The Year in Review

Despite my best efforts I failed to make it to the 50 mark this year but I am pleased with my performance nonetheless. I know why I didn't make it, I got too ambitious. The pseudo-intellectual side of me raged out and decided that I should be interested in all sorts of high brow books with interesting titles and fascinating subjects. If I had stuck to my meat and potatoes - science fiction with a little bit of mystery thrown in - I would have been closer to the mark.

I want to recognize some of my fellow 50-bookers for their efforts: Olman's 50 for some of the great authors he brought to light this year (Attlee and Canning); Meezly for her terrific, well written and thoughtful reviews; and Mount Benson for continuing to giv'er. I would also like to thank Opinion be Damned and Redwing for taking the time to read my blog: increasing your regular readership by 67% (from three to five) is great, just ask any newspaper man.

Happy new year and here's to 2009.

43. Amar Bhide, The Venturesome Economy

This is the baddest of the bad business books. You know you are in trouble when an author (or his editor) decides that it is a good idea to have shaded boxed insets in the middle of the narrative or decides to divide the book into "Book 1" and "Book 2" like its some religious manuscript. This book is supposed to enlighten you about the nature of innovation, how it can be fostered and sustained in a business and how a business man can do things to use it as a competitive advantage. I am not enlightened

42. Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli

Disraeli is a fascinating guy because he was a long time prime minister in 19th century England but he was not an aristocrat, he was a novelist, he was under the burden of a great deal of debt and, most interestingly, he was Jewish. He was definitely the first Jewish prime minister of England and, as far as I can recall, England has not had a Jewish PM since. Disraeli was a conservative whose political career was marked by an epic political battle with Gladstone, his counterweight on the Liberal side of the house.

This was a short, interesting and well put together biography of Disraeli. Those of you who are interested in 19th century British history will find it interesting.

41. John Wyndahm, The Chrysalids*

I grabbed this off the shelf because of Meezly's terrific review. I don't have much else to add other than to say that it was great to re-read the book after so many years.

40. Ray Bradbury, R is for Rocket

This is a great collection of short stories which, I think, were put together for a young adult audience though some seem quite sophisticated. Some of the stories are just brilliant. The Fog Horn is about a lighthouse whose repetitive horn and light attract an ancient sea creature from the depths of the ocean. The sea creature gets himself to the lighthouse and begins slowly and carefully introducing himself to the lighthouse and its operators who, then, foolishly turn off the horn leaving the sea creature distraught and helpless. The Rocket is about a family who can barely make ends meet in a world where only rich people get to ride in rockets to and from Mars. The father runs a scrap heap and is one day offered the opportunity to purchase a full scale model rocket. He blows the family's entire savings and proceeds to refit the rocket with car engines and other bits and pieces. He then invites his kids over, buckles them in, turns on the car engines and manages to convince them that they are on a real rocket ship leaving them forever happy. Frost and Fire is a story about a group of rockets that crashed in a planet resembling Mercury. The heavy radiation on the planet speeds up the survivors metabolism to the point that it reduces their lifespans down to just eight days which means that life has to be lived in fast forward. The survivors live in hill side caves that protect them from the extreme daytime heat and nightime cold leaving them with only dusk and dawn to go outside to gather food, get into fights, wage war and make love. All of the rockets that crashed on the planet have been destroyed but one which crash landed at the crest of a hill and has been able to survive the elements. But it is just far enough away that no one has been able to make it to the ship before they die until Sim. Sim ingeniously finds a way to get to the ship and to save many of the people from the planet.

Ray Bradbury is an interesting writer who was always a little skeptical of the advancement of technology and the dawn of space travel. This collection of stories really highlights his skepticism.

35 to 39. Various Books I've Read in the Past Month

I have been delinquent in making timely posts over the past month or so: too much travel. The period began with the completion of H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, a terrific piece of allegorical science fiction that is highly critical of colonial mores; I then moved on to Larry Niven's Ring World - which I must have read in high school but forgotten. I found this book to be a little too heavy on the tech/gadgets but otherwise an entertaining science fiction story; I then moved on to Philip Attlee's Canadian Bomber Contract which is well reviewed on Olman's Fifty; I then moved on to Alan Furst's The World at Night, a spy story in occupation France. Furst's books are so light and airy that you barely feel like you've read a book and despite his efforts he is not able to add the true grit and darkness that good spy stories deserve. He is now off my list of supported authors; finally, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Gladwell is a man of big ideas and doesn't provide much in support of his big ideas. In this, his third book, he hypothesizes that people don't achieve success through just their hard work and dedication they are, more often than not, supported by particular circumstances that end up giving them an advantage over the next guy. His arguments and examples make sense but one cannot prove such a big hypothesis by anecdotes and scant references alone. Someone needs to tell him that he has ADD and if he really wants to present a compelling hypothesis then he should do the hard academic work required to back it up.