I continued my project of reading all I can of Stanisław Lem, this time His Master’s Voice.
I have to say right off, this novel isn’t for everybody. Some of its ideas and language is very impressive, but as a story, too much of the text is absorbed by many threads of philosophical speculation. It’s like he had a bunch of options before him, and couldn’t decide which to take, so he just presented them all to the reader. You could call it a device, or a failure of decision. This isn’t the only one of his novels where he does something like this.
Otherwise, wow. Again, it’s a completely different sort of story, and a different way to tell one. And if you like sci-fi ideas, there are way too many here to chew in one sitting.
As in many of his stories, the facts of the matter are completely blurred by various misinterpretations and outright deceptions. But the basic premise is: some distant civilization has broadcast a definite message. Just what the message is, or why it was sent, is the question that consumes most of the novel. And the main theme of the story is, how people deal with the unknown and the probably unknowable.
I was especially pleased that the narrator is a mathematician. He’s way more erudite than any mathematician I ever met, but still. Clearly he had spent some time talking with practitioners of the field.
I can recommend this to those who love more philosophical science fiction, and who enjoy speculation about how wildly grand space aliens might be.
I thought the 2018 movie Annihilation was the best sci-fi of the year, as well as being very impressively unsettling. When I heard good things about the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, I went for it.
If you have seen the movie, be assured there are few scenes in common between it and the novel. The main theme is there, and the impression of a strange danger, maybe an alien life form, maybe an intelligence, is very well represented in the movie. There is a lighthouse in both, and the team is all women — besides that, not much.
There’s also a secretive government group, but by the end, we find that they are absolutely feckless and mostly clueless, besides being dishonest.
This is a story about human alienation more than it’s about aliens. The main topic is terrifying biological transformation, and psychological manipulation and finally, assimilation. All of this makes a great scary story.
The science fiction is the idea of otherness, that an invasive alien life form might be so very alien that any resistance might be not only hopeless, but just part of the process.
The Strugatsky brothers’ One Billion Years to the End of the World is an odd story, any way you look at it. It’s so odd, I can’t say I know what was going on — which is OK because the characters don’t know what’s going on, either. One thing they’re all sure about, is that something is going on — and I am inclined to agree.
The theme really grabbed me. It’s very different, and somehow familiar.
The protagonist is some kind of mathematical physicist. His wife and son are on vacation, so he has his apartment free for a while, and is trying to get some work done, but he just can’t manage. Every time he sits down to write, there’s an interruption or annoyance, sometimes weird ones. Every time he tries to put his thoughts together, the thinking is broken off.
He meets with his scientific researcher colleagues, and they compare notes. Everybody wants to know: “what did they ask you?” They find they are each being interfered with — interrupted, annoyed, pressured, stressed, threatened, maybe worse — all in different ways, but sometimes in weird ways, by who knows who, for the purpose, evidently, of stopping their research. A suicide ensues. Maybe space aliens are to blame, maybe a force of nature…
All the action occurs in a single apartment block, mostly in the protagonist’s apartment.
The writing is sophisticated and sometimes even funny. I enjoyed it very much. The pressure and angst is relentless — compare with Roadside Picnic. The protagonist’s introspection and confusion is somehow very familiar.
This book is not for everybody — every resolution leads to another complication or twist. The point is the struggle to find a path or even a goal: what to do, or whether to do the right thing, or to save oneself, is never clear.
I saw that Tom Hanks had published a collection of stories, Uncommon Type. Folks said it was good, and its main thread appealed to me.
This is in the whoda-thunkit category. Whoda thunk this likable actor was a spectacularly inventive storyteller? On the other hand, that he has warm understanding of human inner workings… seems less of a surprise.
Besides the main thread, a couple of unrelated, funny story sequences, and a sweet little screen play keep it going in multiple directions. Everything is fun and clever and human. (There’s even a straight-up science-fiction story — a pretty good one.)
If you like short stories, I think you’ll be impressed!
I first read Arthur C. Clarke’s 1954 novel Childhood’s End when I was about ten years old. It had a profound influence on the way I look at the world. I ordered a recent edition, and picked it up again, to see if the impression was deserved, to see if I could still derive enjoyment from it.
I had read others of Clarke’s novels and collections of short stories. There was always some beautiful surprise or big idea. Some of them were aimed at young adults. Some perhaps focus too strongly on the big idea, and miss the mark on the characters who are living the story. That was my recollection, anyway. Later, in the 70s, I tired of the stories he co-wrote with other authors.
This book is a little masterpiece, though. The big idea is for a long time shadowed by another big idea, and grows only slowly… I did not see it coming. It gave me goosebumps, reading it again.
There is, with a numerical certitude, non-earthling life in the galaxy, and likewise, non-earthling intelligence. What if that intelligence is very different from ours, and titanically greater than ours? So great, there is really nothing anybody can do about it? Clarke explores this a couple of different ways, and takes the question farther than anybody of his time had.
This is not the usual sci-fi film fare, where alien monsters come to kill and eat us, or mate with us, or steal our stuff. All of that is stuff humans do… and this is much much wilder. Clarke imagines what actual space-faring cultures might do, and why they might do it.
I got a 1990 Del Rey edition, in which Clarke updated the preface. OK, it’s clear why: the first edition dealt with the beginnings of human space travel, years before that became history. (It helped only temporarily — the book talks about TVs and telephones.) I don’t think it hurts the story, though.
The prologue to this edition is enlightening, though. I had seen some episodes of Clarke’s 1980s series Mysterious World, and was deeply disappointed with his apparent acceptance of paranormal nonsense. Here he recants all that, with humility and style, as well as providing some insights into how the book came about, and who had used some of its ideas.
I have heard that there was an attempt to bring this book to the screen. Despite my love for sci-fi schlock, I haven’t brought myself to look at it. I just don’t think many producers possess the imagination. (In fact, the TV series V took some images from the book, and totally discarded all big ideas. Likewise with the chaotic, silly Independence Day.)
Don’t tell me you’ve read sci-fi until you’ve read this book.
And another Stanisław Lem: The Invincible, published 1965.
This is the closest thing to a conventional science fiction novel I have ever seen from him. That said, it’s engaging, exciting, and contains themes that were surely unheard of when it was published.
Every novel is so different. This one is told in the 3rd person, and it has a conventional sci-fi setting — a huge rocket ship manned by a military crew of intrepid explorers, investigating the disappearance of a sister ship on a barren world.
No witticisms this time. Early on, it gets creepy and then scary. They solve the mystery pretty quickly, but find themselves in danger — which they don’t understand, and alternately overreact to or underestimate. I got to know a few of the characters a little, and felt and even worried for them.
The danger itself is the sci-fi novelty here. It has to do with the nature of life itself, and evolution. Things like it have become a sci-fi staple, but I’m sure I never saw it elsewhere in the literature of the time.
Not all of Lem’s novels are well constructed — I had trouble with both Return from the Stars and Fiasco, in particular. But this one is polished, a proper tale.
Another Stanisław Lem: Return from the Stars, written 1960, published 1966.
The star pilot has returned from a ten-year sojourn, where he lost several colleagues horribly, and where many scientific discoveries were made — and nobody cares. Due to time dilation, on Earth, it’s 150 years since they left. (Almost) everybody he knew there died long ago. But this was all expected.
The people are polite to him, but nobody is really very interested in what they did out there.
He has terrible culture shock, and doesn’t know whether to try to fit in or rebel. Everything is so stinking weird and nice. People have changed. Not just individuals, not just society and technology, but humanity itself have been re-engineered. They can no longer imagine violence, and they are no longer interested in exploration. But is it good, or bad? Does the astronaut think he is good, or is he bad?
I can’t say that it works for me. I’m pretty sure Lem wasn’t quite sure what he was doing with it. The book is somehow about being uncomfortable in a comfortable situation, so one can’t expect to exactly curl up with it.
Also, the women in this book are pretty disappointing to me. The dialog between the protagonist and his wife-to-be is very strange: sentences are left unfinished, as though both parties know what the other means. Reading it, I mostly didn’t know what they were talking about. I guess he was trying to capture something about intimate conversation, but to me, it came across as failure to communicate, and maybe a failure of the author to capture a woman’s voice.
Like every single one of Lem’s books, this is an odd topic, and a new approach to novel writing. This time, it’s a very psychological perspective of social and personal themes in a science fiction context. I’m going to have to see what else he has done.
Somebody left one of Erich Kästner’s illustrated children’s books in a coffee shop, and I thought it was funny, and wanted to spend some time with one. He wrote a lot of books though. I don’t remember why — I ordered Emil und die Detektive, originally published in 1929. This one is a 1977 re-edit, re-published in 2014, with some vocabulary notes.
Unfortunately, the notes were only occasionally helpful. Most of the words I didn’t know were not explained, and most of the words explained, I already knew. The notes are for kids who lacked grown-up words, when my situation is the reverse.
It’s a story about exemplary boy behavior, a common enough thing. But from the example I’d seen, maybe I shouldn’t have been so shocked about just how scary the situation was that he got into. Needless to say, he overcomes, and wins the praise of everybody — similar to Horatio Alger’s heroes.
The story is pretty good, for what it is. A lot of stuff is packed into its few pages, and there are plenty of surprises.
The setting in turn-of-century Berlin is very charming. They have trains, and cars and phones, but most people don’t have a car or a phone. Kids play stick-and-hoop, and work together. If nothing else, it’s a little peek into a forgotten past.
Continuing my catch-up on previously Eastern-bloc science-fiction writers, I got Stanisław Lem’s Fiasco. It comes highly recommended, but it is not my favorite Lem novel.
It doesn’t pull its punch. And it does explore a couple of directions in sci-fi that had been ignored, if not avoided. If you want something that you’ll feel for a while, and you don’t need the feeling to be comfortable, this might be for you.
It’s not a happy story. And it’s not at all funny, as many of Lem’s stories are. I had problems with the structure of the book, and with Lem’s style, though.
As to style, Lem always loved to indulge himself in speculation — in this book he is unfettered. His characters speculate unfettered. His computer speculates unfettered. And then he as narrator speculates… you know how. For me me, it was too much to hold my interest. I would have reigned him in.
This book seems to be an amalgam of a few short stories and the beginning of a short novel, with a more ambitious project. I don’t know why he chose to do that. It didn’t work for me. The shorter parts were only superficially related to the main story, and they were just cut off. There’s an excuse for each, but they seem lame to me.
I also think the story was needlessly cluttered with characters whom I didn’t care much about, and who didn’t have much to do with the story. I think its a case of a book that needed a good editor, at a point in the author’s career when nobody was brave enough to do the job.
As to the main story — well, Lem isn’t going to do something you’ve seen before. He can’t help but be different. The book’s blurb informs us that it has to do with species in space that are so different that we can’t accurately interpret their actions, and neither can they ours. Maybe I’m too different from Lem too understand his motives.
