Knight's Reading List VI: June 2007

I haven't posted one of these in a while. I think it's about time to remind people that one of my primary activities is, and always has been, reading. I read a lot, I read widely, and some of what I read is pretty ephemeral - mystery novels, fantasies, and so on. But even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes, and I sometimes come up with a good book.

In June 2007 I finished only six books, but a couple of them were extraordinarily good.

2 June: Stanley Portny, Project Management for Dummies. 2007. xviii + 366 pages. Begun on 4 May 2007. I like the "for Dummies" books, and doggone it! this was a pretty good one.

4 June: Nicholas Falletta, The Paradoxicon. 1983. xx + 230 pages. Begun on 2 June 2007. Interested in logic? Interested in strange, mind-twisting paradoxes? Interested in how paradoxes helped to develop the theory of logical thinking? Then this is a terrific book for you. It's a collection of paradoxes, with solutions when they are soluble. Of course it includes the riddle of "Who shaves the barber?", a paradox that changed modern thought. This is a lot of fun.

9 June: Gore Vidal, Lincoln. 1984. 657 pages. Begun on 12 May 2007. I read this book at the same time as the next one. They're both about Abraham Lincoln. They're both solidly based in good historical research. They were in some ways complementary, as when I used the maps in Kearns Goodwin's book to retrace the movements of Vidal's characters. But Vidal uses the power of fiction to fill in the gaps in the historical record, and leaves us a fascinating portrait of a great man, surrounded by rivals and enemies, and eventually brought down by them. They killed Lincoln, but they couldn't defeat him.

15 June: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals. 2005. xix + 916 pages. Begun 20 May 2007. This history is a welcome addition to the enormous volume of Lincolniana and Civil War histories. Goodwin's focus, like Vidal's, is on the personalities and interests of the men in Lincoln's cabinet, and the women who loved them. This book has some excellent illustrations, but Goodwin's descriptions of these personalities penetrate behind the paralytic photographs of the day.

23 June: John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers. 248 pages. Begun 18 June 2007. I note that I got through the 248 pages of McPhee's Uncommon Carriers in just six days. This is a collection of seven essays about transportation workers, and the systems within which they work. McPhee rides with a long-haul trucker, travels up the Illinois River on a tugboat pushing a raft of barges, and retraces Henry David Thoreau's canoe trip on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. McPhee is a terrific essayist. Gay Talese, in his introduction to a volume of The Best American Essays, mentions that McPhee came up as one of the "new journalists." I've read several of McPhee's books, including Annals of the Former World and The Founding Fish, and his technique is always the same: he finds someone who works in a field, and lives with that person, drawing out the individual life, the career it represents, and the subject matter upon which that career depends. Always worth reading, often surprising, sometimes touching.

30 June: Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent. 1989. 314 pages. Begun 20 June 2007. Bill Bryson spent twenty years living and working in England. Then he came back to the United States, and started to relearn his native land. In this book Bryson describes his travels from Iowa around the United States, visiting and sometimes revisiting various quarters of the country. He stays away from the coasts, preferring to travel the inland roads, through the small towns and rural areas of the country. This book invites comparison with William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, written fifteen or twenty years earlier.