Books read, 2012
What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier, by James Gleick. A collection of articles which appeared in the New York Times Magazine from 1996 to 2001, in which Gleick looks at the new and changing technologies that were barrelling down on us, from a viewpoint that is quaintly and intriguingly not ours. He sees dimly on the horizon things we take for granted today; makes predictions that miss the mark wildly, or strike with a resounding “Duh!”
I often wish, when told what groundbreakers the Beatles were, for instance, to hear examples not of their innovations (which are to us now as water to fish!), but of what they replaced, for that is the world that is foreign to me. Best of all is to have those older musical norms discussed in light of the impending changes. Gleick gives us that sort of informed view, looking both forward and back and at his ever-shifting present day.
Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell. Fascinating. I can’t begin to do it justice. Also a quick read, so have at!
What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures, by Malcolm Gladwell. A compliation of two dozen New Yorker articles on various topics, less engaging to me than the focused look in Outliers.
Embassytown, by China Miéville. The central conceit, the linguistic peculiarities of the alien Ariekei, doesn’t hold water for me, but since it’s China the story as a whole is a good one anyway. A favorite line:
When I think of my age I think in years, still, even after all this time and travel. It’s bad form, and ship-life should have cured me of it. “Years?” one of my first officers shouted at me. “I don’t give two shits about whatever your pisspot home’s sidereal shenanigans are, I want to know how old you are.”
Answer in hours. Answer in subjective hours: no officer cares if you’ve slowed any compared to your pisspot home…
Brown, by Richard Rodriguez. A memoir and extended essay about being neither/nor in an insistently either/or country. When most of America talks about race, thinks about race, the default is that we are talking about black/white. Brown is somehow an “other” minority, a minor minority (regardless of numbers, regardless of vintage; this has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with perception). Complicated, well written, something I needed to read and should read many times again.
Fables #14-17: Witches, Rose Red, Super Team, and Inherit the Wind, by Bill Willingham et al.
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. Given what I said about Blackout, you may be surprised that I went anywhere near this one. But its connection to Three Men in a Boat, and the hope that in 1997 Willis might not yet have been quite so firmly entrenched in her rut of choice, led me to give it a try. It helped, for me, that her protagonist’s confusion and ineffectualness at the very beginning had a reason within the story. That got me over the first hump long enough to become engaged with the plot, and I did very much want to know how it all came out.
I often wish, when told what groundbreakers the Beatles were, for instance, to hear examples not of their innovations (which are to us now as water to fish!), but of what they replaced, for that is the world that is foreign to me. Best of all is to have those older musical norms discussed in light of the impending changes. Gleick gives us that sort of informed view, looking both forward and back and at his ever-shifting present day.
Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell. Fascinating. I can’t begin to do it justice. Also a quick read, so have at!
What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures, by Malcolm Gladwell. A compliation of two dozen New Yorker articles on various topics, less engaging to me than the focused look in Outliers.
Embassytown, by China Miéville. The central conceit, the linguistic peculiarities of the alien Ariekei, doesn’t hold water for me, but since it’s China the story as a whole is a good one anyway. A favorite line:
When I think of my age I think in years, still, even after all this time and travel. It’s bad form, and ship-life should have cured me of it. “Years?” one of my first officers shouted at me. “I don’t give two shits about whatever your pisspot home’s sidereal shenanigans are, I want to know how old you are.”
Answer in hours. Answer in subjective hours: no officer cares if you’ve slowed any compared to your pisspot home…
Brown, by Richard Rodriguez. A memoir and extended essay about being neither/nor in an insistently either/or country. When most of America talks about race, thinks about race, the default is that we are talking about black/white. Brown is somehow an “other” minority, a minor minority (regardless of numbers, regardless of vintage; this has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with perception). Complicated, well written, something I needed to read and should read many times again.
Fables #14-17: Witches, Rose Red, Super Team, and Inherit the Wind, by Bill Willingham et al.
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. Given what I said about Blackout, you may be surprised that I went anywhere near this one. But its connection to Three Men in a Boat, and the hope that in 1997 Willis might not yet have been quite so firmly entrenched in her rut of choice, led me to give it a try. It helped, for me, that her protagonist’s confusion and ineffectualness at the very beginning had a reason within the story. That got me over the first hump long enough to become engaged with the plot, and I did very much want to know how it all came out.