Spring is in the Air...

"It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster."

-Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (A good book, but a great movie.)

Chess, Revisited

So I picked up Yasser Seirawan's book on Chess Tactics, and I just can't get into it. I'm trying to wrap my head around X-Rays and Windmills, but man, I'm just not getting it. Forks and Pins, sure, no problem. Discovered Attacks and Skewers, okay, sure, in theory. But X-Rays? I don't get it.

So I think I'm going to stick with Planetary tonight.  I'm 25/27 of the way to the end, so with a little luck, I may finish it tonight. Sure, it's not the first time I've read it. But it is the first time I've read it lately. And it is pretty satisfying to see Elijah Snow stick it to Randall Dowling. More of that later though, when I can do a proper review.

+++++

"And so it was that I studied with the world's greatest detective for five years, until he finally died of old age. To his disgust, I never got rid of the accent in his lifetime. It took another ten years of walking across the world to do that. But I never lost my love of the secrets. And I don't think I ever will."

Elijah Snow
Planetary by Warren Ellis

+++++

That's it for tonight. Now go read something already!
rr

Quote of the Week

“Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one.”

Relativity author Albert Einstein

Quote of the Week

"Hail, Hail Freedonia!"

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

-Groucho Marx

My Favorite Literary Quote of the Moment

"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Oh, to be able to live your days out of order, like Billy Pilgrim or Sam Beckett or Desmond Hume. I'd slap some sense into the 14 year-old boy I once was, and tell him to relax, that's for sure. Of course, it probably wouldn't be as awesome in fact as it might seem in theory. But like anyone who tells me winning the lottery wouldn't bring me happiness, I tell them I'd like to find out just to be sure.

You know, for science.

Also, tip of the hat to my friend KG who claims Vonnegut as one of her "old man crushes." (I think.)

Fun fact: Vonnegut appeared in Back to School as himself. In the story, Thornton Mellon hired V. to write an essay about the works of Kurt Vonnegut, for which he receives an "F."

Too funny.

Quote of the Week

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

-Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Just Finished: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the last book I finished in 2010. (Bought it on 12/26, I finished it on 12/31 with just hours left on the clock, no less! I’m not a fast reader, either.)

Like this, but with 100% fewer flying DeLoreans.

Set in an alternate universe where only 93% of the laws of physics have been installed, the story focuses on Charles Yu’s time-machine repairman counterpart, also named Charles Yu.

The first (almost) half of the book is packed with science fictional ideas, and the whole thing is written with a bold, fresh voice. There’s no technobabble doublespeak explanations here; no lame Star Trek knockoffs to be found.

The most interesting sci fi ideas in the book regard how he deals with time travel: namely, through semantics; the engine that powers time travel in Minor Universe 31 is well reasoned and well thought out; it is literally derived by the tense of language, it is not powered by some simple applied phlebotium.

Without being too direct in the area of spoilers, there are various red herrings planted about in that first half; the second half starts with one, and goes off in an entirely different direction, exploring familial themes more common to straight up fiction (or W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe). That isn’t to say I found the back nine to be boring or without merit; on the contrary, to explore these themes within a genre story makes it the more remarkable. The story's resolution is very satisfying. And there is a neat little trick at the end that reminded me greatly of The Man in the High Castle.

Fun ideas, bold new voice. Highly recommended.

From the book:

“There is just enough space inside here for one person to live indefinitely, or at least that’s what the operation manual says. User can survive inside the TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, in isolation, for an indefinite period of time.

I am not totally sure what that means. Maybe it doesn’t actually mean anything, which would be fine, which would be okay by me, because that’s what I’ve been doing: living in here, indefinitely.”

Quote of the Week

"Take something you love, tell people about it, bring together people who share your love, and help make it better. Ultimately, you'll have more of whatever you love for yourself and the world."

-DC Comics editor, the late Julius Schwartz

Schwartz almost singlehadedly ushered in the Silver Age of comics at DC where he oversaw the late '50's/early 60's revitalization of such iconic titles as Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkman, The Atom and Adam Strange. It's a pretty good philosophy for any line of work.


Happy New Year, fellow Readers!

Sarah Vowell

Happy birthday to Sarah Vowell, author of The Wordy Shipmates and a favorite here at the Reader!

A favorite quote: "Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know."
Sarah Vowell
The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Quote of the Week

"As we turned to leave, I noticed that the elves seemed agitated. At the door, I looked back to see several of them trying gently to keep the old man in his bed. Color had temporarily filled his cheeks, and he struggled to his feet. Grinning impishly, he motioned for silence and then bent to elf-ear level. He whispered, 'Boys, we're back.' The little men looked mortified."


-Red Ranger Came Calling by Berkeley Breathed

And a very Merry Christmas to everyone who has bothered to read my humble musings this fall!

UBIK and Inception

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
If you don't want the book UBIK or the movie Inception spoiled, please stop reading now.
But feel free to bookmark this page and read it later!


