Books

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

Everyone knows that history started just around the time you were born. Things that happened before that are ancient history, and things that happened after you turned 18 were yesterday, even if the calendar says they were actually in a previous millenium.

For me, computer history started when devices like the Sinclair 1000, the Apple II, and the TI 99-4/A came out. Hackers emerged from the culture around the rapid spread of these machines, and soon started connecting on modem-dialed "bulletin board" systems (BBS). So imagine my surprise that the first chapter of Hackers takes place in the 1950s!

This book is a deserved classic, and I feel guilty that it never showed up on my radar until recently. It's the book that made its author, Steven Levy, into a famous tech journalist. It can probably even take credit for popularizing the use of the word "hacker" in the way we use it today: someone who enjoys exploring a system and then using that system to empower themselves or others.

He starts off with the hackers at MIT who got to play with the first mini-computers. Back then, a CPU was a set of boards wired together, and each chip on the board only had a few gates in it. You could literally draw a circle around an adder or register; they were collections of objects that still existed in human scale. In one funny anecdote, the hackers actually add and remove wires to extend the CPU's instruction set.

More interesting than the anecdotes, however, is Levy's attempt to understand and explain these guys. (Yes, almost all of them are guys.) From interviews and stories, he extrapolates a set of principles that he calls the "Hacker Ethic". It's at the beginning of the book, and if this book were written in the past decade, you'd find it slightly annoying and tedious. But this was written in 1984. It covers events so old that Richard Stallman doesn't even appear until the appendix. So his list of principles helped define the current generation of hackers.

The book is split into three parts, each covering a generation: the MIT AI lab of the 1950s and 1960s, the west-coast Silicon Valley of the 1970s, and the home-computer game industry of the 1980s. The first and last parts were the most interesting to me, because I know almost nothing about these times, but the second part was surprisingly informative too, even though I've read a few of the old Apple history books.

The third part doesn't mesh as well as the first two, but would stand on its own as a great book anyway. It describes the rise of Sierra On-Line, from its first few obscure Apple II games and into becoming a multi-million dollar company. The characters are interesting, but don't fit as well into the "hackers" narrative, which Levy openly struggles with in the text. And then it ends at one of the most awkward times to stop: right before they shipped "King's Quest", the only real reason anyone from my generation is familiar with the company. It's clearly just a case of bad timing, because the book needed to be written, and needed to be written in 1984 before the world changed even more.

The appendixes drive home that a quarter century has passed since the book was first published. We're kept updated on the characters every decade or so in fast forward. Some have dropped into obscurity; others are Bill Gates. These approximately ten pages cover my entire life. It's a testament to just how great this book is that I didn't feel like it was missing anything.

Children of the Sky

Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge is one of my favorite science fiction books of all time. This book, Children of the Sky, is a much-awaited sequel that I just finished.

Unfortunately I didn't enjoy the majority of the book. This is mostly my own fault, because i broke my personal rule of not having high expectations--- I desperately wanted an amazing continuation of the amazing story, and I should have remembered the lesson of Greg Bear: the sequel is never as good.

So my purpose here is mainly to save you from Children of the Sky with some spoiler-free expectation-setting.

First, this book is about as direct a sequel as you can imagine. It's critical to have read Fire Upon the Deep, because the characters are all the same, and their histories with each other are important. (However, it's not important to have read "Deepness in the Sky", which is a fine book but irrelevant to this story.)

Second, you should know that the whole story takes place on the Tine's world. Don't expect to turn the page and find a chapter about some soaring ultradrive civilization in the Transcend. It doesn't happen.

Third, I am here to report to you that there's no grand ending: some of the story concludes, but large, important questions are still unresolved as the book ends. So if you go in (as I did) holding your breath for a total resolution, you will be disappointed. Hard to say more without spoilers!

Instead, the book is sort of about the characters and the politics of their little village. But it's mainly an exhaustive extrapolation of the Tines' physiology, society, and technology--- especially in contrast to humans. Vinge has thought most thoroughly about what it might be like for a super-advanced civilization to be marooned on a medieval planet. The degree of detail is fascinating, and is the best part of the book.

