Arctangential

I’ve finished the redesign of my books page. After recently adding ratings and ASINs for most of my books (in prep for uploading things to LibraryThing.org), I decided to also reflect that information on my book web page. However, doing so caused the page to balloon from a (kinda) reasonable 170K to over half a meg. This prompted me to finally split the page up into sub-pages, the largest of which is only 40K. Things, I think, are more manageable now.

This leads me to a request. Meg & I are heading down to Portland in a few weekends, and my wanted books list is down to a pathetic 38 entries. So I ask two things — check out my new book page and let me know what you think, and then recommend me a book or two that you think I might like. I would hate to go to Powell’s and only be able to get 38 books!

Thanks.

I don’t often get that excited about books, but I am pretty excited about one right now.

There’s an author named Michael Moorcock, whose writing I enjoy quite a bit. In 1981 he published a book called Byzantium Endures, the first of what he then called his “Pyat Quartet”. In 1984 he released The Laughter of Carthage, and in 1992 Jerusalem Commands came out. Despite their only getting very brief release in the US, I bought them all around ‘93 or ‘94, although the exact date is somewhat hazy. I was happy at the time to have found them, as I had already devoured the rest of Moorcock’s genre work, and was looking forward to reading this new series. However, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that this was a quartet of books and the 4th one was not out yet — so I put the 3 I had in my “can’t read” pile and left them alone. As it turns out, for more than 10 years.

Every few months I would check around and see if the fourth book, The Vengeance of Rome, had come out, and it never had. Eventually the duration extended to once a year, and then I just gave up. I kept the first 3 books out of stubbornness, but I really just expected to eventually read them after Moorcock died and any kind of posthumous publication seemed unlikely. However, a week or two ago I was talking about this with somebody online, and it occurred to me to check to see if there was any update in its status. I was shocked to learn that it had been published, and on January 13th of this year. I ordered it immediately, paying through the nose for shipping from the UK, but I didn’t care. It arrived yesterday, and like I said, I am quite excited.

I hope the books are good.

I finished Dinosaur World a few nights ago. My sleep schedule has been FUBAR, so I haven’t had a chance to write about it until now.

The book was pretty good — better than I would have thought. It’s actually a sequel of sorts to Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, which is a clever and much-parodied story about a group of people taken to going on time safaris, trips where they go back to the prehistoric and kill dinosaurs that would have died anyways. They have to be very careful about not changing anything, lest they muck up the future. One of them steps on a butterfly, and when they all get back to the present, nothing is as they remember. Cue eerie music.

The author here has taken some liberties — he imagines that the two main characters of the short story have actually become mortal enemies over this incident, and have been chasing one another through time ever since, tearing great rift in time itself, and causing things to go wrong all over the place and all over time. 3 youths, Aaron, Jenny and Peter, get caught up in the time rifts and end up in an alternate prehistory, full of sentient dinosaurs. Most of the setup of this novel was, I expect, simply to get these 5 people into this world, as the rest of the books in the series (there are 7 in total) seem to be about sentient dinosaurs. However, the writing and characterizations are good, the plot is interesting, and Leigh seems to know where he’s going with things, so I’m hopeful that the rest of the book will be OK. This one certainly wasn’t bad.

I’m now reading Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. It’s real good.

I finished The Rolling Stones last night. I had forgotten how great Heinlein’s juveniles really were.

This is a book, written in 1952 and intended for children, that predicts air recycling, hydroponic food growth, gravity-assist flight plans and tons of other actual aspects of real space travel. It’s also a really fun story, easy to read and very entertaining. This is the kind of Heinlein I really like and I look forward to reading the other books of this era soon.

The story’s about a family named Stone: the twins Castor and Pollux, their father, mother, sister and baby brother, and their paternal grandmother, all living in a Lunar colony. They’re all pretty high-functioning people; the twins are millionaires from inventing a frost-proof re-breather for vacuum suits, their father was once Mayor, now retired, their mother a well-known doctor. Their grandmother was a founder of Luna City and their baby brother is probably psychic. They’re all a little bored of Luna, and so buy a ship and head to Mars on a family vacation. They have Many Exciting Adventures on the way there, and once they get there. Not wanting to go back to Luna just yet, they instead head off to an asteroid cluster, and then at the end of the book, we find them heading off to Ganymede for an infinite future of Exciting Adventures.

This book also contains one of my favorite Heinlein passages, one I’d remembered from the first time I read this (probably 15 years ago), and I greatly enjoyed reading again. I’ll reproduce it behind the cut:

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I finished Huckleberry Finn last night. It was good.

I’m thinking of setting up a thingy at LibraryThing. It’s just my kind of anal-retentive collecting thing, and it’d be reasonably easy for me to import my current book database. However, I’m missing a few pieces of important data — namely, ISBNs for all my books, and ratings for them as well. I’d like to have those for when I import, so that I may get all the data in there at once. So, I started the process last night by writing up some code to let me easily rate all the books in my DB. I was surprised how many I could remember — those I was very stuck on usually just took a Google or Amazon search to remember the general topic and my feelings on the book at the time of my reading it. I’m working on some code now to add those ratings to display in my book list webpage, and then I’ll get going on something help me figure out all the ISBNs. I’ve already written tools to help me look up DVDs in IMDb, and to look up author URLs in Google, so this shouldn’t be anything too incredibly cumbersome. After that, uploading things to LibraryThing should be simple. I’ll link to my library there here once it’s ready.

I’m now reading Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones. Great stuff.

I finished Cat Island last night. It was about as I expected.

This story continues following Favian Markham, the main character of the two previous books in the series. If you recall, he’s just discovered an impending attack by the British on New Orleans and is on the way there to warn them. He arrives, and then I guess it turns out that the Brits won’t be there for a month, so he has a few adventures in the city, including accidentally getting married to a young girl, meeting his cousin Gabriel (from book 2) and his wife, inventing draw poker (!) and other such things. Eventually he runs into Jean Lafitte, a famous pirate of the time, who warns them of a group of ex-Napoleonic veterans massing on an island in the Gulf who are planning on helping the British in their attack. This leads Favian to visit the eponymous island and remove the force from its fort there. Then follows some raiding of the attacking fleet and a few interesting sea battles, and then a chapter summing up the next 7 or 8 years of history.

Frankly, I don’t think Williams ever planned on writing 5 books here. The first 3 were very good and made a well-planned trilogy, but the next two felt very tacked-on and didn’t fit into the pattern of those that came before them. Now don’t get me wrong — they were both very well-written, and I enjoyed reading them, but they didn’t really explore any new ground, character-wise. I almost wonder if this book wasn’t ended they way it was because the author didn’t want to be able to write any more books in the series.

Anyways, I’m now reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Good stuff.