fewer than 52
So, not very surprisingly, I didn't get nearly as many books reviewed as I'd undertaken to. In lieu of proper reviews, here's a list of the books on my "to be reviewed" pile, which got reset when we moved house in early September. If I'd done them all, it would have brought the total to 50, which (1) is still less than 52 and (2) in any case includes a few I've read or finished since the new year. Ah well, a man's reach should exceed his grasp and all that.
The books are in no particular order. Paragraph divisions are arbitrary and intended only to break up the big block of text. Links are almost all to isbn.nu and unverified.
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Probably the funniest book ever written about Armageddon. · Dialogues and Natural History of Religion by David Hume. Very fine indeed, but you already knew that if you have any interest at all in this sort of thing. · Mr Belloc Objects to "The Outline of History" by H G Wells. Mr Belloc chiefly objected to what Wells had to say about evolution, and I found little book is depressing reading because it shows how little the arguments and tactics of creationists and quasi-creationists have changed in 80 years. · The man who ate everything and It must've been something I ate, by Jeffrey Steingarten. A collection of columns about eating and cooking. Much more entertaining than that sounds. · Amo, amas, amat ... and all that, by Harry Mount. Undertakes to teach the previously ignorant reader enough Latin to read monumental inscriptions and make some sense of Latin poetry. I suspect the real market is people who have some half-fond half-recollections of Latin from their school days. Quite witty, but sometimes too self-consciously so. Probably not really able to do what it undertakes to do. · On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. An attempt to describe how the brain works, based on the idea that basically the whole cortex is doing much the same thing and that we have a reasonable idea of what that thing is. Hawkins claims it won't be long before (using his ideas, natch) we have genuinely intelligent machines. Probably grievously overoptimistic, but I expect there's something to his ideas. · American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. This time it's Ragnarök, near enough, rather than Armageddon, and the tone is distinctly different. A jolly good novel. · Animals in Translation, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Temple Grandin is a (by all accounts successful and insightful) expert on animal behaviour, who is autistic and claims that her insight into animal behaviour derives from similarities between the minds of autistic people and those of animals. There's a lot of speculation in the book, of the form "Animals have property X; I know this because I'm autistic and I think I have property X and animals are just like autistic people", which I mostly found annoying; but she's a famous expert on animal behaviour and I'm not, so quite likely I'm just wrong.
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney. Good stuff. I don't know the first thing about Old English poetry and can't comment on how the translation measures up to the original, except that Heaney kindly provides both for the first 29 lines. The translation appears to be less concise (and I'd guess therefore less powerful) than the original, but I suspect poetry almost always grows in translation. · Karl Marx, by Francis Wheen. An absolutely excellent biography so far as I can tell, but I know next to nothing about Marx beyond what I read here. As someone else remarked about another book -- regrettably I've forgotten who and what book -- almost all biographies are about twice as long as they should be; this one is only about 1.5 times too long. · Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson. Fairly generic science fiction. Good of its kind. I didn't much care for the ending. · Weighing the Soul, by Len Fisher. A chatty tour of some relatively obscure corners of the history of science. Fisher focuses on what you might call "weird and wonderful ideas", some better than others. The book (or rather its main part; there are notes and suchlike) ends rather oddly with a few woolly paragraphs about how there are plenty of questions that will always be "the province of philosophy and religion", and there's "very strong evidence for the existence of a world beyond our direct experience" which may or may not have anything to do with the other worlds some religions have envisaged. · Convention, by David Lewis. A rather technical philosophical analysis of an everyday topic: what's the right way to think about things like driving on the left (or, as it may be, the right), speaking a particular language, and so on? Lewis's answer, in a nutshell: a convention is a solution to a coordination problem that works because everyone knows it's adopted and suits everyone. Seems reasonable enough to me, but I haven't thought about it deeply enough for my opinion to be worth much. · Far from the Madding Gerund, by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. A selection from Language Log, a weblog written by a few professional linguists. Much more entertaining than that probably sounds if you aren't a professional linguist.
