Started: 12 July
Finished: 25 July
Pages: 187
I first read Colette when took a class in 20th Century French Literature in translation, offered by the French department at the University of Saskatchewan back in the 1980s. I think that must be why I picked up a second-hand copy of The Claudine Novels at some point, and why I finally pulled it down off the shelf earlier this month when I was looking for something to read.
More or less by coincidence, I also started reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollestonecraft and a book of SF short stories by Judith Merrill at almost the same time. Claudine at School was written in the 1890s, Vindications was written about a hundred years earlier in 1792, while the Judith Merrill short stories were written between the late 1940s and the 1970s. All three are by and about middle class women.
I feel a bit as if I'm starting a "compare and contrast" essay. But perhaps I'll desist, given that I haven't yet finished Vindications or the Merrill stories, and it's been more than 25 years since I wrote my last literary essay. I will say that reading the three books together felt a bit like time travel: as I write about the other books perhaps I'll pull a bit of commentary together.
Of the books, Collette's is not self-consciously a commentary on women and women's lives. This is her first novel, written as a very young married woman, to please a demanding older husband who eventually got the book published under his own name. Her later novels explore women's lives, but this one simply describes the life of a teenaged girl attending her local village school.
Claudine at School is described as "charming" on Wikipedia and in its introduction. And so it is. It's a slice of a lost time, set in a quiet village where a visit from a local politician is enough to justify an all day program of welcoming songs by schoolchildren dressed in their best clothes and speeches by local dignitaries. It's a time when girls from village families might get an education so that they could train as school teachers, girls from not-so-ambitous families might snatch kisses from boys in the forest, while girls from good families like Claudine might go to school solely to keep themselves amused while waiting for their lives to begin. The book's not quaint: the school girls and school teachers leap off the page as real, complicated, squabbling people. And because the book was originally written as soft porn (Colette's husband kept nagging her to make the contents 'hot'), it reads as surprisingly modern. (Lesbians, oh my.)
Would I recommend it? Colette's later books, like The Captive are more interesting. Claudine feels more like backstory, and a reminder of some of the ways that women's lives have changed (more opportunities), and have not changed (harassing male authority figures) over the last 100 plus years.
Monday, 17 August 2015
Tuesday, 7 July 2015
The signal and the noise: why so many predictions fail -- but some don't by Nate Silver
Started: May 21, 2015
Finished (ish): 4 July 2015
Pages: 457
There is a genre of book that I tend to pick up in airports. No, not thrillers or romances. Intellectual books of various kinds that pique my interest by addressing something that's top of mind for me. Or at least, they create a top-of-mind subject by virtue of being right in front of me at a time when I know I'm going to be trapped in a chair for hours in the immediate future...albeit without quite enough oxygen for full mental processing. But still.
I picked this one up as a result of a recent visit to Saskatoon. The blurb appealed to me, and work and workish books were on my mind, particularly questions about work-related predictions. I told myself that the book would be interesting, and perhaps even useful.
And it was interesting, if nowhere near as profound as the cover blurb promises. "Could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade." Um...no. Everything momentous in this book is more ably and rigourously covered in Thinking: Fast and Slow. And at least some of the interest of the book comes from factors outside of the direct content of the book itself. But that doesn't mean that the book was dull or pointless. Just not profound.
What do I mean by all of that? And what is the book about?
Nate Silver famously made a 100% correct prediction of the results of the 2012 American presidential election, at a time when pundits were calling the election too close to call and pollsters were suffering public angst about the present and future of political polling. He parlayed that success into this book, which discusses the art and science of prediction by examining its successes and failures in a number of different fields.
What did I learn from the book? The coolest thing is that for the first time, I feel that I have some understanding of Bayesian statistics. Thank you Nate Silver. I've heard Bayesian statistics discussed in passing many times, without really knowing what was meant. Silver not only explains what they are, he illustrates how they are used and why they are significant. It's not like Silver invented Bayes Theorem, but good communications skills matter, and his explanation is a useful contribution.
