Yesterday I finished Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King, about the construction of the dome on top of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence.

A few interesting things jumped out at me. First, how patient people used to be. It took over 50 years to build Santa Maria del Fiore, and at the start, no one knew how to construct the proposed dome. Second, how small Florence was. People today seem to think that nothing important can happen in small towns or cities, but during the Renaissance, Florence's population varied widely (due to recurrence's of the Black Death) but was less than a hundred thousand.

Florence was one of my favourite places in Italy, the other being Vernazza, and one I would like to go back to since we only spent one night there. On reading this book, it was nice to have seen some of the things it describes, like Brunelleschi's dome and the bronze doors of the Baptistery, made by Brunelleschi's chief rival, Lorenzo Ghiberti.

On Thursday, I finished Fortunes of War by Stephen Coonts.

Not much to say on this one. It's pretty run of the mill military fiction. The archtype for this kind of book, and still probably the best example, is Red Storm Rising from Tom Clancy. The problem more recent authors have is to find an antagonist now that the cold war is over. In this case, the bad guys are Japanese, going to war with Russia and the inevitable good guys are the Americans who help out the Russians.

I just finished Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, a prequel to Niven's Ringworld.

Fleet of World is an OK book but nowhere near as good as Niven's earlier Known Space books, including Ringworld. The new book adds to the backstory of the Puppeteer's homeworlds, which are seen in Ringworld fleeing an explosion at the galactic core. It also adds adds to the Puppeteer's interactions with humans by adding a group of humans that accidentally discovered the Puppeteer's home and were enslaved for generations.

Books like this are tricky as the author is either over-constrained by the previous novels or changes things in such a way that it can diminish the original novel. Fleet of Worlds fits in the second camp. Some of the things that happen in this book make the events of Ringworld seem less meaningful.

Last night, we saw the Barefoot Nellies and Mighty Crows at the Starry Plough in Berkeley.

I've been friends with members of both bands since before they were in bands, so it is nice to see them developing as bands. The greatest strength of both bands is their singing - they each have a number of strong singers in their band and do a lot of great harmony pieces. And they've both developed good band rhythms over the years. I think the Crows are a little more polished while the Nellies are a little more adventurous in their set, even including a few nice original numbers.

If you like local bluegrass, you owe it to yourself to check out these two bands. And the Nellies even have a live CD for sale now. You can't get it online anywhere yet, so you'll have to show up at a show to get a copy.

This was the first time we've been to the Starry Plough and we'll probaby go back - it seemed like a very nice little venue for seeing local music, and it's only 10 minutes from my house, which is a big plus.

Last night I finished Something Rotten, the fourth book in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. I wrote about the third book in the series here.

In Something Rotten, Thursday returns to the real world after having spent most of the time in the previous two books hiding out inside fiction. It is my favourite of Fforde's books, so far, and does a nice job of wrapping up pretty much all of the loose threads from the previous books. So much so, that I thought while reading it that it might be the last in the series but I now see that there is a fifth book, and a planned sixth book forthcoming. It also gets extra marks from me for having less of the meta-fiction devices used, sometimes to excess, in the previous books.

Over the weekend, I finished re-reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

The premise of American Gods is that all gods are real, but are created, and sustained, by belief and worship. When immigrants came to North America, they brought copies of their gods with them but they have not thrived in their new environment. This serves as the backdrop for the main character's interactions with Odin and his schemes.

It's Gaiman's best book so far, and very well written, with enough character development and insight into the human condition to elevate it above a lot of modern fantasy.

I've been running into quite a few free online games lately that serve as good time wasters. Here are a few of the ones I've played:

Arcane
Untangle
Guesthouse
Desktop Tower Defense
Ballistic Wars
Orbit
Steppenwolf

My personal favourite is Arcane - it's more of a full fledged game, very atmospheric, with a fun, spooky little story.

A few minutes ago, I finished Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, his first foray into the young adult fantasy market.

Un Lun Dun centers around two girls who travel into an alternate London and into a confrontation with malevolent pollution. It's a good book, but substantially different from his previous works due to being targetted for the young adult market. His other books, one of which I wrote about here, are very dark with a lot of sexual and grotesque imagery and violent action. Un Lun Dun is more in the Harry Potter vein, but with more word games since a lot of the people and places encountered are based on twisted versions of real things. For example, they visit Webminster abbey and have to deal with Binjas, trash bins with martial arts skills.

It's nice to see an author I like try something different and do it so well.

Yesterday I finished Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit, another book about the problems with string theory. I discussed another book that came out around the same time, Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics, here).

