Polymath

Reading for March, April 2009

Working more and reading less. At the same time, I don't have any coworkers that absolutely insist on having lunch together, so I can read while I eat.

The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) by Amy Tan. I missed reading Tan during my college years, probably because I had completed all of my "cultural" requirements before it was published (The Joy Luck Club was published in 1989, just too late to make my reading lists.) A nicely crafted chronicle, which could have done with a little more editorial polish -- like everything else these days. And while I'm complaining, the framing story wasn't very strong, it needs something more.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986/1991) by Art Spiegelman. I bought a copy of this a few years ago but never picked it up. Having read and seen the film adaptation of Sophie's Choice, as well as watching The Pianist I feel suffused with awareness of the Jewish Holocaust.

Kitty and the Midnight Hour (2005) by Carrie Vaughn. Carrie was a classmate of mine, and the informal host of our X-Files gatherings back when the X-Files was on the Friday night lineup. Now she has successfully launched a series of supernatural novels featuring Kitty the werewolf/late night talk show host.

Taking its cues from any number of television pilots, the first half introduces us to Kitty and her network of associates while offering few hints of a plot structure. Kitty doesn't seem to have much of an inner life, which makes it easier for readers to identify with her as an empowered female figure or something. There are lots of squishy-girl moments juxtaposed with razor-sharp-claws-cutting-through-flesh moments, culminating in a [not quite] bittersweet victory and a [not quite] crushing defeat, nine, ten, end of novel, see you next time.

Reading for January, February 2009

Weaveworld by Clive Barker. We were packing our apartment to move to our new house and this was on the shelf. For a 700 page "horror" novel, this is a breezy read. This is also the type of novel that can lead to spontaneous conversations with strangers in public places.

Body of Evidence by Patricia Cornwell. Since my library was (is) still packed up in boxes, I stopped into a used bookstore. Alas, "used books" in this case meant mostly romance novels. This is the second Scarpetta thriller, one I read in '97 or '98, and like the first in the series it features a featureless killer who is only revealed in time for the final showdown.

The Silent Cry (1967 - English translation 1974) by Kenzaburo Oe. A Japanese author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago. I would say this is a fair to poor translation, there are a number of grammatical problems and mangled idioms. Perhaps I should just say it is a utilitarian translation.

Haruki Murakami seems to have been influenced a great deal by Oe, as do the films by Hayao Miyazaki.

--- by ---. This selection shall remain anonymous, as it has a certain cult status that I don't care to perpetuate.

Reading for November, December, 2008

Boy, I've really gotten behind on these updates.

In November:

I finished Against the Day (2007) by Thomas Pynchon.

The World at the End of Time (1990) by Frederik Pohl.

High Stakes (1975) by Dick Francis.

And then in December I read:

Forfeit (1968) by Dick Francis.

Reading for October, 2008

Flying Finish (1966) by Dick Francis.

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008) by Nicholas Carr. Carr was on some talk show and sounded interesting. The book, however, doesn't really hold together. Instead of providing further insights into the future of computing-as-utility, the book resorts to cheerleading and [brand] name dropping.

Excession by Iain M. Banks.

Reading for September, 2008

Cancer Ward (1968) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Bone-Crack (1971) and Odds Against (1965) by Dick Francis. Francis writes a novel every year, some sort of thriller that deals with horse racing. The only Francis I've read previously was For Kicks in December, 2005.

The Wasp Factory (1984) by Iain M. Banks.

Currently on page 848 of Pynchon's Against the Day. I should have this wrapped up in a few days, which will allow me to start another epic novel.

Reading for July, August 2008

Finished the Watt-Evans "Wizard Lord" trilogy with The Summer Palace.

The Poet (1996) by Michael Connelly. I was curious about Connelly, since he keeps appearing on the bestseller lists. His first book was published in 1992, this one was one of his earlier books on the library shelf. A formula plot with some awkward plot twists, and the occasional howler --"We made love after that. Slowly, smiling in the shadows of the room.", "The man with the black hair stood there. I noticed now that he had a mustache as thin as a freeway on a map traveling over his lip."

Currently reading: Cancer Ward (1968) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn passed away on August 3, 2008.

Also, I made a little progress on Pynchon's Against the Day. Now on page 761 of 1085.

Nonfiction reading: Python Essential Reference, Third Edition by David M. Beazley. Picked this up from the publisher at SIGGRAPH, figured it was a good time to learn a new programming language.

