Amazon Delivers, part 2

A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown and other essays for a scientific age, Robert A. Baker: ordered last year.
The Pocket Book of Ogden Nash, Ogden Nash: ordered last year.

read: 3
acquired: 1

Amazon Delivers

A bunch of stuff arrived today:

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi: ordered last year.

Piled Higher and Deeper, Chapter 2: Life is tough and then you graduate, Jorge Cham: ordered last year, and besides, it's a comic book.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Don Rosa (Carl Barks' successor in the U.S.): see above.

Dachshunds: Lightweights Littermates, Sharon Montrose: for my mom. Cute puppies.

The Seasoned Schemer, Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen: this is the only one that counts. Not a comic book, ordered this year, for myself. I'm still working on The Little Schemer, so it'll gather dust for a few weeks.

I also got all of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games columns on a CD-ROM, but I'm not counting that either. My resolution, my rules.

read: 3
acquired: 1

New Year's Resolution

I thought of a good one: I will read at least as many books as I buy, thereby reducing my to-read pile.

I guess library books don't figure into this, nor do books I buy that I've already read. Year's tally so far:

3 read, um...sort of 1 bought.

A Cook's Tour: in search of the perfect meal, Anthony Bourdain

Melissa recommended it. I read Kitchen Confidential six months ago on Tracy's advice, and this is the little I wrote about it:

Fun read. Some interesting bits and pieces (don't order brunch on Sundays or fish on Monday, as it'll all be left-overs from Fri & Sat —that sort of thing—and some advice on cookware, too) and amusing stories. Some quite funny bits. Anthony's kitchen ends up sounding like an army barracks, though.

This one is different. It contains the same amount of swearing and mix of pop culture and not-so-current events references, but instead of with average American restaurant kitchens, it deals mostly with eating weird stuff in exotic places.

While researching the book (read: traveling and eating), Anthony was followed around by a T.V. crew. I kinda wish I had cable again, just to catch this on food network: I wonder whether the T.V. series feels more chronological than the book. Half the book is about Vietnam and how wonderful the food and people are, but it's not a continuous half. It's more...every other chapter. Did he travel back and forth to Vietnam six times? I doubt it, but I don't know. The book could have been edited a little more carefully on smaller scale, too: there are some weird repetitions, sometimes within a paragraph.

Finished January 9th, 274 pages. Doesn't count, since it was from the library.

3: The Inexperienced Ghost (and nine other stories), H.G. Wells

I was inspired by Shaw. (In the Sequel to Pygmalion he mentions Freddy's sister Clara takes a liking to the works of H.G. Wells.)

Short stories reminiscent of Poe's, but a little more insouciant. Not all end darkly and not all make you twist your blanket into a protective cocoon if you read them just before bed.

Finished January 7th, 167 pages.

2: On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt

It's really not that good; it reads like some of my college papers would, had they been written by Harold Bloom. Frankfurt is a pretentious ass with a weak sense of logic, an inability to understand dictionaries, and a desire to...well, bullshit. O.K., it's not entirely that bad, but publishing it in hard back for $10 is rape.

Why did this get so much praise?

In any case, it was short, which is good. Finished January 2d.

1: Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw

A beautiful stage direction from Act IV:

Eliza's beauty becomes murderous

(Is there a book or website listing funny, amusing, interesting, and unusual stage directions? I thought I'd seen something of the sort, but all my "pursued by a bear" searches came up blank.)

Some concluding remarks from Act V:

LIZA: You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how shes treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgings, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

HIGGINS: [...] The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another. [...] The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better.

HIGGINS: Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. Theres only one way of escaping trouble; and thats killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.

And from the "Sequel":

When Higgins excused his difference to young women on the ground that they had an irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural. Nevertheless, when we look round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes producesd or aided by parental fascination.

...[Higgins] declared that if [Freddy] tried to do any useful work some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a procedure involving a net loss to the community, ....

And finally, from the Preface (Sweet was a phoneticist, and creator of a specific form of shorthand, which he used in the postcards described here):

The postcards which Mrs Higgins describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word Result, as no other word containing that sound, and capable of making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on earth.

I find it interesting that Shaw's language is very imprecise, yet his meaning crystal clear. For example, in the above paragraph he does not explicitly state whom he's writing. I'd be tempted to stick a "back" or "in reply" after the write, but he sees it is not needed. I believe he treasures simple language. Things that would make my stomach wrench if others had written them somehow work and are quite pleasant from his hand; see for example the quotation above which uses five forms of "make" in two lines. Terrible, but I read right over it.

Finished January 1st.

What are you reading? Books, books, books.

Hamlet thought small.

My friend Jane asked me what my new year's resolutions were, and I admitted I had none, but since I had read two books this year already (note posting date), that maybe I should shoot for reading a-book-a-day-in-2006. Clearly, this is insane. This guy read a-book-a-week in 2004 and 2005 and is doing the same this year. That already seems like an unmanageably large amount of off-line reading.

I think I'll just go for "as many as I can manage" and not set a particular goal. This will make failure impossible.