January's pleasure reading

While we were in Colorado I was able to read Bossypants, an autobiography by Tina Fey.  It was a quick read, with some chapters sort of like those in The Da Vinci Code and other Dan Brown books.  I really enjoyed Bossypants and it was a nice way to pass time in the mornings and evenings.  I have a thing for (auto)biographies and this one didn't disappoint!  Tina Fey, like David Sedaris, just has a way with making ordinary things funny.  I noticed a lot of parallels between her life and Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, so it was interesting to learn a bit about where she get the inspiration for her writing.

She gave an introduction that I found amusing:

"If you are a woman and you bought this book for practical tips on how to make it in a male-dominated workplace, here they are.  No pigtails, no tube tops.  Cry sparingly.  (Some people say "Never let them see you cry."  I say, if you're so mad you could just cry, then cry.  It terrifies everyone.)  When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable.  Also, don't eat diet food in meetings.  

Perhaps you're a parent and you bought this book to learn how to raise an achievement-oriented, drug-free, adult virgin.  You'll find that, too.  The essential ingredients, I can tell you up front, are a strong father figure, bad skin, and a child-sized colonial-lady outfit. 

Maybe you bought this book because you love Sarah Palin and you want to find reasons to hate me.  We've got that!  I use all kinds of elitist words like "impervious" and "torpor", and I think gay people are just as good at watching their kids play hockey as straight people. 

Maybe it's 70 years in the future and you found this book in a stack of junk being used to block the entrance of an abandoned Starbucks that is now a feeding station for the alien militia.  If that's the case, I have some questions for you.  Such as: "Did we really ruin the environment as much as we thought?" and "Is Glee still a thing?" 

... Or perhaps you just bought this book to laugh and be entertained.  For you, I have included this joke: "Two peanuts were walking down the street, and one was a salted."  You see, I want you to get your money's worth."

I also have two Betty White autobiographies and a biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, to read, so I'm sure I'll get around to those sooner or later.   I read several more books at the end of 2011 but I slacked off on writing them up on here (I slacked off with just about all blog things at the end of the year and will probably slack off until the end of February as well).

Anyway, this was a really entertaining read  :)

October pleasure reading, part 4

This month I also read two other John Grisham books, The Associate and The Client.  Both of these books were less depressing than the first Grisham books I read, so that was refreshing.  They both ended in slightly ambiguous ways but at least I can tell myself that the main characters got their happy endings (instead of knowing that they died or something).  When I return these books to the library I'll see if there are any remaining Grisham books that I haven't read, but I also have a few biographies that I want to read so maybe I'll get to those first :)

October pleasure reading, part 3

This month I also read The Existential Detective by Alice Thompson.  Honestly, I only picked this book up from the New and Noteworthy section of the Duke library because I saw my name on it, but it turned out to be really interesting and a quick read.  It was a story about a private detective who was hired to find a man’s wife.  Throughout the course of the story,  he keeps flashing back to earlier points in his life where we find out he had a daughter who was abducted and never found.  Anyway, the book has a nice, if weird, ending and that’s really all I need from my books.

October pleasure reading, part 2

At BMES 2011, I was able to read some on the plane/in the airport and during conference down time.  I borrowed a book from my friend on an impulse and I enjoyed it.  The book was called Mermaid by Carolyn Turgeon and it was not really the type of book I would usually read, but that's okay.  It was short and quick but a bit sad because it was basically about two women that fall in love with the same man and each make big sacrifices to try to be with him.  It did parallel The Little Mermaid a bit, but this was definitely a lot darker, like the actual fairytale by Andersen.  It really makes me want to go on a Disney-watching binge...

October pleasure reading

This month I finished Heat Rises by “Richard Castle” and The Appeal by John Grisham.  Both books were enjoyable and I got through them really quickly.  A lot of that is because I was at Ethicon on Raleigh on Monday and Tuesday last week so I had a lot of opportunities to read because I don’t have access to the Internet while I’m there.  I finished them both over the weekend.

Anyway, Heat Rises is loosely based around the show Castle, so that automatically is a point in its favor.  This was one was a bit different because the roles were reversed from how they usually are in the show.  For example, in the show, one of them is seriously injured but in the book the other was seriously injured.  I’m sure it’ll turn out alright in the end, but it’s interesting to draw some connections between the show and the books.  I also like the sense of humor of whoever is this ghost writer that takes on the name of the author on Castle.  He had one quip about George Michael’s song “Careless Whisper” and another scene where some agent tells the author in the book that he “sorta looks like that guy who roamed outer space everybody’s so crazy about” to which the character in the book replied, “Malcolm Reynolds?”.  First of all, I LOVE Firefly, and secondly, the actor who plays the author character in the show is the same actor who played Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion).  Just a little humor for the hardcore fans I guess.