They are both worthy attempts at bringing attention to the state of particle physics, but Smolin's is the better book. It's more clearly and concisely written, and better organized. He also does a better job of explaining why string theory was seen as a viable and important idea to work on, which also helps explain why a lot of physicists are un-willing to give up on it.

Woit's book is better at going into some of the mathematical details behind the theories. For the layman, I would recommend reading Smolin's book first. If you are still interested, and want to get more of the details without trying to jump in to the actual papers, then read Not Even Wrong.

I just finished Spook Country by William Gibson, sort of a sequel to Pattern Recognition (which I discussed here).

I liked Spook Country less than Pattern Recognition. It's not really a sequel, but it does have a few characters in common. The new book is harder to get into the last one. The chapters rotate between three different characters -One of them is interesting, another isn't, and the third is hard to get a handle on, particularly in the brief opening chapters of the book.

By the end, they mostly tie together but the book lacks any real resolution. Since it deals with spies, some ambiguity makes sense but not only isn't it clear for most of the book who various people are working for, what they are trying to do or why they are doing it, but it is never really resolved. By the end, we learn a little more about what some of the people are doing, but not who they really are, their motives or the final outcomes of their schemes. It's not a bad ride, but with very little payoff at the end.

The latest book I finished is How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, the first in a series he is calling "The Hinges of History".

How the Irish Saved Civilization, or HISC for short, is a well-written and engaging book but short on actual meat to back the argument. The synopsis is that after the fall of Rome, the monks in Ireland were an important group that preserved and copied a lot of classical manuscripts, allowing them to survive and to influence the societies that would follow.

There is not much argument in the book beyond that simple statement. In fact, the first 2/3rds of the book don't even get to this thesis - instead it describes what was at risk of being lost in the civilization of the Roman world, what the Celtic culture was like in Ireland before Patrick converted the island and how Patrick and the Irish monks that followed him converted Ireland and created a variant version of Catholicism that lasted until the Roman version spread to Ireland through Europe.

The section of the book dealing with the actual thesis is quite short and doesn't really give a lot of evidence or theories relating to the thesis. It just restates it and moves quickly to the close of the book.

Yesterday I finished The Well of Lost Plots, the third Thursday Next novel by Jasper Fforde.

The Thursday Next novels postulate a world where books are actually parallel worlds, inhabited by real characters who can travel from book to book and have lives of their own when they are not being read. In some ways, the idea is similar to what was used in Gary Wolf's Who Censored Roger Rabbit or in the film A Purple Rose in Cairo but more thoroughly developed and explored. Fforde also uses it as an excuse to engage in meta-fiction tricks like having the characters in the book aware of footnotes or mis-spellings.

My reaction to The Well of Lost Plots was similar to my reaction to the first two books - at first I was bit put off by the over-cute meta-fiction tricks and references to different books/characters sprinkled liberally throughtout but by the end of the book it had won me over and I quite enjoyed it.

Last night, we saw Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette as part of the SF Jazz summer season.

They make up one of the best piano trio's in jazz and put on a really good show of standards.

The only less than perfect part of the night was the slumped over guy who had vomited on the floor on the BART ride home.

Today, I finished re-reading The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett, one of his six novels, and one of two to feature his nameless detective - the "Continental Op".

I've always admired The Dain Curse for it's twisted plot, as the Continental Op starts out investigating a simple diamond theft and then gets pulled into family mysteries and a number of murders. It's not as good as the first, and much, much bloodier and hard-boiled, Continental Op book Red Harvest, but if you want to see the start of the modern private detective genre, you can't go wrong with Hammett.

Over the weekend, I finished Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold.

This is the 2nd book of three set in the same world as The Curse of Chalion. I wrote about the third book, The Hallowed Hunt, here. Paladin of Souls is a sequel to The Curse of Chalion, but not a direct continuation. It functions as a stand alone novel with different main characters while still continuing the story from the first novel.

It's quite a good book but overrated. I liked the first book in the series better but this one won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel and the Locus Awards for best fantasy novel in the year it came out. I've read all of the Hugo nominees for that year and I would probably have put this book 3rd or 4th out of that list.

Bujold has an ability to create compelling characters that makes all of her books enjoyable but I didn't find anything particularly noteworthy or outstanding in this particular one.

A few days ago I finished Rocketeers by Michael Belfiore.

Subtitled "How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space", Rocketeers is a chronicle of the first few years of a new industry, sometimes referred to as NewSpace or Alt.Space, that is trying to revolutionize access to space through entrepreneurial means rather than government action.

Belfiore interviewed a number of the most important people in this new field, including people at Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, Bigelow Aerospace, RocketPlane Kistler and SpaceX. He does a good job of covering the people he interviews, but a little more information on some of the other companies would have been interesting.

