charlene

Xenogenesis trilogy (Butler)

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:41:37 GMT

Via ase. Okay, Dawn (and the two sequels) blew me away. Just. This is some extraordinary SF -- humans (or what's left of them) are conquered by an alien race. Only it's not that simple. The humans might think it is. The aliens are really alien and don't look at it that way (and indeed are both much more ruthless than most humans, and much more compassionate than most humans, at the same time) -- they look at it as a sort of symbiosis. The humans, once they start understanding the aliens, can sort of see it the aliens' way, but humans deeply think of things in the form of dominator and dominated, and in that respect the humans are definitely the latter. Um. This synopsis is a mess. I cannot possibly describe what's going on and do it justice.

Butler always catches me a little off guard; this is true of both her short stories and her novels. I suppose it's partly because she makes no secret of her perspective as a black female and that it is going to differ from, say, my perspective; but some of it is, I think, her own style as well. For Parable of the Sower and the Pattern novels, I'm not sure I was working so much with that strangeness as against it (though I do very much like the Pattern novels). With the Xenogenesis books she leverages that strangeness to aid her in describing the very strange alien society, and it really, really works for me.

Trashy red-haired heroines!

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:44:07 GMT

For a while there I wasn't really feeling up to reading much meaty. I was in fact craving trashy-but-not-completely-badly-written novels. My usual go-to for that is to reread Judith Krantz's Mistral's Daughter, which has oodles of trashy romance, not to mention three generations of gorgeous professional-model red-haired Mary Sues. It's not even horribly badly written (for example, I can no longer physically read the Sidney Sheldon I scarfed down as a kid, it's that bad), though note I am not particularly recommending it to anyone here. So, I finished that and was still casting around for something. I decided to reread that trashy-but-usually-not-unacceptably-badly-written long-novel with gorgeous model-quality heroine and hyper-masculine red-haired Gary Sue. Yes, The Fountainhead. I love that book! It is so deliciously trashy, what with the frigid heroine melting when Her Man shows up, the total bonding of Peter Keating (whom, by the way, I totally love) to his alpha male, the wife swapping, the total manly-man Roark-Wynand friendship and love triangle. (Note also that I intensely despise most of Atlas Shrugged, which tries to be bombastic rather than deliciously trashy, thus losing all the charm of Fountainhead. And is depressing to boot.) Yes, I know Ayn Rand is turning in her grave at being compared to Judith Krantz... bonus!

This all led to a conversation with D in which a reorganization of our bookshelves was proposed. They are currently organized in a Byzantine system involving a) how much we like the book (horizontal depth and partial vertical placement), b) category of book (room and vertical placement), c) height of book (inter-shelf placement), and d) author last name (intra-shelf placement). The new proposed system: a) hair color, and possibly b) eye color.

Besides Mistral's Daughter and Fountainhead, on the red-haired shelf would go Bujold's Cordelia books, Hero and the Crown, Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset (the only reason I own this one is because of the heroine's marked resemblance to my awesome high school junior-year roommate)... Cordwainer Smith's stories about C'mell... probably more I can't think of off-hand. I'm a little shocked, actually, at how much red hair there is around, given how few people I know in real life with red hair, though I suppose I shouldn't be.

(Also, I recently picked up one of the Alanna (Tamora Pierce) books from the library because I was feeling nostalgic, and was horrified to find that Alanna has red hair and purple eyes AND a sentient cat. Who also has purple eyes. (D thought this was hilarious, mind you.)

Does anyone else have trashy but still compulsively readable fic they would be willing to recommend? For reference, besides Krantz, I like in this category Maeve Binchy and Agatha Christie (well, I don't think of her as trashy, but she is not exactly literary).

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (Elgin)

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:01:20 GMT

Via nolly. This was really interesting. How to deal with verbal attacks. In particular, the idea is that a verbal attack contains underlying implicit suppositions, and defending against the wrong thing can get you into trouble and escalate the confrontation instead of defusing it. A lot of the tips she gives I had already had some experience with from muddling through thirty-odd years of learning how to deal with conflict in my own life (go after the actual words, not the supposition, or ask to clarify whether the speaker really means the supposition or is just using it as a rhetorical trick), but it's interesting to see it codified and laid out like that, and seems a lot easier than my (and I imagine most people's) trial-and-error ("hmm, okay, that made Mom even more mad, that wasn't the right move") way of doing it. I especially found the specific responses very interesting -- there are certain situations where Elgin recommends a particular phrasing, with examples of how deviating from that specific phrasing can make the situation worse intstead of better.

In particular, I wish that I'd been able to give this book to my sister five years ago, when she and our mom got in raging battles on a weekly basis.

I'd also recommend it for any writer -- if you are a good writer you will have figured out how a lot of this stuff works already just from watching people interact, but it's kind of neat to see it down in black and white -- so I wouldn't necessarily buy it were I a writer, but it would be worth checking out from the library.

I also checked out the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense at Work, which I was much, much less impressed by, mostly I think because it was written for an era and situation with which I do not identify at all. I'm lucky enough to work for a company that espouses more of a "if we work together we can get more stuff done" philosophy than a "let's play off people against each other" philosophy, which she very much assumes. And the examples she used to demonstrate "woman thinking about work" versus "man thinking about work," made me think, "Wow, those women are idiotic, who thinks that way?"... so I guess I've internalized some of the "male" way of thinking.

Stuff I read that I'm not interested in dedicating a whole post to

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:45:09 GMT

...Yeah, I have a backlog of posts... these date back from first trimester, in fact. These are sorted by how much I enjoyed them (from most to least):

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Wilhelm) - I've been on a Wilhelm kick recently. This one started slow but I thought was a strong book, though the science is... um... a little suspect. (I get the impression Wilhelm is not, er, a hard scientist; about three books in a row now I have been rolling my eyes, the worst being in Smart House where she talks about the big million-dollar question in computing being melding digital and analog computing. Er? Granted I believe she wrote it in 1989, but, what?) It's about the end of the world, and clones, and individuality, and honestly rather a Gary Stu type whom I quite enjoyed. I recommend it highly if you can get by the iffy science and treat it as entertainment rather than as A Classic Of Yore (in which case you are sure to be disappointed).

