Guitar Duel at Dawn, Mortars at Nightfall (July Reading)
Scott Pilgrim vol. 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Bryan Lee O'Malley): It took almost exactly one commute to read this. It's hard to tell if I disliked this less because of circumstances (commuting to PT job on bus) or because SP's storyline is "how to suck a little less at being a grown-up person."
The Best American Science Writing 2009 (Ed. Natalie Angier): Snapshot of last year's pop sci writing. I'm playing find the agenda in my nonfiction this month, so I'm very drawn to articles playing with fire - "The First Ache" (fetal pain and abortion), "A Cloud of Smoke" (9/11 hero possibly wasn't) - and/or arguing an agenda: "The Truth About Autism", "The Sky is Falling", "Birdbrain". This year's collection is weighted toward bio/sociology, a change from some earlier anthologies stuffed with astrophysics and computing stuff. I was surprised that Catherine Price's recounting of her week trying to be as untraceable as possible didn't trip my "more sigmas from mainstream than I'm really comfortable with" flag.
Atul Gawande - The Itch
Sallie Tisdale - Twitchy
Annie Murphy Paul - The First Ache
Oliver Sacks - A Journey Inside the Brain
David Wolman - The Truth About Autism
Alex Kotlowitz - Blocking the Transmission of Violence
Jina Moore - Reading the Wounds
Jennifer Kahn - A Cloud of Smoke
John Horgan - War! What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing
Marina Cords - Face-Offs of the Female Kind
Martin Enserink - Tough Lessons from Golden Rice
J. Madeleine Nash - Back to the Future
Elizabeth Royte - A Tall, Cool Drink of . .. Sewage?
David Quammen - Contagious Cancer
Jennifer Margulis - Looking Up
Margaret Talbot - Birdbrain
Gary Wolf - Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
John Seabrook - Hello, HAL
Catherine Price - The Anonymity Experiment
Gregg Overbye - The Sky is Falling
Dennis Overbye - Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?
Karen Olsson - The Final Frontier
Theresa Brown - Perhaps Death is Proud; More Reason to Savor Life
The Onion - Evolutionists Flock to Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain
The House of the Stag (Kage Baker): Prequel to Baker's fantasy novel The Anvil of the World, describing the rise of the Dark Lord and his wife the Saint. Highly entertaining: Baker wasn't an extraordinarily inventive worldbuilder, or a deathless prose writer, or the most clever at plot devices, but her universes hold together on their own terms, the prose is stylistically appropriate, and the stories serve the plot. What Baker does is humor, especially satire.
Goodbye to Yesterday's Tomorrow (Alexei Panshin): Short story collection. Surprisingly philosophical, occasionally to the point where the message nearly obliterates the story. Panshin's intro calls the collection's theme "what does it mean to be an adult human being?" and that nicely binds stories set in standalone worldbuilding, the same universe as Panshin's Hugo-winning novel Rite of Passage, and the present day. The diversity of style doesn't always work to the collection's advantage: if "Sky Blue" is trying to make a point about communication through its idiosyncratic made-up words, the message was largely lost in my frustration with the style. "When the Vertical World Becomes Horizontal" wants to be a folk story, and succeeds mostly as post-'60s faux-folk. When I read this, I felt the general attention of the story moved from broad questions of responsibility and general ethics questions - mirrors about questions of the day - to more explicitly time-sensitive questions of environmental impact and right thinking in a very '70s American idiom. "How Can We Sink When We Can Fly?" pulls this off in an interesting way; "Lady Sunshine and the Magoon of Beatus" nearly inspired me to bounce the book against the nearest wall. I'm deeply dissatisfied by most "literary" and politically-motivated fiction, and found some of the the more experimental stories interesting, but not entertaining.
A Wizard of Mars (Diane Duane): Duane's got the ball! She's passing the 20-yard line... 10-yard... she weaves... TOUCHDOWN! GOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLL!
I have been complaining for at least five years about certain concepts in a the YW series. Therefore, I was immensely pleased that at no point does Mars feature the Lone Power As Itself. Victory dance!
Oh yeah, shippers? Last page shoutout.
The Good Soliders (David Finkel): Army unit in the 2007 surge, as witnessed by a Pulitzer-winning reporter. This reinforced some notions I already had: being an American army officer in Iraq is the very definition of "bad day"; superlative emergency medicine breeds catastrophic long-term medical bills. It's interesting to note the battalion commander's relentless optimism and "big picture" focus clash with soldiers' daily frustrations, stresses, deaths, disasters. Who is right?
