Weasel Words
A Book Log
May
31,
2002
I'd been meaning to read Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass
for some time now. (In this respect, it's just like 90% of the books I
finally get around to reading.) When Anne read it recently with the kind
of rapt, page-turning intensity that usually signifies a compellingly
readable book, I decided to bump it up to the top of my list.
"Compellingly readable" turned out to be pretty much on the mark, too. I
whizzed right through this book, and felt a sense of great irritation
whenever I needed to put it down at the end of a spate of reading.
Pullman's sense of pace (which, as longtime readers know, is one of the
characteristics that I most desire in a book) is impeccable.
The other stuff in the book ain't half-bad, either. The world-building is
fascinating: Pullman builds an alternate Earth with magic of a religious
bent, with many names and institutions pulled from our own history, but
subtly twisted into a still-coherent but very different world. The
characterization is absolutely top-notch: Everyone in the book is
distinct, memorable, and complex.
The weird thing about this book is that I'm pretty sure it was at one
point marketed as a YA fantasy, but it has absolutely nothing YA-ish about
it, save that the protagonist is young; and even there, she's not young in
the same sense that Harry Potter is young -- she's not worried about
candies and school bullies. There is in this book no trace of silliness,
no trace of moral simplicity, no need for idiot-plotting. If this can
really be said to be in any way a kids' book, it single-handedly redeems
the entire genre.
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May
28,
2002
This past weekend was the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by
the vagaries of shifting weather patterns. This meant, finally, that it
was time to break out the summer books. I started things off with a book
I'd been meaning to read for some time, P.G. Wodehouse's Something
Fresh
.
I've been a big Wodehouse fan since I discovered him some years back, but
I always have a problem with his books: I can never remember which ones
I've read. Normally, I keep this kind of information in my book database,
but most of the Wodehouse I read was checked out of the college library,
so I have no record of my reading. This is particularly problematic
because his books tend to be very similar, so it's impossible to tell
whether or not I've read a particular one until I hit some
memorable detail, typically well into the story. It's a bit frustrating
to be reading a "new" book, and then at page 150 encounter a
well-remembered scene and realize that I've already read the book.
Thankfully, though, I'd only read Jeeves books before, which meant that I
could start in on the Blandings books (of which Something Fresh is
the first) with no fear that I'd be inadvertently re-reading. And,
thankfully, this book seems to be every bit as enjoyable (in all the same
ways) as the Jeeves books; which is to say that it's a book largely made
enjoyable by its stylistic touches. Wodehouse's characters are fun, and
his plots are generally serviceable (if repetitive); but the real pleasure
of a Wodehouse book is Wodehouse's writing, which is full of pithy asides,
wry observations, and sparkling dialogue.
Now that I've finally read this book, I'll go grab the remainder of the
series at my earliest convenience, and read all the Blandings books in an
orderly and systematic fashion, keeping track of which ones I've read.
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May
22,
2002
I've been slow reading books lately for climatic reasons.
See, I'm a bit weird in that I mentally assign books to seasons, and I
prefer to read books in the proper season. I don't have a formal way of
assigning books, and the season to which a book is assigned isn't always
predictable (and some books have no season at all; others have multiple
seasons; and don't even ask me to explain the difference between those two
ideas), but it's still a real thing.
Normally, that's not a problem -- I just read the appropriate book for the
season I'm in. The problem right now, though, is that it should be
summer, and I should be reading summer books, but the weather is so damn
cold that it doesn't feel like summer. Given a book that demands to be
read lying barefoot on the couch with the patio door wide open, basking in
the summer heat and the summer evening sounds, it's impossible to read it
while huddled under a blanket with the blinds closed.
And yeah, I could just read winter books, but I'm stubbornly refusing to
give in to this kind of aberration. I don't want to be reading
winter books, damn it.
So, for the moment, I have retreated into the seasonlessness of technical
books -- this time, to Joshua Bloch's Effective Java
. This
is a short... well, style guide, really. What Strunk and White is to the
English language, this is to Java. It tells you which constructs to use,
which to avoid, and properly idiomatic ways to phrase a particular
concept.
It's an excellent guide, too. I found that the suggestions in the book
were evenly split between solutions I'd managed to figure out on my own
after years of Java programming, and elegant solutions to quandaries I'd
encountered before and solved unsatisfactorily. The tip on typesafe enums
alone was worth the price of the book -- as soon as I read it, I realized
that one section of the code I'm working on at my job would be immensely
improved if I rewrote it in that idiom.
Very highly recommended to any Java programmer.
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May
17,
2002
After finishing up Russell, I went back to my shelf for more light
reading, and grabbed another Gardner book. And didn't read it. Somewhat
to my own surprise, I seem to have been temporarily burnt out on light SF.