Dreamsongs, vol. 1 - I enjoy George R.R. Martin a lot, though I can't say I actually like his stories, and I realized why after reading this. I don't know about now, but at least for the part of his life these stories cover, he was not exactly successful in love, and these stories reflect that -- maybe half of them weren't about disillusionment and dysfunctional relationships, but a whole lot of them were.

The Host (Meyer) - Oh, yeah. I read this quite a while ago at the behest of the Kid, but forgot to post. It was much, much better than Twilight. I actually enjoyed it, though as usual with Meyer's stuff there was some disturbing relationship/gender subtext.

Fairie Wars (Herbie Brennan) - not to be confused with Sarah Rees Brennan, of course! - I think this is a first book? Anyway, it's got a lot of energy, and there's a lot going on. As usual in fantasy, the "science" is cheesy and stupid, and I have to say the nomenclature of "Fairies of the Light/Fairies of the Night" made me laugh hilariously, but I liked it!

Purple Emperor (Herbie Brennan) - Sequel to Fairie Wars (and, I think, the second in a trilogy). Well. He certainly has the can't-catch-your-breath plot going full speed in this one as well. I'm a little less enamoured of this one, because I noticed more that the plot seemed to crowd out things like, oh, any kind of character development at all. Still, I did finish it.

The Emperor's Children, Claire Messaud - Mainstream. People interact in New York; hilarity ensues, or something. This was, well, better than I thought after reading the first twenty pages, and by the late middle I thought it was quite good. Then the end happened, and I was all, "That's it?" I guess it's pretty good, but being the mean evil person I am, I totally wanted more of the characters to get a satisfying comeuppance. Warning for preponderance of unlikeable characters. (I think I have yet to read a mainstream book set in New York with a preponderance of likeable characters.) Better, go read Edith Wharton instead; Messaud just wants to be Wharton.

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, Alison Goodman- It's of note because the mythology involved is Chinese-oriented rather than Western-oriented, and I feel like I should support non-Western-based fantasy in general. However, the prose seemed a bit clunky to me (it wasn't horrible, just a little too much first-book-ish), and the ending was completely cheesy; I said aloud, "That's it? That's the answer?" Interesting enough that I'll probably pick up the sequel from the library, but probably not enough that I'll more than skim it. I read a couple of good reviews of it, though, so YMMV.

Valjean, at last, we see each other plain

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:03:54 GMT

I was listening to Pandora today and a song from Les Miserables came on. (They must recently have gotten the rights, as Les Mis songs had to my knowledge never shown up before.) It catapulted me back to the first time I ever saw Les Mis -- I was in middle school at the time -- and it blew my mind and knocked me flat, in large part because it was the first real Broadway musical I'd ever seen, partially because it was first adaptation of a book I'd ever seen where they actually got the spirit of the book right. I can't even describe the effect seeing it had on me except by saying that I went out and bought not just the recording but the full symphonic recording -- and when I was that age the $30 that you had to shell out for the full recording was basically a real fortune, something like six months' worth of discretionary spending. (To compare, I don't think I bought any other CD that was more than $5 until I went to college.)

Now that I'm older, I can see the flaws. Many of the tunes are simplistic bordering on inane (no, I never did like "Castle on a Cloud" much). Much of the libretto is quite silly (especially Cosette's lines). I suspect if I saw it now I would think it was okay, but nothing special. I'm really glad I saw it as a kid, when it had the power to do that to me.

The only other things I can think of offhand that had this effect on me were reading The Dark is Rising and A Wrinkle in Time, both of which I got to at precisely the right time (fourth grade and, um, second grade? respectively) for them to turn my world upside down and explode it into color. (And no, LoTR didn't do that for me -- I grew into that one.) Oh, and Dead Poets Society, which I now recognize as a maudlin sentimental film, but which I saw when I had no idea about poetry (fifth grade, I think), and it had a profound and dizzying effect on me.

I'd love to hear the things that you found extraordinarily powerful at the time and that now you wouldn't quite be so impressed by...

I think we are buying a house

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:03:24 GMT

Our offer got accepted. I am having buyers remorse like crazy. (We could still back out -- we have 17 days -- but barring the home inspection finding some awful problem, which is unlikely, we probably won't, now that we've made the offer.) Not surprising given that this house is, lemme see, more than thirty times as expensive as anything else I have ever bought in my entire life. Ever. And it's a little bigger than we were originally looking for, and therefore more expensive. And we are wiping out our savings to get this place on a reasonable mortgage -- we will actually have to live check-to-check for a couple of months, which we have not done since grad school. And yes, I believe the market is headed down short-term. And it's not in the extra special awesome school district. The high school it goes with is not the totally-kicks-butt one. (And yes, I know, in 14 years who knows what will happen?) And the kitchen is still not big enough. And I am going to have to change church wards from the one that I dearly love, which fills me with a large degree of trepidation and insecurity. What were we thinking?? And it has lovely light-colored carpet which is just crying out to be vomited on by an infant. And it is ten minutes away from work instead of five; are we going to be really annoyed now that we are totally spoiled for a commute?

But it has a laundry room!! That alone makes me so happy I can't even describe it to you. (And now that we have guest space... all of you should come visit!)

so, it appears we're having a kid

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:43:34 GMT

January 22, more or less. A girl! We're alternating between being excited and apprehensive.

-Morning sickness really, really, really sucks. I didn't even have a particularly bad case of it. (However, I suspect I probably reacted worse to feeling queasy all the time than some. I really, really hate feeling nauseous. I REALLY hate it, to the extent that I had trouble working because of hating feeling this way, even though I wasn't really actively throwing up or anything, at least not more than once or twice a week or so. I mean, I still went to work and sat at my computer and in retrospect occasionally actually did things, and even went on business trips and pretended I was a useful member of society, but I was really lucky that there were no bad crunch deadlines during that time.)

