Arctangential » Books

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

avi — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 11:06:32 +0000

Last month, I came across ABEBooks’ Weird Book Room, a delightful collection of amusingly outdated, crazy, niche or otherwise just plain unusual books. I mentioned on Facebook that I’d be delighted to receive any one of those books as a present, a comment which was intended mainly to compliment whomever had put together the list. I was (and remain) amazed and delighted that the list contains not even one book that doesn’t pique my curiosity in some way.

However, some people read into the statement some kind of request for actual gifts, and a few of those people even talked about getting me some of those books for real! I found myself, again, amazed and delighted. Alas, I was to be mostly disappointed, as these things tend to go. However, my wonderful cousin Casey did follow through and gave me a copy of Daniel H. Wilson’s How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

First of all, it’s a beautiful book. The cover’s a heavier-than-usual cardboard with a glossy finish and metallic highlights. The pages are all also gloss heavy-bond paper and are liberally decorated with stylized 4-color illustrations of the book’s concepts. In a nice touch, the pages are all gilt-edged in a red-metallic finish. It’s nice to see such an imaginative book design — it’s clear that someone cared about the project.

Wilson is a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon, and as such knows quite a bit of the state of the art in robot design and capabilities. The main intent of the book, it seemed to me, is to give a broad overview of the state of the art in robotics engineering, paired with humorous comments about what part these technologies will play in the inevitably upcoming robot uprising. I will note that the book is from 2005, and 6 years is a while in any technological field. While most of the stuff he talks about is still relevant, most of his examples of the “next big thing” are today more-or-less commonplace. It doesn’t affect the enjoyment of the book at all, though.

He begins the book by going over the broad different types of robots that might take part in the uprising. He starts with examples of robots based on biological forms: humans, snakes, insects and even lobsters. While this kind of thing is most of what I used to think about when I thought about robots, Wilson presents an array of robot types that I’d never considered before.

He makes compelling arguments for both the smart house and smart cars as possible co-conspirators in the robot revolt. Unmanned planes fly missions every day in the modern military, and those are robots too, as are unmanned submarines and the generally less-successful unmanned automatic boats. He even talks about modular robots, which instead of being a single mechanism are actually a collection of organized sub-mechanisms that work together — like a bunch of minimally-aware, motile LEGO bricks which can assemble themselves into whatever configuration is optimal for the task at hand.

During all of this discussion, Wilson gives tips on how to divert, avoid or destroy robots of different types. Humanoid robots can be tripped; robotic cars can be fooled by thick bushes, which they might not be able to differentiate from walls; modular robots’ communications and linkages can be fouled with oil or sand. He also inserts a good amount of humor: at one point he suggests that a smart house might try to kill you by refusing to cook dinner until you “inspect the oven.”

Next Wilson moves on to a discussion of the different sensors robots might use to help find and kill us all. He defines sensors as devices which “convert a property of the physical world into an electrical symbol.” This includes the obvious stuff like cameras for vision, microphones to hear, and chemical sensors for smell and taste, as well as more esoteric devices such as laser range-finders, GPS systems and thermal imagers. One very interesting example is the hyperspectral camera, which examines a great range of different types of light and is able to see through the outer layers of your skin, allowing robot overlords to identify humans unerringly by the unique patterns of blood vessels in their faces.

In the final section concerning the robots themselves, he talks about machine intelligence: how robots process the data coming in from their sensors. He discusses facial recognition, silhouette recognition and speech recognition and gait recognition, going into the broad strokes of how they work and into more detail on how they can be fooled. For example, gait recognition (recognizing and identifying people by how they walk) can be fooled by wearing a skirt or long coat; talking through a fan will “chop up” your speech enough to fool most artificial speech processors but will still be easily understandable by humans; covering yourself in cool mud (ala Predator) can fool infrared cameras; and so on.

Now that we know what robots are made of, Wilson goes into greater depth about what the robot uprising will look like and how we can survive in both the turbulent early days as well as the oppressed aftermath. The advice is pretty intuitive: first, be prepared; second, be aware and recognize the uprising as soon as (or before) it begins; finally, make your escape quickly and without hesitation.

For preparations, he suggests building an electronics-free “safe room” in your house, and having a good cache of food and survival gear available no matter where you live. Signs of the revolt may include a “sudden lack of interesting in menial labor”, “repetitive ‘stabbing’ motions”, and mysteriously disabled off switches. One escape plan he mentions involves pushing your erstwhile servant into the swimming pool and making your getaway, into the wilderness, on a bicycle.

As before, avoiding detection after your escape is a matter of confounding the relatively simple sensing systems of the robots. Live in the wild to hinder pursuit by machines that are unable to negotiate rough terrain; build your shelter in the side of the hill so that it presents no silhouette and use natural materials with few sharp angles, both of which will be difficult for artificial image processors to recognize. If you want to stay in the urban areas and work to overthrow the mechanical overlords, stay around lots of rubble to confuse sensors and don’t use electronics which will emit fields that can be picked up by the robots.

