Memory of Empire

Galaxy spanning empire and political intrigue? You had me at galaxy, but ok - probably most people aren't as into these tropes as I am. As worn as they are, this read doesn't offer much new - though the plot pivoting on poetry at multiple points is fun.

This book does however join the ranks of those whose character names are etched indelibly in my consciousness, repeated over and again like a pop hook. 19-Ads and 3-Seagrass stand alongside Pham Nuwen and Dalinar Kholin, waiting their turn til they can eat my brain again.

This is How You Lose the Time War

 I would call it a modern day Romeo and Juliet, but of course it isn't. It's a Romeo and Juliet for all time.

The delicious archetypery, woven and weft so effortlessly it yields just the slyest of winks while sprinting past hubris, leaving only dust and a sense of wondering, what koan hath been left in the pattern of its settling through the morning air?

I have to confess, the ambition plain on its cover, blah blah yet another love story, how could I expect to be sated? And I'm not, indeed anything but: I need more. 

But how could there be more? If every novella was super no one would be, and it can only be downhill from here. I grit my teeth and wipe my tears and find solace in the knowing I have been so recently wrong, and wish I will be again, soon.

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

I finished the 4th book the other day. Part of the club. The club of people who know what happens.

I had this actual conversation last week:
me: "I just finished the 3rd book this morning."
Stepho: "Oooh I'm most of the way through the 3rd book. Something just happened oh my god!"
me: "I think I know the thing you're talking about."
Stepho: "It's kind of like the thing that happened in the first book!"
me: "I definitely know the thing you're talking about."

So everybody else that I ever talk to, finish reading already so I can stop being mortally afraid of speaking in spoilers accidentally.

Several of my friends are currently having the same experience I did, of it being impossible to put these books down. It's hard to make time for stuff like laundry, sleep, feeding yourself, etc when you don't know how that battle is going to turn out. Or if that person is going to make it to wherever they're trying to get to safely. The suspensework is just horrifyingly effective.

Doug said that after the party last night he went home and drunk-read for an hour. Then woke up this morning and read it all again because he had forgotten it all.

So these books are good, and you've been warned. When we next see you with 4 day stubble and bloodshot eyes, speaking of how you "must needs to eat soon, you forgot to this morning" we'll know why. We of the club will just nod and be like, "where are you at? ohhh yeah that was a good part."

It's chock full of ethical choices. It's a goddamn kaleidoscope of conflicting loyalties and enumerations on whether the ends justify the means. Plus knights on horses and kings on thrones and sailors on ships and dragons and zombies and magic and betrayal. Ooooh the betrayal, it hurts.

So read it already, and then you can come to the Song of Ice and Fire trivia night I'm going to host.

Marooned in Realtime

This is Vinge's sequel to The Peace War. It was about the same quality - not as good as Fire upon the deep but still kept me turning pages. It pulled the same loose sequel trick as "Deepness in the sky" -> "Fire upon the deep", setting it a squillion years in the future, but contriving to keep one character (transformed somehow by their passage through time) to hark back to the history created in the first book.

Ho hum, It's a murder mystery, with a self-conscious Great Reveal at the end. It was still an interesting twist, looking back on the singularity Vinge loves to go on about. In this case the event also involved a mysterious mass exodus/death of most of humankind, just like in Singularity's Ring (or I should say it's the other way around, since Marooned in Realtime was published 22 years prior.)

It has the same weaknesses as his other writing - a mix of real characters and foil role players, all of whom act in overly explained rational or irrational interests as best they know how given the technology Vinge has gifted them with.

I'm coming to realize the thing I love most about his writing is every book has at least one and often several characters gaining super-human abilities. Watching big fish in a small pond is fun to me I guess. Watching little fish in a little pond, not as interesting, no matter what kind of dance they're doing.

Vernor Vinge: The Collected Stories, and The Peace War

I read two more books by Vernor Vinge recently. I still can't get enough.

The Peace War was a good read; definitely in a lower tier than his other work though. Had me turning pages to find out what happens next, but I think it showed off perhaps the one weakness I've seen in his stories. Most of his main characters play minimax optimal decision making strategies in conflict scenarios... and they take the time to explain themselves in dialog or thought as they make the decisions. It makes me want to skim through all the rationalizations, and leaves characters feeling robotic. Which I guess is a common theme in his characters - humans becoming more than human, with the aid of technology - so I guess it shouldn't be that much of a surprise.

