Reading: my shame exposed

Today, as I made another stab at organizing my office, I rounded up several books from the atop the computer and in cardboard boxes and two from a pillowcase (worst night's sleep ever). Then then I did a bad thing to a book-in-progress: I put them on bookshelves.

Putting unfinished books on a shelf is naked capitulation. On a shelf, it's camouflaged with all the other ostensibly read books, to be admired en masse, but not individually reconsidered.

Now that I track my book consumption on Goodreads, the proof is even more damning. I finish 5 or 6 books a year (not counting graphic novels). That's all. I stopped tracking in-process books on GR because they sit in stasis so long. But I purchase more books in a year than I read.

Today's most glaring surrender was New Ideas From Dead Economists. I received the book for Christmas two years ago. Every few months I would read the next chapter, having largely forgotten the contents of previous chapters. I've liked what I read, and now I even know what Malthusianism is, why it keeps coming up, and why people use it as a derogatory term. That's come in handy!

But the book ultimately failed to penetrate the atmosphere, and has now settled into far orbit on the shelf, where I'll probably only ever look at it again through a telescope.

This week, I started a strange new enterprise, reading The Tower of the Elephant by Robert E. Howard via Project Gutenberg. I've read very little so far, but I wonder how having a browser window open will fare compared to books piled up. I wonder.

Update: Finally started and finished in one sitting on Feb 3.

Affiliated

I'm an Amazon affiliate now. When I mention various purchasable media here, I'll be including links to buy the thing on Amazon.

To many bloggers, this is a Duh-level decision. But I have always quietly deemed QT an ad-free zone. This blog was about writing down things I think, and would serve no other master. So I had to consider the decision to commercialize it via any third party. (Pushing my own stuff is fair game.)

I decided to do it based on a few factors. Amazon links are:

• unobtrusive
• substantively informational in addition to commercial
• testing grounds for my bid to become Internet Famous

I have to imagine pretty hard to see how this could become a problem. But just in case it does, I declare now that I will try to sell out as little as possible, and to be up front about it when I do.

Now go! Go and click on yesterday's board game links, and from there, commence all your Christmas shopping at Amazon in one purchase, without closing your browser window, within 24 hours of first click-through.

Lucidity is becoming optional

Oh my gosh, have I listened to The Flaming Lips cover of Borderline a lot today. Like, seriously, if I weren't already me, I would have made me turn that off. I watched the video about three times, and then put it in the background while I wrote, and then tabbed back to hit play again every time it stopped.

After about 10 of those, it was time to download it. I just set it on "Repeat One" in iTunes, and it played and played and played. Now, about 10 hours later, I'm singing the Madonna version in my head. What the hell?

My wife is gone for the weekend, and of course I miss her, except that I don't miss her at all because I love having the house to myself. I can retreat so far into my cave that daylight becomes an ironic metaphor that you use to mock people who make the mistake of showing emotion.

Except that there's still 2 dogs I have to pay attention to, because if I don't they poop in the house and it stinks and I have to clean it up. That's when I really miss my wife.

If there's one thing I don't recommend it's getting your hand stuck in a vise. If there's another thing, well you and I both know, there's a lot of things I don't recommend.

I never even say, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," because that means your only allowable actions are sitting in the half-dark and reading the Internet for 36 hours straight.

Speaking of which, I can't recommend that either, because I've been up for about 36 hours straight now, and you start making choices like listening to The Flaming Lips for about 4 hours in a row, and reading 50 pages of a Jack Handey book, and then leaving a rambling blog post.

Here's the video, if you want to watch it 9 or 1o times too:

The flaming lips Borderline

Book Review: Anathem

Usually, I start a book and then drop it for months and months before I finish it. Social pressure was the trick to get me to finish Neal Stephenson's Anathem sooner. My b-i-l Jon and I started the book together on opening weekend, and then he finished it way, way ahead of me. So while he was on vacation, I read the other 900 pages.

Which is better, right? That's better?

The Short Version: On an alternate Earth, mathematicians cloister themselves so they can get more math done. Then the very concept of cloistering is called into question.

My Take: As I write this, I find myself reviewing the author more than the book. I liked Anathem. I'd recommend it. But it's middle-of-the-pack Stephenson.

He seems to have good story reasons to avoid starting the plot for 200 pages. But I would have liked to visit the cosmos where he didn't take so long.

