The All-New Bunrab

some of which must return to library Thursday. So I'd better mention 'em now.

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent - amusic, sometimes superficial. He makes an interesting case, in his chapter about the SCA, for the way the SCA manages to create nerd jocks, unlike most nerdy groups.

Recovery Man by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - latest in her Retrieval Artist (Miles Flint) series; all the books in this series are seriously good crime fic/mystery fic as well as quite acceptable science fiction - a far more serious blend of SF elements than, say, J.D. Robb. I like the way she does really alien aliens. And I like the dry sense of humor that sneaks in occasionally. This volume has far more to do with Miles' past history/personal life than any of the previous ones. One of the things I like best is how realistic the characters are - even the nasty-guy Recovery Man has some sophisticated thoughts and thinks about what he's doing, not an all-evil-all-the-time-just-because villain.

Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck. Well, of course, RVs/motor homes/campers are a lot more common now than they were in 1960, and the interstate highway system is a lot more complete (even in some of its deteriorating-infrastructure state), so some of the book is a bit dated. But it's still interesting, especially the postscript about the Kennedy inauguration - coming up as we are on the Obama inauguration, which, you will recall, is more or less a local event where I am; yes, traffic and security and whatnot for DC does stretch all the way to our area.

I had briefly mentioned Odysseus on the Rhine but didn't say anything about it, and I should. It's a sequel to The Odyssey and before you go "ewwww" please listen when I say it's quite nicely done. I've added a review to Amazon.com, which should be posted within a few hours. (And if you read it and like it, besides the Yes button, could you possibly add a comment? I'm a glutton for comments, and they keep Amazon from thinking that it's the same few fans all the time. Thanks!)

A few posts ago, I mentioned Dave Freer's A Mankind Witch, and in truth it was a bit from that, as much as Granny Ogg's writings, that inspired the post "To Serve Rat." Oddly enough, *after* that was when I ran across the book Rats: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, from whence came yesterday's tweets about rats. And then, AFTER I had twittered those, I read the newspaper, and lo! an article about rats in Baltimore! The city is proposing a rat census, as the first step in reducing Baltimore's rat problem; the initial estimate of the number of rats in Baltimore City is 3 million! Which is quite a bit more than one for every fifteen people - Baltimore City is only about 700,000 people, although the metro area of much of Baltimore County is well over a million.

And the slightly odd tone of the above paragraph may be explained by the fact that I am currently reading John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor - a book that had never held the slightest interest for me, until 1001 Books for Every Mood happened to mention that it wasn't just a detailed historical novel of colonial America, it was also a hysterically funny soap opera of a tale. And indeed, in Barth's introduction to the edition I happened to get from the library, he states right out that his intent was to write as much in the style of Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) as he could. So far I am having fun reading it, although it has to be gone at only a couple dozen pages at a time, and it is a great fat book, so it will take a while. And for that while, it will undoubtedly continue to influence my writing style. Perhaps not quite as wordy as when I read Steven Brust's The Phoenix Guards, which had me talking funny for weeks, as well as writing, but still funnier than ordinary twenty-first century Kelly.

Okay, so after the flu in the middle of August and then a week at Sally's inhaling dust, I couldn't stop coughing and I felt even more fatigued than usual; eventually I started thinking maybe there's fluid in my lungs, so I went to the doc. Apparently not fluid, just inflamation, so using steroid inhaler (as of this past Wed) to reduce inflamation; it's working a bit, I guess - still coughing and stuff, but nearly back to only tired all the time instead of exhausted to the point of not getting out of bed.

I got a couple of RL projects done - finally finished a couple of bedside rugs I've been working on for me and squirrel_magnet, since cooler weather is coming and we may not want to step onto cold floors. I'll try to get pictures of them sometime soon. Started work on wedding gift for my cousin Jesse who got married last September - goal is to finish the stuff (quilted table runner and 4 placemats) and mail them off by the end of this month, a year after the wedding. Still cleaning up bits and pieces at old house; we buried Lamarck chinchilla who passed away this past spring and had been in the freezer, and I put a stepping stone on his grave - I'll take a picture of that, too, when I get a chance.

And there has been reading, as usual:

Book I did not finish: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. Forty years ago I didn't make it ten pages in before giving up out of total lack of interest in figuring out who these characters were; twenty years ago I made it about twenty pages in; this time, all the way to page 27 before closing it again. I do not care enough about Hindu mythology and other mythology to follow who these characters are, who is an avatar of who else, who is on which side... I just don't care.