Reading for April, May, June 2008

April-ish:

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963) by J. D. Salinger. Aside from Frannie and Zooey, which I read not too long ago (must have been pre-2005), this completes the published novels of Salinger.

Finished reading Trainspotting (1993) by Irvine Welsh. Given that the narrative shifts between chapters/passages, the overall story also drifts, and the final resolution is mostly superficial. There is a sequel.

Reading for March, 2008

Finished A Prayer for Owen Meaney.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger.

Still working on Trainspotting.

Did not finish the new Pinker book.

Reading for February, 2008

Fight Club (1996) by Chuck Palahniuk. Pointless. This is the second book I've read by Palahniuk, and I think I get the gist: although he doesn't care much about writing, it is a good way to make a living.

Other reading for the month: Made some progress on A Prayer for Owen Meaney. Also started Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, as well as the classic Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I read Brenda Richardson's essay in Jennifer Bartlett, Early Plate Work, which unfortunately diminished my enthusiasm for her work somewhat. And I have a copy of Steven Pinker's latest "linguistic" exploration, The Stuff of Thought. Here's a taste, from the introductory chapter:

A name points to a person in the world in the same way that I can point to a rock in front of me right now.

What a wretched analogy.

Reading for January, 2008

After reviewing my 2007 reading list I felt I needed to boost the quality of my reading. This happens every now and then. And so I naively return to the famous authors, those brilliant Pulitzer and Nobel earners, to see what I have missed.

Sula (1973) by Toni Morrison. More of a sketch for a novel than a fully realized novel.

The Sportswriter (1986) by Richard Ford. I found little of interest in the story. I kept reading past the first two chapters because I wanted to see how much of the plot had been stolen for the 2005 film The Weather Man. Not too much, it turns out, aside from the translation of a superficial sportswriter into a superficial weather man, and a scene where the protagonist secretly parks outside of his ex-wife's home and talks to his son.

Rabbit, Run (1960) by John Updike.

Reading for December, 2007

The holidays gave me some time to catch up on my reading. I didn't start anything new, but I did finish Sophie's Choice by William Styron, which I started in October of 2006. At times Styron's writing is very forced, those times when he has quite obviously pulled out the thesaurus to find another word for "desirable". On a larger scale, the story itself is quite stunning.

The 1982 film version is far too short to explore the full story.

I have made some progress on Against the Day, which has been languishing on my desk for the past few months. I am now up to page 648.

Over the weekend I decided Against the Day was a little too bulky for airplane travel, so I resumed John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany over the course of a short trip to Texas. I am about 2/3 done with this.

Reading for October, November 2007

Reread of Postmortem (1990) by Patricia Cornwell. The first Kay Scarpetta novel, which is now up to fifteen books. I first read this in 1996 or 1997, just before I started work on Dr. K---.

The Spriggan Mirror (2006) by Lawrence Watt-Evans. A chance purchase at the bookstore, I was just checking to see what if any books of his are on the shelves these days. A fun read, if a little self-indulgent -- recycled characters, following up on books from 1987 and 1993.

Appointment in Samarra (1934) by John O'Hara. Number 22 on the Modern Library list.

Abandoned books: Death of the Heart (1938) by Elizabeth Bowen. Too wordy, no likable characters in the first 100 pages, time for something else.

Reading for September 2007

Ah, such a silent blog. Does anybody stop by anymore? I can't tell, because no one can leave comments.

In September I read:

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. The writing gets better after the first hundred pages, sloppy editing I guess. I've read the plot summaries for the rest of the series on Wikipedia, so I won't be continuing this series unless, for some strange reason, I find myself with nothing to read.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Hosseini's first novel was largely written by the editors at Riverhead Books. This one didn't get worked on quite as much, so it drags a bit. My one sentence summary: A beautiful girl and a resourceful cripple find pastoral happiness thanks to the painful sacrifices of the innocent, set against a backdrop of a country that certainly sounds like Afghanistan but it doesn't really matter.

Reading for July and August, 2007

I am in progress on two books, and have finished two books in the past two months.

In progress: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. Currently on page 406 (the end of part 2).

In progress: 20th Century Chemistry by Joseph I. Routh, 1953. Yes, a 54 year old chemistry book that predates the moon landings and most of the Cold War, intended for high school seniors or college students. But in truth it provides some good information on many industrial processes -- today's equivalent would be a super glossy textbook filled with color photos and illustrations, with a special column explaining the environmental dangers posed by each industry, and who wants to read that for fun?

