I finally finally finished it! I think I started it in December of last year, picked up a copy from the library and then when I went to renew it, it had been requested by someone else so I had to return it. I found a free Kindle version so I decided to get that and just slowly chip away at it on Mom’s iPad. Half a year later, I’m 100% done!

You know, it really wasn’t as bad as people make it out to be. And my timeline makes it seem worse than it is. If you really think about it, I’ve gone through several dozen books in 2012 already. I think part of the reason it took me so long to finish War and Peace was just because it was on the iPad, and I really much prefer physical books.

I definitely recommend you read a physical copy of War and Peace too. It’s huge and unwieldy, so probably not when you’re traveling. But honestly, there are so many footnotes, it’s a pain to have to go look for them when you’re reading the electronic version. Or maybe it’s just the free version that’s annoying.
There is a lot of French in this book. Enough that you can’t always figure out what they’re saying by using context clues. There are conversational exchanges where both people are speaking in French.

And the book really reminded me of Moby Dick in that there’s a fictional story with characters and a plot, etc. and then there’s a lot of historical and social commentary. Entire chapters of Leo Tolstoy making interesting analogies to bees, or expanding on historical accounts of the war. I’ll admit I skimmed those.

In the end, if you’re not intent on reading this, then I’d skip it. Read Anna Karenina instead.

Your pretty basic book on the origin of life, from the science side. The title made me think it would be more philosophical, contrasting religion and science, but it was pretty much just science.

The book went through the origin of the solar system, a brief explanation of DNA and evolution, and the many theories of the origin of life. It even threw in ALH84001, and had a whole chapter about life on Mars.

I’ll admit I skimmed it and was not at all impressed. At least the author’s tone didn’t make me feel dumb while reading.

“Out of curiosity, how much do you know about Shakespeare?”
“More than his own mother.”
“And what about the Bible?”
“More than Dan Brown. Why do you ask?”
Dial filled him in on the case and told him what he was looking for. Why was Jansen kidnapped in Rome but killed in Denmark?

I recently went to a “marriage class” set up by a local Catholic diocese. At the beginning of the class, they gave each couple a book called Good News about Sex & Marriage by Christopher West. I really have no idea how many people actually read this book, I’m going to guess not many. I have to admit though, that I learned a lot from the class, and I was curious about the book.

It turned out to be interesting and informative. It’s set up in a question/answer format, and the questions are pretty relevant to modern culture. The subtitle is “Answers to Your Honest Questions about Catholic Teaching” and I think it really did rise to meet that goal. However, reading the answers made me feel a bit brainwashed.

I’m used to reading fiction. When you read fiction, you automatically suspend disbelief while you’re reading. You can submerge yourself in a world where anything can happen and logic works differently. You don’t question, you just take things at face value, and you go with it. Whatever the author says, just go with it and see where the author takes you.

So. It was really easy for me to happily go along with everything Christopher West said about Catholic teaching regarding sex and marriage. And it all sounded good. It sounded reasonable. But at the same time I noticed that he repeated himself. He used the same arguments to justify different questions, and sometimes used the same arguments on different sides, which would be odd, even in a fictional world. And he talked around a lot of questions, brushed them off and just published a little prayer in italics that you could repeat.

I’m glad I read it. Again, I learned a lot. I think that I read it with an open mind, and I feel like I can see where he’s coming from on a lot of issues. That being said, I’m not quite sure he thoroughly convinced me.

So we had bananas and they were turning quite brown. I googled “banana bread recipe” and looked at the top three recipes and mixed them together and came up with the following:

3 (over-)ripe medium-sized bananas
1/3 cup butter
3/4 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups flour

Preheat oven to 350F.

In a medium bowl, mash bananas with a wooden spoon (some small chunks are okay). Melt butter in the microwave (in a microwave-safe container). Pour butter into bowl with bananas and mix.
Beat an egg in your microwave-safe container. Add egg, sugar, and vanilla into bowl, mix.
Sprinkle cinnamon, salt, and baking soda over the surface of the mixture. Mix in.
Add flour, mix thoroughly.
Pour mixture into a loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour.

Turned out pretty tasty. It’s good it only makes one loaf because after a few days the sticky denseness of the banana starts to get a bit repetitive. We’re down to the last slice now and it’s been 5 days? And I’m going to be good on banana bread for awhile.
Would probably be less boring/intense with nuts or chocolate chips or something. But I’m not big on add-ins my banana bread, personally.

