Regarding hotdogs and hamburgers, why make the choice at all? Have some of both!

Ooooohhhh, books ……

I love nonfiction (science and history), and some fiction – if it has spies and detectives in it, primarily. The book currently on top of my stack that I am actually reading right now is “Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age” by Mathew Brzezinski. So far it is excellent. :)

I could go on for ages about some of the books I’ve read, so I’d better stop for the moment at just the one before I start rambling about spy novels and historical mysteries and Central Asian history and genetics and natural disasters and space exploration and …

Under Their Thumb is a must read. About the person who did the Rolling Stone’s fanzine for years. Fanzines remind me of the early stages of blogging. But different.

Also recently finished (finally) Eric Clapton’s autobiography. A huge fan of Clapton… but not of the book.

It is time to cut Mags loose. He will no longer help the team and the Bengals need to go with a younger player. They should play anderson and bring up either Thomas or Larish. Probably Thomas since he is an outfielder.

Wondering if a trade with the SF Giants make sense for both clubs? Barry Zito for Maggs. Both have bad contracts and both are on the downside of their careers. The Giants need offense and the Tigers could use a lefty.

(It didn’t really take me all day to find the ones I wanted to mention, but I’ve been fighting a cold and allergies and have decided to blame my mental fuzziness on OTC medications.) :)

I own a literal butt-ton of books, most of which (but by no means all) I have actually read, so I pared it down to some of the ones that stuck in my mind the most and that I have actually read, instead of just reading the blurb and deciding that it sounded really good, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Sports books: These can be tricky because they are sometimes really sappy, sometimes as poorly written as a string of newspaper columns just stapled together in a pamphlet, and sometimes just dreadfully purple, but here are a few I actually like:

“Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans” edited by Dan Gordon
This book looks at fandom through the lens of neuroscience and what in a fans brain makes them actually think that curses are real. The good thing is that it shows that there are actual scientific reasons for the rush and depression that fans feel about their teams – the bad thing is that sports might actually make us insane. :)

“When Chicago Ruled Baseball: The Cubs-White Sox World Series of 1906” by Bernard A. Weisberger
A fascinating picture of the city and the time as well as the games, with a lot of detail about how people lived at the time and how they looked at the series in the city of Chicago, and how much hype there was, despite the word not being invented yet. This is the series of Tinker to Evers to Chance and “Three-Finger” Brown, and for familiar names it’s remarkable to think of how long ago that was when they actually played.

“The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team” by Wayne Coffey
Even though there has been so much written about that team and that moment, and so much of it on film, this is still a really worthwhile book because it focuses on the players and coaches involved, both Americans and Russians, and what happened in their lives to get them to that point and what happened to them after that game. The focus on the Russians is very interesting because so often they are portrayed as enigmatic robots (sometimes even modern Russian hockey players), and they were just as emotional and human as their opponents. One of them spoke about watching the Americans celebrate after they won that he was happy for them, because the Russian team never got to feel like that when they won, since it was expected. Seriously, not only a great story, but very good writing as well.

Fiction: I like police and detective novels set in more unusual settings, and spy novels as well. Some series that I like a lot:

Lindsey Davis, the Marcus Didius Falco novels (first in the series is “The Silver Pigs”)
These are very typical hard-boiled detective novels, with dangerous broads, difficult relatives, official conspiracies, and hostile politicians – but it is set in Rome and the far-flung empire in the time of Vespasian. Well written and extremely funny, with a wonderful cast of characters.

Barbara Hambly, the Benjamin January novels (first in the series is “A Free Man of Color”)
Less funny, more troubled, these stories are set in New Orleans in the 1830’s and the main character is a physician trained in France and talented pianist and piano teacher, a free black man born of a slave father. The social setting is fascinating, not just the interplay between the races but also the interaction between the French and Americans, with one of the main characters being New Orleans itself. Very good murder mysteries.

Stuart M. Kaminsky, the Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov novels (one of my favorites is “The Dog Who Bit a Policeman”)
These books are set in Russia and the best part of it is the characters. They are such unusual characters, very original, and not the kind of stereotypes that you might expect. Very well written books and engaging stories. These are less murder mysteries than police procedurals, so the structure is a little different than an intelligent amateur sleuth; they have to deal with the police bureaucracy and the politics that go along with it, and that can make investigating crimes tricky if the suspect is powerful and connected.

