Not Enough Books!

[bunn]

According to the Daily Mail (OK, not the most accurate source of data) the average British person only reads 566 books in their entire lifetime! (Wish they'd asked me, I'd have pushed the average up a bit. Though having said that, I don't think I could give them accurate figures: it has to be thousands, but I haven't been counting...)

Apparently the average cigarettes per lifetime is over 77000! What are these people doing, wasting all that money on smoke when they could be buying healthy books!


John Fisher: Why Does My Dog?
Some interesting information on the effects of diet on behaviour, but rather outdated (published 1991) views on the relevance of wolf behaviour to dog behaviour. Also some quite mad stuff on dominance theory, and what in my view was a criminally irresponsible anecdote describing his recommendation for use of an electric shock collar on a greyhound. If there is one breed of dog for which the 'invisible fence' approach is even more totally inappropriate than another, it's the greyhound.

George RR Martin: Fevre Dream - Very impressed with this. GRRM does Anne Rice, only better. A vampires in New Orleans/ Mississippi river boat book: I loved it.

Ursula Le Guin: Changing Planes I'd read this before, but it seemed the perfect book to take on a tedious plane journey (and it was very tedious. Boston is FAR too far away to go for a 2-day course). I love the story of the woman who is 4 percent corn, and the Ansarac bird-people who have a developed civilisation yet still perform a seasonal migration are really inspired.

Adrian Woolfson: An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics. Interesting, but at the same time rather an annoying book. The historical anecdotes seemed to be in there just to show what a renaissance man the author was: I don't know if I just didn't get it, but they seemed to tie up very loosely with the science that was the point of the book. And it annoys me when species are described as 'useless weeds' or 'evolutionary dead ends', as if evolution was deliberately planned and structured to produce modern man and his possessions.

George Mackay Brown: Vinland
A story of a man of early Orkney who hitches a lift with Leif Ericsson. I wasn't entirely convinced to start with: the characters were a bit flat, I thought. But it won me over with some gorgeous descriptive writing: I now want to paint at least one of the descriptions (the description of the waxing and waning moon as a girl-woman-crone).

I'm sure I took something else as well, but I can't remember which book it was now, as I foolishly shelved it when I got back, and now it's become one of the Multitude... It may have been Le Guin's The Beginning Place, but I *thought* I read that the week before.

Comments

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

John Fisher actually recanted his views on dominance theory, but unfortunately he died before he could revise any of his books. He's written a number of articles about why he changed his views, though. Personally, I really like him - I like the way he writes, and I think he explains very comprehensively why punishing aggression just doesn't work. I kind of bleep over the bits about dominance ;) Have you read any of his other books?

Also, it amuses me that you have An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics, since I just ordered a copy of Genetics for Dummies to help me with the biology aspects of my doggy course. Maybe one day I'll get to upgrade.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

This is the only one of his books I've read so far. I did like his writing style and on the whole I thought his recommendations seemed well reasoned (apart from the whole greyhound - sheep - invisible fence thing, which made me wonder if he'd ever actually *met* a greyhound). Mind you, I tend to find most dog training books seem to fit collies/terriers much better than sighthounds. Not that I know much about terriers.

I'm glad to hear he changed his thinking on the theoretical background, and sorry to hear he has died: I was planning to look and see if he'd written anything more recent. Are any of the articles online, do you know?

I was thinking there was an interesting conflict in this book between the 'academic' thinking and what was coming out of the the actual practical experience, so would be interested to see more up to date stuff.

Strongly suspect that 'Genetics for dummies' is a step up from 'for intelligent people' as I bet the former is bought by people who actually want to use the info, whereas the latter is definitely aimed at the popular science newspaper article type market who will never actually do anything with the info - ie, me!

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

There's a lengthy but interesting article called "Understanding the behaviour of the pet dog" - I can't find it online except by subscription, but I have a copy on my hardrive. If you're interested, I could email it to you.

There's also a much lighter hearted discussion of the subject in his last book "Diary of a Dotty Dog Doctor".

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Thanks - would be interested to read that article.

I am on victoria@clareassoc.co.uk. (No point antispamming it, it's allover the net already, woe is me).