It just isn’t as much fun as any of the other books I’ve read by him. But there is something to think about here. I’m still thinking about it.
Masha Gessen’s first book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, I read because Rachel Maddow has often recommended her, and because I wanted to get a feeling for Putin’s motives.
This is partly a biography, and partly a history, and partly a recounting of personal experience. Gessen several times confesses that she has limited evidence to go on — Russia’s government is almost as opaque now as it was in the Soviet days. The book is heavily annotated, so her own sources are easy to find.
She writes very well, passionately but clearly, about events that took Putin from St. Petersburg streets after the war, to being the autocrat of the world’s largest country. She provides some information that wouldn’t be in Putin’s official biography — memories of acquaintances she interviewed, for example. There is enough here to get a picture of the man, and the psychological injuries that contributed to his dictatorial tendencies.
But about the most horrible things, about Putin’s disastrous handling of hostage situations, the Chechen war, his support for dictators in neighboring countries, his war on the Ukraine, and his attacks on homosexuals and other non-conformers at home… she can only show that the official accounts do not reflect the facts. And if they are as inaccurate as she says… one can’t help but imagine better explanations. I had never seen all these events placed side-by-side. The picture that emerges of a desperate, vicious man of limited abilities but unfettered and reckless vengeance, a leader with only disdain for the will and lives of his people.
For example, almost all the alleged perpetrators of the 2002 hostage taking in the Moscow theater were summarily executed before they could recover from the (still unknown) gas used by the special forces to incapacitate them. Evidently, it was very important that the hostage takers never wake up... because, as they were being executed, the gas was simultaneously killing over a hundred of the hostages.
Maybe it was just a mistake, and maybe the special forces collectively decided to take very thorough revenge on the hostage takers (and hostages). Most readers will find this explanation unlikely, as I did. We are left suspecting that someone didn’t want people to hear anything the hostage takers might say if they were taken into custody. This is not an isolated incident.
This was a hard book for me to read. The sense of despair and horror only grows, and, of course, it is never resolved.
Continuing my recent revisiting of my teenage love of science fiction, I looked through some web lists of best sci-fi books. One that came highly recommended on several lists was Iain M. Banks’ Excession.
It’s just so annoying, so disappointing, in so many ways. Once I finished it, I vented my fury with him in a whole page of complaints. I will not inflict that burden on you. Summary: life is too short for such pap.
As sci-fi, there isn’t very much new here. It’s all magnification on previous authors. The space ship is bigger, the civilization is bigger. It is a big collection of ideas that were deemed mind-blowing forty years ago.
He almost manages to make a story with big, intelligent space ships that talk to one another with different voices. But unfortunately there are far to many of them, and their silly intrigues are way too convoluted, for me to have possibly followed without taking notes. This is the only redeeming feature of the book, though. The rest is a drag.
Do not expect to get much out of the title. It’s just a thread for the story, and is never resolved.
The guy isn’t without ideas, and he can turn a phrase. It’s a pity. As Mark Twain said: “Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”
PG Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning recounts events at Castle Blandings, wherein prize pigs are purloined, personal secretaries plummet, private-eye Percy Pilbeam gets plastered, and Parsloe-Parsloe is petrified of the publication of his previous proclivities.
It’s a keystone-kops hodge-podge of characters from his previous novels, with way too many sub-plots to expect any reasonable resolution. But it doesn’t matter much — what matters is his brilliant use of the language, surprising little insights into human foible, and loving parody of the British class system. I came away thinking that such Brits as Wodehouse would never do away with the system — it provides too much fun.
Since I had enjoyed Rachel Maddow’s first book, Linda bought me a copy of her latest one, Blowout. Much of what I said about the other book applies as well to this one — despite her endlessly amusing commentary on the hijinks of politicians and corporate executives and dictators, this was a very hard read for me. She is talking about dire situations, and it hits just too close to home.
The span is broad, covering the ridiculous playboy nephew of the murderous criminal dictator of Equatorial Guinea, the funny deep-cover Russian spies whose lives we have come to know so much about, the first discoveries of oil in Oklahoma and the mysterious appearance of flurries of earthquakes in that state and how it came to acquire a winning basketball team, the pathetic mob land management of oilfields in Russia, the emergence of whole departments of the Russian government whose sole purpose is to destabilize governments that bug their shirtless dictator, the appointment of the head of Exxon Mobile to Secretary of State, and the lifting of sanctions apparently just to enrich the dictator and the oil company, and the apparent suicide of one of the biggest Oklahoma drillers. And the most astonishing and disturbing event of all, the ascendance of a moronic con man to the US presidency, who is transparently a sock puppet for the Russian dictator.
Yeah, it’s hard to get your head around. But what she is talking about is in fact one big ball of crude.
The book is extensively referenced. The events described are real, whether you like the jokes and jabs or not.
Maddow is absolutely brilliant of course. I can’t think of anybody who could have tied all these horrors together and given me a chuckle.
If I have a complaint, it’s that I think she needs an editor with a stronger hand. Like with many movies with Robin Williams or Jim Carrey: there are times when that brilliance detracts from the message. Did she really need to make a joke out of that?
My friend Jevgenija, who learned English in university, found Frances Mays’ Under the Tuscan Sun (At Home in Italy) to be too much of a challenge, and so offered it to me. Because it sounded to me like a travelog, I resisted, but she pressed me.
On the train ride home, my phone batteries pooped out, and I remembered I had something to read. Well sometimes you get something better than you expect, and sometimes you may be astounded.
The woman is a cultivator of language. She’s just relating her experiences and projects as an expatriate in Italy, but with such warmth and passion that you can almost smell the place.
There is in fact an aspect of the travelog in this, and also two whole chapters are dedicated to recipes. Most of it is about purchasing and renovating a villa in the Tuscon hills.
She describes her bankers and contractors and neighbors, their foibles and gesticulations, in splashes of color, and shares her wonder at being part of an ancient time-line that started with the Etruscans, whose potsherds turn up as they till the soil. But beyond that, I was watching her work the language — I read some lines repeatedly, just to get the last bit of taste out of them.
Jules Verne’s big novel Vingt mille lieues sous le mer. Yeah, en Français — by far the longest piece of French I ever attempted. It was a slog — I had it by my bed for years.
It was worth the effort. It’s a fun story.
I should clarify something: I had somehow imagined that the 20000 leagues referred to some imaginary depth. It does not: that is a measure of how far they travelled in the Nautilus under the sea — which is of course much less ludicrous.
There are storytelling weaknesses.
What bugged me most was that, in the 10 months they are aboard, the crew of the Nautilus never spoke to the three comrades, and scarcely interacted with them, except to spend days chopping ice to free the sub, and to join them in battle against monster octopuses. To me, this was more incredible than the science fiction adventure. As they first board the Nautilus, it is remarked that they crew speaks an incomprehensible language, but toward the end, in the battle with the octopuses, the narrator Arronax is surprised when one of them cries out in French as he is being killed… which blows the explanation that they could not converse. It does not make sense.
The book features a biological journal. In most chapters, Arronax recounts the specimens he has observed, duly noting some colorful property of each. This sometimes goes on for pages. It reads as if Verne had a current biology text open on his desk, and thought this listing would lend credence to the story whose narrator is a scientist, or hold the interest of his audience. I don’t know. Maybe some of his readers did find it amusing — I didn’t.
Aside from that, the story is pretty entertaining. They go all over the world, and investigate everything that imaginary 19th century submersible adventurers might. The few characters engaged in the story are maintained, and each has his lively moments — even a wee bit of comedy. (In this respect, the story is much better than his other tale, De la terre à la lune, whose characters I found just too stupid to continue with.)
I was especially interested in the 19th-century understanding of science, and the view of human cultures and of animals. This was a mixed bag, but so many stories are told in the novel, the bag is pretty big. There are savages, but he treats them with some sensitivity. On the other hand, the behavior of Arronax’s valet Conseil is beyond subservient — it is self-sacrificial, and supposedly in his national character.
Arronax even mentions the plight of walruses, being slaughtered to extinction on islands where they breed. Weirdly, Nemo commands tolerance for one group of whales, immediately before proceeding to slaughter a group of sperm whales (which Verne has apparently conflated with orcas) on account of sperm whales being no better than giant predatory tadpoles. This seemed to me to be Nemo’s weirdest act — more insane even than his sinking of ships. The harpooner Ned Land expresses some horror at the act, calling it butchery — although he would gladly have harpooned a whale himself for sport.
As confused as it was, I saw a glimmer of concern about the natural world.
Nemo himself is never explained in this book. He has super-human knowledge and capabilities, and is ferociously passionate, having such an antipathy for human society he will not deign to step on dry land — sort of a science fiction captain Ahab. (Moby Dick is mentioned in passing.)
The vehicle of the story is of course the Nautilus, and all the wonderful things one could do with a vessel that could explore the depths of the oceans. He takes this about as far as it could go in his time. It’s interesting that the need to surface regularly for breathable air comes up several times, but the question of the submarine’s inexhaustible power does not.
I suppose the reality of deep ocean pressure would have ruined the story. Good engineers of his time could have told him that nothing of the description of the Nautilus could possibly withstand the water pressure at the depths to which the Nautilus travels. But it was only in the 1970s that people made it to the deepest parts of the ocean… and then only with much smaller and more limited vessels. And nobody has done it since. Nowadays, such exploration is all done robotically — but in Verne’s time, that area of science fiction was not to arrive yet for a couple of generations.
Rachel Maddow pushed this little tract on her show: On Tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century by Timothy Snyder. Its a sort of a manual for citizens who do not want to see their government be taken over by tyrants. The premise is that the citizens permit, usually unwittingly, a tyrannical government to take control, that it happens bit by bit, by gradual erosion and dismantling of social norms and institutions, gradually making the unthinkable commonplace.
The points are pretty clear. Primarily, the message is “stand up for what’s right”. Every point he makes is worth reviewing an thinking about, and then doing something about.
I do have a complaint, however. The current U.S. political situation is inserted in various chapters, but in what strikes me as an uneven fashion. While we know how the fascist and communist dictatorships played out in the early 20th century, we don’t yet know how those of this millennium will play out. So is this a generic handbook for those who oppose tyranny? or is it intended to compare the current situation with an emerging tyranny? I felt that the author didn’t quite make up his mind.
P. G. Wodehouse’s Something Fresh, because Wodehouse’s Jeeves had made me snork some years back, and I needed a good snork. It’s a little spy story / whodunnit / romance set in the airy pinnacle of English peerage.
Yes I snorked—all better now. In fact, he rolled me out of bed more than once.
Here’s a sample: “…she tucked away her hostility into a corner of her mind where she could find it again when she wanted it, and prepared for the time to be friendly.”
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds — The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. My best guess is that I saw a review served up to me on Amazon, or somewhere else on the Internet.
