Started: Nov. 3
Finished: Nov. 9
Pages: 318
This novel features my least-favorite "historical novel" trap: it makes its characters and their attitudes modern. I know, I know. These books are written to entertain. They're written to appeal to a contemporary audience. And *of course* they're written to sell. So what do I expect from a novel that features Jane Austen as the detective?
Sigh. I know, I know. If I pick up a piece of trash at the library, I get what I deserve. But I refuse to forfeit my right to complain about getting exactly what I ought to have expected..... :-)
Sunday, 11 November 2012
Sunday, 4 November 2012
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Started: June 16th, 2012
Finished: October 31st, 2012
Pages: 481
Wow. I think this is a record. I'm not sure I've ever taken this long to read a book. At least, not one that I never gave up on or restarted during the time period in question.
Oddly, this is actually a recommendation for Thinking, Fast and Slow. It was so interesting that I really wanted to finish it. And its short chapters are conducive to intermittent reading, so I could pick it up and read a self-contained chunk even after a couple of weeks away.
What's it about? How we think. How we make decisions. And how the structure of our brain can work against us.
Daniel Kahneman is an experimental psychologist who shared a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making, and more specifically on "prospect theory", an explanation of how human beings make decisions involving economic risks and rewards in uncertain conditions. His shocking conclusion: people do not typically make rational decisions. Instead they make "irrational" ones in predictable ways that overweight the risk of losses, and underweight the benefits of probable but uncertain gains.
Kahneman and his chief collaborator, Amos Tversky, were led to this conclusion by years of work on decision making. But the book is fundamentally not just about prospect theory, as interesting as that is. Instead it's a coherent summary of the current understanding of how our brains function, and how that affects our thoughts and the decisions that we each make every day.
In some ways this is a very depressing book. In the same way your visual intuition can be quite easily fooled by any of the standard 'optical illusions' (like the ones that ask you to judge which line is longer or shorter), your judgement can quite predictably affected by a number of perceptual factors like "narrow framing", "anchors", and a failure to understand the phenomena of regression to the mean. Kahneman demonstrates this with specific examples. In each case he provides a scenario, asks you to make a judgement, describes the typical responses and how those responses are logically wrong, and then explains the research in that specific area.
Why is this all depressing? Everyone likes to believe that *they* aren't easily fooled. But if you're honest about it, at least some of the time you'll find yourself making exactly the responses that Kahneman analyzes. And even if you avoided every erroneous intuition in the entire book....it would be by concentrating on the specific questions that he asks. In Kahneman's terms, it would be by employing "System 2" in your brain: the thoughtful rational agent. But none of use "System 2" all of the time. It's slow. It requires effort. And the quick-thinking, reactive "System 1" is what gets us through most days. "System 1" recognizes habitual situations, and warns us and allows us to react quickly when we encounter something surprising....like the car that's about to sideswipe us in traffic. We can't live without System 1. In real life we use System 1 all of the time. And it's primarily the behaviour of System 1 that Kahneman describes.
Kahneman had a noble goal in writing Thinking, Fast and Slow. He wants to make people more aware of System 1 and how it works, and wants to give us tools to help ourselves to recognize situations where we need to trigger System 2. But he also says that after a lifetime of studying the brain and decision-making, he hasn't noticed himself getting notably better at decisions.
The next time you get excited, or upset, or motivated by political rhetoric, or advertising of any kind, you should stop and think about exactly *how* that statement was put together. It's likely that it was crafted by someone who has studied Mr. Kahneman's work. Which is the real reason that this is such a depressing book.
Finished: October 31st, 2012
Pages: 481
Wow. I think this is a record. I'm not sure I've ever taken this long to read a book. At least, not one that I never gave up on or restarted during the time period in question.
Oddly, this is actually a recommendation for Thinking, Fast and Slow. It was so interesting that I really wanted to finish it. And its short chapters are conducive to intermittent reading, so I could pick it up and read a self-contained chunk even after a couple of weeks away.
What's it about? How we think. How we make decisions. And how the structure of our brain can work against us.
Daniel Kahneman is an experimental psychologist who shared a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making, and more specifically on "prospect theory", an explanation of how human beings make decisions involving economic risks and rewards in uncertain conditions. His shocking conclusion: people do not typically make rational decisions. Instead they make "irrational" ones in predictable ways that overweight the risk of losses, and underweight the benefits of probable but uncertain gains.
