Book 44: The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz

For my non-fiction selection this time around I'm reading a book that was loaned to me by my sister-in-law.  It is written by a guy who has written several cookbooks, mostly on desserts, though this book is more about his life in Paris and dealing with Parisians.  My sister-in-law tells me that it's very funny so I'm giving it a shot.

It's quite short, at 269 pages, so I only need to read about 39 pages per day.


REVIEW:  I like the way this book is structured.  Each chapter consists of a short narrative, almost a blog post, giving a specific lesson learned about living in Paris.  The stories are well-written and typically very funny.  The role of food is prominent as the author's life is deeply immersed in the culinary world.  And, at the end of each chapter is a recipe, usually somewhat related to the story and always mouth-watering.

I think the only thing I really didn't like about the book was that I read it too quickly.  The ideal way to read this book would be to read each chapter, then prepare the recipe at the end.  In this way, I think you might be able to savor each.

The book shows Paris, and especially, Parisians, in a light that is sometimes quite ugly, but he goes a long way toward redeeming them by the end.  Parisians may be superficial, vain, pushy and condescending but they also live in one of the world's great cities, a world capital in food, culture, finance and politics... and they know it.

The Sweet Life in Paris is a quick, light read.  Nothing of any real depth, but very enjoyable.  It's great for anyone interested in food or Paris or both.

7 out of 10

Book 34: The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg

As a former linguistics student, I still have a lasting love of languages.  English, I think, is one of the most interesting languages, though it's difficult to see sometimes, as we're all native speakers here in the U.S.  But even here, people are mystified by the strangeness of the language.  People ask themselves, why do we pronounce this set of letters one way in this word, but in another word it's pronounced differently.  Well, a lot of the inconsistency and seeming randomness comes from the strange and turbulent history of English.  This book traces that history in a novel fashion, that of a biography of the language itself.  I'm unsure how successful this approach will be, but I couldn't resist the title when I first heard of it.  At 299 pages, it shouldn't be too hard to finish at around 43 pages per day.

REVIEW:  This book definitely delivered what I expected of it.  The author, Bragg, traces the history of the language with each chapter outlining one significant stage in the evolution of English.  He shows Alfred the Great, defeating the Danes and unifying England, the revolt against the Church and Latin by William Tyndale and his English Bible, the rise of English literature with Chaucer and Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson writing his dictionary but, overall, his main character is the language itself.  There were multiple points where English could have simply gone extinct.  When the Danes invaded England they nearly wiped out the English speaking natives, when the Normans invaded they imposed their French language on the land, but it was the "deep obstinacy" and "astonishing flexibility" that enabled the language to survive and eventually thrive.

It is interesting to see the course of a language all at once.  And it's difficult to think of another language with a similar history to English.  Beginning with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, who were themselves invaded by the Vikings and Normans, then the consolidation of British English and then outward to America, India, Australia, the West Indies and beyond.  Now, some 1,500 years later the language is spoken by some 1 billion people, worldwide and is established as the modern Lingua Franca.  And it is the amazing ability of English to adapt, to repair and reinvent itself that seems to have made it possible.

As a linguist, I've always been fascinated with our aberrant language and the reasons that it makes so little sense to non-speakers and learning speakers.  We follow grammatical rules that we hardly understand; We have words that are pronounced nothing like their spelling; We have multiple sets of rules for conjugating verbs, etc.  It is illuminating to see the tumultuous history of the language, not to see that there really is an underlying logic to these things, but to see that there are good reasons that it makes so little sense.  The book did get a little dry in places, after all, it is historical linguistics in essence, but Bragg does a commendable job of making it all make sense as a single narrative.

7 out of 10

Book 24: The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

I'm back around to non-fiction again and this time we're going for some science.  The Fabric of the Cosmos is an exploration of the basics of the universe, basically what is it?  Through theoretical physics, cosmology and string theory he attempts to define the nature of spacetime.  If you know anything about me you'd know this is right up my alley.

It's 493 pages but 536 pages including the more detailed Notes section, which I'll probably read.  So that makes about 80 pages per day.

REVIEW:  Brian Greene does a nice job of laying down the basics in this book.  He starts with explaining the history of our knowledge of space.  Meaning: what is space?  From there he goes through more of the big questions: what is time?  How did the universe begin?  How will it end?  What makes up the fundamental particles and forces in our universe?

I've read enough of these kinds of books to have basic understanding of these concepts already and my own studies have fleshed those concepts out pretty thoroughly.  But Greene does an excellent job of describing all of these difficult ideas.  He explains things in a very understandably way and, if you desire, there is a "notes" section at the end which explains things in more depth for the mathematically and scientifically inclined reader.  He also does a good job of explaining that most of these concepts are just theories, hypotheses, really.  At the fundamental level, we still don't know most of the answers to the basic questions.

Reading through another science book, I typically judge them by whether or not I learn anything from them.  This book had a couple of large sections that I came away from feeling that I understood things better than before.  Entropy was a big one.  There was a large section on time and whether or not it can be shown to have an "arrow", a direction, from a scientific point of view.  I had a basic understanding of these ideas, but his explanations and the math in the notes section, really taught me something.

There was some rehashing; basic, history-of-science stuff at the beginning.  But he quickly moved on to more of the latest findings and theories, so it never really bogged down.  I found this book quite an interesting read... those without a love of science, physics and/or astronomy may not enjoy it quite as much.  8 out of 10.

Book 11: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

I wanted to get a little bit of non-fiction into my rotation of books and this will be the first.  I've seen bits and pieces of the movie version of this book, but have never seen the whole thing.  It is considered one of the best non-fiction books around and I've always been interested in air- and spacecraft so it seems a good fit.  My copy of the book has 436 pages so I need to read 63 pages a day to finish in a week.

REVIEW:  This was a really interesting non-fiction book.  It read more like a novel with the characters introduced, the story building to an exciting climax and the denouement at the end.  It tells the story of the birth of the Space Age in America, starting with the fighter jet test pilots and progressing through Project Mercury and the first human spaceflights.  The astronauts and test pilots of the book all appear as heroes in the classical sense, "single combat warriors" as Wolfe calls them.

All-in-all I really enjoyed this book.  I feel like I learned something about an era that I didn't really know much about.  It dragged a bit in some places but, since it is non-fiction, it is inevitable that some  parts will be more interesting than others.  I'd give this one a 9 out of 10.