Holiday Reading

Books I've read over the holidays:

• Numerati, by Stephen Baker. An easy introduction into the implications of data warehousing and BI on the varying spheres of life - from consumer to citizen.
  
• Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. While I liked his efforts to explain and empathize with why people join evangelical churches, I didn't find the characters that believable. The story and plot, though, moved along fast.
  
• Survive! by Les Stroud. Yep, Survivorman in book form. It's what it is. As they say, if that's the sort of thing you like, then it's the sort of thing you'd like.
  
• All the Colours of Darkness, Peter Robinson. A Chief Inspector Banks mystery where Othello meets up with MI6 - or is it MI5? Either way, it delivers a reasonably satisfying mystery read, but not as good as his Dry Season.
  
• Killing Circle, by Andrew Pyper. A taut suspense/thriller/horror set in and near Toronto, with familiar landmarks - but is really quite creepy.
  
• Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson, by Andrea Mandel-Campbell. While I was already aware of most of the anecdotes in the book, reading them over and over at one setting is a depressing litany of Canadian business failures, both abroad and at home. It's interesting, though, trying to parse the varying contradictions in the stance of pro-business advocates, from support (read: subsidize) us, to encourage mergers/no don't....
• The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross. A history of 20th century classical music. Reading this is tough - not having the musical background meant I kept scurrying onto the Internet to find correct intro to the pieces he describes. While I haven't finished, it's satisfying trying to understand the linkages between, say, Strauss & Mahler. How one symphony is a rhetorical answer to the other Viennese composer's pieces.
• Richard Hofstadter, An Intellectual Biography by David S Brown. One of the great public intellectuals who stood between the American progressive movement and mid-century American liberalism, Hofstadter was also the author of an essay that inspired a course at Queen's - The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It's difficult to think of a comparably, more recent single essay doing that.
• The Turnaround, by George Pelecanos. Bad things continue to happen then and now in Washington DC, involving class, race and power. I think I liked the Night Gardener better.