-If one is going to have morning sickness, early summer in coastal California is really the way to do it. Not too hot, and fresh fruit (the only thing I wanted to eat, frequently) is abundant and tasty.

-There are way too many things you are not supposed to eat when pregnant.

-Second trimester is definitely way better. Actual energy! No nausea! Whew.

-I work for a totally awesome wonderful company. Three months off? Check. Three quarters time after? Check. Work from home a bit? Check.

-My mom is really miffed because my company has no paid maternity leave. Despite the fact that California will pay you for six weeks (not, admittedly, my full salary). Clearly she does not get out enough.

-I spend my time mainly in two cultural settings: one is work (culture: having a life outside the office? what?), and one is church, (culture: kids are the greatest thing since before sliced bread!!). Reaction of church people: SQUEE! Reaction of work people: Oh, hey, um, congratulations, yeah?

They both have their charm. I also had one engineer say, "Wow, that kid is going to be smart. But messed up." Which is true, at least the second part.

-The kid is definitely going to be messed up. For one thing-- this just came up this morning-- I have the feeling it (I mean, she!) is going to hear lots of nice little kiddie-appropriate songs like Lehrer's charming old Irish Ballad.

Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake (Lahiri)

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:14:57 GMT

I have been absolutely blown away by Jhumpa Lahiri's work. She is a mainstream fiction writer who writes predominantly about immigration and assimilation in the Indian/Bengali community, and who writes superbly and elegantly. I read Interpreter of Maladies (short stories - her first book, and won the Pulitzer; this is what we're dealing with!) first, and The Namesake (novel) after. I had varying reactions to the stories, but almost all of them moved me. The first and last stories are, I think, the strongest emotionally, and also complement each other nicely.

The Namesake is almost like an expansion of and sequel to the last story in Interpreter: it chronicles an Indian couple as they move to the US after an arranged marriage and have children, and follows the oldest child, a son, as he grows up and takes his place in the world. It is about the process of immigration and assimilation. It is about expectations and rebellion, and how both can lead to unfortunate results. It is about growing up. It is about names, and families, and love. (And yes, sarahtales, I thought of you. No idea whether you even read this kind of book, but if you do, I think you will like it.If not, you won't.) Warning, it is a slow book, with very little in the way of plotting.

I have a special tie to these books because my parents, of course, are immigrants, who had basically an arranged marriage, and a lot of the things she writes about are applicable to my parents as well: how puzzling it must be to try to adapt to a completely new culture; how courageous it is to leave everything and everyone you know and care about for a new life that, as like as not, will start off in hardship (it certainly did for my parents); how painful it is to see the gulf between you and your children, because you have brought them up in this new world so that they don't understand you or where you came from; how heartbreaking it must be to see your children embrace all the things about the new culture that you wanted them to reject, but how proud you are of them too, as they easily move through a world that still, sometimes, baffles you. It made me think in a different way about my parents (it's always quite wonderful when a book turns sideways the way one thinks about the world), and what they went through, and how incredibly courageous they were and are, and how much they must love us, to encourage us to assimilate the way that they have. (They are really wonderful. My parents have never had any problem with us having friendships, dating, or marrying outside our race/culture, and indeed brought us up more American than anything else on purpose, and I cannot fathom what degree of love that must take, to bring up your kid in such a way that you know she will be half a stranger to you, and that your grandkids will be even further away-- because you want what will be best for them.)

Now, so that this isn't all sappy: I hated Mouse. She was really, incredibly lame. I was totally all, "Get a life!" I understand the point Lahiri was trying to make, but really, did she have to do it via such a completely lame character? (After talking about this with K, I've decided the problem might be mine: I don't deal well with characters' infidelity unless they have a good reason, which Mouse manifestly does not have.)

This is absolutely the best thing I have read this year, in what has been a very strong year for books so far. I don't know if people who don't have strong ties to this immigrant experience will be quite so impressed. It is also true that she doesn't seem to write about anything else but the immigrant experience, so although I continually get new things out of her writing, I could imagine someone else getting kind of bored with it.

Mindblowing SF stories

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:46:06 GMT

So I was thinking a little bit about "mindblowing" stories because of seeing Matthew Cheney's list here. I don't really care that much about the controversy; as far as I can tell "Mammoth" does not necessarily mean "comprehensive" (I own the Mammoth Book of Fantasy, which is not at all comprehensive), or even really anything at all. As far as I can tell from the table of contents, none of which are stories I actually found mindblowing, I suspect it's just that Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF sounded better than Book of Friends of Editor That Would Be Willing to Give Him Cheap Reprint Rights, which is what it actually looks like to me (and would explain the skewing against authors, women and POC and otherwise, that I actually think have written mindblowing SF stories).

In addition to the Butler, Chiang, Kress, LeGuin, Moore, Tiptree, and Willis stories that Matthew Cheney names, I thought offhand of the following (note that almost all my good SF anthologies are in NC, so I'm sure I'm forgetting some good ones). Note that these are all stories I found mindblowing at some point in my life (possibly not this one).

Mountains of Mourning (Bujold)
The Dead Lady of Clown Town (Cordwainer Smith)
Pots (C.J. Cherryh)
Salvage (Orson Scott Card)
I'm sure some story by Alfred Best should go here
Piecework (David Brin)

(I adore Zenna Henderson and Tanith Lee, but I wouldn't call anything I've read by them mindblowing SF. Same with Cheney's Delany, Fowler, Goldstein, Murphy, Russ, and Wilhem -- I've read them, and liked many of them, but maybe didn't get to them at quite the right point in my life, or something.)

(Restricting to hard SF would, I think, mostly restrict my list to the Bujold and Brin, and Tiptree.) He was explicitly trying to make a list of non-white-males, and I wasn't, but notably I got two on my short list anyway, not counting that I would definitely have put Tiptree and Willis on my list if he hadn't (I am ashamed to say that I probably would have forgotten Butler, even though I think several of her stories are pretty darn amazing).

Anyhow. My real question is the following: more mindblowing SF short stories I Must Read?

Wagner!

