Mr. Burke's Reading List

Back at the beginning of the year, I saw a challenge to set a goal of reading 60 books in a year. I laughed it right off. Sorry, but as much as I like to read, I don't often get the chance. My two prime slots from reading are commuting by train and falling asleep, the latter being particularly hazardous with hardcovers and ebooks. For the first half of the year (and most of the fall), I commuted by car, losing almost 2 hours round trip daily. So I found some other Challenges which I list in this this post . I considered them something to shoot for, and maybe to influence my choices in this past year, but calling them goals? I ruled that right out. Sorry, I'm in it for the fun. Putting a goal in front of it makes it a little more work. The journey is more important the finish line right? (With my eyesight, and age, I'll never win Indy, so yeah.) (By the way, ignore the hashtag. It was already there, so I wasn't making a new one.) In the first batch, I can say I caught ...

Vampire Academy , Richelle Mead, 2007 Okay, for starters: There are two types of Vampires: the Moroi , who are living, breeding vampires, and the Strigoi , who are your more traditional evil vampires. There are also Dhampirs , which are the offspring of Vampires with humans or dhampirs. Dhampirs are mules, unable to reproduce on their own, so they owe their existence to the Moroi. If you search online, you'll find that these are creatures from Romanian folklore, which is a plus for me. Mead takes something existing, which I'm at all familiar with, and makes it her own. The Moroi aren't your typical vampires. Besides having families, and vampirism being hereditary, they also go to church every week, even if just to learn about St. Vladmir, the patron of the academy. One of the characters is even named Christian, which seems odd at first blush. This book is the last in a pile of books I won, which included How to Be a Zombie , A Great and Terrible Beauty , and Cat...

So You Think You're Irish , Margaret Kelleher, 1988 This book, published originally in 1988, and reprinted in 2014, was an impulse buy at a discount store. (Note the blurred price tag in the photo.) I'm not aware of any updates to the book for the new edition. Oddly, I never checked when it was published until I was typing this entry. This might explain why my knowledge of history was so rusty, considering that there isn't anything from the past 30 years or so, which would be most of my adult life when I might've been paying attention to such things. I'll come right out and say this book was a bit of a disappointment, but it was an impulse buy. I shouldn't flipped through the pages a little bit before making the purchase. The book consists of some 500 multiple-choice questions about Ireland, divided into categories: Irish History, Irish-American History, Beliefs and Legends, Entertainment, Words, Food, etc. The questions were a little too picky, and som...

History Bytes: 37 People, Places and Events That Shaped American History , Nick Vulich, 2015 I don't remember how I found this one. Maybe it was posted as a free ebook on Reddit . I don't know. It was well-written and the bibliography, with some very old sources, shows that it was well-researched, too. If anything, however, I would have liked some references to the bibliography in the text. The tone, at times, is conversational, so it would be nice to know where some of this information is coming from. This wasn't a book of little-known events, and for history buffs, there probably isn't much here. There was some interesting tidbits, but nothing that made me say either "I never knew that!" or "That can't be right!" But there was information about from Colonial times, the Revolution, the Civil War, western expansion and outlaws. Why 37 events? No answer, but why not? (Aside: sure, there were probably things that, had I'd ever lea...

The Pirates Who's Who , Philip Gosse, 1924 The Pirates Who's Who was written by Philip Gosse in 1924, but through the magic of the Internet, it lives on as a Project Gutenberg ebook. Also, the fact that it's so old adds to its authenticity that it was likely more researched than anything that might be published for the first time as an ebook today. This doesn't read like a lengthy version of some click-bait article. That said, what it does read like is an encyclopedia because that's what it is. Now, there isn't anything wrong with that, except that the document format of the particular version I have could be greatly improved if it had cross-referencing hyperlinks. This is one of those times that paper beats electronic -- flipping back and forth with fingers holding your place. Okay, so why choose this book? Subject matter, obviously. Did I realize that it would be an encyclopedia when I downloaded it? No. Was that a problem? No. Gosse included an intr...

Rickles' Book: A Memoir , Don Rickles, David Ritz, 2007 I was taking lunch, walking down Pennsylvania Ave in Brooklyn when I passed a Thrift Shop with stacks of books outside. I saw Don Rickles' face on a cover with a sticker price of a dollar. For less than a cup of coffee, I had my subway reading. I picked up the book and then perused most of the rest of the shop (as long as I was there). A quick flip through the book showed that it was written in 2-3 page chapters or vignettes. I assumed that they would be a collection of funny anecdotes and jokes, but it wasn't. Some were serious. Some were amusing but didn't exactly end in a punchline. This book might be of interest to long-time Rickles fans, but I doubt the appeal would go much further. Little is mentioned about his life before comedy. He was a kid for a couple of chapters, then in the U.S. Navy, and then trying to establish himself in comedy. Along the way, he drops a lot of names. He talks Vegas, and m...