Finally, he talks about fighting back; using EMP bombs and directed-energy weapons to disrupt the robots’ systems as well as using tradition guns to target weak points in the robots’ structure, such as the joints and the external sensors. In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter; there’s very little we can do about a determined robot overthrow, but it’s fun to think about in any case.

One of my favorite themes of the book is the idea that our advantage over the robots lies in the basic different between our origins. Robots are created things and thus are generally only good at only specific tasks; they’re incredibly simple when compared to the massively complex evolved things which humans are. The arduous path of our evolution has left with us a great number of abilities which are of limited or no use in day-to-day life but can be critically important when they are the only differentiator between ourselves and a murderous machine.

While there are few single things that a machine can’t do as well or better than a human being, there is no single machine which can even come close to matching the variety of abilities possessed by even the most average human being. Science fiction robots might be ultimately superior to humans, but the ones we have today are all purpose-built and designed to perform specific tasks in specific environments. As such, the real key to survival is to recognize which thing it is that the particular robot you’re dealing with can’t do, and use it to your advantage.

A snake robot can climb through small holes and go up any tree, but on a flat-out, a human will outrun it every time. A vengeful smart car can run down a human in that same flat-out without any trouble, but even a 2-foot deep hole will stop one dead in its tracks. The modular robot may seem to be the least vulnerable to this kind of problem, but their design means that the interior of their mechanism is exposed to the outside world every time they have to reconfigure their shape, and you can take that to your advantage just as easily.

So, the moral of the story is, know your robots, know their weaknesses and exploit them as best you can, and you’ll be one of the lucky ones who ends up living in a steampunk rave club at the center of the earth. And thanks again for the book Casey; we’ll have to do another book exchange next year! You still have to let me know how Summer with the Leprechauns turned out.

So goodly won, with her own will beguil’d.

avi — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 10:10:16 +0000

Tonight, insomniacal, I was reading a Dick Francis novel, Smokescreen, written in 1972. It represents some of his journeyman work: competently written, showing some sign of the ideas he would develop more in his later novels, but not as much of the polish and panache. The writing does expose an interesting insight into 70s fashion, however:

He was wearing another pair of painted-on trousers, and a blue ruffled close-fitting shirt with lacing instead of buttons. As casual clothes, they were as deliberate as signposts: the rugged male in his sexual finery.

Later, a woman arrives:

She arrives like a gust of bright and breezy show biz, wearing an eye-stunning yellow catsuit, which flared widely from the knees in black-edged ruffles. She looked like a flamenco dancer split up the middle, and she topped up the impression with a high tortoise-shell mantilla comb pegged like a tiara into her mop of hair.

And finally, the temptress:

The girl was ravishing, with cloudy dark hair and enormous slightly myopic-looking eyes. She wore a soft floaty garment, floor length and green, which swirled and lay against her as she moved, outlining now a hip, now a breast, and all parts in quite clearly good shape.

Her outfit is the least repellent in the mind’s eye primarily because it’s not described in much detail. The temptress and our narrator end up on the couch:

Melanie just happened to sit beside me on the tiger-skin sofa, stretching out languorously so that the green material revealed the whole slender shape. Just happened to have no lighter of her own, so that I had to help her with Roderick’s orange globe table model.

Just so you don’t think I’m reading a bunch of smut, this is a very atypical seduction scene in an otherwise largely bloodless mystery novel. It isn’t even very badly written, regardless of how tawdry these sections may seem, out of context. What I love about it is that these people are presented without any surprise or shock on the part of the narrator; these clothes are clearly entirely acceptable to him. In juxtaposition with the rest of the book, which could just as easily have been set today instead of 40 years ago, it’s a jarring and hilarious reminder of how far we’ve come in so short a time.

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

avi — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 05:51:04 +0000

Last year I blogged pretty regularly about my reading, which was at least interesting to do if not to read. This year, due to some technical problems, time constraints, and a general pall of laziness, I did not keep up with it at all. I did read and I kept my database updated, but I never managed to finish a blog update. Maybe I’ve been saving up until now.

The amount I was able to read was low this year – mainly because there were a few months there when I was commuting by car, and that really cut in to my reading time. Here’s a graph:

You can clearly make out a sharp decline in reading from late May to October that corresponds to my altered commute. I originally set my goal at 120 books with an average length of 330 pages, but I ended up reading only 86 books with a 316-page average length.