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:45:56 GMT

"For the last year perhaps I have been in love... I could say it was a sort of madness. A possession, as by daemons. A kind of blinding." -A.S. Byatt, Possession

So, I'm quite embarrassed to admit it, but I... I... have been suffering for the past two months from this dreadful obsession with Wagner's Ring Cycle. I mean, let's face it, in just about every book I've read with one, the Wagner fanatic is a pompous bore who has nothing better to do with his (I don't think I've ever actually met a literary Wagner fan who was female) time than to spend twelve hours (at least) watching buxom women scream at the top of their lungs.

And, okay, there is a fair amount of buxom women and burly heldentenors screaming at each other. (The Siegfriend/Brunnhilde love scenes are just irritating.) But, but -- The Ring Cycle is totally like Beowulf meets the Silmarillion meets Star Wars, only with better music. It's got an awesome plot (waaaaay better than the epics from which Wagner drew the story; much more coherent) with a dragon, dwarfs, true love (sometimes romantic, sometimes not), a cursed ring, corrupt gods, a trickster god, betrayal, and the end of the world. I defy you to find anything in John Williams that matches the sheer exhilaration of the Ride of the Valkyries. If you get the Andrew Porter translation, you can see the lovely alliteration that I am just a sucker for (in fact, it was the poetry I fell in love with before I fell in love with the story, or the leitmotifs). It's got an incredibly complex series of allusions, both mythological and musical, that make up the fabric of the story and the music.

The thing is, I find most of opera pretty dreadful. The music, of course, is lovely, but the whole concept of opera is that it's supposed to be a story as well, and that's where a lot of them fall down. But with the Ring, I kept thinking over and over again while watching it, "Oh! THIS is what you can do with opera! It can be done! It really CAN, like the best literature, say something about the human condition that I didn't know before, and it can use the music to work with the plot to do that!" (A couple of other operas do that too, but the Ring does it very obviously.)

I mean. I'm not a huge rabid fan of Wagner's music; except for a couple of places in Die Walkure, it doesn't perk me right up the way Le Nozze di Figaro does, or wring my heart in two the way that the ending of Ballad of Baby Doe does. And it's pretty clear that Wagner was an excessively unpleasant guy (I used to think his anti-Semitism was just, you know, cultural blinders, but now that I know a little more he really does seem to have been quite disgusting on the subject, and let's not even get into his penchant for stealing other men's wives), which is reflected in Siegfried being quite awful (I can't stand Siegfried almost ever opening his mouth-- he comes across as a stupid and violent boor). And Brunnhilde goes from being totally awesome to really irritating, and the end of Gotterdammerung just didn't... quite... do it for me. And now that I've finished the whole darn thing, the obsession seems to have faded.

But Die Walkure is still made of win.

Words meme

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 19:15:57 GMT

[Um, so, yeah. I have been really, really bad about posting recently. There is a reason for this, which I'll get to at some point. Meanwhile I think I may be able to get back to posting.]

Via ase [an unfortunately long time ago, now; sorry!]: reply to this meme by yelling (or even saying gently) "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

Science - Five years ago I was a physicist, as demonstrated by a shiny new physics Ph.D. I loved being a scientist. I loved being a grad student (I was very lucky -- my advisor was totally awesome). However, I didn't love science itself enough to do it all the time, part of the reason I didn't much want to be a professor. So now I'm an engineer. Somtimes I'm sad about it, though I madly love the company I work for so I've never really considered alternatives seriously.

Often, though, when I talk to people who really think in a mathematically/scientifically-rigorous way, I worry that I can only aspire to the kind of clarity and precision to the way they think about science, and that I'm really just a science groupie (as I am extremely attracted to that way of thinking).

Though I have, over the last couple of years, realized that actually my sister and I have done quite well in thinking scientifically/rationally considering our upbringing. Our parents are really very smart people (our dad is one of the World Experts in his particular specialized field, actually, and our mom is probably smarter than he is, though without the professional markers), but it is certainly true that rational/reasoned argument has never been a skill that was much valued in our household. Okay, now, everyone go read Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, which besides being compulsively readable and highly entertaining also has some really, really true things to say about science.

Novels - Books keep me alive. Especially novels. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout says, "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." Although hopefully I will never have to fear losing it, that's how I feel about reading. Some favorite novels, off the top of my head: LotR, Memory(Bujold), Possession (Byatt), To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee).

Choral - My high school choral director seems to have imprinted me with five-part Renaissance choral music. My college choral director finished the job... Books may keep me alive, but choral music keeps me happy. I have no idea why, having been brought up on instrumental and orchestral music. My happiest memories from both college and grad school involve not physics, but choral music, and it's the one thing where, if I were offered a chance to sing in a really really good choir as a career, I would chuck my job instantly. Some favorites: Bach Mass in B Minor, Tallis' Lamentation of Jeremiah, Brahms' Requiem.

California - I grew up in NC and went to college in Massachusetts. After two winters there I decided I was going to go to California for grad school. When I was accepted to my first California school I threw away all my non-California applications. It would be hard for me to leave the happy sunshine and awesome climate, though I guess the utter stupidity of California government (*cough*proposition system*cough*) might one day convince us. Favorites: Yosemite. Period. Yosemite Valley, Cathedral Lake, Glacier Point (Taft Point, Sentinel Dome).

Camera - Much of the time I am kind of relentlessly non-visual. But then D showed me how to work his old film SLR, and I started getting interested in cameras. I think photography is pretty cool, it being a mix of technical ability and artistic ability. Also around this point we got married, and our wedding photographer used a roll of IR film, and I also got interested in IR photography (though I haven't done too much recently); my dominant userpic is an IR pic of a California live oak. We just got a new DSLR (Nikon D90, as D has Nikon lenses; totally kicks butt), though D rarely lets it out of his sight. Also, I have a new dream camera! The Olympus EP-1. Oh, I'm not going to get it; I got my Panasonic LX-3 not long enough ago, and also I imagine Panasonic will come out with a similar small interchangeable lens large sensor shiny toy before too long. But still, I can dream, right?

