December
25,
2003
Craig Thompson’s Blankets
is a quasi-autobiographical
(the main character is named Craig Thompson, and has the author’s
background, but it’s not clear if he actually is the author)
coming-of-age story, with the serious flaw that the protagonist never
seems to actually come of age.
The book presents us with scenes from Thompson’s rural Wisconsin
boyhood and adolescence, vignettes full of all the evident myopia that
attends youth. We see Thompson’s first “love” (with a girl he barely
knows, but idealizes); we see Thompson’s intense Christian fervor; we
see his self-congratulatory status as a misfit and outcast; we see his
moderately dramatic family relations. That sounds trite and familiar,
and to an extent, it is. But it’s reasonably well-written,
beautifully drawn (that’s “drawn” in the most literal sense; this is a
600-page black-and-white graphic novel), and has a good eye for detail
in places and minor characters.
The problem, though, is that the story arc the book thinks it’s
tracing — that of Thompson’s maturity and growth — never happens. At
the end of the book (and throughout the retrospective narration),
Thompson remains fundamentally adolescent. He ultimately rejects his
Christian background because he realizes that the Bible’s not
literally true, he never gets over his snide distaste for what he
views as the unwashed masses, and his worldview in general remains as
unsubtle and monochromatic as ever. Sure, he reverses polarity in a
few places, but that’s just change, not growth — it’s a sort of
teenage rebellion against his teenage self, if you will.
Blankets presents a superbly detailed and realistic portrait
of what it’s like to grow up different in deep ruralia; but it’s a
portrait from the inside, so lacks the perspective it needs to get a
wider view; I find myself contrasting it with Adam Cadre’s Ready,
Okay!, which possesses that perspective and consequently feels
more truthful. But if you accept the limitations Blankets has
(and who knows, maybe Thompson meant for the narrator to be
unreliable in this sense), it’s a beautiful,
intermittently-insightful, and sometimes moving work.
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December
24,
2003
So I’m reading Lemony Snicket’s The Reptile Room
, and
I’m sort of wondering why I’m bothering with it. It’s pretty clear by
now that I just don’t like kid-lit, and I didn’t even care that much
for the first installment of this
series, so why am I reading the sequel?
The boring actual answer is that I ran out of books to read on
vacation, but the more interesting philosophical answer is that
whenever there’s a type of book that’s insanely popular and gets good
reviews from people with taste, I’m forced to assume that there’s
something there that’s attracting people, and I’ll keep reading
until I either find it, or manage to convince myself that it’s
completely invisible to me. So in this sense, I read The Reptile
Room for the same reason I read about a dozen Stephen King books
back in junior high, despite not really liking any of them.
When it comes to Snicket, I see what people like. He’s not writing
in the generic kid-lit voice that makes (for instance) Rowling’s books
read exactly like every kids’ book ever written; he’s got his
distinctive style, which manages to be legitimately funny at times — a
definite rarity in the genre. Despite this, I still find myself
shrugging at the book; it’s not bad, but the actively good
moments are too rare to justify reading through the rest of the
cotton-candy fluff. When it comes down to actual story-telling, the
flat characters and obvious plotting obtrude too heavily and make the
reader wonder if there’s not something else they could be doing.
As kid-lit goes, it’s good. But kid-lit doesn’t go very far.
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December
22,
2003
I’ve called Bujold’s Vorkosigan books “Dave Duncan in space.” Well, since Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls
is fantasy, I suppose that it’s just plain ol’ “Dave Duncan.” And, really, it could be; if the name on the cover were different, I’d not have noticed a thing.
Like Duncan, Bujold sets her story in a unique and interesting fantasy world with a novel magic system — or, rather, theological system, since all the supernatural events here are caused by gods or demons. Like Duncan, Bujold populates the world with interesting people who do interesting things in a story so well-paced that it’s all-but-impossible to put the book down before it’s done. (I ended up reading this one until 5:30 AM.)
Paladin of Souls isn’t a work of boundary-pushing genius that makes you rethink the possibilities of the genre, but it’s a superbly crafted work that displays the possibilities of the genre in fully realized form — everything it tries to do, it does damn near perfectly. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this thing.
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December
21,
2003
History of science month continues with David Foster Wallace’s
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
.
Initially, I was a bit wary of this book — a math book written by a
lit’ry post-modern, hip feller like Wallace has all the makings of bad
pop science. You know the signs: the over-simplifications, the hyping
of dubious fringe stuff, the emphasis of biography at the expense of
subject matter.
Surprisingly (or not; I don’t really know much about Wallace),
these pitfalls are largely avoided. Wallace writes as someone who
gives a damn about math, is irritated by shallow and off-the-point
A Beautiful Mind-esque portraits of mathematicians, and really
wants to get across the essential issues and elegant theorems of
mathematical infinity. He’s working with some handicaps, of course,
most notably that the audience he’s writing to is going to a) have
wildly different levels of mathematical background (the book
putatively requires nothing more than high-school pre-calculus), which
b) are almost always rather less than they need to be to really
understand the technical bits he needs to talk about.