The main theme is very intriguing. Octopuses have by far the most extensive nervous system of all the invertebrates, giving them an intelligence, as measured by lab experiments, comparable to that of a cat. But then there’s the color-changing thing, and the surprising fact that most octopuses live only one year.
The nervous of the octopus and its mollusc relatives is arranged very differently from that of chordates. First, the brain itself is in the form of a ring that circles the alimentary canal. Second, much of the nerve material in the animal is in the arms, which seems to reflect the impression that the arms often behave independently. While it appears from the DNA that molluscs and chordates share a common ancestor, that would have been some 600 million years ago, and that ancestor probably had no more than a nerve net, as do modern sponges. So most of the nervous structure of the molluscs and chordates are independent developments.
The amazing capacity for immediately changing color at will presents several puzzles. Besides the questions of how and why, there’s an apparent contradiction: mollusc retinas have no color receptors. (I have an idea about that. I’ll write him.)
Smith ranges widely, from his personal diving experience with cephalopods, to psychology to philosophy (“how does it feel to be an octopus?”, and “how does it feel to be a human?”), to neurology and evolutionary theory. Overall, it’s a very fun exploration.
Heard that Rachel Maddow had written a book. Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power. I’ve come to really respect her piercing intellect and off-the-cuff humor, and I had to have it.
It’s no surprise that she’s making a profound point that she thinks merits a book. It’s also no surprise that her research is excellent. It shouldn’t be surprising that she’s stinking funny—nonetheless, she hit me unawares several times.
Her main point is that the U.S. founding fathers strove to make it hard for the country to go to war, but that through the 20th century, all the measures they put in place have been eroded, to the point where presidents effectively wage war with no oversight, and we are constantly at war somewhere. (That is the “drift” of the title.)
It’s pretty depressing. She has some ideas, but I have my doubts there’s any will to carry those out.
The chapter on our disintegrating nuclear arsenal made my hair stand up, though. I was blissfully ignorant of how many nukes had officially been lost by the U.S. military, and of cases where nukes went missing temporarily. (And then I think… were the Russians more careful, or less careful?) Some of them are “lost” on U.S. soil, in circumstances that I find very very scary.
Somebody oughta do something. But the people who could, have no incentive. Incentive is the problem here: all questions are about ideals versus incentive.
Julian recommended that I read Liu Cixin’s (刘慈欣) recent sci-fi award winner The Three-Body Problem. This author is also responsible for the story behind this year’s mega-ultra blockbuster The Wandering Earth, which I thought was just awful.
Well OK, we mustn’t judge books by movies based on them. And I’ll say up front, Liu has something.
I have to confess, I’m fighting a bias here for the sci-fi literature of the early 20th century. The genre was literarily simpler at the time.
Let me first get out of the way what I didn’t like. The author has taken a mish-mash of gee-whiz popular science ideas and let his imagination go unsupervised. A couple ideas I thought were pretty clever. Most didn’t make a lot of sense, and I found myself struggling to keep up with his efforts to defend them. Sure, wild science ideas are the bread and butter of sci-fi, but… the reader shouldn’t have to dog-paddle through them.
I found the computer-game-inside-the-story particularly annoying, although one of the interesting sci-fi things happens in the game. I felt the game was there because computer games sell, not because the story needed it. The game could be lifted out — perhaps to make a different story.
Also, the multi-layered storytelling, each story intersecting another, that has become so much a staple of modern TV dramas... is just a device. It’s a device that can be over-used, and this author over-uses it. Just tell me a story, please.
There was a lot to like. First, it starts off in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It’s pretty amazing to me to read a Chinese author writing so directly about its horrors. Things have changed.
A couple of characters were fairly well developed, and I liked them. (But most were really not developed well.)
As to the sci-fi, if we’re counting the sheer number of ideas, it’s going to score high. The bulk of them were pretty weak, and they took a great deal of explanation to defend, which for me blew the enjoyment. However, in at least two cases, I thought to myself “Hey, I never heard of that before…” and I got that little new-idea buzz! I think some of this rates as great science fiction.
Stanisław Lem’s Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, because I had enjoyed his other books so much.
Oh boy this is a whole new thing. The general premise, the reason for the title, is that robots have long ago attained sentience. (They mostly tolerate humans.) Most of the stories involve two robots called “Constructors” who are marvelously adept at constructing all sorts of things — for example, the book starts with the story of Trurl the Constructor who builds a machine that can create anything starting with the letter n.
It’s a hoot.
If you’re at all interested in considerations of what would happen were things taken to all sorts of logical extremes, or bothersome questions of ontology and semantics, and if you have a halfway operational sense of humor about the whole thing, you maybe ought already to have read this book.
If you enjoy watching words made up to scratch any itch or tease whatever tickle, this is a sort of catalog for you.
If you can’t bring yourself to take philosophy seriously, if you have your doubts about science, this book may bolster your opinions.
If you don’t care for science fiction at all, I recommend this book.
A tip of the hat also has to go to the translator, Michael Kandel. There is so much crazy wordplay in the text (many little puns and word inventions on every page), it’s hard to imagine how the original might have been, and how anybody could find suitable replacements in another language. I wonder what Lem would have thought.
Besides the abovementioned story of the n machine, you will thrill to the improbability of “Mishmosh the Selfbegotten, who had neither father nor mother, but was son unto himself, for his father was Coincidence and his mother — Entropy.”
If that isn’t enough to whet your perverse fancy, consider this terrifying reasoning: “Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. … Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way.”
Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, another famous book I was meaning to read for a long time.
The planet Solaris has a living, sentient ocean. It’s the only life form on the planet, and people know it does stuff such as alter the planet’s orbit. Humans have been studying it for many years, lately from a station floating above the surface of the planet. But the ocean just keeps behaving in strange ways, ways that invite and deny interpretation, all the while showing no interest in humans at all.
Now the ocean has decided to interact with humans. The way it goes about interaction is terrifically creepy and painful. The protagonist is put into an impossible moral and emotional position by the ocean’s manifestations. But why?
It’s hard, imaginative, even great sci-fi.
Lem luxuriates in academic-sounding prose, which is fun for a while. It’s a literary embellishment he uses in his short stories to comic effect. But this story isn’t a comedy, and I came to feel that he was just writing out every plot possibility. I would have preferred more story.
For you sci-fi readers: as everybody says, it’s a must-read.
Continuing my belated visit of eastern bloc science fiction, I got a copy of the highly-acclaimed Roadside Picnic by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which years before was recommended to me by my friend Denislava.
The premise is that the aliens came in some very alarming fashion, but didn’t interact in any comprehensible way with people, and then just split, leaving vast zones on different parts of the planet that even insects avoid. The zones are full of disconcerting, physically impossible, lethal doodads, many of which can’t be recognized as anything at all, even if they’re visible. People that go in to the zones and survive, sometimes brought very weird fatal diseases with them, so it’s very illegal to go in… some locals, “stalkers” go in nonetheless, to bring out very lucrative alien artifacts. But they never come out the same as they went in.
The impression of menacing otherworldliness is very well done, and it’s the best part. The science-fiction aspect of the story is about the effect of the alien “visit” on the people and on society, and the big question of what the heck the aliens were doing there anyway.
It isn’t perfect. Well, I think the authors would argue that the whole story is about twisted reality and stories cut short — which would serve as a description of the novel itself.
This book was the basis for the very curious film by André Tarkosvky, Stalker. Both are to be recommended, but the film dispenses almost completely with the science fiction theme of the book, although it does capture the feeling of strangeness and oppression.
My pal Poppy complained that she didn’t see much science fiction in this list. I decided that it was high time to take up my erstwhile eastern bloc authors. I’d really enjoyed Stanislav Lem before, and I found good reviews for his book The Star Diaries.
This one is a bit different from the last collection I read, but it too has themes. To sum up a very funny book humorlessly: this one plays with self-reference, time-loops, and absurd extrapolations. By way of testimonial: it rolled me out of bed more than once.
Is it great sci-fi? Well I don’t think that’s really what Lem was shooting for. Is it great sci-fi satire? Sure! But I don’t know if that’s what Lem was shooting for either. I think he was really examining some paradoxes raised by science, society, and the fiction thereof, and reacted convulsively.
This one I probably saw listed on a blog or maybe it got suggested by some bookseller’s robot. I don’t know anybody who reads such books. Joy Williams’ The Quick and the Dead. Boy, howdy. When I finished the little book, I felt I’d accidentally run a marathon. (In my head, of course.)
Death is the main topic here, explored from every direction permitted by the limitations of the medium, often in ways peculiar to the author. She is brilliant, and she knows it, and I’m pretty sure it pisses her off, but she can’t but laugh. She had lots more — it was dribbling out of every chapter — but she had to sell the book, and so to finish it somehow. Some things are somehow tied up, but it shouldn’t surprise you once you get into the book, mostly things just die off. Even her prose is transmogrified.
As to the quick, there are a lot of them, and a few of them went by too quick — I would have liked to have seen them more developed. Although the author does voice, her characters are not realistic — sometimes they have a special voice, but more often they serve as vessels for a theme, and for that reason, I suppose, some of them have a voice incongruous with the character’s description.
I should warn those who insist on positivity in their reading materials, and those who want a happy ending, and those who have heard too many awful stories already. Every story here is oh-no awful. For those of you that love to see someone work the language, or to see such a painful topic as death dissected, or who just need a black humor belly laugh, this book would be my recommendation.
For further reading on the topic (but even weirder), see Rodoreda’s Death in Spring.
In one of my “bright idea” moments (about producing very good rocket propellants on the Moon using oxygen and aluminum), I stumbled across John D. Clark’s Ignition! “An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants”, and I had to have it. This is a surprise: as the title says, it’s a history about practical chemistry — but it’s also a very gripping and entertaining read.
Clark was in the thick of the rush to develop rockets just after WWII. What he describes is a melee — the basic problems in producing practical rocket propellants are much more complicated than one might guess.
The book discusses dozens of chemical compounds that were tried, many very exotic, many having some nice property, but being very nasty in all sorts of ways. I guess my favorite is dicyanoacetylene:
N ≡ C − C ≡ C − C ≡ N
Just look at all those triple bonds! And only carbon and nitrogen! He explains that it’s a lousy rocket fuel, but that it burns with ozone at 6000°K!
Here’s a surprising phys-chem fact: the quantum spins of the pair of protons in the normal hydrogen molecule H2 can bear two relationships to one another: either they have the same spin or opposite spins. The relationship can flip from one to the other over time, but it releases energy in doing so. In a gas, the equilibrium ratio is one in four molecules have the opposite-spin relation. But in the liquid state, the equilibrium state has almost all molecules in the same-spin configuration. The practical issue is this: to flip states, energy is released. In fact, if gaseous hydrogen is cooled enough to liquify it, and it is put in a perfectly insulated flask, enough heat is released by this process to vaporize all the liquid hydrogen! Just when you think you understand the basics…
By the way… lots of people had ideas like using aluminum as a fuel, and tried it, also in mixtures and compounds. It burns for sure, but the results were never satisfactory. But maybe on an airless moon some of the issues would be different.
