Goose the Blog 2.0

End of the year, I better get this out before time runs out.

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
In my mind I get Nick Hornby and Bruce Hornsby mixed up. I know they are different people, but because their names are similar they get lumped together under the same memory address or something. Hornby has a way of writing very realistic characters, which makes this book enjoyable. He also has interesting insight into memory and they way we recall our own life story. I recommend this - it will only take a few solid hours to read. Also, you've probably seen the movie and you know how it ends, so you won't feel stressed out worrying about what's going to happen.

About a Boy - Nick Hornby
Pretty much what I said above. I've never seen the whole film of this book, so I can't say how well it matches the novel. Again, it's really short and really readable. I enjoyed it a lot.

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 - Francis French
This was pretty good, too. As you can tell from the subtitle, it covers the Mercury and Vostok programs in the USA and USSR in detail, focusing on the biographies of the astronauts and cosmonauts that flew into space. It covers their life stories and whole careers, pretty much, so you often get some information about Gemini, Apollo, and Soyuz missions as well, which just goes to show that some of these guys stuck around a long time and had a lot of influence. It took me a long time to finish this - more than a month, I think. It's pretty dense, but well-written. I learned a lot I never knew about the missions and the, of course, the people. Recommended if this kind of thing interests you, but not for a general audience, I think.

That's it. Not so many books this year. I've hardly read anything the last three months, which I blame on laziness and TV.

Labels: books

It has been a long time since the last 30 Second Book Reviews. These reviews are kind of short because I have a lot of books stacked up to review, and some of the books have been slowly evaporating from my brain for almost six months. You gets what you gets.

Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space - Chris Jones
This is a pretty poorly written book about what should be interesting stuff. It starts with an excellent discussion of Soviet (Russian) and American space stations and associated mishaps, especially aboard Mir. Then the plot: Two astronauts and a cosmonaut are "stranded" aboard the ISS when the Columbia disintegrated during reentry. Their only way home is [gasp!] the dangerous (more dangerous than the Space Shuttle? Good luck!) Russian Soyuz capsule, and they have to wait until another team can be made ready and launched from Russia to the ISS. There's some good stuff in there, but Jones is a sports writer by training and it shows. The book reads in many parts like one of those overly-dramatic athlete mini-bios you see during the Olympics.

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 - Edward Bellamy (1888)
Kee-rappy 19th century utopianism. Why does it seem like every book like this I've read sucks? In fairness, the whole concept of SF was just beginning to come together at the time, and these guys didn't have many examples of what not to do. As with the others, there's too much explaining, with a tacked on and stupid story about a guy who fall asleeps for 113 years and then marries his long-dead fiancee's great-grandaughter. Yes, I'm giving away the ending, because it doesn't matter. For some reason, this book spawned a utopian movement called Nationalism (which isn't to be confused with regular old nationalism).

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Pretty good. In it, a couple of teenagers head South of the Border to find adventure and ranch work. They find both, and almost end up dead a few times. The lead character is some sort of superhuman, I think. For sure, I don't know how he learned all the stuff he knows growing up on his Grandpa's Texas ranch. The writing rocks, anyway.

The Secret City - Carol Emshwiller
Meh. Aliens that look like Neanderthals (but can pass for Cro Magnon) get stranded on Earth during the proverbial three hour tour. They to preserve their identity by not to fitting in, and they end up living, secretly, on the outskirts of society. One teenage alien who has lost track of the rest of his kind goes to look for a secret alien city he heard about, hidden up in the mountains. Conflict ensues!

Wizard of the Crow - Ngugi wa'Thiong'o
This one was damn long, and had a unsatisfying ending. That is not a good combination. It's a story about a made-up kleptocracy in Africa run by a crazy dictator. The kleptocrats are angling for World Bank (it's not called the Work Bank in the book, but something similar) money in order to build a giant pyramid that will let the Leader stand in space or something. The titular wizard is an unemployed man and revolutionary woman who work together to do some things, like make a little money, help people, and overthrow the government. It's amusing, but it is hard to get through.