Reading for June 2007

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1966), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967.

In progress: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. At 1000+ pages and over one hundred characters this will be a long-term project.

Reading for April and May 2007

In April I picked up Disgrace by J M Coetzee, which won the 1999 Man Booker prize. It is written very sparsely -- so much so that significant racial distinctions between the characters are not clear at the outset -- and the story is rather grim. The Man Booker people sure do love their post-Colonial fiction.

In May I read Howard's End by E. M. Forster (#38 on the Modern Library list). This book was published in 1910, and at almost one hundred years old it is difficult to say in what ways the story is still relevant. One really has to read this book alongside other Edwardian Era/End of the Century novels (say, The House of Mirth and The Magnificent Ambersons) to get a feel for the period and its social mores.

Also read: Life of Pi by Yann Martel. This is another Man Booker winner, and one of the more readable (and enjoyable) Booker selections I have come across. A bit unpolished, there are a couple of devices that could've been worked in a little better, like the reason for there being 100 chapters, or the parallel narrative that disappears after the first section.

In progress: I also picked up a copy of Pynchon's newest novel on May 24.

Reading for March, 2007

Saturday (2005) by Ian McEwan. "Henry Perowne is a contented man, a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and the proud father of two grown-up children, one a promising poet, the other a talented blues musician." Bleh. Just a total bleh.

In progress: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

Reading for February, 2007

Choke (2001) by Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck is something of a cult phenomenon, so I figured I should sample his work. For all the perverse goings-on in this book -- sex addiction, drug users, mutated chickens -- the central storyline is surprisingly sentimental: a narrator trying to cope with the loss of his mother. Take away the style and you have a middling novel by Douglas Coupland. Could it be that the primary features of Gen X literature are going to be nothing more than drawn out emotions and nostalgia? Let's hope not.

That was the only complete novel I read this month. I have two books still in progress: Henderson the Rain King (1959) by Saul Bellow, and Saturday (2005) by Ian McEwan.

I have also been perusing The Jester by James Patterson and Andrew Gross (Patterson writes the outlines, the ghost writer fleshes out the chapters) which was a NYT bestseller in 2003. I wanted to know what it was like to read something from the Patterson francise, and it is pretty much Goosebumps for the business traveller -- about a ninth grade reading level, with no chapters longer than 4 pages. This one is supposed to be an historic adventure set during the Crusades, but the narrative voice is unflinchingly modern:

Beside the tree, I saw my staff. It must have toppled there in my fall. I reached for it, though it wasn't much of a weapon.

I stared at the angry, snorting boar. "Come at me, offal. Come at me! Finish what you started."

A national bestseller.

Also during the past month, I started to read the first book of Robin Hobb's new trilogy, Shaman's Crossing. After 200 pages it is, alas, not interesting enough to finish. A pre-industrial world where artillery weapons are being perfected, a socially rigid culture attempting to expand its empire, an oppressed and dying native population with mysterious magic... the narrative of a teenage son who heads off to a military academy founded by his father, a former officer turned into a nobleman. And in 200 pages there are only faint whiffs that something interesting is going to happen. Skimming ahead, the boy clashes with the older nobility, life is hard, plague strikes, and the future is no longer certain.

Nine books ago Hobb (Megan Lindholm) made a name for herself with Assassin's Apprentice. Now she is simply cranking out the words to keep the publishers happy.

Reading for January, 2007

Atonement by Ian McEwan. See my comments here.

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever. Number 63 on the Modern Library list.

The last 50 pages of An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. Number 16 on the Modern Library list. I started this book in July 2005, then stalled at the halfway point for about a year. Somewhere in the middle, before Clyde commits his crime, there are about 150 pages where Clyde continues to string Roberta along and nothing much else happens, and that is where I and probably half the readers get stuck.

The second half is interesting in that the narrative shifts into a procedural investigation by the district attorney. The character of the DA is so relentless that it makes you sympathetic to Clyde, though you know he is guilty and quite doomed.

One indicator this novel has earned a significant place in literature is the reaction it continues to produce, from Ayn Rand's angry condemnation to the pathological defense of capitalism by the "Brother's Judd". These criticisms never address the story itself, they simply attack its thinly veiled premise -- that untempered ambition is a destructive force.

@T0N3D!!!!!

"Superb"... "magnificent"... "The best thing he has ever written" — the kinds of things that are said about almost every book that is published these days, from James Patterson to Mo Willems. Yet when I heard these same things said about Atonement by Ian McEwan, I somehow thought such praise was well-deserved.

Silly me.

The overall narrative is fairly light. There is the tale of Robbie and Cecilia (two star-crossed lovers), and the personal struggle of Briony, and then a handful of plot-driven characters in the background. The story spans five years or seventy, depending on whether you include the final section.

2006 in Review

It used to be my practice to post a year-end review of books, but for the past two years I have been posting monthly (/semimonthly) summaries of recent reading, and I never wrote a 2005 review. If I recall correctly, there was a one month old child in the house at the time.

Errata: Some time during the past year I read A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, but it got left out somehow.

So, in the past year I made a concerted effort to read some forty-one books. Four of these were nonfiction, the rest fiction. Of the fiction, I abandoned or otherwise failed to finish four books, those four being:

* Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
* Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
* Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
* JR by William Gaddis

There is a fair chance that I will eventually resume reading Dostoevsky or Gaddis, but no chance that I will finish the Willis or Sawyer volumes.

Out of all the fiction, I would say about eight of the books were of literary quality. The rest were fluff, but enjoyable fluff.

Best fiction of the year: Gateway by Frederik Pohl. Written in 1976, still a good read, and it motivated me to read several other books by Pohl.

Worst fiction of the year: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I have my doubts that Hosseini actually wrote the book, more likely there was an uncredited ghost writer/team of editors behind this.

Well, time to get back to reading. Currently working on: Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit.

Reading for November and December 2006

I did not finish either JR by William Gaddis or Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray. JR was interesting, but a little too much like trying to read a television.

I also did not get much beyond the first week of writing for NaNoWriMo.

I did read:

* Myth-ing Persons (1984)
* Little Myth Marker (1985)
* M.Y.T.H. inc. Link (1986)

by Robert Asprin. The series really hits its stride with Little Myth Marker, then Asprin's writing output started sputtering in the 1990's.

After a year on my shelf, I resumed Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy from page 500 or so. I still have about 40 pages to go.

Reading for October, 2006

Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff, written 1988. This book came highly recommended by a coworker, and I tend to follow friendly suggestions (with the exception of certain authors I will not name here). An amusing book, some interesting ideas, with a very thin execution.

Sophie's Choice by William Styron. I am actually only 80% through this. Styron passed away earlier this week.

Next: Either JR by William Gaddis, or Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray. Murray's book is almost ten years old now, so I figured it might be worth another look.

Reading for September, 2006

I spent a number of hours last month playing Caesar III and the demo for Caesar IV. I did a little light reading:

Books by Robert Asprin:
* Another Fine Myth published in 1978
* Myth Conceptions published in 1980
* Myth Directions published in 1982
* Hit or Myth published in 1983

I also read about a third of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I wasn't really enjoying it, so I left it in the back of my car where it remains.

Now reading: Sophie's Choice by William Styron. This, too, I am not enjoying.

Reading for July and August, 2006

It looks like I forgot to update my reading diary last month. I also haven't been doing much in the way of summer reading -- in many ways I have taken on the role of a large pair of hands, taking care of the child.

In August I read Tatja Grimm's World by Vernor Vinge. Given Vinge's current popularity they have published a new edition of this book, which is an assembly of two or three of his stories from the 60's. It is not worth reading.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. It goes on for a bit, but still a classic.

Reading for June, 2006

First I read the first half of Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer, which won the 2003 Hugo Award. The writing relies on an alternative worlds premise to keep the reader interested, but the reader has access to characters from both worlds so there isn't any mystery involved. After that, the characterizations were too weak to keep me interested, and I skimmed through the rest.

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. Number 25 on the Modern Library list.

Reading for May, 2006

Andrew Glassner's Interactive Storytelling: techniques for 21st century fiction.

Slowly working through Main Street by Sinclair Lewis.

Glassner's Interactive Storytelling

Scene 1: An apartment. The walls are covered with Academy Award-winning movie posters. A man slouches on a couch, his hand resting in a giant bowl of popcorn. A pile of DVDs tumbles off of a coffee table. The drone of music and the chatter of voices can be heard from a small television screen.

The phone rings. A hand reaches for the phone.

Man on couch: Hello?

Voice on phone: Glassner! Some maniac has left another package for the mayor in the basement of the Cartwright building. Get your butt over there pronto!

The camera turns to reveal the face of our protagonist, Andrew Glassner. His eyes glint with the excitement of another bomb to be defused.

Glassner puts down the phone. He takes a remote control out of his pocket and pauses the movie on the television. He grabs his keys from a table, and picks up a black bag marked "Bomb Squad" by the front door. Before we can fully comprehend the speed of his actions, we see the front door closing. Glassner is on the job.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us

I came across What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee and decided to give it a read.

Straight off the bat, Gee informs us that while he has academic credentials (primarily as a reformed linguist) he has only discovered video games in the past few years. This sets the tone for the book: this is not to be a dry tome full of footnotes and theories, but rather a journal of one man's experiences with video games.

Only it isn't just a journal. The more interesting bits are where Gee presents us with his experiences playing games like Pikmin and Half-Life, and though he doesn't make many sophisticated observations about gameplay he does have an interesting perspective to share.

Reading for April, 2006

The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. Notes to follow.

The Wild Palms by William Faulkner.

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl.

Company by Max Barry. Funny for about ten pages, then it just becomes tedious and sloppy.

Oh, and I also listened to a books-on-tape version of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. This would have been nine hours of agony, but I was able to adjust the pitch control on my tape player and speed things up a bit. A dreary book.

Reading for March, 2006

Dragon Weather by Lawrence Watt-Evans. I've been a fan of Watt-Evans for a while, though for some reason his books are sometimes hard to find. His writing has always been of a consistent quality, unlike a lot of the other stuff on the fantasy and science fiction shelves. As he has gotten older, he seems to have become increasingly cynical. In Dragon Weather, he creates a protagonist who loses his family and is then sold into slavery, and after escaping vows to seek vengeance.

His books have also gotten longer, and this is the first volume of a trilogy, following the trend of every other fantasy writer in the market today. But I'm not sure I like the story enough to continue.

Stanisław Lem died on March 27, 2006. In tribute, I read Eden which I bought at a library book sale many years ago. Lem's descriptions always make me feel a little queasy, and I've never been able to reread any of his stories.

Reading for February, 2006

Rogue Star by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, the third part of the Starchild Trilogy.

The Giver by Lois Lowry, winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal. And then I read Gathering Blue by Lowry as well.

That's it for February. The rest of my time was spent feeding and taking care of the new daughter. And playing Civilization IV.

Reading for January, 2006

The Wanderer by Fritz Lieber. Won the Hugo Award in 1965. The story is pretty much a template plot for a disaster movie, complete with handfuls of oddball/nonintellectual characters who get killed as the disaster worsens.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl. 1978 Hugo Award. The first copy I had (checked out from library) was missing a signature, and had actually been stamped "Withdrawn", but they sent it to me anyway.

Reading for December, 2005

It was a busy month, but a good amount of time for reading, at the hospital, visiting relatives, and so on.

Fool's Fate by Robin Hobb. Book three of the Tawny Man Trilogy. This was my least favorite of the FitzChivalry/Elderling novels, so much of the story is spent tying up loose ends, and the book lacks any real conflict on a scale equal to the previous books. The Tawny Man certainly didn't need to be 2000+ pages to tell the story it told.

Reading for November, 2005

I read most of James Agee's A Death in the Family, but skipped the last forty pages or so. There is some criticism that the book was assembled by editors and did not appear in a form Agee would have approved of.

Reading for October, 2005

William Faulkner, Light in August. Number 54 on the Modern Library list.

James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan. I think the Studs Lonigan Trilogy is only sold as a single volume these days, but I found a library copy of the first book. It is full of outdated references and deals with fairly dark subject matter, like "gangshags" and a plethora of prejudice.

Reading for September, 2005

A more fruitful month for reading, though I didn't finish those books which were previously unfinished.

Carol Shields, A Fairly Conventional Woman. There were two copies of Happenstance at the library, and one was twice as long as the other. I took the longer copy, which was a dos-a-dos bound copy of two Shields novels. A marketing gimmick, I guess. So I read The Wife's Tale, which was actually the more recently (1982) written of the two novels.

Reading guide for Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is on the 2005 Booker Prize shortlist. As Ishiguro won the Booker in 1989, his nomination here isn't a compelling endorsement; the judges like to reward their favorite authors based on their past accomplishments rather than their most recent work.