Now, I’m still entertained by the John Grisham books, but I’m noticing the theme that none of them ever ends well.  Not a single one.  You want that execution stayed?  No such luck.  You want that juror to survive?  Well too bad, she dies.  You want that appeal denied?  Today’s not your day.  I've started reading The Client and I feel like I should just go ahead and assume they never discover the body they’re looking for and the young protagonist is murdered by mobsters.  It’s not worth hoping it’ll turn out well.

September pleasure reading, part 2

So I have read quite a few books in the past couple of weeks – I hope I don’t leave any out of my recaps here!  I read The Great Train Robbery, Jurassic Park, and Travels by Michael Crichton and I read Catching Fire and Mockingjay (the second and third books of The Hunger Games trilogy) by Suzanne Collins.  I really liked all of these books except for Travels, which turned out to be autobiographical.  I guess if I had known it was not a fictional story I might have enjoyed it more, but because I was expecting something different, this story let me down (a lot of the books in Duke's library have been recovered so I had no idea what the book looked like or any ideas about what it was about, even though the picture shown here makes it pretty obvious that it's about Crichton).  I really enjoyed Jurassic Park and I’m going to look for The Lost World when I get the chance.  I was surprised by how very different the book is from the movie!  I know that is to be expected when books are made into movies, but a lot of people died in the book that didn’t die in the movie, and several people lived in the book that died in the movie.  It seems like those are things you shouldn’t mess with when you’re making a movie, but whatever. 

The Hunger Game series was a bit depressing and ended on a bittersweet note but the stories really sucked me in, and that’s what counts for me when I’m reading.

I’m not sure what I’ll look for today when I go to explore Duke’s library, but I’ll probably end up in the New and Noteworthy section again.  I’m already reading The Count of Monte Cristo, so there’s one on my list.  I'm pretty sure I've read it before, but I'm not sure if I finished it, or maybe I read it once half-heartedly in school (we were required to read books outside of our coursework and take quizzes on them and we had to earn a certain number of points from these quizzes each semester, so I might have skimmed the book because it was worth a  lot of points on the quiz or something).  Also, one of the shows I really enjoy, Castle, has books that are written by the fictional author on the show and I'm pretty sure another one came out either this week or will come out sometime this month.

September pleasure reading

Last week I read the first book in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins (the book is also called The Hunger Games).  This series has come highly recommended to me from various friends, so I thought I would check it out (plus I was able to borrow it from one of my friends, score!)  I read the entire thing in one night.  Seriously.  I started around 8 and I stayed up until 1 to finish it.  This was bad seeing as how I am already missing out on sleep, and should have gone to sleep around 10 that night, but that’s okay.  I need to learn to pace myself with reading books that are part of a series (ex: reading the first 6 HP books in the span of a week, knowing there were only going to be 7 books) and despite the really depressing content of the books, it was hard to put it down.  I guess it’s like HP in that there’s a main character who everyone is rooting for and even though you know that (s)he’s not going to lose (because that would make the entire series lame), you still want to see how it turns out.  Anyway, the book was a quick read, but also enjoyable.  I’m looking forward to borrowing the second and third books in the series!

Yesterday I finished a book called Rising Sun by Michael Crichton.  This was not as good as the other books I’ve read by him, but that’s okay.  They can’t all be winners.  It was sort of interesting because the premise of the story is about the US and its business relationship with Japan.  I’m not sure how accurate his information is (but I’m assuming quite accurate because he includes references) but it makes me want to understand more about our economy and our trade laws with other countries.  I’m not sure how we expect to turn our economy around if we continue to buy things made in China over things made in the US, but I really would like to know more about those sorts of relationships.  I only had to take basic macroeconomics in undergrad, so my exposure to those sorts of things was quite limited.  Back to the story: to me (at least) the murderer was really obvious from the beginning.  Still well-written, but I’d recommend Congo and Sphere before I’d recommend Rising Sun.

August pleasure reading, part 4

Maybe I read to escape acknowledging the fact that I'm a fourth year Ph.D. student, but I also read While Mortals Sleep, a posthumously-published collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut, Sphere by Michael Crichton, and Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas.  I guess technically I've read Funny in Farsi before, but I was in high school and there were several chapters I don't remember ever reading.