While I’m not very happy with how much I read this year, I am happy, with what I read. I read 33 of Asimov’s books this year, leaving me with only 10 more to go until I’ve read all of his first 100. Unfortunately, those last 10 are pretty hard to find and regularly sell for between $70 and $200 each! I’ll try to buy one every month or two during the next year until it becomes too difficult and/or expensive to continue, at which point I’ll just start on the next 100.

I also worked on my goal of reading more of the “classics”. This year, I’ve read: The Wealth of Nations, A Moveable Feast, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, both Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics, The Great Gatsby, Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, To Kill a Mockingbird, Naked Lunch and Dante’s Divine Comedy. That’s 10 great works, and I hope to do better next year.

As for everything else, I read quite a selection of different types of books, from technical books to spy thrillers, literary criticism to humorous autobiographies. This is mainly an effect of my impatience with sameness, and if I have it available, I will always try to read something different from what I’ve read recently, and I try to keep my shelves stocked with a wide variety of reading material for that purpose.

I didn’t read any really bad books this year, amazingly; the worst was probably Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise, but that was just something cheap I picked up one afternoon because I’d left my real book at home that day, and it wasn’t terrible as much as just a faddy book that hasn’t aged well.

In fact, I read a lot of really good stuff this year, in addition to those already mentioned. I read two by Nabokov, both new to me and both thoughtful gifts. I read a lot of classic crime fiction, by Fleming, Christie and Francis, and some excellent modern hard SF by Jack McDevitt. I took my first real foray into reading autobiography, with universal good result. Reading-wise, I’m very happy with 2010.

Here’s the full book list for this year:

Isaac Asimov – Nine Tomorrows – 1-8-10 (224pp)
Ken Schwaber – Agile Project Management with Scrum – 1-11-10 (163pp)
Dick Francis – Knockdown – 1-19-10 (292pp)
Isaac Asimov – I, Robot – 1-26-10 (224pp)
Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations – 1-29-10 (1155pp)
Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory – 2-5-10 (316pp)
Isaac Asimov – Inside the Atom – 2-6-10 (185pp)
Dick Francis – Dead Heat – 2-8-10 (404pp)
Isaac Asimov – Understanding Physics – 2-19-10 (768pp)
Alvin Toffler – Future Shock – 2-27-10 (505pp)
Isaac Asimov – Words on the Map – 3-4-10 (274pp)
Michael Williams – Arcady – 3-6-10 (442pp)
Isaac Asimov – Nightfall and Other Stories – 3-7-10 (350pp)
Ernest Hemingway – A Movable Feast – 3-9-10 (211pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Bloodstream – 3-13-10 (212pp)
Michael Williams – Allamanda – 3-19-10 (436pp)
Isaac Asimov – The End of Eternity – 3-21-10 (255pp)
Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones – 3-22-10 (328pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Genetic Code – 3-24-10 (187pp)
Lewis Thomas – The Lives of a Cell – 3-26-10 (153pp)
Isaac Asimov – Atom – 3-30-10 (319pp)
Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – 4-7-10 (281pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Clock We Live On – 4-8-10 (158pp)
Vladimir Nabokov – The Original of Laura – 4-9-10 (278pp)
William C. Boyd – Races and People – 4-11-10 (189pp)
Alton Brown – I’m Just Here For More Food – 4-13-10 (335pp)
Isaac Asimov – Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright – 4-15-10 (221pp)
Ariana Franklin – Mistress of the Art of Death – 4-17-10 (384pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Twelve Frights of Christmas – 4-21-10 (263pp)
Robert Masello – Robert’s Rules of Writing – 4-22-10 (224pp)
Isaac Asimov – Banquets of the Black Widowers – 4-25-10 (223pp)
Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi – Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build – 4-26-10 (406pp)
Shalom Auslander – Foreskin’s Lament – 4-28-10 (310pp)
Isaac Asimov – Far as Human Eye Could See – 5-1-10 (302pp)
Dick Francis – Twice Shy – 5-3-10 (344pp)
Isaac Asimov – Nightfall – 5-5-10 (339pp)
Lewis Thomas – The Medusa and the Snail – 5-8-10 (175pp)
Isaac Asimov – A Short History of Biology – 5-11-10 (182pp)
David A. Price – The Pixar Touch – 5-13-10 (308pp)
Isaac Asimov – The World of Carbon – 5-15-10 (178pp)
Aristotle – Ethics – 6-4-10 (383pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Rest of the Robots – 6-5-10 (223pp)
Dick Francis – Bonecrack – 6-6-10 (222pp)
Isaac Asimov – Of Time, Space, and Other Things – 6-9-10 (223pp)
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby – 6-15-10 (159pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Dark Ages – 6-19-10 (256pp)
Ian Fleming – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – 6-19-10 (190pp)
Stephen H. Dole – Planets for Man – 6-23-10 (242pp)
Kathy Reichs – Bones to Ashes – 6-26-10 (310pp)
Dan Abnett – Ravenor – The Omnibus – 7-10-10 (891pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Double Planet – 7-11-10 (159pp)
David Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – 7-16-10 (131pp)
Isaac Asimov – Through a Glass, Clearly – 7-17-10 (124pp)
Agatha Christie – Five Complete Miss Marple Novels – 7-29-10 (650pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Hugo Winners — Volumes I & II – 8-9-10 (849pp)
Ian Fleming – The Man with the Golden Gun – 8-11-10 (182pp)
Terry M. Johnson – Growing Up Riparian – 8-16-10 (208pp)
Isaac Asimov – Words from History – 8-20-10 (265pp)
Alberto Manguel – A Reader on Reading – 9-3-10 (308pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Hugo Winners — Volume 3 – 9-13-10 (603pp)
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird – 9-18-10 (284pp)
Isaac Asimov – Soviet Science Fiction – 9-22-10 (189pp)
Jennifer Traig – Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood – 9-25-10 (246pp)
Isaac Asimov – Tomorrow’s Children – 10-2-10 (431pp)
William Seward Burroughs – Naked Lunch – 10-12-10 (299pp)
Isaac Asimov – More Soviet Science Fiction – 10-15-10 (190pp)
James D. Watson – The Double Helix – 10-19-10 (143pp)
Isaac Asimov – Quick and Easy Math – 10-20-10 (180pp)
Jack McDevitt – Deepsix – 10-24-10 (508pp)
Joanna Russ – Picnic on Paradise – 10-30-10 (157pp)
Isaac Asimov – Is Anyone There? – 11-2-10 (320pp)
Jack McDevitt – Chindi – 11-5-10 (511pp)
Isaac Asimov – To the Ends of the Universe – 11-6-10 (141pp)
Jack McDevitt – Omega – 11-10-10 (493pp)
Johannes Mario Simmel – The Berlin Connection – 11-15-10 (512pp)
Jack McDevitt – Odyssey – 11-19-10 (423pp)
Isaac Asimov – The Near East – 11-22-10 (277pp)
Jack McDevitt – Cauldron – 11-24-10 (351pp)
Philip K. Dick – Counter Clock World – 11-29-10 (218pp)
Bernard Jaffe – Michelson and the Speed of Light – 12-1-10 (197pp)
Dick Francis – 10 LB. Penalty – 12-3-10 (306pp)
Robert A. Heinlein – Friday – 12-9-10 (357pp)
Aristotle – Politics – 12-17-10 (320pp)
William King – Ragnar’s Claw – 12-22-10 (266pp)
Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy – 12-25-10 (492pp)
David Gerrold – Jumping Off the Planet – 12-27-10 (281pp)