Never Let Me Go is written in an unrelenting confessional voice using a limited vocabulary. It was only after at the halfway mark, when I put the book down to find something else to read, did I realize that the "students" of the story, including the narrator, were intellectual simpletons. Oh, of course there is the whole being-cloned-for-their-vital-organs thing, but that is just so much window dressing.

Reading for August, 2005

You know how sometimes you just try to read too many clumsy books in a row and lose all reading momentum? I think I'll call this "reader's block", and here's hoping I'm not the only person in the world who has had this experience.

It is hard to say when it started. I've been working on Dreiser's An American Tragedy, which is... very long. After four hundred pages, Clyde still hasn't killed Roberta.

Then there was the disaster of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. For statistical purposes, Florida considers medicine and law as creative practices. They aren't part of the "super creative core", however. Whatever. I don't need a fake book to affirm my creative impulses. But to be fair, you can ignore my opinion, I didn't come close to reading the whole book.

The Rise of the Something Somthing

I tried to read The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. Florida is a statistician who noticed some "interesting" correlations when looking at urban data mixed with social and occupational data. So he wrote a book. A very repetitive and anecdotal book about the rise of a "creative class", a class which completely defies any statistical or sensible definition, as its members do not have any particular economic status, geographic history, social characteristics, or occupational grouping other than being professional and [mostly] not in the service industry. Search and replace "creative" with any other adjective and you'd have an equally weighty argument for your own rising (and nonexistent) class.

I hear Florida is making a career on the lecture circuit. He must have a dynamic personality.

Reading for July, 2005

It turns out The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler has no plot. Oh, there are a handful of scenes in which characters interact, and things happen off-stage, but this is all "get to know the character" stuff, which culminates in... Fowler's collection quotes of other authors talking about Jane Austen.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The writing is at times poetic, but the narrative structure is haphazard, evasively moving towards "the big secret" which lends little momentum to the story. But don't mind my opinion, this book has already made it only college reading lists where it will hover for a while before getting pushed aside for other things...

Reading for June, 2005

June reading:

Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields
The Box Garden by Carol Shields

These are the first two novels written by Shields. There are some related characters in the two books, but each story stands by itself. I found Small Ceremonies to be more appealing, mostly because, like the novel I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo, it deals with a main character who has just written a failed novel and is trying to figure out what to do next. I suppose there are some writers who are self-conscious about writing, and some not at all.

Reading for May, 2005

In the past month, I read:

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995. I think Larry's Party is an even better novel, which was the first book I read by Shields. She had a gift for cosmic comedy. In case you don't know, she died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 68.

Thinks Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I picked this one off of the "popular library" shelf at the central library, the shelf where they have multiple copies of books which are commonly assigned to students. I see that there are some sequels.

The Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett, number 87 on the Modern Library list. The main characters, Constance and Sophia, are wholly dull. One thing I will say for Bennett: he doesn't disappoint your expectations because he never raises your expectations. And with this novel, I am at the 50/100 mark on the Modern Library list.

Abandoned novels:

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize with her most recent novel. That book has a long hold queue at the library, so I picked this one up first. Full of sleepy prose, there is no real direction to the story, as far as I can tell after skimming through the second half. The story is set in a town on the edge of a glacial lake, and consequently fails to be relevant to the world of 1980, when it was written. Maybe, just maybe, there is a quirky arthouse screenplay in there, but who cares?

Reading for April, 2005

On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Number 55 on the Modern Library list.

Golden Fool by Robin Hobb. The second book in the Tawny Man trilogy. I was glad to have this book with me at the MySQL conference.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

Current reading: The Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett. Number 87 on the Modern Library list. Once I've finished this one I'll be at the halfway mark. Then I think I'll take a break from the Modern Library.

Reading for March, 2005

The Glass Hammer by K.W. Jeter. Reread.

Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb. The first book in the third trilogy by Hobb (who has also written several books under another name). Hobb is a solid fantasy writer; throughout the FitzChivalry Farseer books she uses a single voice for all the storytelling. There are too many writers out there who shift the narrative voice as it suits them, the worst offenders being those writers who like to "peek" into the mind of the villain / antagonist because they don't know how else to move the story forward. Jasper Fforde's /The Eyre Affair/ is a good example of this slovenly writing style.

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Reading for February, 2005

February is the shortest month.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. #17 on the Modern Library list. A haunting story full of tragedy. Some amazing characterizations, where you get to see the character from both the inside and the outside.

