jwg

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Might be a couple of errors here - since some of these were a long time ago

I was thinking about some of the books I read many years ago that I really liked. And I've reread some at various times and will do some more.

- Alice in Wonderland (I have the copy I read)
- all the Oz books
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
-Robert Heinlein's young adult SciFi
-Farmer in the Sky was my favorite - colonizing Ganymede
-Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd Series - 10 volumes - I'm rereading them again
Lanny is a well-placed rich kid/man who is an advisor to various dignitaries including presidents through most of the first half of the 20th century.
-Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome - I reread it a few times
I first read it at summer camp - Camp Killooleet in Vermont. When I visited there a few years ago I looked in the library and it was still there. There are a few other books in that series that I read. Young kids with sailboats on a lake in England
-The Book of Knowledge - an 18 volume set
In 1948/49 my parents sublet an apartment for a year and my room had this. I decided to read it from cover to cover in that year and I did.
- Books by Howard Pease - traveling around the world on a Tramp Steamer. about 22 of them.

Probably missed a few others. Didn't much like Bobby Twins or Hardy Boys.

I just finished reading The World Until Yesterday, What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, a book by Jared Diamond. I am a big fan of his tomes - having read Collapse, and Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Diamond is a Professor of Geography at UCLA. In this book he discusses his studies of less developed societies and their transformations. He has made many trips to New Guinea and uses what he has learned there for many examples.

When he talks about languages he says that there are ~7,000 distinct languages in the world but that many of them are becoming extinct due to the influence of the modern world. In New Guinea each small set of people residing in a section has its own language. Neighboring communities have different languages - he stresses that these are not dialects and most people also speak the several languages of neighbors. Once at a campfire he asked every to say ho many languages they speak. Most people said that they could speak at least 5 languages and one person said it was 15 for him. Diamond is a bird watcher so he has had to learn the name of many birds in many languages to that when fellow locals point out a bird he knows what they are saying.

He has a interesting section about diseases. Of course in some of these native populations with no medical care people die of things that would be easily cured in the western world. On the on the other hand in a small closed society when a communicable disease spreads around the peole who are survive have probably developed immunity so the disease doesn't strike again for many years. But then he writes at length about epidemics of non-communical diseases (NCDs) which are so prevalent in the western world: diabetes, heart disease, strokes, etc. The principal cause of these is diet, environmental factors, and lack of exercise - genetics too of course. In these more primitive societies there is no sugar or salt added to anything - people's salt intake is often 1% of a typical western person. Everybody walks a lot, carries loads, doesn't eat fast food or all the sugar and salt added stuff that we find at the supermarket, and doesn't sit around watching TV or playing video games. It used to be that he saw no obese or even overweight people in New Guinea. Now in the big cities there are some because of the western influence. He gives several other examples - the Pima indians in the US who now are very overweight; about ~70% in the 55-64 age range have diabetes. He emphasizes that these NCDs are really epidemics because social pressures, the processed food chain, and pollution related effects cause the spread.

He describes a social scientist label for our type of society as WEIRD for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Interesting thought.

I definitely recommend the reading of his books. They are heavy going but very thought provoking.

--This is a repost -- last night's version didn't appear on friends (or at least some) pages for some odd reason. ---
I just finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (just in time since it I had to return it to the library today and can't be renewed).

It is a really fascinating book about this amazing person who was one of the most obnoxious people I've ever read about but yet an absolute genius as a business person and technical designer. Isaacson has done a nice job of writing about his whole life both as a person and as an inventor/business leader. Isaacson also wrote biographies of Kissinger, Ben Franklin, Einstein - so he's picked some other extreme personalities.

Jobs was overly obsessed with detail at every level from the big picture down to the shape of a screw on a case. When he was contemplating opening the first Apple Store he had a life-size mockup built in a warehouse so that it could be tested and changed - and there are lots of changes. He has patents on the glass used in the staircases in the stores. He really wanted to build a great company that made great products and pushed his people over the edge to do what he wanted. Some people got used to the fact that when he said "this is shit" he really meant that it wasn't nearly good enough, but that creative, intelligent discussions about the design and how to overcome various technical and non-technical issues would eventually lead to his saying it was great.