The texture turned out like muffins. Halfway between cake and bread. The crust was pretty delicious. So I’m thinking this recipe would make for really good muffins. More crust-to-inside ratio, set servings, and would fit better to taste/visual expectations.

So awhile back, Dad was talking about visiting Idaho. I think he was sitting next to someone on the plane once who was raving about the scenery and whatnot. So on one of our trips to the library, he decided to get some travel books. He got some for Washington, Victoria Island, and Alaska as well as for Idaho. I really didn’t know much about Idaho other than it’s physical location so I got a couple big coffee table book types. I figured if it was known for its landscapes I’d benefit from some nice glossy, full spread pictures.

I checked out So Incredibly Idaho! by Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes and another book called simply Idaho by Cort Conley, with photographs by John Marshall.

The subtitle of So Incredibly Idaho! is “Seven Landscapes that Define the Gem State” and I thought that sounded promising so I started with that. Was really disappointed to find that it wasn’t just full of landscape photos. What he did was he categorized seven different types of landscapes, and had one or two full-spread images of that type of landscape, then a lot of text about what made it important, why it defined Idaho, and a lot of superfluous information that I just didn’t care about.

Idaho was much more my style. I wanted an oversized book for its pictures, but I still wanted to learn something about Idaho. This book had a lot of large, beautiful photographs (thumbs up, John Marshall), and a lot of the important information was in the captions. There’s a brief history of Idaho in the beginning, and scattered pages of text explaining more current events of the state, and that was enough for me.

There’s a section of one of the Dialogues that I thought described the book well, so I’m just going to quote it here:

Mike let me borrow this book, so I admit I expected it to be much more mathematical. Instead it ended up covering a variety of subjects and being more on the philosophical side. And that was good for me, since I don’t think i would have been able to get through a 700 page book about just math. =P

So Mike’s friend had a box set of the “Nausicaä” manga, and really recommended it. I’d heard good things about it, and so when Mike finished it last week and enjoyed it I decided to jump on the bandwagon.

There were quite a few differences between the manga and the animated film. For one thing the manga has much more depth of character. The film’s antagonist is actually a combination of several groups who are working against Nausicaä, and Nausicaä herself is very much simplified from the manga.

The first volume ends at roughly the same point that the film ends, with Nausicaä and the baby ohm(u) surrounded by adult ohmu and lifted up by their golden feelers. The next three volumes (there are four in the “Perfect Collection” box set) chronicle Nausicaä’s continuing quest to uncover the mystery of the forest and set things right, in a way. I did think the last volume was a bit…off. The last bit seemed a bit removed from the rest of the story.

I did enjoy reading the manga, but to be honest I feel that the film was more than adequate. It was superbly done and captures the important aspects of the story. I think the film is both more simple and more mysterious. It doesn’t really explain how/why Nausicaä is special, but it also doesn’t make her too different from the other people in the story so you just sort of go with it. In the manga she seems to have more extensive powers/abilities. But because of that she feels more different from the “ordinary” people, and so it reads like a more traditional fantasy/sci-fi story and I just went into that mode where I think of their world as different from the real world, and so anything can happen.

Anyway, if you have a couple free afternoons, and you enjoyed the film, then I’d recommend leafing through the manga. Definitely see the movie though, I adore it. =)

I had this book on my list for a long time before I finally got around to it. And I’ll admit that it wasn’t on my list until I started seeing promotions for the movie. I really enjoyed the book, but it didn’t make me curious about the movie, especially knowing that the main characters were played by Robert Pattinson (“Harry Potter,” “Twilight”) and Reese Witherspoon (“Legally Blonde,” “Sweet Home Alabama”). I just didn’t think they could add to the story, although I have heard good things about the movie.

I definitely thought Water for Elephants was going to be one of those love stories that had some odd metaphorical connection to the title. Turns out it’s about an old man looking back on his past when he worked for a circus. The main animal in his care is an elephant, so the title is at least somewhat literal.

I liked the story, the characters, and the relationships. I wish there had been more on the work in the menagerie. Not so much as to make it dry (Moby Dick anyone?) and distracting, but just a little more to make it a richer story? I don’t know, I wasn’t disappointed with the amount of detail either. It definitely gave me a different understanding of circus/performing animals.