A couple of months ago, I started listening to audio books in the car. Strange that I never did that before, when you think of it, but I figured that this would be a good way to “read” some fun pulpy fiction, saving my book time for more serious stuff.
So far I’ve enjoyed it a lot. But I do have one reservation: drive-time used to be think-time, and now it’s listen-time.
Over time, I may back away from the audio-book thing in favor of spending that time in thought. But until then, I’ll supplement my “What I’ve been reading” with the occasional “What I’ve been listening to” posts.
- Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton. Crichton’s last book - I don’t think he actually finished it before he died. A full-out swashbuckler, one of those books where the hero puts together a stalwart band of adventurers each with a unique talent and personality and proceeds to launch an attack against impossible odds running up against dramatic obstacle after dramatic obstacle. Evil Spaniards! Cannibals! Betrayal! Corrupt Officials! Exclamation points! Fun and preposterous!
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Somehow I’ve made it to this point in life without ever actually reading A Christmas Carol. Now I have, or have listened to it anyway. You know the story and round up all the movie versions you’ve seen and you get a good idea of what’s in the book. A classic, not much else to say.
- Under the Dome by Stephen King. King tortures another small town in Maine, this time by having an impenetrable invisible barrier appear between it and the outside world. But the biggest threat isn’t the dome: it’s the corrupt small town Hitler-wannabe who seizes power and the various sociopaths he puts in power. A big sprawling book with a huge cast, compulsively readable (or listenable, as in this case) with a strong narrative drive and excellent characters where the biggest downside is that the bad guys are a bit too bad (Big Jim Rennie really should have had a handlebar mustache to twirl). And two special bonuses that make it stand out beyond other King books: first, there is no book author anywhere in sight (King has a habit of making his protagonists be authors, something that annoys me). And second, the ending wasn’t bad, which makes it way better than most King endings. (I’m not a fan of King endings, in case you hadn’t guessed.) It’s not a perfect ending, mind you, but it’s nowhere near as bad and arbitrary as, say, that of The Stand. (And a special shout-out for Raul Esparza, the guy who read the audio book. It’s an excellent performance, and his character voices helped make their personalities stand out.)
- What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. A Christmas present from Andy, this is a collection of articles written by Gladwell over the years covering a wide range of subjects. Gladwell has a gift for diving into a subject and providing interesting details that make you go “huh” and look at the world a little differently. A few examples from the articles collected in this book:
- The inventor of the birth control pill was a staunch Catholic who thought he was helping to make the rhythm method more practical.
- It would be save money to lavish expensive apartments and support services to the worst of the chronically homeless even though that would be fundamentally unfair.
- FBI criminal profiling is largely smoke and mirrors, having more in common with carnival fortune telling than with scientific crime fighting.
I greatly enjoyed this book. I love learning something new about a part of the world that I did not suspect existed, and I enjoy having my preconceptions challenged. Gladwell is excellent at providing those things, and I heartily recommend this one.
- Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold. This was my beach-read for the week in Puerto Rico. A thriller set largely in the 1920’s centering on Carter the Great, a stage magician, and featuring appearances by a number of historical characters ranging from the young Marx Brothers to Warren G. Harding. Nothing really profound about this one, but I enjoyed it.
- The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is one of the leading evolutionary biologists, though in some circles he’s better known as a member of the new radical atheist movement. This is his argument for why evolution is true and why the appallingly large number of young-earth creationists are wrong.
I find biology to be fascinating, for me the most interesting of the sciences. And I find evolution by natural selection to be an elegant and often beautiful process. Put that together and I greatly enjoyed this book. And although it covered a lot of ground that I already knew well, I learned several new things in it.
I do have two criticisms, however. First, I was hoping that this would be a book that I could recommend to creationist friends laying out the arguments for why evolution is true. But Dawkins, who clearly has a lot of anger for the creationists, often launches some pretty nasty attacks at them, referring to them, for example, as “history deniers.” While I don’t really disagree with his underlying point, he’s hardly going to persuade people by insulting them. (Believe me, I’ve tried it over the years - it doesn’t work.)
Second, he often quotes long passages from various works about evolution and the biological sciences. That’s fine, so far as it goes, but in several cases those works are his own books. There’s something unseemly about an author who quotes himself (didn’t Oscar Wilde have something to say on that subject?), and it hardly seems necessary here.
But Dawkins lays out several solid arguments for evolution, many of which I hadn’t considered before. And he describes several related matters that I found interesting, most notably the chapter on how embryos develop and how critical that is in evolution. So with the two caveats above, I recommend this one.