On Julie’s prodding, I located a volume of Bukowski that met with sufficiently positive reviews, and dug in. It was Factotum.
To say anything useful about Bukowski generally, it must be understood that he’s crude — very crude. Oozing and squirting crude. For a lot of readers, that’s the draw. A lot of others won’t tolerate it. For me… I had to think about what he was doing here — sure he’s making a statement, maybe about the way the world really is, or maybe about how he and some other people really are.
Is it hilarious? People say it’s hilarious. It had a moment or two for me, but that isn’t what kept me reading. It was not all that funny, to me — dirty talk has its place, but it doesn’t get the giggles out of me. And once you start seeing it as a literary device applied with a trowel, it’s hard to get past the annoyance. But I did, and I think it was worth it.
I was more interested in the picture he was drawing behind all that, of a guy who will let nothing get in the way of his causing his own problems, self-sabotage as a matter of principle. I know it pretty well — I have more than a dash of if myself. Is it real? Maybe a bit exaggerated… but I’d say it’s gritty-stinky-real.
The narrator (who is undisguisedly Bukowski himself) is not a likable fellow — anybody who sees something in him soon pays the price, including he himself. There’s not a lot of humanity here — not the better side of it anyway. I caught it popping out here and there; I choose to interpret this as a statement that despite all the self-loathing madness and the trash talk and the booze, these are just people doing their pathetic best. But this is my silver lining, not his. Besides that, he does paint a picture of a time and a place and a social substratum that he thinks is worth looking at. I’ll give him that.
Oh, one other thing: I recently lost a job — scarcely an uncommon occurrence. Bukowski’s character goes through dozens in the book, losing them primarily by drinking too much. I was able to compare myself favorably to this guy — which didn’t help a lot.
No Longer at Ease, the third in Chinua Achebe’s “African trilogy”, is set mostly in mid-60s Lagos, the protagonist this time being a young British-educated man, the grandson of the main character of the first novel. You find out right away things are not going to go well for him — although to his mind, the course is clear and he’s the man for the job. As a modern man, he’s the character for which I felt the most direct sympathy — but again, the story is a study in how things go wrong for a person who surely means well. And his denial that he has one foot in old tradition does not help.
Arrow of God, the second in Chinua Achebe’s “African trilogy”, is again set in a West African village, around the beginning of the 20th century. The primary character is the high priest of the local god, a man of highest character. His involvement in the daily, religious, and personal life forms most of the stories in the book. The sweep of the book is broader than the single character, and again takes the reader into the social dynamic of the people.
As with the preceding novel, you know not all is going to go well.
This novel is self-contained, but I think you’ll need the first part for background to appreciate why the characters do some of the things they do. (Also the first book has an Ibo glossary…)
I got hooked on Amy Shira Titel’s YouTube vlog Vintage Space on one of my favorite topics — space exploration, and rockets generally. And she’s so perky and excited about the whole thing, and terribly knowledgeable. (The woman has a master’s degree in history of space flight. Who knew?) So she wrote this book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity, and I had to read it.
It follows the story of rocketry primarily from the early European rocketeers, to the early 60s, just up to the first manned launches. The story is dominated of course by von Braun. I didn’t know half of the details…it went a long way toward enlightening me as to the difficulties, technical, social, and political, that the early efforts had to overcome. (Of course, having often been part of smaller efforts myself, I know how things go.)
She is especially interested in some early concepts that never got off the ground, particularly, one that was briefly popularized under the name “Dyna Soar”, a space-plane meant to orbit, re-enter, and glide to its destination. The concept was pushed by von Braun’s former superior, Dornberger, and can be viewed as a precursor to the space shuttle.
The book isn’t for general consumption, and I have to say, Titel’s enthusiasm does not come through in her prose. I don’t know what I was expecting… I came away with a lot more sympathy for guys like von Braun and Dornburger, at least.
Barack Obama published a reading list that included some modern African authors; from it I picked Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Now you have two recommendations for the little book, the first of a trilogy.
Although there is a main character, the book is really a collection of stories about a village, and for me, a new way to tell a story — sort of a mix of realism and fable — or maybe realistic tales told in the story-telling voice of an African people. While the perspective is that of the people of the village, the cultural logic is carefully explained for an outsider reader, so that I could both respect the characters’ strange feelings about things, and maintain my impression of the other-ness of the situation.
Many of the characters you can feel for, even while they behave in very surprising and horrifying ways. The main character is a special mix — somebody you kind of get — a strong brave man whose weakness is a fear of failing to be brave. He does very bad things, that, within his culture, are the right thing to do. I was expecting a moral set-up, but the morals of this tale are those of the village, not of my culture.
On the insistence of my Kollegin, Ana Kall, I finally got around to one of those books everybody tells you that you have to read, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It doesn’t disappoint — it’s brilliant from the start, vivid and whirling and vivacious, and there is more than one place where a knock-out line appears on one page, and another one on the facing page. If you wonder what the hell is going on, I’m afraid you’re left behind — He guns it and it’s gone.
I don’t want to give too much away here… I’ll just affirm that it is classic Americana, that it portrays aspects of humanity with a fast-moving brush, and that its title is apt. I guess it was a cultural springboard — I can’t say… so I’ve heard, but it’s plenty powerful enough to have moved a generation.
On the recommendation of a stranger, I read Shibumi by Trevanian. I suppose it had its moments, but it was mostly so awful, I nearly threw it out.
Good bits: he does have a way with words, but very little discipline in using them — thus much of the book consists of smarty-pants tirades about whatever was annoying the author at the time. Also, he presents the events of WW II from the Japanese side, and it occurred to me I know nothing about that. I don’t even know where to find a story of the Japanese experience in that war. A couple of characters are filled out amusingly, and find voices. Most of the characters are cartoonish stereotypes — especially the protagonist.
Beyond that, I just struggled to get through it. First, the characters indulge in racial slurs that are echoed by the narrator — I have a problem with that. The women in the book serve primarily as sex objects — about 90% of the text concerning women has to do with this role. Well, it was the 70s. And then the tired old evil world mega-corporation that runs everything… I guess it’s easier than spending the time to research and portray something like the real world — we aren’t reading the book for realism, after all. Oh and the protagonist who is some kind of übermensch, replete with a couple of comic-book hero super-abilities — why did I keep reading this??? I told the lady I would. Oh well.
The author’s most dreary, annoying habit is that of putting a tweed jacket on his character, sticking a pipe in their mouth, and having them expound on the author’s hobbyhorse, often for pages at a time… is simply bad writing, but it is a big fraction of the whole book. What a drag. It will take a while to get the nasty taste out of my mouth.
Meanwhile, I tossed the book in the paper recycling. The content is for composting.
A few years ago, Miranda July was being talked about a lot, and I guess I saw a review, and got her ravely-reviewed No one belongs here more than you. I know I read the first couple of stories, and thought they were hard and awfully feminine in perspective, but I put it aside until last week.
These stories cut close to the bone, portraying relationships that consist of mutual miscomprehension, and inner expectations that mutely stand by as cruel reality motors past. They’re harsh, and overtly vaginal, and beautiful. Sometimes, the shock is breathtakingly beautiful. This is art, this is the surprise insight.
Timbuktu by Paul Auster. Can’t remember where I saw a blurb for this book, but I remember there was a positive blurb, and maybe I was feeling a bit down, and Amazon was there.
So it’s a dog story, from the point of view of the dog, a dog who can understand human speech. I think it’s an attempt to capture canine enthusiasm. In this, I think Auster succeeded. If you like dog stories, it may be for you.
In an interview video of Freeman Dyson, he mentioned with pleasure reading Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell (1937), and said it had influenced him. So I scurried over to my local on-line bookseller, and got me a copy. This is a fun read, kids. He writes beautifully and floridly. Flawed, but fun — like many of the lives it describes.
Let me get through some of the egregious flaws. There are several.
First, the math: mathematicians will be very perplexed — how can so many of the diagrams be so incorrect, how is it that his description of the mathematical concepts are so unenlightening, so confused as to their audience, and so often just plain wrong? I can’t explain or excuse this. Bell was a mathematician of no mean talents. Maybe his expository skills lacked something, I don’t know. Maybe he was having a sloppy year. But this isn’t essentially a story about math.
Second, those who know something of the history of math will be disappointed that no Arab mathematician is mentioned. He goes on about algorithms and algebra without mention of al-Khwarizmi! Was Arabic math unknown in the West in 1930? And he jumps from the ancient Greeks to Descartes, and spends lots of time on the problems of solution of polynomials, without mention of Cardano! What happened to Grassmann? Was he still too controversial? Well, it’s already a big fat book, and you can’t include everybody. Still. These are not the people I would have left out.
He has also been accused of being gossipy, and promoting incorrect historical events. I don’t know. I decided to kick back and take it with a grain of salt.
Guys, this is where all the juicy tidbits about the mathematicians you heard all through school came from, the salacious fact a professor would let drop here or there. For me, what was most important, the fleshing out of so many names I knew only as a fancy handle to some mathematical doo-dad. (I have an old grouch about the practice of mindlessly attaching some researcher’s name, rather than a descriptive term, to a mathematical idea.)
He speculates about the origins of genius — but in the end it’s unresolved. These guys came from all over. They were middle-class and poor, some showed strange abilities as little children, some were introduced to math only in middle age, and several showed no special abilities until their teens, and then skyrocketed. A few had relatives who had special mathematical skills, most had none.
One thing very clear is that each of them had something other people don’t have at all — evidently, not always quite the same thing. Some kind of clarity came upon each of them. A huge amount of work was involved for sure, and for some of them, that work was obsessive. (It killed a few of them.) But some of them wrote groundbreaking mathematics as easily as other people walk. Many found relatively comfortable lives, but some of them worked like this under very strained circumstances — poverty or the presumption of imminent death.
I feel that something different was going on back then. It’s very plain that the mathematicians of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries had pretty direct access to the seminal works of their predecessors — all of them learned directly from the masters.
Should you read it? I think it’s a pretty good read for any interested person. A mathematician will have some issues to overcome.
Plato’s Republic, because I had always heard it was the basis for modern politics and a brilliant display of reasoning. The book is supposedly a record of discourses by Plato’s mentor, Socrates.
In both those respects, it was a big disappointment. It contains passages that treat Greek politics, and even a few pages of interesting ideas, but much of it strikes me as — maybe intentionally laughable at best, and tiresome muddling philosophizing mostly. There is nothing remotely like a blueprint for society here.