There are two flaws in this book. The first is that it is very early in the development of this industry and therefore the real prospects of these companies are far from certain. In particular, the last year has seen a lot of setbacks, from the explosion at Scaled Composite's test site that killed three employees, to Rocketplane Kistler losing their NASA COTS funding and there being no winner of the Lunar Lander challenge at the X prize cup after two years with only one competitor - Armadillo Aerospace. The second is that Belfiore falls into common cliche in non-fiction books - he injects himself into the story. For example, his reaction to finding about the Apollo moon landings in the start of the book is neither germane to the story, nor interesting, to read about. Similarly, his reaction to the Doom computer game in the small section on John Carmack and Armadillo Aerospace is just a distraction.

Last night we went to an Ask A Scientist event at the Axis Cafe in San Francisco. The Ask A Scientist lectures are the SF version of what have come to be called "science cafes", where a lecture is given to the public on some scientific topic in an informal, Q&A atmosphere. The topic last night was ancient science and the lecture was given by Richard Carrier, who is just about to complete a Ph.D with a related thesis.

It was a very interesting and entertaining lecture. The lecturer was obviously an expert in the field and there were a number of good questions from the audience. It was also good that he started off with a brief discourse on what seperates ancient science from modern science.

Yesterday morning I finished The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold - a stand alone fantasy novel set in the same world as The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls.

I've read The Curse of Chalion but not Paladin of Souls, though it is on my shelf right now. Chalion is quite a good book, and Paladin won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards so it is probably good as well. The Hallowed Hunt is a good book but I didn't like it as much as Chalion and it didn't seem good enough to win any awards. Bujold has a good handle on writing interesting characters and she has created a unique world with a religion that stands out as more interesting than most fantasy books. She also deserves praise for avoiding the trap of writing endless series of books. All three of these books are set in the same world but stand alone without any cliffhangers at the end.

Last night we saw the Punch Brothers, Chris Thile's post-modern bluegrass band (formerly known as the Tension Mountain Boys and How To Grow A Band) at the Independent in San Francisco.

We saw the same band almost exactly a year ago at the same club. I wrote about it here. Last night's performance was also an amazing show by some of the best pickers alive today, but I enjoyed it less than last year. A large portion of the show was devoted to what Thile describes as a string quintette for bluegrass instruments, "The Blind Leading the Blind". It's an interesting, ambitious piece and particularly praiseworthy in our current anti-intellectual, anti-art pop culture but it serves as more of a showcase of Thile's composing talents. Thile is probably the best mandolin player of all time and has an amazing creativity in his improvisations, as well as an amazing ability to improvise at extreme high speed. That is what I really like to see from his live shows and it was mostly lacking last night.

It was still a great show but hopefully after this tour, his live show will feature more of his hot picking and improvising.

Over the weekend, I finished On The Wealth of Nations by P.J. O'Rourke, a book about explaining Adam Smith's magnum opus.

O'Rourke is one of my favourite comedy authors, particularly his early works like Republican Party Reptile, but this isn't one of his strongest books. His usually humorous asides feel like more of a distraction, and he particularly gets off track in the first few chapters which seem to be only tangentially about Adam Smith's book.

I learned a few new things about The Wealth of Nations, but I think this book is too much of a mutt and not enough of an explanation or enough of straight comedy.

I just finished Death of the Duchess by Elizabeth Eyre, a mediocre mystery set in Renaissance Italy.

The characters are OK but the mystery is a little lackluster and the author (really 2 authors under a pen name) don't really take advantage of the setting. Other than being told it is Renaissance Italy, there is not much that clearly points to that setting in the story. It could as easily been almost anywhere where nobility existed, before the 20th century.

It's not really needed, but here's more proof of the awesomeness of YouTube - footage of Lemmy playing with Hawkwind before he was kicked out of the band and founded Motörhead:


That clip is also a nice illustration for us younger folk of just how much drugs people were doing in the 70's.

Last night I finished Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Gibson is best known for his cyberpunk trilogy, Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive but in recent years he has moved away from science fiction. Pattern Recognition is set in a the modern world, but at the same time feels fantastical.

The plot is a little difficult to describe but the main character is a consultant and "cool hunter" who gets involved in investigating some mysterious footage that is posted to the web. After his early novels, I felt that Gibson lost his way somewhat while trying to recapture some of cutting edge feeling of his early books and then in trying to get away from the cyberpunk genre he had created. In his newer books, he is finally successful at creating something separate and also interesting.

I just finished Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, an interesting, but depressing, history of the CIA.