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring - Richard Preston
I'm getting tired of narrative nonfiction. This book has an interesting disclaimer at the front that spells out just what narrative nonfiction is, which is nice. Anyway, very interesting stuff about redwood and some other trees. The rest (that is, people who climb trees, including the author) I don't care so much about. More about the trees, please!

River of Gods - Ian McDonald
Good book. It's hard to get into, because the author drops you right into a new locale, and then you expend a lot of effort trying to learn the language, which is sort of like actually traveling. The locale is one of the fractured nations of former India in 2047. There's a sci-fi plot about artificial intelligences, zero point energy, and other universes. There's lots of action. I was satisfied.

Brasyl - Ian MacDonald
Just like the book above, only in Brazil (or some variation of the spelling). Like River of Gods, it's hard to get into because first, you have to learn to speak a little Brazilian Portuguese and find your way around Rio de Janeiro. This time, the sci-fi plot is about quantum computing, parallel universes, and universe simulators. There's lots of action. There's sexy Brazilians. I was satisfied. I should have mentioned this above, but at the end of both of these books, MacDonald gives the reader a playlist of music that inspired the book. You could go multimedia and make up the same playlist and listen to it while you read the book!

On the Makaloa Mat / Island Tales - Jack London (1919)
Here's a bunch of short stories that take place in post-Kingdom Hawaii, up until around the 1910s. There are love stories (tragic or not), adventure stories, and some comedy as well. I liked it.

The Plot Against America: A Novel - Philip Roth
I read this one over a weekend (OK, a three day weekend) which is rare for me. It was engaging. It's about what might have happened if fascists had won the Presidency in 1940, and concerns the family of a young Jewish boy living in New Jersey. Recommended by Bill, so it must be good!

Spaceman Blues: A Love Song - Brian Slattery
Neato! Manuel has disappeared, and his boyfriend Wendell is looking for him. But some people (or some things) are looking for Wendell, so he flees with his friend Masoud into the NYC underground (literally). Meanwhile, the Church of Panic has figured out that something really bad is about to happen to New York City. So what is really going on here? This is a very fun, short novel that reminded me of both Vonnegut and Dick and is also totally in love with Brooklyn. I think you should read it - it might be the best book on this list (or maybe Roth's, so try them both!).

Labels: books

While Sillett's brother watched in horror below, fearing that Steve had lost his mind, Sillett and his friend Steve Marwood threw themselves into a small tree next to the giant and climbed branch by branch to its top, which is called a "leader." Seventy feet aboveground, the leader swayed under his weight as he stared across the gap between himself and the lower fragile branches of the immense redwood trunk. Struggling to control his fear of heights, he threw his body into space and grabbed the branch like a trapeze, landing safely in the tree. Sillett and Marwood climbed the crown of the immense tree they called "Nameless," entering a dense labyrinth of branches more than 200 feet high holding beds of soil where masses of ferns, lichens and ripe huckleberries grew.

"The top of Nameless had been sheared away in a storm that occurred many centuries earlier, and the tree had reacted by driving a radiance of branches spreading horizontally in all directions away from the broken trunk, like spokes coming from the hub of a wagon wheel. Those branches had sprouted vertical trunks, like spikes on a crown. A forest of small redwoods had sprung out of the top of Nameless -- Nameless Wood." As far as anyone knows, Sillett was the first person ever to visit the upper redwood canopy. It was one of "the last unseen realms on the planet." He has dedicated his life to canopy science, going on to make the first 3-D map of the upper reaches of a virgin redwood grove, where new species, such as earthworms and lichen, are still being found. He also became a master tree climber; never again would he climb a giant without the proper equipment -- it's a miracle he didn't die that day.