I liked this quote in a conversation Jobs had in 2008 with the Fortune managing editor. "So you've uncovered the fact that I am an asshole. Why is that news?"

I've been an Apple product user for a long time. My first one was a MacPlus I got in 1986. I'm writing this on Gesualdo da Venosa, my year and half old iMac. Robert's iMac is Clemons non Papa; my MacBookPro is Ludovicus Episcopius; I have an older dead iMac: Machaut (I need to extract the disk before getting rid of it); Obrecht (10 yrs old) and Ockeghem (15 yrs old) (running 9.1) are two old sort-of working macs and de la Rue is an old PowerBook that still works running 10.2. I have had Dufay, Lassus, and Palestrina. Josquin was my only Windows machine which I disposed although I still have the Windows XP image runnable on my iMac. (Yes, I like Renaissance composers). My iPod that I use at the gym is at least 8 years old. I don't yet have an iPad or an iPhone.

While reading The Statues that Walked* by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo I saw this quote at the beginning of the conclusion chapter.

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along.

Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1955

*a new book about Easter Island that offers a very different explanation of what happened using good scientific methods.

No, not me collapsing. I'm reading a fantastically interesting book: Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Diamond is a professor of Geography at UCLA. (He won the Pulitzer for another book: Guns, Germs and Steel which I'll read as some point)>.

In this book he writes about a number of societies that encounter a host of problems - some of which result in failure. I was drawn to it because of his analysis of Easter Island. Thus far I've read about Montana (not failed), Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi, and the Mayans - more failures to come as well as a lot of political-econmic analysis.

He takes a very scientific approach using information from many other scientists and includes his own analysis as well. He clearly expresses his opinion but allows for the situation that there are many opinions and some contradictory data so he might be wrong. He does an excellent job explaining the science involved. An example of this is where he discusses Dendrochronology by which a climate whose rainfall varies a lot over large time spans (not true for all areas) allows scientists to make a pretty valid estimate as to when a tree used in a structure was cut down as a means to date a structure.

I loved this sequence of sentences near the beginning.

"So that readers will have some advance idea where they are heading, here is how this book is organized. Its plan resembles a boa constrictor that has swallowed two very large sheep."

He talks about five factors:
• damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment,
• climate change,
• hostile neighbors,
• decreased support by friendly neighbors,
• how the society responds to problems.
He uses this framework to discuss each place that he analyzes.

In the Montana chapter he talks about the effects of mining, deforestation, lack of rainfall and distance from markets that set the stage for a large set of problems. On the other hand the fact that it is so beautiful there has attracted a large number of wealthy people to buy land and built fancy homes (but not be residents who pay state taxes). This causes land prices to go way up so farming becomes difficult - note that here is where the estate tax comes in because when the children inherit a family farm that barely has enough income to keep alive they suddenly have to pay a large tax and have to sell the farmland for development. This community is still healthy primarily because of financial support from outside - government and the out-of-state land owners who also get houses built and use services. But the potential conflict between old-timers vs new-comers could destabilize the place. (Full disclosure: This is an overly simplistic description of his analysis.)

For Easter Island his analysis is that its collapse was due basically because the people overexploited its own resources. At the time there were no friendly neighbors or enemies and it looks like the climate didn't change so he believes those factors can be ruled out. Essentially deforestation made fishing impossible because they couldn't build canoes, the population was too large for local farming on bad soil (deforestation made it worse) to get enough food and as a result there was so much strife between the rival tribes. Essentially a massive civil war resulted in the killing of most of the people. Of course a bit later there was the hostile neighbors problem where the Peruvians kidnapped about 1/2 the population to be slave labor and later when some returned they brought smallpox.

Of course you can see the parallel to some of our near future dilemma. We are messing up our environment, the climate is changing and may well be more hostile, each country has friendly neighbors and hostile enemies. Currently we are not responding well to many of these problems. The earth is not going to be saved by friendly neighbors from nearby planets and not many people can migrate to them. So we are going to have to figure out what to do, or...