Before reading this book, I expected to read about a lot of illegal, and probably immoral, things the CIA had done. What I didn't expect was the incompetence that existed right from the start of the CIA. Right from the start, the CIA ignored it's mandate to deliver quality intelligence for the president to focus on covert operations of little strategic value. On top of that, president after president, both Democrat and Republican, has abused the CIA in order to further their own political ends.

I'd be curious to see how the CIA's string of failures and lapses compares with other intelligence agencies, like the UK's MI6 or the Soviet KGB, to see if some of these problems are endemic to the intelligence community or if they are uniquely American.

I finished The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason a while ago but forgot to hit the post button. Oops.

The quotes and reviews make this book out to be something like The DaVinci Code only more intelligent, but I think that is misleading. The Rule of Four isn't really a standard thriller at all. There is a historical mystery (based on a real mysterious book called the Hypnerotomachi Poliphili whose author has only been tentatively identified based on an acrostic in the text) but that, along with the Princeton campus, is really just part of the context of the book. It's really more a story of friendship and a classic "coming of age" story. Recommended, but not for people looking for thrillers like the DaVinci Code.

Last night I went to the Freight and Salvage to see a show by three bands put on by the San Francisco Bluegrass and Old Time Festival (aka SFBOT).

The first band was an SF band, Homespun Rowdy. I've seen the Rowdies play at a number of different venues over the year and I didn't used to like their performances very much. In the early days of the band, it seemed like they were going for more of a county rather than bluegrass sound. Happily for me, either they have changed or my taste has evolved because now I like them a lot. They put on a good show of bluegrass done in a mostly traditional style and they've achieved one of the toughest things in bluegrass - a strong and tight band rhythm.

The second band was Spring Creek, from Lyons, Colorado. They were better than I thought they were going to be, based on listening to some song samples on their website, but they were the weakest band of the evening. They obviously have some talented pickers in the band but it felt like they never got into a good groove and their singing is more country than bluegrass. Also, they don't have a fiddle player which is a huge strike against them in my book.

The last band was Town Mountain from Asheville, North Carolina, with local fiddle hotshot Annie Staninec sitting in. I really liked this band. They play mostly originals, and some with a more country feel, but they have my favourite type of band rhythm/sound - hard driving, high energy and a little rough around the edges. They put on an excellent show and showcased some great songs and excellent picking. Highly recommended and I will definitely see them again if they come back to this area.

Last night I finished Making Money, the latest Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett.

Pratchett likes to introduce new characters every few novels and then use them as the main character for a number of books. For example, there are the Rincewind books, the Death books, the Sam Vimes/City Watch books, etc.

Making Magic is the second book to feature Moist von Lipwig, the ex-crook who became head of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office in Going Postal. This book has him getting involved in the banking system and the inevitable shenanigans that follow.

It's a pretty good book - Lipwig is an interesting character and interacts well with some of Pratchett's other standard characters, particularly Lord Vetinari. Some parts of the book felt sloppier and less clearly written than other Discworld novels. I'm not sure if that is actually the case or if I'm just projecting because I know that Pratchett has been recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's.

I finished Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston yesterday.

Tyrannosaur Canyon is a pretty run of the mill thriller. It has a few science fictiony elements but it's mainly stock characters - an evil ex-con, an ambitious professor and a resourceful hero.

Yesterday, I finished Devices and Desires by K.J. Parker, the first book in a fantasy trilogy.

The interesting thing about this fantasy trilogy is that while the main setting is a fairly standard pastoral/medieval country, the plot of the book has to do with the clash between that country and another country that is more industrialized, more similar to a late Renaissance city or even early Industrial Revolution city, but without gunpowder. This gives enough of a twist to the story to make it a little more interesting than a standard fantasy. The characters are well written as well.

Like many fantasy books, it does give to much credit to the medieval lifestyle, and the medieval nobility, compared to an industrial lifestyle. The industrial city is quite an exaggeration, with rigid guilds and rules that dominate all of city life, but it's still an interesting twist and overall, well handled.

I just finished the Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin.

The titular trouble Smolin is referring to is the lack of progress in fundamental physics since the standard model was put together in the 1970s. In particular, he looks in detail at string theory and postulates that it has been a dead end, and the sociology surrounding it impeding progress on other possibly productive areas.

This book is quite good. I especially liked the sections of the book that summarize the progress in physics between the starts of the relativity and quantum revolutions and the development of the final model. I was familiar with the development of relativity and quantum theory, and their extensions in quantum electrodynamics but I had only heard of more modern advances like gauge theory. This book gives a good popular science level explanation of the more modern developments.

It also gives a good description of the development of string theory, and the best explanation I've seen of why string theory was originally seen as being so promising and why so many people have become convinced that it is the right path to follow.

