Rolling Library List

[electricland]

So I've decided it's high time I keep track of what I'm getting out of the library. I have 50 books on hold and I try to get them in the order I put them there, if that makes sense, but this often means it's 6 months between the time when I say "Cool, I want to read that!" and the time I actually pick it up. As a result, I often can't remember why I wanted to read it. So.

Recently returned (please note: as this list grows, the term "recently" becomes less and less accurate):

• Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones -- I believe coffee_and_ink reviewed it, and of course there's the Miyazaki movie. LOVED IT. MUST OWN THIS BOOK.


• Do We Care? Proceedings of the First Canadian Conference on Health. (Something like that anyway.) Edited by Margaret Somerville, McGill's resident goddess of health ethics and law. Mentioned in CMAJ. Fascinating though uneven. Good essay by John Ralston Saul and another by Raisa Deber.


• Stars In My Pocket like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delaney. Must confess I didn't finish this one. Everyone at ConFusion was recommending Delaney and I did enjoy it as far as I got.


• Put on hold June 2005, taken out Labour Day weekend: Retired racing greyhounds for dummies. I'm wondering if one would suit me. Still undecided, but the book has a lot of good info on adopting an adult dog generally, and many references on training.


• Put on hold August 2005, taken out Labour Day weekend: Airedale terriers, Dorothy Miner. Need to take a good solid look at whether it's a good idea to get one. Sadly, this is not the book to help me make that decision, but OMG the adorable pictures!


• Mad cows and mother's milk: the perils of poor risk communication, William Leiss and Douglas Alan Powell. Also mentioned in CMAJ if I recall correctly. Chapter 2 has some useful lessons for work, which I photocopied. The rest is case studies, which are interesting but less relevant for me.


• Real Simple: the organized home. Mmmm, storage. NOT THAT I HAVE ANYWHERE TO PUT THESE LESSONS TO USE. Ahem. One day. It was a bit premature is all.


• A suitable boy, Vikram Seth. Ordered for book club. Did not finish, but was enjoying right up until I had to give it back. Suspect I will eventually buy this one, if for no other reason than that it's damn hard to lug around with you.


• Placed on hold December 2004, taken out 05/08/25: Ottoline Morrell: life on the grand scale. Someone (papersky maybe?) was reading.


• Taken out 05/08/25: Match Me If You Can, Susan Elizabeth Philips. The author was rec'd in strong terms by jennycrusie and the book was on the Best Bets shelf. She hits enough of my buttons that I'll be taking more out.
• Put on hold December 2004: Oh, play that thing; Roddy Doyle. Been meaning to read this for ages and ages. Enjoyed this, although it had elements of "now there are 10 years worth of Great Depression to get through, oh fuck, slog on then" towards the end, and will now have to go back and reread A Star Called Henry, which I own.


• Put on hold December 2004: A Mencken chrestomathy. Believe freerider was reading something Menckenish, but I could be totally wrong. Did not grab me. Read the history of the bathtub in America and brought it back.


• Put on hold January 2005: A.P.H.: his life and times. (Bio of A.P. Herbert.) I was having Topsy nostalgia. Kind of engaging but I don't really know enough about the period to say more. He was a terrible Colonel Blimp, if that's the term I seek, and not at all keen on T.S. Eliot. In a kind of sweet, grandfatherly way.


• Put on hold January 2005: Music for mechanics (Love & Rockets). javahousejihad made me a Love & Rockets icon ages ago but I've never actually read any. LOVED it. Will take up wanderinaengus's recs below.


• Put on hold January 2005: Voodoo science: the road from foolishness to fraud, Robert Park. Doubtless inspired by something enraging. Solid, snarky read about perpetual motion machines, whether there's a link between EMF and cancer, the space program, and more.


• Put on hold January 2005: The king's peace, by papersky. Really good! Need to get the sequel.


• Put on hold January 2005: The Green Man: tales from the mythic forest. Burst of post-ConFusion "Must read everything possible by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly!" enthusiasm. Lovely.


