Weasel Words

January 29, 2003

I've read Andrew Tobias' The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need several times already, but I like to periodically pick it up and give it another read-through. It's short, breezily written, and motivating -- I never feel more like virtuously saving my money than when I've just read a book extolling the benefits thereof.

The book treats on three related topics. The first is how to save money, which (while being fundamentally sound) gets ever so slightly ridiculous at times, as with his suggestion to give yourself haircuts. I'll pass, thanks. The second is an exploration of the different avenues of saving and investment open to you, and recommendations of which ones actually make sense. A quote:

Indeed, the chief virtue of this [book] may be its brevity. This one is about the forest, not the trees. ... Accordingly, this book will summarily dismiss investment fields that some people spend lifetimes wandering around in. For example: It is a fact that 90% or more of the people who play the commodities game get burned. I submit that you have now read all you need ever read about commodities.

The third topic is the stock market, which he treats lucidly and sensibly. The most interesting thing about this latest read-through for me was that the edition I have was written in 1998, at the height of the tech boom. It would have been amazingly easy for Tobias to get caught up in the boom hype, and most would forgive him if the book read a bit silly in the light of the second Bush recession. But he didn't get caught up in the excitement; the book actually reads as if he wrote it knowing that the good times were coming to an end. And in a way, he did -- the first edition of this book was written in 1978, at the tail end of one of the worst economic periods of living memory. An investment guide originally written in Carter's administration is not likely to forget that bad times exist as well as good.

The title of this book is chutzpah, but the contents deliver on the promise. Enormously highly recommended to anyone who's not already in complete command of their finances.

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January 29, 2003

Whew.

I've finally got this weblog converted over to a new blogging system, something a little bit fancier than the old Perl-and-baling-wire script I had rigged up before. (If you're curious, I now store my booklog in XML format, and have a Java app that uses XSLT to publish new entries.)

This matters not at all to you, of course. But what may matter to you is that I now have permalinks! Exciting! Thrilling! Okay, not so much. Other than that (and some mostly invisible marking and scripting clean up), not much is new around here. The nice thing, though, is that now when I want to change something, I can just do it, instead of having to manually go back and update every single old entry to reflect the change. And I can auto-generate an index by author, which I suspect I'll do as soon as I recover from this effort.

The things I do for you people. Let me know if anything looks broken.

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January 24, 2003

So Robert Jordan came out with the tenth installment of his infinite series. I was half-dreading this moment; all my enthusiasm for the series drained away with the last two terrible books, but I felt half-obliged to read it because, after all, I've spent literally half my life reading this story.

Then the (mostly scathing) reviews came in, and I read a summary wherein it became clear to me that absolutely nothing happened in the course of an entire 700 page book, and I said, "Screw it. I'm not reading this, not even in paperback." And I felt much relieved.

I was, however, left with a jonesing for some good ol' nostalgic fantasy. Whatever depths Jordan has sunk to now, I still fondly remember sitting in seventh grade study hall intently reading The Eye of the World, and I wanted to read something that would help me recapture that old-school feeling. So, I turned to David and Leigh Eddings' The Redemption of Althalus .

It's no secret that Eddings is not particularly well-respected by the fantasy literati. His characters are undeniably stereotypes, his world-building is wildly implausible, and his plots tend toward the repetitive. For all that, though, I've always liked Eddings, in a trashy pleasure sort of way. His characters are bouncily fun, his plots are complex without being byzantine (admittedly, it works best not to think too deeply about matters; but I'm good at not doing that), and his writing has that element I've praised time and again on this booklog: pull-you-in pacing.

And in particular, I'd adored Eddings in seventh grade. I read The Belgariad repeatedly -- but then, so has anyone who read The Mallorean. (Ba-dum ching! Thank you, I'll be here all week.) Eddings is basically Dave Duncan without any sense of originality, which doesn't work quite as well for me now, but was perfectly fine for me then.

My main hesitation with reading an Eddings novel now was that, about the time he started sharing credit with his wife, his books started sucking. Belgarath the Sorcerer was one of the worst novels I've read -- it wasn't just trashy, it was dull. I wasn't sure if this represented a permanent decline in Eddings' capability, or was just because that novel was a prequel, and prequels always suck (sole exception: Vernor Vinge's superb A Deepness in the Sky).