The topic is such I feel I ought to have more to say, especially since I haven't really talked about the actual book, but then I'd get into journalist agenda, military objectives, culture and politics, and I'm not feeling up for that.
Scott Pilgrim vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim Versus the Universe (Bryan Lee O'Malley): The bus distraction level continues to trump the energy investment barrier of library holds. Barely.
Doctor's Orders (Diane Duane): My reactions to "leave McCoy in charge of the Enterprise for a shift; of course it's going to get complicated" suffer from coloring from the new movie and Duane's other novels. I see walking tree-like organisms and think, "hey, proto-Demisiv!" When I sit at the keyboard, I think "someone's going to remix this for the reboot, yes? Hmm?" Doctor's Orders isn't a heartbreaking work of deathless prose, but like most early Duane, it has a sufficiently interesting plot. It's my engagement with the text taking an unexpected spin. Why get one story when you can get three? (Original story, reboot version, and the culture meditation between them.) This served as reasonable light entertainment, but I need to stop visualizing Kirk as Chris Pine to get something like the intended effect.
The Prince of the Marshes (And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq) (Rory Stewart): Some books just keep giving; Marshes was littered with other people's bookmarks. I found this deeply interesting in combination with my sporadic military memoir reading; Stewart has different priorities in Iraq than most of the writers I've read so far, and that colors his account of events. I get the impression his approach to priorities is very goal-oriented; justice is postponed in favor of avoiding further violence and disintegration of the remaining structures of authority. Over and over Stewart potrays his CPA offices as bodies trying to to compromise between oppositional groups (moderate middle class, Sadrists, tribes, Marsh Arabs, etc) sometimes with positive outsomes, sometimes backfiring. I read his reaction to Abu Ghraib and find myself thinking about situational ethics and lines in the sand: "I almost resigned . . . I realized I had always known, without admitting it to myself, that such things were going on . . . Military culture was often about bending rules to get results; a certain ruthlessness was admired; many of these things happened in hazing rituals." (The Rule of Law" p343 HC) Again: I had always known, without admitting it to myself, that such things were going on. Where do you draw the line, and start really angering the local powers who likely will inherit authority the CPA arrogated to itself? The common thread in non-Iraqi accounts of the Iraq war and occupation is disillusionment: soldiers, British CPA employees, officers, and American civilians all say, "we came, we achieved our military objectives, we failed our diplomatic objectives." I can't attest to the accuracy or inaccuracy of this as nonfiction, but it's an interesting piece of the Iraq jigsaw.
A description of the first meeting of the CPA-appointed Maysan provincial council reminded me of Bujold's fiction, in a very Barrayaran Age of Isolation way.
On our right was the Prince's faction; the Islamist leaders sat on the left. In the front row were clerics and sheikhs; young mayors, women, and technocrats sat in the back. This seating arrangement, which had not been planned, echoes both Western parliamentary divisions (conservatives on the right, radicals on the left) and more traditional Iraqi codes of precedence. I knew these people well. Most had killed others; all had lost close relatives. Some wanted a state modeled on seventh-century Arabia, some wanted something that resembled even older, pre-Islamic tribal systems. Some were funded by the Iranian secret service; others sold oil on the local black market, ran protection rackets, looted government property, and smuggled drugs. Most were linked to construction companies that made immense profits by cheating us [the CPA]. Two were first cousins and six [of 39] were from a single tribe; some had tried to assassinate each other. This dubious gathering included and balanced, however, all the most powerful political factions in the province, and I believed that if anyone could secure the province, they could. -"Our Successors", p253 HC
What's colorful in fiction becomes stressful and sometimes horrifying in real life.
