Book List

What I've been reading, since about 2008.  Undoubtedly a partial list, since I forget to update, and then add several books at a time to the list.  I may try to fill in some of the gaps.

Andreas Kieling, Ein deutscher Wandersommer: 1400 Kilometer durch unsere wilde Heimat

Walter Lewin, For the Love of Physics

Henry Roth, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park

Michael Common and Sigrid Stagl, Ecological Economics

Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

Deborah Rumsey, Statistics for Dummies

David Kessler, The End of Overeating

Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft

Laurie R. King, Garment of Shadows

Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

Laurie R. King, The Pirate King

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo*

Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome

Deborah Luepnitz, Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas

Donna Leon, The Girl of His Dreams

Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

William Styron, Darkness Visible

Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies

Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

Allen Carlson, Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics
Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, Apartment Therapy's Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces
Stephen Harris and Brion Grigsby, ed. Misconceptions About the Middle Ages
Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

Laurie R. King, God of the Hive

Rick Steves, Travel as a Political Act

Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne, ed., Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Robbin Crabtree, et al., Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward

Nikolas Coupland, Style: Language Variation and Identity

Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Kindheit in Ostpreußen

Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh, A Presumption of Death

Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

Best American Essays 2009

Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

Elizabeth Peters, The Laughter of Dead Kings

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

Laurie R. King, The Language of Bees
Mark Harris, Grave Matters : A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial
Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World

Eric W. Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

Annie Leibovitz, At Work

Gail Sheehy, The Silent Passage: Menopause

Jasper Rees, A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument

Margaret Atwood, Payback: The Shadow Side of Wealth

Laurie R. King, Touchstone

Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)

Best American Essays 2008

Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

Heather Armstrong, Things I've Learned About My Dad (In Therapy)

Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

David Albahari, Götz und Meyer

Jacquelin Cangro, ed. The Subway Chronicles

Selma Fraiberg, The Magic Years

*Read as ebook.

One Million Moms

The NRA wants you to think that gun control means you can't have a gun in your house.  But apparently, the NRA also wants you to be free to keep a rocket launcher and a cache of AK-47s in your house.

Sorry, America, the right to bear guns can exist without being an absolute right to as much firepower as anyone wants.  I'm completely tired of the NRA controlling the conversation.

Hunters don't want to think that their right to hunt is going to be threatened.  But state Fish and Game departments already control hunting rights.  Hunting is permitted only during certain times of the year, and hunters are limited in the number of animals they're allowed to kill.

In Pennsylvania, four more people were killed today, and three police officers injured while the head of the NRA was calling for schoolteachers to be armed and saying we need to regulate movies, not guns.

(I'll admit I think he has a point about the movies.  The Offspring and I have seen numerous advertisements for a TV show about a serial killer.  On the side of the NYC bus.  But movie and video game violence need to be curbed alongside -- not instead of -- limiting the availability of guns.)

In Pennsylvania, you have to have a hunting license if you want to go out and kill animals.  You can bring home one deer, two turkeys, and one bear each year.  If you want to get yourself another deer, you can get another license -- to hunt with bow and arrow instead of a gun.  The list of days when you're allowed to go out and shoot things is complex, but limited; it's here if you really want to know.

One Million Moms for Gun Control, on the other hand, wants you to be free of the threat of gun violence. Following the lead of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which a generation ago finally got lawmakers to get serious about cracking down on drunk driving, One Million Moms is building a nationwide grassroots movement to oppose the gun lobby.

And guess who pays the NRA organizers's salaries?  The people who manufacture and sell guns.  It's not your right to bear guns they particularly care to protect -- it's their right to keep selling guns, even though this country already has more guns than people.

Join One Million Moms, even if you're a dad.  Let's put real pressure on lawmakers for real change.

What If?

What if a woman, 20 years old, had shot her father and six other men, and twenty children, with dozens of rounds of ammunition?

Would that change the rhetoric around gun control?

Gloria Steinem pointed out a long time ago that the unnoticed and unmentioned feature of these mass killings is that the shooters are always male.

Women are constructed by significant segments of our society as weak.  Women are subject to male gaze, male desire, male appropriation, male violence.  What if a middle-aged woman -- a mother, maybe, a wife, a daughter, an employee -- opened fire?

If guns were associated with out-of-control estrogen instead of out-of-control testosterone, would lawmakers be scurrying to limit access?

If mentally ill women were inclined to violence, would that change access to and treatment of mental illness?

Culture of Violence

When The Offspring was a baby, I swore there would be no toy guns in the house. Nine years later, somehow he owns several water guns and nerf guns.  I caved.

We have no television, we turned off the radio when he was a baby and never really turned it back on, and we're careful about violent movies.  Yet somewhere, T.O. has learned to cock his hands and make machine-gun noises.  All summer, the neighborhood kids played "Hunger Games."  Before school started, we finally let him read the book.

