DDC - jen.e.moore's first category challenge

Okay, I've always wanted to try this, and this group seems like a good excuse: in 2015, I'll read two books a month in each of the Dewey Decimal categories. That'll cover the first ten months; for November and December I'll do Fiction and Biography, since those are fairly standard "other" categories. And, because I've been tracking it this year and it annoys me slightly that 2/3 of my reading is male authors, I'll make sure the books I pick for this are written by women. (Am I doing this right? This group has always intimidated me a little.)

January - 000 - General Works, Computers and Information

1. Read This Next by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark
2. The First Lady of Fleet Street by Eliat Negev and Yehuda Koren
3. The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse

Some options:
Knock on wood & other superstitions / Carole Potter.
Reading matters : five centuries of discovering books / Margaret Willes.
(Geek sublime : the beauty of code, the code of beauty / Vikram Chandra.)
The boy kings : a journey into the heart of the social network / Katherine Losse.
(What we see when we read : a phenomenology ; with illustrations / Peter Mendelsund.)
The order of things : how everything in the world is organized--into hierarchies, structures, & pecking orders / Barbara Ann Kipfer.
The first lady of Fleet Street : the life of Rachel Beer : crusading heiress and newspaper pioneer / Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren.
(Fire shut up in my bones : a memoir / Charles M. Blow.)
Broken : a love story : horses, humans and redemption on the Wind River Indian Reservation / Lisa Jones.
Read this next : 500 of the best books you'll ever read / Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark. (ROOT)
Literary hoaxes : an eye-opening history of famous frauds / by Melissa Katsoulis.

February - 100 - Philosophy and Psychology

1. House of Spirits and Whispers by Annie Wilder
2. Better By Mistake by Alina Tugend

Some options:
Wilder, Annie. House of Spirits and Whispers. 133.1 WIL
MacCoun, Catherine. On Becoming an Alchemist. 133.43 MAC
Blum, Deborah. Ghost Hunters. 133.909 BLU
Herz, Rachel. The Scent of Desire. 152.166 HER
LaFrance, Marianne. Lip Service. 153.69 LAF
McGonigal, Kelly. The Willpower Instinct. 153.8 MCG
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided. 155.232 EHR
Tugend, Alina. Better By Mistake. 155.24 TUG

March - 200 - Religion

1. The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson
2. The Wisdom of the Beguines by Laura Swan

Some options:
Griswold, Eliza. The Tenth Parallel. 297.28309 GRI
Greenhouse, Lucia. fathermothergod. 289.5092 GRE
Wilson, G. Willow. The Butterfly Mosque.
Miscavige, Jenna. Beyond Belief.
Ruden, Sarah. Paul among the People.

April - 300 - Social Sciences

1. The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders
2. Complete Without Kids by Ellen L. Walker

Some options:
Forrest, Emma. Your Voice In My Head. 362.19689 FOR
Fox, Kate. Watching the English. 390.0941 FOX
Dugard, Jaycee. A Stolen Life. 364.154092 DUG
Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Created Modern Crime. 364.1523 FLA
Harper, Lisa Catherine. A Double Life. 306.8743 HAR
Weber, Lauren. In Cheap We Trust. 332.024 WEB
Thomas, Dana. Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. 338.47 THO
Dodson, Lisa. The Moral Underground. 339.20973 DOD
Durham, M. Gigi. The Lolita Effect. 305.23082 DUR
Blanco, Jodee. Please Stop Laughing at Me. 305.235 BLA
Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. 305.42 BIT
Bright, Suzie. Big Sex, Little Death. 305.42 BRI
Giele, Janet. Two Paths to Women's Equality. 305.420973 GIE
Maddow, Rachel. Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. 306.270973 MAD
Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. 306.3 ATW
Little, Elizabeth. Trip of the Tongue. 306.446 LIT
Meston, Cindy M. Why Women Have Sex. 306.7082 MES
Metz, Julie. Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal. 306.73 MET
Abbott, Karen. Sin in the Second City. 306.74 ABB
Friday, Nancy. Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age. 306.77 FRI
Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Wife. 306.872 YAL
Breslaw, Elaine. Lotions, Potions, Pills and Magic. 362.10973 BRE
Mason, Martha. Breath: A Lifetime in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung. 362.196835 MAS
Orbach, Susie. Bodies. 362.196852 ORB
Walker, Ellen. Complete Without Kids. 306.87 WAL

Er. 300s may be my favorite section.