The better of the two books was the anthology of his short stories. I'm not sure if it was comprehensive, but if it was - holy shit, I liked every single story in that book. They were all so different from each other. The other short story anthologies from single authors that I've read (Greg Egan, Jim Van Pelt) I enjoyed, but by the end of it I had a feeling that I could write a short story in their style with my eyes closed.

Vinge just keeps surprising with new ideas and plot structures in every story. My favorite part of the anthology though was his personal introductions to every story. He wrote what he thought was good writing about each story, and its weaknesses; exaulted in predictions of the future he got dead on, rued the big developments he missed. It was so impressive to hear him speak in plain words about a kernal of an idea he had for a story, and then to see the finished product so nuanced, detailed... and fresh even decades after it was published.

Steal Across the Sky

Aislinn lent me this novel by Nance Kress, and I started reading it aloud to Erin while we drove up to Seattle over thanksgiving. It starts off with a hook that had us both wanting to find out more, but then just hangs on the suspense far too long without giving the characters any new dimensions.

Probably had enough plot to make a decent short story, but there were just too many "why the hell did that happen... and wait it *never* gets explained?" moments to finish it all the way through.

The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse

I read this during mental health break tines at work since it was on the shared shelf. It was funny and a fast read, mostly dialog, totally enjoyable even in only 15 minute increments.

Also I just started reading To Say Nothing of the Dog. So far it reminds me a lot of A Scanner Darkly, but with time travel instead of drugs, and throwing in some british humour[sic].

Logicomix

I recently read a graphic novel called Logicomix that applies the theme of the superhero's quest to an alternate form of hero: the classical mathematician Bertrand Russell. While there is some degree of math and logic involved, the primary focus is one man's struggle to walk the line between ardently searching for mathematical (and therefore worldly) truth and not losing his mind like so many of his logician peers. It's an interesting biography, though it includes the small irony of taking some liberties with the historical truth of Russell's while trying to convey his quest for truth. It's also a pretty quick read, so I don't have too much to say without spoiling the story. As for the art, it avoids the manga-izing of many graphic novels, putting it more in the realm of Persepolis in terms of the serious artistic work of the genre.

Also, today I owned the Comcast support person trying to find out why I couldn't connect to the internet by applying principles learned from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'm now even more convinced that the universality of that book's practical (if not metaphysical) ideas enables me troubleshoot far better than the average resetter and rebooter. That and k2's 2004 coaching in the ways of the Apple.

Rainbows End

I picked up Rainbows End this weekend so that I could read it on Caltrain commuting to work this week, and I finished it today, Tuesday. And it was a stretch, trying to make it last, by effort of will, not reading it sometimes when I really really wanted to. I had gotten it because finishing Fire Upon the Deep left me with a Vinge shaped hole in my life that I desperately needed to fill. Well the hole is back. I kind of hope I'm sick of his writing by the time I acquire and finish Cookie Monster, or who knows what I'll be forced to do.

Vernor Vinge is definitely my newest author-hero. And it's not because I see echos of his characters in myself; I find most of his characters helplessly single minded and naive actually, and their growth as a result of the numerous plot twists is usually cliche. He is a damn repetitious writer, beating you over the head with his central themes at every opportunity. And yet, every couple pages, there is solid gold. It's usually something a little kid did with his available computing (Vinge would say "automation") interfaces that we can *almost* dream of being real today. And that's why it's so goddamn addictive. I see situations in my own life where, if I was one of his characters, I could immediately have the answers to my idle questions. Was the wind really in my face both directions of my bike ride to and from the Dentist today? I could ask my wearable computer with a few gestures while biking to ping the local weather nodes and compare wind vectors on my path, and display the result on my networked contact lenses. And then there's the times when I actually feel like I'm living in that future. There are lots of queued requests on these shared servers, how many of them are from my team's code? Quick script to curl down a bunch of status pages in parallel, pipe them to grep, cut, sort, uniq: viola!