I also learnt the current state of a number of fields, like weather prediction and earthquake prediction, which is kind of interesting, if not life-changing.
But part of the interest of the book comes out of my 'meta-learning'. Silver talks about himself and his own experiences with prediction throughout the book. Don't blame Silver: it's a modern non-fiction book style to write about yourself while you write about your subject. But one of the distracting side-effects of this style is that I felt that I was learning about Nate Silver as I read, and what I primarily learnt was that Nate Silver is smart, opportunistic, and ultimately kind of shallow.
No, I'm not sure why that really matters. But Silver has apparently built his career by learning something about Bayesian reasoning and the kind of decision-making fallacies that we are all prone to (as described in Thinking: Fast and Slow), and then finding fields that are under-serviced in terms of the rigorous application of these principles to prediction. He's helped develop a program that took a new approach to predicting the performance of baseball players, he made a bunch of money in the great internet poker boom in the mid-2000s, and after that crashed he focused on poll-based political predictions.
So, while the book is interesting, it isn't profound or life-changing, or really applicable to ones' own life circumstances. A 7 out of 10, maybe?
Finished (ish): 4 July 2015
Pages: 457
There is a genre of book that I tend to pick up in airports. No, not thrillers or romances. Intellectual books of various kinds that pique my interest by addressing something that's top of mind for me. Or at least, they create a top-of-mind subject by virtue of being right in front of me at a time when I know I'm going to be trapped in a chair for hours in the immediate future...albeit without quite enough oxygen for full mental processing. But still.
I picked this one up as a result of a recent visit to Saskatoon. The blurb appealed to me, and work and workish books were on my mind, particularly questions about work-related predictions. I told myself that the book would be interesting, and perhaps even useful.
And it was interesting, if nowhere near as profound as the cover blurb promises. "Could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade." Um...no. Everything momentous in this book is more ably and rigourously covered in Thinking: Fast and Slow. And at least some of the interest of the book comes from factors outside of the direct content of the book itself. But that doesn't mean that the book was dull or pointless. Just not profound.
What do I mean by all of that? And what is the book about?
Nate Silver famously made a 100% correct prediction of the results of the 2012 American presidential election, at a time when pundits were calling the election too close to call and pollsters were suffering public angst about the present and future of political polling. He parlayed that success into this book, which discusses the art and science of prediction by examining its successes and failures in a number of different fields.
What did I learn from the book? The coolest thing is that for the first time, I feel that I have some understanding of Bayesian statistics. Thank you Nate Silver. I've heard Bayesian statistics discussed in passing many times, without really knowing what was meant. Silver not only explains what they are, he illustrates how they are used and why they are significant. It's not like Silver invented Bayes Theorem, but good communications skills matter, and his explanation is a useful contribution.
I also learnt the current state of a number of fields, like weather prediction and earthquake prediction, which is kind of interesting, if not life-changing.
But part of the interest of the book comes out of my 'meta-learning'. Silver talks about himself and his own experiences with prediction throughout the book. Don't blame Silver: it's a modern non-fiction book style to write about yourself while you write about your subject. But one of the distracting side-effects of this style is that I felt that I was learning about Nate Silver as I read, and what I primarily learnt was that Nate Silver is smart, opportunistic, and ultimately kind of shallow.
No, I'm not sure why that really matters. But Silver has apparently built his career by learning something about Bayesian reasoning and the kind of decision-making fallacies that we are all prone to (as described in Thinking: Fast and Slow), and then finding fields that are under-serviced in terms of the rigorous application of these principles to prediction. He's helped develop a program that took a new approach to predicting the performance of baseball players, he made a bunch of money in the great internet poker boom in the mid-2000s, and after that crashed he focused on poll-based political predictions.
So, while the book is interesting, it isn't profound or life-changing, or really applicable to ones' own life circumstances. A 7 out of 10, maybe?
