Ramblings in a State of Insanity
books
[Review] Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”
Aug 27th
I am not an enormous fan of fantasy* but I have been known to make exceptions for urban fantasy. Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” popped up on a book list recommend by the lit snobs over at Slate. As I cannot resist lit snobbery, and it comes in convenient e-book form, it appeared on my Kindle.
Quentin, our super brilliant emo protagonist who normally would be in line for the new Arcade Fire CD, is whisked off mysteriously to take a bunch of entrance exams for some mysterious Wizard College. He gets in after some brutal and bizarre exams, because he’s the main character, and he gives up all the vestiges of his old life to become a wizard. The first half of the Magician’s is a bit of Harry Potter meets College Angst meets the X-Men. Quentin meets a whole bunch of other proto-wizards, makes a bunch of friends, and learns to become content with his weird wizarding self. This part of the book is more “New X-Men” than “Harry Potter” frankly — it feels more than a little like Professor Xavier and his secretive school for Mutants in Upstate New York than Hogwarts, especially once the students start to differentiate into different magical power specialities.
The second half is post-college early-20s angst with magic. The book picks up here. It feels like the characters are in a holding pen until they are let loose to go wreak havoc on the magical world. The book becomes funnier and it moves faster once it acquires something that resembles the vague outline of a plot; before then it was just a coming of age story set in a fantasy background. This book does have a lack-of-plot problem. The big evil is not well formed. The fantasy on a fantasy world is pretty vague although, to be fair, it is supposed to be. The fights are written well and the plot ends satisfyingly enough.
The book is highly readable. It doesn’t feel bogged down with turgid prose and it moves at a brisk pace. It mixes modern sensibilities and pop culture references (D&D references; fight club; drinks and drugs of all kinds) with urban fantasy into a nice little whole. The writing gets better as the book goes on, leading me to believe this is a sophomoric effort and leading me to hope for a possible sequel — something with a firmer plot with the same characters would make for a better story.
Originally I gave this book 3 stars out of 5 because I read it immediately following Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.” If you have read Umberto Eco, you know it’s hard for a fantasy novel, let alone any novel, to follow up that act. I docked it a star merely because it came after a better written book. It’s unfair and I give it back half a star and upgrade it to 3 1/2 stars out of 5. It is good. Not great. Not fantastic. It is solidly a good and entertaining read.
* Exception made for Game of Thrones.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Jul 25th
It is easy to forget how far we all have come in medical science to get where we are today, and some of the ugly decisions made in the 1950s. Truly ugly decisions, nearly mad-science level decisions, have all been forgotten and brushed under the rug.
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” isn’t just about the HeLa cancer cell line, although the book is about that. Henrietta Lacks was infected with a line of cancer that simply would not and will not, to this day, die; the line simply grows and grows, ignoring the Hayflick Limit and carrying on. It’s not just about the horrible things done during the times of segregation when people of one color were still seen as “less human” as those of another, or the impact to the family, or that the HeLa cell line forced science to examine its own sets of rules and ethics. It’s more about history — the history of this remarkable find of this cancerous weed, what it meant for science, and what it meant for the Lacks family.
As a book, this one is a pretty brisk read. The chapters are short and to the point. The narrative never lingers or dwells. It would be trivial to take a few of the points in the book and spend hundreds of pages on them but the book never does. It does have several “squick” moments here and there — some of the things that happened to Henrietta herself and to her family are amazingly awful. But the book also demonstrates that without the HeLa line, many things done in medical science today, while doable, would be far more difficult. This feels like a six of one, half a dozen of another situation: the family was shafted but humanity profits. Do we come out ahead?
This is one of those books I can recommend. I know it is already being made into a movie. It’s on all these reading group lists. Everyone and their cousin is reading it. It’s a good read for a book about science if not a bit depressing from its narrative viewpoint.
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7
Harvey Pekar
Jul 14th
I was going to post a long diatribe about the passing of Harvey Pekar at the age of 70 in Cleveland, Ohio, but Anthony Bourdain sums up everything I was going to say and more so over on his blog.
You should go read the above blog post. And then you should go pick through the free stuff over on the Pekar Project.
