garote | Entries tagged with books

Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett (2014)

A bit darker and more thrilling than earlier entries in the series, with just a handful of laugh-out-loud moments, which is a disappointment only if you’re comparing this to Pratchett’s usual hilarious work. I’d still give it a 7 out of 10.

Shattered Dreams: My Life As A Polygamist’s Bride, by Irene Spencer (2007)

For a while I was keen to read about harrowing experiences in organized religion, and this was my window into the not-so-distant past of the Mormon church. The poverty, humiliation, and mental manipulation of the protagonist - and most of the other women she knew - at the hands of what were basically religiously glorified and sanctioned sexual predators, was fascinating and appalling, like a bad dream that defies expectations by getting worse and worse, without ever actually waking you up.

Unfortunately this book sags in the middle when Irene resigns herself to fate, on a destitute ranch somewhere in Mexico, and marks year after year of her passing life by pumping out children for her sleazeball of a husband. I stopped reading it after one too many pauses where I had to yell out to the quiet room: "What is wrong with you, woman? Stand up for yourself! Emancipate yourself! Recognize what your own choices are leading you into!"

This gets a 5 out of 10. It certainly didn’t do Irene any credit that she was only freed from the tyranny of this evil bastard when he died in a car accident. She stuck with him to the end, even though all she ever got from him was a sack-cloth dress, and rape.

The Long War, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (2014)

Okay, so now we get the idea. Pratchett and Baxter are using this series as a sandbox for a bunch of tenuously connected alternate-Earth stories. Interesting, but, they uncover and begin exploring so many mysteries that I fear this is going to turn into a literary version of the Lost TV show, where you’re drawn more and more into the author’s apparent grand plan, eagerly guessing how it will all fit together, only to find out that there was never any grand plan at all, and the things that don’t fit together "yet" just don’t fit together, period.

So I tried to take this as an anthology. In that context, it’s still a pretty good read. 6 out of 10 snarling dog-people up.

Banished, by Lauren Drain (2013)

Continuing my religious kick. An interesting look into the ugly inner circle of the Westboro Baptist Church. As you’d expect, it’s populated by sociopaths and sycophants, and the pathetic children they’ve either spawned or adopted. Lauren was lucky enough to foster a few connections to the outside world and she escaped. An insightful and gossipy read. 6 out of 10.

The Clockwork Scarab by Colleen Gleason (2013)

I know it sounds strange to say, and it’s clearly my own fault for choosing the reading list I do, but it’s refreshing to read a fantasy novel with young women as the main characters that was written by a young woman. I can’t give any itemized account of differences, and even if I attempted to it would just invite accusations of gender stereotyping, but there was something I really enjoyed here, in this blend of lighthearted adventure, and enthusiastic digressions over wardrobe and setting, and the lack of frivolous "grit" or a tiresome "tragic past".

The ending was inconclusive, but I didn’t care - I was eager to spend another series of afternoons with these characters dashing about their pastiche alternate world. 7 steampunk rivets out of 10.

Naked In Baghdad by Anne Garrels (2004)

A first-hand account of the opening of the recent Iraq war by a tough-as-nails correspondent. An efficient and honest you-are-there narrative that doesn’t contain much direct philosophizing or introspection, but eagerly invites it in the reader. Just what you’d expect from a journalist, actually. 7.5 loose bricks out of 10.

Bryant And May #10: The Invisible Code by Christopher Fowler (2013)

Another good entry in the series. Chases, interviews, guided tours of English architectural history, and plenty of bon-mots from the irascible Arthur Bryant. A solid competitor to Terry Prachett for reading pleasure. 8 hidden needles with mysterious poison out of 10.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis (2014)

This book takes what is potentially a very boring, dry subject, and makes it entertaining by focusing on the characters involved. I’m glad I read it, even if all it did was confirm the level - and nature - of the digital corruption that I already assumed was infecting the world stock market. In a nutshell: Insider trading is now built-in, and the trading platforms exist mainly to provide an easy method for useless middle-men to extract money from the process.

This Book Is Full Of Spiders by David Wong (2013)

Very entertaining, in a B-movie sort of way. If you want more of the vibe of Big Trouble In LIttle China and Bill And Ted, with a couple of genuinely horrifying scenes thrown in for variety, check this out. Sometimes the author indulges his philosophical side too much, but he makes up for it with excellent humor.

The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (2014)

About half of this book concerns a splinter group of humanity called The Next, young super-geniuses who, as one reviewer nicely puts it, "reminded me unfavorably of my grandson's smart-aleck geek buddies when they were in high school."

I didn’t care for that half. The Next were a nonsensical mashup of physiology-defying intellectual powers and ridiculous adolescent angst. I assume we’ll learn their fate in future sequels, but I’m not looking forward to it. It’s hard to get invested in characters when their motives don’t make sense.

The other half was an exploration of the titular long Mars, and it was pretty darned interesting, even though a lot of it felt like recycled material from Stephen Baxter’s other work. The guy is in love with the early Russian and U.S. space programs, and he clearly hijacked this series, fast-forwarding the timeline past a large chunk of the Long Earth’s new history just to make the leap to Mars feel plausible. He also distorted the basic premise of "stepping" way out of shape, by declaring that a human could "step" between worlds and casually bring along an entire two-man glider, with luggage and passenger, plus a wind-envelope of unknown size all around the vehicle. How? Well, because we can’t explore the Long Mars otherwise, that’s how.

What a cheat.

Mary O’Reilly Book 1: Loose Ends by Terri Reid (2012)

This had a promising beginning, but somewhere in the second half I lost my grip on the author’s idea of "ghosts" and what they were supposed to be. Wandering souls, or just unresolved fragments of people? Corporeal or not? Able to appear to anyone, or just the "sensitive"? Stuck in one place, or able to travel? Can they make noise? Do they know what they need, or not? It seemed to change based on narrative convenience. Plus, if the villain were any more one-dimensional, he would vanish entirely.

4 out of 10 bloody handprints up.

Life On Mars: Tales from the New Frontier (2011)

These stories were all excellent, and were enhanced further by the "about the author" and "author’s note" sections that came after each one. I was impressed by the socio-political content as well. The authors not only asked "what would humanity do to Mars" but "what would Mars to do humanity" and they came up with some fascinating answers. 7 out of 10 atmosphere-skimming surf pods up.

Cold War, 1957

A silly story about a submarine captain who attempts to grow a gigantic artificial iceberg on the hull of his submarine and then push the thing onto the Florida beach as a practical joke. Clarke seems to think that one could create an iceberg by inflating a gigantic plastic bag with "supercooled air", laying it across a scaffolding, then spraying water at it. Maybe he did some math that I haven't done, but my gut feeling is that the process would totally fail.

Icebergs form in weather where vast areas of the sea and the sky are below the freezing temperature of regular water. (Saltwater can be well below the freezing temperature of regular water and remain a liquid.) If you had to spray water on a floating bag, the skin of the bag would have to contend with the heat in all the surrounding atmosphere, and you would need to be constantly pumping the air inside the bag through whatever you're using as refrigeration machinery. You'd need to make some incredibly cold air to overcome that constant loss.

Then consider that Clarke intends to do this in the ocean. Where is he getting the water? He can't just draw it in from the sea, that water is incredibly salty and will be very resistant to freezing. Did he invent some kind of instant desalinization technique back in 1957?

I suppose this story worked as intended since it got me thinking about the physics. Other than that it was not memorable.

Who's There, 1958

An astronaut takes a spacewalk in what appears to be a haunted spacesuit, in this brief and smartly constructed story. I enjoyed it despite knowing it was completely ridiculous, and in spite of guessing the plot twist only a few pages in. (A couple of red herrings could have eliminated that problem, I think.)

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea, 1957

One of Clarke's good-old-boy scientists goes on a meandering trip down the American coast and winds up on a boat that is actually a piece of prototype mining equipment, extracting tiny amounts of various elements from seawater. Clarke must have been obsessed with the ocean this year. Then more scientists get involved, and there's a sliver of dramatic tension as Clarke whips up an intellectual competition between them. If not for that tension the story would just be a plotless guided tour, past a few mildly interesting exhibits in a museum of technological spitballing.

The idea of extracting minerals from seawater has been repeatedly explored in the intervening half-century, but the general problem is always the same: None of the filtering techniques are passive enough to justify the energy expenditure in sorting out one atom of uranium from, say, 500 million water molecules. Plus the elements are usually bonded to others and require further work to separate.

Still, it's an intriguing idea. And it's unfair to fault Clarke for not being a fortune teller or a strict scientist. He was a writer, not a scientist.

Let There Be Light, 1957

This isn't really science fiction, and it isn't really a murder mystery since the murder is admitted at the very beginning. Harry Purvis just tells the story straight, explaining how a scientist decides to get revenge on his cheating wife by using a searchlight to blind a speeding car and cause a fatal accident.

With a little reorganization, this could be the plot to some overly-dramatic radio crime drama from two decades earlier. It would have suspiciously loud footsteps, interstitial organ music, and the constant noise of a thunderstorm. When the detective and his pretty assistant wander out onto the moors to examine the crash site, there would be enough twittering insects, yipping animals, and croaking amphibians to populate an entire zoo.

Also, the whole thing would be sponsored by "Clarke Brand Cigarrette Holders", and the detective would take a smoke break right in the middle of the story and ramble for almost five minutes about how durable his cigarette holder is.

Sleeping Beauty, 1957

This is a little story about a guy who gets an injection from his mad-scientist uncle, in order to eliminate his snoring, and instead it completely eliminates his need for sleep. At first it's a blessing, but eventually the sheer boredom of staying up all night - every night - frustrates him so much that he asks his uncle to reverse the condition. Instead, his uncle accidentally drops him into a coma, then inconveniently dies and takes all his research with him, so no one knows how to wake the guy up.

The story ends with the guy peacefully inert, and the rest of the family carrying on without him. There's some framing intrigue about his conniving wife and a promised inheritance, but it's not worth considering. We've already established at this point that Clarke does not think much of women and this is just fuel for the fire.

Perhaps I'm supposed to make some exculpatory aside about this story being a product of 1950's-era gender views - like I shouldn't be complaining if I deliberately read stories from an earlier era - but that wouldn't be honest. I read this stuff and it bothers me. None of the science, or the ficton, behind any of these stories actually requires that women be portrayed less like human beings and more like housecats wearing clothing, which is what Clarke does. No, really; women seem to exist in his stories as finicky pets who divide their time between chasing shiny things and throwing hissy-fits. Clarke is a man of far-flung scientific curiosity - why did he feel the need to dress-down his work with this unnecessary patronizing?

Still, I would rather focus on the central idea of the story, so I'm going to do that now. How would I react if I could do without sleep? Well, I have access to some pretty amazing modern technology, and I'm already a bit of a night owl, and I live in a big city. If I didn't need to sleep, I would probably spend each day like so:

4:00am to noon: Put in a day at work. Schedule all my meetings to end before noon.
noon to 4:00pm: Engage in some kind of volunteer work, or a second job, involving the outdoors.
4:00pm to 8:00pm: Take off via bicycle to some relaxing part of the city - a park, a coffee shop, a lake or hillside with a view. Walk, hike, chat on the phone, or bring someone along. End with dinner.
8:00pm to 4:00am: Do home projects. Read and write, mostly, or arrange music, or fuss with electronics, or root around in the garden. I love stuff like this; I'm a major homebody.