Next year, I’m going to go back to the goal of 120, 330-page books. The book length part might be hard to keep up, but now that I’m back on the bus, I think I’ll be able to read the books.

Consider this in lieu of a new year’s post.

With harmony divine.

avi — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:57:02 +0000

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:

1. Isaac Asimov – Asimov’s Guide to the Bible – 1-15-09 (1295pp)
2. Stephen King – On Writing – 1-16-09 (288pp)
3. Isaac Asimov – Earth is Room Enough – 1-18-09 (192pp)
4. Ernest Pintoff – Directing 101 – 1-19-09 (220pp)
5. Isaac Asimov – The Wellsprings of Life – 1-21-09 (224pp)
6. Kurt Vonnegut – God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – 1-23-09 (190pp)
7. Dick Francis – Longshot – 1-24-09 (322pp)
8. Isaac Asimov – View from a Height – 1-27-09 (254pp)
9. MacDonald Harris – The Balloonist – 1-29-09 (280pp)
10. Florence King – With Charity Toward None – 1-31-09 (194pp)
11. Bill Bryson – Shakespeare: The World as Stage – 2-2-09 (199pp)
12. Tom Stoppard – Plays Five – 2-6-09 (593pp)
13. Isaac Asimov – The Neutrino – 2-8-09 (188pp)
14. Dick Francis – Odds Against – 2-10-09 (239pp)
15. Robert A. Heinlein – Citizen of the Galaxy – 2-11-09 (253pp)
16. Sarah Vowell – Take the Cannoli – 2-13-09 (219pp)
17. Isaac Asimov – The Universe – 2-18-09 (315pp)
18. John Tarrant – The Rommel Plot – 2-20-09 (250pp)
19. Henry D. Smith II – Hokusai – One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji – 2-24-09 (224pp)
20. Dave Duncan – The Gilded Chain – 3-2-09 (418pp)
21. Lynne Truss – Eats, Shoots & Leaves – 3-3-09 (209pp)
22. Dave Duncan – Lord of the Fire Lands – 3-6-09 (457pp)
23. Isaac Asimov – Science, Numbers and I – 3-8-09 (226pp)
24. Dave Duncan – Sky of Swords – 3-11-09 (466pp)
25. Virgil – The Aeneid – 3-19-09 (432pp)
26. Isaac Asimov – Asimov on Astronomy – 3-21-09 (271pp)
27. Brian M. Wiprud – Pipsqueak – 3-23-09 (293pp)
28. Isaac Asimov – Building Blocks of the Universe – 3-25-09 (287pp)
29. Charles Dickens – Great Expectations – 4-1-09 (628pp)
30. Stephen Baxter – Moonseed – 4-7-09 (663pp)
31. Stephen King – Duma Key – 4-10-09 (612pp)
32. Isaac Asimov – Asimov’s Mysteries – 4-13-09 (255pp)
33. Charles Burns – Black Hole – 4-14-09 (184pp)
34. Dick Francis – Dead Cert – 4-14-09 (256pp)
35. Isaac Asimov – The Human Brain – 4-18-09 (357pp)
36. Isaac Asimov – Environments Out There – 4-21-09 (96pp)
37. Syd Field – Screenplay – 4-21-09 (262pp)
38. Ken Grimwood – Replay – 4-22-09 (311pp)
39. Isaac Asimov – The Kite that Won the Revolution – 4-23-09 (148pp)
40. Michael Chabon – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – 5-1-09 (639pp)
41. Isaac Asimov – The Death Dealers – 5-4-09 (189pp)
42. Terry Pratchett – A Hat Full of Sky – 5-6-09 (278pp)
43. Isaac Asimov – Words of Science – 5-8-09 (319pp)
44. Tom McCarthy – Tintin and the Secret of Literature – 5-11-09 (211pp)
45. Isaac Asimov – Breakthroughs in Science – 5-12-09 (197pp)
46. Joseph Green – The Horde – 5-13-09 (191pp)
47. Isaac Asimov – Only a Trillion – 5-15-09 (221pp)
48. Benjamin Hoff – The Tao of Pooh – 5-16-09 (158pp)
49. Philip K. Dick – The Unteleported Man – 5-18-09 (202pp)
50. Isaac Asimov – The Martian Way and Other Stories – 5-19-09 (176pp)
51. Dick Francis – Enquiry – 5-20-09 (221pp)
52. Robert Crais – The Monkey’s Raincoat – 5-22-09 (201pp)
53. Isaac Asimov – The New Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science – 5-28-09 (864pp)
54. Melissa Bruder – A Practical Handbook for the Actor – 5-29-09 (94pp)
55. Thomas M. Disch – Fun with Your New Head – 6-1-09 (176pp)
56. Gordon Davis – The Liberation of Paris – 6-2-09 (199pp)
57. David Benioff – City of Thieves – 6-4-09 (258pp)
