Started: Dec. 6, 2012
Finished: Dec. 12, 2012
Pages: 213
Yet another mystery, and yet another mystery from a series I'm familiar with. I have to admit that I've read fewer of the "Nameless Detective" books than most of the other series that I've covered, mostly because Pronzini's books are harder to find. I've never seen a paperback, and only sought out the first of his books because I'm familiar with his wife's.
What are the "Nameless" books like? Standard private eye fare, set in San Francisco. I've come to the series late, so "Nameless" is no longer a loner running a one man agency. But you get the idea. Missing people, small time hoods, stakeouts, and bars that have never seen better days. But although Nameless is introspective he's not hard-boiled. The title of this one reflects his emotional state as he works his latest case: one he survives only because a gun held to his head mis-fires.
Why is the detective nameless? I don't know if the schtick was deliberate, or if Pronzini ran with it once he noticed that a story told in the first person does not necessarily need to spell out who the protaganist is. Either way, it's not obtrusive. If the cover didn't say "a 'Nameless Detective' novel', you might not notice.
Thursday, 13 December 2012
Sunday, 9 December 2012
And be a villain by Rex Stout
Started: Nov. 28, 2012
Finished: Dec. 3rd, 2012
Pages: 247
Rex Stout, like Ellery Queen, began his career during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction during the 1930s. And be a villian was the 13th in the series that nominally starred the eccentric genius Nero Wolfe as its detective. I say "nominally" because in fact Wolfe is only the costar: he provides the brains, but his confidential assistant Archie Goodwin provides the charm, brawn, and ingenuity necessary to corral clues for Wolfe.
The plot: clever, as is usual in Golden Age fiction, and especially as is usual for a Nero Wolfe tale. After all, why write a novel about a reclusive genius detective unless you're going to come up with a puzzler? In this case Wolfe is prodded by Archie and the state of his finances to approach a radio star who has just had a dramatic on-air murder occur on her show. Contrary to logic and fairness, the guest was NOT killed by the execrable beverage that they were drinking as a promotion...but by someone who managed to introduce poison into a single glass poured from a just-opened bottle in front of the host, several guests, and a studio audience. Who did it? How did they do it? And did they mean to kill the seemingly innocuous guest at all or perhaps the host?
Read And be a villian to find out. And see if you spot the same plot hole that troubled me. :-)
Rex Stout, like Ellery Queen, began his career during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction during the 1930s. And be a villian was the 13th in the series that nominally starred the eccentric genius Nero Wolfe as its detective. I say "nominally" because in fact Wolfe is only the costar: he provides the brains, but his confidential assistant Archie Goodwin provides the charm, brawn, and ingenuity necessary to corral clues for Wolfe.
The plot: clever, as is usual in Golden Age fiction, and especially as is usual for a Nero Wolfe tale. After all, why write a novel about a reclusive genius detective unless you're going to come up with a puzzler? In this case Wolfe is prodded by Archie and the state of his finances to approach a radio star who has just had a dramatic on-air murder occur on her show. Contrary to logic and fairness, the guest was NOT killed by the execrable beverage that they were drinking as a promotion...but by someone who managed to introduce poison into a single glass poured from a just-opened bottle in front of the host, several guests, and a studio audience. Who did it? How did they do it? And did they mean to kill the seemingly innocuous guest at all or perhaps the host?
Read And be a villian to find out. And see if you spot the same plot hole that troubled me. :-)
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
Revolution Business/Trade of Queens by Charles Stross
Started: 23 November, 2012
Finished: 30 November, 2012
Combined pages: 324/303 = 627
Technically these are the last two books in a series of six: but like Blackout/All Clear, all of the books in the Merchant Princes series are part of a single narrative. There isn't even a trace of a recap at the beginning of each book.
Which was a bit of a problem: I read the first three books in about 2009, and ummm....wasn't entirely clear on every detail anymore when I started in on The Revolution Business. But I soon remembered why I'd stalled before finishing the series. Despite the non-stop action, the books are kind of tedious.
Yes, there are a few interesting ideas. There is suspense. There are surprises. There is action and adventure. The main character is an innocent abroad who acts as our proxy as we learn about the parallel world that exists beside our own, separated from us only by several hundred years of economic and social development, and the rare inherited ability to step between worlds.
But....there are also plots and counter plots, alliances and betrayals, double-crosses and triple-crosses, and schemes within schemes. Which is all well and good until...you begin to feel an irrestistible urge to ...yaaawwn. Of course subplot x is actually an attempt by character X to double-cross character y. We haven't had a plot shift in almost 3 pages. Yaaaaawwwn. What was I saying again?