Book I didn't like: White Oleander by Janet Fitch. This was apparently a big bestseller and very popular with book clubs, and it reads exactly as if it were written to be a book club discussion subject, and I don't mean that kindly. Where some reviewer sees a "surprising journey of self-discovery" I see a protagonist who stays stupid the whole way through - she doesn't make the same mistake twice, but she makes new and dumber ones all the time, and never seems to wise up and stop approaching life as a manipulating but clueless slut. We're supposed to care about what she learns from each of her foster mothers, and compare them, but she doesn't ever seem to learn any rational kind of lesson. Even when her own mother gets out of jail, she isn't really happy. This book doesn't really have much of a plot; the character grows older but doesn't grow up; her mother gets out of jail but that's just a small paragraph amidst the general whining and indecisiveness. Bleah. I know thousands of people disagree with this evaluation of the book; clearly, many people are looking more for "emotionally gripping" than for "fast-moving plot and rational characters."

And for stuff I did enjoy: Watchers by Dean Koontz - not great literature, but a fast-moving plot and nice characters! This is the first Koontz I've ever read - somehow managed to not get around to any till now. This one features a golden retriever named Einstein, genetically modified to near-human intelligence, able to read and even converse in writing. Plot also includes a nastier genetically modified character, the Outsider, and along the way we are supposed to compare the Outsider and Vince the mob hit-man, and notice which of them is really less human and kills more people. That part is a bit obvious. But hey, it's a good story, and most of the characters are likeable, and there's a more-or-less happy ending.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. This is a novel about a historian who is researching Vlad Tepes, who turns out to be an immortal vampire after all, sort of, only not. It's a very long book, and some of it was longer than need be - in almost a deliberate imitation of Victorian style, there is much more exposition, and jumping back from generation to generation, and words upon words, than is really necessary. Sometimes one can lose track of which generation is taking place - is it our female protagonist as a teenager listening to her father tell about his research, or the father listening to his mentor from a generation earlier, or is it 30 years later? We run through all sorts of minute historical detail from the 1470's onward. I admit to skimming in spots.

Smoke-Filled Rooms by Kris Nelscott - a murder mystery set during the 1968 Chicago convention, featuring a black, male, PI - written in the first person by Nelscott, which is one of Kristen Kathryn Rusch's pen names. So, quite a feat of characterization. Anyway, a decent mystery, though a bit of gory torture of the sort I really don't think could go unnoticed for so long. Much of the plot is timely enough given this election year. I'll probably look for the rest of the series.

The Apostate's Tale by Margaret Frazer - most recent in her Dame Frevisse series, and this one returns more to the priory (convent) after the last couple of very political volumes. The last two were almost entirely about English political uprisings and Frevisse's cousin Alice, and I was not crazy about them; I was glad to see this one get back to the day to day details of everyday life in the fifteenth century. Unfortunately, it's probably the last one, since it ends with Frevisse becoming Prioress, and also it's set in 1452, so any ten minutes now the printing press is going to come along and destroy the priory's book-copying business and only source of income.

Warning: I am going to attempt Twittering. No telling what may show up.

Now to go see if I can catch up on a couple of weeks of unread flist. Speaking of, Chas, your bday present will be in the mail tomorrow. richspk, speaking of addresses, I need your snail mail address. Email me, plz.

I did warn y'all that my attempt to read more nonfiction and a lower percentage of murder mysteries was going to probably mean a lot of pop science. Well, here's some of that:

Fish That Fake Orgasms, and other zoological curiosities by Matt Walker - whole bunch of biology trivia, in little factiod snippets. Not completely accurate, either; he consistently refers to the domestic horse as equus callabus instead of equus caballus, and apparently no proofreader or copy editor caught it.

Father Knows Less, or, Can I Cook My Sister? by Wendell Jamieson. One man's attempt to find answers to all the weird questions his five year old son asks. He also collects odd questions from other people's children, and even some of the ones he asked his father when he was around 5. After collecting all these questions, he then goes to various experts to find answers - the director of the Division of Pain Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, for example, to answer the question, "What would hurt more: getting run over by a car or getting stung by a jellyfish?" and to the official historian of the FBI in Washington DC, to answer , "Why is it called 'kidnapping' if you can steal away adults, too?"