This left me with a bit of a quandary: For whatever reason, the small box
of books that I packed up to Detroit was really SF-heavy, but now I was in
the mood for something else.
I had about a dozen unread books sitting in front of me, but none of them
really looked like what I wanted to read. Although I didn't think much
about it at the time, I'm retroactively smug about this problem, as it
validates my theory that it's necessary to have at least 100 unread books
lying around so that I always have something I want to read.
Fortunately, I'd made an Amazon order not too long ago, in which was
contained Jonathan Carroll's Sleeping in Flame
. It looked
as good as anything there, so I pulled it down. This turned out to be a
wonderful idea.
Carroll is one of those fantasists who's gotten gobs of mainstream
literary attention -- the main reason I bought this book, in fact, is that
I was tired of reading rave reviews in non-genre sources and not having
any clue what the guy wrote. I was a bit wary of that whole "mainstream
literary" appellation, though -- I despise on principle the notion that
once a writer gets good enough, he ceases to be a genre writer and instead
writes literary novels.
For this book, though, it's rather more understandable. Sleeping in
Flame starts out as a straight mainstream novel: it's set in
modern-day Vienna, focuses on relationships, and has not a hint of
anything magical about it. And here's the remarkable part: I loved that
bit of the novel. I knew (due to an ill-advised skimming of the back
cover copy; I wish that publishers would leave off the plot synopses
altogether, which is largely why I avoid giving any in my comments) that
there was a turn coming which would take the novel into a more fantastic
arena, and I actually wished there weren't. I wanted to read the
straight literary novel to which this was the beginning.
Because, fundamentally, Carroll is just a damn good writer. And a
quotable one, with lots of writerly digressions. I've so far resisted
quoting from any of the books I've commented on here, but I couldn't hold
back on this one.
It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of
the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched
by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we
will be spared its cold hand on our heart.
[...]
I had always liked blind dates. If nothing else, it was an
interesting way of discovering what people thought of you. How often
do we have a chance to see what we are in a friend's eyes? On a blind
date you're told "You'll love her. I think she's very much your kind
of woman." And whether she is or not, you end the evening knowing
something new: As far as this friend is concerned, you're the "sexy
blond" type. Or a "smoky brunette who has to be convinced kind of
guy."
[...]
Why did things go wrong? Perhaps because wonderful as it can
sometimes be, you can be sure marriage is at all times a quirky,
difficult thing to maintain. In certain ways, it is very much like
the solid gold family heirloom watch your father gives you for
graduation. You love looking at it and owning it, but it isn't like
the twenty-dollar liquid-crystal thing made of plastic and rubber that
needs no maintenance to keep perfect time.
Every day you have to wind the gold beauty to make it run right, and
you have to keep setting it, and you have to take it to the jeweler to
be cleaned. ... It is lovely and rare and valuable, but the
rubber watch keeps better time with no work at all. The problem with
twenty dollar watches is that they all suddenly stop dead at some
point. All you can do then is throw them away and buy another.
[...]
There are long quiet periods in life that are very much like waiting
for a bus on a nice day. You don't mind being there so much because
the weather is sunny and nice, and you're in no hurry. But after a
while you start looking at your watch because there are more
interesting things you could be doing, and it really is time the bus
came.
[...]
American cities shrug at their brief histories. There are few signs
of pride in past tenants or events, notwithstanding the kitschy
Disneyland atmosphere of places like "Colonial Williamsburg." It is
as if the places are saying no, we're not so old, but who cares? Look
how far we have come. Look what we've got now.
What's amazing about this list is that I pulled all of those from the
first five pages, and still left out a few choice paragraphs (such as the
hilarious Popemobile bit). Like I said: quotable.
Eventually, of course, the book did take a turn into the fantastic, in a
way reminiscent of Tim Powers or American Gods. And, despite my
wish to keep reading a mainstream book, I wasn't at all bothered by the
switch to fantasy -- Carroll handled it well enough that at all times,
this was the book I wanted to be reading, not a hypothetical book that
went differently. Perhaps I could quibble a bit about the suddenness of
the ending, but it'd be a quibble.
In short, I loved this, and have just added Carroll to my "buy entire
backlist immediately" list. I really need to quit discovering great
writers.
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May
14,
2002
Long-time readers (for values of "long time" equal to "all the
way back in February") will remember that I've been in the process of
reading Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy for some
time.
No, don't get your hopes up; I haven't finished it. (Though I am up to
the section on modern philosophy, now.) There are still far too few times
that I feel like picking up a dense, thick text.
But what, I asked myself, about a dense, thin text? So it was that
I picked up Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy
.
It's a short book (only 160 pages), and I thought that a brief, quick and
dirty overview of the main topics of philosophy would be interesting and
useful.
So, I picked this up last week and started reading. The first chapter was
on epistemology. The second chapter dealt instead with epistemology.
