50 book challenge: #34, #35, #36, #37, #38.

#34: Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Though revised a few years ago, the second edition seemed pretty dated, relying mostly on the same graphs that were in the original. Still, this book is a classic for a reason, and helped me think better about the topic, but like many classics it is also slightly nutty - for example, Tufte's focus on counting up graphic elements (each line, word, dot, etc.) and minimizing that number as a sure indicator of quality is a little hobby-horsish. I'm willing to believe that that may be a decent proxy for certain aesthetic values, but several graphs he deemed superior after eliminating all "unnecessary" elements I found harder to understand and interpret. In this he has something in common with modernist architecture.

#35: Annie Dillard, An American Childhood. Memoir of a child growing up in Point Breeze, an upper-middle class neighborhood just next to Squirrel Hill. Dillard has a good understanding of childhood as a series of awakenings, or maybe that's just how it's recalled by adults. Ask a child, I guess. Being a resident here myself, of course the intensely local flavor of the book was great. You can see all the places mentioned in five minutes on a bike - and, of course, this being Pittsburgh, they are all still there, 50 years later.

#36: Bujold, The Vor Game. I devoured this and was hungry for more.

#37: Audrey Niffenegger, The Time-Traveler's Wife. Sadly, I had taken this book with me to Montana in the expectation that it would keep me occupied for the weekend. No such luck. I enjoyed reading it so much that I had almost finished it by the end of the plane ride into Missoula and polished off the little remaining by that night. I was a little sorry to have read it so quickly, thus reducing the amount of time during which I was deriving pleasure from actively reading the thing, but the story has stayed with me so that pays dividends. In a way, I was glad to read it so quickly because it more impact had more proactive impactfulness that way and also made it less confusing, what with all the switching back and forth between time periods. Highly recommended.

#38: Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire. I bought this on my way out of Missoula and only wished that I read it a little earlier, before getting to Montana. Yes, by the author of A River Runs Through It, and a former forestry student and even firefighter, before becoming a professor of English at the University of Chicago. Maclean didn't publish his most famous works until late in life; this book, in fact, was unfinished at his death, but it holds together surprisingly well for being something of a patch job. And anyway, the story has a kind of meditative discursive quality that probably lends itself to a bit of assemblage. His investigation, both scientific and moral, into the Mann Gulch fire of 1949, which killed 13 smokejumpers who were overtaken and killed by a wildfire in a matter of minutes after landing in the area. It was also an essay on how history gets written and why it matters, and the fact of the smokejumpers' death, and Maclean's reconstruction of the moments shortly before and at the moment of their death had a lot to do with his own advanced age, and with the past death of his wife from esophageal cancer. The section on the scientific studies of fire spread had a little of the "throw everything left in the writer's file into the book" about them, but overall that quality added to the book's charm. An unusual work of nonfiction.