58. Gordon Davis – Doom River – 6-5-09 (185pp)
59. Isaac Asimov – Realm of Numbers – 6-6-09 (200pp)
60. David Alexander Smith – Future Boston – 6-9-09 (384pp)
61. Carol O’Connell – Judas Child – 6-12-09 (420pp)
62. Richard Brautigan – The Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away – 6-16-09 (531pp)
63. Caleb Carr – The Alienist – 6-20-09 (498pp)
64. Isaac Asimov – Realm of Measure – 6-21-09 (144pp)
65. MacDonald Harris – Herma – 6-30-09 (431pp)
66. Isaac Asimov – Fact and Fancy – 7-2-09 (206pp)
67. Junot Díaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – 7-7-09 (340pp)
68. Dick Francis – Rat Race – 7-9-09 (216pp)
69. Nevada Barr – Blind Descent – 7-12-09 (341pp)
70. Isaac Asimov – Words from the Myths – 7-13-09 (143pp)
71. Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Imaginary Beings – 7-15-09 (236pp)
72. Agatha Christie – And Then There Were None – 7-16-09 (264pp)
73. Barack Obama – The Audacity of Hope – 7-21-09 (448pp)
74. H. P. Lovecraft – Tales – 8-2-09 (838pp)
75. Kristen Heitzmann – Freefall – 8-7-09 (462pp)
76. Isaac Asimov – Life and Energy – 8-13-09 (378pp)
77. Isaac Asimov – The Kingdom of the Sun – 8-16-09 (157pp)
78. Ariana Franklin – The Serpent’s Tale – 8-16-09 (387pp)
79. Josephine Tey – The Daughter of Time – 8-18-09 (206pp)
80. Isaac Asimov – The Collapsing Universe – 8-19-09 (204pp)
81. Junji Ito – Museum of Terror Vol. 1 – 8-20-09 (375pp)
82. Junji Ito – Museum of Terror Vol. 2 – 8-21-09 (376pp)
83. Isaac Asimov – The Search for the Elements – 8-21-09 (144pp)
84. Paul J. Salamoff – On the Set – 8-23-09 (240pp)
85. F. Scott Fitzgerald – This Side of Paradise – 8-26-09 (255pp)
86. Junji Ito – Museum of Terror Vol. 3 – 8-27-09 (391pp)
87. Caleb Carr – Killing Time – 8-29-09 (335pp)
88. Isaac Asimov – The Chemicals of Life – 8-31-09 (140pp)
89. Audrey Niffenegger – The Time Traveler’s Wife – 9-3-09 (546pp)
90. Terry Pratchett – The Discworld Companion – 9-9-09 (477pp)
91. Joan Hess – Malice in Maggody – 9-20-09 (236pp)
92. Joseph Heller – Catch-22 – 10-1-09 (443pp)
93. Mark Haddon – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – 10-3-09 (226pp)
94. Dick Francis – Trial Run – 10-7-09 (290pp)
95. Kate Atkinson – Case Histories – 10-14-09 (373pp)
96. Isaac Asimov – Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology – 10-16-09 (941pp)
97. Zack Parsons – My Tank is Fight! – 10-17-09 (244pp)
98. Tana French – The Likeness – 10-21-09 (466pp)
99. Isaac Asimov – Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales – 10-22-09 (287pp)
100. Walter Jon Williams – House of Shards – 10-24-09 (309pp)
101. Isaac Asimov – The Caves of Steel – 10-25-09 (270pp)
102. Euripides – Bacchae – 10-26-09 (75pp)
103. Isaac Asimov – From Earth to Heaven – 10-28-09 (253pp)
104. Dick Francis – For Kicks – 10-29-09 (328pp)
105. Isaac Asimov – Words from the Exodus – 10-30-09 (203pp)
106. Julian May – The Surveillance – 11-3-09 (347pp)
107. Isaac Asimov – Words in Genesis – 11-4-09 (233pp)
108. Julian May – The Metaconcert – 11-6-09 (282pp)
109. Isaac Asimov – Realm of Algebra – 11-7-09 (143pp)
110. Eliot Pattison – The Skull Mantra – 11-11-09 (403pp)
111. Isaac Asimov – Twentieth Century Discovery – 11-13-09 (159pp)
112. Vladimir Nabokov – The Defense – 11-20-09 (256pp)
113. Isaac Asimov – Photosynthesis – 11-21-09 (193pp)
114. Bruno Maddox – My Little Blue Dress – 11-24-09 (297pp)
115. Dick Francis – Forfeit – 11-28-09 (222pp)
116. Jim Thompson – The Grifters – 11-30-09 (187pp)
117. Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange – 12-3-09 (192pp)
118. Henry Rollins – Eye Scream – 12-4-09 (219pp)
119. Karen Elizabeth Gordon – The Deluxe Transitive Vampire – 12-7-09 (175pp)
120. Carlos Ruiz Zafón – The Shadow of the Wind – 12-14-09 (486pp)