Highly recommended for readers interested in modern physics. I'd recommend that any readers have at least a popular science level understanding of relativity and basic quantum mechanics before reading this book.

Amazon Link:

I finished a few comic collections over the last few days.

The first is the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa. Rosa took all the hints about Scrooge's background in the original Carl Banks comics and fleshed them out to tell the full story of Scrooge's life before he got involved in the lives of Donald, Huey, Louie and Dewey. It's a fun little read.

The second is V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, which was later made into a movie of the same name. I was underwhelmed by this collection. I like some of Moore's work, like the Watchmen and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, but V for Vendetta left me cold. The art is murky and un-remarkable and the story is difficult to follow and not very engaging or original. Highly over-rated.

The third was Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things by Ted Naifeh, which I picked up on a whim from the library. Courtney Crumrin is a middle school aged girl who moves to the suburbs into the house owned by her grand-uncle (or is it great-grand or great-great-grand uncle). Turns out he is involved in magic and she gets involved after finding some of his books. It's a cute comic and pretty fun. I'll probably read some of the follow on volumes.

Amazon Links:
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck
V for Vendetta
Courtney Crumrin, Vol. 1: Courtney Crumrin & The Night Things

Yesterday I finished Halting State, the latest book by Charles Stross.

Halting State is set in the newly independent state of Scotland and involves the investigations into a theft that takes place in a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG, or MMO for short). Stross has come up with an interesting near future world where MMOs and other online services have become very integrated into day to day life and have real world consequences. What starts off as a simple theft investigation ends up having international implications.

I liked this book. It is definitely stronger than some of his others. Stross is a little hit and miss - I enjoyed Singularity Sky but didn't care much for Glasshouse and The Family Trade. Sometimes his characters can be very unappealing and uninteresting to read about. In Halting State, he flirts a little with that line but in the end, the main characters are quite sympathetic.

Amazon Link: Halting State

A few days ago, I finished England, England by Julian Barnes.

England, England is bit of a meandering book. The largest portion of the book is about a corporation that turns the Isle of Wight into an England theme park that is billed as being better than the real thing. Those sections are book-ended by more personal segments about one of the people involved in developing, and eventually taking over, the park. The middle sections about the park and why it will be better than visiting the actual historical sites, it amusing but I'm not sure what it all adds up to.

Amazon Link: England, England

I just finished Forest Mage by Robin Hobb, the 2nd book in her latest fantasy trilogy.

Hobb is one of the best writers in fantasy and I've been a big fan based on her previous trilogies, particularly the Liveship Traders books. She does a great job of creating interesting characters and then putting them in very difficult situations. Also, she avoids a lot of the pitfalls of modern fantasy. First, she sets her books in worlds not based on medieval Europe. The current trilogy is based in a world that is most similar to late 18th century America. Second, she writes trilogies rather than endless series and the individual books can almost be read as stand alone novels.

If you're interested, I recommend starting with some of her earlier books. This trilogy is good but the first book in the trilogy is not as strong as the first book in some of the other ones.

Amazon Link: Forest Mage

Over the Christmas/New Year's holidays, I saw two movies - Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and I am Legend.

Walk Hard is a parody of music biopics, particularly the Johnny Cash bio I Walk the Line. It's uneven, particularly at the beginning, but has quite a few funny moments and songs.

I am Legend is an adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel, the third to make it to the big screen, but is not really similar to the novel other than sharing the idea of a world taken over by savage diseased humans. In spite of that, it is a pretty good movie, much more intelligent than most big budget films of any sort. The one big problem is the CGI creatures in the movie. Their motion and look doesn't feel realistic and it reduces the scenes they are in to a more cartoonish level.

A few days ago, I finished The Tyranny of the Night by Glen Cook. Cook is best known for his Black Company series but this book is the start of a new series.

It gets off to a very slow start. Cook introduces too many new countries and characters too fast. There is too much detail to keep track of but too little to keep the politics straight in your mind. Instead of becoming interesting back-story, it just becomes confusing. Once he settles down to a few main characters and their relationships to each other, the novel gets a lot more interesting and by the end there are a number of good scenes and the plot comes together.

I also finished the first of the Hamish Macbeth mysteries, Death of a Gossip, by M.C. Beaton. It's a short book, which is a relief since most novels published these days tend to be 300+ pages. It is a classic mystery with some interesting characters and, as typical in a classic mystery, two villains - the murderer and the victim.

Amazon Link:
The Tyranny of the Night
Death of a Gossip

Over the weekend, I finished Kaleidoscope Century by John Barnes.

