So, here are the two more memorable books I read while recovering this week –
1) Never hit a jellyfish with a spade and
2) Latitude zero: tales of the equator
I checked out four books and dipped into all of them .. these are the two that I fully read, the two that actually caught and captured my attention.
So – Christina – is it safe to mention the book yet? Have you finished? Chris .. ditto?
All these serious topics lately! I feel downright frivolous posting a book review.
But, maybe for normalacy’s sake, I’m going to go ahead with it.
Just finished Darwin and the Barnacle. Good book. Talks about all the classification work Darwin did before publishing Origin of the Species.
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This was a great book – took me a while to read through it, because it’s densely packed with all sorts of details, but that’s a good thing. The full title is Cache la Poudre: The natural history of a Rocky Mountain river. That pretty much says it all.
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OK, here’s the latest book that I read. Sort of.
This book …. sigh. It’s the people who make Pet Promise pet food, which I thoroughly approve of. The book is signed by one of them, actually, and was given to me. By all accounts, it should have been a nice little feel good book.
Just finished a great book, literary criticism on the Odyssey (library book). It gave me a whole new set of ways to look at the story; I’ll have to re-read it when I finally unpack it. That’s what good literary criticism does for me; it makes me want to go back to the original and get that broader, deeper, richer understanding of the story.
It also – and this is an aside – sometimes makes me feel that people shouldn’t read real literature until they’re in college, at least. So many things that I read in HS – I think I’ve read them, but then something like this comes along and shows me just how much I missed since I didn’t have any experience or perspective. And if I don’t know to re-read the book, I’ll just miss all that detail.
So .. to the book ..
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OK, this is sort of in response to Mom’s post about how we don’t post much. She’s painting, I’m reading. I did make a new category, though, with the thought that as I finish a book I’ll put something up in this category saying that I’d done so.
Just finished “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Imossible and Learned to Disappear”
Thought it was going to be a history of magic book, and it sort of was. It was the history of magic leading to the trick of hiding an elephant. Imagine that you just saw a historical special on this trick, and you turn to your friend, the expert magician and magic historian, and say ‘how did they come up with that trick?’ And then he answers you. Exhaustively.
Of course, the author knows what he’s doing, so he picked the right trick to explain. Explaining it takes you through 100 years – mid 1800s through mid 1900s – I’d say the full era, though not the full history of magic. And also of course, the author knows what he’s doing, so he doesn’t actually explain much of the details of the trick (or any of the other tricks leading to the elephant). But that’s ok, as he points out that the story and the magic is in the performance, not the mechanics. Many of the tricks premiered in science lecture halls on the interesting properties of optics – the same mechanism was either scientific lecture or magic, depending on whether the presenter was a scientific lecturer or a magician. And besides, as he points out and the extensive notes show, if I’m interested in how it was done I can find that out.
So, 300 pages and 100 years of interesting people. A cultural biography from a new perspective (new to me, anyway). It might have been better if I’d been a little more familiar, with the time, the topic, or the characters. But it is a well written book, easy to follow and be interested in even when you’re not all that familiar with the topic.