Six Short Book Reviews

I've been meaning to review these books forever and haven't got round to it and at this rate I won't for ages. So here's the abbreviated version in order of the first read. As always any of these are available for checkout from the Smitty Library.

1. An Embarrassment of Mangoes, by Ann Vanderhoof.
Wonderful book. Enjoyable to read, will whet your appetite for a Caribbean vacation. Great recipes, although we haven't actually tried any of them yet (but I really want to, especially now I know the DeKalb Farmer's Market in Atlanta has callaloo). Ann Vanderhoof has done what we all want to do--leave the rat race behind and take a vacation forever (or a year, in her case)--so obviously she has more money than the rest of us, but she never ever writes like it, and the book is just a pleasure. Highly recommended.

2. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.
A reread. I love Snow Crash and, the last time I read it, I still loved it. I like this book a great deal, but it runs out of steam 3/4 of the way through and enters a territory of great weirdness where it starts to get difficult to follow and even, frankly, to suspend disbelief for. Still contains wonderful moments of philosophy and lots of solid factual grounding, and still mostly a very fun read. But not as much fun as I remembered. Definitely worth looking at, but it shows the direction Stephenson has taken generally (i.e. increasingly hard to read).

3. Whatever You Do, Don't Run, by Peter Allison.
Subtitled "True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide." Lots of fun. Not quite as funny as you might expect from the cover blurbs and actually surprisingly touching at times, nonetheless a light, quick read, perfect for a bedside book as it consists of a collection of short episodes. I greatly enjoyed this book, and I don't think you need to have gone on safari to enjoy it yourself. It may make you want to pick up and go, though. I suspect Mr. Allison has three or four more books of stories in him and he is a fine storyteller. Smittywife needs to read this before it goes into the lending library circulation.

4. Airline/Transport Pilot Oral Exam Guide
Technical book of very limited interest. Will be out of date soon anyway, and since none of the airlines are actually hiring I won't need to take the test. Useful for brushing up on things before my interview, though.

5. Emergency Sex, by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson.
Absolutely my highest recommendation; the best book I've read this year. The authors were UN Peacekeepers during the 1990s and into the early 2000s and these are their tales. If you are at all aware of the existence of other countries you should read this book. If you are a firebreathing conservative and think the UN should be shut down, you should read this book. If you are bleeding-heart liberal and think the UN should take over the world, you should read this book. If you think it matters at all how the US is viewed in the other countries, you should read this book. If you don't think it matters how the US is viewed in other countries but are aware that other people have opinions, you should read this book.
You should read this book. It is gripping. It is well-written. It matters.

6. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene.
Interesting. On a lot of "Best Books" lists, which is why I read it. I will pick up The Quiet American and The Comedians on the basis of this, but I can't say I was exactly swept up in it or transfixed by its brilliance. Greene knows how to build a novel and is a good writer; if the subject matter, faith (in particular Catholicism) and keeping faith when there is no Earthly reason to do so, is of remote interest to you, this is one of few novels on the subject that doesn't preach to you (there's plenty of preachy junk out there for you if you want that). But it never really answers any questions, for the protagonist or for the reader. Valuable, but not one you need to put at the top of your list.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Over the weekend, I finished Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Not your typical science-fiction--Heinlein's best work always transcended genre--this is really a novel of revolution... so of course it appealed to me right away. My review follows the jump.

Good thing, too, because from the first page I knew I would have trouble with the dialect the book is written in. I've discussed (in Plainsong and elsewhere) the fact that I'm very picky about writing style. In this case, after two pages I decided the narrator, Man (Manuel O'Kelly Davis), was Russian. This was based on some clues in the narrative (and the use of the Russian word for comrade, 'tovarishch'). Although I later decided there was no way Manny spoke with a Russian accent, by that time it didn't matter any longer. I still read it with a Russian accent in my head, which was amusing because if I read long enough I'd speak with one for a few minutes after I put the book down.

Anyway. Manny isn't Russian and the one place where Heinlein's future world falls apart is the existence of the Soviet Union and the fact that the U.S. seems to have disappeared some time around the turn of the current millenium. Hey, he wrote it in the 60's.

