More Reading, Most of it About Alice... (remember Alice?)

I have a few more books to check off of this year’s reading list, plus a couple of re-reads that I’m counting toward my yearly total.  I’ve already written on my other blog about the books I read for work.

This time I have two nonfiction books to talk about.  The first is Myne Owne Ground by T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes about free African Americans in colonial America.  It reexamines life in the 17^th century in Virginia, taking a more intersectional approach to how society worked.  Class and wealth played, in many cases, as large a role as race for a time.  Obviously, that shifted.  It was interesting and educational.

The other is Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter.  Now, this is technically a re-read, but the last time I read it I was in high school.  I am happy to report that I have learned a lot since then, so it was easier going this time around.  There is so much to think about in this book it is difficult to give a summary.  Go read it.  It’s like having a great conversation with a really smart guy.  A lot of the deeply math-y stuff went over my head.  AI has come a long way since the book was initially written.  Nonetheless, the intersection of math, art, music, philosophy, and Lewis Carroll is really irresistible.

Which brings me to the re-reads.  I am in a Lewis Carrol phase.  It started before I read GEB, but it did encourage me to pick that particular book up at this time out of the many on the to-read shelf.  I have re-read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and I treated myself to Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice, which contains both works.  So, technically, I re-read everything twice, plus the annotations, introductions, and other stuff.  I prefer Wonderland to the Looking-glass country, but both are well worth visiting repeatedly.

Then I read The Flying Trunk, which is a collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories.  He was not a happy fellow, I think.  This particular collection did not include the mermaid story, but the steadfast tin soldier and the little match girl are depressing enough.  Some of the stories are just plain weird and do not conform to regular storytelling norms.  I enjoyed reading them and decided that I might need to relax about how well my plots hang together in my own writing.

Total for the year so far:  17 books.