J and I went to the UM – Maryland football game on November 22. The outcome of the game matched the gloomy, it’s-going-to-rain-any-minute weather.
Thanksgiving
Seeing so much family over the last few days, both in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, reminds me that I have so much to be thankful for. We were especially thankful this year for the good weather that allowed everyone to see each other.
Recent Books
Here are some I’ve read in the past year that I can remember – I’ve read more, but they weren’t as notable.
I just finished An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin). It was fictional, but gave a lot of insight into the high-priced art market and the different kinds of New York galleries that exist. I’ve read all of his books, he’s a great writer and even when it’s a serious book, he manages to put something funny in. Several months back, I read one called The Pleasure of My Company, about a man with obsessive-compulsive disorder and the stories he made up about himself and those around him.
Andy Weir’s The Martian is set on – you guessed it – Mars. A manned flight to Mars experiences a storm that threatens to strand them on the red planet. Hurrying back to their lander, one of the crew is hurt by flying debris and appears to the rest of the crew to have died. They leave him, and all their equipment, behind. He isn’t dead, though. The book follows him as he reconstructs what happened, gives himself medical treatment, and figures out how to survive alone, while mission control scrambles to see if they can save him.
Lexicon, by Max Barry, is a strange but exciting book about a group of writers who learn to use ancient words and phrases to control people and the physical world around them. A competition develops between the good guys and the bad guys (it’s hard to know which is which) over who can locate a single word that allows the person who knows it to control more than anyone should control. Max Barry also wrote another strange one, Machine Man, in which a man who works for a high-tech company realizes that he’d rather have bionic parts than the ones God gave him. Much havoc ensues as he tries to escape the bad people who don’t like his approach to human enhancements.
Saying Grace, by Beth Richardson Gutcheon, is about a woman who runs a private school, and the dramas that surround that position. At the same time, she is trying to keep up her relationship with her family members. There isn’t any one thing that kept me reading this, it was just really well-written and I felt for the characters - what's best for everyone at a school can be easily trampled by a single, unreasonable parent.
I read, and liked, two books by Colson Whitehead: The Intuitionist, and Apex Hides the Hurt. The Intuitionist is about a woman who is part of the municipal elevator inspection team. Instead of inspecting it through mechanical measurements and tests, she uses her intuition. I particularly like the history that was invented for the Intuitionist movement, which was wholly believable. Apex Hides the Hurt is about a marketing expert who is called to a town with a rich history to solve a problem: what should the town be named? Local history buffs want the original name, and those who want to attract new tourists to the area want something more exciting.
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