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby. Endersby is English, and so this history is slightly Anglocentric, but nonetheless good. Basically, it's the story of how the mating of a USDA colony of guinea pigs with a bunch of wild Russian fruit flies led to modern molecular biology. No, really, it's sort of an era-by-era look at biology by looking at what plants and animals were being studied, when. We start with the quagga, which went extinct in 1883, in a chapter titled "Equus quagga and Lord Morton's mare" and go on through a plant in Darwin's greenhouse, homo sapiens as Francis Galton's research animal, Mendel's work on the pale hawkweed; Hugo de Vries and some flower; then, "Drosophila melanogaster: Bananas, bottles and Bolsheviks" which ties back to Galton. Finally, we get to chapter 7, "Cavia porcellus: mathematical guinea pigs." We get a history of the domestication of the cavy, and of the naming of it, and then of Abraham Lincoln's establishment of the USDA in 1862, and within only a few decades, the USDA had a large colony of guinea pigs at its experimental farm in Maryland - which I happen to know where that was; we drive past the current Dept. of Agriculture site along Rt. 29 regularly, and every time I see its enormous front lawn now, I envision piggies browsing there. Sewall Wright, who had started working on guinea pigs accidentally as a grad student at Harvard, kept in touch with JBS Haldane from about 1915 on. Haldane and his sister had had a huge bunch of guinea pigs as children:

...his sister Naomi (who would later become a celebrated novelist under her married name, Naomi Mitchison) developed an allergy to the horses she had loved and took up keeping guinea pigs instead. She loved the animals and knew many of them by name; she could impersonate their squeaks and grunts so well that they would answer her. When her elder brother came home from Eton for the school holidays and discovered her new pets, he 'suggested that we should try out what was then called Mendelism on them.' She agreed, deciding that 'Mendelism seemed quite within my intellectual grasp,' and so her pet population began to expand. ... One of JBS's friends remembered that in 1908 the lawn of the Haldanes' house was entirely free from the usual upper-class clutter of croquet hoops and tennis nets; instead, behind wire fencing, were 300 guinea pigs.

Anyway, Haldane's work interested Wright, and Wright went to work for the USDA. And therein lies the tale. By the way, did you know that guinea pigs helped win twenty-three Nobel prizes?

The book does continue after that, to the bacteriophage virus, corn, a plant called mouse-ear cress (at least in England), the zebrafish - still in use in a lot of heart research! - and finally OncoMouse (r), the first patented, transgenic animal.

Great but serious reading, not written for humor like the first two or like Where's My Jetpack? from a previous post (that one was actually written almost entirely for the sake of being sarcastic).

OK, let's see. The Cymry Ring by Michael Allen Dymmoch. I had previously read one of Dymmoch's books, Murder in West Wheeling, a humorous mystery, and I guess I expected another similar. Instead, what I got was time travel. Not terribly SF, since the mechanism by which the time travel works is never explained - just, her dad has a time travel machine, she uses it, poof it gets blown up, and that's all we ever hear about it. But an interesting story anyway; our protagonists travel back to Wales in Roman/Boudiccan times.
In the Company of Books; Literature And Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-century America by Sarah Wadsworth. Obviously started its life as someone's doctoral dissertation. Basically an explanation of how the market for fiction came to be segmented out into books for adults vs. books for children, books for women different from books for men, books for boys different from books for girls, books for the lower economic clases vs. books for the elite, and books for rural families vs. books for urban readers. Before the 1800's there really wasn't any such market segmentation. Examinations of Louisa May Alcott's specific role as a writer of "girls books" and how the marketing of such was being developed, and Samuel Clemens' ambivalence about being typed as a writer of "boys books." Having the brief recaps of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn here turned out to be useful, because I hadn't reread those since I read them once as a kid - I never liked them that much. Nonetheless, the refresher turned out to be useful for another book I read:
A Fictional History of the United States (with Huge Chunks Missing) by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach. A title which is hugely misleading, because although the book has 20 short pieces, not all of them are stories, or even fiction, some of them are only related to history because they're collected in a book that claims to be US history and otherwise nobody would think the stories were about US history. Certainly the David Rees comic isn't a story. OTOH, the story which purports to be the further adventures of Huck Finn in New Orleans was hysterically funny, and I wouldn't have appreciated it nearly as much had I not been reminded just previously of some of the details of the original. The story about a Russian immigrant girl in the early 20th century is touching. Most of the stories, however, were way too postmodern for my taste.
Air America: The Playbook with an intro by Al Franken, is mostly transcripts from the radio shows: interviews, excerpts from the Creep of the Week feature, etc. Funny in spots, but a lot of this worked much better on air than it does as reading.

Other than that, a bunch of magazines, as usual.