Kahneman and his chief collaborator, Amos Tversky, were led to this conclusion by years of work on decision making. But the book is fundamentally not just about prospect theory, as interesting as that is. Instead it's a coherent summary of the current understanding of how our brains function, and how that affects our thoughts and the decisions that we each make every day.
In some ways this is a very depressing book. In the same way your visual intuition can be quite easily fooled by any of the standard 'optical illusions' (like the ones that ask you to judge which line is longer or shorter), your judgement can quite predictably affected by a number of perceptual factors like "narrow framing", "anchors", and a failure to understand the phenomena of regression to the mean. Kahneman demonstrates this with specific examples. In each case he provides a scenario, asks you to make a judgement, describes the typical responses and how those responses are logically wrong, and then explains the research in that specific area.
Why is this all depressing? Everyone likes to believe that *they* aren't easily fooled. But if you're honest about it, at least some of the time you'll find yourself making exactly the responses that Kahneman analyzes. And even if you avoided every erroneous intuition in the entire book....it would be by concentrating on the specific questions that he asks. In Kahneman's terms, it would be by employing "System 2" in your brain: the thoughtful rational agent. But none of use "System 2" all of the time. It's slow. It requires effort. And the quick-thinking, reactive "System 1" is what gets us through most days. "System 1" recognizes habitual situations, and warns us and allows us to react quickly when we encounter something surprising....like the car that's about to sideswipe us in traffic. We can't live without System 1. In real life we use System 1 all of the time. And it's primarily the behaviour of System 1 that Kahneman describes.
Kahneman had a noble goal in writing Thinking, Fast and Slow. He wants to make people more aware of System 1 and how it works, and wants to give us tools to help ourselves to recognize situations where we need to trigger System 2. But he also says that after a lifetime of studying the brain and decision-making, he hasn't noticed himself getting notably better at decisions.
The next time you get excited, or upset, or motivated by political rhetoric, or advertising of any kind, you should stop and think about exactly *how* that statement was put together. It's likely that it was crafted by someone who has studied Mr. Kahneman's work. Which is the real reason that this is such a depressing book.
Tuesday, 30 October 2012
Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian
Started: 16 Oct. 2012
Finished: 26 Oct. 2012
Pages:496
You do know Patrick O'Brian don't you? The pull quote on the cover reads "The best historical novels ever written". I suppose Hillary Mantel might quibble, but the quote dates from long before Wolf Hall or even Sandra Gulland's The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B, so we can allow The New York Times to be a little more definitive than later writers might choose to be.
This is book 2 of a 20 book series set during the Napoleonic Wars. They're widely praised as the best naval adventures ever written, not the least because although our hero Jack Aubrey and his physician friend Stephen Maturin are entirely fictional, every battle is based on a real encounter as recorded in British naval records. And the battles are thrilling, even if your average reader can't understand the fine points of sailing and all the many details of ship's rigging that you encounter in a blow by blow account of battle.
But that's not what makes the books great. You watch Jack being forced to dodge tipstaffs to prevent being thrown into debtor's prison. You ride beside Stephen and Jack as they choose to overnight at an inn rather than travel roads plagued by out of work soldiers who've turned to highway robbery. You read the letters rapidly dictated by a naval official resisting entreaties for ship assignments or promotions made by various nobles for their relatives and proteges.
O'Brian published the Aubrey and Maturin novels in the 1970s and 80s, but he makes you feel that he lived at the turn of the 19th century. And that he's bringing you along for the ride.
Finished: 26 Oct. 2012
Pages:496
You do know Patrick O'Brian don't you? The pull quote on the cover reads "The best historical novels ever written". I suppose Hillary Mantel might quibble, but the quote dates from long before Wolf Hall or even Sandra Gulland's The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B, so we can allow The New York Times to be a little more definitive than later writers might choose to be.
This is book 2 of a 20 book series set during the Napoleonic Wars. They're widely praised as the best naval adventures ever written, not the least because although our hero Jack Aubrey and his physician friend Stephen Maturin are entirely fictional, every battle is based on a real encounter as recorded in British naval records. And the battles are thrilling, even if your average reader can't understand the fine points of sailing and all the many details of ship's rigging that you encounter in a blow by blow account of battle.
