More Books from the Library

Books I've gotten from the San Francisco Public Library (Mission Bay Branch) since my last books post in August:

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs
Beijing Coma: A Novel by Ma Jian
Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal
The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan
Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace by William Lobdell
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Wireless by Charles Stross
Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age by Andrew F. Jones
The City & The City by China Miéville
A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind by Charles Fernyhough
The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher
The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard
Quantico by Greg Bear
Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress by Candacy A. Taylor

And I'm currently reading John Adams by David McCullough

The best fiction was a tie between "Beijing Coma" and "We Need to Talk About Kevin", both of which are extraordinary. "A Thousand Days of Wonder" was the best non-fiction, but I'll call out "The Works: Anatomy of a City" if you're an infrastructure nerd. And if the title of "The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down" sounds really interesting to you, it's worth reading.

My Google Listen Soundtrack

I use Google Listen on my Android-powered phone to listen to podcasts. It's quite nice, and I've basically time-shifted all my NPR and other radio listening to it.

Here's what I'm currently listening to, in no particular order:
* Planet Money - Straightforward, non-polemical discussion of financial stories.
* Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! - A weekly news quiz/humor show.
* The Moth - Stories told in front of a live audience with no notes.
* Onion Radio News - One minute humor pieces from the genius that is the mighty Onion empire.
* This American Life - Observational stories or long-view reporting on a theme.
* Radio Lab - A science show? A psychology show? With some some pretty daring editing (for NPR).

Reading the above, I see why I don't write promotional blurbs for a living, but all of them are worth listening to.

Arrrrrr! I were a music pirate fer Halloween!

For Halloween this year I went as a Music Pirate. I wore a pirate costume, and then sewed blank CD's to my belt. Diane says it was quite dashing.

I also wanted to give away some "Silver Doubloons", so I made data CD's with a mix of music from the many odd corners of my music collection. I wanted to guarantee the listener that there was something on it they'd never heard and something they didn't like. Here's what the contents ended up being:

Aimee Mann - All Over Now

AK1200 - Pornstar Style (VIP Mix)

Alice Donut - Lisa's Father (Waka Baby)

Amon Tobin - Big Furry Head

Asher Senator (from Rumble in the Jungle) - One Bible

Atari Teenage Riot - Speed

Beastie Boys - She's Crafty

Billie Holiday - Body And Soul

Bolia We Ndenge (from Buzz 'n' Rumble from the Urb 'n' Jungle) - Bosamba Ndeke

Chihiro Onitsuka - Innocence

Deee-Lite - Smile On

DJ Hyper (Bedrock Breaks) - Lo Life

Frank Hovington (From Deep Blues The Rounder 25th Anniversary Blues Anthology) - Mean Old Frisco

Gamelon Son of Lion - Sleeping Braid

Gang of Four - I Love a Man in a Uniform

Godsmack - Sick of Life

Hamza El Din - Your Love is Ever Young

Harry Partch - Pollux

Junkie XL - Saturday Teenage Kick

Juno Reactor - Song for Ancestors

Kava Kon - The Atomic Clock

Lamas and Monks of the Four Great Orders - A Buddhist Prayer

Lee Scratch Perry - Roast Fish & Corn Bread

Man or Astroman - Jonathan Winters Frankenstein

Moby - Everytime You Touch Me

Music of Upper and Lower Egypt - Allah

Nerdy Girl - Hate Me

Nine Inch Nails - Sin

Original Punjabi Pop - Nishani Pyar Di

Panacea - Tron Rmx

Pantera - By Demons Be Driven

Patsy Cline - She's Got You

Paul Van Dyk - Forbidden Fruit

Portishead - Machine Gun

Seatbelts - Tank!

