Knight's Reading List VIII: August 2007

I finished reading eight books during August 2007. Three were works of fiction, and five were non-fiction. Of the latter, one was about the origins of the Islamic religion, while another was about the origins of some of America’s constitutional protections. One was occasioned by my trip that summer to the Pacific Northwest, another by my interest in investment strategies, and the last by seeing that one of my favorite journalists had written a book on a particular battle in the war in Iraq.

Non-Fiction:

3 August: Tor Andrae. Mohammed: The Man and His Faith. Translated by Theophil Menzel. 1955. 194 pages, including Index. I began reading this one on July 22, 2007. This is an old book, translated into English in 1955, years after it was first published. (Mohammed, Sein Leben und Sein Glaube, Goettingen, 1932. It is still an interesting introduction to the founder of Islam, and to the way in which information about Mohammed has come down to us. The discussions of Islamic doctrine are spare – I might say mere outlines - but very clear.

7 August: Leonard W. Levy. Origins of the Bill of Rights. 1999. xii + 306 pages, including Appendix, Bibliography, and Index. I read this one between July 21 and August 7, 2007. Since I read this book, I ran across a reference to Levy at the end of Gore Vidal’s novel Burr (1973). Levy has written many books, and many of those are on aspects of constitutional law. This is a very different book to Akhil Reed Amar’s The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, (1998), which I read some years ago, and, to be frank, I found some of Levy’s accounts hard to accept. But he covers the ground, and tries to provide an understanding of how these critical amendments came about, and why they were felt to be necessary.

9 August: David D. Alt and Donald W. Hyndman. Roadside Geology of Washington. 1994. xii + 288 pages, including Glossary, Suggested Reading, and Index. I started this book on 29 July 2007. I love the Roadside Geology books. In some cases, including this one, a new edition is badly needed. Still, the ability to look at the surrounding scenery from a roadside viewpoint, and find an explanation of how it came to look as it does, is priceless. I found one fact of some personal interest: The part of Washington State in which I grew up, the extreme northeast corner, contains the only remaining accessible rocks from the original North American continent. Anything else left of that ancient continent is buried under thousands of feet of volcanic rock, and all the rest of the state has been formed by subcontinents being pulled by subsidence trenches into the embrace of the land.

20 August: James J. Cramer. Jim Cramer’s Real Money. 2005. ix + 300 pages, including Index. I read this book between 11 and 20 August, 2007. I’ve been seeing Jim Cramer on television a lot, lately. Real Money might help more in these difficult times through the influence of its attitude, than by any specific piece of advice. At least it might give you the illusion of understanding what’s happening.

29 August: Martha, Raddatz. The Long Road Home. 2007. 310 pages. I read this book between August 21 and August 29, 2007. I reviewed this book at length last year, and I’ll let that description stand. Martha Raddatz is often seen on Washington Week in Review, and she has made a dozen or more trips to Iraq since 2003.

Fiction:

16 August: J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. 1997. 312 pages. I began reading on 13 August 2007.

21 August: J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. 1999. vi + 342 pages. I started this book on August 18, 2007.

24 August: J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. 1999. 435 pages. I began reading on 21 August, as soon as I finished the previous book.

I like the Harry Potter series. When the last of the books, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, came out in the summer of 2007, I bought a copy for my wife. It was the first of the books I had bought in hardcover; we had the first six volumes in paperback. So, while I was waiting for her to finish Deathly Hallows, I re-read all six of the earlier stories. It is interesting to watch Rowling bring her characters along to increasing maturity, as well as increasing knowledge, and how some of the elements in the earlier books are brought back in the later ones. Events or actions that had a certain significance to the young characters in one of the first books are appreciated differently by the more mature characters later in the series.