Two things make this book stand above others. One is Heinlein's political viewpoints, so well articulated within the framework of the narrative that the book in no way reads as a polemic. Stranger in a Strange Land, which I finished in early 2005, before I was reviewing books here, suffered a bit from this. It, too, was more than a simple work of sci-fi/fantasy literature, but Jubal Harshaw came across as a more direct Heinlein mouthpiece than Professor de la Paz does in this book. The politics is both clearer and more subtle at the same time in this book, if that makes sense.

Being a libertarian (classical liberal, whatever you want to say), Heinlein's political leanings mirror my own a bit so I just loved delving into Prof's (and Stu and several other characters') discussions. But the book also made me ache, for what Prof is describing, a state without government--a stateless state, I guess, or maybe an anti-state--was only possible on the moon because of the physical situation there. Individuals were forced to conform to a certain set of behaviors--to be a decent person at base level, having nothing to do with drinking or gambling or cursing and everything to do with working hard, being polite, etc--simply to survive in the harsh territory. It's not rule by law or by men, but by environment. Anarchy could conceivably have worked there--though, as Manny points out, men seem to have an unquenchable thirst to bully other men around, make laws, enforce standards, rather than let people get along by themselves. It's probably inherent in human nature, for some reason, for us to want to control what other people can do. As Prof points out at one point, no one wants to ban a behavior to stop themselves from doing it, only to stop other people from doing it.

The other thing that makes this book stand out is the well-crafted Lunar world. Heinlein got a few things wrong, as always happens when we try to predict the future, but the tightness and reality of his world is breathtaking. Everything fits together. The existence of Mycroft Holmes is entirely plausible in just the way Heinlein describes. The way the moon was settled, the view taken of the moon by the powers back on Earth, the necessity of living underground, the types of jobs done by Loonies (residents of Luna, naturally, are Loonies), the construction of the cities... it's done so well. Apart from the awakening of Mycroft Holmes--which I maintain is plausible--and the existence of water ice within the moon (not disproven but probably unlikely), there are no leaps of faith required, no suspension of disbelief. If the moon were to be settled surely it must be just this way.

It's brilliant. It's gripping. It's well worth a read. My friend Taemon sent it to me while I was in Djibouti, and it took me this long to finally get around to reading it. Sorry it took so long, T--but it was great. Thanks.

Resurrection, Inc.

Smittygirl's best friend recommended this book to me, and although it's not normally my genre I always like reading other peoples' favorite books (and I'll lend anybody copies of my favorite books if they want). The book is out of print now but if you click on the cover you'll be taken to BN.com's used book area. At least that's what supposed to happen. Anyway, on to the review!
Having just read Fierce Invalids, I caught something interesting in this book that I might not have picked up on otherwise.

Switters, our fearless hero from Fierce Invalids, has this idea that government and industry combine to keep the great mass of people entertained by meaningless garbage--Jessica Simpson, movie box office totals, the latest tawdry Hollywood affair, sports stars using steroids, even politics presented purely as a horse race--because it keeps them from getting curious about anything else, keeps them too happily occupied to ask questions about what the government or corporations are doing. Thus they can do what they want without much inquiry from thinking people.

The antihero of Resurrection, Inc., Francois Nathans, believes he is setting humanity free by creating undead Servants to fill menial tasks--and finds out that the majority of people set free in such a manner are bored, incurious about government or industry or, indeed, anything at all. Nathans had hoped they would take up the arts, sciences, anything--give in to natural human curiousity. Instead, they didn't--and Nathans sets out to eliminate them once and for all.

What an interesting perspective. Is Switters right, that without constant entertainment people would actually ask questions about the world around them? I like to think he is--curiosity and a desire to learn are hallmarks of humanity. But what if Kevin Anderson, the author of Resurrection, Inc., is right? What if, deprived not only of constant entertainment but of menial work, many people would just sit bored, turn to crime or riots not out of a need to support themselves but simply because they can't think of anything else to do?