The narrative itself is mainly about politics, which was sometimes interesting but sometimes annoying to me. The main character, Ravna, is basically likable, but she has self-esteem issues which (to Vinge's credit) he captures in the voice of the writing. The result is probably honest ("how would a librarian fare in a world of violent, cut-throat politics") but also irritating ("grow a spine already, you stupid girl!") At the risk of being a slave to fashion, I found it grating to read a weak, gullible female main character.

Besides my complaints about plot and characters, the book has some flaws that sometimes made me want to give up on it. There is a 200 page arc where most of what happens is that committees are formed and have meetings. There's an entire chapter in which the only thing that happens is that a character prepares to give a PowerPoint presentation. There's 50 pages devoted to describing a circus act. I think Vinge meant to develop characters with these scenes, but I could have done without them.

The final 200 pages of the book were pretty exciting, but the rest was sometimes a slog. Overall I would cautiously recommend this book to Vinge fans who found the Tines creatures fascinating, and want to read about them for 600 more pages. But if you're like me and you're looking for a broader resolution to "Fire Upon the Deep", you'll have to keep waiting.

Look to Windward

"Look to Windward" is the seventh (arguably) book in Iain M. Banks' "Culture series". Despite Wikipedia calling it a "sequel", I found it to be a self-contained story with about 5 main-ish characters that need no introduction and that are not important in later books. The story takes a while to come together, but it all makes sense in the end; as a result, I enjoyed the final 100 pages much more than the first 400. Hard to say more without spoilers. :)

As with other Culture books, the settings and worlds are the centerpiece of the text. But since most of this book takes place on a single world, the scenery is a bit less varied than "Use of Weapons" and "Surface Detail".

My strongest complaint of "Look to Windward" is about the hundreds of pages spent on how Culture citizens pass the time. There are pages upon pages of cocktail parties, hiking trips, hunting trips, hang gliding, concerts, and chit-chat. I think Banks is trying to convey the frivolity and existential emptiness of an immortal life without want in the Culture's idyllic future, but it is damned boring. Slashing 100 pages of descriptions of guided tours of beautiful landscapes would be a big help.

On the bright side, I enjoyed the complexity of the characters in this book: there were funny side characters, despicable protagonists, likable villans, tragic heros, and surprising but believable motives that carry the story to its conclusion.

Overall I would call this a lesser Culture book, but perhaps worth your time if you've read all the rest and are still wanting more. Just skim the hang-gliding scenes.

Reamde

I've become a pretty big Neil Stephenson fan over the last decade, starting with the Baroque Cycle and then reading through the back catalog, and even though it took me a while to decide to pick up Anathem, I think it's now tied with The Diamond Age as being my favorite.

This new book, Reamde, is different from those.

It's a thriller. Reviews that compared it to Snowcrash and Zodiac are not wrong (probably -- I've never read the latter), but it's blissfully missing what Rus calls "the Sumerian chapter". There's no 50-page exposition about a theory of worlds or ideas. It's just nonstop action, after a few chapters of background. I was excited by the background, because the technology and sociology both seemed plausible to me, and I think it's rare for an author to get both.

I try to include zero spoilers in reviews (unlike, say, the New York Times review, which gives this book's plot away all the way through to the final chapter), so I'll just give you the setting that you'd get from the first chapter anyway: Reamde is set either in the present or the very near future. In Stephenson tradition, it leaps across the globe and drops a lot of geeky references, but since we're living roughly in the present, characters talk about tweeting, and check up on each other by scanning their Facebook pages. One character is known by strangers primarily through his wikipedia page, and he's coy about which parts are fact and which are fiction.

One thing that really stuck with me is how Stephenson casts a cynical but loving eye back down on 21st century culture. A memorable scene in Anathem describes a group of obese men, wearing jerseys of a sports team, slurping sugar water from enormous cups -- not a particularly flattering or subtle characterization of Americans. But in Reamde, characters drop knowledge about Walmart, the firearms subculture, Montana cults, and southern trailer parks, and always in a positive (or at least neutral) light. Usually this knowledge is practical to the matter at hand, and frequently it helps save lives.

If true sci-fi requires a description of a technology that doesn't exist yet, this is true sci-fi. The characters live in a world in which "World of Warcraft" became surpassed by a similar game that understood how to make the MMORPG model even more successful: The economy of the game is connected to the real-world economy in a direct and theoretically secure way that makes the phrase "real-world economy" ambiguous. Players can use in-game winnings to pay their subscription fee, vastly widening the potential customer base, and professional authors are on staff to ensure that the game continues to evolve and provide ongoing entertainment. It's new, and so 20-20-hindsight-obvious that I marveled that nobody's actually written it yet.