Vinge's most artfully delivered message in these novels is that the distance between intention and manifestation will shrivel away. It's already happening in the world of the wholly virtual, but step back away from that LCD for a minute and imagine the possibilities. I can't stop seeing them, and it makes me hate keyboards so hard.

Dragaeran series

I've lately been reading the Dragaeran novels by Steven Brust in the order they were written. They are very much fantasy, with magic, spells, and mythical creatures, but with each book written around a open-ended problem that gets 'solved' much like an old-school Dick Tracy detective novel. They are incredibly easy to read and more than a bit addictive.

Besides the how-deep-does-this-rabbit-hole-go aspect of the stories where the main problem always grows from something small, there are two major aspects of the set of books that I find really enjoyable. First, Burst makes no claims that he wrote the books in order, in fact in interviews he has suggested reading them in a very different order than he wrote them (and that suggested order has changed over the 20 years he has been writing these short-ish books: 12 so far) so often I end up reading a story that I know how things start in books after this story so the final state is mostly known and the story is a question of how is Brust going to get there and fills in the back story for books you have already read or you read a story that is intended to be completely independent but still drops new characters in on you that everyone seems to know and be friends with and you have you figure out what is going on, because Brust knew he would later add that character in to a book taking place before the current one. These non-linear dynamics seem frustrating, and are hard to describe, but end up being a bit of a puzzle that is above the story and fun to work out (and is making me seriously think about re-reading the first couple of books in the series when I finish).

Secondly, after the series became popular, Brust clearly started using each book to play around with different styles of telling a story, which is particularly interesting to see the same characters described differently based on the narrators viewpoint for that book. I think he does a reasonably good job of making the feel of the books different by shading the descriptions of a story through the lens of a character that had not previously been a central focus of previous books. Overall, I have really been enjoying this series.

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

This is a three book trilogy by a Swedish dude who died shortly after he finished the last book. The first one is a really solid mystery, which is a genre I'm not usually a big fan of. The second one edges closer to an action-y novel with a little bit of mystery involved, although I did guess the mystery piece of it pretty early on (to the astonishment of my book club, so maybe I just got lucky). Third one isn't in English yet.

The plot centers mostly around an investigative reporter named Blomkvist, but the real character of intrigue is Lisbeth Salander. You don't learn much about her in the first novel, but the mystery itself is interesting enough to keep you hooked. Have to admit that the second, while good, wasn't as fascinating for me, but I think it's because the first one set the bar so high.

First book has been turned into a movie that comes out in a month, so I guess this is really your "if you want to read the book first, you should start now" warning. Or a "there's a movie coming out that read pretty well as a book" warning. Whatever.

The Perfect Mile

Non-fiction. Takes place in the 1950s and follows these 3 guys, 1 australian, 1 american and 1 english, who are all trying to break the 4-minute mile barrier. The description of how these guys balance school, med-school, work and life with trying to achieve something athletically that no one, professional or not, has done before is pretty incredible. This one guy, Roger Bannister, is a full time med student, has his residency at a hospital, and still manages to train. There's this English ideal of the gentleman athlete to uphold, to carry on a full time job and make athletic prowess look easy. Kind of like how Roger Federer doesnt sweat, unbutton or untuck his shirt when he plays.
It's a really interesting book describing amateur athletes and the people who profit from them as well, NCAA stuff as well as the Olympics.
It struck a chord with me as a former runner and also as an ultimate player, a sport where the best in the world still have day jobs. The fact that none of these guys ever turned pro, they knew they had their window of opportunity and they put it all on the line. Pretty inspiring stuff. I highly recommend it.

Alvin Maker

Many people have been sipping the Orson Scott Card haterade as of late. And it's true. He's a dick. But! The Alvin Maker series is quick and good. I picked it up after rolling through some heavy civil-eng books that I read for and after my engineering law class, including one that depressingly revealed the truth that we probably should just cut the southwest off and launch it into space.

I've been reading a good bit more since taking the train to work, and the books are going by fast. I'm on #3 currently, and it's a sweet mixture of Last of the Mohicans and.... uh... I guess Harry Potter (Dave said Merlin, but he's a dick). Romanticizing Native Americans, creating a natural human magic vs. religion vs. unstoppable evil force vs. a little more ender-ish stuff.

