Books You Might Enjoy
(besides mine)
My wife’s the one in the family who’s taking the lit class– once again– from Tom Buesch at CMC (Colorado Mountain College), so she’d have the goods on “serious reading.” The ones below are just fun.
FICTION
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Gerald Durrell. My Family and Other Animals. (1956) His first book. Younger brother of Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet, et. al.). Gerald was the naturalist in the family. Started the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. A pioneer in the field of breeding endangered species in captivity, and then re-introducing them back into their native habitat. The man’s career was truly inspiring, and his many books are fun (and funny) cold-winter-night reading.
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Kurt Vonnegut. The Sirens of Titan. (1959) I know, we’ve all read this, years ago. But it (and a lot of his other stuff) bears re-reading. And an UPDATE: I just found a new book, Look at the Birdie, previously unpublished short fiction of Vonnegut’s from the 50′s & 60′s, at the library. (Delacorte Press, 2009.)
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Flann O’Brien. The Third Policeman. (1967) The Dalkey Archive. (1964) Irish writer virtually unknown in the U.S. My own personal crusade. His “misterpiece,” as James Joyce referred to it, was At-Swim-Two-Birds. (1939) One of my all-time favorites, but these other two are easier. (Dalkey contains a great send-up of Joyce.)
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Daniel Dennett. If you can find it at the library: The lecture found at the tail-end of Brainstorms: “Where Am I” (pp.321-23). (1981) Dennett’s become a leading– strident– voice in the contemporary “atheist onslaught,” but this short piece (delivered to a convocation of “professional philosophers”) is both thought-provoking and amusing. I even tried to turn it into a screenplay once, during my Hollywood days.
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Neal Stephenson. The Baroque Cycle. (trilogy: 2003-2004. 2600+ pages) Great beach reading– if you’re going to be at the beach all summer. Spans continents, and 250 years. One of the main characters (I’m not making this up) is Isaac Newton. His nemesis, Gottfried Leibniz, is in it, too.
NON-FICTION
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Emily Wilson. The Death of Socrates. (2007) Writing about Socrates has lately become an industry in itself. This book might be the best of them, for general readers. It’s enough, at least, to make you wonder whether you would’ve voted against him, yourself.
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Damian Thompson. Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History. (2008) The title pretty much covers it.
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Richard A. Muller. Physics for Future Presidents. (2008) From a bona-fide expert: the background science you’d need to master for intelligent policy and resource-allocation decisions. And how you’d explain those decisions to a science-challenged citizenry.
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John C. Bogle. Enough. (2009) A short book from the founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group (and you’d only have to read the first half, to get the point). A reminder that needless complexity, when it comes to investing, isn’t meant to enrich you. The ancient Stoics would’ve loved this guy.
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Aspen, CO