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The Dog Who Loved Too Much by Dr. Nicholas H. Dodman should be required reading for anyone who adopts a dog from a shelter.Dr. Dodman, who teaches at Tufts University, has written an interesting examination of dogs and their mental problems.

The books uses real life dogs as examples and we get to sit in on treatment for dogs that have the following problems:

• Dogs that are afraid of Thursdays
• Dogs that attack the new baby in the house
• Dogs that attack their owners
• Dogs that are afraid of other people than their owners
• Dogs that tear up the house when left alone
• Dogs that are afraid of thunderstorms
  

There are even more in the book, but those are the ones that pop to the top of my mind.

In addition to describing the dogs above, Dr. Dodman describes the underlying syndrome that creates undesirable behavior. This helps the reader to understand what their dog (which may display the same behaviors) has going through its little dog mind.

Even more importantly, Dr. Dodman describes how to cure the behaviors he describes. At the end of each chapter, a summary of the chapters high point placed for easy reference.

All of this makes it very easy to understand why dogs act the way they do, and how people sometimes inadvertantly reinforce behavior that they do not like or appreciate.

Since dogs acquired from a shelter often have troubled pasts, this book can help dog owners overcome the dogs mental blocks and thought processes to create a better behaved and better socialized dog.

The Peace War by Vernor Vinge is a compelling, fun book.Yeah, it’s not terribly deep science fiction, but it has some interesting plot twists and the action really propels the book forward.

If you like hard science fiction, and if you’re in the need of a fun read, you could do much worse than The Peace War.

These books are part of a larger series, though neither is labeled as such.Revelation Space is an interesting and compelling story. It is one of the few sci-fi books that I’ve read where travel faster than lightspeed is not possible. In fact, travel at lightspeed itself is not possible. As such, while characters move between worlds, hundreds of years may pass. This has an interesting effect on galactic travel and politics. While there are hints that travel faster than lightspeed is possible, no one really has the slightest clue how to get it done.

I won’t reveal the book’s plot here, but I will say that at times, it can double back on itself in some very interesting ways.

Redemption Ark is follows in the footsteps of Revelation Space, but there are some new characters introduced and some new plotlines explored. At then end of the book, it is clear that yet another tome will be following these.

If you’re looking for some relatively long, well considered science fiction, I would recommend both of these books.

If you’re not reading Stephen King‘s Dark Tower series of books, I don’t want to know what you’re doing with your time.When I got done with The Dark Tower: Wizard and Glass two years ago, I quickly awarded it a place on my personal Top Ten Books of All Time list. While the other Dark Tower books were good, until Wizard and Glass, they had been just that, good.

It would be an insult to Wizard and Glass to even try and find a degree of the word “good” to describe it. To do the book justice, you’d really need to skip the word “good” and its ilk, and move right to words like “transcendent” or “sublime” to find adjectives to describe it.

With that in mind, I worried whether The Dark Tower: Wolves Of The Calla could possibly hope to be anything other than a letdown.

It was perhaps inevitable that Wolves of the Calla would not be as surpassing as Wizard and Glass. Having said that, Wolves of the Calla is still a very good book.

If you’ve been keeping up with the Dark Tower series, you would be asmiss to stop reading now. Pick-up Wolves of the Calla and keep up with the journey of Roland and his ka-tet to the Dark Tower.

From our “Books Too Awful To Finish Because Life Is Too Short Department”: Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow.

This book was so awful I barely made it halfway through before returning it to the library.

The book isn’t particularly visionary, interesting, or even well written. Given all the glowing quotes printed on the book jacket and Doctorow’s website, I wonder if those quoted read a different version of the book than the one I tried to read.

Omega by Jack McDevitt is decent SciFi, but nothing special. The reviews on Amazon.com lead one to believe that this book is quite polarizing: either you love it or you hate it.In reality, the reviews on Amazon.com tell us more about the reviewers and the review process, than about the book.

It seems that most of the reviews written on Amazon.com (and other sites), are penned by those who either cheerlead for a product, or those who revile it. Very few reviews are written that place a product solidly in the middle of its category. That is, the product is neither awful nor wonderful, but rather, it is serviceable.

That is the case with McDevitt’s Omega. The book is none too deep, nor is it too challenging. The science is certainly less than complex. The characters are generally believable, but I could never shake the impression that they were somewhat shallow character sketches.

Having said all of that, I did finish the book, and did generally enjoy it.

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is an excellent sci-fi/cyberpunk novel. If you enjoy cyberpunk, you will enjoy this book.Takeshi Kovacs is a mercenary brought in from outsystem to solve a perplexing mystery on Earth. He inhabits a strange body, as just his mind (and soul) have been beemed across the cosmic miles.

Kovacs has to figure out why a particular man killed himself in six weeks. The man who apparently killed himself is, in fact, the man who hires Kovacs. From hotels run by mischevious AI’s to augmented bodies to weapons of the future, Altered Carbon has it all.

