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50 book challenge - January
I decided to give the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50bookchallenge a try this year, which means that I'm committing to read 50 books that are new to me in 2006. I wound up on a bit of a mystery binge in January, which has conveniently elevated my total and made me feel like I'm off to a great start.
Total for January: 9
Total for 2006: 9
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow.
I've enjoyed Doctorow's other books, and so I expected to like Eastern Standard Tribe a lot more than I did. But I never really bought into the central conceit of the Tribes - the more you look at it, the more the logic falls apart - and it didn't seem especially well-realized anyway. What's left is essentially a story about unpleasant people making a business deal, with lots of cool futuristic set dressing. Doctorow's the best at futuristic set dressing, so those parts are neat, but overall I just didn't think this book had much substance.
Einstein never used flash cards by Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, & Eyer.
Of course it's always fun to read a book that validates your own philosophical prejudices, but this book had plenty of value beyond that. The basic thesis is that parents should let children play, rather than trying to push academic or intellectual achievements in baby- and toddlerhood. They back up their argument with a general overview of cognitive and social development, showing how children develop understanding of intellectual concepts through interaction with the world. It's especially interesting to read about intellectual achievements that even the most advancement-obsessed parents are completely unaware of; for example, learning which combinations of sounds could legitimately be a word in one's native language, or learning that no matter which item in an array you start counting from, the total will be the same. A fun added feature of this book: they provide instructions for replicating famous developmental psychology experiments at home.
With child and Night work by Laurie R. King.
Moderately hardboiled mysteries featuring Kate Martinelli, a homicide detective in San Francisco who is a lesbian. One of the things I like about the series is that you see a lot of Kate's inner life and her relationships. There's no "reset button," as too many series have - instead, in book four of the series, Kate and her romantic partner are still processing the consequences of things that happened in book one. I'm not sure that the plots hold up to the characterization, though. Midway through With child I had such a strong flash of "I know what happened" that I thought I might have read the book before and forgotten. But no, halfway through Night work I also felt like I had a pretty good handle on what had happened. So they're not the most mysterious mysteries ever, but they're still really good.
Bab, a sub-deb by Mary Roberts Rinehart.
This was a semi-random pick from Project Gutenberg, for my Palm Pilot, and was a surprising amount of fun. It's a set of long short stories, or possibly short novellas, written from the perspective of a teenaged girl who, tragically, is not yet a debutante (hence "sub-deb") even though she is very sure she has the full maturity of an adult. She goes through a series of dramatic, self-important, and very funny efforts to get her family to take her seriously as an adult. In modern days, she'd make a great Livejournaller.
Third girl from the left by Martha Southgate.
This was a random pick from the "new books" display at the library. It was really good. It follows three generations of women in an African-American family, exploring the roles that love and the movies play in each woman's life. The oldest woman grows up so constricted and frightened that movies are her only outlet for expressing her emotions; her daughter runs away to Hollywood to be a star and winds up struggling for bit parts in the blaxploitation movies of the 70s; her daughter goes to NYU for film school because she wants to be the one in control, behind the camera. Southgate does a great job of creating complex, difficult, and very believable relationships between these three generations of women.
The cradle robbers, Nursery Crimes, and The big nap by Ayelet Waldman.
Yes, I kept reading them after she slandered alt.poly in Nursery Crimes, and I'll probably finish the series. These are entertaining, fast-read mysteries with very little depth to them. The heroine left her job in the public defender's office to be a stay-at-home mom, and finds herself bored stiff. She starts investigating crimes - first because she stumbles across them, and then, in later books, she's founded a detective agency with another guy who used to work for the public defender. She tracks down leads with her baby in a Snugli on her chest, and at one point does a stakeout with a teething four-month-old. I am amused to see how many of the negative Amazon reviews for this series focus on things like, "she lets her kids watch too much TV," or "she didn't have to let herself go like that just because she was pregnant." My quibble would be more along the lines of, "hmmm, that baby sure takes convenient naps." But in general these were fun.