Oh yeah. Stross calls this economic science fiction. And it could have been, if he's spent more time exploring why one world is our world and one world is medieval, and played more with the Family Trade instead of writing a series of cheap thrillers.
Finished: 30 November, 2012
Combined pages: 324/303 = 627
Technically these are the last two books in a series of six: but like Blackout/All Clear, all of the books in the Merchant Princes series are part of a single narrative. There isn't even a trace of a recap at the beginning of each book.
Which was a bit of a problem: I read the first three books in about 2009, and ummm....wasn't entirely clear on every detail anymore when I started in on The Revolution Business. But I soon remembered why I'd stalled before finishing the series. Despite the non-stop action, the books are kind of tedious.
Yes, there are a few interesting ideas. There is suspense. There are surprises. There is action and adventure. The main character is an innocent abroad who acts as our proxy as we learn about the parallel world that exists beside our own, separated from us only by several hundred years of economic and social development, and the rare inherited ability to step between worlds.
But....there are also plots and counter plots, alliances and betrayals, double-crosses and triple-crosses, and schemes within schemes. Which is all well and good until...you begin to feel an irrestistible urge to ...yaaawwn. Of course subplot x is actually an attempt by character X to double-cross character y. We haven't had a plot shift in almost 3 pages. Yaaaaawwwn. What was I saying again?
Oh yeah. Stross calls this economic science fiction. And it could have been, if he's spent more time exploring why one world is our world and one world is medieval, and played more with the Family Trade instead of writing a series of cheap thrillers.
Sunday, 25 November 2012
Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch
Started: Nov. 8th, 2012
Finished: Nov. 24, 2012
Pages: 344
Any review of this book calls out for a compare and contrast with The Life of Pi. After all, how many books can there be that feature a boy, a tiger, and a shipwreck? Unfortunately, I can't do the honours: I may be the only person in the history of the world who started The Life of Pi and didn't finish it. (Don't ask: I am also the only person alive who got through the 1980s without seeing E.T.)
So, I'm on my own here, and am feeling a little at sea. Jamrach's Menagerie is engaging....it follows the adventures of a Victorian boy born into the mud of the East London slums who encounters a tiger. Knowing no better, he pets the tiger on the nose and it reciprocates by taking him in its jaws and carrying him into a much different life.
So far so good.
But....when I read a literary novel I feel as if I ought to be able to figure out what it's trying to say. Instead, as far as I can tell the author was struck by a couple of historical incidents and decided to spin a tale. The end.
Nothing wrong with that. But it feels like empty reading calories.
Finished: Nov. 24, 2012
Pages: 344
Any review of this book calls out for a compare and contrast with The Life of Pi. After all, how many books can there be that feature a boy, a tiger, and a shipwreck? Unfortunately, I can't do the honours: I may be the only person in the history of the world who started The Life of Pi and didn't finish it. (Don't ask: I am also the only person alive who got through the 1980s without seeing E.T.)
So, I'm on my own here, and am feeling a little at sea. Jamrach's Menagerie is engaging....it follows the adventures of a Victorian boy born into the mud of the East London slums who encounters a tiger. Knowing no better, he pets the tiger on the nose and it reciprocates by taking him in its jaws and carrying him into a much different life.
So far so good.
But....when I read a literary novel I feel as if I ought to be able to figure out what it's trying to say. Instead, as far as I can tell the author was struck by a couple of historical incidents and decided to spin a tale. The end.
Nothing wrong with that. But it feels like empty reading calories.
Sprig Muslin by Georgette Heyer
Started: Nov. 19th, 2012
Finished: Nov. 23rd, 2012
Pages: 276
By 1956, Georgette Heyer was supporting her family by her writing, was contemptuous of her fans, and was evidently a little bored. So she'd started twisting her twisty little romantic romps to amuse herself. In this one, the hero *doesn't* fall for the high-spirited runaway girl, even though he literally pursues her (to save herself from herself, of course) for the first two-thirds of the book. Instead he woos a frumpy, respectable and superficially shatter-brained lady who refuses to marry him.
Don't worry, just as in a Bollywood musical, all comes right in the end. Speaking of which, I wonder how many Bollywood films follow Heyer plots? And if any of them do so on purpose?
Sunday, 11 November 2012
Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor by Stephanie Barron
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..... :-)
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, 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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)