But the story is really a long chase/action sequence, using the game as a backdrop and side quest. About one quarter of the way through, I started to get exhausted and complained to a friend that there was no natural stopping place, because things are constantly happening. The only breaks are occasional bits of whitespace where the narrative shifts point-of-view, or chapter markers when 24 hours have passed: "Day 3", it helpfully points out, before continuing with the description of an oil tanker explosion. My friend said, "Just wait till you get to the last half of the book."

I made up the oil tanker explosion, but there are events on that level of destruction and firepower. If it wasn't so intellectually grounded, it could be a new Jason Bourne movie. It probably still could. It was really hard to put down, and usually when I did, it was only because it's hard for me to stay on the edge of my seat for so long at a time.

Even so, it was a very fun read. I was hooked from the first page, and never disappointed. Strong recommendation.

1493

I accidentally finished reading 1493 last night, and loved it. But first, a detour about e-books.

This is the first time a book has been victimized by e-book-ification for me. The author or publisher clearly went to some length to make the book "e-book friendly", but the result is actually worse than if they had left it alone.

There are at least a dozen maps and charts mixed in with the narrative, and they look like they might be interesting, but they're too small to read. Each one has a helpful link underneath saying "Click for larger version". Clicking the link takes you to a separate page, with the image about 10% larger, and no added detail. I tried using the e-book's zoom feature, but the images just pixelize -- there's no actual detail there. The image was destroyed in the process of making the file.

Footnotes are similarly awkward. You have to click on a very tiny little link (usually I had to pull out the stylus for accuracy), and it just takes you to a separate page where the footnote is written in a tiny font. When you're done, you need to navigate through three tiers of menu to get back to where you left off. It's hard to understand what the intent was. If the footnote popped up in a dialog, you could read and dismiss it without losing your place. Or if they had just put the footnote at the bottom of the current page like a paper book, it could be in a tiny font but easily discoverable without interrupting the flow of reading. Instead, it's got the worst of all worlds.

Finally, the book is 450 pages long, though it appears to be nearly 700 in an e-reader. This is apparently because over 200 extra pages are needed to hold the dysfunctional maps and a vast number of unreferenced notes. I suspect the original text was supposed to reference the notes inline somehow, but the e-reader people, who had just faced an existential crisis in trying to figure out how to fuck up the footnotes, just threw up their hands and dumped all the notes at the end.

In short, I begrudgingly recommend that you buy this book in paper form, which kinda invalidates the very idea of e-readers.

The book itself is incredible. I read the introduction while I was still in the middle of reading a different book, and I couldn't put it down. I think I plowed through 50 pages a day at one point.

It covers the "Columbian Exchange", a term scientists use to describe the ecological changes that started when Europeans and Africans first visited the Americas. The author, Charles Mann, claims that a new ecological era began the day Columbus landed on Hispaniola: the Homogecene, an era when all parts of the earth began to intermingle and become the same.

Mann doesn't really try to prove anything. Instead he tells a series of anecdotes that weave together in a convincing way. The book is so full of fascinating stories that I peppered my friends with them incessantly for a month. Some quickies: Africans outnumbered Europeans in America for over 300 years. Jamestown was so malaria-ridden that colonists warned the English companies that at least 3/4 of any new arrivals would be killed in their first year. They called it "seasoning". Inflation from Spanish silver probably wrecked China's economy.

See? It's full of these. Each chapter covers a single topic in detail, but the stories are all interconnected in the way that the world has become. I also appreciated that even though Mann has an opinion about cause and effect, and is trying to convince us of the truth of the Homogecene, he doesn't take sides on the hot topics of the day, like globalization. He meets with farmers, scientists, environmentalists, and government officials, and lets them tell their stories, but doesn't moralize.