When I first read Philip K. Dick's UBIK, I thought, "someone should really make a movie out of this." When I saw Inception for the first time last week, I thought, "wow. Somebody did." That somebody being Christopher Nolan.

In the interest of full disclosure, the two are not the same. There are similar themes, though, and some really neat instances of congruent storytelling.

First up is worldbuilding. Both stories take place in realities very similar to our own. (My favorite kind of science fiction; not the sci fi of laser blasters and warp drive, but the kind of sci fi that takes place 20 minutes into the future.) People still go to work. Corporations still make billion-dollar deals. People fall in love. And they die. But both stories have one or two technologies which are no where near their infancies in the universe in which we actually live.

In UBIK, corporations employ people with special abilities: telepaths, precogs, people who have telekinetic powers. And when a person dies, if they have the money, they can have their body frozen in a special kind of mausoleum where they enjoy a "second life." They can still be communicated with, as long as the tissues of the brain remain somewhat intact. The cold helps preserve it longer.

In Inception, it is possible to access the dreams of another. This is done in the name of big business and usually done in order to steal ideas. Sometimes, though, it is necessary to implant an idea. There are rules, of course. Time and space take on different qualities. It is possible to dream within a dream. If you are hurt, you feel it. If you die within a dream, you wake up.

While these aspects of these stories may at first seem similar, the fundamental story behind each is not: UBIK is largely the story of a man, Genn Runciter, who is trying to figure out what the hell went wrong on his last corporate mission. A bomb goes off. Then some of his colleagues mysteriously die off, aging rapidly as if they had drank from the False Grail. His boss' likeness starts showing up on coinage. It is my favorite kind of story: the ontological mystery.

Inception is a story that is part caper, part tragedy; but I dare to say it is, in the end, the simpler story archetype of the two: the story of a man, Dominick Cobb (Leo DiCaprio), trying to overcome his own inner demons. Both stories play with one of my favorite themes: "what is real, and how do we know it is real?"

Both stories also had the one quality I love and hate about unique fiction: I love it so much, I can't wait for it to be over, even though I know when it is over, I'll be sad about it because I know I'll never be able to read it again for the first time.

The end of both stories is very satisfyingly left ambiguous, and I won't spoil that for you here. The bottom line, though, is that if you liked Inception, you will probably like UBIK. If you liked UBIK, you will probably like Inception. And if you don't like sci fi in general, thanks for reading this far. You are probably lost.

A Quote from UBIK: "It was a tranquil sight, these faithfuls, coming as they did so regularly to pay homage. They brought messages, news of what took place in the outside world; they cheered the gloomy half-lifers in these intervals of cerebral activity. And they paid Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. It was a profitable business, operating a moratorium."

A Quote from Inception: "Well dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize how things are actually strange. Let me ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on."

Quote of the Week

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room."

-Philip Marlowe, Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Arthur C. Clarke

Tomorrow is Arthur C. Clarke's birthday.

Clarke may be the author I can credit with giving me a love for science fiction. (Well, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Gene Roddenberry too, but this is a blog about reading, so ACC gets the nod for written science fiction.) I've read all four of the 2001 books (they all have their moments), and part of The Lost Worlds of 2001, the out of print account of the making of the book and film. The short story The Sentinel is particularly good.

I've also read The Songs of Distant Earth, The Hammer of God, Childhood's End and The Last Theorem. Rendevous with Rama is the only book of his currently on my shelf waiting to be read.

Clarke died in 2008.

Favorite Quote: "For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something." - from 2001: A Space Odyssey

UPDATE: The Reader had its 500th visitor last night. Thanks for visiting, everybody! I hope you are having as much fun reading it as I am writing it!

Quote of the Week

"Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?"

-Connie Willis, Bellwether

Just Finished: The Wordy Shipmates

It took me a little longer than I thought it would, but I just finished The Wordy Shipmates, an examination of 17th Century New England by the always charming Sarah Vowell.

Shipmates is a look into an obscure corner of American History: the era of the first white settlers to what would eventually become Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. I learned a lot by reading it - namely, that Thanksgiving wasn't a yearly ritual, it had to be earned; that Pilgrims and Puritans aren't the same thing; that the Pilgrims wanted to separate from the Church of England, while the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wanted to reform it from within; and that the Puritans gave us the New World traditions of democratic elections and the "acceptibility" of the slaughter of Native Americans.

Vowell uses her trademark blend of insightful historical inquiry and biting social commentary, with a side of pop culture, throughout.
If I had one complaint about this book, it would be the (seeming) repetitiveness of the New England names: Winthrop, Williams, Cotton, Hutchinson. Maybe it was the strong theological subject matter or maybe it was the fact that I felt so removed historically from the people of 17th century New England; either way the result was the same: I felt that Shipmates wasn't her best work. That honor would go to The Partly Cloudy Patriot for its variety and quality of the essays within. I also liked Assasination Vacation better than Shipmates, probably for its macabre sense of history, and the fact that I had visited a lot of the places she described.

