Arctangential

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

avi — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:42:19 +0000

So, for those who care, here is a rough breakdown of my recent appendicular situation: (times are approximate)

Wednesday, January 27th — I wake up in the morning with an odd pain in my side. I think at first that it’s a pulled muscle, but it doesn’t act that way. I decide to wait and see what’s up.

Friday, January 29th:

1:45 — The pain is still there, it’s definitely not muscular. I decide a doctor should probably take a look at it, so I call to make an appointment. I’d assumed it’d be for sometime on Monday, but they’d just had a cancellation, so I drive right over.

2:30 — I see the doctor, who is now a general practitioner but had for many years before been an ER doctor. Long story short, he tells me it’s 50/50 that it’s appendicitis. He said that if he’d seen me in an ER, he wouldn’t let me leave without a blood test and CAT scan. Since it was late Friday afternoon, he didn’t feel he could get me those tests quickly enough in his facility, so he sent me over to the local hospital.

3:00 — The body shop where I was having my car worked on, calls to let me know that my car will be ready at 4. Since I know that, even if I don’t have appendicitis, I’ll be in the ER all night long and I’ll be stuck with my crappy rental car over the whole weekend. So I head back to work to tie up a few loose ends and wait for the car.

4:00 — I pick up my car and head to the ER.

4:15 — I go back to the body shop to give them my rental car keys, which I’d forgotten.

4:30 — Arrive at the ER, am triaged, and wait for admission. I call Marika to let her know what’s going on.

6:00 — I’m admitted and shortly later Marika arrives. The staff at Evergreen is very efficient. Within an hour I have an IV in, they’ve drawn blood and have taken a CAT scan. The radiology tech turns out to be a friend of Marika’s, so she helps expedite the process. She’s also really funny and made the whole process go very well.

7:30 — My doctor comes in and confirms that I do, indeed have appendicitis. He says my white count is not much higher than normal, so it probably hasn’t ruptured, but they are going to remove it immediately in any case.

8:00 — I’m taken to the OR and sedated. I remember asking the anesthesiologist if he thinks that I can make it to “4″ at the part where you count down from ten. He doesn’t think it’s funny. I, unfortunately, do not remember much after then, so I’ll never know how far I got.

9:30 — I wake up in post-op. The surgery was a success, I’m cured, hurrah. The rest of the story is just recovery and is not very interesting, apart from one anecdote:

It’s around 2 on Saturday morning and the night nurse has again awakened me to take my vitals. My temperature is 39 °C and she says that I have a slight fever. After she leaves, I start to wonder what 39 °C is in °F and since I can’t get back to sleep, I decide to work it out. I end up with 63.2, a number that certainly isn’t a fever and, were it correct, would have occasioned (I hope) significantly more concern on the part of the nurse.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized my mistake — I’d thought, in my drug-induced haze, that the freezing point of water in °F was -32, not 32. So my math was as follows:

°F = (39 * (212 + 32) / 100) – 32 = 63.2

But it should have been:

°F = (39 * (212 – 32) / 100) + 32 = 102.2

Which is indeed a slight fever and probably the reason I got a second course of IV anitbiotics around 4am. My temp is at 98.7 right now, so don’t worry. I’m feeling fine.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

avi — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:40:53 +0000

I was watching News Radio just now, which for those of you who might not remember was a sitcom in the mid-to-late 90s. It’s not a great show, but it has a mostly great cast and some good moments. Also I got it for cheap.

The episodes I watched tonight originally aired in April of 1996. Given that time frame, there were two lines in those two episodes that I found interesting to consider from our current perspective. The first was (roughly), “You can’t take something off of the internet; it’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”

This is a very well-put and not-obvious truth. We, now, know this fact very well, but at that time I don’t think it was very widely understood. To see so prescient an idea spoken about with such eloquence, and on a mid-ranked sitcom, no less!

The second comment was not as prescient, but it still makes us think about how far we’ve come in our thinking about computers. Someone is given advice: “You don’t want to delete your file until you’re sure you have a hard copy.” When was the last time you deleted a file from your computer because you had it on hard copy? We delete files we don’t need any more, but the ones we do need, we keep them on the computer.

Back then, the computer was a tool for creating pieces of paper with writing on them. These pieces of paper were the artifact that contained the idea or the message. Today, the artifact is the file on the computer, and we only print to paper if we need to. We might use the paper to read on and mark up, or to bring with us if we need the information where a computer isn’t handy, or to hand out. In fact, we use the paper as a tool just like we used to use the computer as a tool.

Of course this isn’t true with all computer files. We still use software to create posters or magazines or books, and in that case we still think of the finished product as the thing and the file as the tool, but you don’t know how long that will last. It wasn’t long ago that physical photographs were the medium of transfer, but with today’s memory sticks and portable digital screens, that’s pretty much over already.

Both of the lines that I so liked were spoken by the character Joe Garrelli, played by Joe Rogan, longtime UFC fight commentator and host of the hit show, Fear Factor. So, you never know where it’s gonna come from.

P.S.: While trying to remind myself what the internet was like in 1996, I came across this page, which is wonderful and worth a read:
https://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm

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

By perseverance the coy fair is won,

avi — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 04:04:48 +0000

The following is entirely fictional, just something I wrote and decided to not be a complete coward about it.

—

When we lost her, I lost a piece of myself. Her passing left a gap in my soul. I know, I know, that’s hackneyed, it’s a cliche, it’s what everybody says. I’m smart and articulate, I should be able to come up with something better, something more true or at the very least more original. Right?