In the coda, he describes the plight of terrace farmers in the Phillipines. The terraces are endangered by earthworms unleashed by the Columbian Exchange, but they were probably built by people fleeing the Spanish-Chinese battles in Manila. How do you preserve a way of life that is itself a product of the destruction of an older way of life? There often isn't a good guy or bad guy. In the words of Marge Simpson, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Spook

In this non-fiction research piece, Mary Roach puts together 10ish chapters about all of the different ways that people have brought science to studying the soul, ghosts, reincarnation, near-death experiences, and the afterlife.

Although not quite as giggle-a-minute as Stiff was, overall I found Spook to be fascinating and funny. I had no idea how much honest science has been applied to the subject over the last hundred years, including research by institutions like Cambridge University, Oxford, University of Virginia, and many others. As well as countless amateur enthusiasts.

As usual, Mary's writing is funny, critical, and insightful. If I had a complaint, it is that in the first couple of chapters she seems reluctant to highlight (and mock) the obvious lack of rigor in the work of the reincarnation researchers, and the early attempts to compute the weight of the soul.

But later in the book she warms up to the comedy of the charlatans and enthusiasts who are found around seances, claims of "ectoplasm", and audio-tape ghost hunting.

Recommended!

Use of Weapons

"Use of Weapons" is the third book in Iain Banks Culture Series (I've been skipping around) and I liked it pretty well. Much better to me than "Consider Phlebas", the first book.

Use of Weapons is a now-plus-flashbacks story of the life of Zakalwe, a career warrior with a painful past who has fought wars all over the galaxy. The story is told mostly from his perspective, and spans many centuries of imaginative worlds, peoples, tactics, and battles. (The "now" part of the timeline involves mercenary work for the Culture, so that's why it is a Culture story.)

This book doesn't introduce much imaginative tech compared to some of the other Culture books, so it's not the best choice if you're chiefly after technology porn. But in exchange, Use of Weapons delivers a much better main character that I didn't mind reading about for a few hundred pages: mysterious, sympathetic, and flawed in intriguing ways.

The writing is mostly very good; Zakalwe is believable, the descriptive prose is engaging but not tedious, and (as always) sociopathic Culture AIs furnish a backdrop of MacGuffins and comic relief. The action writing is remarkably improved over "Consider Phlebas": it's basically clear what's going on, the tactics are actually interesting to read about, and most importantly, no one scene goes on for 100 pages.

I found myself bored by some of the flashback chapters, which interrupted the now-timeline action at sometimes unwelcome points. But on the bright side, each of them is from a different time and place in Zakalwe's past, so even if you hate a chapter, you won't be bothered by it again.

My biggest complaint is probably that some of the flashback chapters seem disjointed and irrelevant. They're in almost-but-not reverse chronological order and, especially at the beginning of the book before a clear plot and main character has emerged, it's tough to tell what to care about. By the end of the book it has all mostly woven together, and they do accomplish their goal of letting you get to know the main character. But it would have been much improved by some basic cues to chronology and causality.

The book brings both the now-story and the flashback events to a satisfying climax, but the post-climax final scene seemed clumsy and inconsistently bolted on to the rest of the story. Fortunately it's only a few pages, and you can basically forget that it happened if you like. (I plan to!)

Overall I thought this book was a top-shelf member of the Culture series, and I recommend it.

(By the way: If you have already read "Surface Detail", it makes the book a little more fun if you go back and re-read Surface Detail's Epilogue at some point during your read of "Use of Weapons".)

A Dance With Dragons

This review will contain no spoilers.

The simplest review for this book would be: This is book five of a seven-part series. (At least, this year it's still only seven. But the smart money is not on restraint when it comes to Mr. Martin.) If you've read the first four, you are a junkie, and you will read -- you need to read -- number five, no matter what critics think about it. So, go, read it. It satisfies all the requirements of a junkie: it gives a quick fix and leaves you needing more yet again.

I would never have started this series if I knew it wasn't finished yet. My friend Jack tricked me into it with a birthday present, and only at book three did I realize that I was reading only the first half of a continually-expanding series: the liner notes in book one strongly implied that it was a trilogy.

Even if you haven't read any of the books, it won't spoil anything to say that the first three are a consistent series, with small climaxes and a gradually increasing intensity. Each book resolves a few mysteries and tensions, and then leaves you with a new cliffhanger, or usually, a set of cliffhangers. The stories are told from various points of view, known as "POV" to fans, with each chapter rotating through the cast of characters. A chapter from Lord Stark's point of view will be titled simply "Eddard", and might be followed by one called "Tyrion". In this way, several interleaving stories can be told while still leaving room for surprises and twists that would be less immersive with an omniscent narrator.