The Darwin Awards: Intelligent Design , Wendy Northcutt, 2000 While covering for another teacher, I glanced at the books on her shelf, and I spotted this little gem of humor. The Darwin Awards are famous and shouldn't need an explanation. I read posts when they show up on social media, but I've never been to the actual websites where stories are posted, discussed and voted on. Nor have I read an entire book of them before. THere are some amusing stories within these pages. On the other hand, they are also a bit sad. As you chuckle at others' misfortunes, you remember that these were real people, some of whom did very foolish things. And when they are grouped together by categories, they can get repetitive in nature. Maybe that's why I preferred some of the "Honorable Mentions" -- a person gets one of those, generally, by living through their spectacular lapse of judgment. In addition to the anecdotes, each section has an actual science article as an...

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , March 2002, Gordon Van Gelder, editor Catching up on my reading list, this is the first of several posts in the days ahead. >P?First off, okay, it's not a usual book. However, at 160 pages of mostly fiction, this one issue of the long-running genre magazine has more reading material than some of the actual books that I read. I have quite a few SF/F magazines in the house. Most of them are issues of Analog because I had a subscription for a number of years, and I never could keep up with them. Where this issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction came from, I'm not sure. There's nothing to indicate that it was mailed to me (no label, or glue), so my guess would be that it was a freebie at a science fiction convention somewhere, most likely Lunacon , which is held (almost) every March. I have a pool in my yard. I don't sit in read by the pool very often. On the other hand, I've started to like reading in th...

L is for Lawless , Sue Grafton, 1995 This is the 12th book in the series, in case you're counting letters of the alphabet on your fingers. After being a little disappointed by the ending of the K is for Killer , I went straight into the next book. I knew from the start, it wasn't going to be a good time for Kinsey, but at least this time, that fact is telegraphed in the opening comments before the story begins. For the second time in four novels, Kinsey is involved in a wedding party. (You can't say always a bridesmaid, never a bride, because she'll bring up her two past marriages.) And as with the last time, she gets caught up in events that take her away despite the upcoming event. The last time, it was against her will and she wasn't free to go.l This time, she's following a duffel bag of stolen goods and she can't let her only lead vanish. And as Kinsey points out at the start, for everything she's going through, she's not even getting...

K is for Killer , Sue Grafton, 1994 This is probably the fastest I've read any book in the series to date, having extra time on my hand. (I finished a few days ago, but I had connectivity problems.) It's also the first one where I was disappointed in the ending. I won't give it away because there are a few people besides me reading this blog. One thing I can say for the series is that they don't all end the same way. There isn't a shoot-out in every book. The guilty party doesn't end up always end up dead (although truth be told, I do prefer mysteries where the guilty party is named and caught, and not left flying in the wind). Let me back up a bit. This novel takes places less than a year after the events of J is for Judgment . Kinsey takes on a cold case after she gets a visit in her office from a woman who a support group that meets in the same building after the woman spotted Kinsey's name on the building's directory. Janice Kepler'...

J is for Judgment , Sue Grafton, 1993 Summer's here, so I'm back to reading a couple more Sue Grafton Alphabet mysteries, featuring Kinsey Millhone, although had I been keeping up, I probably should be nearly up to date by now. I'm pretty sure that J is for Judgment was totally new to me. That is, it's not one of the novels I heard on tape back in the 90s. It takes place a few months after the events of I is for Innocent although it was released a year later. This will probably become a timing issue somewhere down the line, particularly with Kinsey lugging around her portable typewriter and not owning a cell phone. She even uses pay phones on occasion. Okay, so the plot goes something like this: she no longer works for California Fidelity, but they hire her to investigate whether or not a person spotted in Mexico is someone who disappeared five years ago. When he was declared dead, CF had to pay out half a million on his life insurance. They want to know i...

The Side of Good , Danielle Ackley-McPhail, ed., 2015 First off, this is a bit of a cheat for me, because this is only half of a book. The printed edition of The Side of Good is actually a flip book: if you flip it, you will find The Side of Evil . If you order the ebook, you will get two downloads, each with its own cover (as seen above). As the names might suggest, this pair of books are anthologies filled with stories of Super Heroes and Super Villains. I get the Heroes precedence and read their tales first. Editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail has assembled seven stories by Gail Z. Martin and Larry N. Martin , Bryan J. L. Glass , John L. French , Walt Ciechanowski , Kathleen O'Shea David , Robert Greenberger , and James Chambers . The stories range from the non-powered to the super-powered to the oddly-powered (is it really a superpower?). They not only deal with their heroics but how their actions impact their own lives and the ones around them. And when does it get...

