Weasel Words
A Book Log
November
27,
2002
Alan Moore's Tomorrow Stories, Book 1
is the first
collection of yet another of his numerous ongoing comic book series (along
with Promethea, Top Ten, Tom Strong, and The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Tomorrow Stories, though,
is unique in that each issue is divided into four stories, featuring
totally separate plots and characters (though the same characters show up
in each issue), and possessed of almost no continuity between issues.
Essentially, this is a collection of collections.
It's a truism that short stories are where the most inventive stuff lies;
there's more opportunity for experimentation, variety, and stylistic play
with a short story (and if the experiment fails, a 20-page flop is easier
to forgive than a 1000-page one). So it is here; most of Moore's current
output is novel in some way, but this collection is chock-ablock with
experimentation.
Consider my favorite story of the book, the absolutely brilliant "How
Things Work Out". The story is about the inhabitants of a particular
four-story building, and the page is divided into four horizontal panels,
each a floor of the building. But it's also divided chronologically:
the top panel is 1999, the second panel 1979, then 1959, and the bottom
panel is 1939. This is done with astonishing attention not only to
foreground and background detail (the characters age going up the page, as
do the surroundings -- the building is brand-new at the bottom, and
gradually decays up to the top), but also with stylistic detail: the word
balloons and lettering in each panel reflect the era in which it's set.
The story flows linearly from left-to-right within each level, so that
each level of the building represents a seamless narrative flow from page
to page, but it's also written so that, if read top to bottom, the
dialogue still transitions appropriately, and the individual storylines of
all four eras tie together throughout the story. It's the sort of
intricate, detailed work that rewards lingering over details and savoring
connections; an absolute masterpiece of graphic design.
The other stories are generally pretty good, too. Those featuring Jack B.
Quick are amusing: Jack is a little boy living on a farm, who constantly
whips up super-scientific inventions while surrounded by a bunch of
country folk; the result is a sort of skewed boy's physics primer. The
Greyshirt stories are solid detective/horror stories. The First American
stories are self-aware pop-modern parodies of superhero conventions, and
didn't quite work for me on the whole, though they had some funny moments.
The Cobweb stories are gender/sex obsessed detective stories, and were the
weakest of the lot (though the Li'l Cobweb story was great).
Like most of Moore's recent stuff -- heck, like most of Moore's stuff,
period -- this is well worth reading.
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November
26,
2002
When it first came out, Dave Duncan's Blades series was supposed to be a
series of stand-alone books, each telling a separate story. That premise
lasted right up until the end of the second one, where a twist in the
storyline meant that the third book had to tie the first two together into
a trilogy with many interconnected elements.
But now, in Dave Duncan's Paragon Lost
, there really is a
completely stand-alone Blades book -- at least plot-wise; the book assumes
that the reader is already familiar with the world in which it's set, so
those who haven't read the first three Blades books would likely be lost
starting with this one.
Paragon Lost takes place after all the events of the first three
books, and focuses on a new character, a Blade named Beaumont. Like all
the Blades books, this one isn't told in straight chronological order; it
starts out in the middle, spends two thirds of the book getting back to
that point, and then spends the last third advancing the book forward.
It's something of an unusual structure, actually -- too much of the book
takes place in the past for it to be a flashback, but too much takes place
in the present for it to be a framing story. It works well enough, but
caused a problem for me. When I'm reading a series with gaps between
books, I tend to forget almost everything and need to be reminded what was
going on. So when a book starts out -- like this one did -- referring to
all sorts of events in the past that are unfamiliar to me, I'm never
certain if they happened in a previous book (and I should remember them to
understand what's going on) or if they're new references and we'll be told
everything we need to know.
Other than that confusion (which won't happen for people with better
memories than mine), though, the book was quite smooth. The plot wasn't
overly complex, but it was complex enough to be interesting; the
characters were all well-done, and if Beaumont was perhaps a bit more
superhumanly competent than might be realistic, well, he's fun.
My only complaint with the book is that it didn't feel as original as most
of Duncan's other novels. Partly this is because it's the fourth book of
a series, so there are no world-building surprises; and partly it's
because this series is one of Duncan's most conventional, anyway, and the
characters are tramping across what's really just a thinly-renamed Europe.
If you've read the other Blades books, there are no surprises here.
I enjoyed the book a lot (and stayed up late reading it two nights in a
row), but I hope that Duncan's going to do something else next.
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November
20,
2002
It's not easy to find a book to read while eating. The book needs to be
durable (to hold up to the abuses of eating; paperbacks are clearly out)
and able to be read in small chunks (so that I can read it for 15 minutes
while eating, then put it down until the next day).
Magazines are obviously ideal for this purpose, but I just don't subscribe
to enough magazines. (I actually used to subscribe to Sports Illustrated
for a long time -- despite the facts that I only care about pro football,
and that I can get more than enough sports coverage on the Web for free --
just so I could get a weekly magazine. By the end of each week, I'd be
reduced to reading the articles on women's college field hockey.)
When it comes to actual books, it's hard to find stuff that fits the bill.
