Yet another queue jumper. REG stops by to ask about books.

Me (email response, Sept. 5). Hmm, that's a thought. One problem with it is that more than 50% of the books I start to read I don't finish. Currently I've got a pile of evolution-related books -- Dawkins' Selfish Gene, Eldredge's response to it, and Pinker's Language Instinct -- but all got pushed aside for Peter Singer's President of Good and Evil, which I started perfunctorily but found to be not at all what I expected. That one I'll probably finish.

Me (now). I'm not particularly motivated to coordinate my reading with others', but if others want to try to do the coordinating, I'm happy to reveal what I'm currently interested in, with no guarantee that that interest won't change by tomorrow. It could be a sort of preview of coming attractions to append to the end of the latest book review.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to insert a long-overdue report. I might not have mentioned it at all, except that at the beginning of the year I made a policy decision to record here every book I read from start to finish.

August 15
Convergent Series, Larry Niven (1979)

The date is just a guess. I know it was some time in the middle of last month. Sometimes I get tired of reading new stuff and want to just divert my brain with something easy and familiar. Niven is one of about a dozen authors I use for that. The fact that we mentioned him in the letter column a while back may have had something to do with the choice.

Convergent Series is one of the non-Known Space short story collections. ("Known Space" is the name for the fictional universe in which about 75% of Niven's stories take place, even though many of the stories are not directly related to each other.) It has the Draco's Tavern stories, which I like. It also has the one time travel story I mentioned before ("Singularities Make Me Nervous"). The gist of it is that an astronaut does an unauthorized loop around a singularity which lets him go back in time, then he sneaks back to earth and visits his past self to scheme with him to make his (their) future better. He remembers the experience from the other side when he was the visitee surprised by his time-traveling self. He assumes things will go the same as they did when he was on the other side, but then they don't and then things start getting interesting.

There are some dumb stories in there, too, but all in all it's a good collection. Around the same time I reread about 75% of All The Myriad Ways, which is mostly mediocre and includes two really dismal non-stories -- a juvenile exploration of the consequences if Superman's sperm also have super strength, and the transcript of a very boring discussion of teleportation delivered at some sci-fi convention. I think it was the latter that bogged me down so that I didn't finish the reread.

See, this is how it works. Now I tell you what other books are in the pipe. I finished Peter Singer's The President of Good and Evil a few days ago. Another which I forgot to mention to REG before is David Cay Johnston's Perfectly Legal, which I'm only a couple chapters shy of finishing.

Of the other three library books I've currently borrowing, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is a classic which was on my backburner list for a long time before Darcy recently recommended it specifically (in the course of discussing evolution subsequent to the mention in the review of Harry Potter 5). While looking for it at the library I came across Niles Eldredge's Why We Do It, which purports to be a rebuttal of Dawkins, so I got them both. Also recommended by Darcy was Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct. Before I started it, I was thinking this was part of the evolution group, but now I'm wondering if it didn't come out of our discussion about the nature of language instead. Both of these Darcy dialogues are near the top of the letter column file now, so perhaps they'll see the light of day soon (or perhaps not).

All three I've started but not gotten far in. Dawkins put me off a bit with his billowy writing style. Maybe it was just the introductory chapter, but it sure felt like an awful lot of "first I'm going to discuss this, and then I'm going to discuss that" without getting to the actual discussion. (Yeah, I know, I've been guilty of that at times....) Besides that, the Dawkins book somehow got mixed up with my own books, which means it's now lost in the stacks and stacks which remain unsorted after the move, so it might be a while before I find it again. Eldredge got postponed because it seemed to make more sense to read it after Dawkins. Pinker is holding my interest, and that's the one I'm most likely to actually finish.

For titles on hold at the library, I've gotten into the habit of keeping most of my holds "inactive" so that I have better control of when the book actually arrives for me. I've discovered that an inactive hold still works its way through the queue until I'm up next. Then it sits there at the top of the queue until I activate it, at which point the next copy returned is reserved for me. I've got several holds that I might not even activate, mostly political stuff that seemed interesting at the time but doesn't now. One hold that I somehow left active is now in and waiting for me. The automated email notification, which truncates the title, tells me it's Culture and Prosperity: The Truth by someone named Kay. A vague memory tells me this is some economist writing about why some nations prosper and others don't, perhaps related to the protectionism question.

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