Freakonomics , by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, 2005 This was the third and last book saved from a pile that was being donated. I don't remember if it was my idea to save this one, or if my wife recommended it to me, being a math book. (By the way, I can count this toward my informal Read At Least One Book About Math Every Summer list.) There is no unifying theme to this book, and the book will even get into it. Each section is an investigation into some problem and compares data that you might not otherwise think to compare. This is the work of a man who likes to get his hands dirty looking through data for connections and trends. However, no correlations are made until he finds a method to control for other variables -- such as trying to establish the link between money and politics by concentrating on rematches between the same two candidates. There are some interesting moments, some infuriating and some a little dull. The authors go into detail about the impact...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , by Mark Haddon, 2003 This book was suggested to me by my wife when I asked her about Tuesdays with Morrie . She thought it was a good read and that I'd find it interesting. (Or maybe it was, if I enjoyed Tuesdays , I'd enjoy this one.) Whatever the case, I enjoyed this book. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is something new to me as far as reading goes. The narrator, Christopher, is telling the story, part of which involves writing the book about the incidents in his life, and this is the book that we are reading. Additionally, Christopher has some kind of mental disabilities -- I don't think it was stated outright in the text -- but he is high functioning and good at math. In fact, part of the focus of the book is that he wants to take his "A Levels" exam and pass it with an A grade. (Thanks to twitter and the Math-Twitter-Blog-O-Sphere , I've heard of "A Levels Maths" from...

Tuesdays with Morrie , by Mitch Albom, 1997 If not for those New Year lists of Reading Challenges , I don't know if I would have picked up this book and held onto it. The copy belonged to my wife, who read it years ago. It was about to go into a donation box, but I rescued it (along with the next book I'm reading, which she suggested). Mitch Albom went to Brandeis University where his favorite professor was Morrie Schwartz. Upon graduation, Morrie gave Mitch a present and hoped to see him in the future. Albom then got caught up with life and didn't see Schwartz again until by sheer luck, he flipped TV channels and caught the beginning of Nightline with Ted Koppel who was about to interview Schwartz who was still teaching, despite being diagnosed with ALS , or Lou Gehrig's Disease . What follows are the notes from his first meeting with Schwartz to catch up on old times and discuss life, which then turns into his final class, which will meet every Tuesday. They ...

Analog's Lighter Side , by S. Schmidt, ed, 1982 Anytime I get any kind of notice that some online catalog now has magazines, I check it out. Unfortunately, those magazines are usually either scholarly journal-type publications or popular newstand magazines of the slick and glossy variety. They don't ever have, for example, old science-fiction magazines. One of the first ones I search for is Analog because I had a subscription from the late-80s to the mid-90s. The problem was I never seemed to have time to catch up with them, so I let the subscription lapse. Anyway, while searching for Analog, I found an anthology, Analog's Lighter Side , a collection of humorous stories, edited by Stanley Schmidt, who was the editor I remember (and could possibly still be editing it today). The anthology is from 1982, which meant I'd likely never read any of the material before. As you can see from the Table of Contents above, most of the stories date from before I was born (...

100 Young Adult Books to Read in a Lifetime?? This is my first blog posting about books in general. I felt like writing something, and I'm not done with my current book, so I'm writing about reading itself. I may decide to do this ever so often. I recently saw a link to Amazon's 100 Young Adult Books to Read in a Lifetime . (Normally, I shy away from free advertising on my blogs, but I've taken most of my images from Amazon, so I guess I've already established the pattern here.) It's an interesting list to be sure. In fact, it seems to be two lists. The top part of the page shows 60 book covers under the heading "100 Books ..." etc. The bottom parts shows -- I kid you not -- "1-12 of 113 results for Books : 100 Young Adult Books to Read in a Lifetime". It then goes on to list books, only some of which appear in the 60 icons above. I haven't explored beyond those 72 titles yet. There's much to mention here. For starters, I appa...

Greek - Norse - Egyptian - Mythology Trilogy , by Stephan Weaver, 2015 These three books were released as a trilogy and I picked it up when they were available for free. Worth every penny I paid, and not a penny more. You might also note that there is only one date in the title because all three books have a 2015 date. (Amazon lists them all as June to July 2015). Basically, the three books are poorly organized, somewhat repetitive, and in need of an editor to fix ridiculous inconsistencies. (Like an Egyptian god with, apparently, two right eyes.) I was reading the kindle version and got to the "bonus chapter" of the Greek book -- and immediately wondered how I'd gotten to the bonus chapter already? How short was this book? Short. All of them. You could read the trilogy in an afternoon if you wanted to. The books aren't very well researched. You could probably do better checking websites online. You'd probably find more information as well. Thankfully, ...