A Conspiracy of Kings (Megan Whalen Turner): Fourth in the series; this time Sophos is the main character and storyteller. It's important to remember this is YA and the characters act in, hmmm, fictionalized tropes (Attolia and Attolis! Augh!), and not always the way real people would. However, the wildly unreliable narration continues to draw me: knowing that MWT isn't letting her characters share the full truth, what is actually going on in any given scene? Also, what side-stories are happening just offscreen to the characters who aren't the PoV? The entire series feels a bit indulgent to me: the protagonists are drawn a bit larger than life. Turner likes her characters, even as she makes them suffer; one gets the sense that Everything Will Be All Right In the End. The sense of humor lurking behind each story doesn't hurt, either. These may not be novels of great depth, but they're good stories for distraction,
Numbers game: 10 total finished. 10 new, 0 reread; 7 fiction (2 graphic novels, 1 short story collection), 3 nonfiction (1 essay collection)
The Best American Science Writing 2009 (Ed. Natalie Angier): Snapshot of last year's pop sci writing. I'm playing find the agenda in my nonfiction this month, so I'm very drawn to articles playing with fire - "The First Ache" (fetal pain and abortion), "A Cloud of Smoke" (9/11 hero possibly wasn't) - and/or arguing an agenda: "The Truth About Autism", "The Sky is Falling", "Birdbrain". This year's collection is weighted toward bio/sociology, a change from some earlier anthologies stuffed with astrophysics and computing stuff. I was surprised that Catherine Price's recounting of her week trying to be as untraceable as possible didn't trip my "more sigmas from mainstream than I'm really comfortable with" flag.
Atul Gawande - The Itch
Sallie Tisdale - Twitchy
Annie Murphy Paul - The First Ache
Oliver Sacks - A Journey Inside the Brain
David Wolman - The Truth About Autism
Alex Kotlowitz - Blocking the Transmission of Violence
Jina Moore - Reading the Wounds
Jennifer Kahn - A Cloud of Smoke
John Horgan - War! What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing
Marina Cords - Face-Offs of the Female Kind
Martin Enserink - Tough Lessons from Golden Rice
J. Madeleine Nash - Back to the Future
Elizabeth Royte - A Tall, Cool Drink of . .. Sewage?
David Quammen - Contagious Cancer
Jennifer Margulis - Looking Up
Margaret Talbot - Birdbrain
Gary Wolf - Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
John Seabrook - Hello, HAL
Catherine Price - The Anonymity Experiment
Gregg Overbye - The Sky is Falling
Dennis Overbye - Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?
Karen Olsson - The Final Frontier
Theresa Brown - Perhaps Death is Proud; More Reason to Savor Life
The Onion - Evolutionists Flock to Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain
The House of the Stag (Kage Baker): Prequel to Baker's fantasy novel The Anvil of the World, describing the rise of the Dark Lord and his wife the Saint. Highly entertaining: Baker wasn't an extraordinarily inventive worldbuilder, or a deathless prose writer, or the most clever at plot devices, but her universes hold together on their own terms, the prose is stylistically appropriate, and the stories serve the plot. What Baker does is humor, especially satire.
Goodbye to Yesterday's Tomorrow (Alexei Panshin): Short story collection. Surprisingly philosophical, occasionally to the point where the message nearly obliterates the story. Panshin's intro calls the collection's theme "what does it mean to be an adult human being?" and that nicely binds stories set in standalone worldbuilding, the same universe as Panshin's Hugo-winning novel Rite of Passage, and the present day. The diversity of style doesn't always work to the collection's advantage: if "Sky Blue" is trying to make a point about communication through its idiosyncratic made-up words, the message was largely lost in my frustration with the style. "When the Vertical World Becomes Horizontal" wants to be a folk story, and succeeds mostly as post-'60s faux-folk. When I read this, I felt the general attention of the story moved from broad questions of responsibility and general ethics questions - mirrors about questions of the day - to more explicitly time-sensitive questions of environmental impact and right thinking in a very '70s American idiom. "How Can We Sink When We Can Fly?" pulls this off in an interesting way; "Lady Sunshine and the Magoon of Beatus" nearly inspired me to bounce the book against the nearest wall. I'm deeply dissatisfied by most "literary" and politically-motivated fiction, and found some of the the more experimental stories interesting, but not entertaining.
A Wizard of Mars (Diane Duane): Duane's got the ball! She's passing the 20-yard line... 10-yard... she weaves... TOUCHDOWN! GOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLL!
I have been complaining for at least five years about certain concepts in a the YW series. Therefore, I was immensely pleased that at no point does Mars feature the Lone Power As Itself. Victory dance!
Oh yeah, shippers? Last page shoutout.
The Good Soliders (David Finkel): Army unit in the 2007 surge, as witnessed by a Pulitzer-winning reporter. This reinforced some notions I already had: being an American army officer in Iraq is the very definition of "bad day"; superlative emergency medicine breeds catastrophic long-term medical bills. It's interesting to note the battalion commander's relentless optimism and "big picture" focus clash with soldiers' daily frustrations, stresses, deaths, disasters. Who is right?
The topic is such I feel I ought to have more to say, especially since I haven't really talked about the actual book, but then I'd get into journalist agenda, military objectives, culture and politics, and I'm not feeling up for that.