Sounds great, really. How would you divide up a 24-hour day? Would you go crazy? Run out of things to do? What could you accomplish if you never had to stop for a nap?

The Defenestration Of Ermintrude Inch, 1957

A scientist makes a device that counts spoken words, then challenges his annoying chatterbox wife to a contest to get her to shut up, then when she cheats at the contest, he allegedly throws her out the window.

I think can comfortably speak for female readers in this case, even though I have a penis, by saying to Arthur C Clarke: Grow up, you jackass.

Big Game Hunt, 1956

A very strange story about a scientist who invents a device that can "remote control" living creatures by electrically stimulating their nervous systems, making their muscles move. He eventually takes the device out into the middle of the ocean, drops it overboard, and uses it to compel monstrous sea-creatures to swim to the surface for observation.

I lost count of the holes in the premise - impossiblities in physics and biology, mostly - but the story was short and well-framed enough to remain compelling. Plus I always like it when stories end in disaster for the protagonist.

Critical Mass, 1949

A silly story about a bunch of scientists getting obsessed with radioactivity and panicking over a car accident. I saw the big plot twist way too early. Nothing to see here; move on ...

The Next Tenants, 1957

A rogue scientist is exploring some termite colonies, possibly mutated by man-made radiation. Another scientist in charge of a local nuclear test gets curious, and investigates. Turns out the termites are rapidly learning to use technology, and the rogue scientist is deliberately training them.

The narrative framing is only barely enough to justify the explorative conversation between the two scientists. That's okay - the premise is pretty interesting, even if a more thorough study of the mechanisms that drive an insect colony does not actually bear it out. It may be true that a hive mind is a kind of mind, and it's reasonable to expect that a mind is capable of learning, but to meet that expectation you have to twist and squash your definition of "learn" into something quite foreign.

I believe a termite colony "thinks" in a way closer to how our bodies "think", if one sets the brain aside and considers the body as a collective of individual cells. The technological advances made by the termites in Clarke's story would be equivalent to our bodies hanging around for a while and then suddenly redesigning the layout of our lungs to be more efficient, or making our eyes sensitive to infra-red, or turning our feet into hands, or whatever else makes life easier. Bodies just aren't that innovative - especially for no good reason.

Besides, fundamental changes like those would require a reworking of the way our bodies are grown, from the embryo on up. In the same way, sprawling insect colonies are grown in an orderly fashion from a tiny handful of individual insects. Where is the "hive mind" in this process? It can't dictate the terms of the colony if it doesn't even exist yet. No, changes in growth have to come from something more fundamental. Changes in genes, for example?

There's a bacterium that lives in the guts of all termites that helps it digest wood. It has its own genome, and its own genetic history, even though its symbiotic relationship with the termite is millions of years old. If you think about it, you can just about imagine how the arrangement started. Some insect was eating a plant that grew on wood, and ingested a piece of wood that also had this wood-eating bacteria on it. Perhaps the insect died, perhaps not, but this scenario probably repeated itself for quite a long while in some part of the world, and eventually the insects that could tolerate the bacterium outlived their peers. Then the bacterium started hanging out in their stomachs permanently, after the first time they ate it, and those insects lived even longer because the bacterium was excreting extra nutrients while digesting useless wood. The insects could now eat something their peers couldn't, giving them another food source. Then at some point an insect laid an egg that carried the bacteria along, which cemented the advantage. And the first terminte colony was born.

(Fun fact: Modern genetics has provided us with some specific details about this story.)

This process obviously took an incredibly long time, and was also thoroughly dependent on external factors. Selection pressures. How does this path to innovation compare to the simple "training exercises" that Clarke's scientist puts his termite colony through, building them little sleds and tools? Well, it's hard to imagine anything more different, actually. Selection pressures, working on a pliable organism, created a hive mind in termites over millions of years, the same way it gave them the ability to digest wood. How reasonable is it to expect that such a hive mind can be reshaped in a matter of days by handing "it" an instruction manual?

As an aside - another aside, really - this whole scenario reminds me of the "anthropic principle". Put simply, it means that things are the way they are around us because if they were too different, we wouldn't be around to observe and comment on them ... and invoke concepts like the "anthropic principle" in the first place. The definition is a little bit self-referential, yes.

Anyway it comes to mind because it makes an interesting comment about evolution, and the mechamisms of evolution on our planet Earth. Suppose rudimentary life formed billions of years ago, but the mechanism was a little too much like clockwork - a little too accurate. Natural selection can't operate very much on a life form that's highly resistant to change. Consider the opposite scenario - life formed billions of years ago, and was too pliable, constantly changing and mutating even without external selection pressure. Generation after generation, the organisms with good survival skills would reproduce - and then fail to pass on their survival skills. Life would quickly extinguish itself. In either scenario, there would never be any chance of constructing "highly evolved" creatures like ourselves.

But ... here we are. So, we can confidently assume that the organisms leading up to us were just flexible enough to mutate in interesting new directions, and also just consistent enough to pass good survival skills down the generations, and eventually even hang on to old baggage in case it becomes useful later on. Otherwise: No humans. No one around to make any observations or assumptions.

How many billions of planets all around us are absolutely stuffed with single-celled life, having independently created it from bizarre tidal chemistry, or having been seeded with it by frozen tough-as-nails spacefaring granules ... yet without any of those tiny organisms ever getting flexible enough to form bodies, and spinal cords, and limbs and brains and critters declaring their own anthropic principle?

What if we live in a universe that's sloshing with life in all directions, yet still contains no one else to talk to?

It's an interesting question, and it also defines a spectrum for us to consider. We may be surrounded by life, and it may even be large animals, and yet still not possess intelligence sufficient to hold a conversation with us. In fact the precedent here on Earth is not encouraging: Animals no more intelligent than the average chicken have been dominant most of the time, and in a hundred thousand years or so, our own rise to world dominance has already crossed the threshold from destructive to self-destructive. High intelligence may actually be a major disadvantage, past the first few thousand generations. Our fate as a species might have been sealed with the first symbol we carved on a cave wall.

The Pacifist, 1956

When I was a kid I had a silly fascination with making the computer - a cold and impartial box of wires and plastic - spew bizarre insults onto its screen, in BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS, or better yet, blurt them out loud in a mangled metallic voice, indiscriminately, to anyone passing by. Family members and fellow students, mostly.

It took a certain amount of obsession to get the computer to sound angry, by messing with the stream of raw phonemes that made each word, and my friends and I were divided on which was funnier - a robotic voice that sounded hostile, or one that called people things like "cack-headed pie crust snorter" in a flat, dispassionate monotone. We could never settle the debate, but as time passed, we did uncover a general rule: The more realistic the voice technology got, the funnier it was to call people hideous things with it in monotone.

We still amuse ourselves with stuff like this 25 years later, of course. The joke of making your phone fart and then excuse itself is today's variation on the theme.

Anyway, this short story is about an extremely early occurrence of a computer being manipulated to spew insults, and though it's fiction, I found it totally believable. It was a short, fun, read - and oddly nostalgic.

Publicity Campaign, 1953

This story was just long enough to make a funny point. Hit-it-and-quit-it, as James Brown would say. A mass-media advertising blitz to raise awareness of an expensive new "alien invasion" movie reaches its peak, just as an emissary for an actual alien race attempts to make contact by showing up in person and strolling around. Violent hijinks ensue, repeatedly, and the leader of the expedition blows a gasket and sterilizes the entire surface of the Earth. That'll show 'em!

Yes, there's the usual Clarkeian hand-wringing just under the surface, but this time he kept the tone light and fleet enough that I didn't mind.

Venture To The Moon, 1956

A series of short tales woven together, all about the antics of scientists on the moon. Just about all the science was shown to be inaccurate over the next decade, but it's hard to care when the stories are so entertaining.

This is Clarke writing to his strengths, using a scenario he's very comfortable with: What happens when you get a bunch of excited good-old-boy scientists together and drop them in the middle of an exotic phenomenon? Investigation - the forming of questions and the a-ha moment of discovering the answers - is the extent of the plotting here. Manly competition is the extent of the drama.

Actually, Clarke did extend the drama beyond manly competiton, in one part, and the result is kind of distateful. He brings in the only female character anywhere in the series of tales, and she turns out to be a repugnant gold-digger. Way to win hearts, Mr. Clarke.

The Ultimate Melody, 1957

A just-about-short-enough story about a scientist who invents a machine that reads brainwaves to zero in on the "ultimate melody", a tonal composition that is so incredibly catchy that it jams the brain of any listener into a permanent loop. I can't decide if this story was too long for such a paper-thin premise, or too short instead. Imagine the crime you could commit with a recording of that song and a good pair of earplugs. Imagine the havoc you could wreak on the battlefield.

Remember that Monty Python skit about a joke so funny that it made people die laughing, and how it was instantly militarized and used in the war effort? Clarke could have rolled in that direction and told a nice satirical tale long before the Pythons came along. Or imagine an orchestra passing out sheet music, only a few bars per person, and then playing it at a concert. Imagine them getting it slightly wrong, and causing everyone in the audience to babble incoherently for days, instead of merely going catatonic. Or scrambling their vocabulary around for some reason. Imagine some curious parishoners throwing the Bible through a borrowed analysis engine and discovering that various passages had a similar scrambling effect. One of the people involved could get overexposed to the "right" passages and turn into a prophet, then they could make the process repeatable and generate an army of whacked-out prophets, all claiming to know different versions of the future.

So many directions to go in!

Patent Pending, 1954

I was startled to discover that the premise of this story is a strong precursor to a film I saw called Strange Days, which was scripted by James Cameron and directed by none other than Kathryn Bigelow way back in 1995. The film is graphic, and bizarre, and flawed, and totally fascinating, and it takes a premise almost identical to the one in this story to a very dark and disturbing place.

Clarke's exploration is as lighthearted as the movie's is grave, mainly due to the framing device of his chatty storyteller Harry Purvis. I can happily recommend both the movie and this story.

Also I find it interesting that the central technology in both these stories - a device that can record and then play back the experiences of another person - eventually slips past the grasp of both Clarke and Cameron. With this technology loosed into the world they then have no idea where it will ultimately take mankind, or how it will ultimately settle into the cultural landscape, ... so they just leave it hanging.

For a possible exploration of this, in another flawed but totally fascinating story, check out "The Light Of Other Days".

Refugee, 1955

Sometimes listening to these short stories in sequence makes for some bizarre contrast. Refugee comes right after Patent Pending, but while Patent Pending is old-school speculative science fiction, Refugee barely qualifies as science-fiction at all. Instead it's concerned with the plight of British royalty, and the attempt by one fictional prince to escape the fishbowl of public scrutiny by stowing away on a spaceship and having a little carefree adventure.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, and I'll never understand the appeal of a royal family, or living vicariously through one, but I found this story as boring as heck.

