A list of books I completed reading in 2008. Still a work in progress. The date in brackets is the date I finished reading the book.

January

1. [7 Jan] Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - Jon Krackauer. A chilling story of a trek up Mt. Everest that went horribly awry.

2. [10 Jan] Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class - Ronald W. Dworkin. Dworkin, a medical doctor, argues that MDs have done us a great disservice in the last 50 years by treating “sadness” with anti-depressants rather than addressing the whole person and their situation. Good insights.

3. [11 Jan] Andy Catlett: Early Travels - Wendell Berry. A charming short novel about a nine-year-old boy taking a trip to visit his grandparents. Set in the early 1940’s, Berry paints a very picturesque image of a simpler time.

4. [12 Jan] Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man who Dared to See - Robert Kurson. A fascinating real-life story about a man who lost his sight in a chemical explosion at the age of three, lived as a blind man for 40 years, and then was given the opportunity to regain his sight. More amazing the more I think about it. Worth reading.

5. [31 Jan] Capitol Threat - William Bernhardt. I enjoy the Ben Kincaid series, though I’m a bit concerned that Bernhardt is following a similar path with Kincaid that Tom Clancy did with Jack Ryan - a series of job promotions that ultimately dead-ends because you can’t go any higher. Still, a fun read.

February

6. [4 Feb] The Electric Church - Jeff Somers. A dystopian near-future sci-fi-ish novel (almost cyberpunk, but not quite enough cyber) about a “church” that converts you by taking your brain and plugging it into a cyborg. Darn good story.

7. [9 Feb] Strip Search - William Bernhardt. How does this guy crank out so many books so fast? This other series focuses on a police psychologist and her sidekick, an autistic young man who is a mathematical savant. A quick, easy, fun read.

8. [10 Feb] Case Closed - Gerald Posner. This book is probably 15 years old now, but new to me as it was on clearance for $2 at the used bookstore. I’m not up on all the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, but it seems to me like Posner did a pretty good job of documenting a case for Oswald as the single, independent assassin.

9. [12 Feb]The Driver: My Dangerous Pursuit of Speed and Truth in the Outlaw Racing World - Alexander Roy. This guy drove/raced in a bunch of fairly illegal road rallies, and eventually set a record by driving from New York to San Francisco in 31 hours, 4 minutes. Yowza.

10. [17 Feb] The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland. This is the first Coupland novel I’ve had the patience with/interest in to make it all the way through. A moderately interesting postmodern tale of shiftless people wrestling with meaningless lives.

11. [22 Feb] The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism - Timothy Keller. I was pretty excited to get my hands on this one. I have very much enjoyed Keller’s teaching, especially as it relates to urban ministry and reaching postmoderns with the gospel. Maybe I was expecting too much from this book, but it left me unimpressed. I wanted something new, insightful; Keller rehashed the stuff we’ve all read already, quoting extensively from C. S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, and a few others. This might be a good book to give to your thinking friend who is wrestling with the ideas of Christianity, but for me, it was only OK.

12. [26 Feb] Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography - David Michaelis. A very good but ultimately very sad biography of Charles M. Schulz, whose life seemed to bear out the aphorism that great art comes from troubled psyches. I didn’t realize how much Peanuts represented Schulz’s life… interesting. Sad that a man who had so much to contribute spent his whole life feeling like no one loved him.

March

13. [3 Mar] Navigator: Time’s Tapestry, Book Three - Stephen Baxter. The continuation of Baxter’s alternate history series. Good stuff.

14. [5 Mar] Blasphemy - Douglas Preston. I do so enjoy Preston’s stuff. In this story, the crew running a new superconducting supercollider appear to be getting a message from God when they run the collider. But it is really God? Maybe not… Good stuff.

15. [6 Mar] Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church - N. T. Wright. Brilliant stuff. The first post of a review series is here.

16. [7 Mar] The Sleeping Doll - Jeffery Deaver. Sometimes you just need a good escapist thriller. This one stars a woman who is a gifted interrogator and is on the hunt for a scary cult leader. Fun stuff.

