Book List
Just a few short additions to the book list- I've been watching shows and reading fanfic a lot as a result, so the book reading has taken a side path. I also suspect there was at least one other book in here, read while I was up at my folks' place, but I didn't write it down and it didn't make much of an impact. Oh well.)
17: Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales by William Bass and Jon Jefferson
A seriously cool book and very entertainingly told. William Bass is an anthrolopogist whose lab at the University of Tennesse founded the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility that is commonly known as the Body Farm, where forensic anthropologists can study the process of decay under a variety of conditions. One of the aspects of this story that I found fascinating is how much of this information was simply not known in any systematic way until fairly recently. How fast does a body decay when out in the open? When buried? When enclosed in a container? How can you answer these questions when solving murders so as to help you identify time and condition of death in order to identify the murderer? Confronted with cases where they simply couldn't answer these questions, or worse, the scarcity of knowledge lead them to answer it incorrectly, they developed ways to study the problem and add to our understanding of the process of death/
Bass talks about it all in a very human and humored way that softens some of the potential gruesomeness of the stories (although, you know, I'm a pathologist's daughter and I have a skull in a bucket in my back yard, so I might not be a great judge), with anecdotes about his wife banning him from the kitchen and making him buy a new stove after some of his experiments in flesh removal got a little, um, out of hand, or about the need find answers for the living that makes this quest for knowledge so meaningful.
Highly recommended.
18 Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand
I liked this book. I really wanted to love it though, as it was lent to me by a friend years ago and has been on my to-read pile ever since, and I trust her taste. This is a gorgeous, interesting, and well-written book that just isn't a match for me.
There's a lot to really like. It's set in the DC area and the descriptions are perfect, filled with little details of place that really do feel like this town, or at least this town at the times of the story. Hand is wonderful at writing in a sensual style- if she describes a meal, you'll taste the meal and you'll be hungry after. If she describes a walk, you'll feel the breeze and smell the flowers and you will know what that walk is like. It all feels very accurate and beautifully detailed.
The plot is complex and the character arcs are interesting. Set partially in the 70's at a DC area religiously-affiliated university, and partly in the late 80's/early 90's in the same area, we follow a group of friends as they uncover an age-old secret society, waiting ancient powers, and shifting powers as people enact and personalize ancient rituals.
I think my problem with it is that I really only fall in love with character-driven stories (reading the Lord Peter series, for instance, I really only barely care about the crime so much as I care about how he and his friends respond to it. Plot is a way to make people run around, for my reading tastes), and while the characters in this book were interesting and human, they weren't the kind I warmed to- just a little too detached, a little too little sense of humor, a little too cloaked in the beauty of the story. I had the same problem with a number of stories I've read (Palimpsest and Kushiel's Dart come to mind) where the descriptions are lush but no one ever laughs. Waking the Moon is more approachable and warmer than those, but still had that problem for me. It's a book that feels like a beautiful dress- I can appreciate that it is gorgeous, well-made, flattering, and absolutely appropriate to any number of occasions to which I would feel out of place.
This is not a criticism of the book. There's any number of books I've read and haven't liked and had no problem with saying that the reason I didn't connect with it was that the book was at fault. This book is really extremely well written, just not for me.
Recommended for people with more taste and dignity than I have.
19. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Years ago I took a class in IT support of some kind (clearly it did not take), and the mantra of it, and the one I use a lot when trying to problem solve here at work, is 'check the stupid stuff first'.
Gawande, a surgeon, goes in a search to investigate how complex and multifaceted processes where mistakes can cost lives and/or millions of dollars (surgery, plane flight, high rise construction, disaster recovery) to find out how people manage to organize so as to avoid the stupid stuff. The checklist is the answer.