Scott Pilgrim vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim Versus the Universe (Bryan Lee O'Malley): The bus distraction level continues to trump the energy investment barrier of library holds. Barely.
Doctor's Orders (Diane Duane): My reactions to "leave McCoy in charge of the Enterprise for a shift; of course it's going to get complicated" suffer from coloring from the new movie and Duane's other novels. I see walking tree-like organisms and think, "hey, proto-Demisiv!" When I sit at the keyboard, I think "someone's going to remix this for the reboot, yes? Hmm?" Doctor's Orders isn't a heartbreaking work of deathless prose, but like most early Duane, it has a sufficiently interesting plot. It's my engagement with the text taking an unexpected spin. Why get one story when you can get three? (Original story, reboot version, and the culture meditation between them.) This served as reasonable light entertainment, but I need to stop visualizing Kirk as Chris Pine to get something like the intended effect.
The Prince of the Marshes (And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq) (Rory Stewart): Some books just keep giving; Marshes was littered with other people's bookmarks. I found this deeply interesting in combination with my sporadic military memoir reading; Stewart has different priorities in Iraq than most of the writers I've read so far, and that colors his account of events. I get the impression his approach to priorities is very goal-oriented; justice is postponed in favor of avoiding further violence and disintegration of the remaining structures of authority. Over and over Stewart potrays his CPA offices as bodies trying to to compromise between oppositional groups (moderate middle class, Sadrists, tribes, Marsh Arabs, etc) sometimes with positive outsomes, sometimes backfiring. I read his reaction to Abu Ghraib and find myself thinking about situational ethics and lines in the sand: "I almost resigned . . . I realized I had always known, without admitting it to myself, that such things were going on . . . Military culture was often about bending rules to get results; a certain ruthlessness was admired; many of these things happened in hazing rituals." (The Rule of Law" p343 HC) Again: I had always known, without admitting it to myself, that such things were going on. Where do you draw the line, and start really angering the local powers who likely will inherit authority the CPA arrogated to itself? The common thread in non-Iraqi accounts of the Iraq war and occupation is disillusionment: soldiers, British CPA employees, officers, and American civilians all say, "we came, we achieved our military objectives, we failed our diplomatic objectives." I can't attest to the accuracy or inaccuracy of this as nonfiction, but it's an interesting piece of the Iraq jigsaw.
A description of the first meeting of the CPA-appointed Maysan provincial council reminded me of Bujold's fiction, in a very Barrayaran Age of Isolation way.
On our right was the Prince's faction; the Islamist leaders sat on the left. In the front row were clerics and sheikhs; young mayors, women, and technocrats sat in the back. This seating arrangement, which had not been planned, echoes both Western parliamentary divisions (conservatives on the right, radicals on the left) and more traditional Iraqi codes of precedence. I knew these people well. Most had killed others; all had lost close relatives. Some wanted a state modeled on seventh-century Arabia, some wanted something that resembled even older, pre-Islamic tribal systems. Some were funded by the Iranian secret service; others sold oil on the local black market, ran protection rackets, looted government property, and smuggled drugs. Most were linked to construction companies that made immense profits by cheating us [the CPA]. Two were first cousins and six [of 39] were from a single tribe; some had tried to assassinate each other. This dubious gathering included and balanced, however, all the most powerful political factions in the province, and I believed that if anyone could secure the province, they could. -"Our Successors", p253 HC
What's colorful in fiction becomes stressful and sometimes horrifying in real life.
A Conspiracy of Kings (Megan Whalen Turner): Fourth in the series; this time Sophos is the main character and storyteller. It's important to remember this is YA and the characters act in, hmmm, fictionalized tropes (Attolia and Attolis! Augh!), and not always the way real people would. However, the wildly unreliable narration continues to draw me: knowing that MWT isn't letting her characters share the full truth, what is actually going on in any given scene? Also, what side-stories are happening just offscreen to the characters who aren't the PoV? The entire series feels a bit indulgent to me: the protagonists are drawn a bit larger than life. Turner likes her characters, even as she makes them suffer; one gets the sense that Everything Will Be All Right In the End. The sense of humor lurking behind each story doesn't hurt, either. These may not be novels of great depth, but they're good stories for distraction,
Numbers game: 10 total finished. 10 new, 0 reread; 7 fiction (2 graphic novels, 1 short story collection), 3 nonfiction (1 essay collection)