Book four, however, took a left turn into new territory. It's as if he got tired of writing about all the same people, introduced a lot of new characters, and wrote about them instead. Entire new lands are described, along with its people, culture, and (of course) intrigue. In the meantime, other beloved characters were mentioned only briefly or not at all. Apparently Mr. Martin got so excited by these new developments that he couldn't actually fit all the stories he wanted to tell into one book, so he shipped half of it as book four, and left the other half for book five.

Now, nearly a decade later, we have the second half.

It's hard to fairly judge a book or album that you've been anticipating for months or years, because the anticipation covers a lot more time than the media itself. But I really enjoyed reading this book, even so. You can tell because I finished it in a little over a month, which (at 1100 pages) means I was reading an average of 25 pages a day. That's an incredible rate for a slow reader. The settings are vivid, the stories are engaging, and of course a lot of terrible things happen. If you still believe this series will fit into seven books, then this one at least moves several of the chess pieces toward a goal.

The POV chapter titles are now occasionally a source of deceit, so you can't tell who's in the book based on the table of contents anymore. A chapter might be called "The man with the funny hat", which leaves you guessing about who you're reading about for the first page or two. Sometimes the chapter ends up being about a character I suspected the author had forgotten about, so it ends up feeling like he's toying with the reader.

Even at 1100 pages, though, Mr. Martin can no longer fit an interesting slice of every character he wants to write for. One of my favorite characters doesn't even show up until two thirds of the way through, and squeezes in maybe 50 pages of narrative. It's just not possible to tell an interesting story involving over a dozen POVs; he's fallen in love with so many of the characters that they fight each other for page space. Another character that I was excited about seems to spend most of the book on the equivalent of a long train ride, describing what he sees looking out the window. And yes, there are several new POV added to the mix, too. The only hope for relief here is the author's notorious delight in killing off characters. Here's hoping the herd is thinned out enough to make the next book a bit more managable.

The Windup Girl

I selected this book to read based solely on its appearance from a Google search of books that have won both the hugo and the nebula awards (which if you don't know are both sci-fi novel awards.) This book is the most recent novel to meet that criteria, so I read it.

The book takes place in an energy-poor, post-apocalyptic future, and is set almost entirely in Bankok, Thailand. It is imaginative, vivid, and unfortunately makes what I think are clever, plausible, and extremely bleak predictions about what the world will be like in 150 years.

The characters are all interesting, all flawed, and all believable. I changed my mind several times throughout the story about who I liked, who I hated, and who deserved the messy and violent death that they were inevitably rushing towards. In a good way.

Technology is a subtle backdrop for this book's characters rather than a subject in itself, although I think the science was very sound. The most advanced engineering is genetic; in an energy-poor future there are blimps and sail-hydrofoils and bicycles, but no rockets or super-computers or jet fighters. This is part of what gives the book its bleak feel. (Although not as bleak as Oryx and Crake--- good lord.)

The book ends climactically, with nicely crafted closure for most all of the characters. And in a weird way it even left me feeling like perhaps it was, if not a "happy" ending, at least a vaguely positive and satisfying one. So I give Paolo high marks for being able to end a book. NEIL.

My main caution about the book is that you need to be willing to read about futile desires, flawed characters, a pessimistic view of the future of mankind, and also some violence (including sexual violence) and of course tons of swearing.

My favorite thing about this book is the vivid writing--- Paolo made me feel the oppressive heat, politics, disease, and conflict of Bankok, but without without pages and pages of descriptive text. Instead, he showed how the characters saw their world, as he told their stories, and that made it both more clear and more engaging.

All the same, I probably won't rush to read something else by Paolo; I need to hug a bunch of kittens and stare at a rainbow for a while first.

Stiff

Non-fiction books usually go to the bottom of my literary pile, since I'm a slow reader and I don't like being tricked into learning things while on vacation.

But "Stiff" by Mary Roach was totally fantastic--- a quick, hilarious page turner which I highly recommend. What's it about? Dead bodies.