The redwood defines "superlative," not only in terms of big, but in terms of complicated. It is "the largest and tallest individual living organism that has appeared in nature since the beginning of life on the planet." The fern gardens in old redwood crowns are second only to Olympic Peninsula rain forests in their density, and scientists estimate the crowns hold so much water they function as airborne aquifers, supporting species such as salamanders and copepod crustaceans, the most abundant animals in oceans. The oldest titans, such as Ilúvatar, in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park, contain some 37,000 cubic feet of wood and are so dense you could "put on a pair of snowshoes and walk around on top and play Frisbee there." Many of the trees, Preston explains, reiterate themselves numerous times in the crown, repeating their own shape in smaller scales of size in the form of a fractal. Ilúvatar has done so six times, creating "Ilúvatars within Ilúvatars, " and is considered one of the most complex living structures ever discovered.

Can you believe it? Better than I even imagined. You can read more about it at Salon, and there's a book, too, that I will probably have to look into.

Labels: books, nature

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

Several years ago, I spent many months reading every Vonnegut novel in my local library. Goose (still a puppy, then) even tore the cover off one (Cat's Cradle?) and I asked the librarian if I could pay some money to compensate them for the damage. I think she charged me a dollar, taped the cover back on the book (tooth holes and all), and put it back on the shelf. Go librarian!

Anyway, if you haven't yet spent time reading Vonnegut, it is of course not too late to start just because he is now dead. I suggest Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, or Jailbird, in no particular order. But just pick up whatever they have around and read it.

"We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust."

Labels: books, pop culture

The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery - Daniel Max
Max writes an interesting history of the discovery of prion diseases, beginning with an Italian family that suffers a genetic disposition to a fatal insomnia. He covers pretty much the whole history I guess - scrapie, kuru, BSE, and C-JD. He spends a lot of time explaining how agricultural practices made scrapie, and then BSE, much more widespread than they should have been, and how regulatory inaction may have led to many people becoming infected with prions from BSE cattle. I learned a lot. This one one of two books I read while stuck on the plane to San Juan.*

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo - Peter Orner
This is the second book I read while stuck on the plane to San Juan. I didn't finish it until later in the trip, though. It's enjoyable. In it, Larry, an American Jew from Ohio, goes to Namibia to volunteer as a teacher. He ends up teaching at Goas, an isolated school somewhere in the Namib desert. There, he meets and has a love affair with a beautiful woman (the titular Mavala). The country has just recently gained its independence and many of the teachers (including Mavala) are former soldiers from the war. The style is unusual - the story is told as a series of short recollections or tales (real or apocryphal) by the various characters. It was really engaging. Good reading.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
There are two main points of this book. First: If you are exceedingly clever and have access to a lot of data, you might be able to ask a more-or-less pointless question and figure out the answer to it. Second: One of the authors is one of those exceeding clever people. Frankly, if I was economist Levitt, I would be embarrassed to put such effusive praise to myself in a book I co-wrote. Anyway, the book has some fun facts in it, but it seems to be missing out on the big picture stuff about how to actually ask questions and solve problems, other than to have the gift of exceeding cleverness. It reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's work - lots of anecdotes and personality, but no real substance. Don't misunderstand me, it is enjoyable to read and if you happen to find a copy laying around you might want to pick it up and read a chapter, because the writing isn't bad and like I said before, there are fun facts you can use to impress your more ignorant friends (providing you can recall what the authors wrote for more than 30 minutes after you put the book down - I can't, except for the the thing about baby names). Airy and light, like a marshmallow.

Midaq Alley - Naguib Mahfouz
This is a story by the Nobel prize-winning Egyptian author, credited with introducing the novel to Arabic literature. It takes place on a poor Cairo sidestreet during the waning days of World War II. It has a full cast of characters of all stripes from saintly to slimeball. It is sort of a soap opera, with a variety of connected subplots taking place in a small locale where everyone knows everyone else's business. Better yet, none of the characters are one-dimensional! Anyway, I read this book because it was recommended by someone on the internet (Juan Cole maybe?) as good fiction to read if you wanted to better understand the Arab people. If so, what did I learn? Arabs are petty, greedy, hypocritical, and vengeful, and occasionally pious, honest, generous, and wise, just like everybody else on the planet. A good thing to learn for those who doubt it, I guess.