His big political idea is a class of caretakers who are carefully brought up with the right mix of the right kind of poetry, literature, music, and physical exercise, to prepare them for keeping the society in order. He spends a terrible amount of time deciding just what was fit to teach these people — for example, he doesn’t like astronomy, so that is not something the caretakers should learn. (He discerningly qualifies the proscription as being due to the poor state of scientific knowledge of the cosmos in his time.) He then spends his efforts arguing that the best people to put into power are philosophers. (He, as it happened, being quite the philosopher.) It’s silly.
The one interesting discourse is a comparison between five kinds of government (ones he is familiar with in Greece — he admits that foreigners have all sorts of strange governments). These are aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny, the first three of which he defines as government by “the best”, “honor”, and “the rich”. He ranks these in order best to worst, and he thinks one follows naturally from the last. (It should be remembered that Socrates was condemned to death by the Athenian democracy.) An example of timocracy is the government of Sparta. The list is at least something to consider. And it’s a worry that he claims that the public of a democracy will always elect a tyrant in the end.
The whole argument is spoiled by his insistence on drawing parallels between forms of government and individual personalities. Not that it’s a bad idea, but he takes it as his first principle, and uses it to draw all his conclusions. Unfortunately, again, it’s silly.
Within all the nonsense about putting philosophers in power appears the book’s other famous discourse: the one about the shadow-show in the cave. This is a fun setting for questioning the notions of perception and reality — but it’s spoiled by his conclusion that some people really see the real reality (and he’s one of those, you see.)
I wonder why one hears so much applause of this thing. Maybe the ancient Greek of the original is wonderful — I don’t know. There are a couple of interesting stylistic devices. It’s a mish-mash of discourses on different topics, some of which are terrible drags (to each their own!) The political thread is carried only partway through the book, and never developed. And the purported reasoning is a model for bad thinking — it occurred to me that it could be a catalog of fallacies.
The reasoning is so pitifully awful, I have to wonder if he’s even serious, or whether the whole thing is an exercise in sophism, and meant as a joke. There are a few interlocutions in the book that point in that direction — where someone even objects to some assumption Socrates makes. He just rolls over the objection, even though it is quite reasonable, and maybe half of the assumptions made in the book are likewise dubious. Mostly the chorus just echos “That is surely the case.”
They say Socrates was a crafty old coot, who was good at turning an argument around to illustrate that the assumptions weren’t clear, and that he claimed that a wise man knew that he knew nothing. That kind of thing does not appear in this book. But maybe I don’t know enough to judge it fairly.
A kids’ book: My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. It’s a really fun fantasy of a kid who runs away from home and makes a great life in the Catskill mountains.
My story is, in 5th grade, a teacher was reading this book for us. I put up my hand to ask a question (don’t remember what), and the teacher said, “That’s it, move to the other reading group”. That was the group for kids with poor reading skills, and it was really boring. But worse, I was really enjoying the story, and I always remembered several great scenes from it. I guess I had been disruptive — but the injustice still smarts. I didn’t say anything, and I had my hand up.
Last year the incident came back to me, and I thought, why not? Pull up Amazon, get a used copy for like 2.50.
And you know, it’s still a good read, still very vivid. I’m glad I got to finish it!
Rasselas by Samuel Johnson. The language of this book hooked me—that alone is worth reading the book for.
I don’t know if this is a great book of philosophy. He’s making a point, something like Voltaire makes in Candide. So far, what I like most is his view of the world—the relations of the sexes, and of nations. But this story was a quick potboiler for Johnson — the characters are all cardboard. Don’t approach it with high literary hopes.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Pepys was a British official in the mid-1600s. He was in the habit of writing entries in his diary every night before bed. This one book is the most personal, first-hand account we have of those times. He witnessed the plague coming to London, the Second Dutch War (which was unfamiliar to me), and the Fire of London. He actually met with the king, and made many notes on the king’s habits—not all flattering.
I’m very pleased that the English of a common educated man of the time is mostly easily read.
The politics of his time seems very strange to me. Basically, lords are given various responsibilities, with huge sums of money to carry them out, and only afterward, only when things go very wrong, does anybody consider how well the job is done. Most of these guys just pocket the money. Sailors go to war and are maimed or die, and find they can’t be paid when the come home—Pepys is constantly horrified by this, but the people who could do something about it just don’t care, basically. They don’t care until they’re being attacked by a foreign navy, and the sailors aren’t interested in getting killed—and some even defect. And since the money hasn’t been properly allocated, they haven’t a fleet to defend themselves with anyway. To me, it’s all very sloppy, all this reliance on the honor of the gentry. To Pepys, it’s horrifying, but he never questions the system—he knows nothing else. He questions the individuals.
The diary ends with Pepys’ statement that he’s unable to continue due to failing eyesight. His own story went on for several decades, where he served in high offices diligently, despite health problems besides being nearly blind.
(This all sparked my interest in those times, just after the English Civil War, of which I had known very little. They were messy times, nothing like story-books of royal bliss. I was surprised to find out that Britain was invaded twice by the Dutch. The first time they were paid off, and the second time their own man William of Orange was installed as king — an event nationalistically re-branded as the “Glorious Revolution”. It all happened in Pepys’ life.)
Isaac Newton’s Opticks. This is a beautiful book. If you’re a science-minded person and you haven’t read it, you are missing out. This was the single most important book on the light and optics of that century, and in it are gathered dozens of very incisive experiments about the nature of color, reflection and refraction, as well as musings about their relation to chemistry and human perception.
Alone, Newton’s observation that the image of a circular beam of light made by a prism is elongated, and his deduction about what that meant about refraction of light, completely changed the concepts of the time. He deduces that the different colors of light are being refracted by different angles by the prism—the simplest explanation for that being that color is an intrinsic property of light. And he concludes that white light is a mixture of the rainbow of colors of light.
Among his many lovely experiments, I think my favorite is the one where he looks at paper painted with stripes of various primary colors with a prism—and sees the strips offset from one another by the refraction.
The English is very easy to read. Sure he uses thee and thou, but it’s not a book where people are often addressed so they don’t come up much. There are some funny words for various materials, but these can be looked up. He is speaking in the plain language of his time, and that language is our language.
[in progress] Ulysses by James Joyce
This book isn’t for everyone—I have my doubt that it’s for me. It has its moments. I love the voices and some of the wordplay.
But much of the book is obfuscation for its own sake. Joyce made no bones about this—he was leaving all sorts of obscure references specifically to challenge academics. Well for them it’s a game, but for most readers, it isn’t entertaining.
Machiavelli’s The Prince, that old lesson in Realpolitik that I always meant to read. This is the first English edition, in Elizabethan English — I’m going to offer as an excuse “for a taste of the times, without bothering to learn Italian”.
The usual wrong conclusion is that Machiavelli is bloody immoral, or even evil. A better question might be, what sort of morality is he talking about? He does discuss it, and regards some actions as immoral — just maybe not the same ones modern readers would. He lived in very violent times — he makes it clear that the worst thing is chaos, and to avoid that a stable state is necessary.
Another good question is, how right is he, as to what makes a successful or failed leader? He does provide rationales for most of his conclusions, and many strike me well. I would like to see a modern study, with some hard data.
Aside from the particular advice he offers, maybe the most important lesson of the book is this: to analyze the motivations of everybody that one depends upon for holding power, and to make advantage of those motivations. He runs through the assets that a ruler might have and actions they may take, and systematically points out various ways of looking at it, and guarantees nothing (except failure if you screw up too badly). So what remains is — to keep thinking, and to think from other people’s points of view.
He probably did read all the histories he could get hold of, and he really was in positions where he could observe the workings of state closely. (In fact, he was imprisoned and also tortured. Not unusual in those times.) This really should be required reading for anybody interested in politics or world history. I would be disappointed to know that many dictators have never read it.
After a long struggle, Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung succumbed. A lot of words that weren’t in my handy dictionary got past me, but I took notes, and mean to do them in the Duden.
This is a funny horrid story, that evidently is meant convey some moral message — I think. I have yet to formulate that meaning for myself, and I’m not sure I ought to. He portrays realistic people dealing with a situation they are completely inadequate for. The crazy story is bigger than any message.
The language seems strange to me, surely in part because it’s a century old, with vocabulary influenced by Kafka’s Czech-German upbringing. But it’s often clear that he plays with the language for effect. I often felt like I ought to be laughing, but didn’t know why.
Susan Callahan’s Brain on Fire — My month of Madness was waiting for me on an airport magazine stand shelf. It’s no work of art, maybe could have used some more editing here and there, but—call it a matter of taste or interest—I wasn’t going to put it down.
This is an insider’s view on brain dysfunction, and a medical detective story, and a story about healing and acceptance. It made me re-think the lives of the so many friends, acquaintances and family who’ve taken that plunge. And you can’t dislike the spunky young journalist-author.
The very strange Death in Spring, by Mercé Rodoreda. Why, I can’t say. (I seem to remember reading a review last year or the year before.)
It’s a different way to tell a story allright, and a different story to tell. The story is about death much more than about Spring. And it’s about life in a remote village with odd ideas about death and love, but maybe the point is, everybody’s ideas are odd... But I can’t say. It is kind of poetic, but really I can’t make heads or tails of it.
One of the “great Victorian novels”, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, was my companion for most of last fall and early this year. The language might be a shock at first, and the setting is pretty exotic for us middle-class 21st century folks, and the book is dauntingly huge…I don’t think I’d have got through it in my 20s, and I wonder how much would have sunk in. But it’s very well worth the effort.
Like her contemporary Tolstoy, Eliot shows genuine fondness for her characters, even the less commendable ones. We’re led to understand each point of view in detail, even to the instantaneous changes of aspect during a conversation, as well as the workings of the social web of a small town of that era. It’s a play of moral values, with a psychological chorus.
Her amazing, masterful turns of phrase were what grabbed me first. These had to have been painstakingly constructed, yet scarcely one of the 86 chapters passes without a prosaic surprise.
The characters speak in distinctive modes, including dialect, speech peculiarities, affectations, mincing of words, prudish aloofness, stuffy academic-ese, airheadedness and plain-spoken but proper salt-of-the earth. It’s a play of voices. You hear the characters as they are heard by one another.
Here and there, Eliot lets insights drop — some deep, some very deep — into general human nature, things I’ve never heard said her way, and sometimes, things I never heard elsewhere. This novel is more than entertainment.
The best travel story I ever saw: Henry Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone. The deal is, Stanley was a journalist, a seasoned war correspondent, commissioned by a newspaperman to find the lost missionary/explorer David Livingstone. He could write salable copy, and he was tough in the field.
It was rough going. At the time, the only means of communication or transport in Central Africa was by armed caravan. A single individual would be robbed and probably be killed, or otherwise die. Several members of Stanley’s troupe snuff it (including both of the other Europeans.) I don’t think I’d have made it, to tell the truth.
I was also impressed by the communications: mostly, people are speaking Swahili, the main trade language of the region (to this day). Stanley understands some Swahili and speaks Arabic.
