"The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness" 2006

This morning I finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. It is another brilliant work, providing a perspective on political organization of societies much as The Left Hand of Darkness did for gender organization.

LeGuin writes about decisions, about habits, compromises, and choice. She is probably one of the best writers on the concept of freedom you could read.

Highly recommended. Here's a taste:

Fulfillment, Shevak thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

Getting under the covers 2005

Today I was taking a look at the bestsellers on Amazon - a fascinating social study - and noticed this rather amusing juxtaposition of cover art, subject and added advertising graphics:

Ahem.

One of the rather nice things about getting older is that you can enjoy being on the pedestal, putting someone else there, or the mutual awareness that you're enjoying all this skirt uplooking without sacrificing your sense of safety or self. In any case, I tend to avoid the pop psychology and head for the speculative fiction or fascinating non-fiction.

Here's what I have read in the top 100:

Freakonomics - fun, but pushed a little far to pop. I would have liked a bit more depth. Fascinating ideas, though; particularly the observation that legalized abortion correlates tightly with lowered crime 15 or so years later.

Blink - very much enjoyed this. Thinking about getting the audio book version since Malcolm Gladwell is such a great speaker.

The Tipping Point - amazing, influential book, and oddly enough still imbued with my original mental image of Gladwell - professorial, badly-weathered 50something, Alan Ginsbergesque - despite my now knowing he's a young guy with an afro who's rather nice looking (and just professorial enough to have the male equivalent of sexy librarian going).

The Time Traveler's Wife - recommended to me by my dear friend Shannon and very wisely so.  Fantastic premise, very very well executed.

A Short History of Nearly Everything - highly enjoyable science writing from the ever funny Bill Bryson. Recommended. The audio book is fun too since the guy reading it sounds like the voice of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The Catcher in the Rye - read it many long years ago; only can recall being rather annoyed at the protaganist.

The Chronicles of Narnia - I must have read every one of these seven books at least 25 times each. Probably more. The imagery of these books is firmly rooted in my internal landscape. (Have to admit that I had read them more than a dozen times and loved them deeply before someone pointed out the Christian metaphor to me; my reaction was to think "but that makes them so much smaller...")

1984 - time to re-read this again, America. (Very glad to see this in the top 100).

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - I love the Harry Potter books. Great characters with some complexity to them and I really like the friendship between Harry, Ron and Hermione. I was very pleased in this one to see Harry hitting the hard part of adolescence and J.K. Rowling having the cajones to write him as a less sympathetic character.

Fahrenheit 451 - well, heck, I'm a librarian. Of course I've read this classic.

If I switch over to the top-sellers for science, I can also note Strunk & White's Elements of Style (apparently now achieving the status of a natural law), Fast Food Nation (scary, very scary and essential reading), Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (which I am still working my way through in a plain text version on my PDA while waiting for trains and stuck in lines), and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (a great pleasure, discovered on the virtual book tour if I recall correctly).

There's a new book which ought to be in both those lists. Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human by Michael Chorost is a great book. At the most simple level it is the memoir of a man who goes deaf, gets a cochlear implant and then has to deal with having a computer in his head. And at that level it's a fascinating and enjoyable book. Chorost explains the science of hearing and of the technology which restores it with such grace that you leave the book smarter without struggling. The simple facts of his story are interesting and well told.

It could have been a good book with just these things, but he pushes it in additional directions to create a rich, deep experience. Its also about what makes us human, the nature of reality, longing and loneliness, what it is to be deaf and what it is to be on the outside of the signing deaf community, the trials and tribulations of romance in the age of online dating, how technology like the cochlear implant is created and improved, a literary review of the concept of the cyborg, the frustrations and pleasures of physical life, and how we all rebuild who we are over time.

When most non-fiction books are tasty but hasty, like stir fry, it's a profound pleasure to read a work of depth and maturity in which the carefully chosen ingredients have been slow-cooked to an intricate perfection.