50bookchallenge a try this year, which means that I'm committing to read 50 books that are new to me in 2006. I wound up on a bit of a mystery binge in January, which has conveniently elevated my total and made me feel like I'm off to a great start.Total for January: 9
Total for 2006: 9
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow.
I've enjoyed Doctorow's other books, and so I expected to like Eastern Standard Tribe a lot more than I did. But I never really bought into the central conceit of the Tribes - the more you look at it, the more the logic falls apart - and it didn't seem especially well-realized anyway. What's left is essentially a story about unpleasant people making a business deal, with lots of cool futuristic set dressing. Doctorow's the best at futuristic set dressing, so those parts are neat, but overall I just didn't think this book had much substance.
Einstein never used flash cards by Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, & Eyer.
Of course it's always fun to read a book that validates your own philosophical prejudices, but this book had plenty of value beyond that. The basic thesis is that parents should let children play, rather than trying to push academic or intellectual achievements in baby- and toddlerhood. They back up their argument with a general overview of cognitive and social development, showing how children develop understanding of intellectual concepts through interaction with the world. It's especially interesting to read about intellectual achievements that even the most advancement-obsessed parents are completely unaware of; for example, learning which combinations of sounds could legitimately be a word in one's native language, or learning that no matter which item in an array you start counting from, the total will be the same. A fun added feature of this book: they provide instructions for replicating famous developmental psychology experiments at home.
With child and Night work by Laurie R. King.
Moderately hardboiled mysteries featuring Kate Martinelli, a homicide detective in San Francisco who is a lesbian. One of the things I like about the series is that you see a lot of Kate's inner life and her relationships. There's no "reset button," as too many series have - instead, in book four of the series, Kate and her romantic partner are still processing the consequences of things that happened in book one. I'm not sure that the plots hold up to the characterization, though. Midway through With child I had such a strong flash of "I know what happened" that I thought I might have read the book before and forgotten. But no, halfway through Night work I also felt like I had a pretty good handle on what had happened. So they're not the most mysterious mysteries ever, but they're still really good.
Bab, a sub-deb by Mary Roberts Rinehart.
This was a semi-random pick from Project Gutenberg, for my Palm Pilot, and was a surprising amount of fun. It's a set of long short stories, or possibly short novellas, written from the perspective of a teenaged girl who, tragically, is not yet a debutante (hence "sub-deb") even though she is very sure she has the full maturity of an adult. She goes through a series of dramatic, self-important, and very funny efforts to get her family to take her seriously as an adult. In modern days, she'd make a great Livejournaller.
Third girl from the left by Martha Southgate.
This was a random pick from the "new books" display at the library. It was really good. It follows three generations of women in an African-American family, exploring the roles that love and the movies play in each woman's life. The oldest woman grows up so constricted and frightened that movies are her only outlet for expressing her emotions; her daughter runs away to Hollywood to be a star and winds up struggling for bit parts in the blaxploitation movies of the 70s; her daughter goes to NYU for film school because she wants to be the one in control, behind the camera. Southgate does a great job of creating complex, difficult, and very believable relationships between these three generations of women.
The cradle robbers, Nursery Crimes, and The big nap by Ayelet Waldman.
Yes, I kept reading them after she slandered alt.poly in Nursery Crimes, and I'll probably finish the series. These are entertaining, fast-read mysteries with very little depth to them. The heroine left her job in the public defender's office to be a stay-at-home mom, and finds herself bored stiff. She starts investigating crimes - first because she stumbles across them, and then, in later books, she's founded a detective agency with another guy who used to work for the public defender. She tracks down leads with her baby in a Snugli on her chest, and at one point does a stakeout with a teething four-month-old. I am amused to see how many of the negative Amazon reviews for this series focus on things like, "she lets her kids watch too much TV," or "she didn't have to let herself go like that just because she was pregnant." My quibble would be more along the lines of, "hmmm, that baby sure takes convenient naps." But in general these were fun.
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