Thursday, 18 June 2015
Adventures in time and space with Max Merriwell by Pat Murphy
Started: June 12
Finished: June 17
Pages: 287
Do you like your fiction "meta"? Adventures in time and space with Max Merriwell may take the "meta" cake. Pat Murphy was so dedicated to telling this story of fiction, reality, fictional reality and quantum possibility that she wrote two other novels under pseudonyms (There and Back Again "by Max Merriwell", and Wild Angel "by Mary Maxwell") to support it! Or at least she tried: apparently her publishers insisted that those two books appear under her own name. But the earlier novels get their "proper" attribution in Adventures, and Murphy gets her revenge: Adventures features two characters named "Pat Murphy", neither of whom is a self-portrait.
That gives you a flavour of the book, as does the fact that both Max Merriwell and Mary Maxwell both appear as characters, and Susan, a character in Adventures, reads both There and Back Again and Wild Angel during the course of the novel.
Whew. That was sufficiently self-referential that it was difficult to express clearly. I'm sure that Murphy had even greater difficulties keeping it all clear in the novel itself. But she manages: the book comes across as a romp.
Pat Murphy's day job is as a science writer at the Exploratorium. She's written a Nebula-award winning novel (Falling Woman), and is also notable as one of founders of the James Tiptree, Jr award for fiction. If this novel is any indication, she is also likely to be a lot of fun at a party. Or maybe not: maybe we should imagine her as a dour recluse, to make her as unlike as possible to her fiction. I suspect she'd enjoy that.
Finished: June 17
Pages: 287
Do you like your fiction "meta"? Adventures in time and space with Max Merriwell may take the "meta" cake. Pat Murphy was so dedicated to telling this story of fiction, reality, fictional reality and quantum possibility that she wrote two other novels under pseudonyms (There and Back Again "by Max Merriwell", and Wild Angel "by Mary Maxwell") to support it! Or at least she tried: apparently her publishers insisted that those two books appear under her own name. But the earlier novels get their "proper" attribution in Adventures, and Murphy gets her revenge: Adventures features two characters named "Pat Murphy", neither of whom is a self-portrait.
That gives you a flavour of the book, as does the fact that both Max Merriwell and Mary Maxwell both appear as characters, and Susan, a character in Adventures, reads both There and Back Again and Wild Angel during the course of the novel.
Whew. That was sufficiently self-referential that it was difficult to express clearly. I'm sure that Murphy had even greater difficulties keeping it all clear in the novel itself. But she manages: the book comes across as a romp.
Pat Murphy's day job is as a science writer at the Exploratorium. She's written a Nebula-award winning novel (Falling Woman), and is also notable as one of founders of the James Tiptree, Jr award for fiction. If this novel is any indication, she is also likely to be a lot of fun at a party. Or maybe not: maybe we should imagine her as a dour recluse, to make her as unlike as possible to her fiction. I suspect she'd enjoy that.
Thursday, 4 June 2015
D.A. by Connie Willis
Started: 1 June 2015
Finished: 1 June 2015
Pages: 76
D.A. is a YA novelette.
It was way too tempting to describe the book this way: first of all for the acronymitis (too many years in high tech have made me far too susceptible), and for the excuse to use jargon.
For the benefit of those not familiar with SF fiction prize categories, I didn't make up "novelette". Novelettes are works of fiction between 30-70 pages long. Novellas are their slightly longer siblings, ranging from 70-160 pages. Technically, D.A. may count as a Young Adult novella rather than a novelette, but I'd have to do a word count to be sure as D.A. does include pictures.
Now that I have that out of the way, what did I make of D.A.?
D.A. tells the story of a teenager who gets accepted into the insanely elite and competitive Space Academy....even though she didn't apply. "Why would I apply?" she asks. "I've told you a hundred times that I don't want to go into space. I want to go to UCLA."
How is it? I think it would be great for a young teenager /tween who had some interest in science fiction. It's light, it's fun, and it was written by Connie Willis, who has 11 Hugo awards and 7 Nebula awards proving that she knows how to write. For an adult, it's a perfectly acceptable brief entertainment. After all, when's the last time you read a book with pictures?
