Delia Barry

Yesterday, I received a thank-you note from my 8-year old niece which ended with the sentence "I can't wait to go out and buy a book." 

My work here is done. 

(I also noticed that, unlike the nephews, her signature was in cursive.  Halleluah!

As some of you know, despite several tries over the years, I have never managed to get all the way through Dune.  In fact, I was so depressed by my last failure that I gave away my copy of the book. 

However I was in B&N this morning after the weekly breakfast with BFFHS and, spurred no doubt by the news of another movie on the way, I decided to give it a go again.  So I purchased a new copy, complete with a new cover. 

I am going to finish this book, even if it kills me.  And it might. 

All but the grading, which will occupy me on 12/26 and 12/27. After that, I get to spend many hours per day in my comfy chair reading. Heaven!

In other news, I think I'm going to ::shudder:: join Facebook ::shudder::

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!

Happy Chanukah to my Jewish friends!

A good Thursday to all!

I think that covers it. :) My Kindle and I are off to my Dad's house for Turkey and reading.

Well, that's certainly a relief. :)

I normally don't post the same thing in both of my journals, but in this case, I just had to. My apologies to anyone who follows both of them. This was stolen from caffyolay:

( Book Meme )

I don't normally do memes on this journal, but I found this one - already completed - when I was cleaning up my hard drive last night, so I figured what the heck.

( My favorite things )

The Murder of King Tut
by James Patterson and Martin Dugard

The story of the discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen is well known, and the story of the boy king who died so young nearly three thousand years ago has captured the imaginations of generations around the world. Advances in technology have allowed archaeologists to examine his remains; many of them are of the opinion that he was murdered. This book is Patterson's take on that hypothesis.

I'd never read a book by Patterson, but of course I had heard of him. Perhaps naively, I had assumed that his enormous success meant that his books contain good stories that are well-written and a pleasure to read. Unfortunately, that's not the case; at least not in this book. The book alternates between fiction and non-fiction – episodes from Tut's life in the past, and Patterson’s research and hypothesis concerning Tut’s death in the present. The structure is an interesting approach, and could make an interesting and entertaining book. Here, however, the differences between the two parts are startling. The fictional story of the young king's life and death in the distant past were excellent, and would have made a terrific novel. The "investigative" chapters were of a significantly lower quality. The final one, in which they concluded that Tut was murdered by a conspiracy of all the people closest to him, seemed to pop out of the ether in response to a page count rather than to the story being told, and left me with the suspicion that a publisher's deadline had arrived and the book was ended in order to meet that deadline; ultimately it was a very unsatisfying reading experience. However, if Patterson (or Dugard) went back and expanded the fiction chapters into a full-fledged historical novel about Tut's life and death I'd read the heck out of it.

Snitched from christina_reads:

Copy and paste this to your own journal and answer the questions. You cannot use the same book or series in more than one answer!


1. Book next to your bed right now: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2. Favorite series: Nancy Drew
3. Favorite book: Pride and Prejudice
4. The one book you would have with you if stranded on a desert island: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
5. Book/series you would take with you on a long flight: anything by Elizabeth George
6. Worst book you were made to read in school: The Grapes of Wrath
7. Book that everyone should be made to read in school: To Kill a Mockingbird
8. Book that everyone should read, period: The Handmaid's Tale
9. Favorite character: Elizabeth Bennet
10. Best villain: Lyra from His Dark Materials
11. Favorite concept series: Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Man series
12. Favorite invented world: Asimov’s Foundation universe
13. Most beautifully written book: The Thirteenth Tale
14. Funniest book: Postcards from the Edge

Bogus Science: Some People Really Believe These Things
by John Grant

There is science, there is pseudoscience, and then there are the truly wackadoodle notions that leave rational people staring slack-jawed in amazement. It is this last group that is the subject of Bogus Science.

This is the third in a series of books about science by Grant. I've been vocal about my admiration for the two previous books, Discarded Science and Corrupted Science, so when I was offered the opportunity late last year to read an advance copy of this book it felt quite like an early visit from Santa. I had high hopes for this book and I wasn't disappointed.

The subtitle perfectly sums up my reaction to these topics; it is almost incomprehensible to me that there are people here in the 21st century who still cling to these insupportable ideas. I must admit, though, that as a geoscientist, my favorite of these topics was the Hollow Earth "hypothesis". There’s something very comfy about the idea that literally everything I know about my chosen field of study is completely wrong.

Although Grant clearly expects that his readers have a knowledge of basic science, the book is written in such a way that anyone could read and enjoy it. Grant discusses each of these bizarre ideas with style and wit, which go a long way toward making what could have been a depressing book into a very enjoyable one. The footnotes alone would be worth the price of the book. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
by Julie Powell

During a period of extreme restlessness in her life, Julie Powell decides to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking – 524 recipes in 365 days – and blog about it. (http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/) That decision changed her life.

I'll admit that I bought this book only after seeing the movie based on it. I loved the movie, so it was a bit of a risk reading the book. Fortunately, I liked the book almost as much. The real Julie as revealed in the book is a less smoothly rounded person than the woman played by Amy Adams. She's obsessive, more than a little self-centered, one of the few Democrats in the Republican-dominated Ground Zero development bureau, really fond of swearing, and a big Buffy fan. As presented in this book, she's definitely one of my people; only a fan would include the following sentence in a book ostensibly about cooking: "Fiddling with damp tarragon left me so intensely irritated that when I was done I had to stick the ramekin/mise en place bowls back in the fridge and go watch both the episode where Xander is possessed by a demon and the one where Giles regresses to his outrageously sexy teen self and has sex with Buffy's mom, just to get over it." At another point, she compared beef marrow to magma roiling under the earth's mantle. I really liked this woman. (Of course, we've since learned other, not so savory, things about her, but I did like the way she presented herself her in this book.)

It's clear that the Julia in the book isn't the real Julia Child of history; she's the version of Julia who lived in Julie's head during the course of the project. Ultimately, that doesn't matter, because her spirit permeates the book. I'm old enough to remember her TV show and I could hear her public persona's voice in the dialogue written for her.

While it's hardly great literature, this was a most enjoyable read and was great fun.

No matter what happens in the next four years, at least I can feel confident that our president is at least as smart as I am, and maybe a little bit smarter. I've missed that feeling over the last eight years.