Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Stephen Leacock, another author introduced to me by the now-defunct A Common Reader, brings to mind P.G. Wodehouse or Jerome K. Jerome, except his stories (based on the small Ontario town where he grew up) are written in the third person with his engaging, dry-humored, ironical wit. I have personal experience with small Canadian towns, but that's not a prerequisite to delight in this book.

I really miss A Common Reader - aptly named because I found they had reading tastes in common with me - I felt a high degree of certainty that any book I found in their catalog that piqued my interest, I would truly enjoy and deem worthwhile reading. I feel partially responsible for their demise as I chiefly used their website to find books to take out of the library. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Roger for turning me on to them many years ago. They used to account for over 50% of my reading list, down to 15% this year and dwindling to nothing, since their website shut down around Christmas.

On the upside, 24% of this year's list has been recommended to me by friends, co-workers, and fellow-bloggers. Thank you all!

On This Day

July 21, 1886 my grandfather, Clarence Matheson, was born in Nova Scotia. He died 20 years ago at the ripe old age of 100 years, one month and one day.

His mother died long before he was married, so he and his father found themselves at loose ends and up and decided to go to California. They took passage on a ship through the newly-opened Panama Canal and found work at the famous Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, known for the many celebrities interred there. I don't know how long they were there, but I do know that on the way back my grandfather ate so many bananas that he got sick and never ate another one. Back in Nova Scotia, they bought the farm on Waugh's River just outside of Tatamagouche, where I remember visiting every summer of my childhood.

Also on this day...

in 1861, the first Battle of Bull Run was fought, where Confederate General Thomas Jackson acquired the nickname, "Stonewall".

in 1925, the Scopes Monkey Trial ended with a verdict of guilty of teaching evolution for John T. Scopes. The verdict was later overturned - I don't understand why.

in 1969, according to the BBC website, man first walked on the moon. It was 8:56 on a Sunday night here (almost 3 a.m. in London) and we watched it after church at the Hills' house on their color TV. I remember walking outside and looking up at the moon and thinking, "Wow! There's a couple of guys walking around up there right now!"

Ten Books On Scientific Subjects That I Personally Guarantee You Will Enjoy Immensely (Or, At Least Find Mildly Interesting)

Listed in order of publication date, all of these books are excellent and accessible (i.e. a specialized degree is not required to understand them), as well as concise (only 212-370 pages long). They are readily available in most public libraries, so no financial outlay need be involved.

I challenge you to try one and let me know how you liked it.

Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold by Tom Schachtman; 240 pp., Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus by John Emsley; 305 pp., John Wiley & Sons, 2000.

E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis; 318 pp., Walker & Co., 2000.

Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens by Kitty Ferguson; 367 pp., Walker & Co. 2002.

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World by Jill Jonnes; 370 pp., Random House, 2003.

Pendulum: Léon Foucault and the Triumph of Science by Amir D. Aczel; 239 pp., Atria Books, 2003.

Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scales, and How a 19th-century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry by Scott Huler; 250 pp., Crown, 2004.

Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity by David Bodanis; 236 pp., Crown, 2005.

The Physics of Super-Heroes by James Kakalios; 321 pp., Gotham, 2005.

The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld; 212 pp., Walker & Co., 2006.

I Have Statistics to Back That Up

I remember (or think I remember, which amounts to the same thing) having a conversation with Roger where he shared his view that it's a shame the more you like a book, the faster you read it and vice versa.

I respectfully stated that the reverse was true in my experience. When I'm enjoying a book, I like to take long breaks and think about it - chew it over in my mind - in order to prolong the feeling of satisfaction.

Well...I haven't kept records of my reading for the past 14 years for nothing. I decided (after taking six days to read a 212-page biography of one of my heroes, Michael Faraday - which I thoroughly enjoyed) to see what the statistics were on the various ratings of books I've read.

Books I've rated a 2 on the 10-point scale averaged a Flash-type speed of 129.55 pages per day (sounds like quite a bit of skimming).