One of the books on my reading list is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, one of many futurist books set in a post-scarcity world, where the only things that are hard to come by are good seats in restaurants and short lines at theme parks. Post-scarcity worlds have been treated before by science fiction writers (see the Culture cycle by Iain Banks, the Queendom of Sol by Wil McCarthy, and E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops or Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars, though I haven't read any of these; even The Matrix is a sort of post-scarcity society, at least for the machines that control the place), and occasionally there are looks at the world as it struggles to get to that post-scarcity plain. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson shows a society approaching post-scarcity. And Resurrection, Inc. shows one man's attempt to push society in that direction.

Writers are divided on whether post-scarcity is good or not (in Riders of the Purple Wage, Philip Jose Farmer notes that artists, though they are the toast of society, often run out of inspiration for their art because the society is free of conflict). Francois Nathans seems to have believed it would be great. Though his Servant revolution (Servants are recently deceased people who's bodies are preserved and implanted with microprocessors and synthetic fluids to allow to function as androids would--except androids are prohibitively expensive and there's an endless supply of the dead) would not have ushered in true post-scarcity economics, he did create the means for vast improvements in efficiency in most industries and commerce, meaning many people lost their jobs but were supported by bouyant governments and welfare (presumably in turn supported by immensely more profitable industry). Nathans and his company (Resurrection, Inc., of course) might have started the machinery of the post-scarcity age to come.

But what happens when nothing is scarce and thus no one needs to work? In Resurrection, Inc., we see that a lot of people don't even bother to get up in the morning. A version of online gaming (the book was written in 1988 so MUDs existed at the time, but Anderson still made a good guess at where multiplayer online games were headed) occupies many people, and others simply sit around, bored, start riots, or turn to petty crime. In the world of Resurrection, Inc., scarcity matters--without it, people's live become meaningless.

I suppose this is the danger of defining yourself through your work--when you have no work, you have no self-definition, either. Though I doubt that was Anderson's goal in telling this story.

Indeed, this is a pretty ripping yarn all the way through, and I haven't even mentioned any of the main plot points. Bear in mind I referred to Francois Nathans as the antihero--because he's certainly no hero. After all, as wonderful as Servants may be, even if the people they freed from work found constructive things to do, everything wouldn't be quite hunky-dory, now would it? What if, through a quirk of the resurrection process, some Servants retained the memories of their previous life... and death?

Oh what a tangled web we weave.

Good book. You'll probably find it a well-stocked local library.

Snow Crash

I hadn't read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in quite some time so I decided to pick it up a while back and go through it again.
It took me longer to read this book this time around than it ever has before, by about a month. Shocking, really.

You might think that means I didn't enjoy it as much this time, but that could hardly be less true. I love this book. I truly do. It's one of the best I've ever read and it still holds up. In fact, I'm not even going to bother reviewing it because there's no way I could give it a neutral review, or even pretend to. If you haven't already read it, I'll lend you my copy. Actually, I'll just give you my copy since I need a new one anyway. This book turned me on to cyberpunk, and it's still the best of the genre as far as I'm concerned.

Three Books

I've finished three books recently without reviewing them, and I should rectify that oversight.

First was Undestanding Arabs, which I picked up back when I thought I'd be in Iraq right now instead of whiling away the hours at work desperately waiting for something interesting to happen. It was the first of the pre-Iraq books I decided to read, and as such is also the only one I've finished so far. I can say safely even without having finished/read the other books, this is the one of the four that I would have brought with me overseas.

Obviously this isn't the sort of book you're just going to pick up and read for fun. But if you find yourself heading toward that part of the world, this book (now available in a new edition from September 2005) is basically the standard (not to say only) text on Arab culture written for Westerners. It's a great primer on dealing with Arabs on a personal level. Would that I had reason to use it.

Next up was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick. This is the novel upon which the movie Blade Runner was (loosely) based. It's a nice slim book and I took it with me during the fantastic trip to Valdosta a couple weeks ago. I read the whole book in one afternoon and another evening. I need to rent Blade Runner now and watch it again, but the differences in the two are significant.