In a series of varied investigations and meetings with people from a wide variety of industries, and in a large number of entertainingly told (though sometimes horrifying, such as plane crashes and disasters in emergency rooms), Gawande discovers how different industries find ways to strike a balance between cumbersome oversight and flexibility of response, dispersal of responsibility and team-building in situations where efficiency is vital. From getting people to use soap efficiently in resource-poor areas to proving some level of panic-proofing in a crashing plane, checklists provide a great way to help normalize needed behavior, support against oversight, and a balance for human error. He also talks about the human objection to checklists- against all evidence that they help eliminate errors, are cheap, effective, and efficient, most industries still balk at implementing them, usually because the places that embrace the image of the brilliant individual who acts on but-level instinct as the guide in a high-risk, dynamic field holds something as fussy as a checklist in contempt. Ironically, these are usually the places where the sorts of failures that a checklist can prevent tend to be the most dramatic.
Seriously, after reading this, I need to make more lists. Reminds me of the story my dad tells (he sometimes claims it's about his mother, but I suspect he stole it from somewhere else) about the woman who made lists for everything, and then as soon as she was done she'd start crossing items off- because the first thing on every list was "make a list".
I started reading Gawande's work because I was looking for something like the work of Oliver Sachs- something that tied medical oddities to every day experiences and helped illustrate the working processes that made us human. Gawande's work is not as exotic as Sachs', but he does a wonderful job of showing how the principles that help him as a surgeon work in the rest of life, and how lessons from one area show up in other places. He's a good writer with a diverse range of interests and willing to explore seemingly disparate areas of study to find illuminating and unifying insights.
A very good read, and highly recommended.
(I'm currently reading the second Mistborn book, The Well of Ascension, which is 816 pages, so don't expect another one of these for a while. I may cheat and steal some of my niece's books next time I'm to see them, just to bump up my count. Plus I gave them Dragonbreath and I really do want to read it. Hey wait, I can cheat here:
20 Jim, Who Ran Away From His Nurse and Was Eaten by a Lion by Hillaire Belloc
Because this is what Libby keeps asking me to read her. I think we read it four times at Easter, which is pretty standard count. Huh, I guess there's something slightly inappropriate about stories of little children getting eaten by lions at Easter, but it made us both happy.)
17: Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales by William Bass and Jon Jefferson
A seriously cool book and very entertainingly told. William Bass is an anthrolopogist whose lab at the University of Tennesse founded the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility that is commonly known as the Body Farm, where forensic anthropologists can study the process of decay under a variety of conditions. One of the aspects of this story that I found fascinating is how much of this information was simply not known in any systematic way until fairly recently. How fast does a body decay when out in the open? When buried? When enclosed in a container? How can you answer these questions when solving murders so as to help you identify time and condition of death in order to identify the murderer? Confronted with cases where they simply couldn't answer these questions, or worse, the scarcity of knowledge lead them to answer it incorrectly, they developed ways to study the problem and add to our understanding of the process of death/
Bass talks about it all in a very human and humored way that softens some of the potential gruesomeness of the stories (although, you know, I'm a pathologist's daughter and I have a skull in a bucket in my back yard, so I might not be a great judge), with anecdotes about his wife banning him from the kitchen and making him buy a new stove after some of his experiments in flesh removal got a little, um, out of hand, or about the need find answers for the living that makes this quest for knowledge so meaningful.
Highly recommended.
18 Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand
I liked this book. I really wanted to love it though, as it was lent to me by a friend years ago and has been on my to-read pile ever since, and I trust her taste. This is a gorgeous, interesting, and well-written book that just isn't a match for me.
There's a lot to really like. It's set in the DC area and the descriptions are perfect, filled with little details of place that really do feel like this town, or at least this town at the times of the story. Hand is wonderful at writing in a sensual style- if she describes a meal, you'll taste the meal and you'll be hungry after. If she describes a walk, you'll feel the breeze and smell the flowers and you will know what that walk is like. It all feels very accurate and beautifully detailed.