I've liked other books by Barnes but I can't recommend this one. The narrative is very difficult to follow, mainly since it is made up of a mix of current events and the main character trying to remember what happened in the past. These events all blur together in such a way that it is difficult to tell if what is happening is current, in the past or just in a memory. On top of that confusion, the main character is a major sociopath who kills, rapes and tortures with no moral considerations at all.

Not a fun read, and not a particularly good one either.

Amazon Link: Kaleidoscope Century

I just finished re-reading The Golden Compass (AKA Northern Lights) by Philip Pullman.

Re-reading the book has lowered my opinion of the movie. Inevitably, a movie has to remove a lot of the complexity from a book, particularly complexity internal to a character, but in this case, I think the creators of the film over-simplified things. They also made a few odd choices, like changing the order of some events for no clear reason.

Probably the biggest mistake is the ending. When watching the movie, the ending felt vaguely un-satisfying but the overall movie had been enjoyable, so I brushed that feeling aside. After having re-read the book, it is clearly a huge mistake. The current ending of the movie leaves too many things un-resolved, particularly on an emotional level, and wouldn't have led well into the next film. The book's ending is much more powerful. Since the original ending was actually filmed, hopefully it will show up on the DVD version of the movie.

Over the weekend, I saw the movie version of The Golden Compass and finished Maelstrom by Peter Watts.

The Golden Compass is a good adaptation of the children's/young adult fantasy book Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. It is a good adaptation of the book but not up to the high standard set by the Lord of the Rings films. The book has been simplified in this adaptation, and a lot of the explicit religious references have been pulled out. What remains is the basic plot and a lot of colourful fantasy elements. I saw it with someone who had not read the book and she said afterwards that she could follow the plot, so it is not absolutely necessary to read the book before you see it but it is highly recommended.

Sadly, it looks like this movie won't come anywhere near earning back it's huge costs so the chances of seeing the rest of the trilogy in film is small. One odd thing is there there doesn't seem to be a movie version of the novel in the stores. This is such an obvious, and ubiquitous, cross marketing move that it's lack here is very strange and surprising. I was in a book store just after the movie ended and a number of people were looking for the book and there were not a lot available, and the ones that were were either part of an omnibus of the whole trilogy or were more expensive trade paperback versions. There was also some confusion because the movie says at the end that is is based on the book Northern Lights but doesn't point out that the in America, the book was renamed The Golden Compass. I'm also re-reading the book right now to compare it to the film but might not write about it here after I am done.

The book I finished was Maelstrom, the sequel to Starfish, by Peter Watts. Maelstrom is a direct sequel, continuing the action just after the end of Starfish, exploring the fallout of the ending of the first book and following a few of the characters as they move from the depths of the ocean to wandering around North America. Some of the scientific speculation is interesting but the relentless dystopian world Watts has created gets to be pretty tiring. I discussed Starfish here.

Amazon Links:

Maelstrom

Northern Lights (AKA The Golden Compass)

I just finished The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

This is a very interesting book, interesting enough that I am considering buying a copy when it comes out in paperback so that I can refer to it and spend more time digging into the ideas Taleb presents.

Recently I posted on the book Super Crunchers, and commented that I thought it should have spent more time on the limits of statistics. The Black Swan is the polar opposite of this - it is all about the limits of modern statistical thinking and it raises a lot of good points. At this point, I don't agree with everything in the book and I think Taleb has gone too far in some areas, but the bulk of his argument is correct and has important ramifications for the modern, global economy. In particular, I bet that he is having a good laugh about the current sub-prime mortgage crisis that is currently going on in the US. This is exactly the kind of problem that he points out, with a lot of banks having booked profits for many years that are now turning out to be based on taking a lot more risk than they intended to take.

Along the way, he throws out a lot of related, and very interesting ideas. For example, the difference between scalable and non-scalable careers. Examples of a non-scalable career would be a barber or a farmer while an engineer or a novelist would be scalable examples.

The book is not a technical book - all but a few chapters are written for lay readers and could be appreciated by anyone who is willing to put in a little thought. For example, Taleb defines a black swan as a improbable event that has a large impact. As an example, he gives two groups of 1000 people. One group is weighed to generate an average weight. It is apparent that even if you added the thinnest or fattest person possible, the average weight would not shift significantly. For the second group, their net worth is recorded and averaged. Now if you add the richest person in existence (e.g. Bill Gates), the average will be dramatically different. In fact, any analysis you do of the second group's net worth will be totally driven by the black swan (Bill Gates) since his net worth is tens of thousands larger than the average persons. Taleb's whole point is that to apply the same kind of analysis to the second group as you do to the first results in bad choices.


Amazon Link: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Last night we went and saw the play after the quake at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. It is based on two stories from the short story collection of the same name by Haruki Murakami.