Steel Guitar Masters 1928 to 1934 - Wang Wang Blues

Steel Rails Under Thundering Skies - White Mountain Scenic Railway (ex Sierra Railroad)

Tettix - Typhoid

The Humans - I Live in the City

The Specials - Stereotype

The Tandems (From Big Noise From Waimea!) - The Rising Surf

Veruca Salt - Spiderman '79

Weather Girls - It's Raining Men

William DeVaughn - Be Thankful For What You Got

Zoe Keating - Sun Will Set

I gave away a few copies at the party, but the contents are really odd enough that I was disinclined to thrust it on just anyone. I just listened to it at work, though, and I like it. Mood and style-wise, it's all over the map, but that (apparently) is what I like.

A Year at the Library

For the last year I've cut way back on buying books, and started reading books I've borrowed from the San Francisco Public Library. Mostly I use the excellent holds system, which allows me to have books sent to my local branch from anywhere in the system, as soon as they are available.

Here's an incomplete list of the books I've checked out from the library in the past year.:

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

The Merchants' War by Charlie Stross

Accelerando by Charles Stross (I'd already read this, I got it for Diane to read)

The Cornel West Reader by Cornel West (barely cracked it, waaay too much about philosophy)

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi

The Last Colony by John Scalzi

Crime by Irvine Welsh

Saturn's Children : a space opera By Charles Stross

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Y, the Last Man (series of ten short graphic novels) by Brian Vaughan (disappointing)

More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman

Street Gang by Michael Davis (a great history of the Sesame Street show)

Tokyo Suckerpunch by Isaac Adamson

Self-made Man: One Woman's Journey by Norah Vincent

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

The Sagan Diary by John Scalzi

Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Off The Books by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

The Wine of Violence by James Morrow

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas by Matt Miller (stopped reading after first chapter, was clearly a my-agenda-to-save-world book, not about how ideas hold us back in general)

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard

Sit Down and Shut Up by Brad Warner

Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate by Brad Warner

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries by Noah Levine

The Revolution Business by Charles Stross

Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life by Michael Krasny

Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan

Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

and right now I'm reading Spook Country by William Gibson.

As you can see, I find the library handy to go through someone's backlist once I start to like an author. And I love not having these books filling up my house, and the price. Plus, I can try a book for free, and if I don't like it, so what?

My Shuffle 15

So I just noticed this meme: Put your entire music collection on shuffle, and list the first 15 tracks that pop up. I don't actually use the loathesome iTunes, but I faked it by listing all the tracks in my music drive and then getting a Ruby program to shuffle them. Here's my result:

Led Zeppelin - Box Set (Disc 1) - Communication Breakdown

Screw 32 - Under The Influence Of Bad People - Don't Let Them Take You Alive

Miles Davis - Greatest Hits - E.S.P.

Tettix - Conformatigmatic - Pro

Brian Eno - Ambient 4 (On Land) - Shadow

Bessie Smith - The Complete Recordings Vol. 1 (Disk 2) - Cemetery Blues

Robert Johnson - The Complete Recordings - Disc One - Phonograph Blues (Take 2)

True Funk (Disk 1) - I Know You Got Soul by Bobby Byrd

Beastie Boys - Licensed To Ill - No Sleep Till Brooklyn

Front 242 - Front By Front - Im Rhythmus Bleiben

Tribe 8- Fist City - Think

AK1200 - Lock & Roll - Funky Sound

The Mermen - Krill Slippin' - Neptune's Revenge

Asha Bhosle - The Golden Collection (Sensuous Moods) - Raat Akeli Hai

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures - New Dawn Fades

As a sample, it's lighter on the electronica/dance music and heavier on the blues than I'd expect, and I'd skip the Front 242 track, but a reasonable impression about what I have.

Diane now has a Blog

As many of you know, my wife, Diane, is now working on the thesis for her Masters in Clinical Gerontology degree. While that's a whole boatload of work by itself, she has also started writing a blog called Gerobabble. It's about issues affecting elder care and news about aging. She's enjoying writing it, and I hope you'll check it out and enjoy reading it.