ReadingBlog

08 June 2008

Frames of reference

In 1977, I saw the movie Turning Point. Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft might have been the stars for most people, but Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne were all I saw in that movie. I know full-well that the dancing was enhanced by camera angles and lighting, but I was absolutely enthralled.

Later that year, I saw Gelsey Kirkland and the American Ballet Theater perform Swan Lake. (Baryshnikov was out sick the night I was there.) Kirkland was as fantastic as Baryshnikov had been in the movie. No camera angles or movie lighting needed. I was once again enthralled -- even though I remember Kirkland landing un-ballet-like on her butt during one of her exits.

Thus began a decade when I saw a lot of dance. And loved most of it. And found nearly all of it interesting.

There was another performance of Swan Lake, a few years later, that helped me learn how good Gelsey Kirkland and the ABT were. A well-reviewed local company performed. The music was recorded, not live. The dancers were probably well-rehearsed and dutifully trained. But there was no life in the performance. Neither the dancers nor the recording of a famous orchestra could come close to what I loved about dance.

Books, Ken, books! Remember?

Oh, yes, books. Banker Mary gave me Turquoise Girl by Aimée and David Thurlo for Christmas. A couple months back, I got around to reading it. I was hesitant because last July I'd read and written about the Turlo's book, Red Mesa. I wasn't pleased with it.

One of the reasons I hadn't liked it was probably the inevitable comparisons with the novels of Tony Hillerman. The Turlos and Hillerman write about Navajo police officers and the desert southwest of Dinétah. The comparisons are all over the cover of Turquoise Girl. Obviously the publisher thinks that hooking on to the Hillerman name is worthwhile.

If I'd never seen Gelsey Kirkland and ABT do Swan Lake, I might have appreciated the local company and their tape recording. If I'd never read Hillerman, I might have liked the Thurlo's books a bit more.

But maybe not. After page 25, I stopped remembering the typos and the awful word choices. Did these people not have an editor? or a proofreader? Don't they know that spell-check won't tell them that "thought" is not a substitute for "though?" And somebody ought to tell them about pacing. Speeding up narration and shortening sentences as the climax approaches is appropriate. But doing that in the middle of the book, only to slow down the story telling and then waltzing into the climax is not fun. It's rather like riding the downhill runs of the roller coaster with the emergency brake on.

I said after the first Thurlo book that I wouldn't go back to the library for another. The next time I have a hankering to read about Navajo police officers and the high desert, I'll reread a Hillerman.

Other opinions?

24 March 2008

Funny thing about philosophy

Last fall I noticed a little ad for a book in The New Yorker. The title caught my eye: Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar... The subtitle, Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, convinced me to buy it for David for Christmas. The book is by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein [below].

David and I have enjoyed listening to Garrison Keillor's joke shows, reading political humor, and reading and talking about philosophy. (Sophie's World was one of his favorite books a few years ago.) So, I bought the book.

David read it in the days after Christmas. When he went back to Beloit, I asked him if I could read it.

There are some good jokes, but the title is just about the best thing about the book. The punchline is at the end of the book.

The jokes are illustrative of the topics in chapters on metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, existentialism, et al. But I was really lazy when I read the book. I often wanted more explanation for the connections between topics and jokes. In other words, I didn't always get the philosophy.

If I were still teaching philosophy, I would probably "borrow" some of these jokes to use in class. Well, maybe. I'm not one of those people who readily remembers jokes and tells them spontaneously. The jokes would have to be in the lesson plans and I'd have to rehearse them.

Well, what, you ask, are some of the jokes?

Here's an epistemological joke: "A scientist and his wife are out for a drive in the country. The wife says, 'Oh, look! Those sheep have been shorn.'

"'Yes,' says the scientist. 'On this side.'"

How about an existential joke?

"Norman began to hyperventilate when he saw the doctor. 'I'm sure I've got liver disease.'

"'That's ridiculous,' said the doctor. 'You'd never know if you had liver disease. There's no discomfort of any kind.'

"'Exactly!' said Norman. 'Those are my precise symptoms.'"

There's this from the chapter on the philosophy of language: "As the poet Gertrude Stein lay on her deathbed, her partner, Alice B. Toklas, leaned over and whispered, 'What is the answer, Gertrude?'

"Replied Stein, 'What's the question?'"

Finally, there's a meta-philosophy joke: "A blind man, a lesbian, and a frog walk into a bar. The barkeep looks up at them and says, 'What is this — a joke?'"

Okay, my reaction is definitely mine. Your reactions will vary. If you're curious check it out.

