HCIC-2013-Books-recs

HCIC Dinner June 21, 2013

We met at our usual place--Fandango's in Pacific Grove--to discuss books and music, and recommend the best to each other.

Judy Olson, Gary Olson, Dan Russell, Ed Chi, Leah Findlater

Cecelia Aragon, Sunny Consolvo, Jim Hollan, Terry Roberts, Elizabeth Churchill

Judy – Light between Oceans. M.L. Stedman. Lots of compelling moral dilemmas. After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Is the baby a gift from God, or should it be returned to its family, wherever they are… (Link)

Cecilia – The Kin of Ata are Waiting For You. (1976) Second novel by Dorothy Bryant. How the negation of dreams as a guide to life affects the real world. Alice Walker said this is "One of my favorite books in all the world". Cecelia says “This lower my blood pressure… uplifting and a way to change your life.” (Link)

Sunny— The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever. Teri Agins. There are striking parallels to our (HCI) community. They make ridiculous clothes, but that’s not the point. The demise of suits. Importance of “listening to the customer.” The story behind the increase of marketing in fashion industry. What is marketing anyway other than a way to gain attention and explain your story? (Link)

Terry—Hunger Games (all of the trilogy). Suzanne Collins. Amazing book intended for young adults, but really about relationships, culture, and caring. (Link)

Leah—Escape from Camp 14. Shin Dong-hyuk's life from a child born in a North Korean prison camp up to his eventual escape is a slim, searing, humble book. It’s hard to believe this still goes on. (Link)

Gary—Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam. The struggle for Vietnam occupies a central place in the history of the twentieth century. Fought over a period of three decades, the conflict drew in all the world’s powers and saw two of them—first France, then the United States—attempt to subdue the revolutionary Vietnamese forces. For France, the defeat marked the effective end of her colonial empire, while for America the war left a gaping wound in the body politic that remains open to this day. (Link)

Dan—The Shadow of the Wind. Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Impossible to easily categorize. In post-World War II Barcelona, young Daniel is taken by his bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a massive sanctuary where books are guarded from oblivion. Told to choose one book to protect, he selects The Shadow of the Wind, by Julian Carax. He reads it, loves it, and soon learns it is both very valuable and very much in danger because someone is determinedly burning every copy of every book written by the obscure Carax. To call this book--Zafon's Shadow of the Wind-- old-fashioned is to mean it in the best way. It's big, full of unusual characters, and strong in its sense of place. Daniel's initiation into the mysteries of adulthood is given the same weight as the mystery of the book-burner. And the setting--Spain under Franco--injects an air of sobriety into some plot elements that might otherwise seem soap operatic. Part detective story, part boy's adventure, part romance, fantasy, and gothic horror, the intricate plot is urged on by extravagant foreshadowing and nail-nibbling tension. (Link)

Jim—Ignorance: How it drives science. Stuart Fierstein. Ignorance is the true engine of science. Most often, science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room. The process is more hit-or-miss than you might imagine, with much stumbling and groping after phantoms. But it is exactly this not knowing, this puzzling over thorny questions or inexplicable data, that gets researchers into the lab early and keeps them there late, the thing that propels them, the very driving force of science. (Link)

Ed—Science Since Babylon. Derek J. De Solla Price. A useful division of math was into arithmetic vs. geometry. This division, and combination, is powerful. This series of 5 lectures analyzes the way science works; the ways in which it reconceptualizes the world. (Gary Olson says this book is “in my top 50 books of all time.”) (Link)

Elizabeth—Cheap Amusement. Kathy Peiss. What did young, independent women do for fun and how did they pay their way into New York City's turn-of-the-century pleasure places? "Cheap Amusements" looks at young working women whose meager wages often fell short of bare subsistence and rarely allowed for entertainment expenses. The author follows working women into saloons, dance halls, Coney Island amusement parks, social clubs, and nickelodeons to explore the culture of young women between 1880 and 1920 as expressed in leisure activities. (Link)

Judy—Death Comes to Pemberley. P.D. James. Beginning six years after the close of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are happily married and living at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy's Derbyshire estate, with their two young sons and Mr. Darcy's sister, Georgiana. A murder happens. P.D. James tells the tale, in the style of Jane Austen, in a fashion universally acknowledged to be not her own. (Link)

Cecelia— Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Jane McGonigal. The science behind why games are good for us--why they make us happier, more creative, more resilient, and better able to lead others in world-changing efforts.