Remember: not all comics are about four-color super heroes with over-inflated pecs. And without Harvey Pekar’s original work with American Splendor, most of the long story web comics we have today would be inconceivable.
Spurned by the Berenstein Bears
Jul 9th
From somewhere, Katie acquired a copy of a Berenstein Bears book. She has lots of books. They come from everywhere. It ought to be pretty non-confrontational stuff — bears go to school, bears meet some bear conflict, bears resolve conflict through bear family unity.
But no!
When I read the book to Katie yesterday evening, one passage turned my vision red, boiled my blood, clenched my fists, and made me shake in the burning need to rant. For the bears had offended me and they must die. I am plotting their fuzzy death. Bears are a menace! You see:
Brother Bear, you see, is good at science and math, but is bad at language arts.
Sister Bear, on the other hand, is good at language arts but terrible at science and math.
Why? I thought. Why is Sister Bear good at spelling and reading and Brother Bear good at science and math, which presumably also needs spelling and reading? Because math is hard! We’re giving into gendered stereotypes! And Sister Bear is a girl.
I was coated in feminist rage. Why couldn’t Sister Bear be good at reading and science and math? Why does she have to suck at science and math? Is she not good enough? Is the teacher not giving her enough encouragement? And what does that mean, precisely? And why are you telling my daughter who is obsessed with how brains work and how much blood is in the human body* that Sister Bear sucks at math and science!
Sister Bear goes off to compete in a spelling bee, but in this book she decides to ditch the spelling bee progression right when she was winning because she would rather go play with her friends. Friends are awesome but hey, spelling bee! Father Bear, you see, gets guilt over pushing Sister Bear competitively to defeat her enemies with words and bathe in their spelling bee entrails. He decides he should back off instead. But would he get guilt over pushing Brother Bear? I bet not. No way, man.
Girl == go ditch out of succeeding, go play with your friends. Boy == KILL.
You suck, Berenstein Bears.
Grrr. I prefer stuff with Princesses. At least they get swords and stuff and have to go rescue the Prince from the evil witch. And hey! She would rather go see Despicable Me anyway because she wants a Minion. Not a stuffy. An actual yellow dude Minion.
* 10 gallons under extreme pressures. *SPRAY*
More eBooks
Jul 7th
I saw yesterday some statistics that people are reading slower on their eBook devices then on actual books. I find that I read noticeably slower on the Kindle then the iPad, but not noticeably slower on the iPad than a real book. I’m not a jiffy speed reader anyway; I’m not sure it makes a huge difference. The stat I saw was 6.2%. A summary of the study is here.
But what did we learn? People hate to read off their PCs*, loved their iPad, and was still fond of the printed book. This is sort of a “duh” moment, but it is “duh” quantified.
I am firm in my belief that the codex is going nowhere. Not only are the devices expensive**, but they are good only for fiction and narrative-form non-fiction. I know that Amazon has a dream of getting into the textbook market but I have a hard time seeing how a math book is going to work on the Kindle.
Meanwhile, the market is predicted to grow to some 12.5% this year. Borders, late as always, opened their eBook store this morning with the execrable Sony Reader. Better late than never, I suppose. But I cannot seem to browse the store online to see if it has Pynchon in eBook form so it is dead to me.
For those of you who are sort of waffling on this eBook thing, I recommend downloading Arturo Perez-Reverte’s absolutely brilliant “The Club Dumas.” from the Kindle store to try it out and read it on whatever device has Kindle software (all of them). Or really, just read that book in general because it’s awesome.
* I am notorious for having to dump every PDF I get to the printer — or did before I had an iPad and the sainty perfection of GoodReader. I avoided long articles like the plague but now between Instapaper and GoodReader on the iPad, I can read them easily.
** w00t had a $150 Kindle and it sold out almost instantly. The Kindle is now at Target. I expect a sub-$100 reading device that doesn’t suck by Christmas. Even then, it will lock out a fair amount of the market in price.
e-Books
Jul 6th
As an avowed “book smeller,” I feel deep guilt as I admit that I am addicted to e-Books. Now that I have access to my books on my kindle, on my iPad, and on my droid* synching across all the platforms, I am in this “always a book all the time” mentality. With a shock I realized I have read more books this year so far than the last three years combined.