This was a great book. I won't insult you with a synopsis since if you're reading this blog you are almost certainly well-read and well-screened enough to know how the story goes, from one source or another. If you only know the movie, and you liked the movie, you ought to pick this up. It's so much deeper, but typical of Dick it showcases a very ambiguous morality. I can't recommend this book too strongly to fans of sci-fi or dystopian fiction, though I'll admit non-fans would find many of the book's conceits a little to bizarre. Still, this is probably the best novel I've read in the past year.

And just today I finished Bill Bryson's Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. I picked this one up to take home last weekend because I wanted something ligther than the history of the middle east to read. Today I read the last two-thirds of it. Bryson is terrifically readable, funny and light and, for such a recent discovery of mine, one of my current favorites among writers. After Mother Tongue, I was really looking forward to this.

And it was light and engaging and humorous and a little sad, but it wasn't as great a read as I'd hoped--mostly because I couldn't get past Bryson's condescension toward so many of the people he met. Certainly not everyone you meet is as wise or warm or witty as yourself, but neither is everyone necessarily less so because they come from a different region or speak with a different accent. For an American, even one who when this was written had been living in England for over 12 years, Bryson comes across almost a little bit too Euro-trash, and that was disappointing.

Nonetheless, he makes some brilliant comments, especially considering that they're now over 15 years old. In particular he seems disappointed that every town in America is becoming the same--they're all Anytown U.S.A. He is disturbed by the tendency of the towns immediately abutting National Parks to become seedy tourist traps and is fairly negative toward tourist traps in general. He has some very insightful comments about the NPS' administration of the National Parks, which he sees as quite poor.

The book has been compared to Travels with Charley and Blue Highways. Not having read Blue Highways I don't know how to compare it, and Charley is almost 45 years old, so some of the insights show their age (plus I don't like poodles. Or Steinbeck). But before I started this blog, I read a book by Stephen Coonts called The Cannibal Queen. Coonts is no Steinbeck (or Least-Moon or even Bryson, frankly), but his book is perhaps the most recent version of the schlepping-through-America genre that started with de Tocqueville (who's book is still the best of the type), and to be honest with you, I like Queen better than Lost Continent. A 1941 Stearman is way cooler than any Chevette ever made, and Coonts manages to be less critical of the places he visits, possibly because as a former military man he has an easier time than Bryson looking past America's faults. While I chide this tendency in my colleagues, in print it's a much more attractive tendency than Bryson's condescension.

Neuromancer

I have finally finished reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. It only took me, what, about two months?

Like Frankenstein and The Martian Chronicles, this was a book I didn't so much want to read as it was one that I felt I should read--because it is the first "real" cyberpunk novel. Like those other books, I was a little less than enthralled.
A not entirely negative review follows the jump.


I enjoy the "cyberpunk" genre as rule. I like detective stories and crime novels, I like dystopian fiction, and while I wouldn't call myself a sci-fi "fan," I do appreciate the genre. Cyberpunk tends to blend these things together, and I like blenders.

If I may be so bold as make some sweeping statements about cyberpunk: beyond what the Wikipedia article linked above says, there are a few other general similarities. Cyberpunk usually has a male protagonist, and a female protagonist who links up with the male, though not always sexually. This male is, at least in the outside world, usually a loser (an "anti-hero" in the literary jargon). The female is usually attractive and given over to leather and boy toys like motorcycles and skateboards; in particular she is tough and can fend for herself--but at some point in the story her feminine vulnerability will be exposed. At the end of the story, the man and the woman do not get together.
Cyberpunk endings are vague, and often dissatisfying. So is life a lot of times.
Cyberpunk's stock in trade is a fantastic but recognizeable near-future, or even present day. Like Tom Clancy, cyberpunk writers throw around a lot of jargon that they don't bother to explain. Context often takes care of this, and where it doesn't the mind is free to wander. A good cyberpunk novel introduces a lot of new concepts, and coins new terms, and some are often quite prescient.