17. [14 Mar] On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness - Andrew Peterson. See my extended review here.

18. [17 Mar] Cutthroat - Steve Brewer. Nothing fancy here - just a straightforward crime adventure thriller. A good read, though - a likable hero, reasonable plot, good characters. I’d read this guy again.

19. [23 Mar] The Magician’s Nephew - C. S. Lewis. I decided to re-read the Chronicles of Narnia - it’s been years. I had forgotten much of this story, but it was a joy to find so much of it so familiar as I read.

20. [25 Mar] Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager - Michael Lopp. This book was recommended highly by Geof, and the author (who goes by his nom de cyber, Rands) is brilliant at Rands in Repose, so I finally bought it from Amazon and gave it a whirl. While Rands’ high-tech world of internet startups and quick-turn user applications is a long mile from my process-driven avionics development world, he still has good insights on management and nerds. A good read.

21. [30 Mar] All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well - Tod Wodicka. Not sure what prompted me to pick this one up. It’s an odd little story about a guy who is a medieval times reenactor, except that he’s so uncomfortable with modern life that he prefers to stay in character all the time. Of course, this wreaks havoc with his family. Overall a messed-up, depressing story. Very odd.

April

22. [2 Apr] The 6 Sacred Stones - Matthew Reilly. Reilly’s genre is something I’ll call “non-stop action thriller”. His books read like a Jason Statham movie on speed. He uses more italics and exclamation points than even the Hardy Boys did. But his books are entertaining escapist reads, and this one didn’t disappoint. It did mislead a bit, though: they only dealt with the first three stones in this story, and leave you cliffhanging at the end of the book. Now I’ve gotta wait for him to publish the next one…

23. [14 Apr] Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription: Notes & Asides from National Review - William F. Buckley. I’m going on a bit of a Buckley kick here this past week (after trying again and failing to get into Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver and this is one of only two non-fiction books of Buckley’s that the library carries. Guaranteed to stretch your vocabulary and make you chuckle at the wit. A fun read.

24. [16 Apr] Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith - William F. Buckley. I think this one may have been a re-read for me - parts of it seemed vaguely familiar. Still, worth the read. The emphasis in this volume is far more on the faith than the autobiography; most of the chapters address how he, as a thinker and intellectual, addresses and comes to grips with his (Roman Catholic) beliefs. Well written, insightful, good stuff.

25. [19 Apr] The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester. Written in 1953, this book won the first-ever Hugo Award for sci-fi. I was impressed with how non-dated the story felt. While not having a very futurist slant toward technology, the remainder of the futurist part of the setting and plot was solid. Fun to get back to the early sci-fi.

26. [22 Apr] Betrayal - John Lescroart. I’ve enjoyed Lescroart’s books starring Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitzky for a while now, but this one was a bit of a disappointment. It’s a did-he-or-didn’t-he plot built around a soldier with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and his friend-turned-rival. A decent read, but not a very fulfilling ending.

27. [30 Apr] Gas City - Loren D. Estelman. Supposedly this guy has written a lot of books, but this was my first encounter with him. I slogged through, but didn’t enjoy it all that much.

May

28. [3 May] Korea Strait: A Novel - David Poyer. The blurb on the flyleaf drew me in - ever since Clancy’s Red Storm Rising I’ve been hooked on ideas of what upcoming non-nuclear wars might look like. Unfortunately the nearest this book got to Tom Clancy is when it ripped off The Hunt for Red October at the end of the story. Pretty lame.

29. [10 May] The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick. An early entry in the alt-history genre, and it’s an amazing story. What if the Germans and Japanese had won WWII?

30. [16 May] Vurt - Jeff Noon. A funky, not-quite cyberpunk but definitely virtual-reality novel. Noon does a good job of setting up a detailed-enough picture to make it believable.