I was very tired before the play due to some insomnia but I ended up really enjoying this play. Even though it is based on two short stories, it unfolds instead as having stories told within stories, as the four main characters interact. It is set after the 1995 Kobe earthquake and has the characters trying to deal with the emotional effects of the earthquake and the changes in the relationship between the four of them.

If you are in the SF Bay area, or this play comes to your town, I highly recommend it.

Yesterday, I finished The Last Hot Time, a short novel by John M. Ford.

The genre for this one would be modern fantasy, where the author mixes fantastic and modern elements. In this case, the world changed in the 1950s when magic started working again and elfs re-appeared. For some reason, those elfs seem to have mainly organized themselves along the lines of the mafia so the novel is told from the point of view of a mob doctor that works alongside magical creatures and normal mobsters.

The Last Hot Time is an OK read but nothing special in this genre.

Amazon Link: The Last Hot Time

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I managed to finish re-reading one more book - Ringworld by Larry Niven.

Last week, something I read reminded me of Ringworld,so I decided to re-read it. Larry Niven is my favourite science fiction author, and Ringworld is probably his best novel, so I used to re-read it every so often but lately I have had good luck finding new things to read so my re-reading has dropped off.

Since it has been a while since I had read it last, I appreciated some things about the book that I had taken for granted over the years. I had forgotten just how good of a book it is. Niven does an excellent job of mixing the hard science he is known for, interesting, and well drawn, characters and difficult problems. It is no wonder that this book won both the Hugo (reader voted) and Nebula (writer voted) awards the year it came out. It is one of the best examples of hard science fiction available. Also, unlike a lot of science fiction from the Seventies, it doesn't feel very dated.

Amazon Link: Ringworld

I finished two books over the last few days: JPod by Douglas Coupland and The Dark Water by David Pirie.

JPod is a good book with a lot of unnecessary filler. Coupland likes to add pages filled with nonsense, presumably to affect the feel of the book. Since this particular book deals with a group of wanna-be hipster programmers, the interstitials here seemto be trying to capture in text the feeling of surfing the web, with it's almost random pieces of strung together data. The result is just a distraction from some interesting characters and an odd plot, involving family drug dealers, immigrant smugglers and a skateboarding turtle.


The Dark Water is a fairly typical mystery - detective and sidekick try to track down a serial killer who has a history with the sidekick. The twist in this novel is that the sidekick is Arthur Conan Doyle and the detective is Dr. Joseph Bell, the original inspiration for some parts of Doyle's most famous creation - Sherlock Holmes. It's a decent mystery but the tie in with Doyle/Bell seems entirely superfluous - I would have enjoyed it just as much if the author had done the work to come up with his own characters instead of just stealing the names of two historical ones.


Amazon Links:
JPod
The Dark Water

Last night I finished Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, one of his many Discworld novels.

This novel is pretty typical of the Discworld novels - you pretty much can't go wrong with Terry Pratchett. His novels are all amazingly consistent in terms of quality - almost all are good, with a few very good. This is one of the good ones. The only thing that distinguishes this from most of his Discworld novels is that he uses a new character instead of following one of the usual 5 or 6 characters that he tends to feature.


Amazon Link: Monstrous Regiment

Yesterday I finished The Tiger in the Well by Philip Pullman, the third book in the Sally Lockhart trilogy.

Like all modern novels set in Victorian England and featuring a heroine as protagonist, this series has to have a protagonist that acts in a more modern way than most women would have acted at that time. In inferior novels, this would happen without comment in an a-historical way. In the previous two novels in this series, The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North, Pullman makes it clear that Sally Lockhart is more independent than was considered proper by mainstream Victorian society. One of the interesting things about The Tiger in the Well is that this fact becomes a central part of the plot - someone creates a legal trap for Sally and she finds that her status as an outsider in Victorian society undermines her efforts to defend herself.

I reviewed the first two books in the series here and here. It is quite a good series, possibly even better than his more famous His Dark Materials trilogy.


Amazon Link: The Tiger in the Well

I just finished The Mediterranean Caper by Clive Cussler, the first of his book featuring diver Dirk Pitt.

Every once in a while, I feel like reading the modern equivalent of pulp fiction - quick reads with daring heroes, dastardly villains and absurd action. The other day, I noticed the movie Sahara was on so I watched a few minutes of it. This movie is based on a later Dirk Pitt adventure and it made me slightly curious to check out the series.

The Mediterranean Caper is a pretty standard adventure book. The main characters stumble into a criminal conspiracy while helping to look for a rare fish and end up saving the US from a drug ring. Nothing special but OK for what it is. After seeing No Country for Old Men the other day, this was a good book to use to cleanse my palette.