Great Train Robberies of the Old West , by R. Michael Wilson, 2006 I walked into Barnes & Nobles in Park Slope and stopped at the closeout books table in the vestibule. Usually, there isn't anything "must have", but this time I saw a slim book on Great Train Robberies of the Old West , which piqued my interest. I flipped through it quickly and thought, "I'll take it." It looked like A Good Read, and it was. Nothing fabulous -- given the subject, the book easily could have been twice the size. But it presented a series of train robberies, brought out the facts and gave some background on the people involved and let you know what happened to the participants after. There was an appendix with references, which weren't just websites, but also primary sources, including hundred-year-old news articles. So the author did his homework. I've read stuff like this which reads like expanded click-bait articles that you can find online. Others that make...

Bluebeard -- And Other Folklore Tales , by Clifton Johnson, 1920 I don't know how long ago I downloaded the free ebook of Bluebeard . I'm not even sure why I did. I probably was looking at the best-selling (or most-downloaded) free classics on Amazon, and it was probably there. I hadn't read it before, so why not. This was a short, in-between other books, book to read when I didn't have something else available -- or when I was going to sleep and I had the light turned off already. (It disturbs the wife.) The book is short (Amazon says 52 pages) and I probably could've read it in one sitting. However, the nature of the book and the times when I was reading it caused me to nod off more than once. It is a collection of fairy tales/folk tales from around the world. They might have been children's stories once upon a time, but with all the monsters and mayhem in them, I wouldn't want to read one to any child right before bed. Not unless I wanted them crawl...

I generally don't like setting reading goals. I always have some in mind, but they always seem to get away from me -- especially when social media and the rest of the Internet are around. (And their great ancestor: the TV set.) One of the problems is that Goals are generally boring and somewhat non-specific. Read 10, 20, 30 books. Okay, what kind of books? How big? In 5th Grade, I got tired of not having a star next to my mind, so once I finished the 100-page biography I took out of the library, I started reading the chapter books in the back of the classroom, and other things that were probably below my reading level (unlike the biography). I even read a couple of the books more than once because I knew I could reread them in one day. I got a lot of stars, enough to rival the leaders of the class. But I didn't push myself, read anything challenging. (On the other hand, I won't deny that I read stuff that was fun, which is important, too.) Getting to the point, if I decid...

Rounding out the things I've read recently: When I was in the pool, I generally had an old magazine, such as Analog or The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , which I was might be momentarily upset, but not devastated, by its loss should it slip into the water. And one point I had, again, picked up the Stars anthology, which contained stories by science fiction authors based on the songs of Janis Ian ( At Seventeen ). The few I read were a mixed bag. The book was won, not bought, so I can't say that it's something I might've chosen to begin with, but with the line-up, I know why I held onto it. I'm not sure where I put the book, so I didn't get to finish it. I've also been raiding the library for copies of Phil & Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius series, to find out what all the hubbub was about. So far I've found and read Volume 4: Agatha Heterodyne and the Circus Of Dreams (128 pp) Volume 5: Agatha Heterodyne and the Clockwork Princess (...

A Great and Terrible Beauty , by Libba Bray, 2003 This book came to me via a book raffle at Lunacon , a general science-fiction convention based, for the most part, in Rye Brook, NY. It's the longest running NYC-area con. The actual winner of this lot had already won a pile of books, so when she walked up, she grabbed a pile and came back and gave them to me. Glancing at the titles, she was more the target demographic than I was. Anyway, after a year or so of sitting on my shelf, I started going through the pile of books. (Another book in that pile was How to Be a Zombie , which I read earlier in the year.) Reading the description of this and another book, I was afraid that I had a bunch of Teenage Paranormal Romances , a genre that didn't exist all that long ago and now has an entire section in the last remaining Barnes & Nobles locations I visit. I didn't have to worry. A Great and Terrible Beauty does have some romance, but it isn't the paranormal kind...

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking , by Susan Cain, 2012 This is a book that was given to me by my wife. She told me, "Read this." As that is not something that happens often -- if ever -- I took it and put it on the side to read "next". (I believe the idiom "-ish" might be appropriate here.) She might hand me something that she thinks I might be interested in, but never tells me to read anything in particular. A couple days after I started it, she let me know it was a library book and asked if I'd finished yet. Whoops. Hadn't occurred to me. However, by that point, I was hooked enough that I reserved electronic copies at both the Brooklyn and New York Public Libraries . I appreciate the NYPL's opinion of my reading ability, but it turned out that this volume was still in their 3-day loan category. Seriously? So this book has the distinction of my reading it in both paperback form and electronically, ...