Strange.
I do like the smell of libraries and I love to browse around bookstores. I like the feeling of opening and browsing a book. But paperback books that lived in my bag that I carried around with me, for whatever reason, didn’t get read. They ended up in piles next to my bed and gathered dust. I would buy the books and intend to read the books and then shelve them.
Now I am hovering books at a high rate — I am nearly done with the second 1000+ page book of the year — and they are all e-Books. It is a bit disconcerting and I’m not certain if this is because the Kindle is extremely portable and fits conveniently in my bag, if the iPad is a decent reading device, the “always-on” nature of the books, the ubiquity of the Amazon Kindle app**, or all of the above.
But hey, I am reading again, and at speed. This can only be a good thing.
I do wish Pynchon’s books were available in eBooks, though. GRRR. I shake my fist! I would be reading them all, his entire catalog, right now.
* …although I find books completely unreadable off my droid.
** iBooks lasted about 30 seconds with me. I stick with the Kindle app exclusively.
Mythology and Wikipedia
Jun 30th
This is the first time I am posting from my iPad. I’m seeing how it goes but if this becomes a habit I will need to start packing a travel keyboard.
I have started working on a small mythology-based project. I’m not sure where it is going to go and I get about thirty minutes a day to pick at it. It is not much time but thirty minutes a day starts to add up. I wanted to download Knowledge into my head but since my brain isn’t chipped yet for instant information transferral I went to wikipedia.
Now I know what bored people with phds in mythology or various cultures or library science do in their off-hours. Dude! I have several mythology books but save something like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology the articles in wikipedia are better than most reference books. I was shocked. They go on for pages and pages and are sourced to the nines.
The iPad’s Wikipanion app has been a real help. Not only does it do the fancy formatting but it bookmarks, follows links, and follows internal wikipedia links. Bookmarking is key.
So that’s that. If you haven’t looked up your favorite god, you should. The articles are impressive.
[Book Review] Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard W. Wrangham
May 11th
(This review talks about human evolution. If you’re into ID, I’m sure my next post will be full of something not about human evolution.)
Dr. Wrangham is a British Primatologist over at Harvard and his book, “Catching Fire,” is an interesting science book full of nothing but science. He starts with a basic supposition that something happened on the evolutionary boundary between the habilines, largely shown as Homo Habilis and our buddy Home Erectus. By examining the skull structure, chest cavity, molar structure, and the analysis of diet, nutrition and food science, his theory states that humanity made two major jumps:
1. Australopithecine -> Homo Habilis by the introduction of scavenged meat into the diet, well pounded with early tools to make it palatable and digestible.
2. Homo Habilis -> Homo Erectus by placing the vegetables and meat in the fire cook the food.
He marries primatology with food science to show how cooked meat and vegetables greatly reduces the time to chew and digest food while keeping the exact same caloric and nutritional content of food. Experiments show feeding cooked and easy to chew food to animals, especially primates, results in very fat primates who always prefer cooked food to raw. Raw food consumes an enormous time to chew and requires large molars, which Homo Sapiens no longer has, but cooked food needs a smaller digestive system and smaller molars. It also frees Homo Sapiens from the task of chewing all day to doing other things — a rate of spending 60% of the day chewing down to less than 10%. Energy also is conserved in physiology — all animals across all species and genus with access to easily digested food have reduced gut size and put all that energy into increased brain cavity.
Fire provides a whole host of other evolutionary advantages — more hours in the day available to be active, a source of protection at night, a source of warmth, a place for culture to grow and breed, and a clear division of labor between the sexes — hunting and cooking. Dr. Wrangham pulls dozens of examples from many different hunter-gatherer cultures worldwide, from Inuit to Australian aborigines to the !Kung of Africa to South Pacific Islanders, and finds commonalities that involve cooking, meat/vegetable balance, and division of labor and economic trade-offs. All revolves around fire and food.