Besides being a great page-turner, the book is a snapshot of another time. Ethnologically, you have an American, replete with the best prejudices of his time, and a cross-section of peoples in central Africa, who have their own interactions and idiosyncrasies. He makes little mention of the fact, but by the end, pretty clearly, he respects the Africans as people, although he still maintains his prejudices, as was just proper. Stanley’s descriptions of unspoiled jungle, savanna, rivers, mountains, of the flora and fauna, show a man whose appreciation of his surroundings survived hardship that would crush most people.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (transl. Constance Garnett). Started reading this last year, a chapter or two most nights. He wasn’t shooting for brevity.
Besides being a great long lounge in the previous century, among a social class and in a country I know only by books, besides being somehow a great novel, what impressed me was that Tostoy likes his little characters, even the less sympathetic ones. He wants the reader to understand their motives, to see they aren’t who they appear to be to the other characters. The reader gets into the head of even a minor character, even the dog.
The breadth of the story is no disappointment. There are a half dozen main characters and another dozen minor ones; you see a bit of the world through each of them. For me, the lush country scenes stand out, mowing hay with the peasants and hunting. You can almost smell it, the fresh air and wide open nature. But the city scenes are great too. Conversations in restaurants and political meetings, balls and the paying of visits, although clearly not what Tolstoy enjoyed most, he portrays energetically.
A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity (from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century ) by E. T. Whittaker (pub. 1910). [in progress]
A remark in R. Sexl’s Relativity, Groups and Particles put me on this trail. I’ve worked with Whittaker’s big physics treatise, and knew him to be a good, thorough writer.
The way the story starts: in the late 1600s, the philosophers had very little more than the ancient Greeks, regarding electromagnetism. They had magnetic stones, and amber, which (as we now say) could be given and electrostatic charge. They were a little novelty; a trick. But at the same time they were unlike anything else: both could move objects at a distance, with no palpable substance intervening. It was corner of the physical world that had defied explanation in terms of other familiar phenomena, that was scarcely distinguished from alchemy and magic. And the ancients had wondered about light, and sight, and warmth. And they had very advanced glass making.
Yet, in a span of 250 years, they took these stones, and bits of glass, and miserable state of cluelessness, to what’s now known as the theory of electromagnetism, which is among the most splendidly accurate and practical sciences.
This is a very complicated story. (For beginners, the modern theory is difficult in itself—that’s easy to forget.) Each of its scientists made one or two observations, or proposed an explanation or two. Sometimes it was brilliant (Newton’s observation about the prism’s spectrum; Fresnel’s insight into of the double refraction of Iceland Spar), sometimes a total surprise (Galvani and the frog’s legs), but usually terrible hard work, that was often unrecognized in its time.
I’m also impressed, how you can get the “right” idea, then lose it. For example, in the 1700s, it was a common contention that objects were made of particles, that heat consisted of motion of particles, and that light might be an undulatory motion, which transmits heat to an object by causing its particles to undulate. This idea was lost for a hundred years, because of the observation that glass, which allowed light to pass, would block its ability to heat an object. Of course to us the answer is painfully clear: the glass is opaque to infrared light. But to them, the idea of invisible light would have been an oxymoron: light was that which could be seen, by definition. They were forced to consider other ways of talking about heat and light, that now seem very contorted.
For we who studied physics, it’s a parade of famous names. But it’s a whole different experience, to see how those names relate to one another and form a (halting) progression of ideas.
How did that happen? What did they have the Greeks didn’t? For sure they were no smarter. Well, they had the idea of experiment. Why, I don’t know, but the Greeks really didn’t have it, expecting instead to deduce the world from first principles. For whatever reason, these guys experimented like crazy. And the telescope was invented in these times. (Why on earth did the Romans not have it?) Moreover, they had the printing press, and that was surely no less important
Sexl marveled that Whittaker mentioned Einstein, but assigned to his theory a minor role, that of a re-phrasing of known science. But, come on—relativity was very new, and Whittaker was old. This was the best way a person in his position could have seen it. He couldn’t have imagined that this newfangled formulation would displace the main term in his book’s title.
I’ve forgotten why I have a copy of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World; that, I think, would have fit into its plot perfectly well. It’s a little introduction to the history of Western philosophy for young adults, mixed with a peculiar mystery story. The philosophy is distilled to be pretty accessible—but I can’t judge whether his summaries of the various schools of thought are fair. As my western phil. was never strong, I was going to learn something anyway. The approach is novel at least, but the story gets really silly as it progresses—the girl’s dialog with her teacher stands out as contrived. I was entertained nonetheless both by the story and the lessons.
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is yet another of those great books I picked up as a kid and never finished. I should have, and then I should have read it again now—but one out of two ain’t bad. An adult can appreciate the richness of this story, the people and places, along with the several carefully-recorded dialects that constitute some kind of historical record. The obvious social and moral point is arrived at by humanizing the main characters. One surprise observation is that hell-on-earth to one person is just life to another. While many of the adults are mean morons, Huck (unsurprisingly, I suppose) and Jim both reason their way through the world, and are considerate of others. It’s a big thumbs up from me.
The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells, I’d begun a couple of times, but never finished. And sure I’d seen a couple of its cinematic redactions. The vision is very impressive, coming from a time when the best guess at a means for space travel was by cannon projectile, and for which flight was still a “secret”. The Martian machines are plenty scary as he describes them. The rest is a war documentary, it occurs to me he mixed a that very popular literary medium with the (I suppose) relatively less well received science-fiction-fantasy to very good effect.
P. G. Wodehouse’s My Man Jeeves, upon which Julian had gushed decades ago. Oh he was so right to gush. I’ve found a new role model, and it isn’t Jeeves (although he’s part of the picture).
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, on Lydia’s advice. A story in the vein of mystical journeys, full of amusing twists, and a plain central message, that I found personally encouraging. A particularly nice line:
Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.
— Arab proverb
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, because it was sitting there for free, I up and read it. The vernacular can be a little thick at times, and the expressions colorful, like a 4th of July firework display: of which, according to Wilson,
Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.
(Twain’s aphorisms alone would make it worth the read.)
I was impressed at what a construction this is, on Twain’s part. He’s making an important social point, and has to balance it very carefully on the edge of his readers’ prejudices. So he just makes a travesty of everything: race, sex, honor, and politics, it’s all so confused and juxtaposed, it’s hard to identify a particular place at which to take offense—it’s all offensive. Except: he has a weakness for the smart guy, with the fancy new forensic technology.
Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope (thoughts on reclaiming the American dream), written during his term as U.S. senator from Illinois.
Couldn’t really stop myself, after the shock of reading his first book.
This, as the subtitle suggests, is more of a collection of theses than the coherent work that his first book was. Although it still contains some autobiographical information, its subject matter is mostly political, and so it wouldn’t be of as universal interest. The style still varies a lot from one chapter to the next: some like speeches, some academic papers, others like political memoirs, and a few in the very personal style typical of his first book. His surprising insight is again apparent throughout.
Dava Sobel’s first book, Longitude (The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time), the problem being that of of determining one’s longitude at sea (to avoid crashing into a known island, or missing the destination and starving to death); the solver being one John Harrison. Her clear writing, thorough research, and eye for a great story line are evident here as in her other works.
It’s a great story about seafaring and politics as well as about science. The scientists play the bad guys this time, supporting a sciency method against practical engineering, while people were in fact dying from the lack of a solution. Persistence pays off finally, against all odds, but only barely, and after years of humiliation.
Barack Obama’s first book Dreams from my Father (originally published 1995).
I knew he’s smart and introspective and well-spoken, but I didn’t expect him to be this smart, this introspective, and… to be a splendid writer.
The style is maybe rough here or there, but (without exaggeration) it holds up to literature of professional writers. The story has an amazingly broad arc, from Hawaii to Jakarta to Chicago to Nairobi, with the whole scope of human relationships, yet maintains a simple thread.
I strongly recommend this to anyone. The topics are of general human interest, and I may have learned a thing or two about people from it.
Freedom, by Johathan Franzen, a book surprisingly laid on me by my colleague Jaime.
Franzen is a real one, a novelist who is writes the novel. It’s a whopper too. I have my complaints: some editing would have been useful, and his novelistic inventiveness leaks badly into the voices of his characters. Well, voice is a literary trick seldom mastered.
I guess what impressed me most is the hugeness of the little lives of his little characters. They lead their petty lives epically, as I suppose we all do. The detail of his analysis of their internal struggles is bit of a wonder to me.
There’s pathos to spare, but also, every hundred pages or so, he drops a little comedic cherry-bomb. It’s an interesting way to mix a novel.
One, None and a Hundred Thousand, by Luigi Pirandello, on the recommendation of my colleague Todor.
This one is a hoot, folks. The narrator has a problem that perhaps we all share, but as his uncomfortable fascination with it grows, and he proceeds to deal with it in unrecommendable ways. He shares with us every minute crevice of his excess and torment.
The language (in the translation of Samuel Putnam) is simply beautiful, a kind of turn-of-the-century English with a literary Italian flavor.
In my visit to Dublin last year, I saw the “spire” and wondered what it was, and heard something about a “Rising”. So I picked up Clair Wills’ Dublin 1916, The Siege of the GPO. I would say, I learned something about Ireland and about political uprisings in general. But I do not come away understanding much of the history of Ireland or quite why people were shooting one another for such a long time.
One point of the book is that little is clear about the event, including what really happened but especially what it all meant. My favorite line is: “Celebrations of revolution by established governments carry their own ironies”. It brought to mind recent uprisings, and for me, the much sillier story of the Boston Tea Party, which somehow still carries political weight in my country.
For a foreigner at least, this is a very academic text, full of unfamiliar references; as for action, the Rising itself takes only a fraction of the beginning of the book; the rest is concerned with the effect and interpretation and ownership of the event since then.
The Buccaneers of America by Alexander O. Exquemelin (trans. Alexis Brown). This is thought to be a reasonably accurate (mostly) first-hand, inside account of Caribbean piracy in the 1600s. As such, stands as the only example, and the best source from which all modern pirate portrayals draw.
The author was a very good observer and reporter, of people and their motives, of politics generally, as well as of nature. He paints rich glimpses of the place and time.
He gives a name, but appears in places to have deliberately (but imperfectly) distanced himself from the worst of the atrocities he describes. And for good reason: oh man, these guys were very very bad. He says “the worst imaginable”, and they had lively imaginations. Mercifully for us, after describing a few atrocities as examples, the author abbreviates accounts with “tortured as usual”.
As I read, I realized this was a specific case of more general phenomena of marauding, a mode of behavior that young men can fall into. The author details how, when by chance a group managed to steal a fortune, they would spend everything within two weeks of returning to home port, and be forced to set out again, just to feed themselves. He identifies the behavior as a kind of addiction; the rationale for any action, however sadistic or suicidal, was material gain.
