Friday 1 January 2010
My Colossal 2009 Read Books List ☀
Well, it’s 2010 already and so I failed at a 2009 self-pledge to log a review of each book read. But I did at least log the titles, and so now, at the end of year, I give to you a way too long of a list to peruse.
Obviously, with this lengthy of a list, it would be a rather large book itself to evaluate each title in proper detail. So, a short blurb or summary must suffice. A few books I have already reviewed in a previous separate posting. Some others I just leak a choice quote from the author. Or link to a review on another fine internet site.
- Coders at Work by Peter Seibel (5) — read this in one setting, fabulous interviews with some gifted programmers, Q&A on platforms, tools, development philosophy, etc.… …granted, may be of limited interest to developer types…
- The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain (5) — unable to this book justice in just a short blurb… …literacy/written culture == male, dominator societies vs. oral/image culture == feminine, humanity… …history is a story of right brained religious figures eclipsed by left brained literalists… …fascinating, but of course, entirely speculative… …and extremely relevant as our culture now sways back to oral culture (with the advent of photography, video, interactive web…)
- The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity by Skye Jethani (5) — In less than a century, Christians have gone from opposing over-consumption at Christmas to demanding it be done in Christ’s name alone. The explanation may be in the numbers. Two thirds of the U.S. economy is based on consumer spending, and 50-75 percent of most retailers’ annual profits are generated during December. This makes the weeks before Christmas the high holy days of consumerism. If Christians engaged in the Advent season as they did in generations past, by modeling moderation and self-denial or by ignoring the holiday altogether, it would likely destroy the economy. To ensure economic survival, consumers are stirred into a buying frenzy every winter with the goal of making this year’s shopping season more prosperous than the last. Santa Claus has been the mascot of this manipulation since the early twentieth century, but if more Christians have their way the season of shopping will someday be inaugurated by the appearance of Jesus Christ at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
- Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism by Eric Burns (5) — what a treat! just about every chapter is a fascinating look at a story in the development of journalism in America, dating back to the first colonists… …from the early time when publishers made their own paper with linen rags and had to brew their own ink… …where “news” meant stuff that happened 6 months ago… …and if you thought today’s journalists are a biased, scurrilous bunch, they have nothing on the revolutionary era newspapers, that all functioned as party propaganda organs… …much like Fox News Channel today, all the publishers were beholden to a party (or prominent pol) and the idea of a neutral POV/non-biased objective mode of journalism was completely unheard of… … whigs v. tories, republicans v. federalists, etc.…
- The Sacredness of Questioning Everything by David Dark (5) — Feeling offended is a reassuring sensation. It’s easier than asking ourselves if the redeeming love of God is evident in the way we communicate with people. It’s easier than considering our relationships with the huddled masses throughout the world who find themselves on the wrong end of our economic policies and other forms of warfare. Perhaps our cutthroat ways bear some relationship to our confused notions of God. Maybe we think God, as an intergalactic economist, is a survival-of-the-fittest type. … We might even think that being offended and angry and on the defensive is to be more firmly aligned with the Almighty.
- Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges (5) — you may have noticed that this web space here is chock-full of quotes from Chris Hedges, who accurately and eloquently captures the depravity in our current culture…
- The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith by Tim Keller (5) — more commonly known as “The Prodigal Son” parable in the Bible, but Keller wonderfully details how it’s remarkably a “Prodigal God”, with Jesus crosshairs pointed at the holier-than-thou elder brother…
- A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark (5) — the “Wealth of Nations” for our time… …dry, with chart and table stat overload, but Clark sketches economic history and an assertion that the arc of technology for the entire human history sans the last 200 years was flat and Malthusian… …and ponders why forces unleashed in the Industrial Revolution shattered Malthus…
- How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James Kugel (5) — mis-titled… …first, not really “how to read the bible” but more an examination of the Hebrew Bible (“old testament” for Christians) and the contrast between ancient interpreters and modern biblical scholarship — which rifts against fundamentalist (and many conservative evangelicals I think too) literalism… …each chapter, biblical hero, major prophet, “minor” prophet, etc.… reviewed along with what current scholarship on what is prevailing consensus (or debate) that often rankles not just the ancient interpretations, but religious devotees today… …the author, a former religion professor at Harvard, is a self proclaimed devout Jew and the material, which is blended together incredibly — juxtaposing the clash of scholarship against traditional biblical memes — written at a scholarly level but brilliantly accessibly comprehensible to all… also interspersed with non-canonical texts like rabbaic? commentaries, book of Jubilees, writings of Philo, etc.… along with biblical passages… some takeways: (a)…etiological viewpoint that ancient interpreters embraced which post-reformed theologians discount… (b) …archaeology finds that in some cases confirm biblical record but in others, cast doubt… (c) …gilgamesh epic correlations with noah’s ark… …isaiah v. deutero-isaiah, bible scholar reflections on david, E. v. P. v. D. v. J. (authors)… …monolatry v. monotheism… …greek translation v. hebrew…
- Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon (5) — Or the futility of war — Lincoln + the Civil War are revered, but things really didn’t change much for black Americans. It was just the Age of Neoslavery, where peonage was in effect, where a black man (or child) could be sent away to involuntary servitude in brutal conditions for simply talking in the presence of a white woman or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A lucrative trade developed with prominent families, local & state law enforcement and major corporations profiting immensely from a captive labor force, terrorized into obedience. This continued all the way until WWII.
- Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (5) — incredible… …anybody who works (or desires to) as a “designer” should absolutely read this… …gives a lexicon for words + pictures…
- Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin (5) — another worthy take by Godin on business and marketing in the 21st century…
- Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles Pierce (5) — another book read in a single sitting… …many LOL moments, but chuckles interspersed with grave lamentations over contemporary American culture…
- Four Ways to Forgiveness (F) by Ursula K. Le Guin (5) — can’t believe I just discovered this wonderful science fiction author…
- Flickering PIxels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith by Shane Hipps (5) — Shane Hipps channels marshall mcluhan and examines the intersection of technology and faith… …a nugget that I come away with is that the computer age is really just brought about a more vivid, deeper manifestation of image/moving picture culture that is replacing the written culture that’s been in effect since Gutenburg, universal literacy and ensuing enlightenment ushered in the written culture…
- The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David Black (4.5) — most books on computer language instruction are poor-mediocre, but this one an amazing deconstruction, of value to programmers at all points in the arc of expertise…
- The Myth of a Christian Religion: Losing Your Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution by Greg Boyd (4.5) — not as stellar as Boyd’s earlier The Myth of a Christian Nation, with some of the same themes repeated… …but still worthwhile…
- Elsewhere U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms and Eco by Dalton Conley
- The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer (4.5) — How to Save a Life
- The Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen (4.5) — to read Henri Nouwen is to pierce the heart with love…
- The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox (4.5) — Faith and the future
- The Forever War by Dexter Filkins (4.5) — somebody criticized this as just re-dump of newspaper dispatches, but I was riveted in reading through, as I don’t religiously read newspapers anymore and a good chunk of the “news” reporting here was fresh to me…
- The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose (4.5) — liberal college student transfers to Falwell University (Liberty) and chronicles his adventures in fundie-land.… …Roose makes a lot of friends and discovers he has more in common with fundie-folk than anticipated…
- Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back by Douglas Rushkoff (4.5) —
- Seeds of Hope by Robert Durback (4.5) — actually Durback is the editor of a collection of wonderful essays by Henri Nouwen
- Doing Healing: How to Minister God’s Kingdom in the Power of the Spirit by Alexander Venter (4.5) — using this book as a church group study, remarkable gestation of healing and spirit, and tie-in to kingdom theology…
- Breakthrough: Discovering the Kingdom by Derek Morphew (4.5) — thorough, readable exploration of kingdom theology
- What the Bible Really Teaches: About Crucifixion, Resurrection, Salvation, the Second Coming, and Eternal Life by Keith Ward (4.5) — the author, a self proclaimed born again Christian, takes aim at fundamentalist/evangelical orthodoxies on biblical interpretation of Christian concepts of salvation, second coming, morality edicts, and inerrancy… …have read several times now, and it joggles my mind, still…
- Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell (4.5) — What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible? Shell’s answer: a low-quality food supply, a ruined economy, a polluted environment, low wages, a shoddy educational system, deserted town centers, ballooning personal debt, and the loss of craftsmanship.