I would like to try my hand at maybe a little cyberpunk short story sometime. The fact that Gibson knew next to nothing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer gives me hope that I could do this. But, the fact that Gibson knew next to nothing about computers also shows through in this novel, in a way that Neal Stephenson's avowed dislike of the internet did not show through in Snow Crash (which is a superior novel in most respects). The novel, written in 1984, also shows its age.

Gibson's characters are at least temporarily interesting, but if you like backstory you won't find it here, unless the backstory affects events in the current story, as with Armitage. In other words, if you like to see where characters come from and why they might react as they do, if you like a good character study, this is not your book (some readers will disagree with me; I'll get deeper into this later on). You'll learn little about the twin protagonists, less about the periphery characters. I hate to say it, but it makes it harder to care about the protagonists. The mysterious nature of their quest, and its vague morality, make it hard to care about the outcome. And when you don't care about the characters or what they're up to... well, then it takes you two months to read the book.

Still, Gibson broke some new ground here. His imagining of the Freeside space station and the necessary oddities of a rotating, cylindrical space, is close to genius. His vision of Chiba City's Ninsei enclave--and his rationale for its existence--has echoed throughout the entire cyberpunk genre. Certain scenes in the movie Hackers look like a visualization of Ninsei. I love this description of the place's existence:

But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.

I'm sure at the time Gibson thought this was a true and worthy insight. Nowadays it seems the companies at the forefront of this "burgeoning technology" are trying to shut down any potential playgrounds and keep the technology for themselves.

Gibson also managed to make a couple of contributions to the lingo--"ice" as a byword for network security, "construct" as a word for a digital entity based on a real person (think Halo), that sort of thing--but the real feat of this novel is that it was written in 1984. The internet as we know it did not exist, but Gibson came up with a plausible realization of it. His visual depiction of what the Net looked like to a hacker who had "jacked in" compares again to 1995's Hackers; note that the computer in that movie, which is depicted much like Gibson's "Net," is called "The Gibson" in his honor.

The book was ground-breaking. It more or less created, or at the least defined, a new genre of fiction. It is imaginative, fast-paced, and includes enough sex, violence, and drug use to keep even the most worldly and jaded readers interested.

Still, Neuromancer left me feeling somewhat empty. It wasn't the ending (hey, I just watched Cold Mountain; this ending was great in comparison). No, I keep coming back to the characters, to Case and Molly. Both are interesting as characters, but not interesting enough to really be worth caring about.

This may be part of the problem with cyberpunk. Anti-heroes and tough girls can be interesting because they break the mould, but if their characterizations do not go far beyond that, they don't hold your interest. Case and Molly are interesting character sketches. There's not a lot to Case--we know he's 24, that he used to be a great hacker cowboy, and that he got burned by a mega-corporation/crime syndicate (megacorps being an important aspect of this novel and this genre) for being naughty with their data. We know little else about him, and, since despite attempts to correct them he maintains his drug addictions and his impropriety, it's hard to see why we should care what really becomes of him. Case is a protagonist (unlike Cold Mountain's Inman) who's death would not sadden us. Molly has more backstory (which will be familiar to readers of Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic (though not to viewers of that film)), but her motivation--she's only doing it for the money--makes her hard to know, hard to get involved with, and hard to care about. The most interesting character in the entire story, apart the eponymous Neuromancer, is Armitage, a broken and twisted man who's backstory we get just a tantalizing hint of. But Armitage plays another role; he's more of a tool than a character, both in the sense of his role in the story and his characterization.

So how big a fault is this? Gibson was, as I said, defining a new genre, and sometimes in doing that, especially if one isn't doing it consciously (it's hard to believe Gibson wasn't conscious of it, even if it wasn't his primary intent), the genre itself, the plot and its direction, outweigh the characters. The question, after all is, "What is cyberpunk?" not "Who is cyberpunk?" Case is a shell, like Molly and, quite literally, like Armitage. These shells have been expanded on and fleshed out by later writers, and by Gibson in some of his later works. In the long run, my inability to care about Case is less important than my ability to understand what he is.

Still, this makes characters into mere tools. I don't like to think of them that way. In my own writing I've discovered that plot happens because of the characters; plot doesn't happen to the characters. Not all writers work that way; not all readers expect it. But I do. And for that, and despite all the great and interesting things about it, Neuromancer was a disappointing read.