It reminded me, for example, of the armies that were crisscrossing Europe at about the same time, and of the Vikings who were busy just a few centuries earlier. And also, to a lesser degree, but more familiarly, certain acts in modern warfare. On the other hand, it’s rather different from the very systematic Roman style of plundering and decimation, and from the sanitized and impersonal modern carpet-bombing. This was in a sense very personal.
Some myths: there weren’t any old pirates. A man in his 30s would have been old to them—job safety was not of high urgency. There weren’t any lady starlet pirates—this was a very extreme masculine environment: any women were slaves or prisoners.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, might present some difficulties with regard to the language, but I got used to the spelling and a couple of peculiar usages pretty quickly. His writing is quite direct and plain, for its time. It’s rich, and I highly recommend it.
Having been compiled at different points of life, its style is a little rough, and it’s incomplete (nothing about the revolution, only a bit about science), and unfinished as well. (One chapter consists of entreaties of friends for him to finish the autobiography—I skipped most of it.) It presents a wonderful picture of 18th century life generally, full of detailed personal accounts and intrigues, and very impressive general observations about people. Overall his writing is superb: his voice and humor shine through, although it goes into some details I didn’t care for. Well, it is his autobiography, I suppose.
Man was that guy ever busy, even with the stuff left out! I hadn’t known he was ever directly involved with the military. He was, on the British side in the French-Indian war.
Several wonderful quotes—I pick
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”
Pippi Langstrumpf by Astrid Lindgren, auf Deutsch. My inner child, an underdeveloped 22-year-old, would be horrified. But when I picked this up at a friend’s place, my first impression was: “this is a kid’s book?”. It’s rough in places. Death is present from the beginning. And Pippi is really absurd and charming. The inner child liked it too, even though he skulked off to his room after.
The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, supposed to be in fact the letter of the friar to the King of France, reporting of his mission to visit the Mongol king.
I don’t know why on earth it caught my eye or where I saw it, but it was very entertaining.
The friar is well educated, but starts out being awfully ignorant of the geography and cultures he travels through. The translators struggle to identify some of the place names, and to reconcile his story with present geography. To the end he refers to Buddhists as “idolaters”, but he does come away with some new views.
He is there explicitly to spread his Gospel, but also very much as both spy and ambassador. His analysis of the political situations shows him to be very much a man of the world. And the trouble he gets into, often because of ineffective translators and poorly chosen travel companions, is just precious.
At the same time, a person could very easily get killed in these situations. More than once he had to talk his way out of potentially lethal encounters — these were rough times. And one has to be impressed at the sheer physical difficulty of such travel. As monks, they traveled poorly, with few belongings, which were meant to serve as gifts (call them bribes), the conservation of which was at times difficult.
I visited Stockholm, and met there a sometime colleague Hans, who for lack of any other pressing topic, told me about recent developments in algebraic topology — primarily the solution of the Poincaré conjecture by Grigory Perelman. Somehow this had escaped me, although I remember being very intrigued by mention of it in an otherwise miserably mismanaged topology course. (I have for some years been hanging around mostly with physicists, who as a group show no more interest in mathematical topics than do plumbers, but distinguish themselves from plumbers by ritualistic expressions of disdain for it.)
I knew I didn’t have much of a chance of reading any of the original work. Judging from Hans’ description, it would have been unapproachably technical. So hoping just to get a further taste, picked up two popular books: Poincaré’s Prize by George G. Szpiro, and The Poincaré Conjecture (In Search of the Shape of the Universe) by Donal O’Shea.
Overall both books are entertaining and enlightening enough to deserve qualified recommendations. But neither is going to help you much with the math at all. Both try, and largely fail, to provide any useful picture, lay or otherwise. Both authors indulge in facile hyperbole concerning genius. Szpiro collapses into onomatopoeic blithering in his struggle to describe some of the geometrical techniques (where probably a few good drawings would have helped a lot). O’Shea’s subtitular topic was perhaps intended as a hook, or a handle for the lay reader to latch on to. But its connection to the primary subject is never well explained, and it is stretched beyond the point where it might be helpful or interesting.
They both succeed for me as histories filling out the lives of the primary players, especially Poincaré himself, and finally our stellarly defiant contemporary Perelman, the one who finally brought the monster down. Sure there are aspects of the stereotypical autistic idiot-savant mathematician in several of these people. On the other hand, several of them were in notorious possession of political savvy, which they used to advance both mathematical and professional aims. Especially Poincaré is rounded out as a real mensch and engineer par excellence who would risk his life to do his job to improve the safety of miners, as well as a genuine genius who almost alone pushed whole areas of mathematics to the point where today they are mainstream tools, and used (without gratitude) even by physicists.
It seems that many astrophysicists harbor secret interests in space flight. After several interesting discussions of it, my Kolleg Alexander lent me Digital Apollo, Human and Machine in Spaceflight, by David A. Mindell. This explores the development of the idea of automated flight, and the respective roles of the players, both technically and politically, focusing on the first primarily-automated flying machine, the Apollo spacecraft. It relates the Apollo story from a different view than presented by the astronauts, Besides the history, he goes into the stability of electronics guidance with a human “in the loop”, the development of “systems engineering”, and the purpose of humans in space flight. It’s a pretty amazing story—for those interested in space flight, an important read.
Long ago my friend Hilary recommended that I read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Now again I have been pressured in this Discworld direction, this time by Anne, to read his Mort.
Death gets himself an apprentice, and takes a vacation, leaving the poor guy in charge. I have to confess, it was a fun read. I even loosed a couple of guffaws.
The style is very reminiscent of (more than anybody) Douglas Adams (but less heady) and also of Tom Robbins (without the tweed).
My Kolleg Iliya handed me a copy of Dragon’s Egg, a bona-fide sci-fi novel by Robert Forward. It’s about little critters that live and evolve on a neutron star. The part about the critters is genuine sci-fi of high caliber, imaginings of a whole different physical world and how life might be like in it.
Everything involving humans is, however, dreary, dated and very skippable.
[In Progress] Isabelle cited Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as her favorite book, and I couldn’t remember having read it. I know I owned a copy, but no. Somehow familiar though.
At the insistence of my colleague Hakan, I read I,Q by John de Lancie (who played the “Q” character in several Star Trek series), co-written by Peter David. OK it’s got plenty of “Q” sounding lines, it has the character down pat. And the plot is all twisty, with just the right amount of emotiony stuff.
Leonie Swann’s Glennkill, subtitled ein Schafskrimi, auf Deutsch. The plan was to get through it quickly, without a dictionary, took me over a year, but I very rarely resorted to a dictionary. I still don’t know who done it, and I’m not sure one is supposed to. As to the book itself, the initial idea is extremely charming, and that’s what hooked me. But I think Swann could take the idea of talking sheep only so far, and began to explore other ideas, some more charming than others, so that at the end, at best, one feels that one has been several places (otherwise one would have been stuck on the meadow with the sheep). I can’t say I liked the tone turning from sheep contemplating death while grazing, to all mystical kung fu, to shadowy bad humans in the small town. I would have to read it again, with a dictionary, to say better.
Mikael Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Fun in convulsive fits! On the advice of my colleague Dasha. It’s a layered story, compounding a gentle parody of Soviet life with an alternative reading of the death of Jesus and a very peculiar view of the relation of good and evil.
Stanislaw Lem’s Tales of Pirx the Pilot. A nice collection of stories of the guy who isn’t sure if he should be surprised that he’s a space pilot. They are about life in space, and told with a human perspective and humor unusual for the genre.
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is going to run jumping into the leaves, then express in leaf-jumping horror the crawlies she finds there. This is a rush and jump and splash oh-no! Always panting, scanning for the next object to pounce on, and then to wonder at the impossibility of framing the pounce in a human perspective. Not for everybody, but I loved it.
A friend of a good friend has great taste in books, to have left this laying on the table for me to see.
Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom (subtitled The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947), because I’ve been living next to Park Sanssouci for over four years. Several of these Fredericks and Frederick Williams were very interesting characters, and are set off all the more by some of the rather duller princes that went between.
Clark tells the story in the large, in terms of trends and relationships, periods of migration and wars. He delivers a convincing and sympathetic story of how the so-called “Prussia” came to be, how it came to have some of the qualities that are associated with it, and its relationship with four centuries of political events.
Besides a clarification of the relationships between these kings and with the development of Germany, one shouldn’t be surprised to see similarities with current politics.
[In Progress] Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, this time auf Deutsch. I first read this when I was 19 or so, as part of a literature class, I suppose. I remember thinking at the time, this language is very pretty, I wonder how it would sound in the original? I didn’t really think then that I would ever go so far as to find out. Well, I saw a nice copy in a bookstore, and bit the bullet. And it is rather hard for me—the vocabulary is very special. But I can report that I’m not disappointed by the language. To my limited discernment, the original is warm and rich and transporting.
Reading Siddhartha as a rather more mature person, I’m struck by how much my perception of it has changed. For example, at the beginning is a struggle between father and son. When I was 18, I just saw it as a righteous son overcoming an obstinate, foolish father. Now I see how Hesse has choreographed his characters—the father’s sleeplessness, as the star slowly moves across the window, and how he sculpted as an ideal this familiar unpleasant interaction.
One of the advantages of working in an academic outfit is that you can ask around, “What is the best book in your subject?” and get very good answers. For cosmologists, I found, the present-day bible is Binney and Tremaine’s Galactic Dynamics, a book whose proportions are almost biblical, too. I got a recent copy, and am glad I did.
I learned a lot of new things about cosmology (that the modern view holds that galactic collision is one of the dominant processes in galactic formation rather than a rarity) and some new math as well (that an integral of motion of an orbit of a star in a mass distribution can be used to restrict geometrically the region of space through which the orbit passes.)
Another highly-recommended title in cosmology is Combes, Boissé, Mazure and Blanchard’s Galaxies and Cosmology. It’s not quite so imposing as Binney and Tremaine, but also very well written. They emphasize another odd new phenomenon: concentric shells about elliptical galaxies.
Following my old interest in typography, a respondent to a mailing list recommended Walter Tracy’s Letters of Credit. One might not expect to sit and read a book on type faces, but this guy writes with an easy elegance about his lifelong passion, and draws a reader in.
I tried to export Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Slapstick, and Breakfast of Champions to the German public. Reviews were mixed, but essentially negative. I think they get the pathos, but they don’t get the humor. Well, humor is very delicate and often doesn’t translate. I was disappointed nonetheless. So I read them all myself, and felt better. Then Mr. Vonnegut died. So it goes.
In preparation for a long plane flight, I picked up Tracy Chevalier’s The Girl with the Perl Earring. The blurbs will have you know that it is a masterwork. Were it not for those blurbs, I might be more forgiving.
I am unremarkable in that I’m transfixed, fascinated, transported by Vermeer’s little paintings. So I’m unremarkable in having bought this book, which features one of them on its cover, and which is meant to tell a story about its subject.