The plot is complex and the character arcs are interesting. Set partially in the 70's at a DC area religiously-affiliated university, and partly in the late 80's/early 90's in the same area, we follow a group of friends as they uncover an age-old secret society, waiting ancient powers, and shifting powers as people enact and personalize ancient rituals.
I think my problem with it is that I really only fall in love with character-driven stories (reading the Lord Peter series, for instance, I really only barely care about the crime so much as I care about how he and his friends respond to it. Plot is a way to make people run around, for my reading tastes), and while the characters in this book were interesting and human, they weren't the kind I warmed to- just a little too detached, a little too little sense of humor, a little too cloaked in the beauty of the story. I had the same problem with a number of stories I've read (Palimpsest and Kushiel's Dart come to mind) where the descriptions are lush but no one ever laughs. Waking the Moon is more approachable and warmer than those, but still had that problem for me. It's a book that feels like a beautiful dress- I can appreciate that it is gorgeous, well-made, flattering, and absolutely appropriate to any number of occasions to which I would feel out of place.
This is not a criticism of the book. There's any number of books I've read and haven't liked and had no problem with saying that the reason I didn't connect with it was that the book was at fault. This book is really extremely well written, just not for me.
Recommended for people with more taste and dignity than I have.
19. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Years ago I took a class in IT support of some kind (clearly it did not take), and the mantra of it, and the one I use a lot when trying to problem solve here at work, is 'check the stupid stuff first'.
Gawande, a surgeon, goes in a search to investigate how complex and multifaceted processes where mistakes can cost lives and/or millions of dollars (surgery, plane flight, high rise construction, disaster recovery) to find out how people manage to organize so as to avoid the stupid stuff. The checklist is the answer.
In a series of varied investigations and meetings with people from a wide variety of industries, and in a large number of entertainingly told (though sometimes horrifying, such as plane crashes and disasters in emergency rooms), Gawande discovers how different industries find ways to strike a balance between cumbersome oversight and flexibility of response, dispersal of responsibility and team-building in situations where efficiency is vital. From getting people to use soap efficiently in resource-poor areas to proving some level of panic-proofing in a crashing plane, checklists provide a great way to help normalize needed behavior, support against oversight, and a balance for human error. He also talks about the human objection to checklists- against all evidence that they help eliminate errors, are cheap, effective, and efficient, most industries still balk at implementing them, usually because the places that embrace the image of the brilliant individual who acts on but-level instinct as the guide in a high-risk, dynamic field holds something as fussy as a checklist in contempt. Ironically, these are usually the places where the sorts of failures that a checklist can prevent tend to be the most dramatic.
Seriously, after reading this, I need to make more lists. Reminds me of the story my dad tells (he sometimes claims it's about his mother, but I suspect he stole it from somewhere else) about the woman who made lists for everything, and then as soon as she was done she'd start crossing items off- because the first thing on every list was "make a list".
I started reading Gawande's work because I was looking for something like the work of Oliver Sachs- something that tied medical oddities to every day experiences and helped illustrate the working processes that made us human. Gawande's work is not as exotic as Sachs', but he does a wonderful job of showing how the principles that help him as a surgeon work in the rest of life, and how lessons from one area show up in other places. He's a good writer with a diverse range of interests and willing to explore seemingly disparate areas of study to find illuminating and unifying insights.
A very good read, and highly recommended.
(I'm currently reading the second Mistborn book, The Well of Ascension, which is 816 pages, so don't expect another one of these for a while. I may cheat and steal some of my niece's books next time I'm to see them, just to bump up my count. Plus I gave them Dragonbreath and I really do want to read it. Hey wait, I can cheat here:
20 Jim, Who Ran Away From His Nurse and Was Eaten by a Lion by Hillaire Belloc
Because this is what Libby keeps asking me to read her. I think we read it four times at Easter, which is pretty standard count. Huh, I guess there's something slightly inappropriate about stories of little children getting eaten by lions at Easter, but it made us both happy.)