Either way, highly recommended. What do YOU think?

Creatures of Light and Darkness

Most recently I finished "Creatures of Light and Darkness" by Roger
Zelazny. I had a copy of this on my shelves for a while because Drew
recommended it, I think, back when we were living together at Wilkins.
It was a good fast read, with the whole novel being in the present
tense contributing to the pacing and also the sense of it being an
oral telling of very poetic, timeless myth. I had the urge to create a
graph over the course of the book, with a measure for each character
describing how much of a badass they were known to be at that moment.
Discover they're immortal? bubble gets bigger. Discover they can
travel through time? bigger. Discover they are in fact their own
grandfather? BIGGER. Win a battle of the mighty against your brother
by tripping him out, turning his eyebrows into electric eels and his
will into slimy puddles of fish piss? WE HAVE A WINNER!

--k2

I remember reading that when I was laid up at Rosewood after my shoulder surgery... I believe after the first few pages I even set aside the latest Harry Potter for it. Thanks Drew!

--fraggle

I like Zelazny's work generally, he (and I guess me) is big into
carrying through the assumptions of various religions and building
worlds based on them. Either good or just plain strange.

--drew

Consider Phlebas, American Gods, Permutation City & The Left Hand of Darkness

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks was a fastpaced space opera romp in
the middle of a pan-galactic cultural war. It packed a lot of
interesting ideas into a lot of action. It had a bit of a Lord of the
Rings effect for me with how many characters it tries to maintain, but
the main few were pretty vibrant, the only problem I had with them was
their excessive display of super-human feats. It was a long book but
went really quickly because it tends to go from action scene to action
scene with very short downtime in between.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman was ok, but I wouldn't have picked it as
a Hugo+Nebula winner; if you've ever read "Small Gods" by Pratchet and
him, it has a lot of similar tropes, mainly about gods existing
because people believe in them. After reading it the book club didn't
have a whole lot to say about it; the ideas are pretty self contained
and the plot doesn't leave a lot of questions open. Still entertaining
though, and in one tiny passing insight it gave voice to a feeling I
have all the time: the TV shows that you haven't watched religiously
but that are still popular (for me: Seinfeld, Simpsons, CSI...) you
always somehow manage to catch the same episode of, over and over.
I've seen the "Furry" episode of CSI like 10 times!

Permutation City by Greg Egan was the weakest of the lot I'd have to
say, just because the plot premise was so flimsy, and I don't even
want to bother describing it here. It was redeemed for me by the
character portraits it paints using that premise: people who exist in
an isolated universe with infinite computational power and true
immortality - what would they do? One compelling image that stuck with
me was a guy who created virtual environments for himself that
reflected this infinity, climbing down a never-ending skyscraper, the
top in the clouds above, the bottom obscurred by clouds below, climb
climb rest, climb climb rest, his mental state looping happily without
variant for an entirely indefinite period of time. I've found myself
echoing those feelings at times recently: playing pool and drinking
with Jaffar in Vienna, biking and stopping at traffic lights, and
doing a 3-person box drill with a disc, moments that could've lasted
an arbitrary length of time and afterwards I never would've known how
long they exactly took.

The most recent is Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin (most
badass name/title combination ever, btw). It was an excellent novel
with a couple new ideas well explored (primarily androgynous humans
who only feel sexual drive every 26 days for about 4 days, during
which their first contact with others determines which gender they
become for that "kemmer") - very poetic and philosophical, incredibly
detailed and entertaining; if you're only going to read one of these
4, this should be it.

--k2

The Forever War

I listened to "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman on my kick of
Hugo+Nebula joint award winners. I'm always really happy when books
written 10 years before I was born have ideas in them that are new to
me. I had never considered Homosexuality as a dominant form of birth
control in society. It also makes me see Ender's Game in a new light,
since they have basically the same plot premise (ahhhh humanity is
attacked by the only other sentient race we've ever encountered!) but
they take very different paths through it. One of the biggest
differences is Haldeman stays within relativistic constraints, while
Card has the ansible for faster-than-light communication. I don't
think that's a weakness of Ender's Game though; it lets Card focus a
lot more on the human dynamics that are so interesting.