Expanding the reading list

I didn't want to have to drop some of the books off the end of my "Recent Reads" list, so I've expanded it to ten. I put Frankenstein and the Martian Chronicles down at the bottom even though I read them after numbers 7 and 8. But since I've already mentioned them on the blog, I figure it will be no great loss if they drop off the list first.

But maybe you're curious about some of the other things on the list.

Number 8 there is Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. I read this on my last deployment, and I loved it. It is a terrific story, entertaining and sometimes funny, and it always makes you think. Martel is a lyrical writer, almost as good as Michael Chabon, and it's a pleasure to read his words. The story, of course, is somewhat fanciful--at least, it might be. The ambiguity of its reality is part of the fun. Of the fiction books on this list, I would give this my top recommendation for all my readers.

Number 7 is Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. It's the first Heinlein book I've read; this is the "uncut original version" and I'm not sure how the abridged version would read. This is certainly an interesting book. Heinlein's views on sexuality and religion are...different. But certainly of some interest. This is an absolute classic of the genre so any sci-fi fans who haven't read it would be encouraged to do so... but bear in mind that the subject matter is a bit out of the ordinary.

Number 6 is A Court Divided, by Mark Tushnet. Tushnet is a law professor and Supreme Court scholar. His book is about the Rehnquist Court, and the various factions thereon and how they've affected the conservative legal agenda--namely, it's been variously thwarted in some circumstances (property rights) and moved forward in others (religion in the public sector). This is an interesting study, especially combined with the fourth book on the list, but would be of interest mostly to people already interested in legal issues.

Number 5 is Age and Guile beat Youth, Innocence, and Bad Haircut, by P.J. O'Rourke. O'Rourke is one of my very favorite writers; he practices what you could call gonzo journalism," though he's not quite so ridiculous about it as Hunter Thompson was (though Thompson is fun to read anyway). This is a book of some of his older pieces, the type of thing that you publish after you've published a lot of other books, which O'Rourke has. It's not his best, but it is entertaining.

Number 4 is The Supreme Court, by Chief Justice William Rehnquist. This is one of the classic popular studies of the Court's history and function, and is far and away the most strongly recommended book on this list for every reader.

Number 3 is O'Rourke's All the Trouble in the World. This is one of his best, maybe his very best, but it's hard to say. Chapters include Plague, Poverty, the Environment, Famine, Overpopulation, and the various other of the world's ills, and O'Rourke travels to countries around the world to report on what causes those ills, what they look like first-hand, and what is and can be done about them. I love this book; this was probably my fourth reading of it. It would be really cool to follow in O'Rourke's footsteps but, oh well, guess that ship has sailed.

Number 2 is poo. But book number 2 on this list is the Count of Monte Cristo, which I've already discussed. Read it, it's good.

Number 1 I just finished last night, O'Rourke's Eat the Rich. This was his next book after Trouble and, if you read them in order, you can see how he gets from one to the next. After visiting Haiti (Plague) in the previous book and discovering that the plague there was secondary to the crippling poverty and governmental mismanagement, he wrote that the real solution to Haiti's plague was to make the Haitians rich. In Eat the Rich, O'Rourke travels to such places as Wall Street, Sweden, Cuba, and 1997 Albania (after the pyramid schemes collapsed) to look at what makes wealth, what wrecks it, and how to go about making everybody in the world rich.

P.J. O'Rourke was once a self-described conservative, but in the last 5 years he's been working as a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and preaching some degree of the libertarian gospel. What would make him unusual as a conservative Republican is the desire to see everybody in the world get rich. A lot of conservatives (casting aspersions here, but conservatives do it to liberals all the time) seem not to be terribly concerned about getting the rest of the world--or even the poorer parts of our country--rich. Of course, a lot of traditional lefties feel the same way. Wanting everybody to get rich is definitely a libertarian ethic, and O'Rourke sells that gospel very well.

So there you have it, my recent reading list. I'll discuss the other books as I finish them.