The news about the shooting doesn't seem to have filtered down to the younger kids. At pick-up from school, T.O. was holding a piece of graph paper, and said he wanted to go to Staples and get a whole pad of graph paper.

"Sure, what for?"

"I'm making a death maze."

"What?!?"

"It's a really hard maze."

Then he said something I didn't catch (it's noisy among hundreds of kids who've just been freed for the weekend) about "ammo."

His imaginative world is full of weapons and violence.  It's a big feature of the books he reads -- Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl.  He's growing up in a culture where violence is constantly represented as exciting, honorable, and fun.

And that culture has been around us for millennia.  Last year, I read him The Odyssey, with all its depictions of death and destruction.  I lingered a bit over the scene where Odysseus scolds Eurycleia for her joyous reaction to the death of the suitors.  In Fagles' translation, Odysseus says: "No cries of triumph now. It's unholy to glory over the bodies of the dead" (XXII. 436-7).  Yet this is one line in a long narrative in which Odysseus' survival depends on death upon death upon death.

The anti-war hippy tunes that form our family soundtrack are lost in the winds of this culture.  Anything I've said about peace, pacifism, the wounds of war -- it's drowned in a cultural message that makes violence so much more engaging.

I don't really know, aside from moving to a remote island, how to insulate T.O. from that culture.  I can only hope that he will never find himself at the wrong end of a gun, and that at some point he'll turn aside from killing games and find other ways to express his energy and creativity.

And maybe, in my wildest dreams, he will use that energy and creativity to help to change the culture.

Aftermaths and Catastrophes

Corlears Hook Park, next to our building, used to have whole rows of stately old trees, 80 or 90 years old.  When we first moved to the neighborhood, I kept taking pictures: it seemed the trees demanded it.

Many of those trees are gone now.  Three came down in Hurricane Irene and another nine in Hurricane Sandy, and the park has a completely different feel now: more open, brighter, yet without the majesty of the tall trees.

Corlears Hook park was damaged by the winds of Sandy.  Across the FDR Drive, the East River Park flooded.  A month later, there are still piles of rubble, flotsam and jetsam, tree limbs, and garbage: there just isn't enough people power to get everything cleaned up.  The dog run is in shambles.

These are local reminders that a month later, people in the region are still homeless, still suffering in various ways from the storm's destruction.  And I keep thinking of people and places elsewhere in the world: the tsunami in Japan, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the earthquake in Haiti.  Civilians, many of them children, in places riven by war, drought, famine.

My internal landscape was shaken by the hurricane, and I'm left more aware of the people around the world who suffer from ecological and political catastrophes.  At worst, I'm paralyzed: there's too much suffering, and I can do too little.

Yet I'm fortunate that my institution has given me space to develop two courses on the environment, and in those courses, I can help bring students to awareness of climate change and the resulting problems.  It seems too little, a tiny ripple in an immense pond, yet it's what I can do.

And so I need to push away the feeling that the world's problems are too big, and my capacities too small, and keep doing what I can do, and hope that those around me will also be inspired to action, and the ripple effects will build.

Reader, I Shopped

Yes, I went into an actual temple of commerce on Black Friday.  Two, in fact.

I've chronicled my relationship with stuff and shopping for stuff: I feel as though I have too much of it, yet I'm reluctant to get rid of things because I might need them some day.

Some months ago, I decided to try not to shop any more.  I didn't last long: I'm addicted to books, and even I need a new garment now and then.  Or I want a new garment now and then.

But the attempt to stop buying things did reshape how I shop.  I had been shopping on-line sales to buy stuff I might need some day, rather than things I actually needed at that moment, and often things I didn't necessarily want: colors that were on sale rather than colors I wanted to wear, for instance.  This was a contributor to the excess.

I'm still on the email lists for some stores, because if I'm going to buy something, it might as well be at a discount.  But most of the time I delete the sale announcements unread, and don't waste all that time scrolling through sales listings to see if there's anything I might want some day.

Instead, I buy what I actually want, or see an actual, immediate need for.

I try to buy only items that replace other things: a threadbare blazer, a pair of pants that's gotten too short in the wash.  I also have gotten better at giving away (not throwing away) things that I can no longer use, but that others can, in one way or another. And sometimes I even get rid of something and don't replace it.

The closets and cabinets are far less stuffed than they were a year ago, and I've been saving time and money by not shopping.

Oh, and my purchases this Black Friday?  A pair of mid-weight lined hiking pants, and for The Offspring, a book and a book light for reading in the car in the winter. I went into the stores with the specific intention of buying those items, and that's what I came out with.  No extras, no impulse purchases, nothing I thought I might want on some future occasion.

Bike Lane Rant

Did you know that bike lanes are only for bikes?

 That's right, bikes only.  Also: No Pedestrians:

Plus, they're one way.  Bikers, did you know that?  Here's a hint: the bike icon is right side up:

Also note the arrow indicating direction of travel:

 Still not convinced?  How about this?