State of the Nation

First, the inevitable:

The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos, Sylvia L. Horwitz. Bought in a moment of weakness at the used bookshop on Castro in Mountain View, after a not-so-very-successful pearl-milk-tea-and-a-chat date.

Persuasion, Jane Austen. From Amazon.

Currently actively reading:

How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Collier & Manley. I've browsed it before, but I never really bothered to study it carefully. Before I tackle Gardiner or Graefe, I should review all I've forgotten.

Should really be reading:

Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, Hopcroft, Motwani, Ullman. But I'd rather not.

Would like to be able to say I'm reading:

Knuth volume 3.

Somewhere near the top of the pile of kinda-working-on-it:

Power, Bertrand Russell.

Persuasion, Austen

Very, very far down that same pile:

The Little Schemer, Friedman & Felleisen.

The Story of Decipherment, Pope

In Code: A Young Woman's Mathematical Journey, Flannery

Introduction to Quantum Computers, Berman, Doolen, Mainieri, & Tsifrinovich.

VSI: The Vikings

VSI: The Crusades

The Telephone Booth Indian, Liebling

The New Well-Tempered Sentence, Gordon

and many, many others, just as worthy.

Read: 6
Acquired: 15

Stupid Rain

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Chaucer's a big liar: March wasn't dry at all. He's spot on about April, though.

I'm moving to L.A.

6: The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, Karen Elizabeth Gordon

The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. Have had this lying around for years, and I've read bits and pieces of it before, but I battled my way through it cover-to-cover for the first time now. Gordon is funny in an obnoxiously erudite manner.

Can I remember any of it? No, probably not consciously, but hopefully some of it stuck somewhere, and the next grammar book I pick up will be more intuitive reading.


Disaster on the book acquisition front:

The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, Karen Elizabeth Gordon

The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction, Christopher Tyerman

The Vikings: A Very Short Introduction, Julian D. Richards

The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, Ian Shaw ed.—at least I can claim this is for an Egyptology class I want to audit this trimester.

Sources of World History, Volume II, Mark A. Kishlansky, ed. Kinda silly: a collection of sources for use in high school (?) history courses. I was mainly curious about Gempaku Sugita's "Anatomy Lesson", an account of his, and thereby Japan's, discovery of Western (Dutch) anatomy at the beginning of the 19th century. Sugita was mentioned in a book on decipherments for his efforts in learning Dutch from an anatomy book. (I cannot find the reference again; it does not appear to be in Maurice Pope's The Story of Decipherment—what else have I been reading lately?)

Introducing Kant, Christopher Want and Andrzej Klimowski. I don't know why I keep buying these, since they're really not that great. But it was $6 at Kepler's, and I was bored. (Of course I was bored...I didn't have anything to read, after all.)

Read: 6
Acquired: a sickening 13

5: Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

Stanford Bookstore run, to buy Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (Hopcroft, Motwani, Ullman) for my upcoming CS class. Ordered Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation while I was at it, since it's a far better book.

-  Bought Northanger Abbey. Damnit.

+  Actually read Northanger Abbey this weekend.

-  Very much would like to read more Austen, and Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, which has been on my wishlist for a while, is likely to be purchased soon, too.

What about the book, then? Apart from the two moments where I wanted to kill John Thorpe, it is quite a pleasant read. More self-consciously funny than Pride & Prejudice with more direct address to the reader. Jane breaks the fourth wall and both defends and pokes fun at the novel as a literary form. Well, whatever—you can read all that somewhere else. It's just a fun read.

Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability to administer to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author;—and to her treatment of the subject I will only add in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.

(Volume 1, Chapter 14)

Read: 5
Acquired: 7