As for keeping a fire going, experiments show that chimpanzees can keep a fire going indefinitely. If a fire, captured, was brought in to a cave or another protected place and was properly venerated as the God it is, certainly a fire could be kept going. Homo Habilis was a tool-maker and tool-user — if Homo Habilis realized using the gold (pyrite-filled) stones to smash instead of the grey or brown ones, fire would start, and it had enough presence to repeat the process, fire could be made and kept going. It’s reasonable to believe mankind made fire and kept fire far before measured time.
The arguments make sense and they are well sourced with tons of footnotes, a vast bibliography, and references pulled from other sources. The argument is also persuasive — we can find fire pits up to 800,000 years old and after that there is no trace but that means very little. If one little group became Homo Erectus and survived, we would never find evidence of that one small tribe who lived on. Too many evolutionary advantages match with the archeological evidence. Something happened at that boundary between Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus, something that allowed the gut to shrink and the brain to expand and Homo Erectus to spread all over the world. Keeping fire and cooking food makes sense and the arguments are reasonable.
It’s a fairly short, quick read as these sorts of books go at 320 pages. Highly recommended to anyone interested in human evolution and/or food science.
[Book Review] Castle Waiting by Linda Medley
May 10th
Kim lent me a copy of the hardbound first collection of the graphic novel Castle Waiting by Linda Medley and produced by Fantagraphics Books. The story is a sort of feminist Chaucer set in the never never land of fairy tales. It opens with the story of Castle Waiting, a castle set over a land once lush and prosperous until it became the bramble-covered castle of the story of Sleeping Beauty. Once the Prince woke the Princess and everyone else from their century-long sleep the town was gone and the castle destroyed. With the castle abandoned by all but a few, it became Castle Waiting.
The stories in Castle Waiting are charming and entertaining but lack emotional punch. It’s difficult not to be charmed by the book as the stories are light, funny and entertaining. A pregnant woman flees from her abusive husband and falls into peril before she manages to reach Castle Waiting and give birth to her strange green son. A horse-headed knight and the stork-shaped keeper of the castle go into town for supplies and meet up with bandits. A full second half of the book involves the story of the local nun and how a bearded girl joined a circus, left a circus, and found herself among a feminist order in the service of God. The story of the nun goes on too long — it spins into backstories about backstories that have backstories — but is otherwise fun to read. It’s sort of the fantasy lives of the women of various fantasy series while their men go off and fight wars and the great battles between Good and Evil.
It’s a fun read. It’s well and clearly written. The art is top-notch for being b&w. It’s very light. I’m not certain it’s a “read more than once” but it is handsomely bound and looks good sitting on a shelf among other books. It makes a nice introduction to comics for people who aren’t enormous comic-book people and aren’t interested in requiring an encyclopedic knowledge of this universe or that one going back 40 years. Although it has fairy tale references it is a self-contained volume.
I’ll happily read volume #2 when it comes out. This one comes recommended for those looking to get into comics and not knowing where to start, or those who enjoy comics from time to time but don’t want to invest in some huge story. It’s a great intro-story. It may not be a good recommendation for people who are hard core comics nerds who are looking for more meat out of their stories.
(Also, it needs to go back to its owner!)
In Which I Recommend Comics
Apr 23rd
It is no great secret that I am an enormous comics nerd. (Or maybe it is? WHO KNOWS.) I was recently asked: if I could recommend any comics to someone to get them started, what would I recommend? The big bookstores now stock full walls of comic books next to the Impossible Walls of Manga with no introduction what to buy or what to start. Does one buy Batman? Avengers? Daredevil? Where does one start?
In considering the question at hand, I swiftly removed anything that required 30 years of comics of multiple different lines to figure out what is going on in today’s issues. It’s hard to recommend, for example, “Grant Morrison’s JLA run” without having background in JLA. I dropped anything with excessive T&A, ridiculous violence, or anything requiring a certain level of pre-assumed nerdiness. I also removed any comics like Planetary which require an understanding of the comics it references. Then I peered at my comics shelf.