Plato and Platypus official website
A YouTube video of an authors' reading
A review from BuzzFlash

04 March 2008

Characters and island suspense

Here's another set of comments I wrote about a Laurie R. King book. It's dated February 2004, but that can't be right. I wouldn't have been at Sidetrack in February and Kris wouldn't have been bringing guests at that time of year. Reading the entry carefully, I find I wrote this in July '03 and only got around to posting it at ReadingOnTheWeb in February.

Here's another of my favorite King books.

I was at Sidetrack for the purpose of cleaning and preparing the place for Kris and her friends from Madison who would arrive the next week. I was also dealing with the death of a cell phone thanks to the misfeasance of somebody at Amery's Radio Shack store. Oh, and there was a free range cat that kept hanging out on the deck between hunting trips. I thought it was the neighbor's cat. But the neighbor hadn't been around for two days.

I didn't get as much cleaning done as I'd intended. I was trapped by a book: Folly by Laurie R. King.

King first came to my attention as the author of a series of books about Mary Russell, a young woman who becomes a partner of Sherlock Holmes. Those were quite enjoyable. King also wrote four mystery novels about Kate Martinelli, a San Francisco detective. She's also written a couple other novels about interesting characters.

None of them prepared me for Folly. There are portrayals here of depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome that set my teeth on edge. There's also the story of the brave and intelligent woman at the center of the book who struggles mightily with her feelings and her madness. There are enough real threats to add to the imagined ones to make the suspense palpable. Rae Newborn, the woman at the center of the stories, is living alone on one of the San Juan islands (i.e. no other island residents). The suspense in the story telling was enough to keep me from reading it after dark while I was alone at Sidetrack, even when there were neighbors here.

But it wasn't just the very well-told story that kept me reading that July afternoon when I should have been washing and vacuuming. It was the characters. King has always populated her novels with interesting people: the young woman at Oxford who seeks out a retired beekeeper as a mentor, a "retired" adventurous detective who keeps accepting commissions from highly-placed friends, a cop whose life away from the office is more important to her than the professional dedication she gives to law enforcement, and the quiet deprogrammer who infiltrated a dangerous sect for example.

Folly focuses on four generations of a family and the representatives of these generations are wonderfully drawn. The resilient main character is most complete, but the others appear as real people as well. It's not that I'd like to spend a lot of time with these people, but before I was very far into the book, I cared about them. Even the characters around the edges of the story are bright and clear.

So what makes this a wonderfully excellent book are the characterizations, the portrayals of imperfect people finding ways of coping, the carefully-told suspenseful tale, and the way it drew me into the world created by Laurie R. King. But that's just my opinion.

I finished the book only an hour ago, and I can already pick out some gimmicks and plot devices that I might criticize. But this book doesn't deserve nit picking. It deserves to be read and enjoyed.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the Pulitizer-winning book I wrote about in the last issue was not, to my mind, a great American novel. This may not be either, but it's better. And the tensions between sanity and insanity, struggle and acceptance, and love and resentment are as profound and universal as the themes of Chabon's book. If he can win a Pulitzer, Laurie R. King deserves one too.

What do you think?

Improbable upstart

In my continuing effort to bring reviews from the old ReadingOnTheWeb site to the new-fangled blog, I'm concentrating on my favorites.

Laurie R. King is one of my favorites. I wrote this after reading The Beekeeper's Apprentice back in August 2001.

When I read a review recently of a new mystery featuring Sherlock Holmes set in St. Paul, Minnesota and involving railroad magnate (Empire Builder) James J. Hill, I figured this Holmes stuff must be a trend. I had just finished a new post-Conan Doyle Holmes mystery myself and enjoyed it very much, thank you.

It's been a long time since I've read any Sherlock Holmes -- about 40 years.

When I was about 12 years old, I stayed at my great-uncle Clarence's home for a couple days. (He was a World War I veteran who belonged to the Fraternal Order of the Cooties, Minneapolis Pup Tent, in memory of those awful months in France.) He'd finished off an attic room and decorated it with books. One of them was Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories, which I devoured while a quiet guest. Uncle Clarence gave it to me when I went home. It's on my shelf right now.

The new Holmes mystery I read seemed to very much in the spirit of Conan Doyle's work. Maybe. Because all my Holmesian memories seem to come from Basil Rathbone movies, and the book is dead-on accurate to those images, phrases and accents. The book is one Nancy recommended, The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King [at left].

If you've ever wished that Holmes would get a gentle comeuppance, here's the book for you. And who better to chastise that old know-it-all than Miss Mary Russell, a 15-year-old American orphan "whose mental acuity is equaled only by her audacity, tenacity, and penchant for trousers and cloth caps." (quoting the book jacket flack)

The plot revolves around the kidnapping of the daughter of a US Senator who was visiting London. Holmes is lured out of retirement and persuaded to take on a teen-aged, female assistant to help Scotland Yard solve the case. Of course, the kidnapping was only a ruse to get Holmes out of retirement and into the world, so he could be killed.