Pleasantly, Wallace is rather open in his pedagogical approach; he
remarks frankly about the explanatory trade-offs he’s making, he
admits when he’s lying to children, he tries to stuff in as much
footnotical clarification and expansion as he can without totally
disrupting the main text, and when it’s required, he’s not afraid to
roll up his sleeves and slog through a thicket of equations.
I’m unsure as to how successful he is, though. I’m basically his
ideal reader — with four or five semesters of college math, I’m
well-educated enough to understand most of the background he needs me
to understand, but not so well-educated that I’m bored by his
low-level explanation of the subject. Despite this, I still got
bogged down at the end, when he got to Cantor and the math got more
technical. I read through it, and understood it on some superficial
level, but I didn’t actually get it in the way that perhaps I
should have gotten it.
Then again, I’m a bit of a lazy reader, when I’m reading for
un-work-related pleasure, so I didn’t work my way through the proofs
in detail until they clicked, which may be my fault as much as
Wallace’s. Still, I suspect my reading style is going to be the one
that most readers bring; a more studious approach is only going to be
widely found where grades are involved, and often not even then.
Despite that problem, though, I did find the book fascinating up
until it got to Cantor — the actual historical bits were great.
Wallace traces the concept of infinity, the problems it presents, and
the uses it enables, from the Greeks through the Middle Ages, to the
development of calculus, and from there to the 19th century. If
you’ve got a decent calculus background, almost all of it will be
entirely comprehensible and lucid; and because infinity is such a
narrowly-focused (yet broadly applicable) topic, Everything and
More doesn’t feel like Yet Another Survey Text, either.
Its distinctness is only enhanced by Wallace’s narrative voice,
which I find myself deeply fond of. He writes very much like Neal
Stephenson (to the point where I have to work to remind myself that
they’re not actually the same person — or are they? (No.)),
which is a good thing, particularly when dealing with such a
potentially-dry topic as mathematics; Thomas and Finney should take
lessons.
I generally like to end my entries with a vague sort of
read-it-or-not recommendation, but Everything and More is
idiosyncratically different enough that I couldn’t possibly make any
broad recommendation. I suppose I could address all my readers
individually (Chad: I think you’d like it; Kate: I doubt it; Bruce: I
think you already read it; Novak: give it a whirl; Trent: probably
not; Nathan: fuck if I know), but there’s a chance that I have more
than the half-dozen readers I could address one-by-one, so that option
isn’t especially practical. So I’ll say generically, if you think you
might like it, you probably would; if you know you wouldn’t, you
certainly wouldn’t. There.
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December
2,
2003
After I finished reading Cryptonomicon II: Attack of the Natural Philosophers, I was all geeked up for some more history of science. Lucky for me, as I looked over my shelves, I spotted a copy of David C. Lindberg’s The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450
. I reproduce that subtitle in full to illustrate the point that this isn’t a pop-hist-sci book, it’s an actual textbookish sort of thing.
I’m not sure, however, if it was ever my textbook. It was sitting on my shelf entirely unread, which means either I bought it for a class and never read it (very possible), or I bought it at Amazon in the years since graduation and never read it (also very possible). At first, I was sure it was from a class, as the writer is a UW professor; but the more I think about it, the less likely that seems, as I didn’t have any class where this would have been an appropriate text. And I do seem to remember a “self-improvement” Amazon order some years ago that could possibly have included this.
Provenance aside, The Beginnings of Western Science is an examination of... well, the European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious, and insitutional context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. (This entry is starting to sound eerily reminiscent of an elementary school book report on a book I didn’t read, isn’t it?) It’s a broad topic, so the book is of necessity geared at a relatively introductory level. I could envision a text like this being used as one of the core texts for a History of Science 101 survey class.
It’s a competent book. While it doesn’t have the verve or style of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, it’s eminently readable. This is not faint praise, either: I’ve struggled through my share of nearly unreadable texts on similar subjects, because people who both know the material well and can write well are in short supply. (This is in contrast to fiction, where people need “only” to be able to write well, and there are therefore whole gobs of them that can, and merely competent writers are totally enhy.) The book is well-organized, explains things at appropriate levels of detail with wonderful clarity, and doesn’t put you to sleep doing it. That has to make it a success on its terms.
For my own part, though, reading the book was an odd experience. I’m used to thinking of myself as broadly and deeply ignorant, so it was disturbing to read this book and realize that I already knew a lot of this stuff. The Greek philosophy was familiar to me (primarily from that Russell book); and when it came to the rise of the universities and the rediscovery of Aristotle and his Islamic commentators, I actually knew the subject in greater depth than the book went into. For me, this book mostly served to fill in little gaps, reinforce things I already knew, and provide a broad perspective. Very weird feeling.
(And yes, I really did just finish this now; I haven’t just been neglecting my booklog. Yes, that means that I’ve been averaging something like a book a month since autumn. Yes, that is pathetic. No, this dry spell almost certainly won’t last. And yes, you do look fat in that outfit.)
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