 

All the books were really good (obviously, since I got through them so quickly!) and I would recommend them to anyone looking for something to read that's not too involved.  I read a lot when I go to the fitness room (I usually run then either bike, walk on a steep incline, or (only as a last resort) go on the elliptical) so that's how I get through so many books I think.  I also enjoy reading before bed although lately that's been getting difficult because I've been getting up early to get to lab around 715 so I like to just go to sleep :)

I'm now reading Rising Sun by Crichton and one of my friends lent me the first book in The Hunger Games series, so I'm sure I'll get started on that pretty soon.

Anyway, lunch time over, back to work.

August pleasure reading, part 3

Wednesday I finished Congo by Michael Crichton and I really enjoyed it!  I've also almost finished Sphere by him as well, but I'll write about that after I read the last 60 or so pages.  I had a lot of down time the past 2 days because I was at Ethicon doing some experiments that are mainly "hurry up and wait" types of experiments so I read in between.  I had some journal articles that I read too, but I also don't have internet access while I'm there so sometimes it's hard to read articles if there's something I want to look up.

Anyway, the book was really good!  Apparently it is also a movie, but I'd never heard of the movie.  Sphere is also a movie, but I'm glad I haven't seen them because that would ruin the suspense of the book.  Now that I've read a lot of John Grisham books I guess I'm moving on to another prolific writer.  What's next, James Patterson?

Congo was about a group looking for a valuable type of diamond in the jungle of Congo but all the groups that get close to their destination just vanish and are never heard from again.  The book follows one expedition team that is a follow up team sent in when their first team is destroyed (why you would send another group in seems stupid, but I guess business is business!).  Anyway, it was fun to read but not hard to read, which is nice sometimes when you're tired of journal articles.

August pleasure reading, part 2

This month I also read the book Lucy by Laurence Gonzales; it wasn’t something I’d normally read but it jumped out at me when I was returning the last round of books I borrowed from Duke’s library.  I had been talking to one of my labmates about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which she saw and said was entertaining but really impractical from a scientific POV.  For instance, the guy in the movie did his experiment once on one animal then immediately said “We’re ready for human trials!!!”.  We had just been talking about this when I picked up Lucy in the library to read the inside cover and it talks about one character rescuing a girl only to discover she’s a “human hybrid, half human and half monkey…”.  So since we’d just been talking about things shown in mainstream media that are ridiculous to scientists (ie: DNA tests that take half an hour to run so that the criminal can be caught just in time) I decided to give it a read.

It was pretty entertaining and the author threw a lot of scientific garble into his description of how Lucy was made, but even with my somewhat limited understanding of genetics I know that the sentences were not coherent.  But I guess using a lot of multi-syllabic scientific jargon is really all you need if you’re just writing a book for the general public to enjoy.  It’s not like this author was claiming this could really happen.  It kind of made me want to read Jurassic Park again, just to see how Crichton described that process now that I’m not 12 and know more about science.  I am currently reading a book called Congo by Crichton, but maybe then I’ll reread Jurassic Park and The Lost World.  I also checked out Funny in Farsi, which I read in high school but don’t remember much about except that I liked it.  I read Firoozeh Dumas’ other book and talked about it here, but I’d like to read her first book again.

Last week I also read Something Borrowed and Something Blue by Emily Giffin, but I’ve read them both a few times, so there’s nothing to summarize really.  It had just been awhile since I’d read them.  It feels like I’m averaging 2+ books/week this summer!  Maybe it’s because I know writing my prelim is fast approaching and I’m trying to get all my pleasure reading in while I can…

August pleasure reading

So far this month I have read two more John Grisham books, A Painted House and The Last Juror.  Both were suspenseful but The Last Juror was definitely more interesting to me and had a better ending.  In my opinion the end of A Painted House was a bit of a let-down and the ending felt a bit abrupt.  It was still well-written with colorful side stories along with the main plot so I'm not too disappointed.  I’m still not sure what genre to classify John Grisham books because they aren’t really mysteries or detective novels or anything, I guess they’re just “suspenseful” and that’s their category.  I’ll still continue to make use of Duke’s library because they have quite a few other John Grisham books that I can plough through. 

I also have a book by Kurt Vonnegut that is from the library as well as mystery-type book I saw there the other day when I was returning a textbook.  I borrowed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from one of my labmates so I should restart that soon too.  I read the first 80 pages or so the day she gave it to me, but then I got distracted with the Grisham books.  Maybe I just need to stop reading books concurrently and that will solve my problem.

Talking about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reminds me of this website, which a friend sent to me but I had seen on someecards.com on other occasions – it’s pretty entertaining!