The hardcover Dilbert books (like The Way of the Weasel I read
recently) are great, and I've read all of them repeatedly for just that
reason; but you have to wait a decent interval before you can re-read a
book after reading it, and The Way of the Weasel was still within
that interval. So, when I needed some verbiage to accompany my Hot
Pocket, I turned to Anne's shelves, and pulled off Paul Reiser's
Babyhood
.
Stylistically, this was similar to his Couplehood, which I reviewed
here some months ago, but the subject of this book is the lead-up to
having a baby, and the immediate experiences after it's popped out -- and
since I have no experience with that, there were none of those little
"Yes! That's it exactly!" moments that good humor ideally inspires.
I can't say that I really loved it, but it did successfully
occupy my eating time, so it's at least as good as women's college field
hockey.
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November
15,
2002
Terry Pratchett's Night Watch
is the latest installment in
his Discworld series, and it's a good 'un.
The Discworld series is actually made up of several subserieses -- the
Witches books, the Rincewind books, the Death/Susan books, and (the
subseries in which this book is classed) the Watch books. Night
Watch is not an ideal place to start reading Pratchett, as it assumes
significant familiarity with at least the earlier Watch books -- which is
a bit of a pity, really, because I think this is one of the best Watch
books Pratchett has written.
I was a bit wary at first, because the plot seemed frighteningly cheesy:
A lightning bolt causes a temporal rift into which Vimes (and a criminal
he's struggling to apprehend) fall; they end up travelling back in time to
Vimes's early days in the Watch, where changes are made to the time-space
continuum, which Vimes needs to put right. I think I've seen that story
on Star Trek a few dozen times already.
But here, that's almost just a framing device. I mean, it's an important
part of the plot and all, but it's definitely not the entirety of the
thing. The book is really about corruption, revolution, and experience,
and it amply displays Pratchett's greatest strength, which is his
humanistic understanding of people and societies. This is the sort of
book that's much better than the plot synopsis.
If you've read the other Discworld books, be assured that this is a
significant and worthy entry into the corpus; if you haven't, go read
Small Gods and get back to me later.
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November
12,
2002
Given the title of this booklog, it's probably no surprise that I read
Scott Adams' Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel
just as soon
as Amazon could get it to my greedy little hands.
This is the fourth of Adams' mostly-prose (there are some cartoons mixed
in, but there's more unillustrated verbiage) books, which in many ways are
funnier than his comics, because they get a chance to develop beyond three
panels. I really don't know how this particular one stacks up next to the
others, though; I liked this book -- I laughed out loud repeatedly and at
length -- but I didn't like it as much as, say, The Dilbert
Principle.
But it's my suspicion that the decline in my enjoyment isn't about
anything intrinsic to the book, but is instead a function of the order in
which I read the books (which happens to be the order in which Adams wrote
them, but that's hardly relevant). If I'd read this book years ago, and
read The Dilbert Principle now for the first time, I'd probably
have laughed harder at this one, and thought that one was a bit of a
let-down.
The fundamental problem is that any person only gets so many good ideas in
their lifetime, and once they've run through their stock, they can either
repeat themselves again and again (the route followed by Terry Pratchett,
P.G. Wodehouse, and Adams here), or start trying out their bad ideas
(Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke).
Plus, the more books you read by a single author, the more you start to
see their formula at work, the more obtrusive their little tics become --
it's impossible to read all of David Brin's books without noticing his
unholy fondness for the word "brobdingnagian," for instance. Adams has a
formula and tics, and both are becoming increasingly visible as I read
more and more of his stuff.
So if you've read Adams' other prose books, you know what to expect here;
you won't be disappointed, but neither will you be surprised. If you
haven't read his prose, but enjoy his comics (or enjoyed them before they
got too repetitive), you should give any one of them a shot -- they're
good.
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November
9,
2002
Whenever the topics of design or usability come up, someone always
recommends Donald A. Norman's The Design of Everyday Things
.
And it's got a really
cool cover, so I figured I'd give it a look.
From the illustration on the cover (a teapot with the handle on the same
side as the spout, if you're too lazy to follow a link), I was expecting
this book to be about... well, about the design of everyday things. I
thought it might illustrate the subtle design choices that have honed the
items we use everyday into such fine pieces of efficiency that we scarcely
even notice the interface -- why forks have the number of tines they do,
why spoons have flat handles and pens have round ones, why a teapot spout
has the curves and recurves, that sort of thing. This sounded really
interesting, and I was crushingly disappointed when the book turned out to
be about something else altogether.
In actuality, the book is about the design problems that purportedly
plague everything. If I could sum up the theme of the book in one grumpy
sentence it'd be, "Those dang-blasted kids these days don't know how to
design anything, they're always making stuff pretty but unusable, and they
just don't know what they're doing."
Which is one of the problems with the book: It's a big long bitch-fest
about bad design, but (up until a short section at the end) it doesn't
offer any constructive advice at better design. Which is probably just as
well, because when it does offer constructive advice, it's stupid.