It's a fine story of Mary Russell's discoveries about her new life as a ward in England and Holmes' world of treachery and detection. By the end of the book, Mary Russell is a student at Oxford and ready to take a term off to help Holmes solve another case. That must be what King's next book featuring Russell and Holmes, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, is about.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice is great fun -- just keep imagining Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes sputtering in the face of a brilliant young woman. And then imagine what Dr. Watson is doing!

02 March 2008

Good people, bad cops

Okay, I "know" I don't like violent, bloody, conflict-filled mysteries. I avoid reading them and I stop reading them when I start.

So, why did I like C. J. Box's latest violent, bloody, conflict-filled mystery? It's titled Blue Heaven. And I really liked this book.

In the opening scene, two kids witness a cold-blooded murder and become prey in a deadly chase. Those kids witness more murder and mayhem later, and nearly every character in the story is threatened by the bad guys.

There are lots of bad guys and lots of good guys (almost every character is a guy). There are few if any hints about how things are going to be resolved. Deadly threats hang over nearly every event in the story.

Box [left] does a masterful job of laying out the story. The action is nearly non-stop, but there's enough explanation for things to make sense. And nearly everything does make sense. I'm put off by unbelievable actions by characters in these stories, but incredulity only hit me once. I would have welcomed a little more explanation in the climax, but I'm a pretty literal reader.

Box's other books have been limited by some stock characters and some geography. This one is not, and I think it helped.

Joe Hartlaub, in his review at Book Reporter (see below), calls the book a "visual feast." I agree. Box does such a good job of painting word pictures of the people, events, and settings that it was almost like looking at story boards for a movie while someone described what was going on.

If any of you read this or any of Box's books, write and tell a little bit of the world what you think.

14 February 2008

Old mystery, new novel

I just finished Margaret Coel's latest mystery, The Girl with Braided Hair. (Thanks, Mary.)

I really like this one. Then you'll ask, "Why?" And I'll have to figure out why.

The characters are either better creations now or I've gotten used to them.

The plot is better put together than many of Coel's earlier books. But the liklihood of either a lawyer or a priest devoting much time to identifying a murder victim who's been dead for 30 years, seems really, really tiny.

(Coel could get around my incredulity if her characters, like Hillerman's, were tribal police officers or investigators.)

The relationships still don't work for me. An Arapaho lawyer (Vicky Holden), her Lakota legal partner and lover (Adam Lone Eagle), and a reservation Jesuit priest (Father John) make a lousy triangle.

Father John's connections with the people at the mission and the kids on his baseball team seem realistic. But, the Father John-Vicky Holden tension doesn't. The priest staves off the temptations of the woman in the same way he, as a recovering alcoholic, staves off the temptations of Irish whiskey. I guess I'd expect more prayers from the priest. And maybe more confessions to his priestly colleague at the mission or to his superior.

And Vicky Holden seems not to think much about the temptation of the man who is the priest and is really, really ambivalent about her romance/conjugal relationship with tall, handsome, logical, and successful Adam Lone Eagle. (If her ambivalence is connected to her attraction to the priest, she's more messed up than she otherwise appears.)

The backstory is set on the Wind River Reservation in the 1970s when the American Indian Movement was fighting and campaigning for civil rights. After the Trail of Broken Treaties protest that occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Washington, DC and the Wounded Knee takeover, AIM leaders and members were being pursued by the FBI and local law enforcement. According to Coel, many people associated with AIM moved to remote western reservations to avoid arrrest. The late 1970s were, according to Coel, a difficult time for many people on the Wind River reservation, both those who sympathized with and supported AIM, those who were opposed to the outside agitators, and those who just wanted to be left in peace. That was the context for a murder and coverup that became the plot of The Girl with Braided Hair.

Now, I look forward to other reactions to this book. Maybe Jana will have time to read this one and let us know what she thinks of Coel's new book.

But, please, write and tell a little bit of the world what you think.

13 February 2008

Jana Eaton on Margaret Coel

Well, I did send the books to my friend Jana back in 2002. They arrived at a time when she wanted some respite from thinking about her thesis and her defense. She read The Eagle Catcher and wrote us about it before going on to successfully defend her thesis and earn her doctorate. (Congratulations, Dr. Jana.) Here's what she wrote:

"Ken thoughtfully mailed me three of the Margaret Coel paperbacks.

