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Feb. 28th, 2016 09:19 pm#17: Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class by Barbara Ehrenreich. 5. Fascinating anthropology book written in the early nineties, chronicling the political mindset of America's professional class from the late fifties through the end of the eighties. Is this objective? Not in the slightest. But she's pretty transparent with her biases, and I agree with many of them. Since I was only hazily aware of the eighties, having lived through them as a small child, this made a lot of the current political situation more comprehensible...as well as more depressing. Near the end, she muses on the possibility of a swing back towards the left and a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor. I haven't checked if she is still alive yet, but I can't help but think that dismayed would barely cover her opinion of the last three decades.
#18: Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe. 4. Several years ago, xkcd featured a comic about "Upgoer Five", a diagram of the Saturn rocket explained entirely in the top thousand most used words. (This is most well-known for the concluding sentence "If it starts pointing at space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today.") This is an entire book of that. Munroe explains things as diverse as the composition of pencils and the composition of the interior of a star in incredibly over-simplified language. It's funny and thought-provoking. A note: this is not this decade's The Way Things Work--in fact, if you don't already have a rough idea of how these things work, you will not actually understand any of this. You need at least a working knowledge of freshman year chemistry, physics, astronomy, and more. What it is good for is making you think about the things that you kind of vaguely know about and either have forgotten or never quite got, and making sure you actually turn it around in your brain enough to make things click. (For example, I had to pull up an actual copy of the periodic table to make heads or tails of the periodic table page, but then it was very funny. And I learned about some properties and history I hadn't known before.) It's a puzzle, in which you try to figure out what the real words that he's not using should be, how that all plays into his explanations, and then translate it out again to get the joke. It's delightful for nerds. I would not bother having my son read it until at least halfway through high school.
#19: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs. 4. Jacobs is the kind of writer who I suspect is an insufferable ass in person, but is quite entertaining in prose. In trying to follow all of the rules in the Bible, sensible or nonsensical, he deliberately takes the most outlandish ways of performing them, ostensibly in the name of independence and purity, but partly because he wants to play up the ridiculousness. (For example, when trying to attach tassels to the corners of his garments, he deliberately ignores tzitzit for the first half of the book and makes his own outlandish tassels out of yarn and safety pins. He's a Manhattan Jew, if nonpracticing. He's perfectly well aware this is a solved problem. He finally gives in midway.) I mostly felt for his wife, who went through a round of IVF and then a full pregnancy and delivery of twins during this entirely thing, in which her husband played at purity laws and refused to touch her or anything she had touched for large chunks of the month without any of the cultural support that a couple normally part of this culture would enjoy. But that said--it's still immensely entertaining and somewhat educational. And bits of warmth and transcendence break through despite him.
#20: Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. 2.5. I loved this book from the start. Unfortunately, that love pretty much died by the time Corwin got his memory back halfway through. It starts with an amnesiac playing a clever and dangerous political game whose rules he doesn't remember. It hints at political maneuverings, battles of wits, fantastical magical worlds, and an exceptionally clever and interesting protagonist. Unfortunately, Zelazny can't actually deliver on his political intrigue--once it's out in the open, it's straightforward and kind of uninteresting. The transition to the magical world is fascinating and inventive. Once we get there, though...there's nothing. I do not care who rules Amber, I don't even understand why Amber is special beyond the protagonist being homesick. Similarly, we're told Corwin's brother is an evil despot, but he does nothing that's worse than anyone else does. I can't even root for Corwin. He starts off as more compassionate. He's got a fascinating history of being trapped on Earth for hundreds of years. But as soon as he gets his memory back, that all goes out the window. He's an idiot, a bad tactician, and gives us no reason whatsoever for why he deserves to be king more than Eric. I just didn't care. Heavy front-loaded sense of wonder, but no follow through. Disappointing, for a classic of the genre, but I suppose it comes from a time where character development just wasn't a thing.
#18: Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe. 4. Several years ago, xkcd featured a comic about "Upgoer Five", a diagram of the Saturn rocket explained entirely in the top thousand most used words. (This is most well-known for the concluding sentence "If it starts pointing at space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today.") This is an entire book of that. Munroe explains things as diverse as the composition of pencils and the composition of the interior of a star in incredibly over-simplified language. It's funny and thought-provoking. A note: this is not this decade's The Way Things Work--in fact, if you don't already have a rough idea of how these things work, you will not actually understand any of this. You need at least a working knowledge of freshman year chemistry, physics, astronomy, and more. What it is good for is making you think about the things that you kind of vaguely know about and either have forgotten or never quite got, and making sure you actually turn it around in your brain enough to make things click. (For example, I had to pull up an actual copy of the periodic table to make heads or tails of the periodic table page, but then it was very funny. And I learned about some properties and history I hadn't known before.) It's a puzzle, in which you try to figure out what the real words that he's not using should be, how that all plays into his explanations, and then translate it out again to get the joke. It's delightful for nerds. I would not bother having my son read it until at least halfway through high school.
#19: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs. 4. Jacobs is the kind of writer who I suspect is an insufferable ass in person, but is quite entertaining in prose. In trying to follow all of the rules in the Bible, sensible or nonsensical, he deliberately takes the most outlandish ways of performing them, ostensibly in the name of independence and purity, but partly because he wants to play up the ridiculousness. (For example, when trying to attach tassels to the corners of his garments, he deliberately ignores tzitzit for the first half of the book and makes his own outlandish tassels out of yarn and safety pins. He's a Manhattan Jew, if nonpracticing. He's perfectly well aware this is a solved problem. He finally gives in midway.) I mostly felt for his wife, who went through a round of IVF and then a full pregnancy and delivery of twins during this entirely thing, in which her husband played at purity laws and refused to touch her or anything she had touched for large chunks of the month without any of the cultural support that a couple normally part of this culture would enjoy. But that said--it's still immensely entertaining and somewhat educational. And bits of warmth and transcendence break through despite him.
#20: Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. 2.5. I loved this book from the start. Unfortunately, that love pretty much died by the time Corwin got his memory back halfway through. It starts with an amnesiac playing a clever and dangerous political game whose rules he doesn't remember. It hints at political maneuverings, battles of wits, fantastical magical worlds, and an exceptionally clever and interesting protagonist. Unfortunately, Zelazny can't actually deliver on his political intrigue--once it's out in the open, it's straightforward and kind of uninteresting. The transition to the magical world is fascinating and inventive. Once we get there, though...there's nothing. I do not care who rules Amber, I don't even understand why Amber is special beyond the protagonist being homesick. Similarly, we're told Corwin's brother is an evil despot, but he does nothing that's worse than anyone else does. I can't even root for Corwin. He starts off as more compassionate. He's got a fascinating history of being trapped on Earth for hundreds of years. But as soon as he gets his memory back, that all goes out the window. He's an idiot, a bad tactician, and gives us no reason whatsoever for why he deserves to be king more than Eric. I just didn't care. Heavy front-loaded sense of wonder, but no follow through. Disappointing, for a classic of the genre, but I suppose it comes from a time where character development just wasn't a thing.
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