December 2009 - Dogear Diary

2010 TBR Challenge

I\’m signing up for the 2010 TBR Reading Challenge, hosted by Miz B. The rules are as follows:

* the challenge is to read 12 TBR books in 12 months — you can read those all in one month if you want, or one a month, or however you wanna do it.
* you should have a list posted somewhere for others to see
* you CANNOT change your list after January 1st, of the current year!!!
* you can create an Alternates list of MAXIMUM 12 books, if you want, in order to have options to choose from (you can read these in place of books on your original list).
* audiobooks and e-books ARE allowed
* re-reads are NOT allowed, as they aren’t TRUE “TBRs”
* you CAN overlap with other challenges

Here is my official list of books to read:

Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey
Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Theodore Roszack
The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
Enrique\’s Journey by Sonia Nazario
No One Thinks of Greenland by John Griesemer
Endurance by Alfred Lansing
The Moon by Whalelight by Diane Ackerman
The Lost Years of Merlin by T.A. Barron
Beautiful Swimmers by William Warner
An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
Walden by Henry David Thoreau

And here is my \”alternates\” list:

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez
Split Estate– Charlotte Bacon
Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Chessman
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Rules for Old Men Waiting by Peter Pouncey
Shattering Glass by Gail Giles
The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle

I only have ten of these books on my shelf, so this challenge will get me to use the public library a little more, too!

Love, War and Circuses

by Erioc Scigliano

I could not get through this book. I tried, and some parts at the beginning were really interesting, but it just became too jumbled with a multitudinous miscellany of elephant lore, often referring to incidents I knew little about without much explanation, before jumping on to the next point. It just was hard to follow. I need something a little more focused. Not to say that Love, War and Circuses doesn\’t have a focus. It\’s all about elephants- their evolution, their mammoth ancestors, their role in history: used in warfare, exploited for logging, venerated in religion, trained to perform in circuses, pining away in zoos, etc etc. Elephants in art, myth and legend. Anything you could imagine wanting to know about how elephants have shown up in human culture. More about elephants in Asia than the African ones I\’m more familiar with. Maybe that\’s part of the reason my interest began to slide; the chapter about elephants in India and Thailand mentions so many stories featuring them in folklore and religious canon that my eyes began to glaze over and my head to swim. But if you are besotted with elephants, this would be a perfect book for you!

Abandoned …….. 358 pages, 2002

Tags: 0/5- Abandoned, Animals Nonfiction

a note

The closer it gets to Christmas, the more spotty my posting here will be. Not only am I spending more time with family than reading or blogging, but we just got the biggest snowfall I\’ve seen in years, and somehow it\’s more thrilling to sit and look out the window at all the beautiful whiteness, glittering with tiny ice specks, than in front of a computer screen that glares my eyes. So for the next few weeks I\’ll be reading rather sporadically, posting when I finish a book and occasionally otherwise. Wishing everyone the best of the holidays!

(Here\’s my daughter standing under a wreath I made from branches trimmed off our Christmas tree, and up to her knees in the snow.)

Raccoons

by Samuel Zeveloff

I didn\’t finish this one. I picked it up at a library sale some weeks ago. It has all kinds of data about raccoons and their closest relatives, the coatis, kinkajous and olingos. Everything from their evolutionary origins and current distribution to their habits and diet, threats from humans and management issues. It\’s a very informative book, well-organized and clearly written, but just not very interesting to me right now. A bit dull. If I wanted to write a report on raccoons, this would be fantastic, but as I\’m reading for enjoyment as well as to satisfy curiosity, I feel differently. Even in my nonfiction reading, I like something with a bit more flair, rather than just dry statements of facts. Moving on!

Abandoned ……… 200 pages, 2002

Tags: 0/5- Abandoned, Animals Nonfiction

The Culture Clash

by Jean Donaldson

This book is about dog behavior and training. It tries to look at dog training from the animal\’s point of view, and posits that dogs are highly anthropomorphized and should be treated as simple-minded self-obsessed creatures that respond best to operant conditioning. That\’s it in a nutshell. It goes into a lot of detail about how most people train their dogs wrong, then how to do it with positive reinforcement techniques. I agree that sometimes people see too much of human traits in their pets and this might get in the way of understanding your dog\’s behavior and training it, but on the other hand I\’m not sure I agree with all of Donaldson\’s ideas, and I certainly didn\’t like her tone. She is very disparaging and insulting to other dog owners and trainers who use different methods (and, ultimately, to the reader- assuming you got this book because you want to train a dog). So some parts of the book sound like whiny name-calling, whereas in other parts the language gets so technical it\’s dry and difficult. Overall, I\’d say The Culture Clash is a good resource to round out your knowledge of dogs and various training methods, but not to follow it as the only way to do things. That said, although I grew up with a dog and worked in a boarding kennel for some time, I never trained my own dog. So take what I say here with a grain of salt, as well.

