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Stranger Than Fiction (December Reading)
Only two? December loses at life!
Crytonomicon (Neil Stephenson): reread. Total geek romance. For people who identify first as a geek, there are more important things than sex and your one true love. The more important geek thing is work that engages your brain. So that's why Lawrence and Randy Waterhouse are paralleled, and why the mating dance is one of several threads or themes in a thousand pages. (This comes back to kick you in the pants later in life, when you're established in work and socially disorganized in love, but that's why Randy and Amy are so cute.) The romance action isn't even the second most important theme or concept-cluster going on, most of the time; it's maybe third, after the evolution of Epiphyte into the Crypt, WWII cryptography and Nazi gold. I wish I'd written this while I was reading, so I could be more coherent. I do feel it's very important in this love letter to say that Goto Dengo is more badass than Bobby Shaftoe. Badassness can be quantified by how effectively you complete your mission, and your survival of this task. Goto survives WW2; Shaftoe does not. QED.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks) is a lighthearted collection of colorful and sometimes tragic music-related brain quirks. Sacks does a lot to humanize patients he could reduce to a list of problems and neurological misfirings, which is a talent. It also means the book is somewhere between a collection of case studies and limited glimpses into the lives, which makes this a bit fluffy. If anecdotes about musicians losing their hearing or people with massive anterograde and retrograde amnesia can be considered fluffy.
2007 book stats: 65 total, 37 new fiction, 3 short story collections (including one reread), 1 graphic novel, 8 new nonfiction, 16 fiction rereads. But many of those were very short! Or, to break it down exactly as last year: 65 total, 57 fiction, 8 nonfiction.
My 2008 book resolution is to avoid romance novels unless a trusted prescreener shoves it in my hands with a bang-up rec. By "bang-up rec", I mean they indicate it's shockingly akin to a science fiction novel in drag, or deals with my favorite themes in a way counter to most romance tropes. My other 2008 book resolution is (as always) to read more nonfiction. I did slightly better this year, but the raw numbers obfuscate that I included Girl, Interrupted and The Vagina Monologues in the nonfiction count. That's pretty fluffy. Also, the non/fiction ratio's way off compared to other years.
Crytonomicon (Neil Stephenson): reread. Total geek romance. For people who identify first as a geek, there are more important things than sex and your one true love. The more important geek thing is work that engages your brain. So that's why Lawrence and Randy Waterhouse are paralleled, and why the mating dance is one of several threads or themes in a thousand pages. (This comes back to kick you in the pants later in life, when you're established in work and socially disorganized in love, but that's why Randy and Amy are so cute.) The romance action isn't even the second most important theme or concept-cluster going on, most of the time; it's maybe third, after the evolution of Epiphyte into the Crypt, WWII cryptography and Nazi gold. I wish I'd written this while I was reading, so I could be more coherent. I do feel it's very important in this love letter to say that Goto Dengo is more badass than Bobby Shaftoe. Badassness can be quantified by how effectively you complete your mission, and your survival of this task. Goto survives WW2; Shaftoe does not. QED.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks) is a lighthearted collection of colorful and sometimes tragic music-related brain quirks. Sacks does a lot to humanize patients he could reduce to a list of problems and neurological misfirings, which is a talent. It also means the book is somewhere between a collection of case studies and limited glimpses into the lives, which makes this a bit fluffy. If anecdotes about musicians losing their hearing or people with massive anterograde and retrograde amnesia can be considered fluffy.
2007 book stats: 65 total, 37 new fiction, 3 short story collections (including one reread), 1 graphic novel, 8 new nonfiction, 16 fiction rereads. But many of those were very short! Or, to break it down exactly as last year: 65 total, 57 fiction, 8 nonfiction.
My 2008 book resolution is to avoid romance novels unless a trusted prescreener shoves it in my hands with a bang-up rec. By "bang-up rec", I mean they indicate it's shockingly akin to a science fiction novel in drag, or deals with my favorite themes in a way counter to most romance tropes. My other 2008 book resolution is (as always) to read more nonfiction. I did slightly better this year, but the raw numbers obfuscate that I included Girl, Interrupted and The Vagina Monologues in the nonfiction count. That's pretty fluffy. Also, the non/fiction ratio's way off compared to other years.