Category Archives: Books

Book Log – Return From The Stars

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Return From The Stars by Stanislaw Lem

The Slice of Sci Fi podcast guys gushed about Lem and specifically this novel. I believe they were discussing it in the context of Solaris, a movie adapted from another one of his novels. It sat on my Amazon wishlist for a good while, until I was able to procure it through paperbackswap.com.

Translated from the original Polish, it’s a story about a space traveler’s return to earth 127 years after his departure and his efforts to adapt to the new world.

It’s pretty well written, but kind of… well… dull.

I read this by a reviewer on Amazon… This is a relatively contemplative work by Lem – he saved his blatant humor for other works… [cut] This might not be the best intro for someone new to Lem. I’d recommend his lighter writing to start with. Still, it’s a good one. At the end of the book there are blurbs about his other works, and I have to agree that the other ones sound more entertaining.

So, perhaps I’ll give him another chance.

Book Log – Can’t Wait To Get To Heaven

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Can’t Wait To Get To Heaven: A Novel by Fannie Flagg

I think got this book for our beach vacation earlier this year, and as I enjoyed Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: A Novel, I added it to my To Be Read pile.

I was not terribly engaged by the read, and given that I was engaged by her previous works, I’m curious as to why. I see three possibilities…

1) Can’t Wait just isn’t as good as her previous works.
2) I’ve changed as a person since I read the other books about 10 years ago.
3) I’ve since read The Rattlesnake Master, which is a superior work in the southern-small-town-stories genre.

I’m inclined to think it’s a combination of the above.

I can’t understand why Beaufort Cranford doesn’t enjoy the same popularity as Fannie Flagg. Maybe because nobody made a movie of his one book. Possibly because he only wrote one book. , poke him on that, won’t you? Fannie is flagging, somebody’s got to pick up the slack.

Ice, Solder and Fletch

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There is simply no elegant way to cough with an ice cube in your mouth. And yet, sometimes you must.

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I am about to go solder six 0402 size capacitors onto the circuit board I am testing. I have never worked with 0402 size capacitors. They are small enough that you could probably fit a good 5 or 6 on the back of a ladybug. I know people do it. I’m just not sure how.

—

I am a fan of the Gregory McDonald mystery novels, which most folks know from the Fletch movie adaptation1. The humor style of the books is different from the movie, largely because Chevy Chase is just being himself, doing his own thing. I like both.

I used to own every Fletch, Flynn and Skylar novel, and re-read each many, many times. They are not great literature (Mr. McDonald is a bit heavy-handed with getting a theme across at times) but I like the writing style and his plots are often rollicking. It got to the point, though, where I decided I had just read them enough, and they had to go. I considered bundling them all up and selling that whole batch on eBay, but in the end we gave them to our friend Sarah for a garage sale.

The last thing I had read of his was Skylar in Yankeeland in 1997.

Lo and behold, on a whim, I did a search on Amazon for him today, and he published Flynn’s World in 2003. I’ve been waiting 10 years for a new book, and I only had to wait six! Sheesh.

And on further investigation, I see Fletch Won, the first of the Fletch prequels, is slated to be a movie in 2007. IMDb says rumors are Zach Braff is scheduled to play the lead. I’ll go with that.

1 Though not the Fletch Lives sequel, which had nothing to do with the book series storyline, largely because the ending of the original movie was different from the book (and much inferior, IMHO).

Book Log – Going Postal

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Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

I read this a while back. I’m not sure when, but the mass market paperback came out a year ago and it’s sitting on our bookshelf with creases and dog ears, so that coupled with a vague memory of the plot makes me think I’ve read it. But I didn’t see it on the Book Log when I went looking for it a moment ago, so here it is.

I think I enjoyed it. Why not? It’s a Discworld novel.

Book Log – Thud!

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Thud! by Terry Pratchett

This is another in the wacky Discworld series. Why can’t dwarves and trolls just get along?

Like M&Ms, this is very much like the last one I ate. Sugary, enjoyable, but I wouldn’t want to live on them.

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On the To Be Read pile:

*The Ancestor’s Tale: A pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins
*Darwin’s Children by Greg Bear
*Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
*Can’t Wait To Get To Heaven by Fannie Flagg
*Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty
*Second Helpings by Megan McCafferty
*A whole slew of Janet Evanovich books given to for early Xmas.

Book Log – Shiksa Goddess

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Shiksa Goddess (or, How I Spent My Forties) by Wendy Wasserstein.

This book was recommended by one of the Motley Fool folks on their Eclectic Library discussion board. Non-fictional Essays are more or less my favorite type of book, so I was sold.

I’ve never seen a Wasserstein work on stage, nor do I think I’ve read any. In fact, before I read this book I knew two things about her: 1) She was a somewhat famous playwright and b) She died in January 2006.

While the essays were well written, nothing in there jumped out at me as amazing. Some stories are sad, some amusing. There was somewhat of a black cloud over the reading, as her sister died young and she is writing about how her mother was terribly concerned about Wendy’s health. Here I am, knowing she would be dead 5 years later (at the way too young age of 55), so even her optimistic essays get a tinge of unintentional melancholy.

She seems a nice lady and in fact writes an entire essay about her own niceness, and how she often uses it to her advantage. The one essay that made me think a bit was about gov’t funding of the arts (Wendy was for it, and I remain on the fence). So, since she got me to think a bit, I’ll call the book a win.

Book Log – NeverWhere

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NeverWhere by Neil Gaiman

Brefly, an unremarkable London man with a mediocre life falls between the cracks of society for a while to join a quest in the magical London Below.

Skimming his bibliography on WikiPedia, I see I have read Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, The Sandman, Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion, American Gods and, I’m assuming here, some text he wrote for SimCity 2000.

I originally bought NeverWhere for my brother’s birthday present back in August, but turned out he already had it. So, I put it on my To Be Read pile, and sent him the Serenity essay book as a replacement.

So, I’ve read it, but like most of his books, I end up thinking, “Well. That was that.” I expect that this book will have no lasting impact on my life or worldview, but it was a fine distraction for a couple hours, much like Terry Pratchett’s stuff (whom he cowrote Good Omens with). It gave me something to read on a recent night when I couldn’t get back to sleep after Steakette had woken us up. So, there’s that.

Probably, I should have bought a copy of the Serenity essays for myself.

Book Log – Black Box Voting

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Black Box Voting by Bev Harris with David Allen.

I’m not sure where to start with this one, except to say I felt a twinge of pointlessness when I cast my vote this morning on a Diebold touchscreen voting machine.

Ms. Harris paints a very bleak picture; some of it is making mountains out of molehills, but by and large she has done some important investigative reporting regarding the potential for chicanery in our modern voting system. Her central point, that we need a voting system that can be independently verified without specialized computer knowledge (basically, a paper version of the ballot as backup), is absolutely correct.

On a personally disturbing note, one chapter deals with the questionable ownership of voting machine companies. In particular, Peter Kiewit Sons, Inc., an Omaha company, is intricately involved with the voting machine company ES&S, and has a history of shady dealings with it’s large contracting services (highways and such things). The name Kiewit rang a bell with me, and when they mentioned Omaha, I remembered: Berkshire Hathaway world headquarters is at 1440 Kiewit Plaza, Omaha, NE. That made sense, though, as Kiewit is a major builder in Omaha.

But a few days later, I was flipping through a compilation of Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders where he mentions a new director coming onto the board: Walter Scott, Jr., of Peter Kiewit Sons. The description of Scott on the Berk site is Chairman of Level 3 Communications, a successor to certain businesses of Peter Kiewit Sons’ Inc. which is engaged in telecommunications and computer outsourcing.

More likely this gives credibility to Scott rather than detract from Berkshire, but I’m keeping my eyes open on this one.

The other personal connection has to do with the Georgia election a few years back which gets a lot of focus of the book. Ms. Harris details the sloppiness in upgrading and patching machine code at the last minute, without oversight or certification. I remembered that at the time of that election, I was in an improv group known as BRIC Comedy. One of the founders, Eric, also worked as a IT technician, and apparently he had the voter machine gig because he was called away from workshop on election night to deal with machines that were purportedly breaking down everywhere, much like what was described by Ms. Harris in her book.

An interesting epilogue that I discovered when surfing the web for more info on all this is that Bev Harris and David Allen split idealogically in 2004 as to how to fight this fight. One of them has BlackBoxVoting.org, the other BlackBoxVoting.com. Bev reportedly rewrote another edition of Black Box Voting to diminish the reporting of David Allen’s contributions. (David Allen published the first round of books, including the one I have thanks to , through his company Plan 9 Publishing).

Perhaps she was angry with him because, at least in the version I was reading, Pages 213-226 were missing, demonstrating that Plan 9 Publishing has much of the same production values as Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Book Log – Polysyllabic Spree

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Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

This “book” barely qualifies as such; At 150 5×6″ pages (including index and ads for The Believer), I would probably label it a thick magazine.

But, oh, what a thick magazine.

Essentially a reprint of his book log-esque articles from The Believer magazine, it is aptly summed up by the pseudo-subtitle on the cover: “A hilarious and true account of one man’s struggle with the monthly tide of the books he’s bought and the books he’s been meaning to read.”

Virtually every page of this book had a quote I wanted to steal and tack onto my signature line. I am not one to think I would like to hang out with an author just by reading his stuff… Douglas Adams seemed like he would be a bit standoffish, Douglas Coupland is a bit overphilosophical… but if you skipped over his obsessions with European Football and music, I would hang out with Nick Hornby. My answer to the what-famous-people-would-you-like-to-have-dinner-with would be him and Sarah Vowell.

Consider this paragraph from March 2004:

One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. “The Last Supper” v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occassional exception– “Blonde on Blonde” might mash up The Old Curiousity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and again you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I’m still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.

And then, the following month:

Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything– how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I read four really good books this month, but even so, my cultural highlights of the last four weeks were not literary. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that’s a hole in my argument right there– one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?); I saw Jose Antonio Reyes score his first goal for Arsenal against Chelsea, a thirty-yard screamer, right in the top corner; and someone sent me a superlative Springstein bootleg, a ’75 show at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr with strings, and a cover of “I Want You,” and I don’t know what else. […more babbling about Springstein and Arsenal…] So there we are, then. Books: pretty good, but not as good as other stuff, like goals, or bootlegs.

So, you see… a really cool guy, but you really have to catch him on the right month if you want to have lunch with him.