• Put on hold January 2005: Last call, Tim Powers. Doubtless ConFusion-inspired although I can't call to mind quite how. Anyway I'm very fond of The Drawing of the Dark. By a bizarre coincidence, turns out to have been largely set in Vegas (had the side effect of making me quite determined NOT to play poker, not that I can anyway). Extremely cool book. Some strong similarities to The Drawing of the Dark -- the Fisher King, the reluctant (hell, recalcitrant) hero, drink -- but with tarot and poker and Bugsy Siegel and goddesses and I had to read it twice so I could notice all the stuff I missed the significance of the first time round.

Currently out:

• Checked out October 14 and 27: Depressing books for work on marketing to kids: Kidfluence, Brandchild, and Consuming Kids.


• Put on hold January 2005, checked out November 21: The Faery Reel: tales from the twilight realm. See "The Green Man", above.


• Checked out November 21: To Kill a Mockingbird. As mentioned elsewhere, I'd never read it before it was picked for book club. It's wonderful. (I had to go to Parliament branch to get it, though.)


• Checked out November 21: Uniform Justice, Donna Leon. One of her Venetian mysteries. I want to like them, but I'm kind of meh -- constantly being told in excruciating detail exactly what the main character is thinking, feeling, and thinking about feeling gets a little wearing. Picked up from the paperback twirler when I took out To Kill a Mockingbird.


• Checked out November 21: Breathing Room, Susan Elizabeth Philips. Yummy trash! Picked up from the paperback twirler when I took out To Kill a Mockingbird.


• Put on hold January 2005, checked out November 28: Walking with the wind: a memoir of the movement, by John Lewis. Recommended in strong terms by bodyandsoul_new, and holy shit was she ever right. I'm embarrassed at how little I knew about the civil rights movement. The most moving parts of the book, though, are where he describes his beliefs -- the philosophy of nonviolence, the Beloved Community, and that we're all in this together -- and his vision for the future, and his sadness at the wrong turn America seemed to take after the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.


• Put on hold January 2005, checked out November 28: Wicked: the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I think the musical was opening in Toronto around then.

On hold:
A few words of explanation may be in order here. The Toronto Public Library lets you put your holds on hold, sort of like a vacation stop. So as long as the book isn't actually on the shelf waiting for you or in the van on its way to you, you can do the equivalent of pressing Pause. You'll stay in the line, but once you get to the top, if you're still on Pause, the people behind you will start passing you. Then you can unpause at your leisure and the book arrives fairly fast. Holds now stay valid for 2 years (it was one year but they changed it in February -- I can actually spot the changeover in my book list), so this is a pretty good system.

Unless there is some compelling reason to do otherwise (for instance, I want to read the dog books NOW!), I try to take the books out in the same order as they went on the list. So I'm expecting the Roddy Doyle any day now. I do change it up a bit: if, next up, I have seven heavyweight non-fiction books in a row, I might take two of them off hold and move a bit further down the list and get a few nice fiction reads as well.

They also let you have up to 50 books on hold at any time. And I do.

Holds placed January 2005:

• The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers. See Last Call, above. To be honest when this one was ready for me I was so frazzled that week I didn't get to the library in time to pick it up. But I really liked Last Call so I stuck it back on the list.


• The case for democracy: the power of freedom to overcome tyranny and terror. Anatoly Scharansky. Also mentioned by bodyandsoul_new. I believe GWB was reading it at the time, or something. Irony was involved.


• The wave in the mind, Ursula K. Le Guin. Mentioned by someone, can't recall who. (Ah! It was pretentiousgit!)

Holds placed February 2005:

• The rose and the beast: fairy tales retold, Francesca Lia Block. elissa_carey recommended this one.


• Bless me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya. Also via elissa_carey; I believe some school district was trying to ban it.


• The worst witch, Jill Murphy. Clare Coulter is in the TV series and I keep meaning to check it out.