To pass time on our trip to Nashville, Sarah and I listened to Valhalla Rising by Clive Cussler. We checked out the book on CD from our local library.

Neither of us was aware of the series’ particular features:

• Corny dialogue
• Characters that are caricatures
• Repeated miraculous escapes
• Character after character that is described as “retired special forces” or “former special forces” even if said characters are doing nothing more than acting as security guards without a thought in their heads or a tiny hint of autonomy

We just thought the book was going to be a standard issue thriller. So, we got plenty of laughs at the book, its plot, and its characters. When Cussler wrote himself into the book (as the wealthy owner of a stealthly private super yacht who is only too happy to engage in black ops with people he just pulled from the ocean just hours previously but with whom he had no previous acquiantance) the book jumped the proverbial shark.

Please, please, please do not waste your life reading or listening to this trash. I’ve got nothing against trashy novels of all types. However, this book is a bad trashy novel. For those, there is no excuse.

While at the library conducting research for a potential story, I strolled past the New Releases shelf. A book titled Fortress Malta caught my eye since Sarah and I talked about vacationing in Malta last year. I read the dust jacket and decided to bring it home.Generally, non-fiction isn’t my preferred genre of book. I’m a Sci-Fi/Fantasy reader (I’m reading Phillip K Dick’s short stories, at the moment). So, a non-fiction book has to cover a subject that interests me and do so with intelligence, humor, and insight. This book met all of those criteria.

Now that I’ve finished the book, I would recommend it to anyone interested in history or WWII. The story of Malta, the Maltese, and the island’s British defenders is truly fascinating. There are several people in the book whose exploits would be hard to believe in fiction, must less in real life.

The story of Adrian Warburton (“Warby”) in Fortress Malta is so fascinating, touching, and funny that one should read the book for it alone. The man was a reconnaissance pilot (who had trouble with take offs and landings) yet he managed to shoot down no less than nine aircraft over the course of the war. He flew so low that he once came back to Malta with a radio antenna from an Italian warship wedged into the bottom of his plane.

If you need an interesting and entertaining book for a long plane trip, a day at the beach, or for some bedtime reading, check out Fortress Malta by James Holland.

Excerpts from an interesting book Do Americans Shop Too Much:

“Because environmental damage is typically not included in the price of the product which casues it (for example, cars, toxic chemicals, pesticides), we overcomsume environmentally damaging commodities. Indeed, because all production has an impact on the environment, we overconsume virtually all commodities. This means that we consume too much in toto, in comparison to nonenvironmentally damaging activites.”

“In comparison to what a truly democratic state might provide, we find that a business-dominated government skews outcomes in the direction of private production. We don’t get enough, or good enough, education, arts, recreation, mass transport, and other conventional public goods. We get too many cars, too many clothes, too many collectibles.

“For those public goods that are complementary with private spending (roads and cars versus bicycle lanes and bicycles) this bias constrains the choices available to individuals. Without the bicycle lanes or mass transport, private cars are unavoidable. Because so much of our consumption is linked to larger collective decisions, the individual consume is always operating under particular constraints….As public telephone booths disappear, mobile phones become more necessary. Without adequate public libraries, we need to purchase more books.”

It is obvious that many of those who left reviews of the book at Amazon.com did not understand what they read. Their eyes moved across the words written on the page, but the meaning of the words did not filter down into the consciousness.

The newest book to find its way into my bag is “The Cruelest Miles” by Gay and Laney Salisbury. It’s the true story of how diptheria syrum to combat a diptheria epidemic was delivered by dog sled teams across 674 milesof wilderness through the dark heart of Alaskan winter to Nome, Alaska in1925. The book is full of wonderful characters, classic moments, andsome great writing.

I love the following excerpt:

“Lanky and fair-haired, Will Bill was a jack-of-all-trades, and like so many other men in the territory, master of quite a few of them. He was a mail driver, miner, trapper, and fearless dog driver, who was known to have the fastest dog team in the area. His skills as a driver, combined with a combustible mixture of hot temper, sharp wit, andwillingness to take risks on the trail, no doubt accounted for his nickname. Not coincidentally, he had also become a scholar of the deep freeze. Tonight, his hard-earned knowledge and skills would be tested, perhaps as never before….[I]n these parts, a man did not carry the name ‘Wild Bill’ without having earned it, and he was prepared to risk all.”

It was the middle of July, 2001 when I read Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. It was often hard to imagine snow and cold when I sitting in the sun on a 100+ degree day. This didn’t make the book any less interesting or well written, but it just didn’t seem as real as it might have.

When I walked the dog this morning, the temperature was -7F and the wind chill was -20F. Somehow that brings the story of a dog team run in -50F weather (not including wind chill) just that much closer to real. Of course, I do not wear a long bearskin jacket, mukluks, and caribou pants and shirt when I walk the dog around the neighborhood, but at least the weather feels right to read a book about deep winter.