July pleasure reading, part 3

I was a busy reader in July!  I also read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.  This book was pretty good and a little spooky but I enjoyed it.  The main action of the story took a while to develop and it was never reeeeeally clear what was happening.  I guess that is the way to keep the reader interested, trying to pay close attention so they don’t miss anything.  It’s kind of like the excellent older movies, like Alfred Hitchcock movies, that are scary for what you don’t see than what you do see (ex. Psycho).  Anyway, this was another book I checked out from Duke’s library, the “New and Noteworthy” section.  I think I’ll go over there this afternoon while my experiments are running and see if there’s anything else that catches my eye!

July pleasure reading, part 2

I have finished another book this month, the first John Grisham book I’ve ever read (that I remember…) and it was called The Confession.

The story was really good and very intriguing – it only took me 2 days to read the whole thing and I’ll certainly look in to checking out other books by him.  The whole premise of the story was also thought-provoking because it was about a criminal who got away with a murder that a man on death row is about to be executed for committing.  The minister who this murderer confides in tries to convince him to turn himself in to save the innocent man.  The story is about racing the clock to the execution time as well as getting authorities to believe the criminal when he says he is the murderer.

This book was heavily tilted against the death penalty, given as how it was told from the perspective of a minister and just the fact that it was about trying to get an innocent man off of death row.  As someone in favor of the death penalty I am a bit confused by the attitude that a lot of more liberal people take, saying that the death penalty is “cruel and unusual”.  I’d say it’s infinitely crueler for someone to torture, rape, murder, imprison, etc another person than it is to be heavily sedated to the point that your heart stops and you just don’t wake up.  I like to think that the possibility of the death penalty causes people who are willing to commit such crimes to perhaps think twice about their actions. 

I also find people who are against the death penalty but favor abortion, especially late-term abortion, to be pretty hypocritical.  This is especially annoying to me in people who are liberal and religious and use religion as their basis for objection to the death penalty but feel that abortion is somehow not included in the blanket “thou shalt not kill” statement (and yes, I’m aware how people define “life” and argue that it does not apply to a fetus that could not live outside the womb).  For my own personal reasons I disagree with abortion but I also don’t agree with the government trying to dictate what a woman can do with her own body (also ironic that most people who are pro-choice only disagree with that particular infringement into personal rights made by large and over-reaching governments), so I’m not saying that I think abortion should be illegal just that people who are pro-abortion and anti-death penalty need to figure out what they actually think and how they can be okay with one and not the other.  Basically what motivates my feelings is the presence of guilt in one case and not the other; executing a criminal who committed heinous crimes against another individual is not the same as abortion.

I also just finished the book Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs.  I decided to check out this author because her books are the ones that the show Bones on Fox is loosely based on.

I enjoyed this book a lot too -- the story was good even if the characters are not really at all similar to the tv show.  I'm sure I'll end up reading more of her books because as you can see, she has many!  This was not nearly as controversial as The Confession, and was pretty much the standard murder mystery.

July pleasure reading

I've been making more use of the Duke library to check out books that have nothing to do with surfactants, emulsions, and polymers which is nice to save some money and also because I just choose books at random from the "New and noteworthy" collection and would read books that I wouldn't normally read.

I've read two books so far this month, both from the Duke library, one called Finny by Justin Kramon and one called If I Loved You I Would Tell You This by Robin Black.  Both were good, but I enjoyed Finny more.  The second one was a collection of short stories, which was cool, but I generally like to read books that are more cohesive.  Anyway, I'm not much for critiquing books really, I just want a way to keep track of what I've read so that when I reach December 31 and look back at the year I'll remember having read these books and maybe a little bit about them.

Right now I also have The Hobbit, a John Grisham book called The Confession, and a third book that I can't remember the name of but appeared to be some sort of thriller-type book checked out for pleasure reading.  I also have about 20 books on polymers, but I try not to think too much about those :-P  I now know where the Surfactant Science Series can be found without having to double check and a few weeks ago someone actually recalled two of my books that I've had for about two years and I was irrationally annoyed (the nerve!!).  How can more than one person want to read about nonionic surfactants?  I just photocopied the important sections of the books before I returned them but I was still contemplating recalling the books as soon as I turned them back in, just to be spiteful.  I wouldn't really do that, I was just so shocked that someone wanted these books!  They recalled two of them!  I think I was more annoyed because this was the week I was leaving and swamped with work I was trying to wrap up before we left and finishing the presentation and data analysis and the last thing I wanted to do was photocopy a book chapter!