"While the reading is a bit different from that I'm doing for my dissertation (curricular decentralization and sociopolitical stability in Dagestan, Sakha, Tatarsan and Bashkortostan), I thoroughly enjoyed The Eagle Catcher and am grateful to Ken for putting me on to Coel. While I'm not overly impressed with the character development or logic of the plot trajectory at times, Coel accurately depicts the Arapaho customs as I remember them.

"Having grown up on the Reservation as an Arapaho, the book really resonated with me. I've never felt more nostalgic for life on the Res., a place from which I couldn't wait to escape years ago.

"Coel did do her homework. In fact, I recognized a lot of the names in the acknowledgments, including a close friend, Scotty Ratliff. Scotty is a Shoshone (both the Shoshones and Arapahos reside on the Wind River Reservation).

"He introduced Coel to various people on the Res. and said in an email that he took her to the sweat lodge.

"The big change that I notice is the congruence of Catholicism with Native religious customs and practices. This was not so much the case when I was growing up. In fact, the Church backed the banning of the Sun Dance, as I recall. It is heartening to hear that the Church is now "Nativizing" its services and practices. Likewise, sweating was not widely practiced when I was growing up, but it is very popular today -- and very spiritual.

"Still, the problems on the Res. are daunting and pretty much the same -- rampant alcoholism, abject poverty, high unemployment, etc.

"By the way, there is no St. Francis Mission; it is really St. Stephen's Mission. Why Coel changed that name but retained the other place names eludes me. Also, she says all of the characters are fictional, but I recognized several "fictional" names that are the real names of Arapahos living there -- Oldmans, for example.

"Anyway, thanks so much, Ken (even if I haven't been this homesick in years!)."

Hillerman Imitator

Here's another import from ReadingOnTheWeb. It's from an entry I made in November 2002. I'm adding it because I just read the newest mystery by Margaret Coel and I'll be writing about it shortly. That and the other reactions to Coel's books I've written here gives a lie to my 2002 resolution not to read any more of her books.

Here's what I wrote in 2002:
While browsing in The Book Peddler in West Yellowstone, MT, I ran across a book that looked interesting: The Eagle Catcher by Margaret Coel.

If Tony Hillerman made a career of writing mysteries located on New Mexico's Navajo reservation, Margaret Coel seems to be making her career writing mysteries set on Wyoming's Wind River reservation. (In an interview she said that Hillerman was her inspiration.)

Coel was a reporter who wrote about Wyoming and Native history before turning to fiction. Her stories have been published in several magazines dedicated to mystery writing, but she's also been a "Career Achievement Nominee" in the Romantic Times Book Club.

Instead of centering her stories on a couple of Navajo policemen as Hillerman does, Coel's primary actors are a Jesuit missionary priest and an Arapaho woman lawyer who is conflicted about working for her people on the reservation or working on "big" issues in a large firm in Denver or Los Angeles.

The Eagle Catcher, published in 1995, was her first mystery novel. It's sold well, I guess. My copy was the 10th printing and there are four more Margaret Coel books advertised in the back.

Coel is a pretty good storyteller and offers some attractive characters who, like Jance's Sheriff Brady, have more going on in their lives than finding killers.

In the end, though, the people in her stories are unconvincing. A priest at a poor rural mission ought to be spending more time fund raising and less interfering with police work. And the hot shot lawyer whose legal brief is going to convince the Federal Appeals Court to set a precedent important to tribes all over the country really doesn't have time to pursue murder investigations in her spare time. The implausibility of "Murder She Wrote" rears its ugly head.

Coel does her best to make the dry grasslands of the Wind River reservation attractive, but she can't compete with Hillerman's rhapsodizing about the beauties of New Mexico's deserts. (Or perhaps I've had enough experience driving across the dry prairies of Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Montana not to romanticize them they way I can sometimes imagine the high desert.)

I finished reading The Eagle Catcher while sitting alongside the Firehole River on a gorgeous September afternoon in Yellowstone National Park. I liked it right up to the end despite its shortcomings. When the bad guy (a politician) gets zapped by Mother Nature's lightning instead of meeting secular justice, I'm disappointed. (If things worked that way, there would be few politicians left inside the beltway.) I couldn't have been that disappointed. On my way back through West Yellowstone, I bought two more Margaret Coel mysteries.

The additional books were The Spirit Woman and The Thunder Keeper. If The Eagle Catcher suggested that Coel's characters were not quite believable (in comparison to Jance's or Hillerman's); these books convinced me that Coel needs to work on plotting.

The stories are well told, but the stories left me really disappointed. I'm reminded of Dan Conrad's initial enthusiasm for Paula Cohen's Gramercy Park that cooled on further reading. Margaret Coel's stories are better read without thinking about them too much.