Before I started reading I couldn't imagine what could be interesting enough to fill 12 chapters with cadavers. Mary meets people who deal with the dead every day--- researchers, doctors, med students, undertakers, and even forensic anthropologists. They're all very interesting, and the book is about them to some degree. But it's even more about Mary's experience meeting these people, and her paradoxical feelings of squickiness and yet fascination with a topic that is relevant to every single one of us.

Recommended!

(Admittedly, I am not a good judge of whether or not this book is too "gross" for unusually squeamish readers. But I can tell you that it is in no way violent, nor is it disrespectful of the concepts of death, dying, afterlives, religions, etc. Mary does a pretty good job avoiding being gross or disrespectful, even though she is obviously a fearlessly curious person. There's even a paragraph where she pointedly chooses not to use the "unpleasant" word for "baby flies", and instead substitutes, for the benefit of her readers, the much nicer word "hacienda". Insane, but effective.)

Game of Thrones (TV)

Some notes I made for a friend about the HBO series:

Robey says the Game of Thrones books may well not be worth reading, since the TV show is just as true to the story. (And no less finished than the books, since book 5 is not out yet, and books 6 and 7 aren't even written.)

I do like the show, specifically:
+ all great actors
+ some fun writing
+ great effects and sets

My biggest complaint is that, because they're so true to the book and yet also rushing through it, the show can be hard to follow--- like, harder than Deadwood. Various storytelling crimes:

- Most of what "happens" in the show is the characters talking to each other, rather than you witnessing events, so they generally fail at show-don't-tell. But since the show is about political intrigue, this is expected.

- They mention important characters by name only once and then you have to care who they are for several episodes before you actually meet them. ("Send this message to Stannis!" Who?)

- Many characters have a name, a house name, a nickname, and a title, all of which are referred to interchangeably. So if you didn't catch that "the unich", "the spider", "lord of whatever", and "vargas" are all the same person, then you won't understand who the fuck they're talking about.

- There are hundreds of characters. Hundreds. So sometimes a greasy knight that I thought was somebody's cannon-fodder bodyguard suddenly does something really pivotal, and I'm like, "wait, who was that guy?"

Matter

Okay I just finished "Matter". It was much better than Consider Phebas, not as good as Surface Detail. Your review, sir:

+ Neat settings and worlds--- more focused on races and settings than on tech or gadgets

+ Engrossingly complicated interweaving of alien civilizations and galactic politics

+ Several characters that I cared about, with a book-long suspenseful will-she-reach-him-in-time plot element that kept me turning the pages

+ Better (and briefer) battle scenes. Not a significant part of the book, for the better

+ Generally well written/crafted--- believable characters and motivations, less erratic POV problems, basically clear descriptions of people, tech, settings, worlds

- The most important devices and settings aren't introduced until the last third of the book, and are irrelevant to the suspense built in the first two thirds. So the final conflict a bit of a tacked-on feel

- so many characters and races and planets with weird names that it's easy to lose track of who is who. You basically get it by the second half of the book, but there are times when I was confused. There's a useful glossary of characters and races in the back of the book that I wish I had noticed before I had finished the whole thing :P

Now that I've read 3 books, I can see flaws and tendencies in all works that make him a slightly lesser author than some of my other favorites. I'm reluctant to try another book without a strong personal recommendation--- I would be unhappy if I encountered another Consider Phebas.

So on balance I only strongly recommend "Surface Detail". (Robey is also most of the way through it and is also really enjoying it.)

Consider Phlebas

Okay i just finished this book by Iain Banks. It was his first book, and on balance i didn't really like it. I think if it was the only book I had read and I didn't know anything else about the author, it would stop me from reading anymore. Comments (no spoilers):

+ you'll benefit if you haven't read the later books in the Culture Series, because several of the tech / world items are really neat when you meet them for the first time. But they're hum-drum by Surface Detail.

- the motivations of the characters' actions were unclear to me, so much so that i found myself getting annoyed. I wanted to shout things like "don't go in there stupid!" and "why wouldn't you just murder that character immediately, they're clearly going to double-cross you" and "that character is your ally, why are you trying to kill them", etc. Irrational character behavior is a big distraction for action sequences, which make up most of the book.

- there's a really large amount of "fisticuffs" action scenes. Too much, really.

Anyway, I'm going to try "Matter" now, but if it annoys me then I'm done with the Culture series.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (TV)

Now that it's confirmed that the Airbender movie is a stinker, you'll listen to me when I say, please don't go see it.

Instead, watch the original animated series, it's better than you think. Here's my pitch:

First, about humor. While the show is not intended to be non-stop laughs, yes it's for kids, so there is humor, and you'll have to tolerate that 50% of it is silly fart jokes that are beneath you. Conceded. But there are some genuinely funny-for-grownups moments in most of the episodes. Only a little below a typical Pixar movie in jokes.

Next, there are the characters. Yes, they spend some of their time moralizing about the value of friendship and teamwork and blah blah blah. Conceded. But the characters are genuinely likable, interesting, and have depth and growth that makes you want to keep watching. (Especially General Iroh and Toph--- SO AWESOME.)

The art is also excellent: yes it's a cartoon, but the directors make intriguing, cinematic choices for the sets, scenes, shots, angle, and lighting that are superior not only to most TV, but to lots of movies too. Top shelf.

Lastly, the martial art is impressively authentic. The characters have magical powers (Fire-bending, Earth-bending, Air-bending, etc) which are choreographed on real Kung Fu styles--- water-bending is Tai Chi, fire-bending is Northern Shaolin, etc. And the fight scenes are very creative: each battle is full of interesting new moves and innovative tactics, and no two are alike. It is as fresh and interesting as Dragon Ball Z is rote and tedious. Every fight in every episode is a pleasure to watch.

The show is best in season 2, but you'll want to watch seasons 1 and 3 to see how it starts and how it ends (respectively). The whole show is only 3 seasons, with a climactic and satisfying ending, so it won't leave you hanging.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it! (And don't see the live action movie. It's awful and it will spoil the real show, which is actually good.)

Harry Potter 7

I finished reading the last book of the Harry Potter series this week. I did not number amongst those who finished within the first 12 hours of the book's midnight release date (you know who you are), so I guess I lose Enthusiasm Points for that.

But to save you the trouble I'll give away the ending for you: There's no Harry-Ron-Hermione threesome scene at the end. I know you were hoping, but sorry.

Harry Potter 5

When I start reading a book that I find enthralling it tends to sort of ruin my life: I don't want to do anything else until I've read it, and every sequel to it, and then every other book by that author, and then every book by that author's friends, etc. And since everyone says how addictive the Harry Potter books are, I figured that it was not wise to embark on them until I had some free time.

(You may have also heard me make the argument that I don't want to risk reading them until all 7 are published, in case J.K. Rowling fucking dies before she can finish all 7 of the goddamn books that she promised me, like Douglas Adams did. In truth I'm not that worried about this scenario, but it's a funnier excuse than just saying that I don't have time.)

But anyway, in Arizona I gave in and started reading them. And they've turned me into a complete heroin addict; I'm normally a slow reader but I whipped through them in just a few days. I guess I expected them to be amazing works of literature, but in retrospect that was ridiculous; they're successful and fun because they're not high-brow literary bullshit, why did everyone know this but me?

So anyway, I'm almost done with #5, and soon I will be reading #6, and then I'll be in the same boat as all of you lot--- waiting in agony for the final book. Bitch do not die before you finish writing #7 I am warning you.

Fire Upon The Deep

With a somewhat unfortunate book recommendation debacle on his record, you'd think I would stop taking my Media Recommendation Friend's advice. But I generally enjoy sci-fi more than "literature" so I was willing to give MRF's gift of two of Vernor Vinge's books a try, despite the record.

And I'm happy to report that they were both great! I couldn't put them down, and my productivity at work suffered greatly from them. Definitely the mark of quality fiction.

Thanks, Media Recommendation Friend. You know who you are.

Gravity's Rainbow

(Warning: spoilers!)

I finally finished the beast. I made my first attempt a few years ago, and because I'm a relatively slow reader, it took me months to get within 100 pages of finishing it... before I gave up. This time I did it, in seven months. I've only read one other Pynchon book, Vineland, and I found it relatively easy to read and entertaining. And I'd heard a lot of good things about Gravity's Rainbow so I thought I should try it, but my memory of my last attempt was that 20 or more pages in a row would be pure genius, followed by 50 pages where I had to slog through, paragraph by paragraph, in a war of attrition. I was mostly right.