At the evidence of Althalus, I'm willing to say that it was the prequel thing. This was a bouncy read that had all the virtues of classic Eddings. And, unlike Jordan's latest extrusion, it managed to cram an entire plot into a mere 700 pages. So yeah, not great literature, but as generic fantasy goes, it's very readable stuff. And if the ending is incredibly lame -- which it is -- well, at least it has an ending.

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January 11, 2003

I never planned on reading Cory Doctorow's Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom . I'd read a short story of his called, irritatingly enough, "0wnz0red", and while it was a fine short story, it was way too heavy on the Wired/Slashdot brand of technogeek futurism for me. So I figured any book he'd write would be the same, and mentally planned on ignoring it.

But then an interesting thing happened: Doctorow released the novel in electronic form for free. Well, now, if it's free, I might as well take a look, eh? I mean, why not?

So I did. I grabbed the HTML file and started reading. Two pages in, I knew I'd buy the book, because I wanted to finish reading it and have never liked reading books on screen. (I tried reading Project Gutenberg's The Three Musketeers once, and was completely unable to focus my attention for long enough.) Funny thing, though, was that I just kept reading and reading, and I eventually finished the entire book electronically -- Doctorow's writing is pacey enough that I couldn't metaphorically put the book down.

Of course, now that I've read the book electronically, there's technically no reason for me to buy the printed edition; but I will, anyway. For one thing, this is the sort of action I want to support. Freely distributing an open-format novel in an age when media companies are trying to destroy the general-purpose computer in the name of copy protection is the sort of act that deserves reward. But more than that, I'll buy it because I like having books that I've read -- especially good ones.

And this is a good book. It nicely straddles the line between being a near-future extrapolation book and being a far-future posthumanist novel. The characters in the book are quite posthuman -- death just means restore from backup; most material goods are free; network interfaces and computers are fully integrated into the brain -- but they're recognizably still people. People who live in a very different world, people who have all sorts of different priorities than we do, but still people. I can believe in this future, and I can believe in these characters. And I can sympathize with them, something that's more difficult to do in something like Greg Egan's Diaspora, where the posthuman characters are too alien to be sympathetic.

If I were to complain, I'd say that the future extrapolated here is a bit too generic and obviously a future-of-today (in the same way that Golden Age stories are obviously a future-of-then), with its anarchistic reputation-based society, its pervasive networks, its nano-magic tech; and I might say that Doctorow's outlook is still a bit too technogeeky. But the world is interesting enough (particularly the corner of it that we see: Disney World), and the technogeeky outlook rarely gets obtrusive, so these aren't major flaws.

But hey, you don't need to take my word for it -- go read it yourself.

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January 10, 2003

I must be a masochist. I've read a whole bunch of kids' books, and I've liked scarcely any of them; even the good ones (like Gaiman's Coraline and the fourth Potter book) seem insubstantial. And yet, here I am, having just finished another children's book, Lemony Snicket's The Bad Beginning .

The author warns at the beginning of the book that it's not a pleasant story with a happy ending, and the title and series name ("A Series of Unfortunate Events") might give the same hint to those who are paying attention. The weird thing is, he's not kidding. I assumed they'd be unhappy in a watered-down kiddish way, but they're actually just overtly bleak.

The book deals with the three Baudelaire children, who become the Baudelaire orphans inside of the first ten pages, when their house burns down, killing their parents in the conflagaration (and, most horribly, destroying their library), whereupon they are sent to live with their evil Count Olaf, who abuses them most frightfully. It's all done very cheekily and breezily, but I still have a hard time believing that this is a story which you'd want to give an eight year old to read.

I liked the style of the book -- Mr. Snicket has a decided narratorial voice, which intrudes frequently to amusing effect -- and the plot was fine (albeit depressing) enough; and because it's so quick to read, I'll probably end up reading the sequels before I get to some of the more brick-like entries on my bookshelf. Still and all, I can't help but think that -- like every kids' book -- The Bad Beginning was a bit insubstantial.