The third chapter concerned itself with epistemology. The fourth chapter
focused solely on epistemology.
About this time, my trained philosophical mind started to notice a
pattern, and I flipped back to the table of contents, where I discovered
that, sure enough, the entire book dealt with epistemology.
Well, my own fault for not reading the back cover copy, but I still think
it's a damned misleading title. At any rate, though, it's a perfectly
serviceable brief overview of epistemology. It's lucid and readable
(qualities whose value should not be underestimated, as anyone who has
attempted reading Kant will attest), and if it's perhaps overly breezy and
casual... well, it's 160 pages, so how much precision and rigor can you
expect?
This isn't an especially up-to-date (written around 1910) or thorough
introduction to the subject of epistemology, but what it lacks in
scholarly rigor it gains in readability. It's not required reading by any
means, but it'd likely make a fine starting point for someone looking to
start reading philosophy.
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May
10,
2002
The natural culmination of my recent binge on fun SF is Lois Bujold's
Diplomatic Immunity
. Bujold's Vorkosigan series (of which this
is the latest installment) is perhaps the best fast-paced,
fun-but-not-trashy SF out there, so a new book in that series was an
automatic buy.
The last few Vorkosigan books have been a bit less fluffy than the rest of
the series; some people applaud this, but I'm not one of them. If I want
grim books, I've got shelves full of worthy candidates. Good, weighty
books are easy to find; it's good, light books that are exceedingly rare.
Fortunately, Bujold never got too weighty -- even at their darkest, the
books were still fluffy enough to qualify for my light reading category;
fortunately, too, this latest book reverses the trend, and gives us a
straightforward action-adventure tale reminiscent of entries like The
Vor Game.
So, just to make sure we're all on the same page: This is an excellent
installment of an excellent series that fits square into my favorite
genre. About the only complaint I have is that this book is a
quasi-sequel to Falling Free, one of the worst books of the series,
and one which had previously had nothing to do with any of the other books
and could thus be skipped over easily. Now, alas, that earlier book is
required reading.
Oh, well; I've already read Falling Free, so what do I care?
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May
7,
2002
Like the Gardner books I've been reading and enjoying, John Varley's
The Ophiuchi Hotline
is part of what I call the Old Universe
subgenre -- when humans hit space, there were already ancient,
inscrutable, and powerful aliens there. This is a subgenre I've always
enjoyed, largely because it allows for high idea-density, deep mysteries,
and cosmic stakes.
Also, I suspect that there's a bit of nostalgia to my fondness -- when I
think about the SF that I read and loved as a teenager, stuff like Niven's
Known Space, Clarke's Space Odysseys, and Brin's Uplift (all of which are
Old Universe books) are right up there at the top. In a way, even Douglas
Adams qualifies.
Anyway, the point here is that I like this kind of book, and consequently
liked this book; it had all the requisite ideas, mysteries, and cool
worldbuilding. But I think it suffers in immediate comparison to
Gardner's books: Varley is covering much the same ground, but does it
with less wit and a less-well-developed plot.
Unfortunately, this book was written before the trend toward what some
call "bloat", and what I call "giving the damn plot time to develop", so
it goes along perfectly fine and builds up an interesting plot... then
wraps it up quickly and unsatisfactorily inside of 20 pages. An extra 50
pages could really have helped this book out.
As it stands, though, it's still an enjoyable and fast-paced read with no
major flaws and plenty of things going for it; if you like this kind of
book, you'll like this book. I'm not quite pencilling in Varley's other
stuff on my "buy immediately" list, but I may do so yet.
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May
1,
2002
After finishing up Expendable, I was looking on Amazon to see what
else James Alan Gardner has written. Perusing the results, I couldn't
help but notice that the cover of one of his books looked awfully
familiar. I went over to my shelf, and sure enough, I owned it. So, I
picked up James Alan Gardner's Vigilant
and started reading.
After a bit of a delay due to moving and starting a new job and what-not,
I continued reading. And then, predictably enough, I finished reading.
But enough about logical progressions; let's talk about the book.
Although I didn't realize it immediately (due to not reading the back of
the book, which incidentally has spoilers up to about the 3/4 mark, so I
recommend following my practice of avoiding it), Vigilant is
actually a semi-sequel to Expendable -- it's set in the same
universe, and the protagonist of the earlier book is a significant
character (though not the protagonist) in this one. The plots are
unrelated, but similar in that both have puzzle elements, ancient
mysteries, and fast-paced action.
This book has all the virtues of Gardner's first -- witty dialogue; solid,
interesting worldbuilding; a well-paced story; interesting puzzles; and
likable characters -- putting him at two for two at writing good, gripping
science fiction. That's enough evidence for me: I'm putting Gardner on
my to-buy list, and my next order from Amazon will be loaded up with the
rest of his oeuvre.
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