In which Dag finds out that those cool mathematical objects he came up with are called "matrices"

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:27:57 GMT

Finally got around to Horizon (Bujold). Well, I liked it fine. It definitely reminded me of Cherryh a bit (though markedly less grim): the big bad was not defeated, or even understood, but a minor (well, relatively) part of the big bad is defeated, with the idea that it may now be easier to defeat the big bad entirely; and a culture is not changed upside down, but nudged, little by little, into a better shape.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate Bujold's publishers for splitting the book up and making me think I disliked it much more than I actually do? So I was rather annoyed at the last book when Dag turned out to be a total Gary Sue Expert In Everything. Well, okay, in this book it turns out that yeah, Dag is smart, but not actually so smart that he happened to stumble on something, all by himself without help, that people who, y'know, spent their lives studying didn't know about-- as happens in real life to smart people as well (as you may know, the title of this post refers to one of my favorite physics stories, Heisenberg's experience with Max Born when Heisenberg came up with a cool new way to talk about the mathematics of quantum mechanics). I have to say I laughed out loud when Arkady was all, "uh, yeah, of course I know about that stuff, and why do you do it so badly?"

The training of Dag, in general, was a lot of fun. Points for mentioning ectopic pregnancies, which I was relieved to see did not actually appear in the rest of the book, because, ick. I liked Arkady very much, and was very pleased at his arc. (Though was it just me, or was Dag just plain rude to him after Arkady basically lays his whole life on the line for Dag and all Dag can say is, "You'd better follow my rules"? How about, you know, "Thanks"?) Remo and Barr were fun to watch as well. Fawn's adventure at the end did give me chills, like it was supposed to (eek!), and Dag's confrontation after that was really rather immensely satisfying, even though it probably makes me a bad person to say that I found it so.

I did have one huge problem with the ending specifically. It seems like the whole book was bringing up these Cultural Issues (the status, or lack thereof, of half-breed children, the problem of Lakewalkers curing farmers and the riots when they can't) and then... poof... the epilogue happened and the problems all sort of magically disappeared. Apparently no one gives any of the half-breeds a second glance anymore, and Dag magically became a healer who has pretty much no problem with people wanting him to perform miracles he can't perform. Oh, there are some explanations given, and I suppose it is believable that living in a society where they are friends and neighbors, they aer able to coexist peacefully and in a friendly way (which, as well, is how Card's Worthing Saga glosses over the same issue)... but I still wonder, a bit, if it isn't glossing, and if Nattie-Mari will have problems, one day, when a boy wants to court her and his parents say he mustn't or they'll disown him, or if some crazy farmers from another town come and lynch Dag because he has gone over his maximum for dirty ground so he can't cure their daughter but it sure looks like he is malingering to them.

I also am still sort of worried about how idyllic Dag and Fawn's relationship is. I mean, I know, it's a romance, but... D and I have been married for three years now, and I feel our romance is pretty idyllic, and we've never had a knock-down drag-out fight (of the sort I have with people in my family every couple of years or so), but... you know... we have issues, occasionally. Very small ones, so far, but there are certainly days when life has gone badly for one of us and we are lashing out at the world, and the other one gets caught in the edges (never taking the brunt of it so far, which is good), with some disgruntlement ensuing. Dag and Fawn seem to understand each other perfectly always, which strikes me as a little... unlikely, given their extremely different backgrounds and extreme lack of common features (yes, I know some mixed-race/culture marriages that have done quite well-- I don't count my marriage as this kind of mixed-race/culture, though it certainly could count as one, because though we are of different races we are really from the same American-middle-class schema-- but only because they share some sort of major culture, like a fairly strong religion, or at least the experience of being from an immigrant culture). It's a far cry from the lifebonds I used to make fun of all the time, but it still seems to promote a slightly perniciously perfectionist view of marriage. (Compare Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon, where they did have to work out some things, though they also never really got into a fight.) But, you know, I'll let it slide, as it's a romance. (If it weren't a LMB book-- I really do expect her to be perfect-- I wouldn't even be bringing it up for a romance book.)

The Demon's Lexicon (Sarah Rees Brennan)

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:07:15 GMT

So I was terrified I wasn't going to like this book, because I like sarahtales very much indeed. I should not have worried, as it turns out.

So, first: This is a book about family! Siblings! I cannot even describe how happy I am to read a YA novel that does not revolve around romance, because you know how many couples I know who were serious about romance at that age? Two.

I was very, very pleased -- and I should really not have been surprised by this, given SRB's book reviews -- that the book didn't fall into any of the cliche traps that I exceedingly hate. In particular, Nick takes some risks, but they're reasonable ones that don't blow up in his face and bring Danger and Doom upon them All! (Oh, man, am I tired of that one. Look, *coughHarryPotter* if your protagonist is more-or-less capable, he's probably not going to screw up too badly, and if he's not, I may not really want to read about his screwups.)

The characters are lovely, not cliched or retreads from other fantasy at all. (Jamie bears the marks of a typical mild-mannered SRB hero, but even so transcends those roots.) All four major characters are distinct, non-Mary-Sues, and far more interesting than their first categorization upon appearance (the way that real people are almost always more interesting once you've known them for a while). The mythology seems fairly well-grounded (and I loved the Goblin Market... Christina Risotto, hee!) which is a huge compliment coming from me, as I routinely abandon books in the middle because I don't think they're being consistent or reasonable with the system of magic.

The style I found slightly off-putting at first (by which I mean that I was not immediately grabbed by the first couple of chapters). I can't exactly put my finger on what it is; I think it has to do with having to get used to Nick's stylistic voice, and that being slightly jerky (the paragraphs being very short and choppy, for instance). By the third chapter or so, it is clear that this is mostly a reflection of Nick's personality, and did not bother me subsequently.