June pleasure reading

Well so many things have been going on that I need to post (such as a 12 day trip to England and Wales!) but for now I'm going to give brief posts on the books I've read so that by the end of the year I don't forget that I did read books for pleasure throughout the year.  I actually read a lot more than I mention on here, but I don't count books that I'm re-reading or reading for work.

Anyway, in June during our trip I read a book called I Totally Meant to Do That by Jane Borden.  I borrowed this from my friend Caitlin who was reading it on the way back from New Orleans; she was giggling most of the time she was reading it and she pointed out excerpts for me to read when there were particularly funny moments.  Jane Borden is from North Carolina and went to UNC (but we mustn't hold that against her... too much :-P) and this book was all collections of things that have happened to her in her life but she had a funny way of spinning them all.  Many of her stories are only funny (or primarily funny) to those who are from NC and can actually appreciate what she's talking about.  What do you mean not everyone gives sausage and fruitcakes to people for Christmas?  Northerners just wouldn't see the humor there :)

She's pretty much like a female David Sedaris, so NC is producing some pretty awesome writers, that's for sure.

May pleasure reading

This month I have re-read several books and read for the first time Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin.  She is also the author of Something Borrowed, Something Blue, Baby Proof, and Love the One You're With, all of which I have also read.  A movie version of Something Borrowed was released a few weeks ago and I saw it with one of my sisters-in-law Hadley, and then Alex, Cindy, and Priscilla who also happened to be going to the same show as us :) 

The book was good, but nowhere near as good as her first two books, the ones I like the most.  She delves a bit into what happens when marriages become tired and how people are affected by their work if they don’t make time for each other.  One of the characters in the book gave up her career to stay home and care for her children while her husband continued to work as a pediatric surgeon.  The book deals with the aftermath of that decision for both the husband and the wife and makes me think about what Keegan and I might do in that situation where one of us is a stay at home parent.  In the book the family only had two kids but Keegan and I want more kids than that, so I’m not sure at what point we’ll decide the cost of childcare is not worth it and one of us will decide to stay home (or if we will ever reach that point – who knows?)  That is probably 10 years away from now though, so I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it!

April pleasure reading, part 2

As promised, I quickly finished Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.  This book was also pretty fast-paced and kept me interested, but I don't think it was as good as the other Dan Brown books I've read.

This one was about the NSA and it was a little easier to guess what was going on/was going to happen than in the other books, but since I think this was his first book maybe he hadn't quite mastered the art of suspense yet.  I would still recommend it to other people who enjoy his books because I'm sure you'd still like it.  This book is essentially about a giant code-breaking computer working to break a code whose writer claims it is unbreakable.  It is a little concerning to think about what the government may actually do to invade our privacy without us knowing it though....

Now I will move on to reading The Hobbit and another book that Keegan just bought for me (what a good husband!) called The Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin.  I've read all of her other books, so it'll be interesting to see how this one measures up.  Her first book was made into a movie that is being released this summer I think, called Something Borrowed.

April pleasure reading

This weekend (ie yesterday) I read Deception Point by Dan Brown.  Last week I also reread Angels and Demons and at the end of the book was an excerpt from Deception Point, which doesn’t feature the same characters as Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, or The Lost Symbol but it was still really hard to put down (obviously, since I read it all in one day, enjoying the great weather and then burning 1000 calories on the treadmill because I was determined to finish the book before I stopped exercising and underestimated how long it would take me to finish it)  Once I read the excerpt I was already sucked in, and since Keegan has all of Dan Brown’s books, I just borrowed his!  Our own little library!

The book was really enjoyable – fast-paced and exciting (if not really that believable) but it was believable enough and I guess that’s where the intrigue lies.  I also enjoyed that it was about science and NASA, so that was pretty cool.  There were a lot of twists and turns that were unexpected but I did figure out what was going on about 4 pages before Mr. Brown revealed it (as opposed to being blindsided in his other books hah).  I enjoyed Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code because I think the history behind them is neat, but I also like the character of Robert Langdon, so that’s why I hadn’t read Dan Brown’s other two books because they're not involving the same people.  But last night I started Digital Fortress and I’m about 150 pages into it so I’ll be finishing that up this week too I’m sure (I’m so glad my defense was last week!)  This book deals with the NSA, so it’s pretty cool too.

I’m also reading The Hobbit, which I checked out of Duke’s library.  I wanted to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but The Fellowship of the Ring was checked out and I didn’t want to start in the middle of a trilogy, so I settled for reading the prequel.  I’m only about 50 pages into that, so we’ll see if I enjoy it enough to want to read the other LOTR books.