I didn't experience the white-knuckle effect of Cryptonomicon here, but once I invested myself in the project, it was easy to keep reading. For such a cerebral writer, Stephenson knows how to move a story along.

I understand that people have commented on an anti-religion bias in the book, but these are people with agendas. I have not found another non-religious science-fiction writer who is as clear thinking and composed when writing religion into his or her stories.

The science and mathematical-style thinking are interesting and fun, but not required to follow the tale. However, if you don't enjoy brainy reading, it's probably not worth it just for the story.

Book Review: Butchery

A couple of friends and a few random mentions sent me to hunt down Storm Front: Book One of the Dresden Files a couple months ago. Then finally, with a luxurious day all to myself, I read the whole thing.

The Short Version: Harry Dresden is a wizard and a detective in Chicago. Together, he solves crimes.

My Take: Mark Twain said, "When you catch an adjective, kill it." Butcher seems to be no fan of Twain's.

Jim Butcher bolts together a decent tale, and his writing clunks like something bolted together. I'm told the books get better. I've actually started reading book 2... something about werewolves... but but with my goldfish attention span, I don't see myself finishing it. It's not gotten good enough for me to want to wait through it when I could be reading better, more enjoyable books.

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, dead at 89

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday.

My first exposure to this great writer was in college, when my speech professor, Mr. Collins (a man for whom teaching "speech" took second place to teaching "clear thinking"), sent us to the library to read a Solzhenitsyn essay.

We had to answer several questions about the reading. The questions required harder, fuller thought than I had ever given to anything, and I'm fairly confident that in my second year of college, I did a genuinely sophomoric job of answering.

A question that stuck with me -- more than the essay itself, even -- was, "How can you tell from reading this that Solzhenitsyn is a Christian?"

I had to infer from the question that Solzhenitsyn was a Christian. There was nothing overt in what he wrote. In my limited experience, there was not the usual whiff of "Christian" about the writing -- by which I mean, "vetted by the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board."

After that class, out of curiosity, I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and a few other essays he wrote, more of which bounced than stuck with me. What did stick from his writing was a dignity, clarity, and foremost truth -- the kind of truth that you do not (cannot) hear from people who have not had close, hard brushes with Truth itself.

I'm sorry you're no longer with us, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, but I'm glad you're home.

Now What

This morning I woke up sort of annoyed about something at work, and thanks to the sideways way brains operate immediately after sleep, I started thinking about the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden makes a human sacrifice.

Link to YouTube

When I was a kid, if you had asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I thought you wouldn't make fun of me, I would have told you that I wanted to write science-fiction novels.

When I was 12, I wrote 60 pages of a sci-fi story that might still exist on some unlabeled 5-1/4" floppy disc in my parents' house. I haven't seriously tried to write prose fiction since.

I've slowly, doggedly worked my way through most of the Planet Stories books that Erik sent me, and the pulpy stories of Mars, Earth, and Venus have seeped into the cracks.

Pulp Fiction

Screw Tarantino.

I'm talking about real fantasy pulp fiction, straight out of the 1930s, yards better than modern fantasy lumbering behind embossed covers featuring dragons and sunsets and whatever.

I'm fortunate enough to be friends with Erik Mona, publisher at Paizo, and the driving force behind Planet Stories, Paizo's attempt to make a few bucks off reprinting out-of-print pulp fiction classics.

Erik sent me an assortment of Planet Stories books about a month ago, and I have read them like a starved man. This is what I've wanted for about 15 years now: someone with trustworthy sensibilities to tell me what the good fantasy is. Not the good-enough fantasy, the GOOD fantasy.

I've already blown through Elak of Atlantis, Black God's Kiss, and City of the Beast. I was reading them serially, but I've since trifurcated, and am trying to read three at once (this never works out): Northwest of Earth, Lord of the Spiders, and the Secret of Sinharat, that last one written by Leigh Bracket, who got writing credit on a little flick we like to call The Empire Strike Back.

Many of these stories are not masterpieces, right? They're not keen indictments of the frail human condition. But now I see why people lionize pulps, why George Lucas keeps trying to remake them. I see, basically, where comic books came from.

The energy in these stories leeches out of the paper into your brain. These working writers wore out typewriters, just writing the very next thing that came into their heads. And the stories mostly read like that--you don't know what's coming next, because the author quite possibly didn't know either, but they are both "rip" and "roaring" and you will do well to purchase one or more of these books, both for your own edification, and to insure that Planet Stories is properly funded to continue this literary archaeology.