My Quick Cheat Sheet:
1. Bill Willingham’s Fables. While some are not thrilled with the overarching metaplot that develops in the later collections of Fables, the original collection, Legends in Exile, is accessible, well-written, well-drawn and requires knowledge only of the standard children’s fairy tales. Some disagree, but Fables has won approximately 15 billion Eisner Awards.* My #1 pick for a starter comic line.
2. Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. I adore Hellboy. Everyone I have ever recommended Hellboy to has also loved Hellboy. It is physically impossible not to adore Hellboy. Sure, it has violence, but the stories are some of the best weird tales ever to appear in comic book form. Read Hellboy.
3. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Sandman is the old standby, the original gateway drug. When comics went down the dark hole of T&A and ultraviolence in the 90s, the DC imprint Vertigo brought intelligence back to comics storytelling with Sandman. Start with Preludes and Nocturnes. It’s what got me back into comics after a many year hiatus…
4. David Peterson’s Mouse Guard. Only Series Fall 1152 collection is out in paperback. Winter 1152 is still hardcover. Regardless, Mouse Guard is wonderful — beautifully illustrated with a wonderfully written story about the perils of mouse Paladins defending their homes against mouse uprising. If you get anything off this list, it should be Mouse Guard. Go check out the website here and give David Peterson all your money to encourage him to make more.
5. Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim. Yes, it now has a movie and a video game coming out. And I avoided it for years because it was ‘too hip’ but this was a terrible horrible mistake. Scott Pilgrim is indeed about this guy who meets his true love and must fight her seven evil exs. In manga-style. With kung-fu and sword fights. And sound effects. With the power of RAWK. One of the funniest comics ever written. Sheer brilliance in comic form.
6. Brian Michael Bendis’s Powers. In a world where people with super powers that are relatively common, two cops follow up on “Powers homicides.” One of the cops used to be a super-hero but now he lost all his powers — although he still have deep roots in the “Powers” community. Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl? is one of my favorite comic book stories of all time. It’s beautiful film noir and cop procedural set in a super power universe.
7. Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde and Palestine from Fantagraphics. This is probably not to everyone’s taste but Joe Sacco blends embedded journalism on the ground with his art to make very compelling graphic novels. His Footnotes in Gaza is up for (yet another) Eisner this year. I find his work fascinating and combining on the ground political reporting + drawn pictures gives the tales emotional impact. Also, Fantagraphics offers Love and Rockets, often popular with the “I love comics but not superhero comics” set**. Unfortunately, not often stocked at the big box stores.
8. Alan Moore’s From Hell. Yeah, it’s a classic but of all of Alan Moore’s work, From Hell stands out as my favorite.*** It is a complete novel, it’s about Jack the Ripper, it’s fascinating and extremely well-written with an enormous bibliography.
9. Garth Ennis’s Preacher. It has been re-released into bigger compilations!**** The story of a Preacher whose congregation was murdered by a supernatural creature named Genesis and now crosses the United States to (literally) find God. Also from the 90s but one of the best of the 90s. Has a beginning, a middle and an ending. A complete story.
10. Brian Vaughan’s Y the Last Man. Yorick’s story about a disease that wipes out all men in the world except him and his cross-US journey to get on a boat and get to Australia to find his girlfriend is clinging tenaciously to my list. It’s a great road-trip comic books which includes Another fine Eisner winner and another one with a start, middle and ending.
There’s other stuff that I really enjoy but I could write this post for the next year and never get through them all. I mean, there’s no JMS Rising Stars on this list.***** Nor is Walking Dead. Nor some of the indie stuff I love like Two-Fisted Science. So there’s 10 series — enough to empty out any bank account and fill a shelf with dead trees covered in print.
I was going to limit this list to 5 but then I got typing… sad.
* In 2008, it was 30 + a Hugo. It is nominated this year again.
** I have only read small amounts of L&R so I cannot recommend it.
*** Watchmen is great but it needs so much context to ‘get’ it that it instantly fails off my ‘easy to recommend’ list. I don’t love V for Vendetta. I don’t love Swamp Thing as much as From Hell.
**** So on my birthday list.
***** I have heard your criticism of putting Y the Last Man above Rising Stars and have moved on. It was a fight which one got the last spot.
Recent Comments