The thing that was pretty much just phenomenally awesome about it, to me, is SRB's plot management. Now, I already knew from reading her fanfic work, and from some comments on her agent's blog, that there was going to be an Earthshattering Surprise. How is it possible to pull this off when someone knows there's going to be a Surprise? (The Sixth Sense, for example, was ruined for me because I watched it knowing there was a Surprise Ending, which I then proceeded to guess about ten minutes into the movie.) Here's how: there is the Small Earthshattering Surprise which is not really that surprising at all-- I saw it coming many chapters in advance (Alan using the name Olivia, for instance, is a dead giveaway) -- and I was all congratulating myself for being so observant, which, of course, was playing right into her hands, and while I was caught off guard, of course, the LARGE Earthshattering Surprise came in and knocked me down. Just totally. Didn't see it coming at all. (Though she plays totally fair: there are all sorts of hints, things that don't quite make sense though I thought a lot of them (like Olivia's hatred of her own kid) were there for atmosphere (wrong!), and times where Nick is clearly jumping to conclusions, but while I noticed Nick was doing that, I could not figure out what the true conclusion was. It should really be obvious after the Small Reveal, but that kind of erased the possibility of a Big Reveal from my mind.) Well done!

(Edited to put more of that under cut, as reading other reviews has shown me that apparently others can figure out these things better than I, so as not to give meta-spoilers. All I can say is, I'm impressed you figured it out.)

Also, I felt really sorry for Alan. Poor Alan! What a great guy, and, my gosh, the kid has had to deal with (among other things!) the loss of basically every adult figure in his life. He's almost unbelievable in how saintly he is about it all. Also, I kind of love the Japanese cover and wish I had that instead of the American one, not least because I love its depiction of Alan (who looks very much like a similarly mild-mannered and witty-- though not traumatically demon-haunted-- friend of mine in college).

And the title! I've always thought the title was an amazing one (had I not known SRB at all, I would've still picked it up based on the title alone). I read the book pretty much in one sitting, so I didn't have time to wonder what the title meant (especially by midway through the book when a lexicon had yet to appear), and yet when one gets to the end the title makes complete and total sense.

And when Alan says, "I call on the one I gave the name Nicholas Ryves!" I completely lost it, would've bawled like a baby if I hadn't been in public at the time (and even then it was lucky no one was looking at me at that precise moment). Not even because I saw what was coming (which I think was technically possible, but I'd lost the capacity for thinking ahead at this point), but because that line, all by itself, so perfectly encapsulates the emotional heart of the book: words and names and family and love and brothers looking after each other-- how we name and define the ones we love every day.

Anyway: yeah. I liked it exceedingly. Go read it. (with the caveat that, should you find it slow at first, you should push through at least three chapters before giving up.) Can't wait to see what she does next!

The Books of Great Alta (Yolen)

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:04:51 GMT

Sister Light, Sister Dark, White Jenna, and The One-Armed Queen are books I meant to read at a much younger age (especially the first two) and somehow never got around to it. Yolen's great strength, of course, is her weaving of myth and fairy tale, and it's all here. It's the sort of thing that, if you like her other work, you'll like the first two books, and if you don't, you most certainly won't. I like her work, so I like these books.

SLSD is, to my jaded grown-up eye, actually a little more interesting than WJ because there is less of a sense (to me) that the myth and story are of course right and the history is wrong; in SLSD it seems that it could go either way, and there's some evidence that perhaps the historians, who strip all magic from the world, are right, and the story is only a story. Or maybe the story really is the truth and the history is a lie. It's hard to tell, which is neat. In WJ it becomes a little more obvious that oh, yes, of course the magic prophetic explanations are the right one, and those stupid silly historians who don't believe in magic are just spiteful and deluded. Eh.

Also, I found Jenna's reaction at the end (of WJ) kind of weird. She has this agonizing choice, it's made for her by, basically, death, and she's totally cool with that? No angsting at all? Ooookay. But the myth at the end is beautiful and kind of heartbreaking.

The third book was written much later, I believe, and I don't like it nearly as well -- the mythic ideas of the Chosen One and the dark sisters and the prophecies are kind of sort of there, but not nearly as powerful as their incarnation in the first two books. Also, Scillia is a whiny brat, which doesn't go well with myth.

Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert)

Fri, 29 May 2009 04:24:51 GMT

A fun book, recommended by lightreads, about why we are so bad (except when we're good) at predicting the future. It's not a bad pop pysch book, though I had my usual pop-social-science problem: he describes an experiment, what it's supposed to convey, and I go, "Yes, but..." Which maybe I wouldn't do if I saw the actual paper, but I don't find the level of detail in pop-social-science convincing.

For example, he has this thesis that people deriving satisfaction from having children is a myth propagated by human society, and isn't actually true, which he "proves" by showing a graph of how marital satisfaction diminishes once people have children, and showing that women find looking after kids less satisfying than doing other tasks. Yes, but... but I find working less satisfying than reading books, but I can tell you right now that my overall satisfaction would diminish if I were reading books all the time instead of working, which lets me exercise my technical skills, spend time with interesting geeky people, gives me satisfaction that I'm contributing to society (maybe that is the "myth" part -- but if it really does make me happy because I believe that it should, is it a myth?), and not least, makes me money to buy the books with... And there are lots of things -- he wouldn't even disagree with this -- that can honestly make you happy once you've convinced yourself they ought to make you happy.

ETA: Not that I disagree with his hypotheses (certainly, for his hypothesis on child-rearing, it is supported by kids being a Big Pain to raise) but it irks me that his proof standard is as bad as it is, even for my pleasure reading.

Nothing sort-of-on-racefail

Wed, 27 May 2009 17:47:59 GMT

Okay, I may actually post a couple of times, for a change!

julianyap told me to read Octavian Nothing (Anderson), without telling me anything about it. (It is a YA book, though it's one of those YA books that is perhaps better read after one is a YA.) And he was right, both to tell me to read it and to tell me nothing about it. Because if you know something about it before reading, it does take something out of the lovely first section of the first book (it is a two-book series), which starts out, you think, as one thing, and gradually one finds out one is in another world entirely.

This is an astonishing pair of books which tackles some pretty explosive issues (mostly with great finesse, showing and not telling, although Octavian does have a couple of annoyingly anvilicious whines in the first book); I was blown away by it; and I think everyone should read it. I do not love it desperately (it's pretty grim, and I have a hard time loving grim books, which is not really the author's fault), and I do not own it.