For instance, consider the problem of lights. You've probably walked into
a big room where multiple light switches control various lights, and not
known which were which, right? Well, as Norman points out, that's because
it's a mapping problem: You're trying to map the two-dimensional layout
of the lights to a one-dimensional array of switches. Bad design!
(Never mind that by about the third time you use a room, you've got the
lights down as a matter of reflex.)
So, what does he offer in place of the conventional row of light switches?
Well, he wants something that mirrors the layout of the room, so he makes
a schematic drawing of the room, attaches switches to it in the place
where the lights are, then mounts it horizontally on a pillar sticking out
from the wall. (There are photos of this from his lab.) He gloats about
how well this works, and offers in support a note from a colleague, which
begins "You know, I actually kind of like those new switches now." One
hypothesizes that this note came about after six months of endless
bitching about those stupid, stupid switches -- because everyone's used to
hitting the wall right next to the door to flip on the lights, and I bet
you big money that people kept doing that, then cursing when the switches
weren't there. Norman ignores this issue.
Of course, even if the switches were useful, they're still stupidly
impractical: They require a custom design for each and every room in
which they're placed, they subtract from the usable floor space of the
room, they're expensive to manufacture and install, and they're
ugly. Only someone hopelessly aesthetically-challenged would ever
dream of installing them into a room.
Norman appears to be just such an individual. Throughout the book, one of
his themes is that too many things are designed to look good, and not
enough are designed to work well. ("It probably won an award," is such a
frequent phrase of scorn that one imagines the design community issuing
awards every five minutes or so, in order that they might fully reward all
the beautiful objects Norman hates.) Now, in itself, this point isn't
impossibly wrong: I can think of some things that are designed more for
beauty than usability. In general, though, it's a much weaker hypothesis
than an alternate one: that too many things are designed for cheapness and
ease of manufacture, rather than aesthetics or usability.
More to the point, the specific examples that Norman gives are just so
pathetic as to be laughable. He gives an example of "a friend" who got
stuck in the lobby of a building because he couldn't figure out how to
open the doors. They weren't complicated doors; you just pushed. The
only thing even vaguely complex is that they were plain sheets of glass
without an indication as to which side you should push them on. And note
that the guy got stuck between two sets of doors -- after he'd
already pushed one open! Norman later talks about another "friend" who
couldn't make his CD player's remote control work because he was holding
it the wrong way -- not just when he first picked it up, but for
weeks.
The obvious conclusion we draw isn't that remote controls and doors are
impossible to use, but that Norman has stupid friends. And, as you might
guess from those scare quotes in the previous paragraph, it's my own
personal hypothesis that Norman's "friend" is Norman himself, too
embarrassed to admit to his inability to function in society. Lord knows
I would be, in his shoes.
This book isn't completely worthless; there are a few points in here that
are interesting. The problem is, they're only enough to fill out a short
Web page, and they're dumped in amid the most boring lump of smug,
narrow-minded tedium I hope to ever read. On the whole, The Design of
Everyday Things is both uninformative and uninteresting. Avoid.
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November
5,
2002
I've been getting sick of the unreliability of my previous commenting
system (YACCS) for a while now, and have finally gotten around to rolling
my own. All old comments have been imported, so none of your pearls of
wisdom were lost in the transfer.
If you see anything weird, or experience any problems, drop me a line at
web@klio.org. (I'll note that I don't
yet have the "remember my info" functionality enabled; I hope to get that
done sooner or later.)
| :::
November
1,
2002
I want to slap Elizabeth Moon.
It's clear that she's capable of writing interesting stuff, but
Elizabeth Moon's Oath of Gold
-- and, for that matter, her
entire damn Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy -- is just too lazy for
words.
Consider the following passage:
The elf rummaged in the small pack he wore. He pulled out a flat packet
and unwrapped it.
"It's our waybread. Try it."
Paks took a piece; it looked much like the flat hard bread the Duke's
Company carried on long marches. She bit into it, expected that
toughness, and her teeth clashed: this bread was crisp and light. It
tasted like nothing else she had eaten, but was good. One piece filled
her, and she could feel its virtue in her body.
Her elves have motherfucking lembas! She couldn't even come up
with an original magically restorative food: no elvish jerky, no
elfberries, no Lucky Charms with Green Elf Marshmallows. She's not even
trying here. Which wouldn't bother me so much if the whole book were pure
dreck, but it's not -- when Moon isn't trotting out hoary cliches, she's
actually pretty interesting. I kept staying up too late to read these
books, and that counts for a lot in my book.
But ultimately, the frequent lapses into unforgivable genericity doom this
trilogy to the status of a guilty pleasure. I liked it, but I'd not for a
moment try to defend its quality. Still and all, if you've got a high
tolerance for fantasy cliches, this is a thoroughly enjoyable work.
On a slightly different note, I'm now somewhat abashed, because when I
reviewed the first book in this trilogy, I promised to expound my theory
on the virtues of padding in epic fantasy; alas, the trilogy didn't
develop in the way I'd expected it to (having taken that regrettable turn
into D&D fantasy), so my theory no longer applies here. I'm sure that
I'll eventually read a series where it does apply, though, so you'll just
have to wait for that.
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