May - 400 - Languages

1. Holy Shit by Melissa Mohr
2. Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Some options:
Biting the wax tadpole : confessions of a language fanatic / Elizabeth Little
Holy shit : a brief history of swearing / Melissa Mohr
The English is coming! : how one language is sweeping the world / Leslie Dunton-Downer
Seeing red or tickled pink : color terms in everyday language / Christine Ammer
The real McCoy : the true stories behind our everyday phrases / Georgia Hole
How to read a word / Elizabeth Knowles
Origins of the specious : myths and misconceptions of the English language / Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman
Grammar snobs are great big meanies : a guide to language for fun and spite / June Casagrande
Eats, shoots & leaves : the zero tolerance approach to punctuation / Lynne Truss

June - 500 - Pure Sciences

1. Naming Nature by Carol K. Yoon
2. Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling

Some options:
Stewart, Amy. Wicked Plants. 581.65 STE
Wertheim, Margaret. Physics on the Fringe. 530.1 WER
Naming Nature. 570.14 YOO
Weinberg, Samantha. A Fish Caught in Time. 597.39 WEI

July - 600 - Technology

1. Quinine by Fiammetta Rocco
2. Sickened by Julie Gregory
3. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
4. The Shift by Therese Brown

Some options:
Rocco, Fiametta. Quinine.
Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Marchant, Jo. Decoding the Heavens. 681 MAR
Tucker, Holly. Blood Work. 615.39 TUC
Gregory, Julie. Sickened. 616.858223 GRE

August - 700 - Arts & Recreation

1. Chicks Dig Time Lords edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O'Shea
2. Chalked Up by Jennifer Sey

Some options:
Chicks Dig Time Lords.
Harrison, Stephanie. Adaptations. 791.43 ADA
Haywood, Chelsea. 90-Day Geisha. 792.7028 HAY
Ryan, Joan. Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. 796.44 RYA
Sey, Jennifer. Chalked Up. 796.44092 SEY
Nelson, Victoria. Gothicka. 700.415 NEL

September - 800 - Literature

1. The Water Horse by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
2. The Slippery Art of Book Reviewing by Mayra Calvani and Anne K. Edwards

Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. The Water Horse.

October - 900 - History & Geography

1. Lost Kingdom by Julia Flynn Siler
2. Spinster by Kate Bolick

Siler, Julia Flynn. Lost Kingdom.
Scurr, Ruth. Fatal Purity.
Cooney, Kara. The Woman Who Would Be King.
McCoole, Sinead. No Ordinary Women.
Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror.
Bolick, Kate. Spinster.

November - Biography

1. No Ordinary Women by Sinead McCoole
2. The Woman Who Would Be King by Kara Cooney

Scurr, Ruth. Fatal Purity.
Cooney, Kara. The Woman Who Would Be King.
McCoole, Sinead. No Ordinary Women.

December - Fiction

1. Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
2. Close My Eyes by Sophie McKenzie

Hi! Welcome aboard! That looks like a great setup. Looking forward to seeing what you choose to fill the categories!

If you're having fun and reading books, you're doing it right! :) This looks like a great setup…I don't read much nonfiction, so I'll be very interested to see what you read!

Welcome!! You're absolutely doing it right - not that there really is a "wrong" anyway. :) Looking forward to seeing what you read.

Welcome to the challenge. I will echo what the others have said, it's your challenge and you can set it up however you want, there are no set rules or regulations.

Sounds great. I'm also trying to read more books by women this year, and there's even a thread in the group for discussing the books by women that we read. I'll look forward to your choices.

Welcome to the CC! Hope you enjoy yourself here. I'm impressed with the amount of non-fiction you're planning to read.

Thanks for the welcomes, everyone! I'm looking forward to planning next year's reading. :)

Interesting approach! I may have to try that sometime (although I know next to nothing about the Dewey Decimal System).

Welcome! Best of luck in your challenge. Can't wait to see what you read.

Good luck with all that nonfiction. I am certainly keen to see what fills your categories over the coming year.