• Cakes and ale, Somerset Maugham. I forget who was reading Somerset Maugham. Possibly copperbadge?


• Howards End, E.M. Forster. Possibly also copperbadge but I'm really not sure. See, this is why I need to keep track.


• Critical condition: how health care in American became big business -- and bad medicine. I *think* this was reviewed in NEJM. Or possibly not.


• Cloud atlas, David Mitchell. Via bookslut. It won or at least did very well in that Ultimate Book Challenge whatever-thing-it-was.

Holds placed March 2005:

• A mighty heart, Mariane Pearl. I think she was going to be speaking at the Women of Influence series and I saw a poster at the gym. Or someone was talking about the book. Something like that.


• Cradle to cradle: remaking the way we make things, William McDonough. That has to have been a gristmill_rss rec.


• Paradise, A.L. Kennedy. bookslut again; they rec her often, but I think the timing is related to the kerfuffle over the Orange Prize, or that anthology where the editors said all the women's entries were boringly domestic, or something.


• Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood. Been meaning to get to it for ages.


• Why people believe weird things: pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time, Michael Shermer. No idea where this one comes from but you can see the pattern.


• Necessary dreams: ambition in women's changing lives, Anna Fels. No idea.

Holds placed April 2005:

• Shake hands with the devil, Romeo Dallaire. I think lostvoice went to see the documentary?


• Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin. She died. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.


• The fresco, Sheri S. Tepper. Someone must've rec'd this but I don't know who.


• Off the road: a modern-day walk down the Pilgrim's Route into Spain, Jack Hitt. Might've been referenced in something else I was reading.

Holds placed May 2005:

• Alien sex (anthology). Possibly discussed over at makinglight...?


• Low port (anthology). Because crankygrrl taunted me about the new Liaden Universe novel, and it wasn't in the library system yet.


• Brave new world, Aldous Huxley. I had a reason at some point, honestly.


• Iron Council, China Mieville. Won the Clarke Award.


• Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed, Jared Diamond. Was on the library's most-popular list, and I liked Guns, Germs and Steel.


• Blink, Malcolm Gladwell. Also on the library's most-popular list.


• The mysterious flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco. bookslut posted a link to an interview with him, and I really love Foucault's Pendulum.


• Zorro, Isabel Allende. Saw it on the New Releases shelf at Indigo.


• Don Quixote, the new translation. Someone rec'd it ages ago (again via bookslut), but it wasn't on the library's list at the time.


• Invisible women, Dale Spender. Rec'd by ide_cyan.

Holds placed June 2005:

• Small Island, Andrea Levy. Orange Prize again, plus I really liked the sound of it when the Globe reviewed it.


• The wisdom paradox, Elkhonon Goldberg. Someone posted a comparison between this and Blink, which I thought sounded interesting -- must remember to get them together.


• The gift of fear, Gavin de Becker. Rec'd by erbie during the Great Drama of June.

Holds placed July 2005:

• Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, Helen Fielding. Because I was running low on chick lit.

(July was busy. I guess I didn't have much time to think about reading.)


Holds placed August 2005:

• Not one damsel in distress: world folktales for strong girls, Jane Yolen. Started reading her journal (I wish it had an RSS feed, but you should absolutely check it out) around then and this was mentioned in an interview.


• The smartest guys in the room: the amazing rise and scandalous fall of Enron. Saw the documentary, wanted to read the book.


• Inequality reexamined, Amartya Sen. Skimmed through Freakonomics the other night and wanted another view on the world.


• The historian: a novel, Elizabeth Kostova. As recommended by cosmicbob.

Holds placed September 2005:

• Nickel and dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich. Been meaning to read it for a while anyway, and Heather Mallick mentioned it in a column on Katrina.


• Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs. Mentioned by a commenter on makinglight, with reference to the good people of Gretna and the breakdown of the social contract.


• Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Chris Crutcher. doombookshelves loves this guy. Loooooves him. I thought I'd give him a go.


• Hard Choices: How women decide about work, career and motherhood, Kathleen Gerson. See, here I go forgetting again. And I meant to be so good. Suspect this one came from a comment on bitch_phd.

Holds placed October 2005:

• Arthur & George, Julian Barnes. Rave reviews from both the Globe and Mail and peake. What more does one need?


• If women counted: a new feminist economics, Marilyn Waring. Like the Gerson, no idea but possibly from bitch_phd.


• Candy from strangers: kids and consumer culture, Stephen Dale. More depressing work stuff.


• Bangkok 8, John Burdett. Another one from doombookshelves.


• Contempt of court: the turn-of-the-century lynching that launced 100 years of federalism. Rec from texaslawchick; I may not end up getting this one out.

Holds placed November 2005:

• The thrifty decorator, Jocasta Innes. Parliament branch had this out on display when I went to pick up To Kill a Mockingbird. (See how these things get all circular?) I figured, hey! Thrifty! Crafty! House-related! What more can one need? The rate we're going this will come up in its natural cycle in about September 2006, just when we're ready for it. /cynical

Holds placed December 2005:

• Heavy Metal and You, Christopher Krovatin. Recommended by doombookshelves.


• A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin. Haven't given it a go yet.


• Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley. Recommended from lots of places.

...and because this is getting crazy, I'm going to start a new list for 2006 (to go with my new Book and Movie Binder of Doom).

Comments

[cosmicbob.livejournal.com]

I've read "The Anubis Gates". I've actually read it twice. I really liked it. I like "Drawing of the Dark" too, but I guess I liked "Anubis Gates" more.

I recently finished "The Historian", a vampire hunting novel. It was very, very long. But I enjoyed it. But I'm a sucker for vampire novels. Though I found "Dracula" to be extremely tedious. "The Historian" is somewhat like "Dracula", but it's more interesting.

I'm now reading the "Master And Commander" series by Patrick O'Brian. 20 books of Napoleonic Naval Novels. It's pretty interesting, plus has some darn hysterical parts to it. I'm currently on book 3 ("H.M.S. Suprise").

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Will make a note of "The Historian" although if it's very, very long I may spurn it.

I LOVE the Master and Commander series! And I actually started reading them *before* the movie came out... although much later than I first heard of them, which was in a page-a-day book-lover's calendar written by someone who clearly had a huge thing for it.

[raithen.livejournal.com]

I clearly need to be stripped of my bookish stripes....

[electricland.livejournal.com]

nah... you do quite well! and you have a life!

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Good lord, that's a lot of books.

I have a copy of Stars In My Pocket... as well, but I don't believe I've ever gotten around to reading it. It took me four months to read Dhalgren, and I'm still not sure I understood what the story was about.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Well, they let you put up to 50 on hold. Basically (as you can see) if I hear about a book that sounds interesting, I put it on hold. Hence the Giant Backlog of Doom.

People keep telling me Delaney is good, and I do really like his writing. I'll keep trying.

[wanderingaengus.livejournal.com]

Lucky you -- Los Bros Hernandez are incredible. Music for Mechanics is fun, but I hope you can also get hold of more recent stuff. Those two have been producing genius for a quarter-century now.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I can get hold of more recent stuff! I wanted to start early so I'd know what was going on. Damn completist instincts. Have anything in particular you'd suggest?

[wanderingaengus.livejournal.com]

For convenience, nothing beats the two volumes that Fantagraphics put out last year - Locas for Jaime and Palomar for Beto. Pricey, but worth it.

The Maggie stories that Jaime is doing in the current version of Love and Rockets are as good as anything he's ever done. While you're reading Music for Mechanics, ask yourself what you think Maggie & Hopey will be like when they're pushing 40. Jaime can get so much character into each panel. Amazing.

[pretentiousgit.livejournal.com]

Wave in the mind was my recc., if you're curious.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks!