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Hey, Look What I Found! (April Reading)
One book a week. I think that's a happy medium. I would like to note the unprecedented and shocking fact that nonfiction outnumbers fiction.
The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi (William Scott Wilson): Nonfiction. Life of famous shugyosha (swordsman) and artist Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi lived in the late 1500's to about 1645, so the scholarship relies on some fairly limited and unreliable documentation. The careful notes of significant contradictions were nice, but confusing, because I missed the frontispiece note listing the sources referenced in the bio. In fact, the attempt to balance prose flow with flow-killing reliability analysis - "well, text A says this happened in 1605, and text B describes a similar event, but in 1607..." - sort of didn't work at all for me. Also, diagrams of family trees would have been helpful. The material is interesting, and I don't regret being exposed to it, but I might suggest people look for other books on Musashi if they want a more engaging read. N.B.: this was my primary reading on the plane to and from the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jkling/mareklamo wedding, so external factors may have caused my attention to suffer. So it might not be the book, it might have been O'Hare.
The Child That Books Built (Francis Spufford): Bibliomaniac talks about his childhood of compulsive reading, a topic close to my heart. I suspect I'd really enjoy talking to this guy, but the book felt unbalanced - not really a biography, not exactly a book about books, not at all about child psychology and development. Not what I was expecting, but still useful for random Narnia and Little House tidbits. (Apparently I am the only child in the world who totally missed the allegorical aspects of the Narnia series. In my defense, the most active Religious Ed teachers at the Unitarian church my parents chose to attend were the burned-out Christians and the practicing Wiccans. I think this explains a lot about my knowledge - and ignorance - of the contemporary religious scene.)
The Language of Power (Rosemary Kirstein): Fourth in a series. Steerswoman Rowan continues to pursue information that might lead to the wizard Slado and his sinister plans. This is one of those extremely linear series where it's a really good idea to start at the beginning with The Steerswoman's Road and avoid spoilers. But this is great stuff. Not exactly literary popcorn, but maybe literary grapes: very sweet, tends to go fast. My "Slado the AI" theory is killed dead. And we are handed the "WTF?" of all time in the last twenty pages. What would cause a gravitational lens-like event around a normal boring star? Why would it be important? Or is it important? Is it the shortest nova in the history of novae? Could Kirstein be dropping a huge red herring on the readers? That sort of massive D-Day-like feint seems unlike the story to date, but notice how fast the demons were dropped in this book. Though they may be back; Willam popped up again.
And hey. Willam's back! How cute that Rowan's bending the "Steerswoman's ban" protocol into pretzel-like shapes for him. I wonder if Kirstein's not ultimately setting Rowan up for a fall with the Steerwoman's Guild? In the first book Rowan sort of edged around the ban to talk to Corvus; in the second book she blatantly manipulated it to avoid talking to Fletcher; in the third book she tried to get the ban on Janus rescinded (Which apparently is Not Done). And in the fourth book Willam treads an extremely fine line between deception by omission and lying. I don't know how much Kirstein's considered the gray area Rowan's wandering in to; it's sort of a plot/worldbuilding interaction that may say a lot about the author's perspective, but may not say much about the actual story. If that makes any sense.
Speaking of nonsense... is it just me, or is there an unintentional theme of four-ness in the Steerwoman series? Four Guidestars, quadrilateral symmetry in the native life, four points where there should be one star on Kieran's star charts. I think it's accidental, but it's amusing to observe and track.
Random subtext note: Reeder/Naio. I have no idea why I am inclined to slash this series; I just do.
So. That's a lot of analysis and critique. Unmitigated pleasures of the book include any scene with Willam, many Rowan-Bel interactions, Beck the future innkeeper, the interview with Lorren and Eamer, and dinner with Ona, Naio, and Reeder. I don't think we're done with Donner.
Genes, Girls and Gamow: After the Double Helix (James D. Watson): Nonfiction. After the great "aha!" of DNA, people get very excited about RNA. And Watson tries to get hitched. Really tries. For fifteen years. Many famous people wander through the pages, so now I have personality quirks to go with famous experiments and giants of biology. Like George Gamow, who sounds like my grandfather, only smarter. And dude. Random moment of happiness when Matt Meselson was mentioned. The Meselson-Stahl DNA experiment is so elegant. The only thing that could be better would be more Chargaff and more Rosalyn Franklin. She sounds like she was a Character. Further, entire books could probably be written about Linus Pauling and his family (and probably have been).
As reviews go, that's a fairly terrible one. Second try. It's easy to compare this to The Double Helix and have GGG come up short. (GGG! That's a - let me check - glycine codon! [/geek] [geek]And Richard Feynman was gly in the RNA tie club! [/geek]) tDH focused on a relatively small number of people tracking down one structure. GGG is a lot more amorphous: many more people wander in and out, and there is no satisfying "and then we discovered the One True RNA Structure, submitted to Nature, and were feted by our collegues" wrapup. (Because, of course, there is no One True RNA anything. There are at least six true RNA things, and Heaven help you if you mix up snRNA and snoRNA on a test.) If this were fiction, I would say the plot is really loose, and poorly wrapped up: the two major threads are RNA research and Watson looking for a wife, and both reach their logical climaxes in the epilogue. Further, the Geo Gamow of the title sort of wanders back toward physics about two-thirds of the way through. So I got huge kicks out of the scientific stuff, and the gossip about who was or wasn't doing what with whom. It's a light read, and fairly fun for the science crew, but if you're not into following the names you're not going to like this so much.
The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi (William Scott Wilson): Nonfiction. Life of famous shugyosha (swordsman) and artist Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi lived in the late 1500's to about 1645, so the scholarship relies on some fairly limited and unreliable documentation. The careful notes of significant contradictions were nice, but confusing, because I missed the frontispiece note listing the sources referenced in the bio. In fact, the attempt to balance prose flow with flow-killing reliability analysis - "well, text A says this happened in 1605, and text B describes a similar event, but in 1607..." - sort of didn't work at all for me. Also, diagrams of family trees would have been helpful. The material is interesting, and I don't regret being exposed to it, but I might suggest people look for other books on Musashi if they want a more engaging read. N.B.: this was my primary reading on the plane to and from the
jkling/mareklamo wedding, so external factors may have caused my attention to suffer. So it might not be the book, it might have been O'Hare. The Child That Books Built (Francis Spufford): Bibliomaniac talks about his childhood of compulsive reading, a topic close to my heart. I suspect I'd really enjoy talking to this guy, but the book felt unbalanced - not really a biography, not exactly a book about books, not at all about child psychology and development. Not what I was expecting, but still useful for random Narnia and Little House tidbits. (Apparently I am the only child in the world who totally missed the allegorical aspects of the Narnia series. In my defense, the most active Religious Ed teachers at the Unitarian church my parents chose to attend were the burned-out Christians and the practicing Wiccans. I think this explains a lot about my knowledge - and ignorance - of the contemporary religious scene.)
The Language of Power (Rosemary Kirstein): Fourth in a series. Steerswoman Rowan continues to pursue information that might lead to the wizard Slado and his sinister plans. This is one of those extremely linear series where it's a really good idea to start at the beginning with The Steerswoman's Road and avoid spoilers. But this is great stuff. Not exactly literary popcorn, but maybe literary grapes: very sweet, tends to go fast. My "Slado the AI" theory is killed dead. And we are handed the "WTF?" of all time in the last twenty pages. What would cause a gravitational lens-like event around a normal boring star? Why would it be important? Or is it important? Is it the shortest nova in the history of novae? Could Kirstein be dropping a huge red herring on the readers? That sort of massive D-Day-like feint seems unlike the story to date, but notice how fast the demons were dropped in this book. Though they may be back; Willam popped up again.
And hey. Willam's back! How cute that Rowan's bending the "Steerswoman's ban" protocol into pretzel-like shapes for him. I wonder if Kirstein's not ultimately setting Rowan up for a fall with the Steerwoman's Guild? In the first book Rowan sort of edged around the ban to talk to Corvus; in the second book she blatantly manipulated it to avoid talking to Fletcher; in the third book she tried to get the ban on Janus rescinded (Which apparently is Not Done). And in the fourth book Willam treads an extremely fine line between deception by omission and lying. I don't know how much Kirstein's considered the gray area Rowan's wandering in to; it's sort of a plot/worldbuilding interaction that may say a lot about the author's perspective, but may not say much about the actual story. If that makes any sense.
Speaking of nonsense... is it just me, or is there an unintentional theme of four-ness in the Steerwoman series? Four Guidestars, quadrilateral symmetry in the native life, four points where there should be one star on Kieran's star charts. I think it's accidental, but it's amusing to observe and track.
Random subtext note: Reeder/Naio. I have no idea why I am inclined to slash this series; I just do.
So. That's a lot of analysis and critique. Unmitigated pleasures of the book include any scene with Willam, many Rowan-Bel interactions, Beck the future innkeeper, the interview with Lorren and Eamer, and dinner with Ona, Naio, and Reeder. I don't think we're done with Donner.
Genes, Girls and Gamow: After the Double Helix (James D. Watson): Nonfiction. After the great "aha!" of DNA, people get very excited about RNA. And Watson tries to get hitched. Really tries. For fifteen years. Many famous people wander through the pages, so now I have personality quirks to go with famous experiments and giants of biology. Like George Gamow, who sounds like my grandfather, only smarter. And dude. Random moment of happiness when Matt Meselson was mentioned. The Meselson-Stahl DNA experiment is so elegant. The only thing that could be better would be more Chargaff and more Rosalyn Franklin. She sounds like she was a Character. Further, entire books could probably be written about Linus Pauling and his family (and probably have been).
As reviews go, that's a fairly terrible one. Second try. It's easy to compare this to The Double Helix and have GGG come up short. (GGG! That's a - let me check - glycine codon! [/geek] [geek]And Richard Feynman was gly in the RNA tie club! [/geek]) tDH focused on a relatively small number of people tracking down one structure. GGG is a lot more amorphous: many more people wander in and out, and there is no satisfying "and then we discovered the One True RNA Structure, submitted to Nature, and were feted by our collegues" wrapup. (Because, of course, there is no One True RNA anything. There are at least six true RNA things, and Heaven help you if you mix up snRNA and snoRNA on a test.) If this were fiction, I would say the plot is really loose, and poorly wrapped up: the two major threads are RNA research and Watson looking for a wife, and both reach their logical climaxes in the epilogue. Further, the Geo Gamow of the title sort of wanders back toward physics about two-thirds of the way through. So I got huge kicks out of the scientific stuff, and the gossip about who was or wasn't doing what with whom. It's a light read, and fairly fun for the science crew, but if you're not into following the names you're not going to like this so much.
Narnia
Re: Narnia
no subject
"You do realize Aslan's meant to be Jesus"
"No. Why would I?
"The sacrifical death and resurrection's something of a tip off"
no subject
BTW, your mother sounds like she has a dry sense of humor.