The problem is, there is no more true statement. Sure, I could describe the sadness, how it sucks you in and engulfs you. I could describe the physical symptoms: the loss of appetite, the headaches and exhaustion. These are just symptoms of depression, though, and could be caused if your favorite car were totaled or if your home team bungled the big game at the last minute. Of course those things are sad on a much lesser level, but the basic components are the same, it’s just a question of how much and how often and for how long. There’s another difference, an entirely other thing that happens to you when you lose a person, and that’s what I and others are talking about when we say we’ve lost a piece, and that’s what I want to try to explain.

There was a time, when we each still had her and one other, that I was happy most of the time. Not everything was perfect, but whenever I found myself in a trough in the road, I’d just think of her and everything would seem better. It wasn’t any specific memory; once it was a bath she’d had the night before, how she wouldn’t go in until it was just the right temperature and that she farted and forgot to be scared long enough to belt out one sharp laugh before breaking into tears. Sometimes it was as simple as watching her sleep or pushing her in a swing, but whatever memory it would happen to be, it helped. It didn’t make the work easier or the pain lesser, but it touched the deepest part of my instincts and gave me strength.

It became second nature to me, like a dozing dolphin coming up for air, automatically and rhythmically. Throughout the day, I’d find myself reflexively going back to her in my thoughts. I’d be reading over double net lease documentation and she’d just pop into my mind, blowing bubbles or propped in the corner of the couch, sound asleep. After that, things just seemed… better. It didn’t just happen when things were bad; sometimes I’d be feeling great and I’d think of her and then I’d feel even better. It wasn’t a band-aid or a pep pill, it was a simply a cherry on top: a breath of wind at my back on a long walk home.

Now, of course, that’s all gone. No, not gone. It might be ok if it was gone; I’d lived without that for decades and was quite successful. The problem is that it’s all still there, but flipped over, poisoned. Instead of just being able to leave it behind me, I think about her more now than I ever did before. It’s a chain reaction: I could be anywhere, say, driving home and like always before she’ll pop into my mind. But now, instead of a cool breeze, it’s a dark wind. It stops my heart, catches my breath, makes my hands shake and my eyes well up. I’m nauseated and chilled and it takes everything I have to pull it back together enough not to wreck. Once I get it going again, get my mind clear, it’s only a matter of time until my focus wanders again and my natural reaction to the lingering ill-feelings from the previous incident is to call her back again. The only solution is constant internal vigilance.

So that’s my missing piece. It isn’t a figurative thing, no kind of Platonic ideal or metaphor but an actual, tangible void, as real as a missing limb and just as debilitating. There’s no better way to describe it. You don’t search for simile when describing a missing hand, and I can’t do it now either.

I had to leave the firm, of course. The practice of law isn’t as stressful and life-destroying as people make it out to be, but it is hard work and it demands faculties of which I find myself in short supply these days. We divorced soon afterward as well. Neither of us blamed the other but it turns out that the one person least able to help someone with a missing piece is the only other person in the world who is missing that same piece. We still love each other but we just can’t be together any more. It’s the insult to injury, this massive loss precipitating the death of an otherwise healthy relationship.

So here I am, a thousand miles from the only other place I’ve ever lived, a bachelor legal secretary living in a studio apartment overrun with roaches from the deli downstairs. People ask me, sometimes, in moments when they feel very close to me, how I keep going. That’s easy: nobody knew her but the two of us. We are the only people in the entire world who spent more than a total of 10 days with her. Her memory lives on only with myself and with her mother. I carry a precious cargo, so I don’t have an option. I don’t have to thrive, I don’t have to be happy, I don’t have to do anything except carry that gift with me for as long as I can.

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.

Then how are all things neat?

avi — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:21:00 +0000

While driving around yesterday, looking at houses, we came across a neighborhood where, in at least two different places, multiple streets came together all at once. Five or six at a time, they didn’t meet in simple geometrical patterns, but instead would all flow into great oceans of cracked asphalt, like dendrites entering the body of a neuron. There were no lane markings, no signs, no islands. I left me flabbergasted in a way that I don’t commonly experience.

As a gamer and a computer programmer, I generally find that I’m good at puzzle solving and at imposing order on disorderly situations. But this wasn’t a puzzle to me; it was a complete breakdown of my expectations for how roads fundamentally work. It was like as if the road suddenly went straight up the side of a building; I had no idea what to do. I knew which road I wanted to leave on, but I simply couldn’t figure out how to get there; did I drive straight across? Did I go around the edge? Was there some serpentine path that would be best? I felt like if I did the wrong thing, some SUV would come barreling in from another street and t-bone me into next Tuesday.

I think the essential thing here is that driving is dangerous, and to protect ourselves, we regiment it as much as possible. There are very few places that I drive where lanes aren’t clearly demarcated, turning orders aren’t well-defined and all you have to worry about it not rear-ending the guy in front of you and taking your turns at the right time. Once all of that was taken away from me, even though I was the only moving car in sight, I was paralyzed. I think it’s similar to the confusion people feel when moving from a right-side-of-the-road country to a left-side-of-the-road country, or vice versa.

I understand there are people who drive around in fields and other unmarked area all the time and they don’t have any problems, but that’s not me. Those folks are probably the ones who are always burning through a light just after it turns red anyways. I hate those guys.

In other news of yesterday, I accidentally bought two christian rock CDs in uncorrelated events.