Intentions and Consequences: February Reading
This very nearly wound up titled "Geniuses and Megalomania", because there seemed to be an awful lot of that this month, but the entry wound up bookended by lighter stuff. Thank goodness.
Monsoon Diary (Shoba Narayan): Autobiography about life as the bright daughter of a large South Indian family that loves food. Very lightweight, good bedtime reading - as long as you don't go to bed on an empty stomach. Food is a major focus of the book: common breakfasts, memorable feasts, a well-intentioned but fairly disastrous charity dinner; love expressed through lunches. The author includes recipes at chapter ends. It tempts me to cook, which I consider a good thing.
Cold Tom (Sally Prue): Tom of the Fae is - horrors - enslaved to humans by love. YA fluff with one interesting idea (love as a chain) and a whiff of Tam Lin. It suffers from the cuteness and over-tidiness seen in a lot of YA books - very small cast, who all wind up in close happy relationships - and the central theme's pretty standard YA stuff, but the perspective twist is kind of cool. Worth the dollar it cost at a library sale, but not necessarily worth the full price.
The Life of the World to Come (Kage Baker): Fifth novel in the Company series. (Finally!) It moves things along very nicely. Document D, Alec Checkerfield, time travel, weird and possibly metaphorical prophetic dreams. Things go boom! in bad ways, as they tend to around the botanist Mendoza.
For people unfamiliar with Kage Baker's novels: the Company series focuses on events in the lives of certain time traveling immortals who steal great cultural works and to-be-extinct species from their doomed fates and stash them in improbable places for the edification of future generations and profit of Dr. Zeus Inc., the company that created the immortals. Only there's a few hitches, like that distressing "things go boom! around Mendoza" pattern. Sometimes there are also little gray men. If someone wants to explain what was going on at the end of Graveyard Game (or send me a copy of the paperback), email or indicate spoiler-ness when commenting.
The style is fun, the plotting multi-novel, and attention to detail sometimes is really rewarding. Hooked? Find a copy of In the Garden of Eden and start catching up.
Because oh the stuff to catch up on. Remember that "attention to detail" thing? I need to hit the library for copies of "Son Observe the Time" and The Graveyard Game. "That be thuyne uncle Labienus" yes there's some sneaky cross-arc connections. The sixth book is going to be all sorts of fun. Who knows, Mendoza might actually finally be back.
Reread bits of Cyteen. It's a stress thing.
Watchmen (Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons): Notable '80s graphic novel, noted for being an "adult" comic back when they weren't so much. Edward Blake, ex-superhero, is killed. Those who try to find out why discover they've got a thread into a Gordian knot of trouble.
It's, um, well. Picking this up for some light bedtime reading was really a mistake. (I have this problem quite often when I'm trying to read comics. Which is probably why I don't read them much.) There's an awful lot of blood and violence, I can't think of a major protagonist I'd want to spend time with, the art does what it's supposed to, the blocking is striking, and the plot is fabulous. All the byzantine twisting of now, history, minor characters, world events, and even interesting use of the use/abuse of power theme. It's cool. It's intricate. It's just... did Moore really have to throw someone out a skyscraper on the first page?
So. Major points for fabulous plotting, but... don't read this if you're convinced the world's in bad shape.
A Beautiful Mind (Sylvia Nasar): Biography of John Nash, Nobel laureate and mad mathematician. Very good book - extensive research, heavily footnoted, and a very lively read. And occasionally distressingly close to home. The science library at school has a resident Weird Guy - badly dressed, gives off the creepy vibe, makes female undergrads (at least me) a little nervous. I've heard one very apocryphal origin story, and mostly try to avoid him. Unfair and paranoid? And at the same time, maybe he's the violent sort of crazy.
Mental health care in this country is a mess. I'll be over here, being vaguely upset and incoherent.
The one place I think A Beautiful Mind falls down a bit is explaining the concepts key to Nash's work. It does an okay job with game theory, but everything else tends to blur into mathematical vocabulary glossolalia. I may be biased on this point, though, because my other recent significant nonfiction reading has been The Selfish Gene. Selfish Gene is all concept, all the time; a very different proposition from a biography. (I've been reading Selfish Gene since late December or early January. It's heavy going, but really interesting and intellectually exciting.
I just called something "intellectually exciting." Shoot me, please, before the bourgeoisie mentality spreads.)
That's my only real quibble about the book. A Beautiful Mind gets bonus points for making me think about how I look at people and how society treats the usefully eccentric and/or the less usefully odd. Find it and read it so I have someone to talk to about it!
I also reread Mirabile (Janet Kagan) in random chunks. Comfort reading, With silly puns, off-the-wall biology, and nice characterization. Everyone means well, and it generally works out.
My last-weekend-of-the-month binge was Hellspark (Janet Kagan). Mirabile is a short story collection, and Hellspark I believe a first novel, and I think the difference shows. In brief, Tocohol Susumo, a red-haired golden-eyed Hellspark trader with a Really Special extrapolative computer, is asked to solve a murder and a question of sentience. I'm glad I read this when I was younger and less jaded by fandom, because I would've tossed this as a Mary Sue-ish if I'd read it after reading all that bad fic. I would have missed a very entertaining story that's just a bit larger than life, in that nifty space opera way. My other quibble with the book is the way everyone's good intentions work out for the best, but after some of the other stuff I read this week I can't say that's a bad thing, in fiction.
In February I read an awful lot of the fiction on the weekends, when I slept late and failed to get anything done that I'd planned on. I can either blame this on a disinclination to get up when it's cold out (and the circulation in the house is terrible; the upstairs is always ten degrees warmer than the downstairs) or my disinclination to do my homework. One of these can be solved by a heater. The real problem probably can be solved by willpower, or going to the school library, out of reach of all that pesky fiction.