In these second and third books I read, the incredibility factor kept rising. Coel kept taking the shortcut of having her characters do things for very questionable reasons in order to move the story along. By the end of the third book, I wasn't sure I liked either of her main characters very much. I'm glad I read them, but I don't think I'll read any more of Coel's books. I'll send these off to Jana Eaton, who grew up in central Wyoming. If she has time while writing her thesis and teaching school, maybe she can escape to them. Then she can tell us what she thinks.

04 February 2008

Keeping murder within the family

My sister-in-law Mary, one of my primary suppliers, gave me some books for Christmas. I finally got around to reading one of them: Three Sisters, A Charlie Moon Mystery by James D. Doss. [That's him below at a book signing for an earlier Charlie Moon mystery.]

Thanks, Mary.

My reactions to the book were mixed.

Since Mary is one of three sisters, I thought there might be some symbolism in the title. I hope there wasn't. I didn't get very far into the book to realize that I was lucky not to marry into that literary family.

I thought the basic plot was interesting, but getting through the story telling was difficult for me. Doss kept commenting in asides about the story, and he did it as the writer outside of the book. Douglas Adams did some of the same kind of commenting in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, but it wasn't so obtrusive. And Adams was writing about really weird things that needed commenting on. Now murderous husbands and wives are rather weird, but not as weird as Vogon demolition fleets and two-headed Galactic Presidents.

Oh, but see, now I'm off the track of what I wanted to say about Doss' distracting asides. Ah, but that's the point, isn't it? And Adams was writing humorous science fiction, not a Serious murder mystery set in southern Colorado.

In the middle part of the book, there weren't as many asides and I liked reading it more than I had at the beginning. But, then, in the final fourth of the book, disclosures came more and more quickly; events were more and more quickly related. I had been reading leisurely through most of the book and suddenly revealing facts popped up and I had to pick up the pace of my reading to keep up with the rapidity of the story telling. I don't think that anyone gave Doss a limited number of pages in which to tell his story, but it seemed like he was in a rush to finish.

Some of the best parts of the book were the buddy scenes in which Charlie Moon and police chief Scott Parris hang out and be friends. I think I could read a plotless book about those two guys taking a road trip.

Oh, and I did enjoy reading about Moon's aunt, Daisy. She's an ancient character who is a hoot. I don't know if I'd like to spend much time with her, but I did like hearing Doss tell stories about her.

All in all, it was a pretty good book. If anyone else reads this and has a reaction, add it here by using the Comments link at the bottom.

A review of Three Sisters by tfedge at Review Stream
A review by Oline Cogdill from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
List of Doss' books from Fantastic Fiction

02 February 2008

Protest Literature

In an attempt to raise the quality of literature mentioned here and transfer some of the best of the old ReadingOnTheWeb to this venue, I dug up this oldie. I wrote this in another lifetime (in June of 2001).

Back in the strange times of the 1960s, I had an inspiring teacher of Russian history. Russian politics were as mysterious then as they are now; the stakes don't seem quite so high these days (though they probably are). I got intrigued with Russian literature and then with Soviet literature and then with dissident literature. (I even tried teaching myself the Russian alphabet so I could hear the poetic words of Babi Yar.)

The protest literature was wonderful: full of allusions and analogies and insiders' jokes insults and attacks.

It was a window into a world of large and petty injustices, absurdities and tyrannies. And, in spite of being a creative sign of life and hope, the books seemed to express hopelessness--the hopelessness of the individual pitted against totalitarian government, true believers, and culture. (The Cancer Ward comes to mind just now.) Even the funny ones were depressing (The Fur Hat, for example.)

Well, I got back into that "world" when I read Zhang Jie's As Long As Nothing Happens Nothing Will.

The stories may be about China in the 1970s and '80s.
Zhang Jie (a 60-year-old writer who sacrificed literature for the country and Party by studying economics, and who was sacrificed by the Party and country during the Cultural Revolution and who didn't begin writing until the 1970s) may be a popular Chinese novelist.
She may have won "China's most prestigious literary award" [book jacket blurb].

But she's writing exactly the same kinds of stories the Russian dissidents did.

There's the peasant village artisan whose craftsmanship entrances a wealthy tourist from the Philippines. When she invites him to Manila for an exhibit of his work, he becomes the toast of the provincial town near his village--until the invitation falls through.
There's the story of the "free" cat and its "unfree' master.
Another about the struggling doctor whose invitation to a medical seminar to learn surgical techniques is transformed by the machinations of politics into a trip to England for the hospital's Party cadre.
And when an timid-but-critically-thinking professor does get to go abroad, his bladder infection makes it impossible for the Party chaperone to keep track of both him and the rest of the group.

The stories bring to mind Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil."

They suggest also something from Kathleen Norris: the smaller the community and the stakes, the more vicious the infighting.

The worst part was that the stories kept reminding me of school.

