Books

I read…a lot. Here’s where I ramble about books and printed media.

So many books, so little time

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In a fortuitous bit of serendipity, I just re-discovered a website I’d found a few months ago, but forgotten to bookmark — All Consuming, which scans recently updated weblogs for Amazon book links, and uses that data to track what books are currently popular in the weblog world. Nifty stuff to explore!

Amusingly enough, there’s a feature in the top right that lists the first line of a book for you to attempt to guess the source, which reminded me of a bookstore up on Broadway on Capitol Hill that does the same with a readerboard on the sidewalk. As it turns out, that very bookstore is where All Consuming’s webmaster got the idea! Small world, I tell ya.

Incidentally, though, I’ve never run across a first line up at the bookstore that I knew. Hm. Guess I just haven’t read enough yet!

Laughter is good

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However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than perhaps you think for.

— Ishmael, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Parable of the Talents

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I’m not sure where or when I picked Parable of the Talents up, but I found it while digging through my book box at one point, and finally got around to reading it. Neat stuff — though apparently it’s the second book in a series (the first being Parable of the Sower), so now I’ll need to go search that book out to get more details on the first part of the story.

PotT is the story of Lauren Olamina, a woman with a mission to spread the word of Earthseed, a religion with the destiny of bringing mankind to the stars in a post-apocalyptic (though not nuclear) near-future America. America has fallen from its status of world protector into nearly third-world status, torn apart by wars with Canada and the newly-seceeded nation of Alaska, and run by a ultra-conservative religous fanatic as President.

Told as a memoir of Olamina’s life though the difficult years of the growth and destruction of her first Earthseed community as written after her death by her estranged daughter, a fascinating portrait of a woman driven to a purpose, no matter what the costs, is painted. Using excerpts from Olamina’s journals to present her side of her cause, and ruminations by her daughter to give an alternate view gives a wonderful portrait of a very intense and controversial woman at a very trying time.

Hopefully there’s more coming…and I’ll definitely need to flesh out the story with the first part sometime soon.

Doomsday Book

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Doomsday Book is another one that dad loaned to me. A very good sci-fi novel, set in England both in the near future and in the 1300’s, as an archaeologist travels back into the 14th century to study the people of the time first hand, and gets trapped there when a mysterious illness starts infecting the people in the modern world, leaving her to deal with the onset of the Black Plague in England.

Willis does an excellent job balancing the grimness of the situations both in the past and the present with some wonderful touches of humor to help keep things from getting too distressing. Coupled with some insightful looks into both joy and despair, and you’ve got a Hugo and Nebula award winning novel. Good stuff!

St. Patrick’s Gargoyle

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Dad loaned me St. Patrick’s Gargoyle last time I was in Anchorage, and it was exactly what he described it to me as being — an enjoyable little piece of fluff, basically. Using the concept that some of the Gargoyles we see on churches and buildings are actually angels assigned to Earth, Katherine Kurtz creates an entertaining little mystery story with a touch of light theology thrown in here and there. Not a lot to it — I read the entire thing between Anchorage and Seattle — but a fun little read.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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Ow.

Ow ow ow.

My brain hurts.

It’s a good kind of hurt, though. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is an exploration of everything from mathematics to the mechanics of thought and reasoning to Artificial Intelligence, all tied together and interrelated to each other. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

My big difficulty is that I am really not a math person, so whenever the chapters moved into that realm, I had to muddle my way through as best I could until he moved on to something else that I could comprehend more easily. I haven’t had to work this hard to read and understand a book in a long, long time — and I’ve got to say, I enjoyed it (though I did need to let my brain relax with a bit more light reading afterwards).

Some of the concepts are a bit dated, especially in the areas of AI — the book was first published in 1979, and there’s been a lot of progress since then — but the core concepts that he deals with are most likely the same that we’re dealing with today, just from more advanced positions.

Anyway, neat stuff — definite brain food.

Emperor of the US

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I first read about Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America in one of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. He was also mentioned in the book I’m reading now, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, by Robert A. Wilson. Quite the interesting — and very real — character, he declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Lots more information about him in his archives — could make for some very interesting reading.

(via MeFi)

Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy

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Conspiracy theories amuse me to no end. I think they’re silly, fairly ridiculous, and don’t believe a single one of them, though I do enjoy playing with them from time to time. However, a couple years ago I read The Illuminatus Trilogy, and by the time I was done, I was almost ready to believe every conspiracy theory out there. Great, bizarre, wacky stuff.

An online conversation got me remembering that, and so I picked up the companion volume, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy. While not quite as good as Illuminatus, it was still much of the same style — bizarre, confusing, and entertaining, with a wonderfully twisted sense of humor throughout.

The only thing that would worry me would be if Wilson actually took any of this stuff seriously…which I’m thinking he just might, given the results when I do a search on his name on Amazon. I’m not quite sure what to think of that.

Ship of Fools

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Ship of Fools is a good, though not excellent, sci-fi novel following a group of people on a deep-space ship wandering the universe looking for a home. Their travels bring them to a planet where they discover a staggeringly disturbing massacre, the investigation of which leads them to an alien ship — and even more problems.

While the overall plot is certainly interesting, it was more of the minor details that I really enjoyed, from the makeup of the social classes within the multi-generational starship to the integration of religion into the characters and the story. Unfortunately, there’s no real satisfying ending to the book, leaving me to wonder if there may be a sequel — or sequels — down the line. Overall, not bad, with some interesting passages and some occasionally beautiful imagery.

Fight Club

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I hardly really know where to begin, or what to say. I love this book, and I love the movie. Both should be required reading/viewing, as far as I’m concerned. ‘Nuff said, I guess.

