Category Archives: Books

General posts about books, reading, etc.

Written upon the summit of a gate

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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A Britain would the law of honor give;

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.

And though the last lights off the black West went

It’s June, so I thought I’d do a little end-of month book update. I have three “goals” going right now. The original 50 book goal would have me at 6,250 pages right now. My updated 100 book goal would have me at twice that, 12,500 pages. I’m thinking now that maybe I want to do 120 books, or 10 books per month, which would have me at 15,000 pages now. So here’s the data:

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To their first elements their souls retire:

I haven’t done a book update in a while. I’m reading a lot faster than I thought I would; even if I don’t read one single page more this month, I’m projecting that I’ll be over 31,000 pages by the end of the year, which is 16,000 pages more than my 50 book goal and 1,000 pages more than my 100 book goal. The number of books I’ve read so far is kind of low, but that’s because I’ve been working through this Hugh Cook series and all of those books are well more than the 300 page average I’ve set for myself. I’m planning on reading a bunch of really short books after I’m done with this series, to bring my page average back down. I’m massively over thinking this.

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Than or Whitehalls, or Mantuas were.

So, another book update. As of last night, I’ve reached both of my goals for this month, in terms of number of books read and average number of pages per book; in fact I’m 15 pages per book ahead of the curve right now. A lot of this was due to the length of the book I just finished, the 5th (fourth) book in Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series. It is pretty daunting to read a book that’s nearly 800 pages long; there’s something about the fact that your bookmark seems hardly to move, even after you’ve been reading for a half hour bus trip, that is kind of discouraging. It did help quite a bit that the book was very fun to read, a nice light-hearted adventure. I realized the other day how long I’ve been collecting these particular books; in volume 4 (three) I found a packing slip from Half.com which had a note exhorting me to donate to help victims of the recent attacks on the World Trade Center. That means that I’ve been trying to complete this series of 11 (ten) books for over 7 years. That’s kind of crazy.

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Right up above the mast did stand,

It’s time for another book update. I’ve modified my book database software so it can generate this report, but that necessitated modifying the way some of the data was laid out, so some of the numbers here have changed slightly. Nobody cares. I don’t even care. Anyways.

I finished the fourth (or third) book in Hugh Cook’s Age of Darkness series. It was really good. This series is not really at all what I had been expecting; instead of being a series of books following a group of characters over time, each book covers the same time period, but centering on different characters and how they are affected by the major world events in that time period. The interactions that the different characters have with the events are very different: for example, in the first book there’s a major land battle and our main character (for that book) is in command over one side’s forces; we learn a lot about the battle in this book. In the third book, that book’s main character is a very low-ranking soldier on the other side of the battle and he actually sleeps through most of it because he’s sick.

Another really fun thing about this series is that each book in written in a different style of fantasy writing. The first book is classic Tolkeinesque high fantasy about a group of wizards on a Great Quest. The second (and third) book is a comedy about a bumbling hero who only wants to have sex. The fourth book is a feminist fantasy story, a-la Marion Zimmer Bradley, about a woman who begins the story as a slave and ends as empress of the realm. Each book is completely stand-alone, and could be enjoyed without knowing anything about the other books, although having read those, I find many sidelong references to the others quite enjoyable. I’m really looking forward to reading the next 7 books. Interestingly, this was originally planned to be a 60 book series; the first 20 about this time period, then 20 more about another time period and finally 20 more about a third time period. Unfortunately, the books didn’t sell well and Cook has stated publicly that he won’t be writing any more. Oh well.

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The British language claims in either sense

Time for another book update, I guess. I finished Farmer’s World of Tiers series the other day, after a short delay because it turns out I had been missing the sixth book in the series and had mistakenly thought that the seventh book was the sixth. Overall I liked the series, but it was a little bit “out there” at times, and the last two volumes, written decades after the original books, were a great shift in tone that I didn’t find entirely agreeable. I’ve also now finished the first book (of 11) of Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness and I liked it quite a lot. I’m looking forward to reading the rest in the next few weeks.

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Ignore the stars. They will not

I’ve read 3 more books since my last update. They were small, but also I have been getting a lot more reading done by riding the bus. It’s also saving me money on gas. The last book I finished, On Directing Film, was really excellent. I’m not a huge fan of Mamet’s movies, and I thought this book wouldn’t be very good, but it’s actually a really remarkable treatise on how to construct a film optimally. He has really only one idea — that a film should be made of scenes, a scene of shots and that as each film has a reason, so does each scene and so does each shot. Each shot should be “uninflected” and the meaning of each shot should be understood through the cuts entering and leaving it. It’s a simple idea, and very well presented, mainly through Socratic dialogue. I’d recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in the construction of film. I might even enjoy Mamet’s movies more now that I know better his philosophy.

Anyways.

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