Sixty Days and Counting - Kim Stanley Robinson
This is the final book in Robinson's "Abrupt Climate Change Trilogy" (I don't know what the official trilogy name is. Maybe it's the "Counting By Tens Trilogy."). Anyhow, this one is more a return to the form of the first book, in that I liked it more than I liked the second, but still less than I liked then first. Got that? I was thinking about this novel the other day, and I realized it had no actual plot. It had a couple of subplots, but no plot. The subplot with the Quibler family and the Buddhists is my favorite. I had more than enough of Frank Vanderwal (the Mary Sue) in the last novel; luckily, I don't have to read about him sleeping in trees, kayaking, or going on hikes anymore. Still, I enjoyed the novel. It's actually a feel good story about what could happen if we had competent, proactive government that based its policies on the actual real world instead of ideology and opportunism (that's the "fiction" part of this particular scifi, haha!). Robinson is getting a lot of credit for grounding his climate change story in a bunch of science, rather than the conspiracy theories that another prominent author has promulgated (even in front of Congress!), so that's a bonus, too.


Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
Here's another good one. It's the story of Blue van Meer, a genius IQ sixteen year old who has traveled the back roads of America with her father, a semi-famous, itinerant visiting political science professor at out of the way state universities and small liberal arts colleges. The novel's conceit is that it is actually written by Blue as an autobiographical excerpt of her life, beginning when she starts her senior year in high school at an elite private academy in small town North Carolina. At first, this seems like a straightforward coming-of-age story as Blue gets involved with a clique of popular students; the weird thing is that the teacher these kids hang out with on weekends (weird, huh?) dies by hanging sometime during Blue's senior year. You learn this at the start of the story, so I'm not giving much away. Regular H.S. bullshit ensues, moderated by Blue's detachment and cultural awareness. It's fun, but you can see the disaster coming. After the beloved (that's not exactly the right word) teacher kills herself, the novel switches gears wildly, but that's all I'm saying. This is a first class effort all the way, and highly fun to read.


The Road - Cormac McCarthy
I started reading this after Elias' bathtime one evening and didn't stop until I finished it in the early hours of the morning, five hours later. It was riveting. In it, a father and his son are walking through a post-apocalyptic landscape of ruined cities and ash, rain, and snow, on the run from roving bands of cannibal brigands. They have only the clothes they wear, a shopping cart full of dirty blankets and rare, scavenged canned goods, and a pistol with two bullets. They are going south to the shore, because the father hopes, improbably, that things will be better there, and because staying in one place means death only catches up with you faster. It's a brutal short novel written in a evocative spare style, but what really sets it apart is the father's unending love for his young son. There is nothing left in the world for them but each other and they are both acutely and painfully aware of it. I want to say more but I don't want to give away the story because I want you to read it, too. Highly recommended.

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* A few days ago I got a ticket voucher from US Airways worth $150 as compensation, probably because I wrote them a long complaint letter. That's $20 for every extra hour I sat on the plane - not too bad! I expect that the passengers who didn't complain got nothing.

Labels: books

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus - Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley (1818)
This was pretty good. The prose is old-fashioned, but the thesis is surprisingly current. The story differs significantly from the generally held Frankenstein "myth", and is richer for it. The writing style can get a little bit tedious, but I suppose that overall things move along pretty well. Other than that, I don't have much else to say about it.

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention - Guy Deutscher
This is a really interesting book about the evolution of language. It starts with the assumption that a very simple language exists (Deutscher calls it "Me Tarzan") and details the mechanisms by which it may have changed over tens of thousands of years to the modern languages we speak. Along the way, he addresses the major concerns of linguists over the last couple of centuries - notably the idea that languages seem to be de-evolving from a complex and sophisticated original. I won't spoil the ending by giving anything away. For a text on something as seemingly dry as linguistics, the author does a very good job keeping things lively and readable. He also drops the more esoteric nuances into appendices to spare the casual reader unwanted effort, which is a nice gesture.

