Just finished reading an interesting Project Gutenberg Edith Wharton story from the Atlantic, The Bunner Sisters. Harrowing tale of spinster poverty in late 19th Century lower Manhattan.
As usual, alternating fiction and non-fiction:
I have begun James Gleick's THE INFORMATION: A HISTORY, A THEORY, A FLOOD hoping to refresh my "geek" credentials. I had just reached the page introducing Alan Turing and at the same time (while pausing to read Google News), I saw that the UK Museum dedicated to breaking the Nazi Enigma Code has just rebuilt a "Turing Machine," the computer that helped win the war.
For someone who has trouble with crosswords and math and can't decipher simple substitution codes, I am addicted to books about codebreaking. I like reading about people who do what I can't, like mountain climbing. Can't wait to visit the Bletchly Park Museum when I get to go back to England.
Also beginning CALEB'S CROSSING by Geraldine Brooks, about the first Native American to graduate from Harvard in 1665. Six miles from my house in Northwestern Connecticut, in the early 19th Century there was a missionary school for young men from Hawaii and other Native Americans. It was disbanded in 1826 when a local (white) woman married a Cherokee graduate, and the mixed-marriage upset the town. Marriage Equality and Affirmative Action have always been prickly subjects
Have a Happy Memorial Day! I am off to Seattle to see my niece graduate from High School (and then head to Penn as an engineer-to-be) and to congratulate my nephew on finishing college (UC Berkeley) and getting a job as the first software engineer in our family's youngest generation -- which also includes our first Turkish and Arab speaking journalist (an American University graduate who is off to the Middle East as a State Dept. Language Fellow). These young people give me infinite hope for a future with fewer and fewer wreaths to be laid at fresh graves on Memorial Day.
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I'm in the middle of --
ReplyDeleteJohn McPhee's The Control of Nature. Part I is fabulous context for the Mississippi floods (terrifying, written smooth as honey). Part II is the mind-blowing geophysics that is Iceland. Haven't gotten to Part III yet.
The O'Reilly Using Drupal book. Chapter and a half in and surprisingly useful thus far. (Of course it is not surprising that an O'Reilly book should be useful as they are consistently awesome, but I'm surprised that I've already gotten so much stuff I can use from a survey-style book given that I already know a fair amount about Drupal (it powers our web site).)
Daniel Abraham's A Shadow in Summer -- quite good thus far. I recently read & loved his Dragon's Path (medieval banking as a major theme in epic fantasy? sign me up), but the sequel isn't out yet (the travails of an epic fantasy fan) so I've headed to back catalog.
Sense and Sensibility, because I'm tickled that I can read a public-domain ebook from the 1800s on my phone. Unfortunately, nowhere near as good as Pride and Prejudice (why is nearly every character in this book annoying?).