Persuasion by Jane Austen
I read this a while back, but noticed that I didn’t blog about it.
I can’t for the life of me remember much about it, except that it had a character named Wentworth. And someone was persuading someone else.
Okay, a brief skimming reminds me that this is the tale of Anne Elliot, and this crazy friend who was after her brother, and trying to push her brother on Anne. I remember they were kind of amusing.
That’s all I got.
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
It was only during this book, the fourth Jane Austen I’ve read this year, that steakums happened to mention that she liked Austen as well. Honestly, couples never talk anymore.
Mansfield Park is odd in that the reservedness of the time period grates a bit. I mean, going on and on of the evils of putting on a play in one’s house, with our protagonists, Edward and Fanny (of all names), as the main detractors of amateur theatricals? Really, how am I to relate to that?
It’s not like the idle rich have anything else to do.
Really, you side with the protagonists merely because everyone else is so much less worthwhile.
Emma and Clueless are next up on our Netflix cue. If time allowed, we’d do a double feature night.
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter
I’m not clear on how this came to be on my Wish List… it made a lot of pick lists in 2005, I think.
I thought it was a fun novel, easily read and engaging. Set in 1979, it humorously chronicles the adventures of a man in the witness protection program who is trying to make sense of the presidential election as this will be his first time voting. In the meantime, his past is catching up to him. Kind of a toned down My Blue Heaven without the fish-out-of-water theme.
It just occurred to me… this book must have come from Nick Hornby’s Stuff I’ve Been Reading column from The Believer… Hornby has a quote on the back of the jacket.
Going to The Believer online, this book was published in 2005. Try the November 2005 issue… Hornby lists Over Tumbled Graves by the same author under Books Read. Flip back a couple months and bingo, Citizen Vince under Books Read, Tumbled Graves under Books Bought.
So, Hornby liked it well enough to pick up Over Tumbled Graves immediately. I’ll have to see what he said about it.
All of which reminds me I haven’t read Hornby’s A Long Way Down. Which is currently available from PaperBackSwap.com. Done and done.
ETA: Here’s what Hornby said about Graves…
“I read and loved Jess Walter’s Citizen Vince recently, so I wanted to check out one of his earlier books. Unlike Citizen Vince, Over Tumbled Graves belongs firmly within the crime genre, although it’s not formulaic– it actually plays cleverly with the serial-killer formula. I enjoyed it a lot, but on the evidence of the recent book, Walter is a writer who is heading for territory that gives him more freedom than genre fiction allows.”
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
By far the least formal book I’ve read by JA. Self-referential, witty…
There was some author’s note about not being released until 10 years after it finished, and apologies for the out-of-datedness. You know, I was able to overlook it from my two hundred years later perspective?
The Subtle Knife and
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (Books 2 and 3 of the His Dark Materials Trilogy)
After finishing The Golden Compass (or, Northern Lights in Europe) I wanted to wait to see the film before continuing on in the books. But I heard the film was a bit unfortunate, so I never got around to seeing it. So, thus, during last week’s beach vacation, I knocked out the last two books in the trilogy.
I have to say I enjoyed the final two more than the first, which is not to knock Compass. The second two moved along better, with action and adventure and really wild things. Regardless of how good (or bad) the first film is, I would still love to see the last two adapted, because there’s a heck of a lot of exciting stuff to put on the screen.
I very much enjoyed Pullman’s inversion of Paradise Lost, not because of any antipathy to the Christian religion, but because it’s always good fun to flip the convention of tradition. I would have enjoyed an inversion or re-imagining of the Greek/Norse mythology just as well (Gaiman’s American Gods, for instance, or Adams’ The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul come to mind amongst many others).
While I thought there were a moment or two of weakness in the writing quality, I think by and large Pullman’s technique is superior to other fantasy epic writers, and here I’m thinking of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, possibly even J.K. Rowling. I’m not sure I can authoritatively say why, but my best guess is effective use of Show Don’t Tell.
A few words on the title of the first book… I mentioned that I preferred The Golden Compass to Northern Lights as a title, and given the titles of the next two books, it just makes better sense. The Compass, the Knife, and the Spyglass are each plot-significant handheld objects introduced in each of their respective books, and make for a nicer “title rhythm” for the trilogy.
