Arctangential

It’s been a while since I did a book project update. I blame work, mostly. Or myself. Either way, it’s been so long that this post is actually the last one for 2009. On the 14th, I finished reading Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “The Shadow of the Wind”, which was my 120th book of the year. I also was able to do some math and make it work out that my page average this year was precisely 310 pages per book. Last year I really struggled at the end of the year to hit my more modest goal — this year I’m done 2 weeks early. Next year I’m going to still go for 10 books a month, but I’m going to bump my page average up to 330 per book. We’ll see how it goes. For those who care, here’s my final stats:

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It’s been like 2 months since I wrote anything in here. I have actually been doing some writing, but I’ve been throwing out more than I’ve been keeping. Also the new house and all that stuff is still taking up a fair amount of my time. Do you like excuses?

Despite it all, I’ve still been keeping up on my reading. I’m one book short of my goal for the end of the month, but I’m above my page goal, so I’m happy about that. I’ll write more later, promise.

The stats:

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4 of the first 11 books I’ve read this year were written by Isaac Asimov. This isn’t a statistical fluke; I’m doing my best to read all of his books over the next few years. Let me tell you why.

I’d never really been a fan of Asimov. As a teenager, I was really into classic SF, reading as much Heinlein, Clark, Ellison, Bradbury and their ilk as I could get my hands on. I read Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage books at some point, disliked them greatly, and wrote him off from then on. Three years or so ago I decided that I should give him another shot, so I picked up all of his Foundation novels. I enjoyed them somewhat, but not enough to really get back into his work, so I decided that Asimov just wasn’t for me and that I probably wouldn’t be reading anything else of his.

I had, however, while shopping for the Foundation novels, found an anatomy book of his called “The Human Body”. I was really surprised to see that a science-fiction author had written a non-fiction book, so I picked it up, but was in no hurry to get to it and it sat on my shelf for some years. Last August, I finally read it and I was blown away at how good it was. It was incredibly clear, very detailed and very easy to understand. Since it was written in the 70s, the actual science was somewhat out of date, but that really doesn’t matter very much when you’re dealing with popular science like this.

It turns out that Asimov was never a science fiction author who wrote some non-fiction. He was really a popular science author who wrote some science fiction. He was not just any popular science author; he was an unbelievably prolific popular science author, with something like 350 books to his credit (the exact number depends on how you count them.) After learning all of this, I’ve decided to try to read his complete works. After having read about a dozen of his books now, I’m totally committed to completing the project; the man is a master explainer and I even enjoy having him explain things to me that I already know.

To that end, I picked up his book Opus 100, his 100th book which contains excerpts from and discussion of the 99 books he’d written previously, and I’m using the book list on its rear cover as a shopping list. I’m finding that this approach has kind of front-loaded the difficulty in terms of finding and affording the actual books, as I’m starting with all of his oldest and rarest work, but I will have to get all this stuff eventually. I should be done with the first 100 books in a year or two and then I’ll have to pick up Opus 200 and start the process over again. Should be a fun couple of years for reading.

And, of course, the reason that I didn’t like his science fiction writing was that it simply isn’t very good. In fact, most of his fiction work is really just the same as his popular science work but with thin plots wrapped around it. This is not the kind of approach that generally produces great literature. Luckily for me, he didn’t really write much fiction.

Ok, first post on my new blog. Super exciting. Or whatever. I’ve imported all of my old posts from livejournal, so any post older than this one is from there. Any comments on those posts from “do_not_lick” are me.

So, on to the book stats. Yup, I’m going to do the N Book Challenge again; I liked keeping track of what I read and seeing how much it actually amounted to. I also really enjoy looking back on my old lists and remembering when I read what. Kind of a book nerd nostalgia. This year I’m going to again aim for 120 books, or 10 books per month. I’m going to try for an average page count of 310 per book instead of 300. I think if I gradually increase my targets, I’ll eventually be reading twice as much as when I started this.

I’ll do another post later talking about the books themselves. I just want to get this numbers part out of the way first.

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Well, there goes 2008. I did manage to meet my reading goal for the year; 120 books with an average page count of 300 per book. Actually 300.04, but who’s counting? I almost didn’t make it; I do most of my reading on the bus to and from work, and with the terrible weather and the holidays, I haven’t been on a bus in weeks. It was close going up to today, but this morning I inexplicably woke up at 4:30 and sat down to read. I finished Straight over lunch this afternoon, bringing me right to the finish line. Here’s my final stats for 2008:

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I haven’t done a book status post for a while, and since I’m snowed in this morning, I figured I might as well. I was also holding off making this post until I finished Michael Moorcock’s The Vengeance of Rome, the last in a 4-book series called “Between the Wars”. I’ve been waiting to read these books for something like 15 years; I bought the first two books, Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Carthage from the remainder table of the Border’s in Framingham, MA when I was in high school. I waited something like 3 more years until I was able to find a copy of the third book, Jerusalem Commands, which I thought at the time was the past book. It turns out, of course, that there was a fourth book, and Moorcock didn’t finish it until last year.