Welcome to the challenge and interesting setting :)

Welcome to the challenge. As a library worker I applaud your use of the DDS. It'll be easy to walk through your library to find something for each section that appeals to you.

As everyone has said, Welcome!

Welcome to the challenge!

Knocked off my first Challenge book at last - Read This Next, a collection of book discussion selections and questions, which is actually one of the most hilarious books I've read in a while. Take, for example, this question about John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium -

Norwich tells us that since eunuchs were considered more loyal and less threatening to the emperor, castration was a route to a political career in the Byzantine Empire. There were eunuch generals as well as eunuch courtiers and patriarchs. Not tempted? If you wouldn't consider it for yourself, what about for your teenage son? Doesn't seem like that big a sacrifice anymore, does it? Take a minute to consider the benefits of having a general in the family -- and having a castrated teenage son.

Book two for January was The First Lady of Fleet Street by Eliat Negev and Yehuda Koren. Although this claims to be a biography of Rachel Beer, the female editor of the Sunday Times and a prominent social figure in Victorian London, it sometimes seems like the authors are doing anything they can to avoid actually talking about Rachel Beer. There are lengthy chapters about her family's history, her husband's family's history, her husband; an unnecessarily detailed description of the Dreyfus affair which Beer made much of in her editorials; entirely too much weight given to other people's descriptions of her and not nearly enough to her own words. (In most cases, it's hard to talk about Victorian women in their own words, but she wrote weekly editorials for one and sometimes two newspapers for years - there are plenty of her own words out there.) Overall I'd say less than half of the book is actually about Rachel Beer.

That fulfills my challenge number of two, but both books were co-written by men, so I'm going to try to find a single-author book by a woman I can finish in the next nine days. ;)

My extra book for January was The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse, the book that was a source for the movie The Social Network. I'd give this book a four for content and a two for likability, so that's a solid three, I suppose.

This is a profoundly cynical book. To read it you'd think that Losse was the only person working at Facebook in its first five years who had a soul at all. She projects a lot of feelings onto other people, without ever showing any real understanding of a person who isn't her. To be totally fair, Losse's book did kick off a series of critiques of bro-centric startup culture, and that's valuable - but she doesn't have any particular insights other than "this is bad" (which it definitely is).

Her critique of Facebook's mission is almost worse, not because I don't agree with it, but because of her unilateral preference for "real life" over digital interaction. As someone who basically grew up online, despite being only a few years younger than Losse, and who's still more comfortable with online interaction in some spheres, Losse's critique is a little too heavy-handed for my tastes.

A little bit of a late start this month, but today I finished House of Spirits and Whispers by Annie Wilder, a memoir of living in a haunted house in Minnesota. I'm never sure if I believe stories like this, but of all the "true" ghost stories I've ever read, this was by far the most well-written and engaging. Wilder moves back and forth between fear and fascination, and is more than willing to believe where she wants to and be skeptical where belief would be more frightening, which is at least the kind of self-awareness I can get behind. :)

And squeezing in at not quite the last minute, Better By Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong by Alina Tugend. I find popular psychology books like this pretty fluffy, but this one was a good example of the genre: Tugend treats contentious points (like gender differences) with sensitivity and open-mindedness, is careful to point out where the research undercuts common sense, and even mentions some of the flaws of psychology research generally. As for the actual subject of the book - well, I know I tend toward the perfectionist end of the scale, and it was nice to have a book-length reminder to treat my mistakes with generosity.

Oh my god, I need to stop doing these at the last minute. Anyway, first religion book, The Butterfly Mosque by science fiction and comic book author G. Willow Wilson. I know she wrote this first, but that's where I heard of her first. This is a gorgeous memoir about a young American woman converting to Islam, moving to Egypt, and getting married to an Egyptian man (and his family) - all inside a year. Wilson writes beautifully about the challenges and happiness she found in all of this chaos. It was also fascinating to see her perspective on the place of Islam in the world - she moved to Egypt in the early 2000s, where she paid little attention to the American media and was a little blindsided by the increasing vitriol it generates about Muslims and Middle Easterners.