3s & 4s were 81.56; while middle-of-the-road, nothing-to-write-home-about 5s were close to my overall rate of 73 - 74.98.

6s & 7s held my attention slightly better at 61.93.

8 - 10s were read at the easy, mulling-over, semi-languid pace of 56.77.

Statistical proof that the more I like a book, the longer I take to read it!

Top Ten for July

My favorite works of art by M. C. Escher (in no particular order)

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, and I've always been intrigued by it - so I finally read it.

I think it's about how everything's interrelated, but he goes off on topics like artificial intelligence, Zen Buddhism, infinity, Typographical Number Theory, how the brain works, where thoughts come from, etc.

He includes in every chapter a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise of Zeno's Paradox fame in imitation of Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles."

He uses a lot of word play and makes thinking about hard subjects fun.

As soon as I was done with this book, I ordered from the library Kurt Gödel's 1931 treatise On Formally Undecidable Propositions. This is Gödel's famous Incompleteness Theorem (which I've always thought should be rendered thus: Gödel's Incompleteness Th...), wherein he disproved pompous, arrogant Bertrand Russell's assertion that he had included comprehensive proofs of everything in his Principia Mathematica - actually, Gödel proved that it was impossible to prove everything in any formal system. Unfortunately, this was way over my head, but it was cool reading something of such significance - and anyone who shoots down Bertrand Russell is OK in my book.

I also took out a book that had the complete works of M. C. Escher, as well as The Bach Reader by David & Mendel (a life of J. S. Bach using contemporary documents and letters).

I love books that spark excursions into unexplored territory. I would recommend that if you read this book and come across a chapter that bogs you down in technical details, just skip it - there's plenty more good stuff to be found, so don't let anything ruin your enjoyment of it.

Redwall

It turns out I really like talking animal stories. I know Ken used to hate anthropomorphized animals (I wish he were here, so I could debate with him - on second thought, I wish I was where he is, but I digress...), but I like them. From The Wind in the Willows to The Chronicles of Narnia to Watership Down to Aesop's Fables - I like 'em all.

Let's face it, a lot of time is saved in characterization. You don't have to develop motivation for the rat to be the bad guy - I mean he's a rat!

In this book, a bunch of medieval mice attempt to defend their abbey, Redwall, against the evil rat hordes and their allies (weasels and assorted vermin, of course).

I gave it 9 out of 10.

Good Bloggers Rise Above Distractions

Whew! It took me three weeks to get over my last humiliating post. Bad karma got me. Thank goodness for the NL Central, where a team can lose eight in a row and remain in first place!

I've been busy following the World Cup. Naturally, the likelihood of the last two teams being evenly matched is very great, thus having the winner of the biggest prize in the world of sport unsatisfyingly being decided by penalty kicks. To my mind, that's like having the Super Bowl determined by each team taking turns throwing footballs through a tire - or like the World Series coming down to a spirited bout of 'Running Bases.' My 14-year-old son predicted that France would win it all months ago, so I was kind of pulling for them until the supposedly classiest, best-player-in-the-world blatantly head-butts a guy and then wonders why he's being red-carded. Those French! "C'est la guerre!"

I've also been glued to the ball-by-ball coverage of the Third and Fourth Cricket Test Matches with India touring the West Indies. In the Third Test, the West Indies won the toss and elected to bat first, putting up an impressive 346 before their second wicket was taken. Like the first two tests, India went on to force a draw on day five. In the Fourth Test, India went in first and were held to a meager 200 all out. I thought, "Wow! The Windies have this one in the bag!", but then, Cub-like, they scratched out a paltry 103 in their first innings and went on to lose the five-day match by 49 runs in only three days.

I was also busy preparing for and coordinating the annual Physical Inventory at work. In fact, we took the auditors to lunch at Champps on Friday, June 30th, where there are a kajillion large-screen plasma TVs and we naturally had to hang around to see Germany defeat Argentina on penalties (yuck! - but very exciting, all the same).

I said all that to say this: I am endeavoring to set aside the things which so easily distract me, and am committed to regular posting (for the four of you that even read this). See ya in the Blogosphere!