That first page was really hard. I kept thinking, "Is this a dream?" No, I guess not. Where is he? Huh? No wait, it is a dream! But then the banana breakfast sequence rewarded me for persevering.

Characters were still being introduced for the first 100 pages, but it works because each new character (or pair of characters) is introduced through a mini-chapter on what they're up to here in 1941 London. Then we move on to a character somehow related to the last, in a loose chain that's kind of like a "six degrees of separation" game.

I have to admit, it was really rough going at the end. When I got to page 700, which is apparently about the place I gave up last time, I knew I was gonna be in for a tough climb. The plot completely dissolves. At least one major character (Slothrop) and one minor (Jamf) are declared to have never existed. The free-wheeling stoner rants take center stage but not many of them last more than one page before Pynchon gets distracted and switches to another topic.

I was mentally prepared to be let down, to have no closure or conclusion, so I wasn't mortally disappointed like I was at the end of Cryptonomicon or Infinite Jest, but I was also a little bit taken aback. There is a conclusion to one of the plots: We find out what Imipolex G is (turns out to be an extended sex joke), and what was actually in the final 00000 rocket. Although, if you didn't know what was in the 00000 rocket by the time it's revealed, you haven't really been paying attention, since Pynchon drops hints every 20 pages like a giggling schoolgirl who can't keep a secret.

Disappointment aside, the book overall is worthwhile, but more as a collection of stories. There is absolutely no point in obsessing about getting to the end and hoping that any of the loose ends will be tied up. (I wish I could take a time machine and go back and tell myself that.) It's more of a huge rambling snapshot of a few months in the lives of a dozen really interesting characters. The best sections stand on their own as awesome short stories without requiring any context: Roger & Jessica's spontaneous church visit, Pökler's backstory and the German "Dozen Children" themepark town, the party boat on the Oder, the balloon ride across the Zone, the squid attack, the party in France with the tank, etc.

There's something I think Pynchon is trying to do over and over here: drift off into some free-association riffing, away from the story, and start dropping freeform stream-of-consciousness babbling that, when it works, becomes kind of transcendant and magical. I actually bookmarked the pages where he hit the mark with one of these because they're really incredible. There was a really great one when Roger & Jessica made a spontaneous stop at a church for holiday services and Jessica's mind drifted off to thoughts of a giant room filled with empty toothpaste tubes waiting to be recycled into useful metal for the war effort. Sadly he didn't edit out many of the ones that didn't work, so sometimes it comes across as trying too hard.

On the other hand, he's not a math & science guy. The descriptions of Roger's statistics work are best skimmed with your brain turned off, and Pointsman's Pavlovian experiments seem like they exist only to show that's he a cruel man. Unless we're supposed to think that he really believes that mindlessly repeating someone else's experiments over and over is a sure way to win a Nobel prize.

I think I'll feel better about the book after it's had time to sit in my brain for a bit (I just finished it last night). But it's definitely time to move on to more light reading after this.

Midnight's Children

Tonight I almost fell asleep after reading barely a page of Salman Rushdie's miserably unreadable Midnight's Children. Like pages on hundreds of nights before this one, tonight's page contained only 2 huge run-on sentences, full of unrelated and uninteresting facts about the main character. It also contained what you might charitably call "poetic language" but that I simply call "incorrect English grammar". Salman likes to omit commas a lot, especially around adjectives, which makes it easy to get lost in his shitty run-on sentences and have to start over again at the top of the page. My average reading speed with this book has been about 1 page every 15 minutes.

But no matter.

Because unlike the preceeding two years of nights that I have spent trying to wade through this pointless tome, tonight's page was the final page of the book.

It's OVER.

Baroque Cycle

I have just finished the entire Baroque Cycle, a 3000 page mound of historical fiction by Neil Stephenson. And even though it's 2am and I'm really tired, I feel like I just have to tell SOMEone. Some notes:

• The end is not bad. Especially not bad in light of Neil's record r.e. endings.


• DON'T read the Epilogue, it's just better if you don't. It doesn't add much of anything to the book. Instead, imagine that it says "And they lived happily ever after". Because the Epilogue basically does say that, but it says it in kind of a goofy and unnecessary way that will bore you for the first 9 pages and then annoy you on the last page.


• If you want closure, read the Acknowledgements page. It's somewhat amusing.