Finished: 1 June 2015
Pages: 76
D.A. is a YA novelette.
It was way too tempting to describe the book this way: first of all for the acronymitis (too many years in high tech have made me far too susceptible), and for the excuse to use jargon.
For the benefit of those not familiar with SF fiction prize categories, I didn't make up "novelette". Novelettes are works of fiction between 30-70 pages long. Novellas are their slightly longer siblings, ranging from 70-160 pages. Technically, D.A. may count as a Young Adult novella rather than a novelette, but I'd have to do a word count to be sure as D.A. does include pictures.
Now that I have that out of the way, what did I make of D.A.?
D.A. tells the story of a teenager who gets accepted into the insanely elite and competitive Space Academy....even though she didn't apply. "Why would I apply?" she asks. "I've told you a hundred times that I don't want to go into space. I want to go to UCLA."
How is it? I think it would be great for a young teenager /tween who had some interest in science fiction. It's light, it's fun, and it was written by Connie Willis, who has 11 Hugo awards and 7 Nebula awards proving that she knows how to write. For an adult, it's a perfectly acceptable brief entertainment. After all, when's the last time you read a book with pictures?
Monday, 1 June 2015
Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik
Started: 15 April
Finished: 24 May
Pages: 252
Being interrupted is bad. This isn't a long book, and it isn't a difficult book. But for one reason or another my reading of it was interrupted a couple of times. With a novel, that can mean feeling like I've wandered back into a conversation with strangers. With a nonfiction book it just means a curiously disrupted perception of the the book's contents.
So, apologies to the book, and its author. It deserved better.
Stuff Matters belongs to the now-venerable tradition of nonfiction works begun by Much Depends on Dinner back in 1986. The author begins with a simple everyday artefact -- in this case, a photo of himself sitting on a roof patio -- and devotes a chapter to exploring the history, sociology, and science of items within that artefact. Mark Miodownik is a materials scientist, so his focus is on exploring the materials that make up everyday objects: things like paper, concrete, chocolate, and china.
Stuff Matters won the 2014 Winton Prize for Science Books. The judges said "This brilliantly written book is a fresh take on material science that makes even the most everyday stuff exciting and interesting. It demonstrates just how creative and ingenious the human mind can be in its ability to incorporate them into our lives.” Personally, I think the primary reason Miodownik won, and the primary virtue of the book is how imaginative he is. Each material he discusses is treated in a different way. For example, he wrote a film script for the "plastic" chapter.
The only "but" to this book is that if you have a science background, you might find the contents a little bit basic. Not that the science is less than rigourous--I definitely learned things--but that as a science reader you may have encountered some of the contents before in different contexts. But hey, I picked up fun facts that I was able to insert into conversation twice within a couple of weeks. And the book is entertaining and engaging, and might just get you interested in the science of the "stuff" that surrounds us all.
Finished: 24 May
Pages: 252
Being interrupted is bad. This isn't a long book, and it isn't a difficult book. But for one reason or another my reading of it was interrupted a couple of times. With a novel, that can mean feeling like I've wandered back into a conversation with strangers. With a nonfiction book it just means a curiously disrupted perception of the the book's contents.
So, apologies to the book, and its author. It deserved better.
Stuff Matters belongs to the now-venerable tradition of nonfiction works begun by Much Depends on Dinner back in 1986. The author begins with a simple everyday artefact -- in this case, a photo of himself sitting on a roof patio -- and devotes a chapter to exploring the history, sociology, and science of items within that artefact. Mark Miodownik is a materials scientist, so his focus is on exploring the materials that make up everyday objects: things like paper, concrete, chocolate, and china.
Stuff Matters won the 2014 Winton Prize for Science Books. The judges said "This brilliantly written book is a fresh take on material science that makes even the most everyday stuff exciting and interesting. It demonstrates just how creative and ingenious the human mind can be in its ability to incorporate them into our lives.” Personally, I think the primary reason Miodownik won, and the primary virtue of the book is how imaginative he is. Each material he discusses is treated in a different way. For example, he wrote a film script for the "plastic" chapter.