Moving Spirit, 1957

A Trifling little Harry Purvis tale that's mostly a courtroom farce, and would barely fill out the corners of your average Law And Order episode. I'm surprised it was published.

The Reluctant Orchid, 1956

This story is basically a revenge fantasy gone wrong. Although the descriptions of the titular plant are interesting, the rest of the characters are cardboard.

Not one of Clarke's best. And boy, he really doesn't seem to think much of women. Yeah, the male protagonist in this story is equally repugnant, but with women, Clark's got a pattern going across all these stories. It's hard to miss.

What Goes Up, 1956

This tale was told amusingly enough, but the kinks in the treatment of physics were just too bizarre and inconsistent for me. With every paragraph I caught myself saying, "That doesn't make sense!" or "Hey that completely contradicts what just happened!"

I don't mind "soft" sci-fi; I really don't. But this story didn't even have internal consistency, and without a few interesting characters or some witty dialogue, I was adrift. I find it telling that Clarke decided to frame the whole thing in the context of an unreliable narrator. The fellow telling the story-within-a-story was charged with making the whole thing up to impress people ... and if he did, where does that leave us?

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

A while ago I stopped doing monthly reports of books I read, because what had started as a fun exercise in combing through my thoughts had turned into something with a foolish consistency. But I really have to say something about this book.

(786 reviews on Amazon and still a solid five stars. That should tell you something!)

I’m a 38-year-old dude. By common wisdom I should have a very stoic appearance, generally. But I had to pause in reading this book, put it down, and sit there and cry for a little while. Not once, but four times. At least four times. This interwoven stories in this book astounded me, revolted me, and humbled me. At first I had a little bit of trouble keeping the interview subjects straight because the narrative jumps between them, but it didn’t matter that much, since the effect - and the possible intention of the book - is to blur the experiences of these people together, into one highly detailed tapestry of political disenfranchisement, psychological abuse, and appalling and abject poverty.

We are talking serious poverty. "Children attempting to eat the bark off the trees" poverty. "People fishing through animal shit for undigested kernels of corn" sort of poverty. We are talking "my shirt has no sleeves because I tore them off to use as menstrual rags", "I just had sex with a stranger for half a fistful of rice", "frogs are now extinct in North Korea because we ate all of them" sort of poverty.

North Korea remains largely opaque to Western perceptions. The country is hard to see into, and what one does see is culturally difficult to understand. "Nothing To Envy" starts out interesting enough, but then guides you steadily down the path of interesting to somewhere much more intense. It’s an almost whiplash-inducing attitude adjustment, and it carries additional impact by describing the inner lives - the thought processes - of people who have been born and raised in the midst of a gigantic cult disguised as a government. North Koreans do not labor under the bootheel of one man so much as under their own collective hallucination, competing with each other to swallow the biggest share of cognitive dissonance. When things went very bad, very few of them managed to escape.

Some of the memories recounted by these escapees are impactful in unexpected ways. One woman describes how she defected to China and then eventually to South Korea, and through her friends in China, was able to send a messenger back into North Korea to contact her mother. Her mother, a dedicated North Korean citizen despite a lifetime of suffering, accepted the offer to visit her daughter, even though it meant temporarily crossing the border into China - a risky and difficult journey.

The mother arrived at the Chinese safehouse, well across the border, and was astounded to see a color television, a refrigerator, and an electric rice cooker - a particularly surprising instrument since back in North Korea electricity was strictly rationed and it was illegal to use it for cooking. The daughter called her on the phone and confessed that she was in South Korea - not China - and wanted her mother to join her there. Her mother was furious, and refused the offer, and swore that she would rest at the safehouse for a few days and then go straight back to North Korea like a good citizen, and good riddance to her daughter.

She rested at the house, eating the plentiful food, and watching the color television. One night as she slept in the bed she dreamed about her recent past in North Korea. Her only possessions had been a blanket, an aluminum pot, and two spoons. She’d watched helplessly, as her husband and her son slowly starved to death before her eyes in the one-room shack they called home, going from delirious, to bedridden, to silent corpses. She was awakened the next morning by the automated "ding" of the electric rice cooker in the other room. "I’ve spent 57 years suffering ... for no reason," she thought. "I’ve wasted my life."

That was her epiphany - the "ding" of an electric rice cooker. She never returned to North Korea.

What I find shocking on a personal level is that this was happening in the late 1990’s. At the time I was whooping it up in college in Santa Cruz, stuffing cafeteria food into my face and worrying more about my inane romantic life than anything material. By the North Korean metric I was living better than the emperor himself, especially if you factor in my access - to things like the university library, diverse foods, unrestricted travel, and eligible, intelligent young ladies. I fully admit that I didn’t take my education as seriously as I should have, and though I did have some idea of how lucky I was, I didn’t understand just how much luckier I was at that very moment than, say, the two million North Koreans who wasted away during that time.

Almost no one at UCSC - certainly no one I talked to, instructors or students - was aware of North Korea. The hot political issue on campus was "Free Mumia", a series of protests about a writer being held in prison on a suspicious murder charge over in Philadelphia. I remember feeling exasperated that so many people around me claimed to have sufficient grasp of the facts to have such a strong opinion, and that of all the things they were agitating for, it was for release of a convicted murderer nine states away.

But in retrospect, I think the capriciousness of those campus politics was a reflection of a less flattering truth: For all the chest-pounding I saw from fellow college students about our ability - and obligation - to change the world, we were not actually all that powerful. Not at the time. There was a whole lot we just didn’t know, and the networks we relied on for information were very distorted by - perhaps even defined by - the personal interests of those who ran them. ("If you're not outraged, you’re not paying attention," I’ve heard it said. I suspect many people feel that outrage itself is sufficient, and that paying close attention is optional.) But maybe "Free Mumia" at UCSC wasn't so much about the prisoner himself as it was about a whole lot of middle-class white kids denouncing their parents’ collective racism -- real or assumed.

That opinion makes it pretty obvious that the college experience is half a lifetime away for me, and that the years have not been kind to the memories. The biggest thing I feel right now is a kind of survivor’s guilt; or something like that even though I am not even a survivor of anything in particular. There was no famine to endure or gestapo to resist over here in California. A whole bunch of people lost homes they didn’t technically own, but I wasn’t one of them. I faced a sobering medical issue a few years ago but have very fortunately recovered from it. Compared to the stories I’ve read in this book, my life has been an absolute cakewalk. And, curse my ridiculous human nature, I still regularly find myself scheming for some way to make it even better, even easier, even more fantastic, because for my whole life there has been a thread of discontent woven through me that keeps turning up as my circumstances change and then stabilize.

(My latest hare-brained idea is a two-month bicycle trip 1600 miles through New Zealand. If I’m clever I can save up the money to pay for it all in advance while still covering the mortgage and putting in adequate time at work.)

How can I pursue such flippant things with a clear conscience? Or does it make more sense for me to go in the other direction - and try to drop this "survivor’s guilt" completely? Live well as a kind of revenge against all the poverty my ancestors experienced? What would someone who managed to escape from North Korea do? I’d like to say they would do exactly the same thing, but that’s awfully Western of me, isn’t it, opting for the greater consumption... I should just keep paying down my mortgage.

Reading this book also reminded me how dependent we are on our peers and parents to construct our reality for us, or at least the framework that we can hang reality on, and reminded me that things could be very different for me - inside and out. I recently read another book called Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church and am startled by the similarities I found in North Korea. I think all the enemies of the new modern era, of the next four or five decades, can be collected under one word: Cults. Organizations that thrive only by depriving their members of almost all outside information.

A little outside information could have saved a million lives in North Korea.

The Nine Billion Names Of God, 1953

Clarke must have felt pretty snug when he managed to work the big twist in this story into the last word of the last sentence. Other than that sleight-of-hand and some snappy dialogue, there isn't much to this story beyond the somewhat iconic title.

Armaments Race, 1954

Another cute story from Clarke's pub-full-of-scientists setting. Not science fiction, though. I had a feeling well before the end that he would never even try to explain the technological breakthroughs involved, and that drained my enthusiasm. Anyone can describe something fantastical. It's the plausible explanations that I find compelling.

No Morning After, 1954

In his stories, long or short, Clarke spends a lot of his time wringing his hands over the collective failings of the human race, through the mouthpiece of his characters. After a while he begins to sound like Eeyore from the Hundred Acre Wood.

In this particular story, the human race faces imminent death from a sudden solar explosion, and for ludicrous science-ey sounding reasons, a benevolent alien race that stands a chance of saving us can only make contact telepathically, and only through the mind of one thoroughly drunk human being. The human assumes he is hallucinating, and basically tells the alien race to go screw itself.

If it were funnier, it would be a black comedy, but Clarke overplays his hand - or should I say, over-wrings his hands - and the story remains mere tragedy.

Kaboom; world ends; we all die! Are you listening, rest of humanity? Booo! Carry on.

The Star, 1955

This story is told entirely through the interior monologue of one scientist on a spaceship, as he ruminates on the discovery an alien civilization in ruins.

The aliens anticipated their fate and built a gigantic monolith on the outermost planet of their solar system, completing it just before the other planets were engulfed in a supernova. For me, the setting invokes very strong memories of a computer game I played years ago called Alien Legacy. It too, was full of monoliths and artifacts from a tragically extinct alien species, and it was great fun to go digging through them and piece together the clues.

As an aside, it never stops being amusing to encounter the anachronisms in Clarke's world. Here we have a robust spacefaring civilization that has explored countless worlds ... and recorded everything on miles of magnetic tape and chemical film stock. Yeah! Why not!

The Deep Range, 1954

This was a bizarre exploratory work about whale farming. (That's FARMING, not FARTING!) A guy goes down in a sub, with a couple of dolphin sidekicks, and "protects" a pod of whales from one of their natural predators, thus ensuring that the great underwater farmlands of the future Earth are kept wholly for the engorgement of human stomachs. You can probably tell I wasn't very impressed with this tale.

I was also a bit surprised at my reaction. Why would I find the idea of fencing and policing large parts of the ocean to be so upsetting - or implausible - when just about every scrap of exploitable land surface has been utterly transformed by this same practice? Well, it's not the use of ocean space that's upsetting to me in this story. It's the firm line drawn between participants. Humans are masters, dolphins are pets, whales are cattle, sharks and orca are vermin. The master is in charge, the pets obey, the whales are grateful (until they are eaten presumably) and the sharks and orca are violently slaughtered, with prejudice.

It makes sense the story conveys these things because it's obviously constructed as an analogue of cattle ranching. But dolphins are not dogs; they do not live to serve. Perhaps some future custom-bred dolphins, but not the ones that winnow the oceans today. Likewise, whales are not as bonehead-stupid as modern cattle - and while I suppose "future whales" could be just as dumb as posts, that actually begs the point I'm trying to make: Humans are generally uncomfortable killing and eating an animal that's intelligent, or exhibits behavior too reflective of our own. Our modern ears are too familiar with the sound of whalesong to condone factory farming of these huge beasts.

(This is a pretty recent sea-change, pun intended. Humans have been hunting whales for at least 8000 years. Here; read about the International Whaling Commission!)