What follows is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, as well as the book.

The tears were really coming now, and one fat stripe rolled along the barrel of the gun and down the loop around the trigger to burst flat against my index finger. Raymond Hessel closed both eyes so I pressed the gun hard against his temple so he would always feel it pressing right there and I was beside him and this was his life and he could be dead at any moment.

This wasn’t a cheap gun, and I wondered if salt might fuck it up.

Everything had gone so easy, I wondered. I’d done everything the mechanic said to do. This was why we needed to buy a gun. This was doing my homework.

We each had to bring Tyler twelve driver’s licenses. This would prove we each made twelve human sacrifices.

I parked tonight, and I waited around the block for Raymond Hessel to finish his shift at the all-night Korner Mart, and around midnight he was waiting for a night owl bus when I finally walked up and said, hello.

Raymond Hessel, Raymond didn’t say anything. Probably he figured I was after his money, his minimum wage, the fourteen dollars in his wallet. Oh, Raymond Hessel, all twenty-three years of you, when you started crying, tears rolling down the barrel of my gun pressed to your temple, no, this wasn’t about money. Not everything is about money.

You didn’t even say, hello.

You’re not your sad little wallet.

I said, nice night, cold but clear.

You didn’t even say, hello.

I said, don’t run, or I’ll have to shoot you in the back. I had the gun out, and I was wearing a latex glove so if the gun ever became a people’s exhibit A, there’d be nothing on it except the dried tears of Raymond Hessel, Caucasian, aged twenty-three with no distinguishing marks.

Then I had your attention. Your eyes were big enough that even in the streetlight I could see they were antifreeze green.

You were jerking backward and backward a little more every time the gun touched your face, as if the barrel was too hot or too cold. Until I said, don’t step back, and then you let the gun touch you, but even then you rolled your head up and away from the barrel.

You gave me your wallet like I asked.

Your name was Raymond K. Hessel on your driver’s license. You live at 1320 SE Benning, apartment A. That had to be a basement apartment. They usually give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.

Raymond K. K. K. K. K. K. Hessel, I was talking to you.

Your head rolled up and away from the gun, and you said, yeah. You said, yes, you lived in a basement.

You had some pictures in the wallet, too. There was your mother.

This was a tough one for you, you’d have to open your eyes and see the picture of Mom and Dad smiling and see the gun at the same time, but you did, and then your eyes closed and you started to cry.

You were going to cool, the amazing miracle of death. One minute, you’re a person, the next minute, you’re an object, and Mom and Dad would have to call old doctor whoever and get your dental records because there wouldn’t be much left of your face, and Mom and Dad, they’d always expected so much more from you and no, life wasn’t fair, and now it was come to this.

Fourteen dollars.

This, I said, is this your mom?

Yeah. You were crying, sniffing, crying. You swallowed. Yeah.

You had a library card. You had a video movie rental card. A social security card. Fourteen dollars cash. I wanted to take the bus pass, but the mechanic said to only take the driver’s license. An expired community college student card.

You used to study something.

You’d worked up a pretty intense cry at this point so I pressed the gun a little harder against your cheek, and you started to step back until I said, don’t move or you’re dead right here. Now, what did you study?

Where?

In college, I said. You have a student card.

Oh, you didn’t know, sob, swallow, sniff, stuff, biology.

Listen, now, you’re going to die, Ray-mond K. K. K. Hessel, tonight. You might die in one second or in one hour, you decide. So lie to me. Tell me the first thing off the top of your head. Make something up. I don’t give a shit. I have the gun.

Finally, you were listening and coming out of the little tragedy in your head.

Fill in the blank. What does Raymond Hessel want to be when he grows up?

Go home, you said you just wanted to go home, please.

No shit, I said. But after that, how did you want to spend your life? If you could do anything in the world.

Make something up.

You didn’t know.

Then you’re dead right now, I said. I said, now turn your head.

Death to commence in ten, in nine, in eight.

A vet, you said. You want to be a vet, a veterinarian.

That means animals. You have to go to school for that.

It means too much school, you said.

You could be in school working your ass off, Raymond Hessel, or you could be dead. You choose. I stuffed your wallet into the back pocket of your jeans. So you really wanted to be an animal doctor. I took the saltwater muzzle of the gun off one cheek and pressed it against theother. Is that what you’ve always wanted to be, Dr. Raymond K. K. K. K. Hessel, a veterinarian?

Yeah.

No shit?

No. No, you meant, yeah, no shit. Yeah.

Okay, I said, and I pressed the wet end of the muzzle to the tip of your chin, and then the tip of your nose, and everywhere I pressed the muzzle, it left a shining wet ring of your tears.

So, I said, go back to school. If you wake up tomorrow morning, you find a way to get back into school.

I pressed the wet end of the gun on each cheek, and then on your chin, and then against your forehead and left the muzzle pressed there. You might as well be dead right now, I said.

I have your license.

I know who you are. I know where youlive. I’m keeping your license, and I’m going to check on you, mister Raymond K. Hessel. In three months, and then in six months, and then in a year, and if you aren’t back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead.

You didn’t say anything.

Get out of here, and do your little life, but remember I’m watching you, Raymond Hessel, and I’d rather kill you than see you working a shit job for just enough money to buy cheese and watch television.

Now, I’m going to walk away so don’t turn around.

This is what Tyler wants me to do.

These are Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth.

I am Tyler’s mouth.

I am Tyler’s hands.

Everybody in Project Mayhem is part of Tyler Durden, and vice versa.

Raymond K. K. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you’ve ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your entire life.