I could write pages and pages about these books. They’re like nothing I’ve ever read before and I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with a concise description for them. They follow the life of a man born on January 1st, 1900. His name is always unclear; we meet him as Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, or Pyat, but he changes his name on a regular basis as it most benefits him. The books follow his life from the age of 18 (at the end of WWI) to the age of 36 (at the beginning of WWII). He travels all over the western world, starting in the Ukraine, moving all over Europe and then on to the USA, then to northern Africa and then back to Europe. He works as a movie star, invents a laser beam to fight the reds in the siege of Odessa, ends up as a sex slave to a mad hermaphrodite in the Sahara, works to build Mussolini an air force and even dresses up like a woman to be Hitler’s dominatrix.

Part of the joy of these books is Pyat’s complete self-involvement and inability to see the reality of any person other than himself. He lies almost constantly through the books; he invents not only new names, but entirely new personas for himself as they’re needed. He pretends to be a count, to be a Colonel in various armies and to be a member of almost every major political faction in the world. While doing this, however, he is unable to recognize when anyone else is ever lying, taking everything said to him at face value. Even though the books are written in his voice and we see his world through his own warped vision, it is entirely clear to the reader when people are tricking him and he never, ever catches on.

Anyways, I’ll stop there. Here’s my stats:

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It’s been a long time since I posted anything. I’ve been writing a short story and somehow the urge to write also blogs hasn’t really been coming into me. For now, here’s a book update:

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I just finished reading Adding a Dimension by Isaac Asimov. I know I haven’t been doing these miniature book reviews, but I enjoyed this book so much, I felt like I had to share it with you all (both).

The book contains 17 essays on various topics in science: math, physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. They’re all aimed at a very much non-scientist audience, and in fact the only negative thing I could say about the book is that the sections on the sciences in which I am educated (math, physics and astronomy for those keeping score at home) were a little bit of a re-hash to me, although I did learn something from each essay. I especially enjoyed the chemistry essay in which he dissects the chemical name para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde, giving both the details of the chemical meaning along with the etymology of each segment. For example, the “benz” part means that it’s a benzene ring, having 6 carbon molecules arranged in a hexagon, and the name comes originally from a Javanese phrase, “luban javi”, meaning a certain kind of tree from which could be harvested a resin from which benzoic acid was first isolated. I learned more about the underlying concepts behind organic chemistry naming from this essay than I ever did from my college courses.

In another essay he mentions that one would be able to fit more television stations in the broadcast range if you were to transmit them using visible light instead of radio waves. He suggests using lasers for this, and admits that a flaw in his plan is the difficulty is directing said light inside of buildings. He suggests long plastic tubes with mirrors, but I think he was mostly joking by that point. What’s amazing is that he actually predicted the optical data networks of today, for the same reasons that we use them today. He just didn’t know about fiber optics or digital coding back then. Which leads to the only other bad thing about the book; and that is that it was written in 1969, and so much of the science is dated to some degree. I imagine that’s why these non-fiction books of his are so rare these days.

I’ll leave you with a passage from the book:

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It’s about time for another book status post. I’m only 200 pages shy of my goal for August, which is a lot closer than I’ve been at this time of the month for a while. I might actually make my goal of 120 books this year! Crazy. Here’s the stats:

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I finished Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series a while ago, and I’ve been meaning to write about it since then. As I may have mentioned before, this series was originally planned to be 20 books long and to be followed by 2 other series, each of 20 more books. As I also may have mentioned before, the interesting thing about the series is that it doesn’t follow the same group of characters through their adventures over time, but rather each book covers a similar time line, following different characters through vastly different stories and geographies. The characters from different books meet one another from time to time, and it’s these interactions that really make the series incredible to me.

See, in your standard epic tale, the heroes travel around a landscape, encountering enemies and allies, discovering wonderful new cities and cultures and having, as my father always puts it, Many Exciting Adventures. The thing is, the enemies, allies, cities and cultures that they interact with are generally pretty one-dimensional. You have the idyllic elven wood-city (or two), you have the dashing adventurer, you have the evil monks, the haunted dwarven mine, the desert planet, the jolly but politically clever king and the corrupt vizier. Now I’m not saying that it’s bad to use these archetypes, as they’re important storytelling tools, but they are very common tropes in the genre and what Hugh Cook has done with them here is really brilliant.

Let’s take an example. There’s a warlord who shows up in a number of the books named “Watashi” which we are told is the word for blood and death in his native language. He’s generally referred to as a fearsome warrior, and not much else is said about him, but the reader (and the main characters) tend to fill in his backstory with what it is that they know of the genre, and the books never disabuse you (or them) or their preconceptions. However, one of the later books has this Watashi guy as the main character, and through his story we learn that he’s actually kind of a wimp, having “earned” his fearful name in a bet. He aspires to be a great warlord but by and large he fails.

This kind of secondary backstory isn’t just limited to the people in the story. There’s an important city on the main continent, and it’s visited numerous times in the various books. Each group that visits this city sees an entirely different aspect of it, but in each individual book, this disparity is never pointed out or even mentioned. Each group sees the city as they expect to see it, and we as the reader go along with them. One book, however, is largely set in this city, and in that book we get the true view of the city: a large metropolis, made up of many varied neighborhoods and districts.

So what we have here is a collection of books that explores the backstories and histories of basically every important player in the world, all while telling 10 different exciting adventure stories, full of fighting, intrigue, sex and slug-eating. The body of work represents a staggering detailed and varied world of enormous scope, and after reading all 10 books, it really feels like a real place to me. To think that there were originally to be 60 of these books, and twice as many just to cover the time period I do know about, is breathtaking, and it’s a little bit sad to think that the series will never be finished.