Book two for March was an impulse grab off the new books shelf at the library: The Wisdom of the Beguines by Laura Swan. Too academic to be a popular history, too shallow to be a satisfying academic study, this book was not terribly well written. It did offer some interesting insights into a tradition I'd heard very little about, though. Swan puts heavy emphasis on the beguines' religious calling, but I gotta say, if I was a medieval woman and I found out there was a place where I could live in a community of women without men and learn a trade with which I could support myself, religious calling wouldn't come into it.

Okay, this was my fault, I picked out a brick. The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders was a more academic book than I was expecting, but that's all right - it just made the little flashes of humor all the more entertaining. Flanders discusses murder in the 19th century (not strictly the Victorian age, as the subtitle implies) and the ways it was talked about in popular media and literature. There's some kind of organizing principle I don't quite understand, since it's not entirely chronological, but I was in it for the murder and the crazy Victorian broadsides, so that's fine.

Second 300s book: Complete Without Kids by Ellen L. Walker. I really wasn't terribly impressed by this book. It never hits a consistent tone, bouncing back and forth between an ambivalence about the choice not to have children and an almost anti-procreation attitude which I think, based on what she says about herself, reflects the author's own personality more than anything. There's also a huge focus on relationships, which as a single-not-looking person I frankly find boring.

Enjoying your Dewey Decimal categories, but that last book sounds awful! I mean, if you can be "complete" without kids, then it stands to reason that you can be just as complete without a couple relationship too.

BTW, are you aware that there is an entire challenge group for Dewey Decimal books? I've participated over there for a few years, although have not been actively posting recently. Check it out! http://www.librarything.com/groups/deweydecimalchalleng

>37 sjmccreary: I had no idea, thank you! (I did kind of dig around when I first wanted to start this, but apparently not deep enough.)

My adventures in linguistics begin with Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr. A very fun study of the history of swearing in the English language, with Roman and Biblical swearing for background. Useful for writing research purposes in the descriptions of various things considered profane and their degrees over time, as well as concept-categories that are fairly nonsensical to the modern American or English person - they had a number of words for "to spray something with shit" in the Renaissance, which does not speak well to historical bowel health if nothing else. Mohr takes an interesting stance on Biblical history, treating the words of the texts in good faith as written and taking descriptions of God's actions as fact, but also describing Yaweh's path to ascendance over the other regional gods as evidenced in the text. (Brain-bendingly weird to read, but interesting.) It was also enlightening to pay attention to my own reactions as I read, noting what I was surprised by (quite a few things, really; the Middle Ages and early Renaissance were more foreign than we usually suppose), what I was shocked by (very little), and what I was genuinely offended by (more than I thought).

>39 jen.e.moore: - Would love to read that! Always fascinated by what's considered a swear word.

Wrapping up May with a classic: Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. It's true, I really didn't read this when it came out. And having read it now, I can't feel too bad about that. I am emphatically not a linguistic prescriptivist, so the chapters on the terrible slow death of communication were nothing but grating to me. I did like the little histories, and Truss has a deft hand with an example, but overall I wasn't blown away.

My science reading is themed on categories, it seems, and my first book was Naming Nature by Carol K. Yoon. A delightful, fascinating book about the history of taxonomy which is also - more importantly, perhaps - a book about the ways in which science is inadequate to human experience. Yoon structures her book around the idea of the umwelt, the natural human sense of the living world around us. (And it is a natural human sense - anthropology has found a remarkable degree of uniformity in the umwelt.) Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, worked almost entirely out of his own well-developed umwelt.

Unfortunately, the umwelt does not match up at all with the distinctions important to science - the evolutionary history of organisms. So the history of modern taxonomy has been a history of ever-more precise definitions of evolutionary relationships which are also ever-more distant from the way humans actually see the world. (For instance: scientifically speaking, there is no such thing as fish, as a category.) Yoon concludes that, in the face of our disconnection from the natural world, we should leave scientific taxonomy to science and re-take folk taxonomy for the rest of us. Fish exist, and whales and dolphins are fish, and unless you're a scientist, that's all that matters.

Getting one in at the last minute for June, my second science book was Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by Anne Fausto-Sterling, recommended at a WisCon panel about what science does and does not know about sex and gender. There's a lot going on in this book - a history of the science of sex and gender, an analysis of how social expectations shaped and continue to shape that research, a possible systems-based understanding of sex and gender - all crammed into 250 pages. The rest is notes. I admit I did not read the notes. I had enough to deal with without them.