The only "but" to this book is that if you have a science background, you might find the contents a little bit basic. Not that the science is less than rigourous--I definitely learned things--but that as a science reader you may have encountered some of the contents before in different contexts. But hey, I picked up fun facts that I was able to insert into conversation twice within a couple of weeks. And the book is entertaining and engaging, and might just get you interested in the science of the "stuff" that surrounds us all.
Sunday, 24 May 2015
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
Started: May 8
Finished: May 12
Pages: 356
Ancillary Justice won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Ann Leckie, which is quite an accomplishment for a first novel. Ancillary Sword is the sequel.
Has there every been an outstanding "first" book that was outdone by its sequel? That's an interesting question, and not one that I propose to answer from my own reading experience.
But in thinking about the question, I was reminded of Scott McCloud's take on creativity and "great works" from Understanding Comics. He suggests that are two types of great artists: those whose greatness comes from mastery, and those whose greatness comes from innovation. The first type of artist creates their greatest works in the fullness of their careers. Earlier works are like practice runs for their greatest work, which comes as the artist develops full mastery of message and technique. The second type of artist is a revelation: they seem to spring from nowhere to astonish the world. They often provide something radically new. Subsequent work by that artist may not seem as original or as interesting, and later artists may well build on that innovative artitst's originality,and create more polished versions of what made the innovator great. There are innumerable examples of artists of type 2: Jane Austen, for one.
In a science fictional context, any author who wins the Nebula and the Hugo with their first novel must be in category 2, right? They must be an innovator. But ......what was new about Ancillary Justice? The main character of that novel is an embodied artificial intelligence: a starship's intelligence in a human body. This isn't novel. If I could be bothered to pick through the stacks on the shelf behind me I could give you the title and author of a book more than 15 years old that features an artificial intelligence that assumes human form. (Although that info would definitely be a spoiler for the book). Is the universe that Leckie creates novel? Nope, it's a standard space opera universe: a multi-solar-system human empire with faster-than-light travel and powerful and inscrutable aliens on the fringe.
So, why did Leckie win? Basically, good writing. She uses a limited viewpoint/unreliable narrator to tell her story, while doing a whole lot of showing rather than telling. She provides a novel viewpoint on the story she chooses to tell, and animates her plot, characters, and themes in a compelling way.
Ancillary Sword continues the story told in the award-winning Ancillary Justice, to much the same standard as the first book.
Does either book provide anything totally new? Nope. Are the books interesting? Yes. Are they good reads? Yes again. So while I wouldn't consider either one a classic, I was happy to read them. I'd recommend Ancillary Justice to any SF reader.
Ancillary Sword continues the story told in the award-winning Ancillary Justice, to much the same standard as the first book.
Does either book provide anything totally new? Nope. Are the books interesting? Yes. Are they good reads? Yes again. So while I wouldn't consider either one a classic, I was happy to read them. I'd recommend Ancillary Justice to any SF reader.
Relaunched book blog
Yes, I've decided to relaunch the book blog, but I'm going to do it a little differently than I did it before. Rather than blogging about every single book I read, I'm going to write about some of them. Most of them even. But I'm going to feel free to omit talking about anything that I didn't find particularly interesting. I may periodically list the ones that come "between" the books I actually review though.
In that spirit, I've read the following books since I last reviewed one:
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
May 2015
Pages: 383
The Second Confession by Rex Stout
May 2015
Pages: 197
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (skimmed)
April 2015
Pages: 344
A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd
May 14-20
Pages: 329
Late April and May were a stressful time, hence the generally unchallenging comfort reading.
In that spirit, I've read the following books since I last reviewed one:
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
May 2015
Pages: 383
The Second Confession by Rex Stout
May 2015
Pages: 197
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (skimmed)
April 2015
Pages: 344
A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd
May 14-20
Pages: 329
Late April and May were a stressful time, hence the generally unchallenging comfort reading.
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