Oddly enough, The Golden Compass was a misunderstanding… Wikipedia entry:
Pullman earlier proposed to name the series The Golden Compasses. This term also appears in the poem Paradise Lost, where it poetically refers to the [drafting] compasses with which God shaped the world, an idea depicted in William Blake’s painting The Ancient of Days. Due to confusion with the other common meaning of compass (the navigational instrument) this phrase in the singular became the title of the American edition of Northern Lights (the book prominently features a device that one might label a “golden compass”1).
A few words on “atheist”2 themes… I had heard that the book was more anti-dogma than anti-belief, and quite honestly, I’m not sure whether this trilogy can be classified in such a way. It’s a speculative fiction novel, a huge “What if?” It’s got Angels, and God, and (a) Church… and they’re certainly the Bad Guys. But this series wouldn’t convince anyone to be a atheist, or even agnostic. It’s not an allegory; It’s just taking some existing traditional characters and turning their story on its head.
But, were I a believer, I’d have a tough time overlooking God as Bad Guy, even for the sake of a good story.
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1 And I believe actually described as such in the book.
2 Can it be an Atheist novel if God is a character?
Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger by Wendy Dale
I really liked this book.
One of the folks I was requesting a book from on PaperBackSwap.com had this on their posted books list, and as the title was funny, I added it to the request on a whim. It’s a first book, so my expectations weren’t very high. I was pleasantly surprised.
Ms. Dale has had an interesting third decade of life, a large swath of which involves prisons in Costa Rica. Having been the responsible eldest daughter of her eccentric family growing up, taking care of the house and putting herself through college, she reaches 25 and makes a conscious grab for some irresponsibility of youth. As it happens, she ends up taking on way more responsibility than most 25 year olds, or 45 year olds for that matter.
Her story is interesting and her writing is very witty with none of that first-time-writer unevenness (perhaps because her career has been writing jobs of various sorts). One of the author quotes on the book reads “Mix David Sedaris, Lucille Ball, and a fifth of tequila in a blender… you get Wendy Dale.” That’s roughly accurate. A better description for Atlanta locals would be “Put Hollis Gillespie in Costa Rica with somewhat less cursing… you get Wendy Dale.”
The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore
Moore manages to pull characters from his other books Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, Practical Demonkeeping, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, and Island of the Sequined Love Nun in this silly book about a really dumb angel sent to Earth to do the annual Christmas Miracle.
All of Moore’s books fall under my category of Brain Candy. This is no exception.
It is also short. And has Zombies.
Which reminds me that I bought World War Z when I was in Omaha, NE, but I haven’t seen it since… Hmmmm…
What Are The Odds? Chance in Everyday Life by Mike Orkin
My friend J_ from high school recommended this book, and then gave me a copy when he was in town last. He had brought it up when we were discussing coincidence versus omens on our high school drama alumni message board a while back.
It’s a slim book with not much math to it. It covers some basic probability, some long odds stuff like lotteries, and then delves into 4 chapters on gambling (where I learned the rules of craps). The last three chapters are on game theory, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and then attempts to apply game theory to the conflict between NATO and Yugoslavia.
Aside from the rules of craps, I didn’t pick up much new from this book, though I appreciate going over covered grounds in a fresh way. The language is very accessible even to the non mathematically minded.
I come away from the book wondering if the point of the book was to discuss probability theory, or to pull people in with probability theory and then explain what NATO did wrong in Yugoslavia. The last chapter of the book has language that deviates from the more specifically analytical tone of the earlier parts, and basically boils down to “NATO didn’t consider the long term consequences”, which is associated with the game theory strategies, sure, but without a more extensive overall analysis of the choices it just feels like preaching.
The book was published in January, 2000 (apparently now out of print). The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia had ended 6 months before. It seems like Mike Orkin got riled up by the NATO bombing and whipped out a quick book in his discipline so he could add his two cents to the debate.
So, there are probably better probability books out there.
But that didn’t stop me from being in a probability frame of mind when terracinque brought up relative genetic similarity in siblings and parent/children. With some refresher genetics research, I learned that siblings share anywhere between 0% and 100% of their genes. So, it is theoretically possible that you could have no chromosomes in common with your sibling, meaning for each chromosome pair in both parents, you inherited the opposite one than your theoretical sibling.
terracinque countered that “[t]he chance of two siblings with the same parents sharing zero genes must be so close to zero that I will state with confidence that it has never happened in the entire history of Mammalia.” With my mind fresh from probability reading, I did the math:
We can calculate the odds… according to this “tour of the basics” of genetics (http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/b
asics/tour/ ), each parent has 2 sets of 23 chromosomes, call them A and B, of which they received one from his/her dad, one from his/her mom.But when they contribute one half their chromosomes to their child, they can take a little from column A, a little from column B to put together a 23 chromosome set.
