Adventures in the Mouse House

63. Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall

This book is about a lot of things. It's non-fiction, and while it packs in a lot of facts, it really reads more like an adventure novel.

It's an anthopology work in that it focuses on two interesting groups: the Tarahumara, a native people who live in the Copper Canyons of Mexico who are legendary for their extreme endurance running prowess, and the ultrarunning community - people who run races of up to 100 miles, in extreme environments such as Death Valley and at extreme elevation.

It's also about how the technology brought to bear on running and running shoes since the 1970s have made runners more prone to get injuries, not less so, and for distance running they've been getting slower too.

This is a really inspiring book. Not just the athletes, who are all insane in the best possible way, but the people who support them and their races. My personal favourite were the group who run the aid station at 12,500 feet of the Leadville 100 in Colorado. The guy who organised the race thought it wasn't safe to put an aid station that high up, even though it was really needed. But a local llama farmer and his friends put a load of stuff on the llamas and treks up there with a bunch of his friends and spends the weekend dispensing food and drink, and taking injured runners back down the mountain on the llamas.

There's some truly fascinating factoids too - extreme distance running is one sport where women's times are nearly as good as men's, and being older is no barrier to putting in some extremely impressive performances.

And most importantly, the more high tech your running shoes are, the worse they are for you. Which means that if I can ever find the time to start running again my Converse will do just fine.

46. Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells us About Sex, Diet and How We Live by Marlene Zuk

Sick of scientific illiterates telling you that we're not "evolved" to live the way we do? This is the book for you.

Full of interesting facts detailing how we are still evolving, we were never "perfectly evolved" to match our environment (and anyway that concept brings one up against the erroneous idea that evolution has a goal or direction), how we have so evolved the ability to digest grain (and that we've been doing it for far longer than most of those "paleo" types would have you believe) and some of us have an undoubted genetic marker allowing us to digest milk. And anyway, humans are a succesful species because we adapt so well to just about everything - so far, the only thing that's definitively a step too far is spending time in zero gravity.

While she's hilariously dismissive of some of the more whack-job stuff she's found online, Zuk engages intelligently with actual scientific research that argues against, say, persistence hunting as an early human feature.

This is an engaging read that I can't recommend highly enough.

47. Unseen by Karin Slaughter

The latest in the Sara Linton/Will Trent detective series. It must have been good because I read it in less than three days, but not a lot sunk in. Way more disposable than the last one, Criminal.

I still love Will, though.