The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. A nice book about science, skepticism, UFO craziness, and the like. (It seems to be regarded in some circles as The Best Book Ever Written, which it clearly isn't.) · The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Widely criticized for not taking sufficient account of the sophisticated beliefs of sophisticated liberal theologians or the intricate ideas of mediaeval scholastics. This misses the point; this is a determinedly middlebrow book, aimed at ordinary but open-minded believers (and, obviously, at angry skeptics wanting confirmation of what they already think); most not-very-reflective religious belief is almost as silly as Dawkins says it is. If you want a sophisticated analysis of sophisticated theism, go and read Mackie (or any one of the various other books along similar lines by Sobel, Everitt, etc.) instead. Dawkins is offering a sort of atheistic equivalent of the apologetic works of C S Lewis or Lee Strobel. I rather enjoyed it, but I suspect that anyone reading this is likely to get more out of Mackie. · The Re-enchantment of Nature, by Alister McGrath. Rather wretched, I'm afraid. McGrath wants to defend Christianity against the charge that it's opposed to concern about the natural world -- fair enough, I think -- and furthermore to claim that Christianity actually offers uniquely rich resources to fuel such concern, and that we should all be Christians because then we'd see natural things like stars and take them to mean that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, and that would feel nice, so it must be right. Well, OK, I'm caricaturing a little, but not nearly as much as you might hope. There are some bizarre attacks on Richard Dawkins where McGrath (so far as I can tell) just makes up something he wants Dawkins to have said so that he can say how ridiculous it is; for instance, he goes on and on about how science never "proves" things, putting the word "prove" in quotation marks again and again and claiming he's disagreeing with Dawkins, but he doesn't offer any evidence that Dawkins thinks otherwise and in fact I'm pretty sure he doesn't. · The Truth (with Jokes), by Al Franken. A savage but funny shredding of the Republican fraud machine. Exactly like all the other savage but funny shreddings of the Republican fraud machine. · White Light, by Rudy Rucker. The back cover says: Albert Einstein! Georg Cantor! Franz Kafka! Dunald Duck! The Secrets of the Universe Revealed!, and that's about right. If you combine hallucinogens with set theory and a taste for science fiction, this is the kind of thing you get.
Unequal Childhoods, by Annette Lareau. Lareau and her team studied a smallish number of American children of various sexes, colours, and economic statuses, in considerable depth. They found that economic status makes much more difference to the lives of children than the other factors, and in some potentially unexpected ways. Most notably, they found systematic differences in child-rearing strategies according to wealth. Very interesting reading. The sample size was (inevitably) rather small and there's a strong interpretive component, so her conclusions aren't quite as robust as one might like. · Feynman's Tips on Physics, by Richard Feynman, Michael Gottlieb, and Ralph Leighton. When Feynman was giving the famous "Lectures on Physics" he held a few problem-solving sessions. This book is a reconstruction of those sessions, together with a lecture on rotating bodies that was omitted from the Lectures. It gives some insight into how Feynman attacked elementary problems in physics; it would of course be more interesting to know more about how he attacked terrifyingly hard ones.
AI for Game Developers, by David Bourg and Glenn Seemann. I have no idea how well this book matches the practical needs of game developers, never having been one. It covers a fairly wide selection of topics shallowly. · The Plot, by Will Eisner. Tells the story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the form that used to be called a "comic book" (but it is, of course, not funny) and is now commonly called a "graphic novel" (but it isn't fictional, alas). I was a bit underwhelmed; I don't think this is a very suitable format for telling this story, and somehow there seems something wrong about a history of one of the most infamous chapters in the history of racism that consistently draws the "bad guys" as looking unappealing. · Advanced Unix Programming, by Marc Rochkind. I'm not sure the word "Advanced" in the title is really merited. This is a thorough and workmanlike text about the fundamentals of the Unix programming interface: files, terminals, processes, IPC, and so on. It does its job very well. · The Stanford GraphBase, by Donald Knuth. A set of literate programs for working with graphs, together with some sample graphs constructed in interesting ways. There's lots of good stuff here, but I think the book would have been vastly improved by the addition of another 50-100 pages of discussion not interleaved with the code. The code itself is typical Knuth: elegant but quirky and rather old-fashioned. · The Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky. A theory of mind, sort of, cut into one-page chunks. There are too many places where Minsky has to say "Then a miracle occurs", but intelligence is a hard problem and (despite Jeff Hawkins) we're still a long way from a solution to it two decades later.