Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman

Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman. The story of the OED. I've always been fascinated and puzzled by the creation of dictionaries - how would you write the first one? Apparently, by reading every book and writing down every word and quotes of it used in every context. The story of the people who created the dictionary (an army of volunteers including one notable murderer and lunatic) was interesting, but I enjoyed the dictionary parts more. I think I read the wrong book, as the author has written another book about the venerable dictionary focusing on the work itself.

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City. I thought it was a novel about the world's fair in Chicago, judging by the cover, but instead it was a novelized non-fiction account of a disgusting and ingenious serial murderer operating in Chicago during the world's fair. Maybe it was good, and it was certainly fascinating, but I wanted to bathe in sand and bleach and remove my mind after reading.

Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island. Bryson can be engaging and chatty but this book was like being trapped on a greyhound bus with a dull and cantankerous old codger who will not shut up about how the world was so much more interesting and difficult in his youth and how people are so boring to talk to on buses nowadays.

Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses. I expected a bit more from this primer on viruses.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and her cells. A riveting glimpse of history.

Theodore Gray, The Elements

Theodore Gray, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. Unexpectedly delightful. I bought the book for the pictures and ended up reading it cover to cover. A hilarious, opinionated, and above all fascinating window into the world of the elements. Who knew Boron could be so interesting?

Teresa Marrone, Abundantly Wild

Teresa Marrone, Abundantly Wild: Collecting and Cooking Wild Edibles in the Upper Midwest. This book had me eating all the weeds in my garden immediately. I was excited to find out that violet leaves as well as the flowers are delicious in salads, since this year violets are half of my lawn (not to mention my lettuce patch). I also tried burdock root, which tasted like a watery Jerusalem artichoke - definitely not worth the effort of digging two feet deep in clay. Pig's ear and plantain (the low broad-leaf weed, not the banana relative) are two more weeds I won't bother to pick out of the spinach patch. I also recognized quite a few wild berries or fruits that I will try later this season. (Don't fear for the health of my family, they won't even try wild raspberries, so all risk of accidental ingestion and poison ivy contact is mine alone). Recipes are included, but I generally just ate my experiments raw. As a guide this could be very useful, with pictures of leaves, fruits and flowers, detailed descriptions of dangerous lookalikes, and information about season and habitat. I wouldn't be comfortable eating a plant I wasn't already able to identify, though, so the information on which plants are edible is more useful than the identification guide. More than for its utility, I enjoyed this guide for the chatty tone and the author's infatuation with all things growing. She often exhorts to take just one leaf(!) from a plant, or describes the odd places that she has found specimens. This book perfectly fulfills the function of a wildlife guide in that it opens your eyes to the world around you and leaves you itching to get outside.

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains. The Paul Farmer story. A dangerous book to read; a book to change your life.

David McCullough, John Adams

David McCullough, John Adams. Could have been a bit shorter, and I admit that I used it to fall asleep a few times. But I loved Adams - his moderation of thought and his independence - and I even enjoyed his inconsistencies, his vanity, and his moodiness. I liked that he was self-aware enough to admit his faults to his wife. I really did fall in love with Abigail Adams. If I was going to do it over, I'd probably read the Wikipedia article on John and get a collection of Abigail's letters. So many letters, to so many people, crossing oceans; really remarkable. Without the letters, the book would have been a dry recounting of official record; with the letters it sometimes had the gossipy feel of a novel or movie. The most suspenseful subplot was the relationship between Adams and Jefferson (and it had a happy ending, too, which was nice).

One fascinating thing was how much illness was a part of the story: so many children dying, adults suddenly taking ill, the widespread fear of epidemics, and seasonal illnesses that we have no conception of today. Infectious diseases lurked in the corners of this book - typhoid, diphtheria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, malaria - sinister characters picking off the players like snipers. I'd forgotten that the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia happened when George Washington was president and displaced the entire Congress, and I had had no idea that Dr. Benjamin Rush was one of Adams' closest friends.

Paul Davies, How to Build a Time Machine

Paul Davies, How to Build a Time Machine. Not quite the practical guide I was hoping for - but a nice little book about wormholes and such. Good pictures, funny text, everything you want in an armchair time-travel treatise. The printing of the book itself was very strange - sans serif with gray highlighting, a strange page layout, and a barcode-like motif around the page numbers - I couldn't figure it out and it was visually annoying.

Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea

Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea. A fascinating glimpse of people working together for community development and education despite incredible geographical and political barriers. Unlikely and beautiful - it's as much a love story of place and a lament about war as a story about building schools.

Nicholas Harberd, Seed to Seed

Nicholas Harberd, Seed to Seed: the Secret Life of Plants. A journal sketchbook about plants: growth, life, reproduction, and death. The life cycle of a thale cress plant in an English graveyard describes global growth and development. An explanation of transcription factors and how genetic material connects the growth of the plant to the world. A discussion about science, communicating a series of minute observations, and how to connect them back to the encompassing world. How one scientist can hold the world as sacred, and view it in awe and wonder for its order and beauty.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own. Read it.

Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief

Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief. This was interesting. I would have liked more on the orchids and less on the people. The botany is incredible and the descriptions needed large color plates. I thought the contemporary orchid people were a little boring, but I would definitely read an entire book on the Victorian era orchid hunters. The story was scattered, running off in all directions, but when it focused on the flowers or on the character of LaRoche it was fascinating.

Somaly Mam, The Road of Lost Innocence

Somaly Mam, The Road of Lost Innocence. (I read this for a group at school). While it was shocking, it was not written to titillate. Somaly says that she told her story in a book so that she doesn't have to keep telling it, so that it stands apart from her. What was remarkable was the practical attitude of the book.

"I don't feel like I can change the world. I don't even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering."

It is a personal story about the global sex trade and human trafficking, and more importantly, about the effort to fight it. Her organization (as well as Somaly and her family) have been threatened and attacked as a result of her work against organized trafficking. They continue to provide protection, shelter, education, and support for sustainable employment to victims of human trafficking in Cambodia. Somaly has written a direct and honest story with the purpose of creating awareness and support for her organization and her cause.

Charles L. Bardes, Pale Faces

Charles L. Bardes, Pale Faces: The Masks of Anemia. A lovely old fashioned little book about blood. A scholarly rumination about history and medicine - the nature of diagnosis and illness. Sometimes a little too ruminative, a little too effusive. I didn't mind, although I occasionally rolled my eyes at prose like this:

"A red cell lives for ninety days, give or take, and when it is old and gray and full of sleep the spleen recognizes its senectitude and takes it aside, takes it down, administers some fatal blow and breaks it apart, recycles its parts for future use, its iron and vital stuff."

Even with this lack of restraint, the overall story was pleasing. I wouldn't mind if textbooks were written in the same style, with myth and literature interwoven with description. I picked it up at the library because it was small and attractive, and it lived up to its looks.

Mitch Albom, tuesdays with Morrie

Mitch Albom, tuesdays with Morrie. A dear friend gave me this book as a gift. To be honest, I thought I wouldn't like it ("I don't usually go for the uplifting") but I did enjoy reading it. Maybe I didn't connect with the author's tone or his answers, but I did connect to the questions he was asking. These questions matter. How do you live a good life? How do you value other people and love them? What is important and what is distraction? What are the values of our culture and are they right? How do you live a good life within a culture that is dysfunctional? How do you tolerate fear, pain, and loss? How do you confront your own death, and worse, the death of those you love? I enjoy people who ask these questions and honestly try to answer them. It's not a matter of religion or no religion to me - I can deeply empathize with most people if they are thoughtful. The intolerable sin is apathy, a careless approach to life. Don't be unthoughtful or formulaic - have a reason for what you do and who you are. Not asking questions is worse than having the wrong answers or no answers. Morrie's insights reminded me of the Forster epigraph "only connect". So the answers in this book were simple - love each other, listen, touch, learn. Pretty basic humanism, hard to argue with (water's mighty wet stuff, chief!). I didn't love the author - he didn't delve deeply enough, it seemed to me, but I loved the subject of the book. A great teacher is important and should be cherished - don't let your teachers fade from your mind.

David Sheff, Beautiful Boy

David Sheff, Beautiful Boy. A memoir of living with a son's drug addiction, so a fairly terrifying book for a parent to read. Matt brought this home because they're promoting it at Starbucks and he wanted to know if it's "well-written" for his customers. Fairly. Not incredibly gripping, a little repetitive. But still, I had to keep reading, hoping for a neat resolution and a happy ending for Nic. By the nature of the story, you care for the characters despite Nic's flaws (the subject of the book, after all) and David's extraordinary navel gazing. Although you have to excuse some of the constant self-blame, because mostly David's role consisted of worrying. The second half of the book was tighter than the first. David suffered a brain hemorrhage some way through the writing process,and I wonder if that paradoxically cleaned up the narrative. I read that Nic Sheff wrote a memoir published at the same time, and I'm curious to read it. Not curious enough to buy it, but if I run across it I'll read it.

Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia. I love Oliver Sacks. What I love most about his books is the boundless curiosity that spreads out from topic to topic, and I also appreciate the respect and obvious love he has for his patients. He has a passion for music himself, and so the exploration of the neurology of music was captivating, and more personal than some of his other books. This book also had a little less natural structure and tightness than some of his other collections. Lots of stories about memory loss and brain injury that alter musical experience, and summaries of interesting research and case studies related to music and the brain. I'm not a very musical person myself, but as I read this I did think about the place music has in my head, about the memories and emotions it can evoke -and I also thought about other more musical people I know, and how large a portion of their lives is wrapped up in playing and listening to music. Matt is like that, and it baffles me. I think my involvement with books is just as mysterious to him as his musical focus is to me.

Marcia Angell, The Truth About Drug Companies

Marcia Angell, The Truth About Drug Companies. Well, I have a bit of a backlog of books to post due to finals and procrastination - I read this one for a sociology class. Anyway, this was a book with a compelling argument, but it was too little information stretched into too much book, and seemed repetitive. I recommend the summary from the New York Review of Books - it's almost all of the information and much more concise. But Angell (who was once the editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and so is definitely what you might consider an insider in the world of medical research) gives a wonderful critique of big pharma and squashes the myths about direct to consumer advertising, drug development, and financial conflicts of interest with researchers and doctors.