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January 9, 2003

One of my favorite subgenres is what I'm dubbing "civilized fantasy." It's not an easy subgenre to define, but its core elements are: 1) that it's set in a post-medieval but pre-Industrial Revolution world, 2) that most of the action takes place in cities rather than the wilderness, and 3) that the plot primarily concerns itself with institutions of civilization. Examples of civilized fantasy are Paula Volsky's excellent Illusion, Martha Wells' Death of the Necromancer, Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, and Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.

There aren't nearly enough civilized fantasy novels out there, so when I saw that Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman's The Fall of the Kings was a sequel to Swordspoint, I grabbed it and read it right quick.

And was immediately irritated, because The Fall of the Kings takes this great urban setting, these involved aristocratic politics, and squanders them all on a plot involving ancient magic (with the by-now-standard strong sexual/fertility elements), the bond between the King and the Land, and all those similarly overused themes that fill up a hundred other fantasies.

If I were the Supreme Dictator of Fantasy Publishing, my first rule would be, "Don't write a novel that explores the deep psychosexual underpinnings of ancient magic, and how it's all about this wild relationship that man has with nature. Except for you, Mr. Gaiman; you're exempted." (My second rule would be, "Don't write enormous multi-book series that don't come to a conclusion. No, Mr. Jordan, you are most definitely not exempted.")

It's not an inherently bad theme, you understand, any more than fighting the dark lord is an inherently bad plot. But, in exactly the same way, it's so painfully over-exposed that I've had enough in the last five years to last me through the next five years. I'm not novelty-crazed, but still I say, give me something new, something different.

That said, this was a really good book. Sherman and Kushner have written absorbing characters, the city itself remains a great setting, and even the theme is handled very well. If you don't have my aversion to ancient magic, you'll likely find this a superb novel.

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January 5, 2003

It's somewhat out of character for me to be reviewing Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice ; because, although it sounds like it could be a medieval mystery, it's actually a cookbook. Sort of. I suppose it's really more of a book about baking bread.

See, when I think of a cookbook, I think of a bound collection of recipes. And while this has that -- there are recipes (formulas, Reinhart calls them) for something like fifty different breads in here -- it's more than just that. The first hundred pages of the book are essentially a detailed tutorial on baking processes, explaining at length both what you do to bake bread and why you do those things. The material in these pages coherently ranges the gamut from the very practical (mixing techniques, both by hand and with a mixer) to the theoretical (an explanation of the chemical changes involved in the formation of gluten).

From that description, this might sound like two unconnected books bound into the same cover -- a tutorial book followed by a formula book -- but it doesn't read that way at all. Throughout the tutorial section, Reinhart makes reference to the way these techniques and effects play out in reference to breads in the formula section, and the formulas (which are written in a more verbose, narrative style than in, say, the Betty Crocker cookbook) frequently refer back to the earlier tutorial section.

Hmm. I'm not familiar with the conventions of cookbook reviewing, but I'm guessing I should probably talk about what this book purports to enable you to make. As you'd guess from the title, Reinhart's metier is bread, particularly European-style breads. There's only one quickbread in this book (a drool-inducing cornbread recipe); and most of the yeast-risen breads are fairly complex affairs. A few of them can be made in one day, but the vast majority of them are two-day projects, with a sponge (that's fancy baker talk for pre-fermented dough) made the first day and the rest of the preparation done on the second day.

That sounds insanely complicated to me, largely because I almost never cook anything and have never baked bread outside of a bread machine; but it's a testament to Reinhart's competence that I'm not intimidated by the notion of making one of these breads. In fact, I've got a big ol' mass of dough in the fridge right now. I'm not exactly confident that it'll turn out properly, because there are doubtless an enormous number of ways that I could screw it up -- could have already irredeemably screwed it up, really -- but I am confident that if it does fail, I'll be able to figure out why and do better the next time, because this book has given me the analytical framework to troubleshoot difficulties.

Essentially, this is everything that I could possibly want a cookbook to be. It's precise and thorough; it gives detailed steps and the underlying reasons for those steps; it has a nice range of recipes; the writing is both pellucid and interesting; the author speaks with enough authority to compel the reader's trust; and, as a nice bonus, it's a prettily photographed and beautifully bound book.

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