--k2

The Art of Simple Food

Diana,

If you're looking for a good cookbook to cover the basics and explain everything from what to stock in your pantry to the best kitchen tools to have and lots and lots of really good (and mostly good for you) recipes, check out The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. It's probably similar to Bittman's book. Waters is one of the most significant American foodies, Chez Panisse is her restaurant and she basically started the localvore movement in the 80s in the bay area. Tessa and Deo gave Stu the book for graduation and he has been using it to cook the most amazing things ever since. But don't tell him I told you that, he wants to uphold the image that all he does at home is drink beer, watch sports and shave sweet moustaches.

--Acadia

Think like a Chef & Ender's Game

Oh man.. water polo? My first ever shoulder dislocation was playing water polo..

Anyway, one of my favorite non-cookbooks is called 'think like a chef' or something like that. Very few recipes, but teaches you how to pair tastes and freestyle and stuff. I'll attribute 15% of my success to it.

My school has a classroom set of Ender's Game. I checked one out so I could reread it. Then I realized I didn't have a lesson plan for my freshman class, so I checked out the rest. It's weird to teach that book in terms of themes and motifs and character analysis... but even more weird that it's making me appreciate it even more. One of my kids came in during lunch upset because other kids in our class were giving her shit all the time for 'acting like she was better than them just because she had a good friend she likes to be with in class.' I scrapped my lesson plan and we're spending two days looking at why some characters like Ender and some don't (and vice versa) and why kids are mean to each other. It was awesome.

And if you're wondering, yeah, it's still good.

--fraggle

The Time Traveler's Wife (yet again)

> I checked out the Time Traveler's Wife as a book on CD, but realized that it
> was the abridged version. What I listened to, I have to admit, I really
> didn't enjoy at all. I'm not sure what the actual book is like, but the CDs
> seemed to have sentence structures that would start to annoy me pretty
> quickly. I noticed a lot of short phrases or even one word sentences.
> Like, "Running. Laughing. Walking on the beach. I used to do these
> things." I made that up, but stuff like that...not sure I can handle much
> of it. Is the real book written like that too?

I didn't notice any jarring pacing when I was reading it. I feel like
when you read it visually you can skip over those parts as quickly as
you like instead of being forced to listen to some narrator invest too
much emphasis into every word. Give the dead tree version a try, I bet
you like it.

-k2

How to Cook Everything, Bakewise and Cookwise & The Time Traveler's Wife (again)

Fraggle, welcome to the water polo team!

I'm glad that you joined because I've recently looked into three books about cooking, which you might be interested to learn about.

1. How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman -- this was a pretty interesting book for me. It really did have tons and tons of recipes for nearly everything that I have always been curious about how to make, and the best part is that it kept stuff simple (including ingredients). I found it to be similar to the Reader's Digest do-it-yourself guides, where they give you suggestions about essential tools and ingredients and also a lot of explanation for even doing simple things. It didn't have photos (bummer) and some of the recipes weren't all that exciting, but as a starting place, I thought it was good.

2. Bakewise and Cookwise by Shirley Corriher -- these books are advertised as the science of baking and cooking. They are supposed to explain why ingredients do what they do and what parts they all play. I was interested in learning about substituting applesauce for butter/oil, but alas, it didn't really get into that. I was frustated with these books. Unlike the above book, these were all of those really strange recipies and ingredients that really, I'm never going to use. Why couldn't she just explain stuff about ingredients that normal people use? I'm not sure. The books weren't a complete loss. There are some interesting tidbits in there, but overall, I didn't find them to be as useful as I had hoped.

Apparently, I am hungry all winter and like to read about cooking and baking.

I checked out the Time Traveler's Wife as a book on CD, but realized that it was the abridged version. What I listened to, I have to admit, I really didn't enjoy at all. I'm not sure what the actual book is like, but the CDs seemed to have sentence structures that would start to annoy me pretty quickly. I noticed a lot of short phrases or even one word sentences. Like, "Running. Laughing. Walking on the beach. I used to do these things." I made that up, but stuff like that...not sure I can handle much of it. Is the real book written like that too?

--diana