Adam Hall (pen name of Elleston Trevor), his Quiller spy novels (favorites: “Quiller KGB” and “Quiller Bamboo”)
I hesitate to recommend these because they are written in a style that isn’t for everyone, although I love it. You don’t really see the main character from the outside at all, but everything is from inside his own head. By far the most annoying (in a very good way) thing the author does is transition between scenes. Quiller will be in an impossible situation, and he will be thinking to himself that there is no way out, and then the next chapter starts and he will be talking on the phone and details about the environment will come out one by one as he thinks of them, and you have to wait until he gets around to recapping what happened in his own mind before you figure it out yourself. It’s hard to explain, and probably most people wouldn’t take to it, but I love his novels.

Nonfiction: I have to just mention a few. I read a ton of history and science books, but not everyone is enough of a nerd to enjoy that kind of stuff, but these are some really good ones.

“Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet” by Peter Hopkirk
The same author has written several books about the same region and the Great Game that went on between some combination of the Russians, British, Soviets, Chinese, and Americans in Central Asia. Excellently researched history, but it reads like the most exciting of adventure novels.

“Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier” by Jeffrey A. Lockwood
Locusts used to plague the American West and were seen as a major impediment to settlement, as they still inflict so much misery in other areas of the world, and then they suddenly vanished. This is a wonderful story of how the plagues of locusts impacted American history as well as started the modern science of entomology.

“A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire” by Amy Butler Greenfield
I did not think this book would be nearly as interesting as it was. It covers a lot of ground starting with the social use of color and the importance of the technology of dyes in the Renaissance, and how culturally important red was as a color because it was so tricky to make, and then the story of the Spanish importing cochineal, a brilliant red pigment, from the new world and how other nations tried to figure out what the dye actually came from and where the source of it was. Producing dyes was the high technology of the Renaissance and the masters closely guarded their secrets against industrial espionage. It’s an interesting look at something that is so readily available in the modern world to everyone – brightly colored fabric – that it no longer counts as a status symbol.

“The Beak of the Finch” by Jonathan Weiner
“At the Water’s Edge: Macroevolution and the Transformation of Life” by Carl Zimmer
I grouped these books together because I think anyone teaching a science class at the high school level could do worse than making these two books required reading instead of a standard biology text, because they do one of the best jobs of explaining the concepts of evolution so any moderately intelligent person can understand that I’ve ever read. “Finch” focuses on microevolution, the outwardly invisible changes in the genome from one generation to the next, not just in the finches of the Galapagos but also in the plants they eat and how the gene frequencies changed with changes in environmental factors, and in crops, antibiotic resistance to disease, and other examples that most people are fairly familiar with. “Water’s Edge” is more of a historical view and covers the two greatest alterations in animal life in evolutionary history; the transition from water to land as fish learned to walk and eventually broke all dependence on the water as a living space, and the lesser known transition back, as a land predator evolved from hunting and scavenging along the beach to resuming an exclusively aquatic existance and breaking all contact with the land and living in the water full time as modern whales. Fabulous books, and they do a fantastic job of showing the sweep of evolution and the power of the idea in explaining how the life we see around us got to be the way it is. The most remarkable thing about evolution is that once you understand it (and it really isn’t that hard, because the concepts are intuitively logical) you can see it everywhere, and so much biology that seemed disconnected becomes part of an interconnected whole.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you that I might love books a little too much! :-)

“The Entitled: A Tale of Modern Baseball” by Frank Deford

Just happened to see it on the desk at work and had nothing better to do, so I picked it up and started reading it. Was pretty good. I don’t read much and couldn’t put this one down nor the 2 BATF books I mentioned earlier.

Other books I’ve read that I suggest and am surprised I haven’t seen this author mentioned is Nelson Demille.

The Generals Daughter (much better than the movie)
Plum Island
The Gold Coast
Spencerville
WIld Fire

Those are just a few of his that I have read and really enjoyed.

Also, Louis L’Amour, classic westerns, which helped pass many an hour while I was in the Navy and underway.

since I teach literature and writing courses. Right now I’m reading /Distant Star/ by Roberto Bolaño. Perhaps my favorite writer is David Foster Wallace (still crushed by his suicide last year). I love his fiction and find his non-fiction to be especially superb. Love Salinger, too.
Two baseball related books that I want to read but haven’t yet are /Ball Four/ by Jim Bouton and /The Great American Novel/ by Philip Roth. Any one read (either or both) of these?