On racefail: I have been making no secret of the fact that as far as I can tell, racefail is at least 99.9% a complete and utter waste of time. On both sides. But then... there is always that 0.1% (and I'm glad for the people who wade through the crap to bring me the 0.1%, even as I marvel at the black hole of what must be gobs of their free time) that makes me, at least, think about things a little more. It was in the context of racefail raging in the background that I read these books, and it made me think about how I responded to the first and second volumes, and what that means about me as a reader, and I came to some less-than-comfortable conclusions.

The first volume starts out in a mannered eighteenth-century prose that reminds me a little of, say, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in its mannerisms -- that is to say, it could be our world or it could be a fantasy world (and the dice are loaded to make you think the latter) -- but in either case, a very, very, culturally white milieu. Octavian, the narrator, further encourages this mindset on the part of the reader by being very Western-culturally-trained (e.g., he knows Latin and Greek).

This has two effects. First, when you find out Octavian and his mother are, in fact, black, it is a shattering surprise (for Octavian as well). Second -- and this is what racefail made me realize -- I think I was captivated by the book because of Octavian's educated white voice. Had the book been instead a straightforward tale of how blacks fared in the Revolutionary War (and indeed the second volume is much more in that vein, complete with African stories that Octavian sometimes transcribes), I would have been less interested in starting the book. And Anderson knew that. I dont think it's at all a mistake that he (she?) structures the books the way he does. But I think it does say something about me that Anderson had to do that to get me to read the book.

Also, I love Dr. Trefusis. As julianyap remarked, the scene where he tells Octavian why he saved him -- that it was all selfishness, in a way that in fact transcends selfishness (and race, for that matter!) -- is the most moving and lovely scene in the entire sequence.

(edited to fix annoying typo)

keeping cool

Sat, 09 May 2009 04:54:20 GMT

The fire hasn't gotten to us, as we live (and work) to the southwest of the major conflagration, and no one expects it to anytime soon (we'd have to have several more windy days... knock on wood). However, about a quarter of the people I work with have been evacuated (and that is a lot, considering how many people commute in and don't live in town at all). My company building is being used as an evacuation site for employees and family (though almost everyone had cleared out by 9pm tonight -- I think there were only a couple of families staying overnight).

What they ought to have been called

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:55:36 GMT

Perhaps y'all have seen these (and here and here, though I think the first is the best) before, but I hadn't. Hysterically funny especially if you, like me, grew up reading bad 80's SF/fantasy novels (Dragonlance! Xanth! Valdemar! ...hey, why are you running away? Wait, did I actually admit to reading those?)

I'll add
Katherine Kerr: People Make the Same Dumb Mistakes When Reincarnated
Patricia McKillip: Riddles in the Welsh Tradition Kinda Suck
Diane Duane: The Door Into Alternative Lifestyles
Rosemary Kirstein: Wouldn't It Be Cool If People Revered Their Scientists?
Susan Cooper: The Search for Plot Coupons (okay, that one was not original)

(and yes, I adore McKillip and Cooper, and have a certain fondness for the others; I mock because I love!)

Any other suggestions? Especially for 80's stuff? (Most of the really bad 80's stuff I read has completely escaped my memory...)

in which I reveal my apocalyptic leanings (also: go Elizabeth Warren)

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:21:59 GMT

I have been a fan of Elizabeth Warren since reading The Two-Income Trap, which significantly changed the way I thought about practical economics. In brief: if everyone's income goes up by a factor of 2, this does not make, say, houses cheaper. Because now everyone can bid up the prices of houses to two times what they could before, housing prices will also go up by about that much. Of course I did learn this in first-year economics supply and demand, but this was when-- okay, fine, I am slow-- I really got that yes, this occurs in non-textbook situations, and a similar application to the lax-credit market of the last five years (guess what-- if everyone regardless of income can get a mortgage loan of $500k, houses will cost at least $500k!) helped us to keep our head about it. I am still a fan of hers based on her TARP COP remarks. Transparency in disbursing government money! Oh, my heart.

I promise to shut up after this, but let me just say once: I strongly believe things in the financial system (and not just the US's) are Very Bad, people don't realize how bad they are, and things are just going to get worse. Probably much worse. I'm talking about Depression-era worse; I don't think we have staved off a depression, at all, and have probably made things worse. (Note I am not being partisan here; I don't think this is Obama's fault, or Bush's. I do think both of them did/are doing stupid things, but I'm not convinced any other politician would have done much better.)

My main sources of gloom-and-doom apocalyptic-ness are Mish and Karl Denninger-- the latter is kind of crazy, but then again look at his predictions for 2008 (scroll down to the bullets)... he might just be crazy like a fox.

I'll shut up now and go back to books. You can take all this with a large lump of salt, of course (and I realize I do look silly given this morning's news/stock market surge); I certainly don't claim to have a particularly high batting average with this stuff. Still. Save. Don't take on any more debt than you have to. Don't take your job for granted. Have a backup plan. Always good ideas, but I think now more than usual. I would add, don't invest in stocks right now; my dad begs to respectfully disagree.

back from wedding

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:58:59 GMT

The Kid had a wonderful and beautiful wedding (I guess I need to stop calling her that now that she is an old married lady!). The weather cooperated beautifully. The cherry trees (at least, I suppose that's what they were) were in bloom, which was lovely. She was a beautiful bride (I wasn't close to crying except for the moment she started walking in on Daddy's arm, trailing the gorgeous veil I wore to my own wedding... ohh!). My family was all very happy. In particular, my mom was very happy and mellow (it was the perfect party for her -- music, dancing, excitement-- whereas ours, much more low-key, was rather more suited for my dad, who left the Kid's reception early). It was also fun to meet all her friends I've heard so much about. Some of them were just utter joys, and I feel so lucky that my sister has these amazing friends; and all of them were at least amusing.

Now, of course, I'm recovering from both a cold (which I have furthermore transmitted to D) and the stomach virus which I finally got. Oh well!

