Arctangential

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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Walking home from the bus the other afternoon, I passed one of the local homeless people in my neighborhood. She is particularly memorable because she has a collection of about a half dozen shopping carts, all filled with junk. Sometimes she lashes them into a fleet and other times she has them split up, scattered over a few blocks. She isn’t usually with them, although she’s often nearby, doing something intently with paper and pens and glue. In this case, she was sitting on the curb next to just one of her carts, half of its payload of newspapers spread around her in a semicircle on the sidewalk behind her. She had one of the papers open in the street in front of her and was singing; whether to it or from it, I can’t say for sure. She seemed to be having a lot of fun.

I thought to myself that it was a shame that her enormous energy, know-how and dedication to craft couldn’t be put to to use at a job someplace, but then I thought further, is it a shame? It’s possible that she is as happy as she could possibly be, and any attempt to make her work to deadline and work at the direction of someone else would result only in a reduction of that happiness. The only reason she would need a job, frankly, is for guarantors of health like money for food and medical coverage, and it seems to me like those are the kinds of things a wealthy government should provide to everyone living in its borders regardless of employment. Some people would call that welfare and would say that people ought to be able to pull their own weight, but that sounds to me like saying that a person ought not be allowed to live if they do not serve the purposes of others. The only reason that I am seen as more valuable and more accomplished than she, is that I am able and willing to do a particular thing which some other people want.

Some people judge the health of a nation by its unemployment rate. That is, they count the number of people like me, people who are useful to others and are put to that use. I think that the health of a nation should be measured by the number of people like the crazy shopping cart lady, that is, people who are happy.

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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