So, for a 0% matching sibling set, each child must have gotten A where the other got B in each instance of 46 chromosomes. (As a by-product of this requirement, our theoretical siblings must not be of the same gender… both brothers means they share the father’s Y, both sisters means they share the father’s X)
So, with a 50/50 chance of getting the opposite chromosome on any given pair as a given sibling, I believe the odds are (0.5)^46, or 1.42e-14, or 1.42e-12%, or 1 in 70.4 trillion for humans1. If I’m remembering my probability calculations correctly. So, not likely, even with all the siblings in history.
The kangaroo (and marsupials in general), however, may be a different story. Wikipedia says 12 chromosomes (6 pairs), another source I saw said 14 (7 pairs). So, the worst case odds become (0.5)^14, or 0.006% or 1 in 16,384.
Which is why you see so much squabbling in kangaroo families.
Out of curiosity, I looked up how many humans there have been, because due to the law of very large numbers, even the highly improbable becomes probable when you have a lot of chances (otherwise, no one would ever win the lottery). According to this analysis, 106,456,367,669 humans have been born between 50,000 B.C. and 2002. If we assume that all those people had a sibling, that makes roughly 53 billion sibling pairs. So, with a 1 in 70.4 trillion chance, 53 billion tries probably isn’t enough to make the improbable probable.
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1 Also roughly the odds that Marty McFly would still be the same Marty McFly after he messed up his parent’s meeting.
The Cobweb by Stephen Bury (AKA Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (AKA George F. Jewsbury))
The Cobweb is the second of two books written by Stephen Bury, which is the pseudonym of Neal Stephenson and his uncle, J. Frederick George, which is actually a pseudonym for his real uncle, George Jewsbury. The other novel was Interface.
Strangely, in my log of Interface, I go fairly easy on the book. In fact, I was greatly disappointed in it for its huge, unbelieavable plot holes. I felt that the The Big U, Stephenson’s first novel and one he reportedly cringes at, was better. I blamed his uncle, J. Frederick George, for the poor plotting, since everything else prior to Interface was just plain good (Zodiac, Snow Crash).
But Stephenson and Jewsbury must have figured out how to work together, because The Cobweb is a much better read, and tighter in the plotting. Essentially a political detective story,The Cobweb concerns a small town Deputy Sheriff who stumbles upon a mystery that has global repercussions, including effecting his wife who is serving as a nurse in Operation Desert Shield/Storm. President Bush the First has a few scenes, where he is portrayed as a sympathetic character greatly concerned about the human impact of his actions. This characteristic is viewed as a flaw by his underlings.
The title comes from a political tactic where you block someone’s actions by bogging them down in bureaucratic busy work, appointing them to special pointless committees and whatnot: “cobwebbing”.
My only disappointment was a deus ex machina at the last moment which could have been easily avoided.
Also, how believable is it that this Deputy could solve an international conspiracy while taking care of a 6 month old alone? Please. I can’t even get to the bathroom unless steakums is around.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
curt_holman‘s read-bag review piqued my interest in this book, primarily due to my casual interest in circa 1900 technology and entrepreneurship.
Here’s Curt’s synopsis of the subject: “This lively history text follows narratives on two tracks, primarily (but not exclusively) based in Chicago. Track One depicts the tumultuous planning, construction, implementation and aftermath of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (technically the “World Columbian Exposition”), primarily from the point of view of chief architect Daniel Burnham. Track Two recounts the horrific practices of H.H. Holmes, a charismatic doctor, landlord, pharmacist, fraud and serial killer.”
The catch is that I’ve little interest in (and somewhat of an aversion to) crime stories, which the second track definitively is. So I was jerked between being fascinated in a good way and repulsed in a bad way as the story jumped between the tracks. I considered just reading the story of the fair, but the book is well written and engaging enough that skipping sections felt wrong. Kind of like seeing candy in a bowl and being unable to stop eating until you get that sick feeling once the bowl is empty.
But aside from the sugar-crash, it’s a good read. I learned a few things about good old Chicago’s history, which I miss just a little bit more than the other cities I’ve lived in.