27 January 2008

Tiny reviews

Rob Bingham, who had a couple careers before he braved teaching licensure and secondary physics classrooms, has written again about his reading.

In the old days of Reading as a paper newsletter, Rob wrote about some of his books and about scouting.

He's being very brief with these reviews, but they communicate:

Logos Run, by William C. Dietz, 2006 , AIrline read... cheery mayhem!
Rising Tide by Weir & Boyne, 2003, history of cold war submarines - that was my watch!
A Mind at a Time, Mel Levine, MD, 2002, ADD/ADHD point of view; interesting.
Labyrinth, Kate Mosse, 2005, Will make good movie; quick read, catchy mystery.
Assault on Reason, Al Gore, 2007, Well edited ... more of the unlikely should read it.
Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan, 2007, Fun, for an Econ major like me; what a neat background!

Thanks for the thoughts, Rob.

Now, everyone else can see how easy this is.

Write. Tell a little bit of the world what you think.

25 January 2008

Books that smart people read

Books That Make You Dumb

Here's a badly mis-titled research project that has interesting results. (Interesting does not mean meaningful to me.)

It's not about books that make you dumb. It's not even about books popular with dumb people. It's about the favorite books identified by college students and the relationship of those preferences to the average SAT scores at the colleges the students attend.

But that doesn't make for a snappy title, does it? (Or an easy-to-remember URL)

Go look at the details for yourself: Books that make you dumb

23 January 2008

Robots, robots, everywhere

While hanging out at O'Hare on his way home for winter break, young David picked up a copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot with a picture of Will Smith on the cover. He figured he was buying the screenplay for the movie Smith starred in. But, no, it was the classic collection of Asimov short stories originally published in 1950. The stories had appeared in science fiction magazines in the decade prior to that, so some were over 65 years old. David had read them some time ago. The book just got a new cover for a 2004 paperback edition.

I hadn't read these stories, so I picked up this classic. This is, after all, where Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics first appeared. In addition, Robbie, the robot in the first story, was the inspiration for Robby of The Forbidden Planet and Robot B-9 of Lost in Space.

It took me a long time to get through this collection. I just wasn't in the mood for all the thinking that Asimov instigated.

The stories are amazing. Asimov was making predicitons about technology, politics, culture, and psychology. One of the characters who holds this collection together is robopsychologist Susan Calvin, born in 1982. Calvin dies at age 82, shortly after the last story ends. Her life span coincides with the successes of U.S. Robotics and Mechanical Men, the company that created "positronic brains," thinking machines, and robots.

Some of Asimov's predictions seem quaint now; others are on the mark. I guess I should have expected that with so much speculation in one place. The thinking machines and robots are huge constructs filled with vacuum tubes in Asimov's 21st century. He was writing in the shadow of Eniac. [Two programmers work on Eniac in the photo at right.]

Asimov's 21st century world was a global society, but it was politically organized into half a dozen economic-geographic regions, each with its own "thinking machine" to rationally organize its economic production and coordinate global trade. He did predict that the capital of the Tropic region would be a brand new city in central Nigeria, just about where Abuja, the purpose-built capital city is today.

Construction in Abuja, Nigeria

He also predicted the competition for resources between the developing and developed worlds even though he underestimated global population. But in Asimov's global economy, the thinking machines rationally organized things to resolve conflicts that arose from the competitons.

And in the end, the thinking machines injected little anomalies into the global production-trade system to make people more comfortable with the machines' dominance over human beings.

In the final story, a colleague says to Dr. Calvin, "But you are telling me, Susan, that... Mankind has lost its own say in its future."

She responds, "It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand... Now the machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines... [have] the greatest weapons at their disposal, the absolute control of our economy."

Ah, utopia.

Then, yesterday, the February edition of Seed Magazine arrived. The theme of the issue is Blue Brain. One of the main articles is Out of the Blue by Jonah Lehrer. It asks the question, "Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?"

And in Wired Magazine's Danger Room (What's next in national security?), this headline appeared: "Israel Eyes Thinking Machines to Fight 'Doomsday' Missile Strikes." Noah Shachtman writes that "Israeli military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it 'could take over completely' from flesh-and-blood operators..."

The quest for Asimov's thinking machines goes on. To what ends?

16 January 2008

More cartoon than comic strip

Well, I found time around the holidays to read another bubble gum novel to escape from whatever it was I was avoiding.

After reading the 13th Stephanie Plum novel, I went back in the series and read the 12th, Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich [at right].

This one actually had a plot!

It was more like a cartoon or a graphic novel than a comic strip.

Better? Maybe.

I got a stack of better books as gifts recently. I look forward to escaping into them soon. I'll let you know.

