ase

I think this is an appropriate post in which to record last night's experience for future reference: Long Island iced tea is evil.

I've had some other things on my mind, so this is late, but January's mostly ready to go, so I'll have the backlog cleared out Real Soon Now (hah).

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson): There is a reason this got a Hugo was nominated for a Hugo (thank you, rwl). The main plot is about, oh, venture capitalism in Southeast Asia, WWII cryptography, and Nipponese gold, but it's also a two-generation geek romantic comedy of love and manners. Also, there is an EMP gun. This will never stop amusing me. The novel is literally about a thousand pages long, so I'm behooved to say, yes, it's worth it. It's definitely bloated in places (Enoch Root is a pompous ass, in my humble opinion) but the one character I dislike is outweighed by the many characters, plot points, one line bon mots and EMP gun I adored.

2006 book stats: 23 total (!), 17 fiction, 5 nonfiction. Also the Hugo shorts, a novella, and sundry essays on Lord of the Rings. I think I read more words than shown here, but for reasons that don't need explaining at this time (oh, wait: graduating from college, maybe?) they weren't reflected in the lit/nonfiction totals.

I must honor Molecular Biology of the Cell (Bruce Alberts et al), my favorite textbook ever, with which I spent many hours in 2005 and 2006. I will resell this book over my dead body. I must also put in a word for The Organic Chemistry of Biological Pathways (John McMurry and Tadhg Begley), which only does one thing, but it does that one thing superbly. Biology students: if you are taking a biochemistry couse that deals with the common pathways (glycolysis, citric acid cycle, pentose phosphate pathway, Calvin cycle, etc), look into this book. It only covers mechanisms, but it does so in exquisite detail.

In 2007, I plan to read more actual books. We'll see how well that resolution holds up.

Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned (Judd Winick): Comics artist and Real World contestant reflects on relationship with HIV-positive roommate Pedro Zamora in words and pictures. Fluffy; probably more meaningful if you're 1.) more into comics than I am or 2.) more familiar with pre-1996 Real World seasons than I am.

Shirahime-Syo (CLAMP): Noted manga collaborators do a collection of stories drawing on myths of the Snow Princess. Very pretty artwork, which is wasted on my manga-illiterate self. The theme of the collection is snowfall as the Snow Princess crying, but this gets turned on its head ( in spoilerland. )

I don't know what it means, but it looked really cool.

This and other forays into manga are an attempt to ride the phenomenon; suggestions for good intro manga encouraged, especially from my age cohorts. Some kind of "idiot's guide to manga" primer would be even more awesome; I'm pretty sure I'm missing genre markers left and right.

James Tiptree, Jr. : The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (Julie Phillips): Biography of the SF writer. I've read one of Tiptree's novels plus one or two of her short stories, and was underwhelmed, but Sheldon/Tiptree's actual life is fascinating. She did an amazing variety of stuff during her life: as a child, her parents took her to Africa, and her mother used her illustrations for a children's book on the experience; she eloped shortly after her coming-out party; she joined the Women's Army Corps during WWII; her second husband was significantly older than her; she ran a chicken farm; she was a depressed drug-addicted McLean housewife. And she wrote science fiction under two pseudonyms.

"...she is surely speaking for the many people who were passing in that decade: gays pretending to be straight, geniuses working as housewives, token women acting and thinking like men."

Philips gets in some pithy prose that speaks deeply to my issues: identity, self-esteems, parents. Science. One of my hardest classes this semester has about fourteen people in it, and three of us are not men.

I think I'm going to be terribly unbiased and just say that it was a fascinating biography, with a light hand on the feminist jargon. I'm not sure it was good for me, but I encourage everyone else to go read it so I have someone to talk to.

Random quotes:

Tiptree on life: " ' The puzzle of seeing those same hands grasping a pencil here, that grasped a horse's mane - was it a week ago or a century ago that one was fourteen? And yet that same crooked thumbnail continues, my same round shadow of a nose goes before me in the scene. ' " (p196)

What did Le Guin put on her letters to Tiptree? "...drawings of jellyfish and squid (because they hide in clouds of ink)" p267.

Pat Murphy & Karen Joy Fowler start the Tiptree award: "Because most science fiction writers can't live from their work, they decided their award should have a cash prize. Where would the money come from? From bake sales at science fiction conventions, ha-ha. What to call it? They named it after their favorite literary prankster. . . in making their decision, the judges often hold long discussions about what constitutes reenvisioning gender, a debate that in turn raises more questions about what science fiction is and can do." I feel the need to include this after this summer's Tiptree tempest in a teapot.

Notes that I never got around to expanding: "...questions about what science fiction is and can do." Well, sometimes; sometimes it starts blogfights. Turnabout: letter-writing => LJ; Tiptree as sockpuppet? SF - fiction as dialog (LMB quote). And now I'm having visions of j_tiptree_jr writing fan fiction.

Climbing Mount Improbable (Richard Dawkins): Dawkins on natural selection as the power behind life and evolution. A number of interesting case studies showing the gradual accumulation of "irreducible" complexity. Unfortunately, the book didn't really gel for me, or engage my intellect at the level which The Selfish Gene did. Some that may be the timing; this was published in 1997, and uses a lot of computer modeling that was hot stuff in the mid-90's.[1] Today, we have spiffier software. But Dawkins' ability to turn a phrase doesn't utterly desert him. Take a look at this paragraph from the chapter on figs and fig wasps, for example:

Much of the deciphering of the wasp-pollination story would simply have involved slicing figs open and looking inside. But 'looking' gives too laid-back an impression. It wasn't a passive gawping but a carefully planned recording session yielding numbers to be fed into calculations. Don't just pluck figs and slice them. Systemically sample figs from a large number of trees, from particular heights, and at particular seasons of the year. Don't just stare at the wasps wriggling inside: identify them, photograph them, accurately draw them, count them and measure them. Classify them by species, sex, age and location in the fig. Send specimens to museums for identification by detailed comparison with internationally recognized standards. But don't make measurements and counts indiscriminately just for the sake of it. Make them in the service of testing stated hypotheses. And when you look to see if your counts and measurements fit the expectations of your hypothesis, be aware, in calculated detail, how likely it is that your results could have been obtained by chance and mean nothing.

Now, imagine doing a great deal of that outside. In the heat and humidity. That's science. And I am so glad my specialization doesn't require field work.

[1]I remember the '90s. I remember when the CD-R drive was the Hot New Thing on our computer, and when we got the ten gig hard drive, and how we wondered how anyone could fill it up. As I write this, I have forty gigs of data clogging my laptop hard drive. Five gigs of that's just program files. The WINDOWS folder gets 2.75 gigs all to itself. And let us not even start on the music folders.

Star Wars: Outbound Flight (Timothy Zahn): The Outbound Flight project gets off the ground and shot out of the sky. Whoops.

The narrative uses umpteen PoVs to cover the umpteen sides dancing on the head of a pin. I thought this was pretty fun, but then, I was getting a kick out of all these people from other Zahn novels showing up. Zahn's done a fairly unobtrusive information control job on the facts of the OF in the past (right up until Survivor's Quest, where people needed to be beaten with an "ask questions, fools!" stick), so the climatic destruction didn't feel like a retread. Recurring characters felt younger, crazy Jedi masters proved that bad cloning merely exaggerates pre-existing megalomania, Obi-Wan and Anakin had an extended cameo that didn't really affect the plot. Was this deep? No. Was this fun? Yes. Thrawn was a bit of an over-manipulative supergenius, but that's his role in the series. I really was hoping Car'das would hijack one of Thrawn's plans for his on purposes, but no joy. On the other hand, there were smugglers, but no Bothans. Cheers!

There's also a thing to be said about how this means I've been reading fanfiction since I was, like, ten, and didn't notice. Not that I was tempted to describe any part of the OF plot as crack. Okay, maybe I am. See also "strategic supergenius who reads alien psyches through their art."

Fifth Business (Robertson Davies): I have no idea how to classify this. I think it might be genuine, plain fiction. And I have no idea how to discuss this. There are a ton of pithy quotes, but I have no idea how to approach what the book is "about". It seems to be Dunstable Ramsay's account of the interlinked fates of himself, Paul Dempster, and Percy Boyd Staunton. But that's speaking to the bones of the novel, not the spirit and heart of the story. This may be a case of the theme whooshing over my head, and it makes me want to hash the book out with people.

The Art of Detection (Laurie R. King): A mild collision of series when Kate Martinelli must solve the mysterious murder of a die-hard Sherlock Holmes fan.

I'm most tempted to compare this to A Letter of Mary, where a manuscript of sorts also acts as the McGuffin, but I'm also compelled to note that there's a 100 page Holmes pastiche wedged in the middle of the book. It was an entertaining pastiche, mind, but it does break up the story a bit.

Randomly: internal evidence dates the book's conclusion to mid-February 2004. Which end was very schmoopy, and pretty cute, but felt a little tacked-on. Discuss in comments.

The Vitru (Sarah Monette/truepenny): Felix isn't crazy. Pity, that; we liked him better when we was.

( Felix is Justin Warrick. Why am I still talking about this? )

This suffered from bad packaging: for the full effect, it should be read back-to-back with Melusine. I lost a few character names and biographies between volumes, and I still feel like there's some unresolved stuff going on; it should come as no surprise that Monette's writing two more books in the same series.