Attitudes towards predators have morphed since the 50's as well. It's no longer the most desirable outcome to just run out and shoot anything that tries to dig under the fence. These days if you're a clever farmer you trap the animal, or study its life cycle or biology and find more efficient ways to deter it from invading. In other words, violence is wasteful and tends to be pushed farther down the list of options. Not always - an infestation of rodents is still best solved with a cat - but then you go out and patch the hole in the grain silo.

Yes, Clarke's story can be interpreted through the attitudes of his time. That's a sensible thing to do. But I'm glad the times have changed. I read his "what if" scenario and the first thing I felt was a sense of loss, for all the genetic diversity that would need to be stomped out by millennia of directed breeding for whales-as-cows, dolphins-as-sheepdogs, et cetera.

Call me a hippie.

I was surprised to learn that Clarke decided to revisit this and create a full-length novel with the same premise, and name. I don't think I'll read it.

Encounter In The Dawn, 1953

Along time ago I watched an episode of The Outer Limits where the protagonist was an astronaut who was trapped alone on a newly discovered planet. He spent most of the time glued some kind of intergalactic radio device listening to the progress of a devastating war happening back home. By the end of the episode it looked like he was going to be the only surviving member of the human race, except in the meantime he's also encountered a native of the planet he's stranded on - a solitary survivor of some other apocalypse - and it's a human woman.

Not a vaguely humanoid woman, a woman with four arms and huge eyeballs, or even a woman with too much hair or bad teeth ... but a straight-up fashion-magazine human woman, about 19 years old, with shaved legs and a flattering Jane-Of-The-Jungle outfit.

In the last few minutes, he introduces himself as Adam, and the babbling woman - who is young and spunky but also as dumb as a bag of hammers (just the way they liked them in the 1950's) - reveals that the new planet is called "Earth", thus turning a sci-fi deep-space apocalypse into a lunkhead biblical origin story.

Three pages in, I was certain Arthur C Clarke was going to pull the same damn stunt in this story.

Turns out he had other things on his mind. The intergalactic archaeologists of this story encounter a creature that is obviously not human, but shows intriguing promise. Then the decline of their own space empire calls them away before their research can bear fruit, and the reader is left hanging. And perhaps that's the point: Maybe Arthur C Clarke was attempting to instill in us the same feeling of regret that his future scientists feel here, of an opportunity lost. On the other hand, maybe he just got bored with his own story. Either way it wasn't much of a read.

If I Forget Thee, oh Earth, 1951

This story tries hard not to be a big old heaping mountain of Arthur C. Clarke standard hand-wringing about the failings of fickle humanity. But no matter how intently you talk about the tiny rocks that crunch under your feet, you can't obscure the fact that you're mountain climbing.

I spent almost all the time simply waiting for this story to make its point and end, so I could move on to something more intersting.

Jupiter Five, 1953

The big premise is fantastic: An alien spaceship in our solar system, that has gone unnoticed because it's so enormous that we assumed it was a moon. Clarke does fine work getting us there and inside, carried along by the plot contrivance of two rival gangs of scientists. But then he tears his focus away from the wondrous ship and instead attempts to amuse us with gravity acrobatics. What the heck?

I'm glad he would eventually revisit this premise with Rendezvous With Rama. That's a great book. Brilliant, even. And don't get me wrong - this is a good short story too. It just doesn't keep the focus where I'd like.

At one point Clarke is describing a statue that the explorers find deep in the spacecraft, and he compares the expression on the vaguely reptilian alien's face to a painting of a famous cardinal. I googled it, and now the picture is wedged in my photo history, invoking memories of lizard people and giant spacecraft every time I thumb over it.

The Other Tiger, 1953

A short, playful, contrarian story that seems to think it's a lot cuter than it actually is. I was unimpressed. Perhaps I'd just eaten some undercooked sausage, or maybe the weather was bad.

Second Dawn, 1951

Clarke spends the first third of this story dealing with the aftermath of a war between two species on a distant planet. One of his main characters is a general in the army, who has discovered a way to destroy the minds of his enemies telepathically. This is significant because his entire civilization is a species of creature that has no prehensile limbs, and cannot use tools of any kind, so their minds are highly developed but their technology is not.

Anyway, after a bit of boilerplate Arthur-C-Clarke-standard monologue about the horrors of war and the burdens of sentient beings, the story takes a left turn and follows another character, who is in the midst of developing a new relationship with a different kind of sentient being from a different part of the planet. These are feeble creatures with very well developed hands and arms that can use a wide variety of tools, and with the telepathic guidance of the first species, they are beginning a technological revolution that seems to be highly beneficial for everyone. Nevertheless, by the end of the story, some of the characters are expressing doubt.

The symbiosis between the species was most intriguing in the ways that it was flawed. Deprive any thinking creature of its symbiote and its toolbelt and suddenly it was as useless and helpless as a barnyard animal, despite being a Wyle-E-Coyote "Super Genius". How much of our own technology has escalated beyond the ability of our own two hands to maintain? If something breaks, almost all the time our only options are to throw it away and do without it, or bring it to someone else who can fix it for us with special gear and training. In this respect, we have the same problem that the intelligent beings in the story do, without the added complication of a symbiote to make it obvious. (Unless you get wacky and think of our symbiote as electricity, I suppose.) "Helpless brain in a jar" is a state we all instinctively revile, but at the same time, we embrace it, eagerly. Gratefully.

Don't get me wrong; I don't bear any hipster nostalgia for working fields and chasing game and burning dung for heat in a dugout under the prairie. Instead, what I would rather see is a groundswell of interest in seeing how things work. All things, from indoor plumbing to outer space telescopes, from seeds to sailboats to sonatas.

But curiosity is an animal act, indulged under certain safe conditions, instilled from a young age. Clearly there is a lot of world-building yet to be done before we all feel safe enough to turn our minds to other things.

Death At The Priory by James Ruddick

This book inspired a lot of interesting thought.

It's a recounting of a famous unsolved murder case that took place in the late 1800's. The circumstances of the death are complex and bizarre, the surrounding events are titillating, and the wealth of evidence accumulated over the last 140 years provides a great playground for armchair detectives and gawkers like myself. James Ruddick approaches the material as an investigative reporter, and as you follow along you can almost see the Ken Burns slow-camera-pan over old photographs and documents, and the darkly-lit amateur theatre reenactment with a bunch of no-name actors in period costume, skulking around with suspicious expressions, all intercut with modern-day shots of unrecognizable buildings, roads, and signs. All that's missing are commercial breaks, but you can put the book down and create a few yourself to complete the BBC experience if you like.

The murder itself was not what made the book especially thought-provoking for me, though. It was the fact that the setting is late Victorian society, and the author goes to a lot of trouble framing the details of the case in their appropriate cultural context. This was a society in which women were essentially slaves, groomed from birth as chattel to secure financial and social connections between patriarchal family empires. Powerless before marriage, and equally powerless within it, a Victorian wife was not even allowed to assert a distinction between consenting sex and outright rape at the hands of her husband. Wealth and power were central; happiness was an irrelevant afterthought.

The legacy of Victorian culture has lingered, and I don't have to look very hard to see its eerie tentacles woven into every corner of even my own famously progressive liberal American environment. In this modern age, marriage is primarily about happiness. If your husband or wife is sabotaging it, you separate, and you try again. Even if children are involved, it is becoming accepted wisdom that an unhappy couple would be better off making separate households, and splitting the children between them. The law provides a way to make this happen even in cases where a separation creates a financial imbalance. This is almost the polar opposite of Victorian conduct, and yet, that conduct is still here - or something closely related, anyway - because our legal system is progressive, but human nature is stubborn.

Consider a few general observations about romance and dating:

A woman who has children, and then divorces, is going to have FAR more trouble finding a second husband than a divorced woman with no children, and more trouble than a man in either position.
A woman moving into her 30's will have much more trouble finding a husband than a man moving into his 30's will have finding a wife.
Men and women who acquire high wealth and status generally limit their dating pool to people of equal or higher wealth and status.
Additionally, men who acquire high wealth and status will more often exploit it to become philanderers.

I believe these observations apply for modern society, but taken together they are also something else: A blueprint one could use to construct Victorian codes of conduct from the ground up, the very practices we claim to have "progressed" so far beyond and left behind. This is interesting to me because in my time as a bachelor, moving through my 30's, I have seen these blueprints alive and breathing in the minds of some of the women I've dated, as well as in my own.

I've become very self-sufficient, and so have most of the women I've dated. Not just financially or socially, but emotionally as well. That changes a lot of things. When you have your own life happily established - whether by choice, or by force after finding yourself adrift for a time - your primary concern changes from whether a given suitor will help you pursue happiness, to whether a given suitor will interfere too much with the happiness you have already learned how to pursue. Your career, your social life, your way of running a household, your idea of a kickass vacation; you know what these things can be already, and you probably have most of them in place. And just as important, you know that any romantic entanglement demands compromise. That makes you a lot more choosy. You want someone who brings their own happiness to the table, so you can trade in it equally.

I've come to realize that I have a very feminine approach to romance, and I've even become choosy in a feminine way. I've become drawn to women with careers, with a handle on their own finances, with aggressive, assertive behaviors, sexual experience, high energy, short haircuts, sturdy limbs. Women who debate, and challenge, and belch and play in the mud and tell jokes, but who also have a strong affection for children and a home. All these things mix together and become an emotion, a feeling of interest and excitement, a desire to connect. The core of romantic desire. But again, there is a Victorian shadow around all of this. As I read Death At The Priory, I realized that my criteria were more-or-less the same criteria that the widow Florence Ricardo had settled on, after the disastrous seven-year ordeal of her first marriage, and after achieving financial independence and comfort. After 140 years and across a cultural and literal ocean, we were going about the same search, for the same reasons. What to make of that?

Florence's outcome was not good: She dated a rakish, exciting young man named Charles Bravo, then began to distance herself from him when he became predatory, only to get snared in a marriage when they got pregnant out of wedlock. His aggressive behavior turned to violence and he began to systematically deprive her of all power and control, and since this wasn't her first rodeo, she fought back, and the consequences were horrifying. Society and family conspired to keep her trapped in the marriage, and after her husband's death, she was crushed. She moved to a small house on the coast, became a hermit, and drank herself into her grave at the age of 28.

One thing that's striking to me about her history is her courtship with Charles Bravo. She was clearly hesitant about being married again, and was eventually able to ferret out specific reasons why Charles was not a good match. It's clear she would have rejected him in due time, before pregnancy forced her hand. The question I have is: Why Charles Bravo in the first place? Her first marriage had just been bad luck, and she clearly didn't want to repeat history. Instead she went from bad to worse.

I have an insidious suspicion. I suspect she was deliberately choosing a relationship with a man she would ultimately find incompatible, because she did not actually want to be married at all. Society was compelling her to search, but her instincts were sabotaging that search at the same time.

This translates to a question for myself: Am I somehow my own worst enemy in my attractions? Has my own desire to avoid repeating history somehow become an engine for it? Which is more important - a hesitation I feel after 15 minutes, or one I feel after 15 weeks? What if the key to avoiding the latter is to ignore the former?