My favorite Amazon review of Rebuilt so far is by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, who writes

What struck me most about the book, though, was the sense that this is the first of a new genre: the memoir of people becoming cyborgs. The experience Chorost describes is one that, in the future, more and more people are going to go through: surviving some major medical crisis, recovering some lost ability, or regaining a sense, through a technology that then comes to contorl part of their body or mediate their relationship with the world. We're going to see many more books that talk about how, thanks to technology, the author learned to walk again, or learned to see again, or came back from the brink of death. "Rebuilt" sets a high bar for the genre.

Go read Rebuilt.

 

Feeling a little mixed up? You aren't. Really. 2004

I've thought I was kind of weird, not a normal girl, but now, having read Jennifer Traig's hilarious autobiographical book Devil in the Details: scenes from an obsessive girlhood, I know I'm just fine.

Things I Could Do If I Wanted To Be Less Content

1. Wash hands over and over and over.
2. Worry more (Tip: for extra fun, worry about worrying).
3. Have fits of guilt-induced prayer using a litany of my own devising.
4. Attempt to follow the behavioral laws in Leviticus.
5. All of the above while going through puberty.

Little Jenny had quite the bumpy ride and she tells the whole story in delightfully alarming detail. I highly recommend this book. Those with peculiar families may find escaping to it particularly comforting during the close confinement of the holidays. It could be worse, honestly.

Go get Devil in the Details, because everyone needs a little situation-tragedy around this time of year...

This review brought to you by my pal Kevin's clever idea: The Virtual Book Tour. Go check out the other stops along the line...

Things that should not be 2004

For years my friends have been urging me to read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Recently, at their pushing a copy into my hands and again telling me how good it is, I finally started. It is good. Odd, but an incredible creation. And unsettlingly, even though I'm not that far into it yet.

It is a testimony to just how eerie a mood it creates that tonight after reading another section, I decided I'd best put it down, take a bath and read something else to sooth my mind before sleep, and selected The Tomb by H.P. Lovecraft as more likely to produce pleasant dreams.

52 magazines or bust 2004

Jason Kottke has a great conversation (now closed) going on his site about which new magazines he should try out this year. His goal is to read a new one every week and dozens of people have made fascinating suggestions. If you're looking for a magazine recommendations (hello serials librarians!) this is an incredible list.

Lance Arthur: Fucking Brilliant 2003

If you're cool, you'll buy Lance's book.

Did they really think this through? 2003

So Amazon has this new search the whole book feature, which is neat, but I don't think they really thought it through. I mean if I want a recipe for chicken tarragon, say, why not just look it up at Amazon, compare a few recipes and go with the one I like best? And not buy any cookbooks.

Hrm. That doesn't seem very good for authors, publishers or Amazon.

Blurring lines 2003

Is Neal Stephenson an author, annotator, or web-based service developer? His new project, MetaWeb, a wiki for participatory learning, is definitely making the boundaries quite fuzzy.

The Metaweb is a collaborative structure for learning. In our first phase, we are annotating the ideas and historical period explored in Neal Stephenson’s novel Quicksilver, seeding the Metaweb with an initial base of information. We are currently working on 108 articles, and hope you will expand and relate these and many other entries…

[from Many2Many]

I clearly need to catch up on my Stephenson reading and start playing with this fun stuff.

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On the topic of blurring lines, I also enjoy the trend of films including features by creative professionals revealing more about how & why they do what they do. The extended DVD of Fellowship of the Ring is still the most outstanding example of this I've come across, but I'm finding myself surprised by this kind of content appearing in places I don't expect it. For example, Eddie Izzard's stand-up comedy performance film Dress To Kill includes a commentary track by him. Just Eddie chatting a bit about this & that and some of it's just crap and some of it's interesting from a technical point of view and some of it is personal. It's going to be interesting to see how growing up with these kind of resources affect the next generation of performers.

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Yes, I am all about the meta.