Kicking off the 600s with Quinine: Malaria and the Quest for a Cure that Changed the World by Fiammetta Rocco. A solid history of quinine, from the discovery of the cure to the modern day. It's a little odd, in that it's specifically a history of quinine, not malaria, but you can't talk about the one without the other, so sequences of events sometimes come out a bit strangely. There's some added interest in the author's personal connections to some events, as well. If you were writing historical fiction set in malarial regions, this would be tremendously useful research.

>44 jen.e.moore: I liked how Rocco give the topic a personalized angle to it. I did not know much bout the history of quinine before reading her book.

This got stuck in medical memoirs, though I'm honestly not sure why - Sickened by Julie Gregory is not Munchausen by proxy as a genteel, invisible kind of child abuse; this is Munchausen by proxy as part of a whole slate of abuses, physical and mental, not only by a monther but also by a father, an incapable child welfare system, and the medical establishment. It's rough to read - I read the book in one sitting mostly because I didn't want to keep it around - but the passages about Julie's coming to terms with herself as an adult are gorgeous. I'm immeasurably glad she was able to build a meaningful life for herself, and I hope she was able to make a difference for her siblings as well.

One more, because I could: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Okay, like any other improve-your-life book, I'm all fired up to try the advice just as soon as I've finished reading it - we'll see how I feel in a few weeks. But I like Kondo's attitude, which is very pantheist - thanking your possessions for the good they've done you, letting them go because you can't take care of things you don't love. And I like her strategy of doing the whole purge in one (six-month-long) go and then being able to relax. Like I said, we'll see how I feel in a week.

And another, because I got a review copy (I don't usually read this much medical stuff, I swear): The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives by Theresa Brown. I'm a sucker for healthcare-work memoirs, but this one was okay at best. The writing's nothing special (with a few too many really obvious poetry quotations for my taste) although the subject is interesting.

One from my shelf for Arts & Recreation, Chicks Dig Time Lords, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O'Shea. As fandom history, this book is invaluable, containing oral histories of fandom from the early zine - and - videotape party era to the contemporary Livejournal era (which would all but die out within a year of this book's publication), and encompassing most of what I remember of the discussions around fandom at the time. But that means it's also very dated: one essay makes the same mistake a lot of us did of predicting that the Moffat era of New Who would be much more feminist than its predecessors. Christa Dickinson's "In Defense of Smut" reads as terribly old-fashioned even now, just five years later. It was terribly timely when it came out, but it's suffered for it since.

And - a sports memoir! Possibly the first one I've read ever. (Chalked Up by Jennifer Sey.) More a direct memoir than I expected from the subtitle (my fault for not reading the description before I picked it up), I found this kind of mesmerisingly horrible. I was a gymnast as a kid but stopped when my coach made it clear that the fact that I was approaching puberty was unacceptable; I never regretted it, but now I'm very glad.

Coming reeeeeeally close to the wire this time (what can I say, it's been a month): The Water Horse by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, a book of Irish poetry. Okay, technically I've only half-read this book, as I...cannot read Irish. (Yet.) But even in translation there are some really interesting poems in here. Not all of them worked for me, not by a long shot, but I particularly liked "My Father's People," a poem about ancestors and all their baggage, "The Hair Market," which is just a little creepy in the right way, and "Opening the Tomb," about being there at the beginning of a goddess's cult.

For my second literature book, The Slippery Art of Book Reviewing by Mayra Calvani and Anne K. Edwards, I was inspired to write something closer to an actual review!

This book was written in the early days of the book blogger explosion, and you can tell - and not just from the facile "Bloggers vs. Reviewers" chapter. It shares the attitude I often see toward writers of fanfiction: doing this for free online is fine, but only if you aspire to the more traditional standard of success. If the authors really were targeting all these new book bloggers with this manual, they couldn't have done a better job of alienating them.

On top of that, I noticed a whole lot of typos and just generally poor design decisions. I'm not sure the structure works well, either - surely the section on the impact of reviews should come first, to explain why adhering to high standards is important? The web links are at least 50% outdated, but that's a flaw of print media generally (dear everyone: stop printing lists of websites).