What if I set the criteria as: Someone who doesn't care about a career, may not necessarily have complete financial independence, isn't particularly aggressive, doesn't care much for debate, grows her hair long, and avoids the mud? Sure, I suppose someone like that would be easier to stick with in most ways. But something tells me that I would not be happy. In fact, those criteria sound like a recipe for guaranteed disaster, and it wouldn't even be a fun courtship in the meantime.

I guess there just isn't any escape from experience. I can only choose the people I'll be happy with long-term from the pool of people that I am also happy with short-term, and if those groups are mutually exclusive, there isn't much I can do. Happiness in all things is not guaranteed. Florence Ricardo destroyed herself in the pursuit of it. If happiness as a perennial bachelor is my lot, with my overdeveloped and suspiciously gender-reversed Victorian instincts, so be it. It's not a bad outcome.

(I get to stay up as late as I want writing introspective journal entries, for example!)

These two months have been crazy, but I've still managed a bit of reading...

Breasts: A Natural And Unnatural History by Florence Williams

There's quite a variety of discussion here, from a cleverly presented skewering of the male-centric state of breast research, both medical and anthropological, to a terrifying investigation into the rise of body-polluting complex chemicals from manufactured goods - mostly plastics. I was fascinated to learn that there is a correlation between certain kinds of pollutant exposure in women during puberty, and the incidence of cancer IN THEIR GRANDCHILDREN. A compound that can linger across three generations is a force to be reckoned with.

I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit that the whole section on porn actresses and the implant craze was wasted on me, since I'd recently read the interviews in "The Big Book Of Breasts". Yes! I was totally reading it for the interviews. I was amazed to learn that an actress I'd seen as a kid, named - wait, let me google it - Francesca "Kitten" Natividad, that's her - was originally relatively small-breasted, but had undergone a series of direct silicone injections in Tijuana, ballooning her chest. By the time I saw her she was totally unreal. Then over the next twenty years, she began to suffer from an increasing variety of ailments, until some surgeons went in to remove the material and discovered that it had been industrial-grade silicone.

Very sobering stuff. This book isn't a downer, though. It's far more often interesting than terrifying, and when digested in parts - one half-chapter or so at a time - is a worthwhile read.

7 out of 10 slowly disintegrating flame-retardant carpet squares up.

The Victoria Vanishes, by Christopher Fowler

It took me a while to pick Bryant and May back up after the last tale - White Corridor - was so underwhelming. But it was inevitable. One of the ways to make a good mystery great is to wrap it in a compelling atmosphere, and entirely apart from the hit-and-miss appeal of his plot mechanics, Fowler’s atmosphere is first class. He uses his stories as a platform for some amazing digressions into the lore and atmosphere of London, and he communicates his deep affection for the city so thoroughly that I find myself nostalgic for a place I’ve never visited.

The Victoria Vanishes builds up to a massive confrontation with a huge shadowy organization, and the potential for a sublime payoff when Bryant and May decide to "go guerrilla" on their adversary, but to my disappointment, that confrontation never arrives. The mystery is solved, more or less, but there isn’t any justice in the solution. That ultimately tainted my enjoyment of this otherwise lovely book.

Six-and-a-half out of ten burial urns up.

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett

I listened to this for a bit of light entertainment while cleaning house, even though I remembered being unimpressed the first time through, more than a decade ago. My opinion hasn't changed. It's packed with clever hollywood references and it's kind of fun puzzling them all out, but there are so many that the plot and the setting and the characters and far too much of the discworld itself is distorted in favor of fitting them in. Why is there a big golden guardian carrying a sword? Well, because, the Oscars. Why does a character have a dream about skirts billowing up over a gust of wind from a sewer grate? Because Marilyn Monroe. And so on. Pratchett's characters are as fun to spend time with as ever, but they go through so many contortions that they lose their sense of identity, and it becomes hard to relate to them, and then to care about them. The book turns into a film.

A mere 6 banged grains up out of 10. Pratchett has done way better than this.

A Blink Of The Screen by Terry Pratchett

This is an anthology of Pratchett’s short fiction, spanning many years. It’s proof that even as a little kid his writing chops were substantial, and you can tell that his dialogue-driven style was already taking shape. The Discworld-themed stories from later years are amusing as well.

What really makes the collection shine, in my opinion, is the story about the writer who is confronted with one of his own characters inexplicably arriving on his doorstep. As I read it I could think of five or six ways the story could resolve itself, according to common tropes of many movies and books I’ve absorbed, but Pratchett managed to impress me by constructing a very character-driven resolution to the tale that was quite satisfying. He is a natural spinner of yarns, and even these unrefined oddities are a pleasure to listen to.

All The Time In The World, 1952

This one was a lot of fun! A few weeks later I read it again, in fact. Clarke hides the central invention of the plot and reveals it progressively, managing to make each reveal raise and answer questions in an engaging way. Plus, at the very end, it goes all Twilight-Zone cerebral horror on you. Always a great way to go.

A Walk In The Dark, 1950

Seems the inspiring concept for this short tale was the idea that one could get horribly lost on even a small piece of land, if that land is isolated in the unfamiliar environment of interplanetary space. Strange gravity, strange horizon lines, uncertain day-night cycle, or no day cycle at all, et cetera. Not bad, but a little clumsily escalated.

I remember walking home from friends’ houses, on an unlit road with forest canopy obscuring even the meager light from the stars, and getting freaked out the way the protagonist does in this tale, but I could at least rely on the fact that if I blundered into the woods like an idiot and got totally lost, I could sit on my butt and wait for the sun to rise.

Time’s Arrow, 1950

Among other things here, Clarke manages to sketch a bunch of amusing variations on his beloved archetype of the working-class scientist. I can almost hear the jazzy 50's-era lounge theme underscoring the dialogue. I can't say much about the plot without spoiling it, but it's worth a read as an early example of a concept that would later be mined well and truly to death in television and cinema.

The Parasite, 1953

Clarke claims that this story was the genesis for his later book "The Light Of Other Days", co-written with Stephen Baxter. I don’t see much of a connection, personally. It’s a bit of creepy psychological horror in the Lovecraftian tradition, but it's also a bit thin for even the short-form. Might as well skip it and read the later novel.

Nemesis, 1950

It's not too much of a spoiler to know that the titular nemesis enters a deep hibernation and accidentally wakes up alone beyond the end of human history. It's the second time that the cruel fate of being isolated for eternity has come up in this little collection of stories. Perhaps Clarke was going through a period of introspection, contemplating the dark side of a personality that is iconoclastic and generally happier working alone. It might explain why he revisited this story and repurposed it several times under different titles.

The Possessed, 1953

In the author's notes that accompany this story, Clarke confesses to having bad information about the behavior of the animal kingdom. However, since there's no way to correct the misconception without destroying the whole story, he leaves it unaltered.

As an aside, I'm noticing another pattern in stories from this era. Scientists and explorers were collectively enchanted by the phenomenon of radio at the time, and just like today, the yet unseen fronteirs of science - the truly fantastic ideas - tended to arrange themselves along the edge of the up-and-coming phenomenon, and filter through it. In other words, if a scientist of the 50's wanted to find a plausible way to explain something totally magical, like an invisible spacefaring consciousness, he or she would probably describe it by invoking an "advanced form of radio waves", or at least using radio-related words to give the impression of accessibility without actually explaining anything.

Before the era of radio, the big science phenomena were electricity and internal combustion. Automatons. Steampunk. Then later on, it was nuclear power and radiation. Monsters weren't just monsters, they were radioactive monsters. They weren't just deformed, they were mutated.

What's the zeitgeist now? Processing power and memory capacity, I suspect. We interpret the fantastic through our cellphone apps. If a spaceship travels the stars in our imagination, it does so at the capable hands of a solid-state, omnipresent computing device made of steel and glass, loaded with every piece of information ever generated, unobtrusively anticipating our every whim.

The Martian, by Andy Weir

All the four-star Amazon reviews are warranted ... this was book was a complete blast. It may not resonate very well with most of the population, but for a hard science geek like me (and many others) it's a great big Tournament Of Roses Parade of puzzles, dilemmas, experiments, and solutions, one after the other, marching happily on for hours, start to finish. I loved it! Even though the hero was obviously put through hell and it eventually became absurdly unrealistic that he would survive or find solutions, I wanted the book to spontaneously grow another 200 pages just so I could keep basking in that feeling of facing a difficult - but somehow solveable - SOMEHOW! - engineering problem.

It was also refreshing to see that the author knew exactly when to end the story. He saw the exact moment when the bottom would suddenly plummet out of the narrative, and went barely a paragraph farther than that.

8.5 out of 10 crushed faceplates up!

America Again: Re-Becoming The Greatness We Never Weren't, by Stephen Colbert (and his staff writers)

This book is a retread of the comedy style in his last book. Good on audio for chores or waiting in line, but not much else. Only the last chapter, where Stephen acts drunk for the whole thing, has real comedic energy to it. You might picture it as a coffee-table paperweight or as bathroom reading - something to leaf through when you're bored - but I recommend instead you go back in time almost 30 years by grabbing a copy of Science Made Stupid. The cover says it all!

4.5 out of 10 American lapel pins (made in China) up.

Inside The Kingdom, by Carmen Bin Laden

I'm not sure why I picked this up, but I'm glad I did. I think I was curious about a culture that was very obviously radically different from mine, and I wanted to view it from the perspective of someone who was intimately entangled with it but still, at heart, "a westerner". Looking back, I'd say this book is my equivalent to "50 Shades Of Grey". A drama-filled first-person story about bondage and putting parts in parts would bore me, but a drama-filled first-person story about descending into an appalling misogynistic culture and then fighting one's way back out of it? Hell yes.

It was very interesting to hear the author work through her conflicting emotions towards her ex-husband. She simultaneously adored him and resented him, simultaneously pushed against his desire for orthodox behavior, and supported him and advised him in his business ventures. She encouraged him to pursue greater status and responsibility, and generally tried to inhabit a role she could feel pride in as a wife without running too far astray from his family's strict muslim traditions. In a way, she was taking the ambitions that were being denied to her and displacing them to her husband. That in itself seems tragic, but on the other hand, if that displacement took place in a society where it could be mutual - where a husband was encouraged to take just as much pride in the success and the self-actualization of his wife - well, that sounds like a pretty fantastic marriage. Married partners should be each others' advocates, and in some measure, share in each other's ambitions as well.

I like that dynamic. I like the idea of being with someone who is going to push back.

But I digress. Carmen Bin Laden's story ended in divorce, healthy dynamic or no. She naïvely traipsed into the middle of a family with an entrenched culture that would never accept her. In fact, she simultaneously hungered for the acceptance and approval of the Bin Laden family while also feeling utterly repulsed by the pettiness, the ignorance, and the complete subjugation that the women appeared to embrace. It was a maelstrom of contradictions and it only grew worse when she had her own children, and it was only for their sake that she found the will to escape it.

Thought-provoking and certainly bound to create some interesting reading-group discussions. 7 out of 10 thieves' severed hands up.

Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks, by Ben Goldacre

Very educational. This book filled some gaps in my knowledge of scientific studies and methods that I wasn't even aware I had. It's also written in an amusing, almost bantery tone that borders at times on the self-satisfied - which is totally acceptable. Goldacre spends some time talking about the misconduct of organizations that should know better, and the revolting behavior of people who depend on us not knowing any better, and he manages to dance on the line between honorable objective detachment and emotionally satisfying - and hilarious - taunts, reproaches, and occasional potshots. Who wouldn't relish the opportunity to confront someone who is stealing or slandering or distorting good work for criminal ends, and give them a good rant?

Not Goldacre, and not me! Bring it on!

The proper practice of science is everybody's concern, and the very best way we can address this concern is by educating ourselves to be proper skeptics with proper tools. This book is a great - and surprisingly easy - step in that direction.

8 out of 10 doctored study results up.

The House With A Clock In Its Walls, by John Bellairs

I've always been a lover of haunted house stories, especially when they have a strong sense of play. As "young adult" fiction goes, this one is great! Atmospheric, unpredictable, with well-sketched characters and an amusing protagonist. It reminded me strongly of Roald Dahl.

I was lucky enough to experience this as an audiobook, narrated by George Guidall. He did lovely work here, investing a lot of himself in each role. The ending is a little sudden, though.

Seven out of ten minute-hands up.

Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky

Overstuffed with information, including things only tenuously connected to salt. Like its mineral namesake, hard to digest in large quantity. The author made a strong effort at imposing structure on his meandering tour, and mostly failed. Some parts are genuinely intriguing, other parts are distressingly bland, and you never can tell which category the next chapter will belong to.

I'd give it a middle-of-the-road 5.5 overpriced himalayan rocks out of 10.

No Easy Day, by Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer

A lightweight and well constructed book describing the training missions that led up to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and the mission itself, with a few asides about the life of a Navy SEAL and the ethical and emotional struggles they can experience.

I'm sure there are a lot of ""patriots"" out there who think this book should be on high-school reading programs. Some of them may have even read the book itself. Other people think this book is a cynical cash-grab devoid of any true cultural value. Most of them have not read the book and never will.

Setting aside the inane controversy, such as it is, this book is honestly no more impactful than any generic summer action movie. (Actually, the summer action movie probably contains even more guns. Hah!) I enjoyed it quite a bit, but forgot about it almost completely after turning the last page.

6 extremely expensive night-vision goggles out of 10.

2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Epic, and sprawling - in good and bad ways.

The opening scene will absolutely hook you, but be warned: Robinson is apparently not on speaking terms with his editor these days. This book has only enough plot for a 40-page short story, stretched wafer-thin out over a meandering whistle-stop spaceship tour all over the solar system to expound upon the Wonders Of Tomorrow. If you want a big stack of brochures about bizarre future tourist destinations, interspersed with confusing digressional snippets about politics and armchair anthropological wheedling, then this is totally your book. If you want a plot, or decent dialogue, or characters you give a crap about, then go read some Terry Pratchett instead.

With that warning in place, I will now admit that there were sections of the book - certain brochures in the big stack - that were totally enthralling, just as much as the very first one that opens the story. In particular I remember a descent into the cloud layers of a gas giant in search of a mysterious derelict ship. So, this book has its merits, and as a sci-fi fan, I couldn't help churning through the dull parts in search of the next awesome part. Some of those dull parts are real stinkers though.

I'm not the kind of fellow to unexpectedly spoil a book for someone else; even a bad book, and even though I appear to be spoiling something here, I'm not. Instead I'm saving you frustration. I am saving you from a level of frustration so great, it might possibly have caused you to stop reading the book entirely and throw it in the trash and call Kim Stanley Robinson various bad names.

When the protagonist and her friend get trapped in an endless hallway due to a disaster aboveground, they will spend a very long time walking slowly down that hallway. Pages and pages are utterly wasted here. It's as if Robinson was deliberately trying to instill the same level of hopeless ennui in his readers that the characters were suffering through in his book. When you get into this part, just start skipping pages. Keep skipping, and don't stop, until the characters are back out on the surface again. All you really need to know can be summarized in one short sentence: "They endured some hardship and developed some feelings for each other." Done.

Trust me; you have just avoided a section so pointless, so inane, so meandering and insipid and eye-gougingly dull and useless, that it would have compelled you to set the book on fire and stomp on it, and then possibly extinguish the ashes with some near-to-hand water stream. I would have done this very thing except I was listening to it as digital audio, so I would have had to stomp on my iPhone, and I couldn't possibly do that to my Most Favorite Possession Ever In The Universe That Isn't Physically Attached.

A hard book to rate, but I'll give it 6.5 out of 10 protagonist temper-tantrums up. The good bits really are good.

Discworld 13: Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett

"Let there be another lettuce!" And lo, there was.

This is one of the greats. Pratchett is in top form all the way through this, and his satirical tools are sharp. You grow to love the characters, and even though he works hard to send them off with several additional codas, you still wish there was more to read. I'm not going to summarize the plot or anything here... I'll just say, you gotta read this story.

8.5 out of 10 lettuces up.

Discworld 15: Men At Arms, by Terry Pratchett

This was a fun whodunit with a stellar cast. Pratchett's books are always very dialogue-driven, and this one is loaded with scenes of mismatched characters having heated discussions, cracking jokes, stumbling over clues, bugging each other, and eventually learning to cooperate. In other words, it's like a whole set of buddy-cop movies tangled together. You really get the sense that Pratchett is not just filling out characters here, but evolving them.

On the other hand, Nobby is always Nobby, and Colon is always himself. They don't evolve, and that's the way it should be. The whole point of them is that the universe throws an endless variety of amazing and random events in their path, and they somehow find a way to Nobbes and Colon their way through them unchanged.

7.5 haunted firearms out of 10 up.

The Canterville Ghost, by Oscar Wilde

This brief story starts out as a lampooning of bull-headed americans and over-polite brits in equal measure, and it's fun to see the author play around in that sandbox for a while, but then the plot takes a few sideways turns and becomes a kind of standard-issue quest, ending on a sweet note of resolution. I get the impression that Oscar Wilde knew his story would never catch on if it didn't satisfy the reader's more conventional taste for a tale with a beginning, middle, and end, so he took his potshots, had his fun, and then folded the whole thing up into a harmless origami hat.

Seven out of ten rattling chains up! WoooOOooo! *clank*

I Am America And So Can You, by Stephen Colbert (and his staff writers)

I was underwhelmed with this book ... but to me, Colbert's breed of comedy - and his comedy persona - doesn't work in long-form, and this book is just proof of that. The Stephen Colbert of the TV show is a creation purpose-built to satirize the media and make topical commentary. Like chewing gum, you gnaw on each episode for a little while and then throw it away, never to be seen again, which is okay because there's always another to look forward to. This book is basically a piece of chewing gum the size of a boxcar. It's way too much gum, and after a little bit of chewing your sense of taste gets all wonky and you forget why you liked gum in the first place.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. There is, of course, some great political commentary marbled into this work, and every now and then Colbert succeeds in coaxing the most minor of laughs out of me. And it's great to listen to while gardening or doing laundry. Now that's what I call damning with faint praise!!

Five out of ten mismatched earlobes up.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: A Comedic Take, by the BBC, based on the story by Arthur Conan Doyle

This was pretty entertaining and forgettable, except for a throwaway audio gag about two-thirds through it involving a "lamb in a bag" that had me laughing so hard I had to stop the recording and fall over for a while, then rewind a good two minutes or so to find my place again.

I'll Mature When I'm Dead, by Dave Barry

This is an anthology of some of Dave Barry's editorials with a vague adulthood and parenting theme.

The audio version is excellent for a long car trip, especially on unfamiliar roads that are nevertheless boring. The content is amusing and easily digestible, and you don't suffer much for getting distracted and missing the occasional paragraph.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Oh my god, this is a fantastic novel.

If I didn't already have a clear favorite (Diamond Age) I would say this is Stephenson's best work. It's a self-aware combination of Cyberpunk and parody, with enough wildcards and bizarre scenery and moments of adorable character development to keep you thoroughly entertained all the way to the last page. It has also aged remarkably well for a Cyberpunk novel - somehow still feeling innovative after a decade and a half. One can't quite say the same about Neuromancer, for example, which is built around some ideas that seem quaint or even inane in our wireless, touchscreened present.

But you don't need to come to Snow Crash for its science fiction merits. Read it for the characters. They are a riot! Amazon proclaims this book is "One of Time magazine's 100 all-time best English-language novels," and I am almost inclined to pitch in a voice of agreement, but ... that's a pretty big honor, putting it in competition with enduring works like Great Expectations and Treasure Island. Snow Crash is a damn good novel and you really shouldn't miss out on it, but it does end a bit sloppily, leaving you hungry for a sequel that has never materialized, or a film adaptation that has been almost pre-spoiled by The Matrix and a variety of explorative anime works like Serial Experiments Lain, Perfect Blue, Summer Wars, and Ghost In The Shell.

Nevertheless, the book is so much fun - and such an enjoyable world to be in - that upon finishing it, you'll be tempted to just turn from the last page to the first and read the whole thing right over again. It's really that much fun.

Nine out of ten electronic pizza boxes up.

Why Evolution Is True, by Jerry A. Coyne

I can usually conjure something interesting to say about any book I read, or start reading. I can at least explain why it didn't hold my interest, or make some snide joke about why it sucked.

The most I can say about this one is, it's well-meaning but presented without flair. Jerry has made a piece-by-piece, well-mannered, tick-all-the-checkboxes procession through historical and semi-recent scientific evidence establishing the fact of evolution, pulling in strong case-studies, and supporting scaffolding from various physical sciences such as geology, physics, biology, paleontology, anthropology, genetics, and so on.

The problem I had with this book is, none of it was new to me. It would have been nice to see Jerry wander afield a little bit, like the way Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale uses a story about the speciation of grasshoppers as the basis for a very interesting discussion about the meaning of "race" to humans, and follows the branches of the discussion to reach recommendations of other works, including The Red Queen and Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation.

Why Evolution Is True contains no such zestful wanderings. But, perhaps it doesn't really need to contain them. I think my own perspective is too warped to judge this book fairly, so I'm going to avoid giving it a rating.

Discworld 25: The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

This is an especially vivid Pratchett novel - you can practically see every character marching around in your head, pontificating and cracking jokes as they navigate the twisty passages of Ankh-Morpork. All of Pratchett's characters are generally well-realized, but usually his protagonists are given far more development and attention than his antagonists. Not so in this book. The two main villains here are hugely entertaining - a brilliant cross between hard-boiled gangsters and an Abbot-and-Costello vaudeville act, with endearing flourishes, and they are given plenty of room to strut their stuff. They're so much fun you almost find yourself rooting for them by the end of the book, despite their blatantly despicable behavior.

With this book, even more than Pratchett's others, I had to stop and wonder every now and then at how much entertainment I was deriving from a work of humorous, seemingly uncomplicated, fiction. It's not a blazing philosophical manifesto, or a brilliant exploration of a scientific frontier, or cunning work of investigative journalism. There's no convenient way to justify reading it. But it is a fun, funny story that's fantastically well executed, and having read it for the second time now, I'm convinced that I will eventually return to it a third time, and maybe even a fourth.

Nine out of ten fine marble carvings up.