Sunny—Marie Antoinette…. ????? I didn’t get this one… Notetaking failure!

Gary—Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948. Madeline Albright. The remarkable Madeline Albright was raised Catholic, but discovered much later in life that she was *actually* born Jewish in Prague. Gary likes this as a story of personal discovery (and he’s partial to biographies anyway). But he agrees with Václav Havel who writes that this is “A remarkable story of adventure and passion, tragedy and courage set against the backdrop of occupied Czechoslovakia and World War II.” (Link)

Dan—Bel Canto. Ann Patchett. A lovely book with incredible writing. It’s got revolutionaries, worn boots, Tchaikovsky, tall grasses, uncooked chickens, machine guns, Verdi, last rights, St Rose, blood, chess, Rusalka and love. A good summer time read. Highly recommended. (Link)

Jim-- Whom the Gods Love: The Story of Evariste Gaolois. Leopold Infeld. Galois lived a short life. The night before his fatal duel the next morning ("There is so little time" he wrote!) he hurriedly scribbled his original and profound ideas of mathematics, and gained immortality through the power of his insight. His life is a truly captivating drama, written by one of the great story tellers. (Link)

Ed—The Pianist. Władysław Szpilman. Szpilman's family were deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognised him. This was only the first in a series of fatefully lucky escapes that littered his life as he hid among the rubble and corpses of the Warsaw Ghetto, growing thinner and hungrier, yet condemned to live. A true story, turned into a movie by the same title. (Link)

Elizabeth—The Other. David Guterson. A man named Kurt goes off the rails and ends up living as a hermit in a remote forest in Washington State. The author also wrote “Snow Falling on Cedars,” so he knows the Northwest in a deep and personal way. Guterson knows Seattle the way Updike knows small-town Pennsylvania. (Link)

New category… best concert/ best music you ever heard live.

Dan—a solo two hour impromptu concert by Jordi Savall. The rest of his performing group was ill with the flu, but he was still healthy. So he played an entire concert, from memory, of solo viola da gamba music. Astounding.

Judy—was the gong player in a performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Her “endorphins went crazy” waiting for her contribution to the performance. (Link to YouTube performance ) [Dan: I never played the gong, but I have sung in the choir for this piece… and she’s right. Wonderful!]

Ed—I’m a violinist by birth, a guitarist by choice. But my brother is a high-end musical salesman. The peak performance of his life was when his brother brought a Stradivarius cello to his house and had members of the SF Symphony come by to try it out. Hearing a Strad up close and personal… Astounding!

Gary—Guthrie Theatre (in Minneapolis, MN) season tickets. Most moving performance was of an opera performed in English about a wise woman and king who play chess together. Except in this staging, the chess pieces were humans on a big chess board.

Celine—When she was 14, Celine saw the opera “The Flying Dutchman” in Stuttgart. The final scene, as the Dutchman sets sail, Senta throws herself from a towering cliff into the sea, was mighty powerful.

Elizabeth—The Waffle Opera in San Francisco. IN particular, a performance of Monetti’s opera, “The Telephone.” Imagine synchronized iPhone sounds during the performance.

Terry—The musical “Memphis” astonished her with it’s portrayal of the time when early rock was crossing over from “black” music to “white” radio stations. She notes that Memphis was begun as a local production, from TheatreWorks in Palo Alto.

Leah—While there’s no ONE performance that is especially memorable, ALL of the music she hears while travelling is memorable in ensemble.