guess I've been spoiled by all of the post-modern stuff that came later.
good 2005/11/20: The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein: Interesting and worth reading. At first I was put off by the seemingly forced and unnatural style of the writing, but it stopped bothering me.
good 2005/11/14: Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Slightly above average quality. I think the non-linear narrative was too non-linear.
great 2005/11/08: Something Happened, Joseph Heller: Interesting and worth reading. Do/did most middle-class Americans really live like this?
good 2005/10/22: Zuckerman Bound, Philip Roth: More good stuff.
good 2005/10/18: Lila, Robert Pirsig: Some parts were very interesting. The "story" parts were pretty poorly executed. Altogether uneven and disorganized.
good 2005/09/20: Radio Free Albemuth, Philip K. Dick: Pretty good. My kind of paranoid trip. I see more PKD in my future.
great 2005/09/11: Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth: Soopah doopah pizzazz.
good 2005/08/30: The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth: Every journey has a beginning. (I liked it.)
good 2005/08/18: The Great American Novel, Philip Roth: OKish and enjoyable at times. This one was entirely comic without the authentic feel that so endeared the latest Zuckerman trilogy to me.
good 2005/07/29: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov: Bleh. Some brief periods when it held my interest.
good 2005/07/17: The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene: Not bad. Not awesome.
bad 2005/06/28: The Picture of Dorian Gray (and three stories), Oscar Wilde: I wanted to give this well-known story a try, and I was hoping the Wilde-ishness I'd read before wouldn't be involved too much. It was, and the interspersing of serious stuff with wit-wars didn't work very well. I didn't have the stomach to stay for the three stories.
good 2005/06/09: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco: Off-and-on gripping. Definitely unique and imaginative.
good 2005/05/31: It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis: All right-ish. I liked the feisty 1920's charm.
good 2005/05/24: Life of Pi, Yann Martel: It was pretty good, but uneven. Anyone who needed to wait for this one to "make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction" has been living in a paper bag.
great 2005/05/22: The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger: Seal of approval granted.
great 2005/05/20: The Human Stain, Philip Roth: This was really good.
great 2005/05/15: I Married a Communist, Philip Roth: I like.
great 2005/05/04: Great Expectations, Charles Dickens: Top-notch.
good 2005/04/03: American Pastoral, Philip Roth: Hey, pretty good.
good 2005/03/20: All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy: Interestingly compelling, though I'm sure the double-quotes industry had a fit when they saw this one.
good 2005/03/05: John Barleycorn, Jack London: Pretty swell.
good 2005/02/15: Rabbit Redux, John Updike: I liked it better than the first book in this series. Definitely some good stuff here.
bad 2005/01/21: God Knows, Joseph Heller: I gave up without finishing it. It was too loose and purposeless for me. Maybe I would have liked it if I had grown up with this biblical stuff.
good 2005/01/05: Mao II, Don DeLillo: Eh. Eh.
good 2004/12/30: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving: Not bad.
great 2004/12/28: Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon: Not bad. I agreed with the author's comments in the introduction, which said that the last story, "The Secret Integration," was significantly better than the others.
great 2004/12/24: A Son of the Circus, John Irving: Really good. Very different from his previous books, and yet very similar at the same time.
good 2004/12/12: Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, Joseph Heller: Not bad.
great 2004/12/05: The Water Method Man, John Irving: A grade-A good time.
good 2004/11/26: The Body Artist, Don DeLillo: Short and sweet. Neither great nor horrible.
good 2004/11/24: Moloch, Henry Miller: Very nice writing style, when he wasn't off in the Purple Prose Nebula. Definitely promising enough to warrant trying some of his better known books.
good 2004/11/11: The World According to Garp, John Irving: It didn't quite have the life of Irving's later novels, but it had a less intense version of their quality.
great 2004/10/31: The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon: Worth reading, if only for another masterful treatment of paranoia. A few times I wondered if Pynchon had written a paragraph just to be confusing.
bad 2004/10/28: Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov: Not very remarkable.
good 2004/10/10: Ishmael, Daniel Quinn: Interesting
great 2004/10/02: Catch-22, Joseph Heller: This is really something!
good 2004/09/18: Americana, Don DeLillo: Y'know, I really liked a lot of it, but it spent a lot of time dragging in Part 3. I also found a pathetically prolix style that DeLillo seemed to abandon immediately after this one.
great 2004/09/03: The Cider House Rules, John Irving: Great
good 2004/08/29: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo: Pretty good
great 2004/08/27: The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto: An extremely illuminating book; highly recommended
great 2004/08/22: Vineland, Thomas Pynchon: My appreciation for this guy just grows and grows. This book is both more down-to-earth and weirded than his previous.
good 2004/08/07: Rabbit, Run, John Updike: It didn't always hold my interest, but in the end I liked it.
good 2004/07/30: Picture This, Joseph Heller: Just my luck; I picked up another nontraditional sort of deal. I enjoyed it all the same. It almost makes me angry that I've had no exposure to "Classics" in my formal education.
good 2004/07/25: Now and Then, Joseph Heller: I picked this one at random from the library shelves because the title sounded good, not realizing that it was an autobiography. It was pretty good, as autobiographies go. The writing was amazingly good. This man past age 70 had an amazing knack for writing pleasing English. So, I'm on to reading some of his fiction!
