Book Post: Chiang, Dahl, O'Leary, Leiber
Most books disappointed me this April. I have been reading a book in Russian that my Dad gave me for my birthday "Fox Fords" - it is 1,000 pages and I needed to break it up. I suspect it would take me awhile. So I would pick books that are either quick read or short for a distraction and most books I have been picking have mostly been frustrating. Except BFG - that was a cute kid's book. So this post is mostly about how these books fell flat for me.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang, 340pp
First disappointing book that I finished in April was Ted Chiang's more recent collection of short stories. I enjoyed the first one, even if I didn't like all the stories there but I had a lot less tolerance for this one. I did like maybe half the stories but I also found his writing style very choppy - he is not terribly good at dialogue and voice - all the characters in a story sound very similar. He is a person of ideas. He develops a story around the idea and then beats it over the head. Some ideas are pretty interesting and it works but some ideas didn't work for me and the dissonance of the writing style just stood out.
I actually took notes on the stories so if you are interested take a look. It is mostly for me to remember.
[Stories]The Merchant and the Alchemist Gate
Written in the style of 1000 and 1 nights, with stories within stories. I liked this one a lot. Set in the medieval middle east, there is a door where one can travel through time either 20 years to the future or 20 years in the past. While one can go to the past or future by 20 years, things are set - traveling to the past or future doesn’t change anything, the timeline is fixed. But you can discover new things about your life and put it into more context, which is exactly what happened to Abbas, the main character. He couldn’t save his wife, but he learned information that he didn’t have before and he could forgive himself. All the side stories were amusing as well. The writing style really worked for me here.
Exhalation
In a world of robots/mechanical people who breathe argon and are in a chrome sealed universe, one discovers that as the pressure of the universe’s “air” equalizes, all the people who rarely died, will die eventually and everyone is slowing down. The main character accepts the eventual death and urges to live for today and to be grateful to life in the first place. It started out intriguingly but then sort of devolved into cliches by the end of appreciating life. The concept was interesting at least.
What’s Expected of Us
Very short story of people going mad when they discover that there is no free will from a toy. A bit short and silly.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects
I hated this story. And it was so long! The writing style felt so juvenile. Even internal thoughts felt so basic. This story goes through years of people training digital lifeforms through changing technology on the internet and software. Once digital lifeforms sold well, then then became a niche. There are ethical dilemmas of when lifeforms are evolved enough to make their own choices even when it comes to sex or exploitation. There is a sort of romantic subplot between several trainers but it just feels so silly. I also don’t care about raising digital lifeforms or the people doing it and their obsession with it. The digital lifeforms were not that interesting. But mostly it was the writing. It didn't feel like a story written by a professional author. This is a very long story too and I don’t know if it needed to be this long.
Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny
This story asks the question of what would happen if a kid has been raised by a mechanical nanny in a scientific way instead of a human one. I’m not sure if I buy the premise that a child raised for two years by a machine would even thrive. Here the claim is that the child won’t even respond to human contract because they are used to the machine. But every study has been clear that children without human contract don’t thrive at all so it feels too overboard.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
Finally, a story that is interesting to me. Adoption of new technology changes us and how we see ourselves and the world and new tech always brought both excitement of fear. This story is set in not so distant future where most people have a recording of their whole life (which doesn't seem that farfetched) and now new tech offers instantaneous search that would basically replace memory and change how people process and see events and their life. The narrator is at first resistant to it since he values true memory even as he realizes how faulty our memory could be. There is also the second story set in a past where a boy in a Guinea tribe learns to write and discovers how the act of writing and technology can change meanings and what is perceived as truth. This contract between future tech that seems to go to far and past tech that we take for granted is well done. And this story gives a lot of food for thought as well. In 50 years the world and people would be different just for tech. Just this year the conversation about AI seemed to shift as it is becoming more and more of a reality and all the uncertainty of what it would do to a new world. I mean even how we work is now different because of the pandemic and use of Zoom and other video platforms that wasn’t thought about just four years ago. So this story plays on that. It also brought to mind an article on deep reading that I used to teach which posited that the internet is changing our brains and we can’t deep read anymore, we just want to skip at the same time as the article reminded how introduction of reading and writing provoked anxiety and fear of memory not being the same. And yet we adopted. Enjoyable story overall to posits that feelings and expressions are as essential to our lives as the facts of it. That truth is not just facts.
And I like how the main character in the story, the Dad, uses the new tech to realize that he remembered something completely opposite to what actually occurred and created a self-delusion and his own self image based on that misremembrance. So new tech was actually useful to him. And I like how in the story of the past Jijingi realizes that new tech of writing and paper doesn’t always point to the right of it and sometimes that tech needs to be ignored for custom and listening to elders.
Also, I have no doubt that “lifelog” when a person has a personal videocam that continuously records their life will actually be reality someday with so many in our culture already posting video and photos of everything, no matter how trivial.