Most damning for me, really, was the complete and utter lack of personality both in this book itself and in the example reviews it holds up as professional. (That's the example reviews for fake books, not the real reviews reprinted as examples: those are fine.) I've seen more interesting reviews in LibraryJournal. Not inspiring in the least. There's some good advice here, but it's barely worth digging through the rest of the book to find it.

A history I've been meaning to read since it came out: Lost Kingdom by Julia Flynn Siler, about the end of the Hawai'ian kingdom. For someone researching Hawaiian history or the American imperial impulse, this would be an invaluable resource. For general reading - well, it's a history book, and it reads like one. Good, but not great. It's a very sympathetic portrait of Lili'uokalani, the last reigning monarch of Hawai'i, and of the political maneuvering that got the islands annexed by the United States without either government actually wanting to do so. There were occasional oddnesses in the prose that seemed to indicate a slipshod copyediting job, but nothing that impeded my enjoyment of the book.

And at the very last minute, an Early Reviewer's book from earlier this year: Spinster by Kate Bolick. Even in the modern age, marriage is the defining question of a woman's life - even if she decides not to marry, it's an important decision, sometimes the most important. Through a lens of her own experiences and the stories of women writers she's found inspiring through her life, Kate Bolick examines ways women have pushed back against this question, carving out lives for themselves in spite of society's expectations for them.

I wasn't terribly familiar with most of the women Bolick discusses - Neith Boyce, Maeve Brennan, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edith Wharton - although I did know some of their work, so I was fascinated to learn more about their lives. Bolick is using a broad definition of "spinster" here. Many of these women did marry, but, she argues, they found marriage to be stultifying and damaging to their work, and so they also divorced or lived separately from their husbands rather than sacrifice their lives to something that didn't work for them. Bolick compares their solitary lives with her own, where even though she's never married, she dates compulsively throughout her twenties and thirties.

I enjoyed the historical parts of the book more than Bolick's memoirs, but I think the personal story is important to the book as a whole. We get to learn not only from famous women writers but from Bolick herself, who struggles with modern expectations in an entirely different way from her heroines.

My first biography is a collective one: No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900-1923 by Sinéad McCoole. This is a terrific different perspective on a familiar story: the women involved in the Irish independence movement, War for Independence, and Civil War. That is, if it's a familiar story to you - if it isn't you're going to be a little lost. The book is split into two parts. The first is narrative, and gives a decent summary of the environment, both political and physical, where these women lived - with a heavy focus on Kilmanham Gaol where political prisoners were held through both wars. The second is a collection of biographies of as many women as the author could manage to compile. (It's great to see someone other than Maud Gonne and Countess Markievicz discussed at length.)

Reading the biographies also gave me a new perspective on the Troubles - when founding members of Sinn Féin were being buried with full military honors (which they undeniably deserved) into the late nineties, it's easier to see how people could keep justifying that level of violence. I also want to give a shout-out to the author for being nonpartisan throughout the entire book. She betrays no partiality to either side, British or Irish, Free State or Republican, pointing out the heroism and the atrocities in both, wherever it touches her story. It makes for decidedly uncomfortable reading sometimes, which I have to applaud.

Whoops - I ran over a little bit and finished my second November book on the first of December. You won't tell on me, right?

The Woman Who Would Be King by Kara Cooney - This is a solid biography of Hatshepsut, a woman who reigned as a king in Egypt first as regent for and then alongside her nephew, in an attempt to solidify her family's hold on the kingship. Cooney is writing half to a general audience and half to Egyptologists who she thinks have misinterpreted Hatshepsut's reign, so it turns out to be a fascinating insight into Egyptology research, too.

>56 jen.e.moore: I am reading this book for Early Reviewers and I have a hard time since it is, like you say, a solid biography, but is mostly based on conjecture since there is so little evidence about her to work from. I have set it aside for a while to get my brain reset for it. I often wished it had been written as a historical fiction.

I just peaked at the reviews to see if you had read it for ER and I saw another reviewer also thought historical fiction would have made it more readable.

