Gulliver's Travels

#733
Title: Gulliver's Travels
Author: Jonathan Swift
Publisher: Audible
Year: 1726/2010
~318 pages
Audiobook.

Read by David Hyde Pierce. A good satire of both the travel writing genre and Swift's political milieu. Each of the adventures has its very funny aspects. It's clear why the journey to Lilliput is the most popular: It's a tight story with well-chosen "factual" details to support its claim to be non-fiction, plus a great deal of amusing scatology. 

The Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide

#732
Title: The Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide
Author: Richard Garrigues
Illustrator: Robert Green
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Year: 2007
Country: Costa Rica
408 pages

Costa Rica.

Yes, I read all of it. I'm like that with some field guides. This one features somewhat larger illustrations than many. Our Costa Rican birding guide isn't taken with the color register (he blamed the printing process), but in many cases, I found it more accurate than the other guidebook I was using. The illustration of the keel-billed toucan, for example, was much more true to life.

The intention of this handbook is to omit information unneccesary for identification, and this it does, while bolding field marks and behavioral information that assists differentiation. I found it easy to use in the field.

Open Road's Best of Panama: Your Passport to the Perfect Trip!

#731
Title: Open Road's Best of Panama: Your Passport to the Perfect Trip!
Author: Bruce C. Morris
Publisher: Open Road
Year: 2008
248 pages

For a book whose big sell is that it only has what you need, it's amazingly, astonishingly repetitive. I'm not just talking about repeated information, but word for word, cut-and-paste repetitions, sometimes 3 or 4 times through the volume. I'd have rather bought a smaller book without repetition, or this length book with more information.

Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure

#730
Title: Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure
Author: Sarah Macdonald
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 2002/2004
298 pages
Audiobook.

I enjoyed this more than I first thought I would, but less than I'd expect. I liked it precisely because it <i>wasn't</i> fun girl adventures in India. The author conveyed her fear and the harrowing nature of many of her experiences, which is useful for my teaching. What I liked less well was what seemed like a superficial tour of available religons. I assume that this was the great idea that sold the book, but I'd have liked more depth, whether or not this premise was real or constructed. 

The Filter Bubble

#729
Title: The Filter Bubble
Author: Eli Pariser
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2011
304 pages
Audiobook.

If anyone has told you recently that the information you want is in "the second link that comes up for X on Google," but it's not, you already know the first part of what Pariser is going to tell you. Much of this book addresses aspects of the issues of filtering, which means monitoring, and how our online behavior and data may be used not only to tailor what we see, but to commodetize us. Pariser does a good job of demonstrating that a filtered web does not flatten access to information, but compartmentalizes it. At the same time, he represents the necessity of some filtering, given the crush of data. If you read hard science fiction you'll find this confirmatory; if you tend to be naive about what you post on Facebook, it may usefully increase your paranoia.

The Sense of an Ending

#728
Title: The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2004
144 pages
Audiobook.

What I like here is how Barnes sneaks in changes of genre within the fictional confessional memoir. I enjoyed attending to the structure of the novel. Less enjoyable was the story aspect, which was not terrifically interesting to me, perhaps because I didn't find any of the characters sympathetic.

The Demon King (Seven Realms, #1)

#727
Title: The Demon King (Seven Realms, #1)
Author: Cinda Williams Chima
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2010
528 pages

I almost stopped reading early on because the writing was so awkward. Example:
Using a stick, he lifted the amulet by its chain. It dangled, spinning hypnotically in the sunlight, a green translucent stone cunningly carved into a snarl of serpents with ruby eyes. The staff was topped with a brilliant round-cut diamond larger than he'd ever seen, and the snake's eyes were blood red rubies (18-19).
Well, which is it? A stone? A stone topped with a diamond? A stone topped with a diamond plus inset rubies? Isn't "ruby eyes" pretty much the same as eyes that are "blood red rubies"? Are there many serpents, or one snake? And what is this "staff" of which you speak? This is all made worse by the cover illustration, which shows one snake with a ruby eye, no translucency to the green stone, no diamond, no staff, and a metal setting. Fortunately, it picked up after that, though there are certainly tracts that cry out for basic editing.

The first volume introduces the protagonists and sets them on their courses. There are some enjoyable reveals (both in the story's frame and historical) and believable villains. This might turn out to be a quest narrative, but since Han acquires a pretty good Magic Thingie by page 18, the journey may be one of discovery rather than acquisition.