From the back cover:
“Catch-22 is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original.

Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn’t even met keep trying to kill him. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane. It is a novel that lives and moves and grows with astonishing power and vitality—a masterpiece of our time.”

My thoughts:
This novel is undeniably a masterpiece. It is not only a commentary on the absurdity of war (and capitalism thrown in for good measure), not only an encapsulation of the entire 20th century Zeitgeist with all of its angst, humour, brutality, and tragedy, but a metaphor for human life itself. Absolutely brilliant with great characters, outrageously funny episodes, and a jumble of a timeline that works both to confuse and elucidate the action (how’s that for a paradox?). I loved every minute of this book, even when I cried. I listened to the audiobook version (read by Trevor White), which I would highly recommend, and I thought the novel was so fantastic that directly upon finishing it, I put it on my wishlist for a hard copy for my permanent collection. This deserves to be on the top ten list of 20th century novels for sure. But I’m not going to touch the sequel with a ten-foot pole. Some things are best left alone, and I get the feeling this is one of them.

From the publisher:
“The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his ‘charming’ friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.”

My thoughts:
I quite enjoyed this “sensation novel”. It was extremely suspenseful and though I knew in advance what some of the plot twists were going to be, I was completely enthralled throughout. Not only did Wilkie Collins provide a wonderful escape to the nineteenth century complete with inheritances and stratagems, mad women and secret societies, mysterious foreigners (why are they always Italian?) and cruel men in power, but The Woman in White can be read with an eye to the rights of women and their position as second class citizens in every situation. On top of it all, Collins has given us the gift of Marian Halcombe, one of the strongest, most intelligent, most worthy of Victorian heroines.

From the back cover:
“Why do we look the way we do?
Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the ‘fish with hands,’ tells the story of our bodies as you’ve never heard it before. By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look, and function, like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm.”

My thoughts:
I really enjoyed this book when I read it last year as a library copy. So much so that I decided to send it toStephen Harper for the What Is Stephen Harper Reading: BookCrossing Edition Release Challenge.

Rather than try to recover my initial thoughts, I went back to some posts I made on the BookCrossing Book Talk forum and will quote them here.

I [...] am now reading Your Inner Fish which seems okay so far, but the author seems like he’s aiming at someone far younger or with far less general knowledge than me. It’s like he’s talking to a 15 year old. It’s also annoying, especially in a book about science, to have measurements in US imperial instead of metric measures.

Finished Your Inner Fish, which was pretty good on the information side, though I was less than impressed by the style (just a bit too condescending, like he was talking to a child). Anyway, the book was well worth reading. I was aching for some science and got it. Very fascinating discussion of various anatomical features humans have (e.g. limbs, eyes, ears, bodies) and from what ancestors we got them (fish, microbes, worms). Interesting stuff like how the bones in mammalian ears evolved from jawbones of fish, and how our genes show evidence of messy evolution over time rather than any kind of rational design.

There are similarities even with fish and chicken embryos. It’s all very fascinating.

From the book:
Watching the process of development brought about a huge intellectual transformation in me. From such simple embryonic beginnings–small blobs of cells–came wonderfully complex birds, frogs, and trout comprising trillions of cells arranged in just the right way. But there was more. The fish, amphibian, and chicken embryos were like nothing I had ever seen before in biology. They all looked generally alike. All of them had a head with gill arches. All of them had a little brain that began its development from three swellings. All of them had little limb buds. In fact, the limbs were to become my thesis, the focus of my next three years’ work. Here, in comparing how the skeleton develops in birds, salamanders, frogs, and turtles, I was finding that limbs as different as bird wings and frog legs looked very similar during their development. In seeing these embryos, I was seeing a common architecture. The species ended up looking different, but they started from a generally similar place. Looking at embryos, it almost seems that the differences among mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish simply pale in comparison with their fundamental similarities.

Flies have genes that are associated with development of sections of their bodies and those same genes in us are associated with the same regions of our bodies. Shark heads and human heads have the same gill arches and nerve structures. Very cool.

It’s also amazing to think of how life went from being a bunch of single celled organisms into all the myriads of species we see today, all from miniscule changes over time.

He also has some very interesting facts about weaknesses we have due to our evolutionary history. For example, hiccups are a holdover from our amphibian days when as tadpoles we needed to close our airway.

QueenBoadicea wrote:
> Thanks for the critique. The condescending
> tone you mention is off-putting but
> perhaps the author was simply trying to
> make the book accessible to the average
> reader and didn’t want to discourage them
> by making it too esoteric.

Yeah, it kind of sounds like he’s used to talking to students who may not be the brightest on the block. But then, I’m sure many people would like the style because he sounds like a ‘regular guy’ explainin’ stuff & not some ivory tower academic or esoteric scientist who’s forgotten how to speak English.

LOL. I guess my problem was that it was *too* readable. But that was only a mild annoyance. Overall, I thought it was good and thought-provoking.

From the back cover:
“‘For God’s sake, come!’ Unfortunately, by the time Hercule Poirot received Monsieur Renauld’s urgent plea, the millionaire was already dead—stabbed in the back, lying in a freshly dug grave on the golf course of his adjoining Merlinville estate. There’s no lack of suspects: his wife, whose dagger served as the weapon; his embittered son, who would have killed for independence; and his mistress, who refused to be ignored—and each felt deserving of the dead man’s fortune. The police think they’ve found the culprit. Poirot has his doubts. A second murder proves him right.”

My thoughts:
This is Agatha Christie’s second novel featuring Hercule Poirot and his sidekick Captain Hastings. From the title, I was a little concerned that golf would be heavily featured (as apparently have most book cover designers for the novel), but in fact it isn’t really mentioned at all. One of the bodies in the case is found on property which happens to be a golf course under construction, but that’s the only connection to the game.

In this one, Poirot using his knowledge of human psychology, observation of the people involved, and his memory of a prior murder case is pitted against a French detective using “modern” methods of evidence collection and analysis. Hastings, blinded by the attractive and/or interesting women he encounters, is particularly foolish (for example, leaving one of them alone with the body for several minutes).

Some of the twists in the plot I figured out, but still I was surprised at learning the identity of the killer, so overall it was a good mystery. I didn’t care for the object of Hastings’ affection and had to agree with his initial dislike of her but it will be interesting to see how their relationship plays out in future books. Next comes a collection of Poirot short stories.