31. [18 May] Shadow Command: A Novel - Dale Brown. As much as the geek in me loves Dale Brown’s technology, the Patrick McLanahan story is getting very very old. Same story every time - McLanahan has his gadgets and goes off to save the world. The President and other Defense Department folks oppose him as a loose cannon. Blah blah blah.

32. [19 May] The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography - Sidney Poitier. I picked this one up because I was curious what he would put in a “spiritual autobiograpy”. It ends up being a strong dose of moralism (”the measure of a man is how he provides for his family”) mixed with a lot of naturalistic theism (”there is a god that we see in nature”). Poitier may be “a good man”, but, sadly, seems quite muddled spiritually.

33. [21 May] Stone Cold - David Baldacci. Dale Brown should be taking lessons from this guy. A fun, engaging adventure novel.

34. [22 May] Dead Heat (Political Thrillers Series #5) - Joel C. Rosenberg. OK, so I like stories where the authors actually go for the disaster scenario and then play out the results. Rosenberg’s first couple books in this series were pretty good; by this time, though, he’s getting far too preachy and dispensational. Ugh.

35. [27 May] Majestic Descending - Mitchell Graham. OK, I really liked this book. As an adventure/mystery-type story, it managed to keep a nice even pace, keeping me interested without being over the top. Nice little twist at the end.

June

36. [1 Jun] Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages - Derek Bickerton. These books on linguistics interest me for some reason. Rather dry reading in parts, it’s still an interesting story of this scholar’s investigation into the development of various Creole and Pidgin languages.

37. [8 Jun] Cauldron - Jack McDevitt. A fun futurist space novel a la Arthur C. Clarke. A few hundred years in the future, a new space engine technology is discovered that allows travel to the far reaches of the universe. No big plot twists or over-arching story arc here, just an exploration of the setting. Pretty good read.

38. [20 Jun] Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II - David Stafford. An interesting read about WWII in the period when the war was basically but not totally over, the mop-up in Germany, the liberation of the death camps, and the like. A period not usually covered in detail.

39. [23 Jun] Golden Fox - Wilbur Smith. I’d never read anything by Mr. Smith before; just picked this one up from the library on a whim. It was actually a lot of fun and reminiscent of Ludlum’s classic Bourne stuff. Set back in the Cold War, a well-written and plotted story of politics, romance, intrigue, and blackmail. Entertaining.

July

40. [5 Jul] A Case for Amillennialism - Kim Riddlebarger. A spirited defense of amillennialism, with arguments for why the other common positions are incorrect. Quite readable, seemingly fair. Leaves me with much to ponder.

41. [7 Jul] Phytosphere - Scott Mackay. A short sci-fi novel that reads like a script to a cheesy SciFi channel made-for-TV movie. The basics: aliens want to emigrate to Earth, but can’t come to an agreement with the UN on where they will be allowed to live. So, they generate a “phytosphere” (i.e. a green, growing shroud) around the earth to kill off everything. Much more time spent on the drama of crisis on earth than in the actual sci-fi stuff. Kinda lame, but still moderately entertaining.

42. [10 Jul] The Redbreast - Jo Nesbo. This Norwegian author weaves a darn good detective story that ties in neo-Nazis with the Norwegian presence on both sides of the WWII battlefield. I really enjoyed this book - will be looking for others by Nesbo.

43. [17 Jul] James Van Allen - The First Eight Billion Miles - Abigail Foerstner. A really interesting biography of an Iowa native who played a big role in America’s early space exploration and discovered the earth’s radiation belts. A very good read.

44. [20 Jul] Rules of Deception - Christopher Reich. I’ve been a fan of Reich’s since his very first book, and this one does not disappoint in pacing or twistiness. The one disappointment is Reich’s compulsion to make a wacko evangelical Christian the villain of the book. Still, I enjoyed the story.

45. [23 Jul] 1787 (Five Star Mystery Series) - Sean Michael Bailey. Another airborne thriller with more holes in it than my fifteen-year-old shorts. Oh, and the villians: once again wacko “Christian fundamentalists”. Yawn.

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