Saturday, July 14, 2018

What I Read in 2007

Although these days I'm a fairly organized reader, with a Excel spreadsheet and everything,  when I first started yakking about books in 2007, I didn't even list them. I just posted rambling towers of paragraphs on MySpace.  I've been wanting to have a better reference for what I read in the early years, and since it's a quiet, rainy day, good for parsing paragraphs of superfluous commentary into  legible data...why not?

I should note that not everything I read in 2007 was on this list, because I didn't start tracking my reading until late May, and from August onwards I was largely tied up with life and work at my new university.  Nothing for most of December '07 or January '08 was reported!   This was also a unique moment in my life, as the year before I'd summarily rejected everything in my past and was actively trying to develop my own, independent view of the world.  I've been building on that foundation ever since.   Note that science, not history,  is king of nonfiction!   That will change, however:  as I was finishing a degree in history, with a European emphasis,  I read a lot of German, English, and French history later in the year, and would open 2008 with the same.

May 21st, 2007 -  December 12th, 2007

  1. The Rapture, Jerry B Jenkins and Timothy LaHaye
  2. Kingdom Come, Jerry B Jenkins and Timothy LaHaye
  3. The Know-it-All, A.J. Jacobs
  4. The Everything Classical Mythology Book, Lesley Bolton
  5. The Osterman Weekend, Robert Ludlum
  6. Allegiance, Timothy Zahn
  7. Universe on a T-Shirt, Dan Falk
  8. An Intimate History of Humanity, Theodore Zeldin
  9. Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade
  10. Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief,  Lewis Wolpert
  11. Phantoms in the Brain,  V.S. Ramachandran
  12. The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea, Jacques-Yves Cousteau
  13. Extraterrestrial Civilizations, Isaac Asimov
  14. Hitler's Shadow War, Donald McCale
  15. Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
  16. The Valley of Horses, Jean M Auel
  17. The Tribe of Tiger, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
  18. Dolphin Days, Kenneth Norris
  19. Nightfall and Other Stories, Isaac Asimov
  20. The Plains of Passage, Jean M Auel
  21. The Stand, Setphen King
  22. The Associate, Philip Margolin
  23. The Mammoth Hunters, Jean M Auel 
  24. Theories for Everything;  John Langone, Bruze Stutz, and Andrea Gianopoulos
  25. The Middle Ages, Dorothy Mills
  26. The German Empire, Michael Stuermer
  27. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Al Franken
  28. A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut
  29. Rickles' Book, Don Rickles
  30. Our Endangered Values, Jimmy Carter
  31. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, J.K. Rowling
  32. The Complete Idiot's Guides to Turtles and Tortoises, Liz Palika
  33. The Rising Tide, Jeff Shaara
  34. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
  35. Storms from the Sun, Michael Carlowicz and Ramon Lopez
  36. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, JK Rowling
  37. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, JK Rowling
  38. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire JK Rowling
  39. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, JK Rowling
  40. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling
  41. Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows, JK Rowling
  42. Shelters of Stone, Jean M Auel
  43. Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan
  44. River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins
  45. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, FL Allen
  46. Infidel, Ayaan Hiris Ali
  47. Broca's Brain, Carl Sagan
  48. The Assault on Reason, Al Gore
  49. The End of Faith, Sam Harris
  50. The Darwin Awards, ed. Wendy Nortcutt
  51. Great Tales from English History 2, Robert Lacey
  52. Mephisto, Klauss Mann
  53. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Marion kaplan
  54. The Hundred Years War, Desmond Sewawrd
  55. Great Tales from English History, Robert Lacey
  56. I Am America (And So Can You), Stephen Colbert
  57. The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, James S Corum
  58. The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, David Irving
  59. German into Nazis, Peter Fritzsche
  60. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
  61. Montgomery: Biography of a City, Wayne Greenshaw


8 comments:

  1. Oh, MySpace! Humorous side note - I got one of the emails a couple years ago when a bunch of people had their MySpace accounts compromised, that mine was one of the ones where the password may have been stolen. Works for me, someone should know the password because I sure as heck don't anymore!

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    1. I get the same warning when I sign into CreditKarma. Those were the days when MySpace was still kind of active!

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  2. Read:

    Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
    Extraterrestrial Civilizations
    Nightfall and Other Stories
    Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    Slaughterhouse-5
    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    The End of Faith
    Meditations

    TBR:

    The Tribe of Tiger
    The Hundred Years War

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    1. I REALLY like The Hundred Years war, by Seward. I've tried reading another book by him (Monks of War) but it wasn't near the same quality of narrative.

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  3. The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea, Jacques-Yves Cousteau

    Whales and Jacques Cousteau?! I need this book.

    That is cool you majored in European history! I took a ton of history electives and would've liked to make it a double major, but it wasn't offered at my small campus (till about a year later, alas).

    Now I'm curious to go back and read your Kurt Vonnegut reviews. He's an author much talked about, but I don't feel like I'd know what to expect.

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    1. The European concentration owes largely to the fact that two of my favorite professors were the European history dons, one focusing on older Europe (medieval, largely) and the other focusing on early modern Europe. They're the two guys I still go by and shoot the breeze with!


      To be honest, sometimes it's hard to know what to expect from Vonnegut when you've read him! I've read some of his fiction and some nonfiction collections over the years:

      https://thisweekatthelibrary.blogspot.com/search/label/Kurt%20Vonnegut

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  4. Interesting and eclectic list. I read The Stand in the eighties when I was on a King kick. Mephisto and the Asimov's are also on my personal "have read" list.

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    1. My background might add some sense to it -- the year before I'd revolted against the sect I was raised in, and was deliberately reading things that had been discouraged before (fantasy, horror, science). Mephisto was a product of my German history class, however!

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