Blindsight - Peter Watts (ebook)
Here's another very dark SF story from Peter Watts. It has a complicated backstory that is dealt with in an appendix (and online), but vampires have been genetically re-engineered from ancient genes. Mentally and physically superior to Homo sapiens sapiens, but physiologically enslaved by them, the vampires serve as councilors to humanity. That's all an aside, however, as the main plot deals with the discovery of an alien intelligence hiding in the Oort cloud around our solar system. A team is sent to contact the ETs, and then it gets crazy. Watts does a good job giving the aliens a very non-human otherness (I like that in an ET story), and I think that facet of his story is comparable to Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco or Solaris. Very good.

Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest - Gerard J. DeGroot
Here, DeGroot writes a cynical history of the American space program. I was surprised to find that I didn't really disagree with much of what he said. Anyway, DeGroot covers the space program from the beginning (von Braun and the Germans), through Eisenhower's reluctance to enter the space race (and Johnson's and Kennedy's political ploys that got us into it), to the eventual disillusionment following the successful moon landing and NASA's self-imposed irrelevance. He makes at least one glaring factual mistake concerning the Apollo missions, asserting that Apollo 9 went to the moon instead of just making earth-orbit maneuvers. Messing up something that simple is kind of unforgivable. I don't have the energy to factcheck everything he says, and one wonders if he can be trusted. Nonetheless, for the most part, the book agrees with history as I already knew it. Overall, I liked the book, and appreciate his point of view, even if my own is somewhat less jaded.

Sailing Alone Around the World - Joshua Slocum (1900)
In the last few years of the 19th century, Joshua Slocum sailed around the world alone in a small ship of his own design. This is the self-authored story of his trip. The most remarkable thing to me is what a different world it was one hundred years ago. I mean, I knew it was different, but reading this book brought home not just the technological changes, but the wildly different pace of daily life. At some point during his trip (perhaps while crossing the Pacific), Slocum becomes something of a celebrity, and the rest of his trip he is treated royally at almost every port at which he stops. While this may be an artifact of Slocum's demeanor and writing, I found it kind of amazing to see the respect and aid given to him by strangers who were, perhaps, only familiar with his journey through occasional newspaper stories. I don't know, I suppose that sort of stuff still happens today. Anyway, cool book.

The Android's Dream - John Scalzi
The title is an homage to the famous novella, but it is also about the only thing in the novel that has anything to do with Philip K. Dick, just so you set your expectations accordingly. It's a good book, though, with a creative plot and a fast moving storyline. It features the eponymous genetically engineered sheep, interstellar diplomacy, an alien civil war, and a lot of "Die Hard" style action, gun play, and bon mots. That last one is the weak point for me. The "funny" seems to fall flat. I'm not obsessed with realism (if I was, I wouldn't read SF), but I like it when characters talk like real people, instead of movie people. Scalzi does funny well, as in Agent to the Stars and many parts in this book, but... I've already made my point. It's pretty light reading - I finished it in a couple of days. The first chapter is killer, and really pulls you into the rest of the story.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Michael Pollan
Whoo. Great book. Pollan traces the history of four meals (just like the subtitle says) made from ingredients of industrial agriculture, big organic, sustainable farms, and wild forage. Obviously he has his biases, and you can probably guess what they are, but nonetheless I think he maintains a pretty even hand in his description of the benefits and disadvantages of each system of agriculture. Along the journey, he discusses evolution, the philosophy of eating, animal rights, hunting, and politics. I think there's been some complaint that the book turned some readers off eating, but I just can't see that. He forces the reader to confront the choices they make when they buy food, but I don't feel like he's making judgments or being holier-than-thou; it seems to me he just wants the reader to actually look at what they are eating, and know what it entails. It's really worth your time - you will definitely learn some new things, and you'll have a good time doing it. I highly recommend reading this.

Labels: books