Disagreement here--Cooney's book is anything but a solid biography. It's full of unsupported assumptions (for example, ages of members of the royal family when they ascended the throne, Thutmose I's allegedly enormous number of wives and concubines, alleged perpetual intoxication in the palace). There are also a number of outright factual errors. And Cooney seems to be attempting to revive the "Thutmosid feud" reconstruction of the history of this period. She suggests that Hatshepsut might've been a victim of homicide. Despite the utter lack of evidence. (We don't know how, or exactly when, most Egyptian rulers died, yet no one runs around claiming Horemheb or Senusert III as murder victims.)

Her account of Egyptian mythology is also slipshod. She focuses on only one of the many creation myths. And she claims that Osiris, after being murdered by Set, revivified himself without any help from Isis! Ay caramba!

When the book first came out, I was at a party attended by a number of Egyptologists; one doctoral candidate came up to me and said, "So you're reading that book? I heard it's really bad!" Unfortunately, the reports were accurate.

As for fiction, the last thing we need is yet another bad historical novel about ancient Egypt. Libraries are full of those abominations. Let's not add to them.

>58 orsolina: Fair! When I said "solid biography" I was thinking stylistically; I definitely don't know enough about ancient Egypt to judge the merits of her arguments. Thanks for the input! Any suggestions for something that would be readable to a non-expert but a little more in line with current theory? (Not necessarily for this time period; I know "ancient Egypt" is a huge field.)

>jen.e.moore:
Catalogues of recent museum exhibits often have feature articles written by specialists (as well as stunning illustrations); I would recommend Hatshepsut: from Queen to Pharaoh, edited by Catharine H. Roehrig. Within this volume the papers by Catharine Roehrig and Peter Dorman are especially good. (Any time I pick up a collection of papers that includes chapters by these scholars, I read them first!) Other catalogues to look for: Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids, Egypt's Golden Age: the Art of Living in the New Kingdom, Pharaohs of the Sun, The Secrets of Tomb 10A.

Other books on special topics are Tomb Builders of the Pharaohs by Morris Bierbrier, Mummies and Death in Egypt, Unwrapping a Mummy, and Tutankhamun's Armies. A series with titles beginning The Complete...has several volumes you might be interested in: The Complete Pyramids by Mark Lehner, who's been working at Giza for decades, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt by Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt by the same author, and the The Complete Valley of the Kings by Wilkinson and C.N. Reeves (look out, however, for the latter's unscholarly speculations about the private lives of the royals.)

Richard Wilkinson has also published books on art, writing and iconography in Egypt. Aidan Dodson has published many volumes dealing with various periods in Egyptian history (he too sometimes gets a little carried away by speculation); they are accessible to the non-specialist but perhaps it's better to read them after having read a general history. Like mummies? Then look for books by American University in Cairo archaeology professor Salima Ikram. And if you have a chance to attend one of Doctora Salima's lectures, don't miss it! She can describe an ancient garbage dump in a way that makes the audience bounce up and down.

Generally, when browsing for books about Egypt, look for the author's credentials--there are a number of authors who are labeled "Egyptologists" or even "prominent Egyptologists" by the media despite a complete lack of training (one such has a Ph.D. in philosophy and wrote a dissertation on parapsychology, another has degrees in geography and business education!). Also check the publisher--university presses are usually (but not always) reliable. Among other publishers, Thames and Hudson are noteworthy for their well-illustrated books on ancient history for the general reader.

Good luck and happy reading! If you have any other questions I will try to answer them.

Thank you so much! That certainly gives me a good place to start.

I am certainly spoiled for choice for fiction - but to grab just one out of my recently completed stack:

Cotillion by Georgette Heyer - I think this was actually my first Heyer - and I loved it. Fake engagement is one of my favorite romance tropes, and I loved the roundedness of all the characters.

>62 jen.e.moore: Cotillion is one of my favorite Heyers as well! I also enjoy the "fake relationship becomes real" trope, and Freddy is one of my favorite Heyer heroes. :)

And my last book for December and for my 2015 challenge - Close My Eyes by Sophie McKenzie. Well, this book was a wild ride. It started out as an examination of a woman in the throes of grief and turned into one of the most implausible thriller plots I've ever read. The writing was very repetitive, really stretching out the first section of the book much longer than it needed to be. The audiobook reader, however, was excellent.