Arctangential

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:

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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 Since it was written in the 70s, the actual science was somewhat out of date, but that really doesn’t matter very much when you’re dealing with popular science like this.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.

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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

How do you suppose nuns use the toilet? I wonder if they hike up their whole habit, or if there’s some kind of subtle zipper system they can open up. Maybe they just take the whole thing off.

I wonder what kind of underwear nuns wear.

The Cloak Company

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:

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Right now, I am straight-up, 100%, eating turkey spam.