Rating: 2/5 223 pages, 1996

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Animals Nonfiction, Past Reads

Frogs

by David Badger

I don\’t think I ever read a book about frogs before this one. I found it at a library sale and was attracted by the stunning photographs by John Netherton. Frogs is, of course, all about frogs and toads. It\’s full of interesting facts and observations, including quotes referencing frogs and toads in literary works – Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Emily Dickinson and many others. Not all the species are represented (there being over five thousand known!) but many of the more common, beautiful and curious ones are featured here. I learned lots of stuff about frogs and toads- that they were the first land animals with vocal chords, that they have teeth, that some remain in the tadpole stage for two years before metamorphosizing into an adult! There is a marsupial frog that carries its eggs in a brood pouch, a breed of frog where the male carries the eggs until they hatch (like a seahorse!) and another that carries its eggs inside its vocal sac. Some don\’t hop or leap but only walk. There\’s even a flying frog that can glide short distances on the outstretched membranes between its long toes. I did not know before that frogs not only absorb water through their skins, but also oxygen, and besides the poison-dart frogs that exude strong toxins from their skins, there are some frogs that can withstand having sixty percent of their body fluids freeze during hibernation because they produce antifreeze components. Another amazing fact is that some frogs can change their skin color, like a chameleon. Those little slimy frogs sure are incredible creatures. I have to say the most bizarre one featured in this book is by far the surinam toad. And the descriptions of their various calls- from the stereotypical ribbit (which only one frog species actually utters, according to this book) to sounding like the mewing of a cat, bleating of a lamb, bellowing of an ox, singing of a bird, etc- had me on youtube listening to different frog voices. Well, if you\’ve any interest in frog and toads, this is definitely a book to pick up. The pictures are awesome.

I read this one for the What An Animal Challenge.

Rating: 3/5 142 pages, 1995

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads

winners!

The winners of my latest bookmark giveaway (names drawn on Random.org) are

Nymeth and Esperanza!

You\’ve both been winners before (no rules against it!), so unless your address has changed, no need to email me. I\’ll just drop them in the mail! Please come again next tuesday, for another giveaway event.

Breed to Come

by Andre Norton

I had this book on my TBR because it was mentioned on Clare Bell\’s blog and sparked my interest. So when I found it at a thrift store, of course I snatched it up. Breed to Come is a futuristic tale about a planet once inhabited by humans, who fled hundreds of years ago in the face of a terrible contagion. After humans abandoned the planet, the domestic animals they left behind- cats, dogs, rats and pigs- evolved into sentient beings with separate societies (the cat and dog tribes usually enemies but united in hatred of the rats). They remember the humans as a horror from the legendary past, calling them Demons. The story is told through the eyes of one of the cat-people, who at his coming of age leaves home on an adventure to the long-abandoned human buildings, where it is rumored that some of his kind have begun unearthing secret knowledge the Demons held. Among the mysteries and wonders the feline companions find there, where they battle with the rats for access to knowledge databases and technology, is the suggestion of a universal threat- that someday soon the Demons might return…

This was a fun read. I did wish the characters were developed a bit more, and the ending felt kind of rushed, but it\’s a very imaginative sci-fi story with some vividly feline characters. Done with the book, I read up a bit more about it. I had always assumed when I heard the name that Norton was a man, but I was wrong. She wrote scads of books- many featuring cats or cat-like creatures. I\’ll definitely be on the lookout for more of her books!

Rating: 3/5 …….. 285 pages, 1972

More opinions at:
Olman\’s Fifty
anyone else?

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi

Almost Adam

by Petru Popescu

Almost Adam is a story about some anthropologists who discover an existing tribe of protohumans in a remote part of Kenya. Thrilled with their find and excited at having possibly found a \”living missing link\”, they start to study the small tribe but things turn disastrous when civil war breaks out in the area. One of the anthropolgists, Ken, suddenly finds himself abandoned in the wild. His only means of survival is to assimilate into the protohuman tribe. One of them, a young boy, eventually accepts him and slowly they develop a close father-son relationship. There\’s lots of adventure, a love story, a bit of a mystery. I didn\’t much care for the focus on how sexuality “evolved” among primitive man, or the political violence and corruption in Africa (that was sometimes distracting and confusing). But the basic story was interesting, and the comradeship between the boy and Ken reminded me of another book I really love, An Imaginary Life.

I read this book several years ago, borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 544 pages, 1996

Anyone else written a blog post about this book?
let me know and I\’ll add your link here

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, General Fiction, Past Reads

DogEar Reading Challenge Wrapup

This is the last post for my DogEar Reading challenge. I finished it yesterday. The five books I read were:

The Snowflake
The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle
Growing Your Own Vegetables
Search for the Golden Moon Bear
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

If you\’ve completed the challenge, use the Mr. Linky below to link to your wrap-up post (you have to click through to view the mister linky- it doesn\’t show up in the reader I don\’t know why). At the end of the month I\’ll draw a name and one lucky participant will win the prize (your choice of any three books from my swap shelf- 228 titles- some of my handmade bookmarks, or BookMooch points). I know several of you have already completed the challenge and written up your final posts; please leave your link here again so your name is sure to be included in the drawing.

I\’m trying to decide if I want to host a reading challenge again next year. I liked doing it, but didn\’t get many participants. I feel like a different (more focused) theme would be more interesting, and perhaps I had poor timing in when it started- everyone was already involved in so many other reading challenges! Any feedback on this is appreciated- what can I do better next time? is it advisable to host the challenge on its own site? should I let it run all year instead of six months? or are there just so many other reading challenges already out there that it\’s kind of pointless adding mine to the mix…?

Month: December 2009

RATINGS / SUBJECTS: