All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
INTRODUCING FRACTAL GEOMETRY by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, Will Rood, and Ralph Edney:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/05/2003]
I just read INTRODUCING FRACTAL GEOMETRY by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon and Will Rood, and Ralph Edney. This is part of a series of introductory books from Totem Publishing which don't have to appeal to dummies or idiots. :-)
I have read several in the past--INTRODUCING KAFKA by David Zane Mairowitz and R. Crumb is probably of the most interest to readers here. But isn't Robert Crumb an artist, you might ask. Yes, and these books are ... well, if they were fiction, they would be called graphic novels, but since they're non-fiction, I'm not sure what to call them. If you are familiar with Scott McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS, it's in that category, although it does not use a series of frames per se, but rather a system where the illustrations occupy a large proportion of the page and are integral to the content.
(Actually, this is somewhat discussed in the July issue of LOCUS, which has a special feature section on "Graphic Novels." An alternative that never caught on was "Drawn Books"; the Comic Relief store has a section labeled "GNF" for "Graphic Non- Fiction.")
These latest books seem to have been inspired by a previous series, "X FOR BEGINNERS." These were less ubiquitous, though David Brizer and Richard Castaneda's PSYCHIATRY FOR BEGINNERS (1993) seems to be number 59 in "Beginners Documentary Comic Books", indicating there were more than a couple of them. I also have Joseph Schwartz and Michael MacGuinness's EINSTEIN FOR BEGINNERS from Pantheon Books (1979). But the granddaddy of them all seems to be CUBA FOR BEGINNERS by "Rius", published in 1970. The "X FOR BEGINNERS" books frequently have a strong political point of view.
Just to show the range of this series, other volumes I have previously read and recommend include INTRODUCING POSTMODERNISM by Richard Appignanesi (who is also the editor of the entire series) and Chris Garratt, INTRODUCING SEMIOTICS by Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz, INTRODUCING HEGEL by Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze, INTRODUCING WITTGENSTEIN by John Heaton and Judy Groves, INTRODUCING KANT by Christopher Want and Andrezey Klimowski, INTRODUCING MACHIAVELLI by Patrick Curry and Oscar Zarate, INTRODUCING JOYCE by David Norris and Carl Flint. and INTRODUCING QUANTUM THEORY by J. P. McEvoy and Oscar Zarate.
Still queued up are a batch I bought recently: INTRODUCING LOGIC by Dan Cryan and Bill Mayblin, INTRODUCING SHAKESPEARE by Nick Groom and Piero, INTRODUCING STEPHEN HAWKING by J. P. McEvoy and Oscar Zarate, and INTRODUCING MODERNISM by Chris Rodrigues and Chris Garratt.
To order Introducing Fractal Geometry from amazon.com, click here.
"The Tale of the Golden Eagle" by David D. Levine:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/09/2004]
"The Tale of the Golden Eagle" by David D. Levine (about a brain in a spaceship) is another story that left me cold. (Reviewers have compared both this and Jay Lakes's "Into the Gardens of Sweet Night" to Cordwainer Smith's writing. I don't particularly like Smith's writing, so I guess it's no surprise I didn't like these two stories either.)
"Tk'tk'tk" by David D. Levine:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/19/2006]
"Tk'tk'tk" by David D. Levine (ASIMOV'S Mar 2005) takes a premise that seems very "Golden Age"--a salesman from Earth in an alien culture--but gives it a very 21st-century sensibility. In the Golden Age, the salesman would have proved the superiority of Earth culture, or would have been shown to be venal and deserving of being bested, or something equally simplistic. Levine adds some layers to the story. (In some ways it reminds me of the film THE BIG KAHUNA, which is a look at three salesmen in which their product is completely irrelevant to the story.)
FREAKONOMICS: A ROGUE ECONOMIST EXPLORES THE HIDDEN SIDE OF EVERYTHING by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/09/2006]
FREAKONOMICS: A ROGUE ECONOMIST EXPLORES THE HIDDEN SIDE OF EVERYTHING by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (ISBN 0-06-073132-X) has been a cause celebre for a long time now, enough that I had to wait this long to get the library's copy. Levitt and Dubner do acknowledge that correlations can be misleading: if A and B are correlated, does A cause B, or vice versa? [Note that commonly you have both in a feedback loop. -mrl] But the other possibilities that they often seem to overlook are that both are caused by C, or that it is just a coincidence. Their conclusions certainly sound reasonable, but I am still skeptical, for example, that they have definitely pinned down the important factors in parenting. After all, everyone who came before them was sure they had the answers also. The chapter on teachers and sumo wrestlers suggesting bias in testing methods does imply that at least some of the accusations derived from the data were admitted to by the perpetrators, but otherwise I suspect the last has not been heard on these subjects. What is true is that if you have been reading all the articles about FREAKONOMICS, you may not get very much additional from the book itself unless you want to try to analyze the data yourself.
To order Freakonomics from amazon.com, click here.
THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE by C. S. Lewis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/23/2005]
Last week I read KING KONG; this week it was THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE (ISBN 0-060-76489-9). While the book KING KONG is but a pale imitation of the movie, the movie THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE is not as good as the book. However, this does not mean I think the book is great either. But while the movie has some stunning visual scenes, it cannot convey some of what can be done with narration. Take the children's reaction to Aslan. When they first hear of him in the book, Lewis writes, "And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everybody felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something that you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning--either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in his inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you get when you wake up in the morning and realise that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer." So you have some idea of what the children feel about Aslan. In the movie, all you can see is that they seem oddly deferential to a talking lion.
Lewis's background as a professor shows through in some odd ways. When Mr. Beaver calls out, "It's all right! It isn't *her*!", Lewis adds, "This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean in Narnia--in our world they don't usually talk at all."
And in what seems far too modern for 1950 (when the book was written), he writes "And when each person had got his (or her) cup of tea, each person shoved back his (or her) stool. . . ." (But I notice that Lewis's "battles are ugly when women fight" was changed in the film to just "battles can get ugly".)
There is some irony in that the film based on Lewis's work often seems to be a "Lord of the Rings" wannabee, because Lewis himself had disdain for Tolkien's Middle Earth and its "non-Christian" mythology. But when I read THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE, it seems like a fairly mundane children's book, with some heavy-handed symbolism ladled on. (And it is arguably the best and most popular of the "Narnia" books, which makes me wonder how well the film sequels to it will do.)
And it's worth noting a recent change in the series. Traditionally, they have been numbered in the order of their publication:
Now, however, they have been re-ordered to match the internal chronology:
Which is why we old folks think of THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE as the first book, while newer readers think of it as the second and may possibly wonder why Disney started with that one.
To order The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from amazon.com, click here.
PERELANDRA by C. S. Lewis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/02/2003]
Our library book discussion group read C. S. Lewis's PERELANDRA. Actually, it was both our groups--the science fiction one and the general one--but interestingly, only one person showed up who wasn't in the general group. My conclusion on reading this for a third time was that as a theologian Lewis was an acceptable science fiction writer, and as a science fiction writer he was an acceptable theologian. Only one person really seemed to like it, and she said that was because she had been attending church services all through Holy Week and could see a lot of what she was hearing about in the services.
To order Perelandra from amazon.com, click here.
BABBITT by Sinclair Lewis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/23/2007]
BABBITT by Sinclair Lewis (ISBN-10 0-553-21486-1, ISBN-13 978-0-553-21486-4) is a classic that is still relevant almost a century later. It is not just the theme of a man who is the ultimate conformist, a man who will justify whatever path is most convenient. It is all the fine details. It is about people who want an easy path to success: Babbitt's son believes all the "learn-by-mail" offers he sees. "We teach boxing and self- defense by mail. Many people have written saying that after a few lessons they've outboxed bigger and heavier opponents. The lessons start with simple movement practised before your mirror...." When Babbitt says, "But I thought they taught boxing in the school gymnasium," his son answers, "That's different. They stick you up there and some big stiff amuses himself pounding the stuffin's out of you before you have a chance to learn." In other words, he wanted to *have learned* boxing, not to learn boxing, without realizing that the latter is a requirement for the former. This desire for a quick path dates back at least as far as Ptolemy I (who was told 2300 years ago by Euclid, "There is no royal road to geometry") and up to the present day, though now it seems more focused on entrepeneurial ventures and less on learning by mail (or learning in any form, alas).
Babbitt is completely self-delusional. He says things such as, "We ought to get together and show the black man, yes, and the yellow man, his place. Now, I haven't got one particle of race- prejudice. I'm the first to be glad when a n***** succeeds--so long as he stays where he belongs and doesn't try to usurp the rightful authority and business ability of the white man." [my asterisks]
Another classic element is Babbitt's speech on how wonderful their city of Zenith is because of "the finest school-ventilating systems in the country" and "the second highest business building in any inland city in the entire country."
I put BABBITT on my reading list because everyone says it is a classic, and because I kept seeing allusions to it, but I kept reading it because it was a great book.
To order Babbitt from amazon.com, click here.
ANARQUIA by Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/14/2005]
ANARQUIA by Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings (ISBN 0-918736- 64-1) is an alternate history set in Spain, Hollywood, and Germany in 1936 and 1937. The idea of an alternate Spanish Civil War is certainly promising, but it gets sabotaged by the heavy-handed approach all too common when authors try to write books with political agendas. (It seems particularly bad among Libertarian authors.) At times the book seems to be almost entirely expository lump, and it has two dozen pages of background material and another page of URLs. So the mistakes are even more annoying than they would be otherwise. For example, on page 9, in July 1936, pulp writer Howard Davidson is talking about Orson Welles's voice as the Shadow. The only problem is that Welles did not become the Shadow until September 1937. (And even the name Howard Davidson is a bit cutesy--a melding of Robert E. Howard, Howard Philips Lovecraft, and Avram Davidson.) When Kim Newman did Hollywood in "Coppola's Dracula", he got all the details right; I agree that Linaweaver and Hastings have a different agenda, but for a media fan, it's still grating. Add to this the authors' unfortunate use more than once of lines from the Tom Lehrer song in discussing Werner Von Braun (e.g., at one point they write, "'That's not my department,' said Werner Von Braun."), and you get a book that's more annoying use of famous characters than thoughtful alternate history.
To order Anarquia from amazon.com, click here.
The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/24/2007]
I want to add something to my comments in the 08/10/07 issue of the MT VOID about J. Rufus Fears's analysis of Abraham Lincoln in Books That Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life". Fears spends a lot of time analyzing the words of the Gettysburg Address, and in particular how certain phrases--"four score and seven", "brought forth", "conceived in liberty", and so on--were purposely phrased to echo the King James Bible's language and to give a religious meaning to his words. But in "Angels and Ages: Lincoln's Language and Its Legacy" (New Yorker, May 28, 2007), Adam Gopnik notes that we are not really sure what Lincoln said. "The Cincinnati Daily Gazette, a Republican paper, made the famous first sentence end 'that all mankind are created free and equal by a good God,' though it's hard to know whether its reporter had deliberately italicized the point or was simply hearing it with his heart. Also in the first sentence, Lincoln's remark that the nation was 'conceived in liberty' was reported in some newspapers as 'consecrated to liberty,' a more religious reading of the intended message, and there are those who believe that Lincoln made an impromptu alteration." Given this, attempting to find deep significance in very specific words and phrases is an interesting exercise, but perhaps not entirely reliable as a way of pinning Lincoln down. Gopnick does agree, however, that Lincoln's speeches tended toward a Biblical basis and style rather than the Classical basis and style favored by some others of that era, notably Edward Everett, who gave the main speech at Gettysburg.
"The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2005]
"The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link (in the anthology THE FAERY REEL) seems like a typical fairy tale translated to an urban setting. As with many of the nominees, my only question is why this was deemed Hugo-worthy.
To order The Faery Reel from amazon.com, click here.
"Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/12/2006]
Last year Kelly Link won the Hugo for novelette for "The Faery Handbag", a story that I found okay, but nothing special. This year she has a nominated novella, "Magic for Beginners" (in MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS, ISBN 0-1560-3187-6; also F&SF Sep 2005), and my reaction is about the same. Jeremy, Elizabeth, and Karl are friends who watch a mysterious television show which runs at random times on random channels, yet somehow they always know when it is on. Then Jeremy's mother inherits a wedding chapel and a phone booth in Las Vegas, and Jeremy starts getting strange communications from the phone booth which may or may not be connected to the show. It seemed fairly pointless and uninvolving to me.
To order Magic for Beginners from amazon.com, click here.
A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER by David Liss:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/23/2004]
Of particular interest to Jewish readers might be a book *not* read for any group, David Liss's A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER. This is a mystery set in the early eighteenth century in England, during a time after Cromwell had allowed Jews to return to England legally for the first time after their expulsion by Edward I in 1290. The main character is basically a private detective before such a thing existed, who left his family of stock jobbers to become a thief before settling into a somewhat more respectable profession. After complaining about all the economics lectures in Robert A. Heinlein's FOR US, THE LIVING, it may seem odd that I am recommending this, because there is a lot of "expository lump" about the financial situation in England at the time. But proportionally it is considerably less than in Heinlein, and there is actually a plot that goes with it.
To order A Conspiracy of Paper from amazon.com, click here.
THE ANNOTATED LOVECRAFT by H. P. Lovecraft, with annotations by S. T. Joshi:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/17/2004]
"Books are where things are explained to you. Life is where things are not." --Julian Barnes
This may be true for most books, but not necessarily in Lovecraft. Of course, with THE ANNOTATED LOVECRAFT, you can have it both ways. The stories don't explain themselves, but the annotations explain the stories. The stories are by H. P. Lovecraft (obviously) with annotations by S. T. Joshi (ISBN 0-440-50660-3). The book contains four stories: "The Rats in the Walls", "The Colour Out of Space", "The Dunwich Horror", and the novel "At the Mountains of Madness", as well as an introduction by Joshi and comments on Lovecraft by such people as Gene Wolfe and F. Paul Wilson. I love annotated works, with my favorites being William S. Baring-Gould's annotations to Sherlock Holmes and Martin Gardner's annotations to Lewis Carroll. (Peter Heath does a good job with "Alice" as well.) Joshi's annotations here cover literary and historical references, textual variations, and various arcane words that Lovecraft uses, and help the reader appreciate the craft of Lovecraft's work (no pun intended). There is another volume already out; I don't know if the plan is to annotate all of Lovecraft's stories or not.
To order The Annotated Lovecraft from amazon.com, click here.
Cthulhu Mythos stories by H. P. Lovecraft:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/06/2009]
In writing about Kali, Carlos McReynolds says, "I rather think there's some similarities between the sort of spiritual reality that Kali implies and some of Lovecraft's fiction. Quoting Kinsley in Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: 'There is an insistence in Hinduism that the world as it appears to us is a show, that there remains hidden from our normal view an aspect of reality that is... shockingly different from our ego-centered way of apprehending it. The Mahavidyas... are awakeners, visions of the divine that challenge comfortable and comforting fantasies about the way things are in the world.' Based on that quote, I'd say the biggest distinction between the above and the sort of truth presented in Lovecraft's fiction is that the Tantrica believes that it's ultimately positive to see reality as it is, whereas nothing good ever comes in an HPL story from learning the truth. But ultimately, whether you're gazing on Kali or Cthulhu, I would argue, you're going to get a big batch of truth that is going to unsettle you."
stories by H. P. Lovecraft:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/31/2008]
Jorge Luis Borges once said, "Hoy trato de escribir del modo más sencillo posible. Un español me decia la semana pasada que no aprovecho la riqueza de la lengua española. Le dije que no quería aprovechar ninguna riqueza, que soy un hombre modesto y quiero expresarme de un modo lucido e inteligible. Yo creo que esa idea de escribir con muchas palabras es un error y fué el error de Lugones: tratar de escribir con todo el diccionario. No creo que todo el diccionario sea apto para el manejo literario. Vamos a tomar por ejemplo tres palabras; azulado, azulino y azuloso. Creo que azulado puede usarse para escribir porque pertenece a nuestro lenguaje oral. Azulino y azuloso. en cambio, son palabras que estan en el diccionario y que no estan en ninguna boca. Entonces es mejor no usar azulino y azuloso, estorbos para el lector y pequeñas sorpresas que dan le presentar el escritor." (Now I try to write as simply as possible. Last week a Spaniard said to me that I did not make good use of the richness of the Spanish language. I said to him that I did not want to make good use of any richness-- that I am a modest man and I want to express myself in a lucid and intelligible manner. I believe that this idea of using a lot of words in writing is a mistake and that this was Lugones's mistake: to try to write with the entire dictionary. I do not believe that the entire dictionary is fit for literary treatment. We can take (for example) three words: "azulado", "azulino" and "azuloso", [all meaning "bluish"]. I believe that "azulado" can be used in writing because it is in our oral usage. "Azulino" and "azuloso". on the other hand, are words that are in the dictionary, but not in our mouths. Thus it is better not to use "azulino" or "azuloso", stumbling blocks to the reader and small surprises that the writer gives.") [pages 155-156, BORGES ANTE EL ESPEJO]
I mention this because our science fiction group just finished reading three H. P. Lovecraft stories ("The Colour Out of Space", "The Shadow Out of Time", and "At the Mountains of Madness"), and Lovecraft obviously felt differently about words. The following is a list of words appearing in one three-page descriptive passage (about 1200 words): groinings, well-nigh, colossal, hieroglyphs, curvilinear, chiselled, masonry, megalithic, convex-topped/convex- bottomed, pedestals, luminous, inexplicable, vitreous, latticed, octagonal, Cyclopean, titanic, parapet, frontage, prodigious, dilapidation, basalt/basaltic, apertures, aeons, aura, omnipresent, monoliths, predominated, ghastly, fungoid/fungi, pallor, spectral, calamites, cycads, coniferous, bespeaking, horticultural, topiary, lepidodendra, sigillaria, frondage, mottled, vexed, anomalous. Add to this Lovecraft's predilection for choosing British spelling ("colour", "shewing", "modelled"), and it is clear he is writing under different rules than Borges.
In case you are wondering how Lovecraft put these words together, how is this for a description: "a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future." Indeed, "The Shadow Out of Time" is almost Stapledonian in its scope.
We picked those three stories, by the way, because they appeared in "Amazing" and "Astounding" rather than "Weird Tales". To some extent, this was more a function of who had space and/or could read Lovecraft's writing, as these are probably not noticeably more science fictional than other Lovecraft stories.
To order Tales by H. P. Lovecraft from amazon.com, click here.
"Bambi Steaks" by Richard A. Lovett:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/01/2007]
"Bambi Steaks" by Richard A. Lovett (ANALOG, May 2007) is the sort of story that makes me yearn for the days of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. It is set in the future (sometime after 2017) and apparently the Red states and the Blue states split apart (actually there seemed to be six different splinter countries at one point) which eventually re-formed into a confederacy. And someone has developed mind transference, so there is a draft where Reds swap minds/bodies with Blues for a week or a month or whatever. (This is the best use they have for mind transference?!) Our narrator is a Blue and has to live as a Red for a month. Oh, and people are supposed to try to conceal their identity during the swap. The word "predictable" is far too understated for this story. The narrator has his brain full of stereotypes of Reds, but as written, is just a mass of stereotypes about Blues. And just in case even this is too subtle, the tagline reads: "The trouble with the real world is that it too often refuses to fit our nest pictures of it. . . ." And the fact that the exchange is symmetrical provides no balance--when he returns, his Blue buddies talk about what a great guy his Red "mind guest" was. The Golden Age of social satire science fiction is indeed passed.
SMOKIN' ROCKETS by Patrick Lucanio and Gary Coville:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/29/2006]
SMOKIN' ROCKETS by Patrick Lucanio and Gary Coville (ISBN 0-7764-1233-X) is subtitled "The Romance of Technology in American Film, Radio and Television, 1945-1962". What sets this apart from most other books about technology (and science fiction) in that era is that most other books concentrate on film and television, and almost completely ignore radio. Lucanio and Coville, on the other hand, spend a lot of time on radio, recognizing its centrality to American life leading up to and during much of that period. They do spend a bit too much time, I thought, detailing the plots of some of the films discussed (particularly THE TWONKY).
To order Smokin' Rockets from amazon.com, click here.
THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST by A. R. Luria:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/01/2006]
When our book discussion group read Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes the Memorious", someone recommended THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST by A. R. Luria (ISBN 0-674-57622-5), an account of a real-life example of phenomenal memory. The subject (called only "S.") remembered things through synesthesia--a "crossing" of the senses. So, for example, he may remember a certain word as not just the word, but also a puff of smoke, or a certain smell, or a particular sound. Of particular interest was the way S. solved mathematical problems, using visualizations which often seem to have only tenuous connections to the problem itself.
To order The Mind of the Mnemonist from amazon.com, click here.