He is still terrible at dialogue - his writing style is very choppy. Two characters don’t really have individual voices as such. And he conveyed his ideals well through the story - he doesn’t need to passage in the end that actually ‘tells’ his idea, he already showed it. He is just hammering at the end and it is insulting to readers’ intelligence and just takes away from the story. The ending went on a little too long. But overall I did enjoy this story since it made me think. Sometimes the author's idea overcome the shortcomings of the writing.
The Great Silence
From a point of view of the parrots, who see themselves as an intelligent species that humans should rather communicate with rather than search for alien. They also learn through vocals and have always been right here. The parrots are dying out but they are not resentful of humans, more wishing that they were seen. This story was pretty forgettable. I had to go back and look up the first line less than a day after I read it to remember what it was about. Meh. Funnily enough, Tanya was reading something for school that mentioned the same parrot who learned words that this story also mentioned.
Omphalos
In a world where there is scientific evidence that world was created about 10 thousand years ago - no rings on trees after that, mummies without navel - where faith is strong, that faith gets questioned when astronomy evidence points to humans being only incidental to God’s creation. Either an early test run before actual creation by God or an afterthought product. The conclusion is a bit predicable, sort of like that quote from “Angel” "if nothing else matters then all that matters is what we do” Free will is in itself miraculous and worth even more than God’s direct attention. While the story and conclusion is pretty cliché by the end, I did like the concept here of a world that did see proof of creation and what that would mean for society and science and scholarship.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
Idea of choices we make. If we live in a world where there was a way to see a parallel universe where we made a different choice would we just say the heck with it or still try to be better. The moral is that the act of trying to be the person you want is what matters. The writing in this story was awkward again. I am just not jelling with his style. And some of the characters and moral dilemmas didn’t seem like real people. Like with psychologist - she felt guilty betraying her friend as a teenager and thought that it was that that drove her friend off the rails, but any other decision at this time would have made that. Decisions and outcomes are not as linked as we think they are. And we should try to be better.
BFG by Roald Dahl, 208pp
This was a pretty cute book. It all takes place in like two days. Sophie, an orphan, see the giant out of her window, who basically kidnaps her so she doesn't tell about giants, but he is a good giant, unlike the other nine nasty giant. BFG also catches dreams and gives it to people. So after one day Sophie comes up with the plan to stop the other 9 nasty giants from eating people and they do that. Pretty straightforward with nice dream imagery. Tanya really liked it and wanted me to read it, so I did. I'm catching up on Dahl this year apparently, since I never read him as a kid.
The Road Trip by Beth O'Leary, 381pp
I liked O'Leary's last two books, especially the characters in the "Switch" so I was looking forward to some light romance book of two exes getting back together through a road trip. And ended up hating pretty much all the characters. Dylan and Addie meet in France - he is on holiday, she is a caretaker of the estate for the summer, they both know the same friend whose family owns the estate. They immediately are attracted to each other and begin sleeping together right away but they also fall in love after those few holiday weeks and it is all super serious. Which already makes me roll my eyes because they don't really know each other. Then he goes travelling for a while and is basically a shitty boyfriend but then he comes back right when she was going to give up. And continues to be a shitty boyfriend though his codependence with his best friend, who is the worst. Dylan is incapable of making up his mind or making his own decisions and is easily led - which at least the book does acknowledge. Addie should have dumped him then.
Instead they break up because of a disturbing misunderstanding and after a year and a half end up in the same car for a day going to their mutual friend's wedding with the shitty best friend, Addie's sister and a random dude, going through silly contrived things that make their trip longer and ending up back together. I didn't like them together in the first place so I didn't care if they ended up together. I didn't like their friends who all just drink a lot and party with drinking and consider that a great time. There are also class issues as Dylan and his shitty friend Marcus are very rich. And Dylan has a cliche terrible Dad who disowns Dylan's older brother for being gay and is a general dick although he has a point of Dylan getting his life together and making some sort of decision. The older brother's only characteristic is being gay, with his fiancee, and even running some gay clubs in US or something - it just felt tacked on. I don't know - lots of things in this book just irritated me. Mostly I couldn't understand what Addie sees in Dylan or why she loves him.
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, 118pp [Hugo book]
This book won a Hugo in the 50s, and the style is a bit weird. There is a time war going on and people are taken through various times to fight it. There are places where the soldiers fighting in the time war can rest and recuparate and Entertainers (basically escort services) to help them relax. There bunch of people from various times end up stuck in a locked room with a ticking nuclear bomb and they need to figure out who basically took the remote that can open the door to chuck that bomb into the void or disarm it. It is a locked room mystery. it was hard for me to keep track of all the characters, and I usually can keep track really well. It was fine but everything felt just really crammed together and sort of weird.