Reading for January, 2005

Here's what I've been reading this past month:

The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. #56 on the Modern Library list. Actually I may have read this in December. Speculation why book is on list: Sam Spade is an archetype private eye. This type of book is more important for its influences on cinema than for any literary qualities, a story that doesn't claim any deep significance.

2004 in Review (books)

Best read, non-fiction: Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics, 3rd edition, by Stan Gibilisco. Over the summer I spent a fair amount of time mucking around with a pile of resistors and capacitors, trying to make an LED flash. As a student, I took a lot of math classes, but the only physics class I ever had was as a high school junior, so now, many years later, I find there was actually a reason for learning how to do differential equations. Gibilisco's book is a sizeable 800 pages, but well organized into short chapters for easy reading. If you're trying to teach yourself electronics, I'd suggest getting both this book and Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest M. Mims III. If you're having difficulty figuring out something in one book, the other might have a better explanation.

Worst read, non-fiction: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, 1990. Comments here. Complete rubbish, made worse by the fact that the concept appeals to some academics.

Twisty Little Passages

Nick Montfort's book on interactive fiction, Twisty Little Passages, describes itself in two ways. The first description (p. 5) reads:

This book seeks to describe some of the intellectual history of the form and its relationship to other literary and gaming forms, and to computing and other computing programs, while critically examining a representative selection of important works and describing their interrelationships.

The second description (p. 14) reads:

Thus this book considers [interactive fiction] works from the standpoint of the narratives they can generate, the way they function as riddles, and their nature as computer programs.

Thus Montfort has promised to present two equally important perspectives on interactive fiction (IF), the first a critical history of the form's origins, the second a critical analysis of the form's operations, or to put it in even simpler terms, where IF operates and how IF operates. Given the meagre attention previously given to interactive fiction by scholars, it is this first perspective, the critical history, that is most needed, and that takes a more dominant role in the book.

Against the Flow

In Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play, the authors introduce the concept of flow as a kind of pleasurable experience. Flow is the state of mind where someone achieves a high degree of focus and enjoyment, they tell us.

Shortly after finishing the book, I had a brief exchange on the suspension of disbelief [Intelligent Artifice] in which flow was mentioned. It appeared that flow is a popular idea in the study of games.

Being unfamiliar with the origins of flow, I picked up Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (I first browsed through Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, Csikzentmihalyi's monograph from 1975 detailing his research technique.)

2003 in Review (books)

Best read, non-fiction: The Mind's Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism, Vincent Descombes, Stephen Adam Schwartz (trans). A well crafted argument. More people need to read this book. Let me repeat myself: more people need to read this book. Particularly all of you aspiring computer science majors and computational linguisticists. (Amazon customers who bought this book also bought: Dude, Where's My Country? by Michael Moore.)

Worst read, non-fiction: The Language Police, Diane Ravitch. Ravitch's stunning conclusion about how to fix education: better educated teachers. Sounds like the chicken and the egg.

Seek Ye the Gnarl (part 3)

Final notes on Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play.

Unit 4: Culture is the final section of the book, and the shortest. This is the place where, typically, the subject takes on a certain urgency, culminating in an explosion of broad conclusions and/or open-ended questions. Nothing quite so dramatic here. Instead we get this unit on culture, and a set of activites which are related to games by rather loose connections.

Seek Ye the Gnarl (part 2)

More notes on Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play.

Unit 3: PLAY presents six different schemas for talking about games with respect to "play".

Editorial notes: This unit seems to be the real core material of the author's interests. It is better edited and provides a more thorough discussion of the areas covered. Here we get 20-30 pages on each schema, almost twice the amount of material compared to units 2 and 4. The commissioned game notes by Kira Snyder reveal more interesting detail about the design process than the previous two.

Seek Ye the Gnarl

I am working my way through Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play. (I discovered this book by way of andrew's reading list [grandtextauto].) I've just completed Unit 2, which puts me somewhere around the halfway mark. Some preliminary notes:

- plenty of typos (a useless thing to say, really)
- I'm not sure I like the writing style. Lots of remarks like "Do you remember when we talked about..." and "As a game designer, you need to..." I think this was a choice to give the book a focused target audience, but it could have been taken up a level. Add a little redundancy for things like key definitions, or at the very least add page number references instead of "back in Chapter 3". These are all things I'm sure will be taken care of in the second edition.
- It's a textbook.

Now, as far as content goes...