Monette's written some engaging characters, and some fairly intricate worldbuilding (contrast the city of Melusine to Lankhmar or Tai-Tastigon), but the things the characters make me roll my eyes and want to throw popcorn. I've read enough of her LJ that I can't believe it's accidental the characters are behave in such a compellingly human fashion, but that isn't helping me suppress the urge to hand out love-taps with a clue-by-four. I think I'm skipping Monette's next book, unless someone vets it for me and tells me it's awesome in all the ways the first two books weren't.

Also read sundry essays from Understanding The Lord of the Rings (Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, editors): "The Dethronement of Power" (C. S. Lewis) - a classic "my friend wrote a book and it's really cool, you should all read it!" only in Oxford Don English - "Men, Halflings and Hero Worship" (Marion Zimmer Bradley) which I read twice because I'd forgotten I'd already been through it once, "Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of Hero" (Verlyn Flieger) academic and dry-ish, "Another Road to Middle-earth: Jackson's Movie Trilogy" (Tom Shippey) academic and entertaining. Also picked up Meditations on Middle-Earth (Ed. Karen Haber), essentially a collection of authors discussing some aspect of their own reactions or analysis of LotR. "A Changeling Returns" (Michael Swanwick), "Rhythmic Pattern in The Lord of the Rings "(Ursula K. Le Guin), "The Longest Sunday" (Diane Duane). I power-skimmed the Card essay; Ender's Game may be a classic, but I really can't get into Card's oevre. I keep trying to find something Card's written that doesn't turn me off, but he is my anti-author with shocking consistency.

Combining these because it's a fairly short list, other than the Hugo shorts abuse. I'm also letting the comments made under the influence stand, because I can.

April Books

I read Hugo nominees, how cool am I? ( Well, not very, because I just finished the shorts and they were *terrible*. )

I think a more interesting discussion might be consideration of why the short story nominees were so lacking this year (tentative hypothesis: since only 278 ballots were sent in, according to the LACon Hugo nominees list, a writer with a good publicity plan could totally swing the vote), and/or suggestions of short stories that should have been nominated, but weren't.

Actual books

A Short History of World War II, James L. Stokesbury: If ever there were a title that begged to be poked fun at, this is it. Surprisingly, Stokesbury almost manages to live up to it: 389 pages (hardcover) is a brief review of some really complex maneuvering. The narrative moves along at a reasonably brisk clip, laying out the broad movements of the war in clean academic prose punctuated by the occasional dry bon mot. I have absolutely no background to judge the book by, but I liked it. It's 20 years old, which is absolutely ancient by bio standards, but it's not like WW2 is on the move, so this is probably a reasonable book to recommend to people. My major complaints are two: first, it is academic, so it's fairly heavy reading by default, and second, my geographic knowledge is appallingly bad, so more maps would have been nice. I was constantly flipping to the available maps as it was.

Personal reactions: there is something riveting in all catastrophes. But after reading the casualty counts, the territory lost and won, you're left wondering what it was all for. War is still the triumph of stupidity over good sense.

* * *
May Books

Throne of Jade (Naomi Novik/naominovik): Second book in a series of adventures about William Laurence, aviator, and his dragon Temeraire. In this episode, the pair are shipped to China to appease Imperial sensibilities. For some reason, I found this more cohesive and entertaining than the first (Temeraire or His Majesty's Dragon, depending which side of the Atlantic you ordered it from). The set-pieces were about the same, but felt more firmly knit together by the intervening material. My big question at this point is how deliberately Novik's going about her B-plot: it looks like she's setting Temeraire to set off the English Dragon Revolution, but I don't know if that's where she's planning to take the series. The sea serpent thing was an interesting touch, but for which side of the argument I don't know.

To my infinite shame, I didn't finish a single non-school reading in February. This may be because I now know way to much about Stargate: Atlantis fandom. Let this entry stand as a testament to my disappointment in my reading choices, and my inability to understand that crack is a drug, and not a fanfic genre. Also, as far as SGA goes, het is the new slash. Sally forth and write some smokin' [male character]/[female character], people. By which I do not mean gender screwiness. Also, gen still trumps all shippyness.

Fortunately, I've already finished one real novel this month, so March will be at least a little better than February. If you consider Napoleonic Wars, Now With Dragons, to be an improvement.

Other than my mother, that is. In two days, I've gone from being extremely exasperated by how little I like Mélusine to being extremely exasperated that the sequel/second half, The Virtu, won't be out until June. For some reason I'd thought it would be published in February. I still think the beginning of Mélusine is hideously florid, and a number of secondary characters act fantastically thick, but I want to know what happens to Mildmay the Fox.

Aha. Emerson. Of course. Though I like the slightly less complete version for its anonymous annotation: "Emerson does not explain the difference between foolish and wise consistency."