Totals:
Books: 120
Pages: 37200
Avg. Pages per Book: 310.00

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown

avi — Fri, 01 May 2009 05:06:13 +0000

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:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

avi — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 02:05:55 +0000

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.

And managed for the good of inquiring minds,

avi — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:05:44 +0000

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.

Totals:
Books: 11
Pages: 3658

I’m well on my way. More later.

This erring mortals levity may call

avi — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:58:00 +0000

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:

1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287pp)
2. Jonathan Vankin – The Big Book of Bad – 1-7-08 (93pp)
3. W. Michael Gear – The Warriors of Spider – 1-16-08 (367pp)
4. Max Brooks – World War Z – 1-19-08 (342pp)
5. Hari Kunzru – Transmission – 1-27-08 (276pp)
6. Bill Watterson – The Complete Calvin and Hobbes – 1-30-08 (480pp)
7. W. Michael Gear – The Way of Spider – 2-7-08 (408pp)
8. Dick Francis – Hot Money – 2-12-08 (423pp)
9. W. Michael Gear – The Web of Spider – 2-21-08 (648pp)
10. Philip José Farmer – The Maker of Universes – 2-22-08 (247pp)
11. Samuel R. Delany – Empire Star – 2-23-08 (132pp)
12. Philip José Farmer – The Gates of Creation – 2-25-08 (188pp)
13. Neil Gaiman – Don’t Panic – 2-27-08 (182pp)
14. Philip José Farmer – A Private Cosmos – 2-29-08 (275pp)
15. Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club – 3-1-08 (218pp)
16. Philip José Farmer – Behind the Walls of Terra – 3-3-08 (188pp)
17. John Swartzwelder – The Time Machine Did It – 3-4-08 (138pp)
18. Philip José Farmer – The Lavalite World – 3-6-08 (282pp)
19. David Mamet – On Directing Film – 3-7-08 (107pp)
20. Steven Gould – Helm – 3-11-08 (383pp)
21. Sharyn McCrumb – Missing Susan – 3-14-08 (401pp)
22. Philip José Farmer – Red Orc’s Rage – 3-15-08 (282pp)
23. Dick Francis – Break In – 3-18-08 (371pp)
24. Philip José Farmer – More Than Fire – 3-21-08 (312pp)
25. Hugh Cook – Wizard War – 3-25-08 (447pp)
26. Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights – 3-30-08 (324pp)
27. Hugh Cook – The Questing Hero – 3-31-08 (186pp)
28. Hugh Cook – The Hero’s Return – 4-4-08 (204pp)
29. Jack Weatherford – Indian Givers – 4-4-08 (255pp)
30. Philip K. Dick – Eye in the Sky – 4-7-08 (255pp)
31. Hugh Cook – The Oracle – 4-12-08 (346pp)
32. Stephen King – Everything’s Eventual – 4-14-08 (583pp)
33. Hugh Cook – The Walrus and the Warwolf – 4-21-08 (779pp)
34. Robin Wayne Bailey – Shadowdance – 4-26-08 (537pp)
35. Hugh Cook – The Wicked and the Witless – 5-2-08 (459pp)
36. Joel Engel – Screenwriters on Screenwriting – 5-6-08 (287pp)
37. Jeffrey Richter – CLR via C#, Second Edition – 5-8-08 (648pp)
38. Hugh Cook – The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers – 5-12-08 (448pp)
39. Larry Niven – Crashlander – 5-16-08 (281pp)
40. Hugh Cook – The Wazir and the Witch – 5-23-08 (448pp)
41. Walter Jon Williams – Ambassador of Progress – 5-28-08 (432pp)
42. Michael Howard – Writing Secure Code – Second Edition – 6-1-08 (745pp)
43. Spalding Gray – Swimming to Cambodia – 6-3-08 (127pp)
44. Hugh Cook – The Werewolf and the Wormlord – 6-3-08 (352pp)
45. Hugh Cook – The Worshippers and the Way – 6-6-08 (380pp)
46. Geoffrey Sampson – Writing Systems – 6-12-08 (217pp)
47. Hugh Cook – The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster – 6-19-08 (726pp)
48. Symon Jade – Return from the Dead – 6-20-08 (181pp)
49. Ian Fleming – Thunderball – 6-22-08 (188pp)
50. Symon Jade – Cosmic Carnage – 6-23-08 (198pp)
51. Symon Jade – Alter Evil – 6-25-08 (196pp)
52. Robert A. Heinlein – Between Planets – 6-25-08 (190pp)
53. Mike Resnick – The Widowmaker – 6-27-08 (293pp)
54. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice – 7-7-08 (324pp)
55. Mike Resnick – The Widowmaker Reborn – 7-8-08 (297pp)