16 December 2007

A taste of philosophical silliness

In the late 1980s, when Neil Gaiman was a young writer, he started a short story and couldn't figure out how to end it. He sent the manuscript to his friend Terry Pratchett. He couldn't figure out where the story was going either. The story sat on Pratchett's desk for a year.

When Pratchett looked at it again, he figured out what came next in the story. Intercontinental telephone calls were made at strange hours. Floppy disks were sent back and forth by air mail (those were the days before e-mail, children) and after awhile the two wild men had a nearly-400-page novel. Well, they had the beginning of one. The got themselves into the same room and hashed out the writing of Good Omens.

All that is a preface to my purchasing a copy of the book in the famous Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon. (I'd always wanted to by a book at Powell's.)

David is a fan of Pratchett's Discworld novels. I've heard him chuckling over the books and ranting about the wonders of Discworld and the hilarity in the books.

I didn't know if I was ready for Discworld, but I thought I'd get a taste of Pratchett by buying and reading Good Omens. You may have noticed that it took me a month to read the book.

Actually, I didn't start until after I'd come home from Oregon and a 30-hour round trip to Denver. It still took a long time for me to read a book about Armageddon.

Yes, the book is about the end of the world and how it didn't happen. Seems the agents of fate were as falible as the people. Mistakes were made from day one, it turns out, and in the end not everyone went along with what was ineffable.

The dialogues (between devils and angels, between witches and witch hunters, among children mystified by goings on and their powers, et al.) sparkle with puns and logical jokes. It does remind me of the humor of the late Douglas Adams. Sometimes I was reminded of Jim Henson and the Muppets. I was also reminded of Kurt Vonnegut, especially Cat's Cradle.

If a movie is ever made of Good Omens, I think it should be a Muppet movie.

By the way, seemingly the only being to really know what is going on (everywhere and everywhen) is Agnes Nutter, witch. And her prophecies don't get used to their full extent.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "So it goes."

It's good winter time reading. Look for the book in the library or in a new paperback edition. You can order it from Powell's or from Amazon below (and a few cents will come back and support this web site).

29 November 2007

Confirmation of my good taste

The New York Times book editors have named Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson as one of the 5 best fiction books for 2007.

I only mention this because it confirms my good taste. I wrote about my experience with the book back in early September.

I thank the Amery (WI) Public Library for making it available to me. I thank Graywolf Press in Minneapolis for publishing it. And I thank all those teachers who helped me learn to read and to like books.

From the New York Times: The 10 Best Books of 2007

Fiction:

MAN GONE DOWN By Michael Thomas
OUT STEALING HORSES By Per Petterson; translated by Anne Born
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES By Roberto Bolaño; translated by Natasha Wimmer
THEN WE CAME TO THE END By Joshua Ferris
TREE OF SMOKE By Denis Johnson

Nonficiton:

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq's Green Zone By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression By Mildred Armstrong Kalish
THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court By Jeffrey Toobin
THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History By Linda Colley
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross

23 November 2007

Colorado mystery

I was in the Denver airport. I had over an hour until my plane left and I'd read the New Yorker I'd brought along.

I found my way to the Hudson Bookseller store in Terminal C and bought a copy of The Sign of the Book. It's by John Dunning [at right], a Denver resident. "How appropriate," I thought.

Years ago, I'd read a couple of Dunning's mysteries. They are set in Denver and involve "cop-turned-bookseller Cliff Janeway." Bookseller in this case does not mean someone like the clerk at the airport Hudson's. It means someone who deals in rare and obscure books for collectors. (See the link to Dunning's Old Algonquin Books.)

Anyway, there weren't many Dunning books, and I never became a fanatic about them. (I don't remember why at this distance.)

Well, this one was extraordinary and compelling.

I had gotten up early on a Saturday in a Denver motel, taught a workshop for teachers all day, and then had over two hours at the airport before flying home. I was a little tired.

But, once I started reading at departure gate C22 it was difficult for me to stop. A couple times during the flight home, I did put the book down and close my eyes for attempted naps. But before long I was reading again.

Once I got home, I discovered that Nancy had had a flat tire on her way to pick me up, and I had another 45 minutes to read. By the time I did get home, it was nearly midnight and there was no way I could keep reading.

But the next night I did read more and didn't finish only because the suspenseful finish was "in sight" and I wanted to be able to get to sleep. I took time to finish the next afternoon.

The Sign of the Book was just the kind of thing I wanted to read just now. The pace of the action, the amount of detail, the intriguing asides, the near absence of unbelievables, and the clarity of narrative were just right for me.

So, if you read it, let us know how it fit you.