Monsoon Diary (Shoba Narayan): Autobiography about life as the bright daughter of a large South Indian family that loves food. Very lightweight, good bedtime reading - as long as you don't go to bed on an empty stomach. Food is a major focus of the book: common breakfasts, memorable feasts, a well-intentioned but fairly disastrous charity dinner; love expressed through lunches. The author includes recipes at chapter ends. It tempts me to cook, which I consider a good thing.
Cold Tom (Sally Prue): Tom of the Fae is - horrors - enslaved to humans by love. YA fluff with one interesting idea (love as a chain) and a whiff of Tam Lin. It suffers from the cuteness and over-tidiness seen in a lot of YA books - very small cast, who all wind up in close happy relationships - and the central theme's pretty standard YA stuff, but the perspective twist is kind of cool. Worth the dollar it cost at a library sale, but not necessarily worth the full price.
The Life of the World to Come (Kage Baker): Fifth novel in the Company series. (Finally!) It moves things along very nicely. Document D, Alec Checkerfield, time travel, weird and possibly metaphorical prophetic dreams. Things go boom! in bad ways, as they tend to around the botanist Mendoza.
For people unfamiliar with Kage Baker's novels: the Company series focuses on events in the lives of certain time traveling immortals who steal great cultural works and to-be-extinct species from their doomed fates and stash them in improbable places for the edification of future generations and profit of Dr. Zeus Inc., the company that created the immortals. Only there's a few hitches, like that distressing "things go boom! around Mendoza" pattern. Sometimes there are also little gray men. If someone wants to explain what was going on at the end of Graveyard Game (or send me a copy of the paperback), email or indicate spoiler-ness when commenting.
The style is fun, the plotting multi-novel, and attention to detail sometimes is really rewarding. Hooked? Find a copy of In the Garden of Eden and start catching up.
Because oh the stuff to catch up on. Remember that "attention to detail" thing? I need to hit the library for copies of "Son Observe the Time" and The Graveyard Game. "That be thuyne uncle Labienus" yes there's some sneaky cross-arc connections. The sixth book is going to be all sorts of fun. Who knows, Mendoza might actually finally be back.
Reread bits of Cyteen. It's a stress thing.
Watchmen (Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons): Notable '80s graphic novel, noted for being an "adult" comic back when they weren't so much. Edward Blake, ex-superhero, is killed. Those who try to find out why discover they've got a thread into a Gordian knot of trouble.
It's, um, well. Picking this up for some light bedtime reading was really a mistake. (I have this problem quite often when I'm trying to read comics. Which is probably why I don't read them much.) There's an awful lot of blood and violence, I can't think of a major protagonist I'd want to spend time with, the art does what it's supposed to, the blocking is striking, and the plot is fabulous. All the byzantine twisting of now, history, minor characters, world events, and even interesting use of the use/abuse of power theme. It's cool. It's intricate. It's just... did Moore really have to throw someone out a skyscraper on the first page?
So. Major points for fabulous plotting, but... don't read this if you're convinced the world's in bad shape.
A Beautiful Mind (Sylvia Nasar): Biography of John Nash, Nobel laureate and mad mathematician. Very good book - extensive research, heavily footnoted, and a very lively read. And occasionally distressingly close to home. The science library at school has a resident Weird Guy - badly dressed, gives off the creepy vibe, makes female undergrads (at least me) a little nervous. I've heard one very apocryphal origin story, and mostly try to avoid him. Unfair and paranoid? And at the same time, maybe he's the violent sort of crazy.
Mental health care in this country is a mess. I'll be over here, being vaguely upset and incoherent.
The one place I think A Beautiful Mind falls down a bit is explaining the concepts key to Nash's work. It does an okay job with game theory, but everything else tends to blur into mathematical vocabulary glossolalia. I may be biased on this point, though, because my other recent significant nonfiction reading has been The Selfish Gene. Selfish Gene is all concept, all the time; a very different proposition from a biography. (I've been reading Selfish Gene since late December or early January. It's heavy going, but really interesting and intellectually exciting.
I just called something "intellectually exciting." Shoot me, please, before the bourgeoisie mentality spreads.)
That's my only real quibble about the book. A Beautiful Mind gets bonus points for making me think about how I look at people and how society treats the usefully eccentric and/or the less usefully odd. Find it and read it so I have someone to talk to about it!
I also reread Mirabile (Janet Kagan) in random chunks. Comfort reading, With silly puns, off-the-wall biology, and nice characterization. Everyone means well, and it generally works out.
My last-weekend-of-the-month binge was Hellspark (Janet Kagan). Mirabile is a short story collection, and Hellspark I believe a first novel, and I think the difference shows. In brief, Tocohol Susumo, a red-haired golden-eyed Hellspark trader with a Really Special extrapolative computer, is asked to solve a murder and a question of sentience. I'm glad I read this when I was younger and less jaded by fandom, because I would've tossed this as a Mary Sue-ish if I'd read it after reading all that bad fic. I would have missed a very entertaining story that's just a bit larger than life, in that nifty space opera way. My other quibble with the book is the way everyone's good intentions work out for the best, but after some of the other stuff I read this week I can't say that's a bad thing, in fiction.
In February I read an awful lot of the fiction on the weekends, when I slept late and failed to get anything done that I'd planned on. I can either blame this on a disinclination to get up when it's cold out (and the circulation in the house is terrible; the upstairs is always ten degrees warmer than the downstairs) or my disinclination to do my homework. One of these can be solved by a heater. The real problem probably can be solved by willpower, or going to the school library, out of reach of all that pesky fiction.