56. Richard Brautigan – Trout Fishing in America – 7-10-08 (112pp)
57. Mike Resnick – The Widowmaker Unleashed – 7-10-08 (231pp)
58. Emil Petaja – Saga of Lost Earths – 7-11-08 (124pp)
59. Stephen King – The Colorado Kid – 7-12-08 (184pp)
60. Emil Petaja – The Star Mill – 7-14-08 (128pp)
61. Ian Fleming – For Your Eyes Only – 7-15-08 (143pp)
62. Emil Petaja – The Stolen Sun – 7-16-08 (136pp)
63. Mark Twain – Pudd’nhead Wilson – 7-21-08 (172pp)
64. Emil Petaja – Tramontane – 7-22-08 (119pp)
65. Michael Moorcock – The Wrecks of Time – 7-23-08 (135pp)
66. Susan R. Matthews – An Exchange of Hostages – 7-28-08 (372pp)
67. Ian Fleming – Diamonds Are Forever – 7-30-08 (160pp)
68. Susan R. Matthews – Prisoner of Conscience – 8-1-08 (312pp)
69. Dick Francis – High Stakes – 8-2-08 (223pp)
70. Steve McConnell – Code Complete 2 – 8-3-08 (862pp)
71. Susan R. Matthews – Hour of Judgment – 8-5-08 (260pp)
72. John Swartzwelder – Double Wonderful – 8-6-08 (151pp)
73. Susan R. Matthews – Angel Of Destruction – 8-11-08 (342pp)
74. Isaac Asimov – The Human Body – 8-14-08 (320pp)
75. Susan R. Matthews – The Devil and Deep Space – 8-19-08 (362pp)
76. Cynthia Kadohata – The Glass Mountains – 8-21-08 (301pp)
77. Scott McCloud – Zot! – The Complete Black and White Collection – 8-24-08 (288pp)
78. Susan R. Matthews – Warring States – 8-26-08 (395pp)
79. Lawrence Watt-Evans – The Wizard and the War Machine – 8-28-08 (291pp)
80. Isaac Asimov – Adding a Dimension – 8-29-08 (224pp)
81. Isaac Asimov – An Easy Introduction to the Slide Rule – 9-2-08 (158pp)
82. Midori Snyder – New Moon – 9-2-08 (280pp)
83. Robert Louis Stevenson – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – 9-3-08 (54pp)
84. Midori Snyder – Sadar’s Keep – 9-6-08 (341pp)
85. Isaac Asimov – The Relativity of Wrong – 9-8-08 (302pp)
86. Dick Francis – Reflex – 9-9-08 (346pp)
87. Midori Snyder – Beldan’s Fire – 9-14-08 (376pp)
88. Isaac Asimov – Computer Crimes & Capers – 9-16-08 (235pp)
89. Timothy Zahn – Conquerors’ Pride – 9-18-08 (389pp)
90. Isaac Asimov – Asimov’s Lecherous Limericks – 9-19-08 (207pp)
91. China Miéville – Perdido Street Station – 9-25-08 (623pp)
92. Timothy Zahn – Conquerors’ Heritage – 9-30-08 (360pp)
93. Sam J. Lundwall – Bernhard the Conqueror – 10-2-08 (159pp)
94. Timothy Zahn – Conquerors’ Legacy – 10-6-08 (486pp)
95. Isaac Asimov – David Starr, Space Ranger – 10-7-08 (144pp)
96. Isaac Asimov – Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids – 10-8-08 (144pp)
97. Aristotle – Poetics – 10-8-08 (118pp)
98. Dick Francis – The Edge – 10-11-08 (348pp)
99. Isaac Asimov – Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus – 10-11-08 (142pp)
100. Megan Lindholm – Wizard of the Pigeons – 10-14-08 (254pp)
101. Isaac Asimov – Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury – 10-15-08 (143pp)
102. Virginia Woolf – Orlando – 10-16-08 (333pp)
103. Isaac Asimov – Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter – 10-17-08 (142pp)
104. Donna Tartt – The Secret History – 10-22-08 (524pp)
105. Isaac Asimov – Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn – 10-23-08 (144pp)
106. Michael Moorcock – Byzantium Endures – 10-30-08 (404pp)
107. Dick Francis – Banker – 10-31-08 (306pp)
108. Michael Moorcock – The Laughter of Carthage – 11-12-08 (602pp)
109. Ian Fleming – Dr. No – 11-14-08 (192pp)
110. Michael Moorcock – Jerusalem Commands – 12-1-08 (577pp)
111. Richard Brautigan – A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, The Hawkline Monster – 12-6-08 (595pp)
112. Joanne K. Rowling – The Tales of Beedle the Bard – 12-9-08 (111pp)
113. Mark Twain – The Diaries of Adam & Eve – 12-11-08 (127pp)
114. Michael Moorcock – The Vengeance of Rome – 12-16-08 (618pp)
115. Wassily Kandinsky – Point and Line to Plane – 12-20-08 (146pp)
116. Jim Dodge – Fup – 12-21-08 (59pp)
117. James Joyce – The Dubliners – 12-26-08 (170pp)
118. Isaac Asimov – Sattelites in Outer Space – 12-27-08 (79pp)
119. Max Brooks – The Zombie Survival Guide – 12-30-08 (254pp)
120. Dick Francis – Straight – 12-31-08 (303pp)