But that's not what makes the books great. You watch Jack being forced to dodge tipstaffs to prevent being thrown into debtor's prison. You ride beside Stephen and Jack as they choose to overnight at an inn rather than travel roads plagued by out of work soldiers who've turned to highway robbery. You read the letters rapidly dictated by a naval official resisting entreaties for ship assignments or promotions made by various nobles for their relatives and proteges.
O'Brian published the Aubrey and Maturin novels in the 1970s and 80s, but he makes you feel that he lived at the turn of the 19th century. And that he's bringing you along for the ride.
Sunday, 21 October 2012
Monster by A. Lee Martinez
Started: Oct. 12, 2012
Finished: Oct. 15
Pages: 325
Monster is the kind of book that Tooth and Claw is not: it's funny, satirical, and exists both to make you laugh, and to make you laugh *at*. What you're laughing *at* is mostly just everyday life. It's the kind of book where the annoyance that disrupts your overnight shift stocking shelves at the supermarket isn't aggravating coworkers or a broken freezer....but yetis gorging on ice cream. And the solution is calling the authorities, but the person who shows up to deal with the problem has received thaumaturgy training at the Community college. Which would surprise you a lot more if your memory of magical events didn't get confusingly vague just moments after the yetis are removed or your apartment is destroyed by trolls.
Amusing, with no threat of profundity.
Finished: Oct. 15
Pages: 325
Monster is the kind of book that Tooth and Claw is not: it's funny, satirical, and exists both to make you laugh, and to make you laugh *at*. What you're laughing *at* is mostly just everyday life. It's the kind of book where the annoyance that disrupts your overnight shift stocking shelves at the supermarket isn't aggravating coworkers or a broken freezer....but yetis gorging on ice cream. And the solution is calling the authorities, but the person who shows up to deal with the problem has received thaumaturgy training at the Community college. Which would surprise you a lot more if your memory of magical events didn't get confusingly vague just moments after the yetis are removed or your apartment is destroyed by trolls.
Amusing, with no threat of profundity.
Sunday, 14 October 2012
Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan
Started: Oct. 4, 2012
Finished: Oct. 10, 2012
Pages: 254
Remember Omni Magazine? It doesn't surprise me that Tea from an Empty Cup originated from an Omni short story: the novel was published in 1998, but it has that early 90s cyber-punk feel. It also doesn't feel as dated as some books written in that era, maybe because the "alternative reality" cyber-technology is neither as ubiquitous nor as "taken for granted" as it is in some books from the era. The cyber-world is basically just an incredibly immersive MMORPG, rather than a replacement for every-day reality, and the viewpoint characters are themselves only marginally familiar with it, entering only to investigate a crime / friend's disappearance. That makes the book still compatible with today's future: you can imagine that we'll still invent such a thing even if we no longer talk about "virtual reality" or see booths with dorky eyeshade headsets at the fair.
Remember Omni Magazine? It doesn't surprise me that Tea from an Empty Cup originated from an Omni short story: the novel was published in 1998, but it has that early 90s cyber-punk feel. It also doesn't feel as dated as some books written in that era, maybe because the "alternative reality" cyber-technology is neither as ubiquitous nor as "taken for granted" as it is in some books from the era. The cyber-world is basically just an incredibly immersive MMORPG, rather than a replacement for every-day reality, and the viewpoint characters are themselves only marginally familiar with it, entering only to investigate a crime / friend's disappearance. That makes the book still compatible with today's future: you can imagine that we'll still invent such a thing even if we no longer talk about "virtual reality" or see booths with dorky eyeshade headsets at the fair.
Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
Started: 24 Sept 2012
Finished: 3 Oct 2012
Pages: 292
Tooth and Claw is "Jane Austen with dragons". No, not a pastiche of classic fiction, like "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" Tooth and Claw is a mannered romantic tale where all of the parts are played by dragons.
Books like this are generally a part of a separate sub-genre of fantasy/speculative fiction. Depending on its tone, you'd expect Tooth and Claw's readers to be either people who will read anything and everything about vampires or dragons or zombies or <insert favourite trope here>, or, if the tone is arch rather than twee, to be people who enjoy satire.