Ms. Chevalier deserves credit for an absolutely magnificent choice of topic. She also sat down, and bloody wrote herself a novel. But she holds a degree in creative writing, and she writes like someone with a degree in creative writing. What is worse, her 14 year-old maid protagonist narrates the story like someone with a degree in creative writing.
One lesson Ms. Chevalier missed in her courses was, not to irritate the reader with detail that adds nothing to the story. For example, the color of almost every eye mentioned in the book is dutifully reported.
Her style is so transparent that I could almost see her sitting at her desk, with art and history books of the times, thinking: “how will I get that bit into the story?”
Erwin Kreyszig’s 1959 text Differential Geometry. He has a beautiful writing style, which I fear has now died out. I couldn’t write like that.
The book covers the material using the simplest tools. There are no charts or atlases (by those names), no algebra of differential forms; topology is mentioned only lightly, tensors are objects that transform in a certain way.
This might be objectionable. Well, a lot has changed since 1959. A lot of the equipment and terminology one sees in modern literature post-dates this book. Also, I think the book is quite accessible to perhaps a third-year college student, who has just learned about partial derivatives, coordinate transformations, and multiple integrals, whereas all that modern machinery could amount to a barrier.
And he covers a great deal of geometry.
Now, I should have known all this material decades ago. But I’m hitting lots of beautiful little details that I never saw or don’t remember or never fully appreciated or saw but never connected with anything.
For example, the idea that the tangents to a curve (typically) generate a surface, and a family of involute and evolute curves. Somehow I found this a novel idea. Of course, it’s just a way of looking at developable surfaces.
I would love to understand the connection with geodesics with geometrical treatments of nonlinear P.D.E.’s.
Then there’s a formula for the torsion of a curve. How will I write it? The bars represent the determinant of a matrix whose columns are the three vectors written inside, the overdots are derivatives with respect to the parameter t of the curve x(t).
What the heck is that?! It’s gorgeous—such things don’t exist for nothing. Is there a corresponding formula in differential forms for this? I do not know. (I don’t remember any treatments of curves with differential forms—that material always rushes off to multi-dimensional surfaces.)
I paid too much in Seattle for a torn-up copy of a book that came highly recommended: Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter. It’s a history of Galileo, with the perspective of copious letters from his cloistered daughter, Suor Marie Celeste. I paid too much due to the condition of the book, I mean. The text itself is an excellent story.
This is naturally a very personal treatment. I find that it balances well his scientific endeavors with his political, religious, and personal life.
In contrast to the conventional story of a far-seeing scientist persecuted by a backward Church, Sobel explains that Galileo’s political connections with the Church were deep and complex. Even the Pope himself, who was an acquaintance, was such an admirer that he had once written a poem for Galileo. Also, Galileo had gone to great lengths to have his Dialogs checked and altered by the authorities (including the Inquisition) for anything that might offend. Yet, something went wrong. Sobel does not completely answer the question, but she does suggest a possible, probably unintentional, personal offense as the deciding mistake.
We also get a very rich picture of 17th century monastic life through Marie Celeste. It’s another surprise, both horrifying and touching. Through her, life at that time is roundly represented. I came away with a deep impressions of the society, the difficulties they faced, and their little joys.
Sobel knows how to string a story together. I had a problem keeping the book on my night-table, not to read one more chapter.
From the wonderful German children’s series “Was ist Was”, Band 16: Planeten und Raumfahrt. For my language studies, you see.
In the 1980s, I saw part of a single episode of the fascinating PBS series The Story of English. I didn’t have a TV at the time, and the people who owned the TV on which I saw the episode were disinterested to the point of turning it off. I always regretted this. So I finally ordered a copy of the book, and read it, with full enjoyment and without the disapproval of TV owners.
You could complain that the tone of the book is overly congratulatory to the language (which is certainly in no need of encouragement). But it is a great story, of people from several places risking everything to move, and other people being displaced and having their cultures crushed.
I was particularly impressed by how complex the mixing of languages was, which resulted in English. In most books, we have: Old English, then the Norse invaded, then the Normans invaded and it was Middle English, then there was Shakespeare. But most of these “invasions” happened over a span of centuries, and often didn’t involve conquest as such.
The authors plainly love the playfulness of the English language, and its surprises and pitfalls. Their own mastery of the language is apparent from the beginning. It’s beautifully written, and quite gripping.
The 1962 edition of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by Max Born. He does as much as one could hope without requiring knowledge of Calculus. It is also a sweeping history of the development of theories of electromagnetic phenomena in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This is a courageous attempt to bring the theory to the interested lay person, specifically those who don’t have the Calculus. I can’t say to what degree he succeeds. I’m sure all but the bravest high school students would be intimidated by the sheer amount of calculation he presents.
There is some point where it would be easier for everybody to just tell the reader to take a Calculus course. On the other hand, I wonder if his appeal to differential equations to distinguish action at a distance from contiguous action was really necessary. Also, I know of one or two places where he slips up, pulling a math formula out of a hat.
For me, I was in wonderment at his treatment of the history of the subject. He treats discredited theories with respect for their better features, and doesn’t shirk from pointing out inconsistencies in the reasoning of the greatest thinkers. And then, I was once again in wonderment that in the chapter on the concept of simultaneity he went on to make statements that are of the same nature as the ones he had earlier criticized.
For its flaws, this is the best book of its kind I have ever seen. I learned a lot about the development of science and relativity in particular, and he pointed out a number of subtle philosophic points I had never considered.
On the recommendations of both my Kolleginen Katarina and Diane, I read The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch. It’s certainly an entertaining read.
To be frank, I was left dissatisfied. But perhaps this was his intent, and perhaps this is the mark of true genius. I’m pretty sure that would be his explanation. (Oh. It was his explanation!)
It had to happen. On the advice of my Kolleg Thomas, I read the first two of JK Rowling’s series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. These are page turners; the lady knows how to work a hook. For me, it was a challenge to put myself in a pre-teen frame of mind, but once that was accomplished, the books were a simple thrill. And now I can’t get back to my adult frame of mind.
P. G. Drazin and R. S. Johnson’s text Solitons: an introduction. I only got through the first two chapters, and skimmed the rest, just because I got distracted.
The book is quite accessible to those with a general mathematics background, and the material is very engaging.
Solitons are an under-appreciated phenomenon of nonlinear waves. (That tsunami in Indonesia killed 100000, and it was a soliton!) Maybe there is some fundamental importance: in physics, we have a well-understood theory of linear waves that explains a lot—except how stuff comes to be localized, as in the case of matter. Then we have a notion of particles, which are a nice conceptualization of localization of stuff, but in practice, particles keep falling apart. In solitons is a theory of wavelike phenomena that can be localized for long periods of time.
One misconception the book tackles right off is that solitons are rare in nature. It happens that (in some sense) most non-linear time-evolution equations exhibit soliton-like phenomena. Perhaps the real reason for this misconception is that there is so little literature on the subject.
My only literature was The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, circa 450 BC. This is a beautifully written account for any time; the presentation is remarkably balanced and seemingly modern. Or is it more that our modern prose sensibilities took form 25 centuries ago?
The tone is that of a report of the minutiae of a huge disaster. While this is interesting in itself, the window really opens on the occasions when he breaks out of his narrative to express his horror and disgust and despair over the events.
I would recommend this book to anyone with any interest in politics. The issues and arguments are amazingly familiar.
People have been pushing me to read more Salinger ever since I read Franny and Zooey. So when I was in Portland last year I visited Powell’s books, and thought enough to buy a copy of Seymour, an Introduction and Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters. Seymour’s Introduction is a bewilderingly silly, self-absorbed literary roller-coaster. I’m amazed at how he manages to integrate the point he’s making with the tone of the book. It’s a lesson in Zen archery. Since then I’ve also read The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, which, I think, is all of Salinger. Here’s my big observation: Buddy always sweats profusely when he’s just had a Seymour-related epiphany.
Perhaps in honor of his passing, I read almost all of Stephen Jay Gould’s popular books, including Dinosaur in a Haystack, Bully for Brontosaurus, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Ever Since Darwin, and Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms. I wish I had another one by my bed. I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but now it seems they will eventually run out.
A fuzzy little book, Vinyl Cafe—unplugged by Stuart McLean, a gift from my bud, Lin Patfield. After the last book, it’s a relief, let me tell you.
Now there are two books in my life. One is yet another Emma Tennant, Queen of Stones. Another sad non-chronological tale told through the eyes of children.
The other is a recommendation of a writer named Rachel whom I met while she served time as a waitress: Vurt by Jeff Noon. Well, I must say it’s different, and very energetic.
Hilary recommended a “young adult” sci-fi, Gillian Rubinstein’s Galax-Arena. I’ll give it this: I couldn’t predict the outcome. As these things go, it’s not a happy book, and that pleased me.
I read an odd little whodunit, Kinky Friedman’s Greenwich Killing Time, that Julian sent me. Seems this guy also had some sort of band, so now I’ll have to find out what he sounds like, too.
Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi kept me company in a stinky bar. I now have little sympathy for river-dwellers whose expensive homes are swept away in a flood.
I played for a while with Catastrophe Theory by V. I. Arnol’d. I’ve spent some time with a couple of his other books, and I’ve always loved his style, from that Russian math-puzzle tradition. If you’re at all interested in geometry, give this book a whirl.
Mr. Vonnegut, who seems to be ironically still alive, has written several novels since we last met. The one I just read was Timequake. Probably not his best, but then I’ll read anything he writes. I got a few laughs out of this one, so who can complain?
I plowed through a collection of short fictions of Jorge Luis Borjes. It went at a rate of one story per bar visit. Took months. It had its moments, but I think I’m finished with Borjes.
Last year’s big novel was Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera. Took me months, but then, it’s a very broad book.
Also read J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. The characters’ dialog is beautifully quaint; there’s more going on here than you might at first expect.
Milan Kundera’s Slowness. More of the same. A simple observation is woven into a dual fantasy. I think this is also the year I read The Joke.
Over the past two years, I read almost all of Stephen Jay Gould’s popular books, including Wonderful Life, Eight Little Piggies, The Panda’s Thumb, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, and The Flamingo’s Smile. Also read rather more serious books by Gould: The Mismeasure of Man and Ontogeny and Phylogeny.
On Tali’s recommendation, I picked up The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. This is just up my aesthetic alley.
At John Kerkhoven’s insistence, I read A. R. Luria’s seminal The Man with a Shattered World, to contrast with Oliver Sacks. I however found it to be another wonderful island in a world Sacks had first shown me.
Joy shoved at me a copy of Oliver Sacks’ The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. I was thrilled, and so read An Anthropologist from Mars, A Leg to Stand On, and The Island of the Colorblind. Seems people have one of two reactions to Sacks: either wonder or horror. I’m in the first category.
Very much enjoyed Milan Kundera’s Immortality, despite some not-terribly-original literary indulgences. He’s very good at weaving a simple observation into a story.