Essential, but Superficial

I finished The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator's Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child this weekend, after long trysts with non-printed media.

The Short Version: Famous educator, Ron Clark lays out his 55 rules for how to teach children to, essentially, be successful humans. Some of his rules cover homework and listening in class, but many more are about table manners and common courtesy.

My Take: The book contains a lot of truth, although the writing contains sleep-inducing cliches and is so relentlessly positive, it borders on pollyanna. If one were reading this as a how-to manual, one would have to read between the lines. Although Clark is a success at his chosen profession, that's because he has devoted his whole self to teaching, not because of 55 rules.

You know how, when you're a kid, and you see your teacher in the grocery store, and your little mind is blown because you see this person out of context? After reading this book, one wonders if Clark is ever out of context. He talks about baking brownies for his students every night, and taking them on week-long field trips, planning surprises for them... the logistics alone would take all my time, without any of that pesky pedagogy.

What he never directly says is, "You must give all of yourself to the children you teach, by means of convictions so deep and personal that I cannot convey why this is done. Only that it must be so."

This is not a complaint, but rather a caveat. The book contains excellent lessons about motivating people, especially the young form of people. But the rub is not the lessons themselves, as much as in applying them, and following through on them.

Like many supposed how-to books, I read this and wanted the how-to behind the book: How to WANT to do _______. Armed with that elusive giveadamn, I suspect many lessons would seem uselessly self-evident. Without it, they're an interesting, but baffling set of laws that you'll apply haphazardly.

It's good for teachers, and useful for students of leadership and motivation.

Sci-Fi Style

Writing about reading has given me motive to finish something. Just finished reading Rudy Rucker’s new novel Postsingular, and it’s a well-written novel, full of wonderful and strange ideas, well-presented, and like nearly all sci-fi I read, kind of empty.

I like science-fiction. I don’t like most science-fiction novels. As I’m reading, I follow the characters and skim their ideas and see the reality this author has created and is trying to sell me, I almost always think, “This is your future reality? This is all you’ve got?”

So today in the shower, I was trying to figure out why that is. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

1. Sci-fi writers are more invested in their ideas than their humans, or at least equally invested, which means they’re still only half-invested in people, because they also must spend a LOT of time artfully explaining theoretical physics/chemistry/agronomy so the story remains science fiction rather than science fantasy. Which leads to less fleshed out people.
2. Here’s where I walk into a minefield: They leave God out. Some sci-fi novelists flirt with Buddhism, or take vague (often deprecatory) swipes at other established religions. But otherwise God has no existence. Ignoring God imperils your fiction to irrelevancy.
   

Also, maybe your reality. But if I start there, then I've stopped meddling and gone to preaching.

The humanity, the sense of realness in most sci-fi stories is not jeopardized by the introduction of fantastical ideas, but by the refusal to properly address the rest of reality that you're proposing reacts to them. I want my sci-fi writers to be better engaged with the world, the people in it, and themselves so they can sell those parts too, along with the changes that come from a worldwide nanobot swarm and unfolding the 8th dimension within our understanding.

I don't think that's too much to ask. I just think it's hard.

Read for yourself! Mr. Rucker is giving away the book in pdf form under Creative Commons license. It is worth the time you'll spend on it, despite my misgivings about the whole field.

Reading is for Railroads

I have a wave of new books here at Casa Pienso, like a dozen in the last month, and here is the number I've read: The big goose egg. Zeroteen. None.

I've started almost all of them, but then like a poodle in a fire hydrant factory, I'm off after something else and when I notice what I'm doing, I am aggrieved in ways unlike a poodle.

Here's most of my list, followed by the page number I'm on, and commentary:

• Danse Macabre by Stephen King. Page 100-something. I can't get into this like I meant to, and I haven't opened it in 6 months. I might give up on it soon.
  
• Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis. Maybe 2/3 done. I was reading this when we moved, and then I lost track of it. It's pretty good. I'll probably go back to it before the end of the year.
  
• I Am America (And so Can You)! by Stephen Colbert et al. Page 50-ish. This is funny, but it's a one-joke book. I think it's better read in several short sittings.
• The Essential 55 by Ron Clark. About half done. This is an inner-city grade school teacher's 55 rules to train kids to be socialized humans rather than modern barbarians. There are good rules for how to interact with anybody in here though, and if you're not careful, you might just learn something before you're through. Hey hey hey.
  
• The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Page xiii. Only finished the preface to this book about the overseeing editor of the OED and his greatest volunteer assistant, an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.
  
• A Short Life of Christ by Everett F. Harrison. Page 0. I assume it's about Jesus or somebody.
  
• Better Not Bigger by Eben Fodor. Page 0. I think it's about gentrification.
  
• Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood by Leonard Pitts, Jr. Page 40-ish. Leonard Pitts, Jr. is an exceptionally clear thinker, and I just wanted to read anything he had to say. This is the only book he's written, so I'm reading it.
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Page 37. A thin book about Web usability.
• We Don't Die We Kill Ourselves by Roger L. De Haan. Page I don't remember. My mechanic had a heart scare and diabetes trouble this year, and he now has a convert's zeal about eating well. So in addition to repairing my brakes, he gave me this book.
  
• Stupid Sock Creatures by John Murphy. Page 13. My lovely wife bought this for me off my amazon wish list because I have been making plush monsters, and this is a good book for that sort of behavior.
  
• The History of the Hobbit by John Rateliff. Page 0. John is a former colleague of mine, and dare I say, a "friend." He is the most knowledgeable guy I know about Lord of the Rings, and you'll just have to trust me when I say that's not faint praise. I know people who can speak Elvish. John Ratliff knows more than those freaks (who are dear to me. They are dear freaks.).

This isn't even all of them! Sweet baby Moses in a handbasket, won't someone lock me in a room with a comfy chaise lounge so I can't get any more distracted from reading these freaking things?

Not counting BlogaDay, of course. BlogaDay soldiers on!

Da Wince-y

I read The DaVinci Code a couple of years ago. As a recreational conspiracy fan, I already knew about the "secret" heresy. There's nothing in it that real-world theologians haven't already dealt with, even at the Vatican.

I have a mouthy critique of the whole thing, but the short version is: not very good. Apparently I'm quicker on the draw than a Harvard professor and an Interpol agent, both experts on codes and symbols, who are surprised at every turn by information you could find on the Internet without looking very hard. It's like a marine biologist being shocked by what's really a mammal. "Gasp! Dolphins too?"

I try not to be curmudgeonly and patronizing. Barring that, I try not to do it in public. I understand many otherwise reasonable people enjoy the book. Further, some Christians feel challenged by issues the book brings up, and you know, crisis of faith, that's not cheap.

So somehow, this below-average adventure thriller book-made-movie has become, like, the Anti-Passion of the Christ.

The best article I've found around the hoopla is Some Christians Shun, Others Co-Opt DaVinci in the San Francisco Chronicle, which talks about various theological types trying to deal with this month's media phenomenon. Bits worth comment:

Many evangelical Christian leaders are embracing the discourse and breaking with tactics they've used other times when they've felt under attack. They are questioning and refashioning how they react to pop culture and asking whether it's appropriate to profit off of what they see as heresy.

It seems some pastors (and Filipino bishops) feel attacked, and need to "counter-attack." How Christlike!

I'm reminded of how I used to discuss D&D with religious types. The thing (game, movie, whatever) is like a candle. You can use a candle to worship Jesus in your Christmas Eve service, light your house when the power's off, or summon a demon. But sacred, secular, or profane, the candle is not the issue. God doesn't care about candles. God cares about people.

Controlling candles does nothing for the soul in front of you. Loving your neighbor is the job, not batting down opposing ideologies.


My favorite part is at the end, where we see the continued dance of entertainment marketers do-si-do with the Christian demographic:

Just as evangelical Christians have learned to adapt to what they see as a cultural threat posed by "The Da Vinci Code," the studios have had to learn new strategies as well, said Robert K. Johnston, an evangelical Christian who is the author of "Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue."

Movie marketing never used to mention criticism of a film, said Johnston, also a professor at Fuller. But the novel had spawned so much criticism that ignoring it was not possible, Johnston said.

"Sony is gambling that even negative discussion by the religious community will bring more bodies into the theater to see the movie," said Johnston....

Lookit! They're changing color in front of us! But here's the thing: Whatever they look like, they still basically just want money. I'm not pointing this out to be cynical. I'm pointing it out to say, since we know their bottom line, and they're fumbling around for ours, how can we use this advantage to love them better?