After the August 2007 reading list, you won’t be surprised to find another four Harry Potter novels on the September 2007 list. Two other novels – one good, one really bad – round out the fiction group. In non-fiction we have one computer techie book, one investment guide, one work on the Supreme Court of the United States, and one polemic on politics, religion and oil. A mixed bag, indeed, which won’t surprise those of you who know me.
Non-Fiction:
Maria Langer. Quicken 2007: The Official Guide. 2007. xxvii + 484 pages, including Index. If you use Quicken, the personal finances software from Intuit, this guide could be useful for you. It has major sections on Quicken functionality for cash flow, investing, managing property and debt, financial planning and tax management. It is, of course, more of a reference than a work to be read for pleasure, or even for general information. Read 21 August-7 September 2007.
Kevin Phillips. American Theocracy. 2006. xvi + 462 pages, including Notes and Index. Kevin Phillips became famous – famous in political junkie circles, anyway – back in the 1960s, when he published The Emerging Republican Majority. In that book, he accurately predicted some of the major trends in the partisan politics of the next forty years. The South became Republican territory, the Sun Belt became the core of conservative country, and the Republicans benefited from the racial and social tensions which riddled American society. Forty years later, Phillips’s youthful enthusiasm had turned to horror: His Republican majority had given rise to George W. Bush, the religious right, and an unholy alliance between the petroleum sector and foreign oil powers. Phillips seems to feel that, because he predicted the success of the Southern Strategy, he is somehow responsible for its results. So, he has turned to writing polemics attacking the political nexus of the Bushes, the evangelicals, and the oil producers. American Dynasty (which I have not read) preceded American Theocracy. American Theocracy is heavy reading, because Phillips is no prose stylist. But it is chockful of material to feed any conspiracy theorist’s hunger for tales of the evildoers behind it all. You can fill the breaks in reading American Theocracy watching Fahrenheit 911, Jesus Camp, or Crude Awakening. Read 29 July-16 September 2007.
Charles B. Carlson. The Smart Investor’s Survival Guide. 2002. xxiii + 325 pages. I wish I had read this one earlier, but I don't know that any individual's investment decisions could have affected the impact of the recent financial crisis. There have been bigger forces at work in the credit markets, in particular - and this does relate back to Kevin Phillips and his work - the set of policies designed to allow people to improve their standards of living, without increasing the incomes which ought to have been required to support those standards. At this point, "smart investor" sounds like an oxymoron. Read 3-26 September 2007.
Earl M. Maltz. The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, 1969-1986. 2000. xvi + 307 pages, including Appendix, Bibliography, Index of Cases, and Subject Index. This is a volume in a series from the University of South Carolina Press, Chief Justiceships of the United States Supreme Court. At the time this book was published, volumes had been published on Melville W. Fuller, John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth, John Marshall, Stone and Vinson, and Edward Douglass White. Read 17-29 September 2007.
Fiction:
J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. 2000. 734 pages. I suppose that one can sum up the difference between a literary novel and a genre novel written for young people in this fact: I read Goblet in eight days and Deathly Hallows in three, while it took me seven weeks to get through The Stone the Builder Refused. Read 26 August-2 September 2007.
J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. 2003. 870 pages. Read 2-8 September 2007.
J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. 2005. 652 pages. Read 8-10 September 2007.
J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 2007. 759 pages. Read 10-12 September 2007.
Elizabeth Peters. The Night of Four Hundred Rabbits. 1971. 247 pages. Elizabeth Peters, a cat fancier from Maryland, has become a prolific author of mystery novels, who is perhaps best known for her Amelia Peabody series set in late 19th- and early 20th-century Egypt. This was an early book, and it shows. Peters’ acceptance of a sort of Reefer Madness attitude toward drug use rings of Puritan disapproval. And that’s only one of the bad points in this improbable adventure set in Mexico. Read 17-19 September 2007.
Madison Smartt Bell. The Stone the Builder Refused. 2004. xvii + 747 pages. This is the third work in a trilogy on the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture. Bell does an amazing job of weaving French, Creole, and various African expression through the dialogue. His characterizations of both fictional and historical persons have depth and texture. Bell has a very solid grasp of the political realities of the relations between Haiti, Santo Domingo, France, and the United States. The title is taken from a Biblical citation, a Psalm quoted several times in the New Testament. Read 10 August-27 September 2007.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
Showing posts with label Harry Potter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harry Potter. Show all posts
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)