Mass burial

We're not caught up. Instead the backlog has mushroomed and festered, nursing itself into mammoth proportions. So it seems to me as I contemplate making ten distinct entries. The prospect of gnawing through the content of all those books before pouncing on the next great read inspires me to wilt and pine away. I liked most of them, but thoughtfully representing what I made of them and took from them in several paragraphs each would take a week or two, and I want to live life. I want to breathe in sunshine. In a nod to summer (and a pity gift to myself) let's put them all away here. List 'em off, give them some cursory comment and move on. Deal? Alright then.


Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide (Coloroso)
Grim in subject, softened by the hopeful voice of Barbara Coloroso. She wrote the book believing that an ability to recognize genocide and appreciate its nature is the key to preventing future genocides. In essence, she claims that genocide is the graduated form of bullying, an exaggerated expression of contempt. It is not war. It uses war as a mask, an excuse, and a distraction. The book wasn't fun, but well worth the time.

How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie)
A book on the art of friendly manipulation. There's some good stuff in there. Dale Carnegie explains why criticism doesn't work so well, why a soft touch and a sweet word will punch a hole through most defences, and how to go about explaining what you need. Deservedly a classic.

Blink: The power of thinking without thinking (Gladwell)
Written by Gladwell and therefore fabulous. However, not my favourite among his books. Outliers still holds my full allegiance. If you read only one Gladwell, go for Outliers. If you are sensible about your reading, you will consume all of them.

Till We Have Faces: A myth retold (Lewis)
My second time through. It was as mesmerizing and meaningful as ever. As a novel, this is the book I think of when I want to show someone expert character development. As a work of philosophical magnificence, it is one of the foundations to my conception of love and a measuring stick when I'm questioning what I mean when I say I love someone.

The Five Love Languages (Chapman)
Borrowed from a canny friend who assured me of its great worth. I read it and quickly thereafter purchased it to give to someone I love. The next book I buy will be my own copy of Chapman's explication on love and its expression. It would be awesome if you were to read it too. Tell me, what's your language?

Strange News from Another Star (Hesse)
Don't know if I get along nicely with Mr. Hesse. He's thinking hard and reaching high, but I don't know if I like where he's going or how he's getting there. He is an idealist. That puts us in some accord. But what ideals I can extract from his hints and allegories are either not ones I share or similar but altered enough to force strange pursuits down dour paths. If colours can be put to feeling, then his work gives me a dingy grey that dreams in white.

The Reluctant Widow (Heyer)
Another Heyer-reading friend stocks this one on her personal shelf and tells me Reluctant Widow, and not Talisman Ring, is the best of Heyer. I cannot agree.

Death by Black Hole and other cosmic quandaries (Tyson)
A touch repetitive yet reliably delightful. Here, try this:

"Turns out that some celestial bodies give off more light in the invisible bands of the spectrum than in the visible. And the invisible light picked up by the new telesopes showed that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbours, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas. And as our ordinary, optical telescopes got bigger and better, more mayhem emerged: galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits. And as noted earlier our own cosmic neighbourhood - the inner solar system - turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they've even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth's flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.

Of course, Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parsites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, swarms of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.

So the universe wants to kill us all. But, as we have before, let's ignore that complication for the moment."

Is it not yummy?

The Blue Castle (Montgomery)
Gables have I hated, Castle have I loved. Odd, that.

Never Cry Wolf (Mowat)
Mowat is replete with deft description, delicate sarcasm, smooth irony, and delicious language. However, do not resort to him for happy feel good material. He is too much a realist to soften the edges for us. In me he achieved his objective, which was to inspire respect and affection for the wolf and bitter antagonism for those who set about to exterminate it.


Clean slates are lovely. Breathtaking. Why have I denied myself this pleasure for so long? Off we go, then. Next book: Not a novel! Full entry! A week or two from now!