I am the cheese (Cormier)

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:04:31 GMT

I read I am the Cheese for the third time today - I seem to have been reading it about once a decade or so. This time, I believe for the first time, I finally totally understood the plot. How is it that this book is classified as teen lit?? Or maybe I'm just slow. Well, at least I'm improving!

kindle 2

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:40:03 GMT

Yeah, so, I've been busy with frivolosities, and I'm not going to post more than once more until after the Kid's wedding on 4 April. Meanwhile, I've been playing with gadgets! Just the kindle today so I can get it out for julianyap, though I may quickly post on cameras in the near future.

A really wonderful co-worker let me borrow his kindle 2 for a couple of days. (He's a tech geek, not a lit geek, so only really bought it for travel.) Oh, man, I so wanted to like this. Some of it is awesome. The free web access? Worth the purchase price. The amazon store easy access is both really great and also will make a mint for amazon once I get one of these things.

But. BUT. The buttons are lame, more like pushing a (rather hard) mouse button and not at all like tapping an Ipod button, which is what it should be like. Since I have longstanding struggles with RSI, this was by itself a dealbreaker. If I wanted to push a mouse button to turn a page, I'd read on my computer.

Also, I do not read linearly. I read a page, wonder if the protagonist is going to die, flip to the end, decide I can read further since the protagonist still seems to be alive, realize I may have missed a Clew a chapter back, remember that oh, wait, something that was said at the very beginning was relevant... On the Kindle, you have to access a menu to flip to different parts. A menu! ...No.

And yet... once I gave it back to my co-worker, I missed it. I missed being able to carry lots of books in one package. I missed having (free!) web access all the time. I missed being able to download free sample chapters on practically anything that struck my fancy. I missed not struggling with a huge hardback book on the reading rack on the exercise machine. Bah.

Intuition (Allegra Goodman)

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:52:12 GMT

National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month has expired, but I started writing this post in February...

His despair seemed to melt and pool inside him, until he could almost congratulate himself that he was no longer desperate, but simply demoralized and depressed -- emotions entirely accepted, even expected, in the lab.

This quotation from Allegra Goodman's Intuition captures a large part of what captivated me about this book -- it shows what it's like to do research. It simultaneously made me miss research (there's nothing like the high of discovering something) and be very very glad I don't do pure research anymore.

Yeah, so this book impressed the heck out of me. It's mainstream fic (which surprised me; I was expecting science fiction, but it's actually rather that rare beast, fiction about science) about a research lab and what happens when friction erupts in the lab over a postdoc's experiments, until it has ramifications that go well beyond the one postdoc.

But what really impresses me about this book is this: I believe quite strongly that there are empirical facts about the world that do not change. Either an experiment worked or it didn't. But people are complicated. A given empirical fact, say, a conversation between person Alpha and Beta, can to person Alpha say something about herself. Person Beta may look at that same conversation and conclude something different about Person Alpha. And the thing is, they might both be right. Because people are complicated. (And to take it a step further, it may be true that Person Beta's conclusion about Person Alpha says something, moreover, about Person Beta. That may be different from both the way that Alpha looks at Beta, and the way that Beta looks at himself.) And it seems to me that most books assume that there is one right way of looking, not just at facts, but at people and people's motivations. Even in books with unreliable narrators -- well -- it is true I am a sucker for the unreliable narrator, but the whole concept presupposes that there is some underlying truth that the unreliable narrator does not see. No, in this book everyone is a reliable POV, but reliable in different ways, and unreliable to the extent that they do not necessarily see in the ways that others see. Like real life!

The result is that there is a great compassion in this book for all the characters, and that there are no villains. Indeed, the magnitude of Goodman's accomplishment can be seen in that the character that abigail_n, in the review that got me to read the book, calls "the closest Goodman comes to an out-and-out villain" is the one I thought of, before rereading her review, as the hero of the piece (though I understand why he can be thought of as the villain as well).

I feel like I should add some caveats. I was predisposed to like this book because it describes Cambridge, MA, a city which I love, and even a concert in Cambridge that I actually watched (and which liuzhia was in)! I have no idea if her portrayal of bio-lab work is all right (I only know that her emotional portrayal of science is dead on). And indeed her portrayal of music (which only occurs a couple of times in the book, to be honest) really kind of sucks (excuse me, but no one who learned violin before his teenage years thinks about the violin spot when practicing unless it's infected, so even mentioning it is a bad sign). I found the middle section of the book, which opens up into the wider world, a bit tedious (though I understand why it had to happen).

Despite all that, my vote for my best read of the year so far, though it's only March and most of what I've read has been old Asimov novels :) I am not entirely sure about this, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think ebs98, ase, julianyap, and lightreads would like it (and if you try it out and don't, let me know so I can do better next time). joyce I'm even less sure about, but the next time someone starts yapping at you about academia you could do worse than reading the first chapter of this to remind yourself why you aren't in research!

NPQiYBM

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:38:06 GMT

Hmph, February is almost over and I have not posted half as many quotations as I would have liked. Well, here is a sonnet by my favorite poet:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

ETA: Gerard Manley Hopkins, as julianyap guessed.

NPQiYBM/Asimov

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:50:55 GMT

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Anyone who does not know that this quotation is from Isaac Asimov should go and read a book of his in penance. I've been rereading a bunch of his stuff lately, mostly because I had a cold and was not feeling up to anything less readable, and whatever else you might say about him Asimov is very easy to read.

I had never actually read his robot mystery novels before (though I've read every single one of the robot stories), and the first two are really quite good (in, of course, a Golden Age sort of way-- don't expect psychodrama), though I figured out the killer in the first book after the first third of the book. I have always loved the Black Widower mystery short stories (joyce, you might like these -- they are short and sweet and usually pretty upbeat), though they vary widely in quality. I love them honestly for the afterwords more than anything else. Which realization started me on reading his autobiography (I, Asimov, though there are three others), which is just really charming. Asimov sounds like he was a delightful person, and I am annoyed that he left us after only 300 (!) books.

Off to Yosemite for this weekend, yay! hope the weather is nice *crosses fingers*