The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt

Most of these stories I'd already heard just from being a long-time denizen of the internet, but there were some that were new to me. I had to take this book in small pieces, because story after story of people behaving like morons is funny for only a limited time, then it becomes bland, and then it gets depressing. The inclusion of "urban legends" alongside the verified stories is an interesting enhancement, and I was pleased to find that the tales I'd read online that had been passed around as "verified truth" - though never with any documentation - were just as unsubstantiated to the authors of this book, and even more obviously implausible to my jaded adult self.

Despite reading it in pieces, it was still a chore to finish. The authors tried to keep it fresh by organizing the stories into rough themes and throwing in amateurish editorials, but somewhere around the story of the young woman who jumped off half-dome with a defective parachute and plummeted like a stone to her gory death in front of her boyfriend's eyes and a gathered crowd of tourists, I lost my taste for it.

Four out of ten exposed wiring panels up.

Discworld 19: Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett

This was a fun police procedural, and I returned to it because I'd completely forgotten the plot after so many years. I'd also forgotten what a fun read it was. This is the one where Nobby learns about his family tree, and we are treated to a much elongated version of his name, which is something like - and don't fault me for getting it wrong since I'm quoting from memory - "Lt. Crpl. Cecil Wormsborough St. John 'Nobby' DeNobbs."

I remember using that name as my email alias back in the 90's, but it still wasn't long enough so I tacked a few things on, and came up with "Lt. Crpl. Cecil Wormsborough St. John 'Nobby' DeNobbs Esq. And His Ragtime Band." Somehow that address and the associated name got thrown into a list of "celebrity email addresses" and passed around from website to dusty website, and over the next decade I got five or six emails from people who asked, incredulously, if that was my real name, or if I could help them get directly in touch with Sir Terry Pratchett.

This was a breezy read. The mustache-twirling high-society conspirators are about as sophisticated and threatening as the ones you'd see in the average Saturday-morning cartoon - The Gummi Bears perhaps - but Vimes is thoroughly Vimesey, and Colon is very Colonesque. And Nobby is ... well, ... is.

Seven out of ten magic scrolls up.

New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer, by Bill Maher

Bill Maher is, to myself and my left-leaning social circles, equal parts alarming firebrand and national treasure. He's an outspoken critic of conservative and religious attempts to legislate morality, and he uses comedy as a gateway and weapon to enliven his panel discussions. Sometimes he comes down on the wrong side of an issue, but he also shows a refreshing willingness to admit when he's wrong and publicly change his opinion.

That said, this book is not a good demonstration of his appeal.

It's an endless clockwork procession of topical political jokes, most of which have not aged well, interspersed with sex jokes, and references to current events that have long since lost their currency. Without a panel to derail him or an audience to force him to pace himself, Bill's tone here is a bit too consistently sanctimonious to be enjoyed for the comedy.

He's gathered a second collection, "The New New Rules", that I read sometime last year and found to be more palatable, but still not enough to recommend.

Three out of ten flag lapel-pins up.

Enter Jeeves: 15 Early Stories, by P.G. Wodehouse

Quaint. It's hard to tell just how hard the author is laughing at his own characters. Are we supposed to feel like Jeeves' employer is a doddering but endearing moron, or should we hiss him like a villain - a punching-bag example of high-bred ignorance and weakness? Is it okay that Jeeves puts him into embarrassing situations, or are we supposed to be troubled by such apparent insubordination?

Mind you, this is apparently early in the written legacy of Jeeves, so perhaps I've been exposed to half-formed characters. Unfortunately, the comic-book feel of these adventures has not whet my appetite for more. I'll probably be ignoring Jeeves in the future and reading more Bryant and May instead.

A mere four out of ten magnifying glasses up.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, by Matt Ridley

Fascinating. I didn't realize it before reading this book, but there was a gap in my exploration of genetics; a hazy unexplored cloud around two simple questions that actually require hugely complicated answers: "Why does sex exist", and "why are there (only) two genders?"

In this book I found a thorough discussion of all the modern theories that have been proposed to answer these questions, and it was truly eye-opening. Two chapters in particular impressed me more than the others:

First, the chapter discussing how there was darwinistic competition not just at the gene level, but below the genes, at the level of genetic code itself - an information warfare with startlingly apt parallels in the world of modern computer programming - an arena with its own computer-virus-like infections, code patches, system exploitations, and so on. It seemed such a natural fit that I was a bit embarrassed I hadn't thought about it before.

And second, the chapter that discusses the game-theory implications of genetic competition amongst females, across a spectrum of species, and how the sexual behavior of each species in its environment can be understood as a balance between genetic stability and innovation. In other words, long-term environmental pressures on a species can alter the level of sexual competition, the amount of cheating, the amount of male involvement, the level of infanticide, the number of offspring in a litter, the number of partners a female seeks and for how long, et cetera. Basically, every way the sexual system can be gamed, is subject to tinkering through environmental pressures.

The author sometimes delicately overreaches to extrapolate into human behavior, but always frames each attempt with a disclaimer. Even if it's terribly unscientific, it's still absolutely fascinating to search for parallels in the human world, even in my own life.

For example, why should I be flooded with hormones as a teenager, saddled with a burning desire to have indiscriminate sex that is at odds with modern enlightened society, ... only to have those hormones submit increasingly to my control as I mature emotionally and intellectually? If I work from the premise that my natural instincts are generally successful - they produced me and all my ancestors after all - then this hormonal transition must serve some purpose in furthering my genes (though not necessarily my personal happiness).

I can think of an armchair answer to that question: As a young man, I am surrounded by older, more powerful men, and may not live terribly long. Better to be highly motivated to get someone pregnant despite the consequences. As an older man, I have power of my own, and can make more discerning choices about the quality of my mate and my offspring. A cooler head is more likely to prevail.

It's not a perfect hypothesis, obviously, and I have no idea what kind of experiment could be designed to test it. But it's just the tiniest example of the enormous number of ideas that The Red Queen conjured in my mind as I was reading. It spurred me to look at every single social behavior I engage in - and the ones that I don't - and consider them all from a strategic perspective, as the steward and the vehicle for a bundle of furiously competing genes.

I've returned to this book four or five times to re-read some of the most interesting chapters, and each visit reawakens a tangled bank of thoughts. Love it!

Eight out of ten codons up!

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade

This book is a awkwardly assembled. The content is absolutely fascinating, and I do recommend it, but the author tends to charge from one anecdote or setting straight into another without enough connecting narrative. I've heard it said that to write clearly, you need to announce what you're going to explain, then explain why it is necessary to explain it, then finally make the explanation. This book tends to skip the second step, and sometimes even the first.

I confess, I put it down about a quarter of the way in, and have not yet returned to it, even though I know I'll be fascinated again when I do.

How To Be Black, by Baratunde Thurston

This was a fun read, and probably a pretty important book as well, for the point of view it offers: We obviously do not live in a post-racism world, but we definitely live in a more culturally cross-threaded one, which can help us confront and defray racism on an ongoing basis.

I had an interesting realization partway into this audiobook. Somewhere in my head I have a stereotype of what an urban black man is supposed to "sound like" when he speaks - a deep voice with an air of machismo and aggression woven into it. I remember my friends and I using that voice when we were joking around in high school. What was funny about it to us at the time was how totally badass it sounded. It was a "don't mess with me" voice, straight out of an episode of a Mr. T cartoon, and we were all white, middle-class, suburban kids - the opposite of badass - so we used it ironically. We knew that if we ever used it around any "actual black people" we would be completely mortified and probably die of shame, because Racism Is Not Funny, but meanwhile, crowding together at recess and calling each other names in an overblown street thug voice was freaking hilarious.

I stopped using that voice before I graduated high school. It wasn't really a deliberate decision; I just stopped being in a context where using it wasn't totally inappropriate or even dangerous. Since moving to Oakland, I sometimes hear it around me, coming out of the mouths of people of varying ethnicity, but uniformly disenfranchised. When I talk to them I sometimes have to concentrate to keep myself from speaking the same way, because I don't want them to feel like they're being mocked. Coming from me, that voice would sound like the ironic parody I learned it as, and that would just be lame. I'm better off sticking close to my Typical White Guy, like that voice Eddie Murphy used to use in his stand-up routines. It's the lesser of two evils.

Political correctness is weird, innit yo?

In How To Be Black, that macho urban voice is totally absent from Baratunde's performance, all way up until he suddenly invokes it deliberately, when he plays the role of his younger self reading a paper he wrote when he was in school. He doesn't explain or announce that he's using that voice, but nevertheless I found it instantly recognizable, and it even felt like a shock to hear him using it, by the bizarre scorecard of political correctness. He was overplaying it into parody, for comic effect, just like I'd done with my friends in high-school, and he was performing it for an audience, whose laughter you can hear spilling over into the background of the recording.

I can't even imagine a time far enough in the future when it would be acceptable for me to use that voice in public for any reason, but nevertheless it was strangely cathartic to hear Baratunde use it for his own humorous ends. It's as if he was telling me, "Yes, there actually is humor in this. You're not a jackass if you laugh."

And I certainly hope that's true, because sometimes when I'm playing cards with my older sister, her husband and I break out terrible accents, and I call mine my "Oakland accent". It's the old "urban thug" accent from high school but it's cranked up into an ear-grating falsetto and slurred into whiny mush. It sounds a bit like Towelie from South Park, come to think of it. Or something Dave Chapelle might do.

Uh anyway, yeah. Good book. Two un-ironic and totally politically correct thumbs up.

Discworld 34: Thud, by Terry Pratchett

An engaging story from beginning to end, with plenty of time in settings I like - underground rivers, dark caves, torchlit tunnels - and a murder mystery to solve at the same time! Pratchett almost always uses some mystery as the core of his City Watch novels, and here he proves his skill in the form.

As I listened to this I couldn't help imagining live actors in a cinematic version of the story. It was fun to try different faces on each character and see who fit where. After a while I decided that the best living fit for Sam Vimes would be Karl Urban.

On that note, I totally approve of the BBC's casting of Jeremy Irons as the Patrician - though yes, Alan Rickman (as Pratchett is claimed to prefer) would have done quite well too. Joss Ackland did an absolutely perfect Mustrum Ridcully. (Did you know he was also "Chuck" De Nomolos in Bell and Ted's Bogus Journey?)

Discworld 24: The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett

This book is a great read - don't get me wrong - but I'm critiquing it in reference to the other Discworld novels, and that makes for stiff competition.

There is a mystery to solve here, as is standard for the City Watch novels, but the two big twists in it were too easy to figure out, and the biggest shift in the plot - the one that sets things in motion for the resolution - seems to come too early. I remember I had the same trouble the first time I read this book some ten years ago. A short coda where the main villain gets a good whacking helps to avoid the feeling that the story is all downhill after the middle, but it doesn't quite help enough. Also, this time around I found the whole business with Colon going power-mad back at the watchhouse to be a bore - an unwelcome derailment of the story.

On the other hand, the vampire character was refreshing, the visits from Death were fun, Gaspode The Wonder Dog and all the wolves were great, and every scene with Lady Sybil in it was a blast. She really is a great character - a combination of vulnerability, earnestness, and guts - and you can't help rooting for her.