Sarah Vowell is an amazing writer. In fact, the strongest conclusion I had after thinking about it for a while was that she would make an amazing history professor: smart, funny, relatable, good with primary source materials. Unfortunately, I'm well past school and she probably makes more money writing history commercially than she ever could at a university.

Either way, I'm glad I read it, and I'm looking forward to reading her new book Unfamiliar Fishes when it comes out next year.

Favorite Quote: "The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwelmingly, fanatically literary...the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston's communitarian English majors."

Quote of the Week

Two good ones this week! I couldn't pick between them:

"What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

And:

"I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence - a series of words - which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky, you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works."

-Philip K. Dick, VALIS

Goodbye, Aberfan.

We lost a member of our family last week.

Our dog, Xeena, was sick - the vet didn't know with what. She had been relatively healthy over the summer, when she weighed 30 pounds, although a routine checkup indicated the beginnings of congestive heart failure. In October, she had a seizure while she was at the kennel one weekend. After that, she began favoring her back left leg. By mid-October, she was down to 25 pounds; we thought she had a UTI, but after 2 rounds of antibiotics, nothing helped. Then I noticed during the last weekend, she hadn't eaten. I took her to the vet for another exam the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and she was down to 22 pounds.

Xeena in 2004. Happier times.

It may have been a neurological condition, or kidney failure, or cancer; it was probably cancer. We could have run a whole bunch of expensive tests to determine exactly what it was, but in the end, considering the likely diagnosis, and the fact that she was 14 years old, even after running the tests there probably wasn't a whole lot we could have done for her.

She was supposed to go to the kennel for the holiday weekend; she just wasn't strong enough. We were afraid she would have another seizure, or worse, that she would die alone, surrounded by strangers in an unfamiliar place.

And so it was time.

The day before Thanksgiving, we had her euthanized at the vets. She died in relative comfort, surrounded by her family.

It was the hardest decision I've ever made. My heart is still furious with my head over it, even though I know it was the right thing to do. If she wasn't suffering last Wednesday, she was going to be soon.

After some time had passed this weekend, I was able to reflect on the whole thing. It turns out I was more attached to her than I ever realized.

It put me in a mind to read a short story I had read a couple years ago, "The Last of the Winnebagos" by Connie Willis. It is a story that takes place in the near-future; a future a lot like ours, except that a virulent disease has wiped out all the dogs on earth.

It is kind of like that subgenre of sci fi termed "post-apocalyptic" except that so many post-apocalyptic stories are stories of survival; this one is more about how people react when they are faced with loss. And that was exactly the kind of story I needed over the weekend.

The story is about a photojournalist who never got a picture of his own dog, Aberfan, before he died. Most dogs died of the disease, but Aberfan died after getting hit by a car. Years later, he sees a jackal by the side of the road - hit by someone on the highway - and it triggers some pretty harsh memories and sets into motion his own journey of self-discovery. He sets out to talk to the girl who hit Aberfan with her Jeep, to see if he can find Aberfan in the look on her face when he finally reconnects, and confronts her about it.

Instead, he finds out something about himself. He accidentally gets a picture of himself, and finds the truth of his emotions in an unguarded moment: "And it was all there, Misha and Taco and Perdita and the look he gave me on the way to the vet's while I stroked his poor head and told him it would be all right, that look of love and pity I had been trying to capture all these years. The picture of Aberfan."

The same look of heartbreak I saw as Xeena rode on my lap to the vet, for the last time.

So goodbye, Aberfan.

And goodbye, Xeena. You were a good dog. We love you, and we will miss you.

Now if you will excuse me, I think I have something in my eye.

Quote of the Week

"These are the moments I live for. I put up with all the other crap just to get seconds like this. The moments when you know the world is a better place than advertised."

-Jakita Wagner in Planetary #4 by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday

PS - "Quote of the Week" just indicates a favorite literary quote of mine that I decided to post online that week. It doesn't necessarily mean it was a phrase used in lit that actual week.

Quote of the Week

"Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque, ut pecuniam acceptero, Graecus primum autores, deinde vestes emam."

"I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes."

-Desiderius Erasmus, Letter to Jacob Batt, April 12, 1500

Just Finished: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

November 17, 2010 - I just finished The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett. This was an intriguing, yet somewhat unsatisfying true story of John Gilkey (the man in the title) and Ken Sanders, the former head of security for the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. Gilkey would obtain books through...unconventional means. Sanders was responsible for putting him in jail. It was a riveting story 75% of the way through. The end of the book lacked the solid resolution I was hoping for. A fascinating look at the seedy underside of the rare book trade.

Favorite Quote: "...Gilkey is typical of many book collectors. It is his crimes and his unwavering, narcissistic justification of them that sets him apart."

I'm not entirely certain what I'm going to read next.