the 30 second book reviews strikes back
by John at 9/15/2006 02:02:00 PM
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) - Jerome K. Jerome (1889)
This is a breezy short tale of three young, unmarried, mostly idle men (one of them works at a bank) who decide to take a boating trip up the Thames to Oxford to relieve themselves off the ills of Victorian London. They bring along their rascal dog, Montmorency, who seems to have only a little more sense then they do. On their way to Oxford, the boating group get involved in several still-funny adventures, mostly due to their own mild incompetence and careless laziness. Supposedly this book was very popular back in its day, and provided a gently satirical look at middle-class Victorian life. A good quick read, so it's recommended for a rainy weekend day.
free e-book available
Radio Free Albemuth - Philip K. Dick
Published posthumously (it was written in the mid-seventies), in this novel Dick imagines an America nor unlike the one in A Scanner Darkly: This America is run by a man who is a combination of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and civilian spy corps try to root out communist sympathizers through intimidation and dirty tricks. Oddly, Dick features himself as a character (named Phil Dick) who is friends with another man, Nick Brady, who just might be receiving messages from outerspace while he sleeps. This dark tale deals with some of PKD's familiar themes of identity and reality, but also gives the reader a strong indication of Dick's anti-authoritarian beliefs. There's a lot to digest in here.
Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality - Steven Poole
"Unspeak" is the art of speaking while doing two things: 1) Avoiding discussion of the unspoken assumptions behind words, and 2) simultaneously silencing the counter-argument. It's not exactly "framing" (Lakoff) and it's not "Newspeak" (Orwell) but a combination of the two and more as well. One of Poole's arguments is that, by analyzing unspeak, one can really begin to understand what the person doing the speaking wants or believes. Drawing mostly from the last couple of decades (and especially the last ten years or so) Poole goes through a large variety of examples, taking special care to examine how the words used really betray the speaker's actual desires. The emphasis is largely on Britain and the USA, and especially the Blair and Bush administrations. You can imagine that this gives the work a mostly partisan flavor, although I think Poole usually doesn't take sides - the unspeak speaks for itself, as it were. This is a clever and useful idea, I think. Poole keeps a blog at unspeak.net, where he keeps up with instances of unspeak in public discourse. It's fascinating and maddening, so check it out.
The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
Here's another series of short tales by Lem. They concern two "Constructors" - supremely powerful robot engineers (and by robot engineers, I mean they are engineers that are robots) - and the adventures they have in a wild universe peopled primarily by persons of a mechanical nature. The tales almost always have a humorous bent, but typically belie some deeper point that Lem is trying to make. As I said above, there's a lot to digest here. There's a problem though. I think I said in a review a long time ago that Lem tends to use made-up-word puns (I suppose this is both in translation and in the original Polish - of course, I can't read Polish so I don't know) in his humorous stories, and these neologisms are thick in this book. I got tired of them after a while. Because it is a series of tales related mostly by the two main characters, it might be best to read this book one story at a time, with a night or more in between stories, just to give yourself a break. Anyway, it's another SF classic, and you'll be a better person if you read it.
The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross
Do you remember "A Colder War?" This book has two stories in it that are kind of like that, except not as depressing - "The Atrocity Archive" and "The Concrete Jungle." The narrator of both, Bob Howard, is a budding field agent at The Laundry, which is sort of the equivalent of MI-5, but for the supernatural. Their job is to keep very bad people, or very curious people, from unleashing unnameable horrors upon the world. Stross has made a very clever combination of Lovecraftian horror and spy-thriller here. These stories are both very engrossing and you'll probably stay up late to finish them, and then go to sleep with the covers pulled over your head so the bad things can't get you.
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I keep thinking that there's one book I'm forgetting. If I remember what it is, I'll update it here.
This is a breezy short tale of three young, unmarried, mostly idle men (one of them works at a bank) who decide to take a boating trip up the Thames to Oxford to relieve themselves off the ills of Victorian London. They bring along their rascal dog, Montmorency, who seems to have only a little more sense then they do. On their way to Oxford, the boating group get involved in several still-funny adventures, mostly due to their own mild incompetence and careless laziness. Supposedly this book was very popular back in its day, and provided a gently satirical look at middle-class Victorian life. A good quick read, so it's recommended for a rainy weekend day.
free e-book available
Radio Free Albemuth - Philip K. Dick
Published posthumously (it was written in the mid-seventies), in this novel Dick imagines an America nor unlike the one in A Scanner Darkly: This America is run by a man who is a combination of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and civilian spy corps try to root out communist sympathizers through intimidation and dirty tricks. Oddly, Dick features himself as a character (named Phil Dick) who is friends with another man, Nick Brady, who just might be receiving messages from outerspace while he sleeps. This dark tale deals with some of PKD's familiar themes of identity and reality, but also gives the reader a strong indication of Dick's anti-authoritarian beliefs. There's a lot to digest in here.
Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality - Steven Poole
"Unspeak" is the art of speaking while doing two things: 1) Avoiding discussion of the unspoken assumptions behind words, and 2) simultaneously silencing the counter-argument. It's not exactly "framing" (Lakoff) and it's not "Newspeak" (Orwell) but a combination of the two and more as well. One of Poole's arguments is that, by analyzing unspeak, one can really begin to understand what the person doing the speaking wants or believes. Drawing mostly from the last couple of decades (and especially the last ten years or so) Poole goes through a large variety of examples, taking special care to examine how the words used really betray the speaker's actual desires. The emphasis is largely on Britain and the USA, and especially the Blair and Bush administrations. You can imagine that this gives the work a mostly partisan flavor, although I think Poole usually doesn't take sides - the unspeak speaks for itself, as it were. This is a clever and useful idea, I think. Poole keeps a blog at unspeak.net, where he keeps up with instances of unspeak in public discourse. It's fascinating and maddening, so check it out.
The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
Here's another series of short tales by Lem. They concern two "Constructors" - supremely powerful robot engineers (and by robot engineers, I mean they are engineers that are robots) - and the adventures they have in a wild universe peopled primarily by persons of a mechanical nature. The tales almost always have a humorous bent, but typically belie some deeper point that Lem is trying to make. As I said above, there's a lot to digest here. There's a problem though. I think I said in a review a long time ago that Lem tends to use made-up-word puns (I suppose this is both in translation and in the original Polish - of course, I can't read Polish so I don't know) in his humorous stories, and these neologisms are thick in this book. I got tired of them after a while. Because it is a series of tales related mostly by the two main characters, it might be best to read this book one story at a time, with a night or more in between stories, just to give yourself a break. Anyway, it's another SF classic, and you'll be a better person if you read it.
The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross
Do you remember "A Colder War?" This book has two stories in it that are kind of like that, except not as depressing - "The Atrocity Archive" and "The Concrete Jungle." The narrator of both, Bob Howard, is a budding field agent at The Laundry, which is sort of the equivalent of MI-5, but for the supernatural. Their job is to keep very bad people, or very curious people, from unleashing unnameable horrors upon the world. Stross has made a very clever combination of Lovecraftian horror and spy-thriller here. These stories are both very engrossing and you'll probably stay up late to finish them, and then go to sleep with the covers pulled over your head so the bad things can't get you.
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I keep thinking that there's one book I'm forgetting. If I remember what it is, I'll update it here.