I've occasionally wondered who could play the role of Sybil in a film version of the Discworld, and so far I've come up completely blank. Sybil is not supposed to look like a movie star, but she still needs a strong presence. I haven't even seen any drawings that look right. The closest I can find to how I envision her is the Lady Fanny "Aunt Fanny" Janet Blunt, born in 1839, and pictured here.

Another unexpected highlight is when Cheery Littlebottom describes the conflict between old and new mining practices of the dwarves, taking the reader on a surprisingly creepy journey through the deepest caverns of the Disc. It's a wonderful example of how this book is still a very good read, even if it's not Pratchett's top form. Seven out of ten scones up.

T Rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez, foreword by Carl Zimmer

This is a short piece of scientific non-fiction that guides the reader along the chain of discoveries establishing the (rather strong) case for the extinction of the dinosaurs by a giant impact from space - a comet or an asteroid. It's particularly engaging when it describes the event of the impact itself, marshaling an impressive array of physics and geology to present a clear - and terrifying - picture of the devastation. You come away from it with a new respect for just how destructive a large impact can be.

The book is very well laid-out, highly informative, and fun to read, especially for geologists I bet. It made me want to watch that silly old film Deep Impact. (Which I did, about two days later.)

Good job, Zimmer and Alvarez! You get eighty million out of a hundred million hydrogen bombs up.

Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane.

The introduction comes across as very pompous, like a mush-mouthed Carl Sagan. It could be chopped right in half and it would only improve the book - which, for the rest of its pages, is a refreshingly up-to-date and coherent tour of ten of the "most innovative" products of evolution - such as photosynthesis, sight, and warm-bloodedness - along with explanations for how those products arose, and sometimes two or three competing explanations.

I learned some things that genuinely surprised me, and even laughed a few times at the author's unexpected sense of humor.

Definitely recommended. But skip the introduction and start right in with the main book. Eight out of ten flagella up.

Discworld 22: The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett

I hadn't read this one in at least ten years, and all I remembered from the first read was some Mad-Max chase scenes in the desert and a bunch of jokes about beer. The book definitely had those, as well as a whole bunch more cultural references to Australia that were a little more poignant now that I've poked around Melbourne and Tasmania a bit.

I enjoyed it all the way up to the end, especially the episodic ramblings of Rincewind in the outback, but the last sentence of the book came and went without answering what I felt was a very important question: Where did the time portal in Unseen University come from? Why was it there?

The portal is found in the bathroom of a University apartment, ostensibly belonging to the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography. According to The Internet, that professorial title belongs to Rincewind. Before they find the portal, the wizards spend a while reading the journals on the apartment bookshelves. Those journals really don't sound like Rincewind wrote them. What's going on? Did Rincewind inherit the position? If he didn't make the portal, why didn't he at least discover it, since it was in his university apartment?

The book was funny and cute. Seven out of ten boomerangs up.

The Science of Discworld: Revised Edition, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen

Ian and Jack apparently decided that the science-and-story first edition needed a whole lot more of the science part, without adding anything to the story part. Even if I wasn't already familiar with almost all of the book's revelations about the formation of the solar system and the evolution of life, I would still find myself impatiently skipping forward to get back to Pratchett's story about Hex and the wizards toying with a quaint self-contained universe.

It's worth a read, if you take it at your own pace. Six out of ten bananas up.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

This book was ruined for me, even though I knew nothing about it going in - not even so much as a plot synopsis. Why? Science. Atwood has claimed in interviews that the book is not meant to be hard science fiction, but instead a kind of cautionary tale or morality play, and I can usually roll with that, but in the case of Oryx and Crake I found that my suspension of disbelief was attacked over and over again, and about halfway through the book it took one too many hits and I just stopped reading.

My problem is this: I've read too many books about evolution and genetics, and even my layman's grasp of the science was enough to tell me that the heinous consequences foretold in Atwood's cautionary tale were, at best, absurdly unlikely, and at worst, total violations of the physics that govern metabolism and the principles of natural selection that govern evolution.

Plus, a huge amount of the book is spent switching between two plots that bear some mysterious connection, and for most of the book that connection - which is the central mystery in the story - is left almost totally unexplained, even outright ignored.

Beautifully realized characters, but too deeply flawed as a work of science fiction for me to finish. Four snowmen out of ten up.

The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins

This is my third exploration of this book in the last five years. Amazon describes it thus: "An exhilarating reverse tour through evolution, from present-day humans back to the microbial beginnings of life four billion years ago." And it is just that. Each time I come back to it, a few more concepts are wedged into my head that managed to drift by me in previous reads.

At this point I've read quite a few books that explore evolution, in theory and in experiment, in the mathematical world and in the natural world, and I can confidently say that whatever misgivings you may have about Dawkins' political shenanigans with atheism, he is a first-rate science writer, consistently achieving a standard of clarity that disappointingly few other writers can match.

I will admit, The Ancestor's Tale is very information-dense, and is not really palatable when read all at once. Pick it up and open it at random, then wait a few months and do it again. ... As long as you're prepared to relinquish two or three hours of your day each time.

Nine out of ten proto-limbs up.

Discworld 12: Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett

I couldn't remember most of the plot to this one. What really made me pick it back up, though, was being reminded that Greebo gets transformed into a human during the last act and runs riot in the kingdom.

My favorite line, from Nanny Ogg: (Upon spotting a dozen alligators drifting in the swamp.) "Ooo, them's mighty big newts!"

It was just as much fun to read a second time as it had been the first. Pratchett is a genius.

8 out of 10 pumpkins up.

Discworld 18: Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett

I continued my revisiting of Pratchett with a book I only vaguely remembered. Something about a ghost and a singing lady. I figured that the more vague my memory, the better, since the story would be a fresh surprise.

As I plowed through it, I realized why it was so vague. I was inexplicably dissatisfied with the ending. The beginning is alright, and the middle is hilarious, and the ending is clever but a little too quickly tied off. Miss Perdita is arguably the main character in the book, and at the end, we are deprived of any view whatsoever into her mind as she makes several huge life-altering decisions. The witches steal the show and run off with it.

That said, it's still a great read. I was thrilled to get more time with Greebo in human form - he's a riot! Mmmmmrrroowwr!

7 out of 10 wonder-dogs up.

Discworld 20: Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

I'd totally forgotten how the assassins did their job, and so this re-reading had all the suspense preserved. That said, Pratchett mucks about with the timeline of events between locations much more than usual with this book, and I found it a bit disorienting. I would have also liked to linger a bit more with Teatime at the end.

But these are very minor quibbles in a book that is by turns hilarious, exciting, and wonderfully dialogue-driven. After I finished it I watched the two-part BBC dramatization of Hogfather, and enjoyed it a lot, even though the story was savagely compressed and a little bit disjointed.

8 out of 10 spoons up.

Bryant and May Book 5: White Corridor, by Christopher Fowler

Two interleaved murder mysteries for the geriatric duo of Bryant and May to solve. The first one used the writing tactic of the "unreliable narrator" to obscure the real culprit, a bit of a cheat I thought, but still a fun ride. Fowler's characters are vivid and endearing, and sometimes he sneaks in real zingers, such as:

"The princess has an incredibly tight schedule," she said, managing to make the statement sound vaguely gynecological.

7 out of 10 thumbs up.

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

This book feels like Young Adult fiction, despite all the beyond-dated 80's callbacks. The author expects readers to be as nostalgic for the 80's as he is, often to the point where he will waste paragraphs of time explaining the details of some environment, costume, or vehicle that has absolutely no relevance to the plot, and only barely contributes to atmosphere. Actually seeing a car decked out like the Ecto-1 would be cool. Reading some guy's daydream of what it might look like is not cool - it is tedious. The linear narrative of the first quarter of the book is also a bit of a chore.

The good news is, once he sets the stage and cranks the plot up, the book becomes one hell of a page-turner, and you feel happy you stuck with it. His pacing becomes sure-footed all the way through to the smartly chosen ending point, and you find yourself paradoxically glad that he didn't go any farther, and in retrospect, disappointed that he didn't find an excuse to stretch the middle for a another hundred pages or so, even if the characters just goofed around for that time.

Ernest has great skills with plot and pacing, but not with characterization. He rarely gets inside the minds of his characters, rarely imbues them with feelings, and for a while I thought the lead female character was suffering from an unfortunately common affliction I'll call "paradoxical feminist syndrome", or PFS for short - where her primary motivation seems to be to emasculate and reject the lead male character, over and over, all the way up until the male character triumphs over adversity, at which point she has some kind of brainfart and throws herself at him like a raffle prize. I've seen cases of PFS in dozens of fantasy and sci-fi novels, all authored by men old enough that they should know better, including Piers Anthony, Stephen Baxter, Dan Simmons, John Varley, etc. I was all ready to add Ernest Cline to that list, when I realized, it wasn't actually the character that was shrill and emasculating - it was Wil Wheaton's reading of the character that brought her across that way! I started re-playing her dialogue in my head, without Wil's inflection, after each line, and she suddenly sounded like a regular human being in context.

This is both the blessing and the curse of audiobooks. The narrator brings their own take on the character to the character. When it's done well, you get an added layer of depth that really enhances the experience. When it's done poorly, or overdone, you suffer.

5 out of 10 fuzzy bunnies up.

Current Mood: refreshed

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A few things about a few books
Arthur C Clarke Round 14: Can't Get Enough O' Super Golden Clarke
Arthur C Clarke Round 13: Humans Is The Crraaaziest Peoples
Arthur C Clarke Round 12: Rendezvous With Drama Llama
Arthur C Clarke Round 11: Eleven Clarkers Clarking
Nothing to envy
Arthur C Clarke Round 10: Mo Clarke, Mo’ Physics Problems
Arthur C Clarke Round 9: In France He Is Monsieur Clar-KAY
An early November book.
October and September reading
Arthur C Clarke Round 8: This Time, It’s Clarkesonal
August reading
July reading (more catching up)
May reading (still catching up...)
June reading (oops we skipped a month)
April reading (oh man, we're totally catching up now!)
December reading (finally getting around to describing it)
March reading (yeah I know no one reads these but I like writing 'em, so nyeah)
January reading (clearing out some backlog)
February reading

Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 07:44 am

Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Entries tagged with books

A few things about a few books

Arthur C Clarke Round 14: Can't Get Enough O' Super Golden Clarke

Arthur C Clarke Round 13: Humans Is The Crraaaziest Peoples

Arthur C Clarke Round 12: Rendezvous With Drama Llama

Arthur C Clarke Round 11: Eleven Clarkers Clarking

Nothing to envy

Arthur C Clarke Round 10: Mo Clarke, Mo’ Physics Problems

Arthur C Clarke Round 9: In France He Is Monsieur Clar-KAY

An early November book.

October and September reading

Arthur C Clarke Round 8: This Time, It’s Clarkesonal

August reading

July reading (more catching up)

May reading (still catching up...)

June reading (oops we skipped a month)

April reading (oh man, we're totally catching up now!)

December reading (finally getting around to describing it)

March reading (yeah I know no one reads these but I like writing 'em, so nyeah)

January reading (clearing out some backlog)

February reading

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July 2025

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