bad 2004/07/20: Old School, Tobias Wolff: Eh, mediocre.
great 2004/07/19: A Widow for One Year, John Irving: Super duper as usual.
great 2004/07/13: Libra, Don DeLillo: Very good.
good 2004/07/05: Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Fairly good. I find Vonnegut's repetition of phrases and overfrequent references to his other books annoying, though.
good 2004/06/29: The Fourth Hand, John Irving: Pretty good.
great 2004/06/23: Underworld, Don DeLillo: Again, it grew on me as I read it. The idea of moving backwards in time as the book progressed was very effective.
great 2004/06/05: A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving: Another excellent book
bad 2004/06/03: An Outcast of the Islands, Joseph Conrad: I gave it a chance, but it just couldn't hold my interest, so I gave up. The writing was waaay too verbose.
bad 2004/05/30: Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell: A curious book. I think Orwell was trying to get across a social message, but it was generally unclear which of his characters and their views he agreed with.
good 2004/05/26: The 158-Pound Marriage, John Irving: Another good one, though a bit more erotic than expected!
great 2004/05/21: Mason and Dixon, Thomas Pynchon: Very enjoyable. The 90's Pynchon is much more organized than the 70's Pynchon. The sudden songs were kept to a minimum.
good 2004/04/26: Players, Don DeLillo: This was short but reasonably enjoyable.
great 2004/04/24: The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving: Wow. This book is amazing. Need I say more?
good 2004/04/22: Setting Free the Bears, John Irving: This book was quite good, though the quality was inconsistent in places. I got the impression that this book was one of those attempts to merge several story ideas into one book. You'll see what I mean if you read it.
bad 2004/04/14: The Psychology of Computer Programming, Gerald Weinberg: I don't think I've really taken too much away from this book, especially given that most of what it talks about is based on the outdated computing conventions of the early 1970's. However, I have to say that Gerald Weinberg is one of the best nonfiction authors I have ever read. He has a very lucid writing style that keeps the reader interested.
great 2004/04/06: V., Thomas Pynchon: Overall positive opinion, though I often felt like it lacked organization and coherence. There really wasn't any clear connection between the two parallel stories that got about equal time and merged senselessly near the end.
bad 2004/03/17: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell: I stopped reading this after the first of two parts. There were some interesting ideas, though somehow I feel like I would have gotten just as much out of a short article.
good 2004/02/19: Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: An interesting story, very reminiscent of Timequake, though I read them in the reverse order to that in which they were written decades apart.
good 2004/02/18: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: I liked this one a lot. Very good weaving of social commentary into an engaging story.
good 2004/02/17: Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: I thought it was mediocre. There weren't really any sympathetic characters for me in it, and the plot came across as somewhat disorganized.
bad 2004/02/14: Strange News from Another Star, Hermann Hesse: As I would expect from a book alternately entitled "Fairy Tales," this one wasn't really my style. I hadn't realized that these short stories were written shortly before Hesse got into psychodrama.
good 2004/02/08: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, William Barrett: This was quite clearly written, and I feel like I understand the basics of existentialism much better now than before I read this.
great 2004/01/27: The Names, Don DeLillo: I really enjoyed this one. It was a little slow starting up, but I ended up appreciating it more in the way I would appreciate a poem than the way I would usually appreciate a novel.
good 2004/01/14: Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: I picked this one out expecting a novel. It turned out to be some weird unstructured autobiographical thing. Nonetheless, I ended up enjoying it.
bad 2004/01/13: Rudin/On the Eve, Ivan Turgenev: Pretty unremarkable stories.
bad 2004/01/10: Ratner's Star, Don DeLillo: Sometimes interesting, but not particularly satisfying. It reminded me more of Kafka's The Castle than the previous DeLillo books that I've liked. Instead of putting strange characters in believable situations, DeLillo puts strange characters in absurd situations for the entire book.
bad 2004/01/10: Running Dog, Don DeLillo: The streak is spoiled. This one is very different from his two books that I read previously. Somewhat enjoyable, but too action oriented. Not enough improbable conversation. Too real.
great 2004/01/05: Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon: Interesting book. Very 70's. If all your life you've longed for a novel full of spontaneous singing, then Gravity's Rainbow may be your deliverance.
good 2003/12/20: Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë: Recommended by opet in #haskell. I ended up enjoying it. It didn't rock my world, but that's OK.
good 2003/12/12: The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler: I read this on recommendation from Andrew Clausen, and I was pleasantly surprised. Seeing as how it's a detective story, I was expecting something much, much more pulpy than I got. The plot and behavior of characters were close to what I expected, but it was very intelligently written.
good 2003/12/11: Great Jones Street, Don DeLillo: This one ended up being pretty enjoyable. I think it got significantly better somewhere near its middle. OK, time to stop reading DeLillo before I overdose or something.
great 2003/11/30: End Zone, Don DeLillo: Another very good book from this author. Doubly impressive for being centrally about football and still being enjoyable for me.
good 2003/11/27: Nabokov's Dozen, Vladimir Nabokov: Mixed feelings. I liked the story about the crazy kid. :-)
good 2003/10/20: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald: Not stupendous, but surprisingly good for something so often assigned in high school English classes
bad 2003/10/13: Forty Stories, Donald Barthelme: Abandoned because I don't like the format.
great 2003/10/11: White Noise, Don DeLillo: :-) Good recommendation by dwb.
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