Reviews from Book Browse

John Dunning's biography at the Old Algonquin Books web site

Bibliography of John Dunning's books from Fantastic Fiction

13 November 2007

Comic book wannabe

Eugene, OR: I read another graphic novel wannabe between spending time with my mother, working on the test bank for the new edition of Chip's textbook, and preparing materials for Saturday's workshop in Denver.

I decided along the way that Janet Evanovich's books could be animated or transformed into comic books. I read Eleven On Top. There's not a lot to distinguish it from the Evanovich book I read earlier.

Stephanie Plum, the central character, runs through cars and jobs just as fast in this book as in the other one. She is still unable to say "I love you" to her main squeeze, Joe Moreli. She still flirts with her employer of last resort, Ranger. She still loves her old neighborhood in Trenton, New Jersey. And she still tolerates her family (even her dad, who is all but invisible).

I kept trying to imagine what Stephanie Plum's comic book or cartoon charachter would look like. I don't think she would look like Sandra Bullock, who is featured on the front of the Stephanie Plum Forum. Maybe the character should be based on Evanovich herself [at right].

See: The Stephanie Plum Forum Site

10 November 2007

Swedish mystery (again)

The street on which Kurt Wallander and his daughter Linda shared an apartment in Before the Frost. Photo by Simon Hämmerle

I picked up two more Henning Mankell mysteries at the Northfield library to take along on my trip to Oregon. I started Before the Frost before I left, but it was a big hardcover, so I didn't pull it out during the flight west. I finished in Eugene while taking breaks from writing an instructors' manual and spending time with my mother.

This Mankell story is mainly about a police recruit named Linda Wallander. In this fictional Swedish world, Linda is the daughter of Kurt Wallander, detective inspector about whom Mankell wrote half a dozen other mysteries.

This story is pretty good, although the main characters are so flawed they seem real. Now, I am pretty sure that there aren't any perfect families, but I'm glad I'm not part of the Wallander family. Father Kurt unpredictably veers from ignoring anything his daughter says to telling her to present her theories at a case conference in police headquarters. Daughter Linda goes from being thoughtlessly cautious to being dangerously venturesome.

And most of the other characters -- especially the crazy bad guys -- aren't any more predictable. Now with crazies, that's understandable. But with an experienced investigator and a rookie just out of the police academy, such behavior is unexpected. Unless these people are real humans with a history we don't know much about. Mankell seems to have created those characters in this book.

He's also created a convoluted plot full of violence and mystery.

Overall, it's a long book full or realistic characters, and it's good reading. I liked this one better than the first Mankell's books I read a couple weeks ago.

If you other ideas, write and tell us.

From Swedish TV, three actors who play major characters in Before the Frost: Ola Rapace (plays dectective Stefan Lindman), Krister Henriksson (plays Kurt Wallander), and Johanna Sällström (who plays Linda Wallander).

See

Henning Mankell's site for Before the Frost
A review of Before the Frost from The Age (Australia)
Fiona Walker's review of Before the Frost at Mystery Ink
Ystad, Sweden web camera
"The new inspector Morse?"

31 October 2007

Recorded Maisie Dobbs mystery

A couple weeks ago, I was headed up to the little cabin called Sidetrack for some end of season work. I stopped by the library and checked out the audiobook for Birds of a Feather, a Maisie Dobbs mystery by Jacqueline Winspear.

Back in August I'd read a couple of Winspear's books and was engrossed in the recreation of 1930 London. I said at that time that Winspear "tells the stories in a plodding, detail-filled way," but the enchanting detail of life over 70 years ago made up for the mundane story telling.

Well, the drives to Sidetrack and back only got me through the first 4 of the 9 CDs in the novel. So, when Nancy and I went back the following weekend to finish closing up the cabin for winter, I listened to the CDs between yard work, window washing, vacuuming, and napping.

The story was interesting. The murders of 3 women who had been friends in a Swiss bording school is central. There are about as many suspects as victims. Winspear does a good job of laying out the clues and allowing red herrings to distract me.

The reading is very well done by Kim Hicks, a radio, stage, and screen actress who personalizes the voices without histrionics.

However, the "plodding, detail-filled" writing is deadly when read. When I was reading, I could easily skip over the fashions of the women characters. But as a listener, it was hard to ignore things without missing something at the beginning of the next paragraph. I also think some things stood out more when recited than when silently read. Maisie Dobbs finally got to the convent where one of the characters was hiding, but I think it was a CD and a half after I'd figured out that's where the missing person was.

I wish I'd read the book. I might go back and read another of Winspear's mysteries. Then I'll be in control of which details to attend to.

Jacqueline Winspear's web site for Birds of a Feather
A review by Karen Meek at Over My Dead Body
Joy Calderwood's review at Reviewer's Choice