I read seven more books in April than I reviewed here (oops). To wit:
I read all the rest of the Company books, and at the end I was probably about 85% satisfied, the remaining 15% belonging to Mendoza and her lot, because that was a bit too weird for me. Oh, and at least 1% of my dissatisfaction was down to Kage Baker’s suggesting that there would have been 315 Doctors on Doctor Who by 2351 (though I do appreciate the implication it’s got that kind of staying power). That would necessitate a majority of the Doctors doing one year in the part; and come on, it’s the best acting gig in the world, why would anyone do just one year, let alone most of them? (Paul McGann was in a film, and Christopher Eccleston was lending credibility, so that’s them explained away.)
Really, trapunto, thanks for the recommendation. I had a ball with them.
Then I read this book called Reading the OED, which was, you know, about reading the whole of the OED, in the vein of A.J. Jacobs’s The Know-It-All, when he chronicles his time reading the whole of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Reading the OED was fun in the sense that I like learning new words, but there wasn’t much to it.
I also read Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, which was about how people act contrary to how they think they’ll act, irrational but irrational in ways that studies can predict fairly reliably. It was interesting, and I think people are irrational, and probably predictably so, but I didn’t always feel Ariely was making a strong case. Most of his experiments were smallish, and most of them used students as subjects, which isn’t a representative sample of the population. I also was sometimes bothered by his tone when he talked about women, and that put me off.
So that’s what I’ve been up to, that and cataloguing all my books on LibraryThing. I’m moving soon, so as I catalogue them, I stack them all up in stacks in the living and dining room in my apartment. This makes it difficult to find any individual book. It took me ten minutes to find The Dud Avocado, which I’m reading for the Spotlight Series tour of NYRP Classics in mid-May. Up with independent publishers!