- jQuery Cookbook (4) — another computer language book that rose above the typical poor-mediocre standard for the genre…
- From Eternity to Here: Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God by Frank Viola (4) — Viola emits awe-inspiring metaphors for the story of Christ
- No Country for Old Men (F) by Cormac McCarthy (4) — even better than the award winning move, even if the movie followed the book plot…
- The Road (F) by Cormac McCarthy (4) — gripping, have not seen the movie yet
- The Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization—Christian, Islamic and Judaic—From Constantine to Dante A.D. 325-1300 by Will Durant (4) — philosopher/historian Durant spent his entire life on multi-volume treatise on civilization… …each book is double brick wide, and while Durant espouses an eloquent style, can be overbearing… …have embarked upon a quest to read them all, about two-thirds of the way through…
- The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now by Thom Hartmann (4) — Thom and his life walk with his mentor, Gottfried Muller…
- Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve our Future by Neil Postman (4) — one of the last works by media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman… …cogent and prescient…
- In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony by Eamonn Fingleton (4) — What if the Japanese never really did “surrender” to us, inasmuch as we think they “adopted” our culture and values after World War II, but instead have been playing us for suckers, angry about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ever since? What if they’re collaborating with the Chinese in creating an Asian sphere of influence – decidedly un-democratic – to rule the world over the next century? What if the Chinese have perfected a neo-Confucian system (with surprising resemblance to Machiavelli’s “The Prince”) that melds an oppressive and fascistic state with laissez faire capitalism, creating greater strength for both than has ever been seen before on Earth? And they are using this to both co-op and change our values, to take over our corporate and economic system, and to ultimately gain control of our political system? What if they were already well over halfway to that goal?
- The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right by David Neiwert (4) — Neiwert visits FDL Book Salon
- More: Population, Nature and What Women Want by Robert Engelman (4) — a study of population factors and social impacts…
- The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics by Riane Eisler (4) — Eisler implores a return to a “caring economy”.
- The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society by Henri Nouwen (4) — written ~40 years ago, still a remarkable read… …an essential book for Christians today…
- Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano (4) — Read an excerpt here.
- Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? by Susan Weinschenk (4) — interesting, but not really much about “web design” per se…
- Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices by Julie Clawson (4) — would have liked more details on the gory, unjust nature of economics that remains out of sight for most Americans. Even discussing with fellow churchgoers sympathetic to argument, they are puzzled over this “alleged” existence (other than sensationalist sex trafficking that seems to have permeated the mainstream news-vine) and really want to hear real stories of exploitation to prove it’s not just liberal fear mongering.… …one criticism — Clawson seems to spend a lot of words massaging the reader, almost in apologetic “not to offend anyone” tone. …better to just lay it out, tell the truth, illustrate with real stories and let the reader make of it what they will.
- A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller (4) — The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vacuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won’t work in a story, it won’t work in life.
- Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer (4) — Krakauer is an amazing writer, in every book I’ve read of his, able to weave actors and particulars of a narrative into the historical and present-day global state and stream in which conducted… …and this story of fundamentalist Mormonism gone tragically amok is no exception.
- Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God by Henry Blackaby (4) — Baptists instruction on how to get in touch with the Holy Spirit…
- Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg (4) — What? The story of the blog in a hardcover book? Why yes, and it’s a comprehensive look at the history of blogging and Rosenberg gives short shrift to little on the topic…
- Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer (4) — see my review here
- Teaching of the Twelve: The Power and Relevance of the Ancient Didache by Tony Jones (4) — the Didache, an early Christian document dating to before the Gospels, was a short guide to Christian life… …Tony Jones republishes and adds commentary along with a look at a U.S. house church that’s living it out…
- Abusing Scripture: The Consequences of Misreading the Bible by Manfred Brauch (4) — see Jesus Creed review
- Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson (4) — began reading with the ominous overtone of another cliche screed proclaiming the perils of our digital age… …but it turned out to a be a worthy work, asking good questions and putting together a top-notch study…
- Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne (4) — good, but would have been better without the subtle and not so subtle anti-Christian preachiness…
- The Book of Inkscape by Dmitry Kirsanov (4) — more like, the missing manual for Inkscape, a free/open source vector drawing program that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (4) — the stepbrother of Freakonomics?
- The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman (4) — All societies are being torn between traditionalists and those who are attempting to redefine the family, women, and sexuality. This conflict is going to intensify in the twenty-first century, but the traditionalists are fighting a defensive and ultimately losing battle. The reason is that over the past hundred years the very fabric of human life — and particularly the life of women — has been transformed, and with it the structure of the family. What has already happened in Europe, the United States, and Japan is spreading to the rest of the world. These issues will rip many societies apart, but in the end, the transformation of the family can’t be stopped.
- Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis (4) — exploring how we connect, and what it means
- The Jesus Paradigm by David Alan Black (4) — Are you willing to wash the feet of others?
- Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor by David Augsburger (4) — Augsburger is an Anabaptist who believes in non-violence, but also believes that anyone who supports anyone or anything that supports violence is an apostate
- Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang (4) — shatters the orthodoxies of neoclassical Friedman-esque economics, and lucidly demonstrates the folly of so called “free trade” policy…
- The Fourth Turning by William Strauss (4) — on my writing agenda to log a lengthy piece on this book written back in the 1990s… …basically, a treatise on generational theory, how approximately every 20 years, a new “constellation” of generations results in stage of civilization… …from Awakening (1964-1984) to Unraveling (1985-2001) to Crisis (1929-1945, 2001-2020?) to High (1945-1964, ?)… …the entire cycle is repeated every 80 years or so… …the generations themselves are classified as Prophet (baby boomers), Nomad (i.e., lost generation, generation X), Hero (i.e., greatest/G.I. generation, millenials) or Artist (silent generation, generation Z)… …authors Strauss and Howe remarkably prescient in predicting the crisis and trauma in new century, and actually accurately sketched out a 9/11 scenario years before 2001…
- Using Google App Engine by Charles Severance (4) — an beginner’s introduction to web applications, Python language and the Google App Engine
- Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon Wolin (3.5) — a rant on corporatism and democracy…
- Heaven is Real: Lessons on Earthly Joy — What Happened After 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper (3.5) — Man in terrible automobile accident is pronounced dead, but comes back to life and shares his story and premature heavenly encounter…
- The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran by Hooman Majd (3.5) — FDL Book Salon Welcomes Hooman Majd
- Ruby Best Practices by Gregory Brown (3.5) — should have been titled More Tales of Opinionated Ruby Software Development… …some good morsels, but not sure it fits a “best practices” constitution…
- A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster (3.5) — not much pragmatism, more like ponderation on games…
- Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization From Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age by Will Durant (3.5) — a one, slim book summation of Durant’s epic multi-volume series on world civilization…
- Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding (3.5) — Think globally, suffer locally
- A Short HIstory of the United States by Robert Remini (3.5) — squeezed into just under 400 pages. OK.
- Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions by Bill Scott (3.5) — in color!
- Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas (3.5) — the canonical Ruby language guide and reference, updated for a new version
- jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery by Dan Wellman (3.5) — decent, but these types of works are dated and irrelevant within a year of publishing…
- Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson (3.5) — Free is missing the free. Moreover, while there is an audio version available for free on iTunes, the ebook was only free for a short duration. Anderson belittles his own argument…
- Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur by Pamela Slim (3.5) — Valley native Pamela Slim with a self starter entrepreneurial guide… …decent, but it is an offering competing with a crowded space.
- Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill (3.5) — All societies have a dream and a nightmare. And our nightmare has been, I think, our racism. We practically committed genocide on the people who were here, the Native Americans. We enslaved another race of people, the Africans. And then we dropped the atom bomb on Asians. We would have never dropped that bomb in Europe in my view. And I think that’s what proves the racism of it. That’s the nightmare of America. The dream is just the opposite. The dream is that there is no country on earth that has tried to actually embrace all the people that we have tried to embrace. All you have to do is walk through New York City to see that — or any of our cities and not a few of our countrysides at this point.
- Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus (3.5) — The human mind as a mess of parts
- ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book (3.5) — not bad for a training manual
- Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell (3) — OK
- The Reason for God by Tim Keller (3) — while I relished the other Keller books I read this year, this one was flat…
- Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson (3) — pop contrarian fare, arguments against traditionalist moralizing over the ills of technology… …credible, but really just a decent essay padded with filler to make a book…
- Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture by Thom Hartmann (3) — disappointing, as much as I wanted to embrace, as much of Hartmann’s political outlook is similar to mine…
- Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy by Barry Ritholtz (3) — it can be really hard to convert a blog to a book… …sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t…
- A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story by Diana Butler Bass (3) — patterned after Howard Zinn’s epic work, had high hopes for this, but it was missing good chunks of the people’s history and the author seemed to engage in excessive dumbing down…
- Ten Stupid Things that Keep Churches From Growing: How Leaders Can Overcome Costly Mistakes by Geoff Surratt (3) — bleh…
- Version Control with Git: Powerful Tools and Techniques for Collaborative Software Development by Jon Loeliger (3) — maybe it’s just an issue with me and version control software, but the book was befuddling…
- Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America by Jay Parini — what a wonderful premise for a book, however the execution was a bit flawed… …Parini tried to classify and categorize each of the selected books in similar means, and I don’t think that was very effective… …but it did propel me to think more on the matter…
- Rich Like Them: My Door-to-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America’s Richest Neighborhoods by Ryan D’Agostino (2.5) — author goes door to door in rich neighborhoods, asking rich people how they got rich… …just like the title says…
- No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process by Colin Beavan (2.5) — it was very difficult to get past the annoying tone of the author…
- What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis (2.5) — meh…
- Inventing American History by William Hogeland (2.5) — more like three essays (one on Alexander Hamilton, one on Pete Seeger and one on the U.S. Constitution Center) on how Americans genuflect history to the point of distortion…
- It’s Not What You Think: What Americans Really Want and Why You Need to Know by Frank Luntz (2.5) — puzzling, that Luntz, a gifted rhetorician, meanders aimlessly about in this one…
- The Evolution of God by Robert Wright (2.5) — much ballyhooed, but I found Wright’s treatment of the subject matter to be rather shallow…
- Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott (2.5) — an important and relevant topic, but the Tapscott egregiously juxtaposes personal anecdotes with hard statistical data…
- Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the HIdden Beauty in Software Design (2.5) — disappointing…
- Not Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class by Nan Mooney (2.5) — a college degree used to be a ticket for financial success… …not anymore…
- Finding Organic Church: A Comprehensive Guide to Starting and Sustaining Authentic Christian Communities by Frank Viola (2) — a tiresome screed on “house church”… …loved some of Viola’s other books, but the practice of jamming parenthesized bible pointers to the extent they crowd out the text, the repetitiveness of points made, etc.… grew too exhausting for me in this one…
- Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything by Daniel Goleman (2) — it’s hard to take works like these seriously, when so many people’s basic needs for food and shelter go unmet…
- The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West by Mark Lilla (2) — it was a struggle to get through this, did not arrive at the same takeaway here…
- Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better by David Shipley (2) — don’t understand why something like this is made into a book…
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