Totals:
Books: 120
Pages: 36005

I hope everybody has a good New Year’s Eve and a productive 2009!

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

avi — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:25:00 +0000

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:

I know I said when I started this that I wouldn’t be reading a bunch of short books at the end in order to meet my quota, and this has turned out to not be true. However, I’m not reading short books for the end of this month in order to meet my book count quote, but rather to bring down my average number of pages, which is at roughly 307 pages per book. I have figured out a set of short books I can read over the next couple of weeks which should allow me to bring that down much closer to 300.

I’m now reading a book on art theory by Wassily Kandinsky. It’s something else; I’ll probably end up doing a post on it soon.

A heart, how shall I say? too soon made glad,

avi — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:56:00 +0000

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:

Totals:
Books: 106
Pages: 31866

My goal for the end of the month was 100 books, so I’m 6 books ahead of the curve right now, which is quite good I think. I’m at an average of 300.62 pages per book as well, which is about as close to that average as I could hope to be. I think the average number is going to be rising slightly over the next month, as I have some whoppers to work through, but that’s ok. I have a plan in place that should let me hit very close to 300 by year’s end.

I’m not sure if I’ll do this experiment again next year. Partially it is fun just keeping track, but I’m not sure anybody actually cares. Of course, that’s not why I’m doing it. We’ll see.

Hopefully more interesting later.