But Tooth and Claw is simply a well-written regency-style romance that explores an interesting idea or two about what kind of society might be established by dragons, and what kind of role might be played by women (dragons) within that society. It won the World Fantasy Award in 2004, which gives you an idea that the writing and plotting are well above average.
I'd previously read two of Walton's later books: Farthing and Half-penny. Be warned. In the same way that a reader of To Say Nothing of the Dog might be surprised by the Domesday Book, a reader of Tooth and Claw might be a little taken aback by some of her later work. Farthing and Half-penny take place in an alternative history where British fascists gain the ascendancy and Britain abstains from the Second World War. The first book (Farthing) perfectly captured the zeitgeist of George Bush's America....a world in which certainties about logic, justice, and decency are heartbreakingly false. Recommended, but not exactly something to curl up with with a cup of tea and a cat -- unlike Tooth and Claw.
Finished: 3 Oct 2012
Pages: 292
Tooth and Claw is "Jane Austen with dragons". No, not a pastiche of classic fiction, like "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" Tooth and Claw is a mannered romantic tale where all of the parts are played by dragons.
Books like this are generally a part of a separate sub-genre of fantasy/speculative fiction. Depending on its tone, you'd expect Tooth and Claw's readers to be either people who will read anything and everything about vampires or dragons or zombies or <insert favourite trope here>, or, if the tone is arch rather than twee, to be people who enjoy satire.
But Tooth and Claw is simply a well-written regency-style romance that explores an interesting idea or two about what kind of society might be established by dragons, and what kind of role might be played by women (dragons) within that society. It won the World Fantasy Award in 2004, which gives you an idea that the writing and plotting are well above average.
I'd previously read two of Walton's later books: Farthing and Half-penny. Be warned. In the same way that a reader of To Say Nothing of the Dog might be surprised by the Domesday Book, a reader of Tooth and Claw might be a little taken aback by some of her later work. Farthing and Half-penny take place in an alternative history where British fascists gain the ascendancy and Britain abstains from the Second World War. The first book (Farthing) perfectly captured the zeitgeist of George Bush's America....a world in which certainties about logic, justice, and decency are heartbreakingly false. Recommended, but not exactly something to curl up with with a cup of tea and a cat -- unlike Tooth and Claw.
Monday, 1 October 2012
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Started: Sept. 8th
Finished: Sept. 24, 2012
Pages:544
This is what the future looks like.
Sea levels have risen. Bangkok is protected from the ocean by huge dikes and pumps. Whole forests of sacred trees stand as haunted lumber, and the appearance of a dragonfruit in the market is as puzzling and awe-inspiring a mystery as the appearance of a unicorn in downtown Vancouver.
Our great-great grandchildren live in a "calorie" economy. Large machinery is driven by megadonts (genetically engineered elephants), and smaller devices by "kinksprings" that are wound by people or animals because global warming has made the everyday use of carbon-based fuels unthinkable. But calories are not so easy to come by either: the food chain has been catastrophically disrupted by genetically engineered accidents or attacks. And the threat of a newly mutated plague is never far away.
This is another book that took me a long time to read. It seemed far too vividly probable. And the cast of characters too desperate, too corrupt, too sinned against, and too sinning to let you identify with any one of them.
I could never have finished it if the book weren't so brilliant. Or if this were the depths of a dark November.
Finished: Sept. 24, 2012
Pages:544
This is what the future looks like.
Sea levels have risen. Bangkok is protected from the ocean by huge dikes and pumps. Whole forests of sacred trees stand as haunted lumber, and the appearance of a dragonfruit in the market is as puzzling and awe-inspiring a mystery as the appearance of a unicorn in downtown Vancouver.
Our great-great grandchildren live in a "calorie" economy. Large machinery is driven by megadonts (genetically engineered elephants), and smaller devices by "kinksprings" that are wound by people or animals because global warming has made the everyday use of carbon-based fuels unthinkable. But calories are not so easy to come by either: the food chain has been catastrophically disrupted by genetically engineered accidents or attacks. And the threat of a newly mutated plague is never far away.
This is another book that took me a long time to read. It seemed far too vividly probable. And the cast of characters too desperate, too corrupt, too sinned against, and too sinning to let you identify with any one of them.
I could never have finished it if the book weren't so brilliant. Or if this were the depths of a dark November.
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