Amazon Link: The Mediterranean Caper

This weekend I saw the new Coen Brothers film, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel.

Previously, my least favourite Coen Brothers film was the critic's favourite, Fargo, but I've got a new bottom dweller with No Country for Old Men.

(Possible Spoilers upcoming)



Most of the movie is fairly engaging. There are a few dialogue scenes that slow it down and a few characters that show up and then get killed without leaving much of a mark on the story, but Josh Brolin being chased through rural Texas by a psychopath keeps the audience involved.

But the ending is simply atrocious, from all standpoints. It's possible McCarthy is intending his work as a criticism of other modern crime novels, like those of Elmore Leonard, that boil down to confrontations between men to see who is really tougher. There are multiple characters in this movie that, like in Leonard novels, express that they can deal with their opponents but it turns out none of them can. The main character of the movie is killed off-screen in a gun battle, another tough guy character is introduced and then killed off after only 3 scenes and the final confrontation is between the psychopath and the defenseless wife of the main character.

After everyone important is dead, the movie basically drifts to an end with a few more dialogue scenes from Tommy Lee Jones - a character who ends up not interacting with any of the other main characters at all, but just comments a little on what has happened. The ending is so Naturalistic as to be almost a parody of Naturalism, including a random car crash near the end of the movie that comes out of nowhere but doesn't actually change anything important in the movie.

Don't be deceived by the glowing critic's reviews - this is a movie to be avoided. Or, if you absolutely can't miss it, watch the first 90 minutes and then walk out of the theater and make up your own ending. You'll be much happier that way.

I finished two books yesterday.

The first is The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Given that I've been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan since I was a little kid, it's odd that I've never gone beyond those books and read anything else by Conan Doyle until now. Instead, I usually decided to just re-read the Sherlock Holmes stories. The White Company is a historical novel, set during the Hundred Years War between England and France. It's Victorian view of the late Medieval world is an interesting contrast to how it is portrayed in more modern novels. Conan Doyle focuses on noble characters, mainly a squire who was raised in a monastery and who hooks up with a band of archers and eventually becomes a knight while campaigning in France.

It's an enjoyable book and creates an interesting portrait of the period.

The second book has the long winded title Disney Presents Carl Bark's Greatest Ducktales Stories Volume 1. It is a collection of some of the original comics that inspired the late 80s animated series DuckTales and is one of the few places you can find some of the original Scrooge McDuck comics. I don't know why Scrooge McDuck popped into my mind last week, but since he did I've been trying to track down some of the comics to read.

The actual comics are better than I remembered, and quite a bit better than the animated series they spawned. Carl Bark's, the creator and main writer of Scrooge McDuck, had some wild ideas and the stories are pretty amusing. In one story, Scrooge enslaves a rival to work his Klondike gold claim for a month. In another, he discovers the subterranean creatures who cause earthquakes and steals the trophy they have been competing for.

The comics are fun diversion and a very quick read.

Amazon Links:
The White Company
Disney Presents Carl Barks' Greatest Ducktales Stories Volume 1

Yesterday I finished Whitethorn Woods, the latest book by Maeve Binchy.

Binchy's books don't fall into any of the categories of books I normally read but somehow I ended up reading one in the early 90s and I loved it. I quickly read the rest of her books and I read each new one as they come out. But there is an exception - I strongly prefer novels to short stories so I haven't read her collections of stories, and she has tended more and more towards short stories. Even her latest novels are really sequences of inter-related short stories, and Whitethorn Woods is no exception. There is a slight over-arching story about the fate of a local shrine, but that is clearly just an excuse to tell a number of vignettes about local characters in a small Irish town that is dealing with the challenges of a modernizing Ireland.

Binchy's books are all set in Ireland, and most deal with the tensions between the sexes, between the old and the new, between the rich and the poor and between the rural and the urban. She is excellent at creating sympathetic characters and showing them responding to very realistic challenges.

This book is good but I particularly recommend some of her earlier works, like The Copper Beech, Circle of Friends or Firefly Summer.

Amazon Link: Whitethorn Woods

I just finished Next by Michael Crichton.

The most interesting thing about this book is the change of style. Crichton is best known for writing techno-thrillers, most with some variant of "there area some thing's human's shouldn't know/do". As such, they are usually pretty straight forward narratives with just a few wooden characters dealing with some kind of crisis, with large sections of exposition on new science/technology mixed in.

In his latest book, it feels like he is trying on a new style - more similar to that of Carl Hiasen or Elmore Leonard - with many characters, more dialogue and multiple, interlocking plot threads. It's an interesting experiment and I'm curious to see if he maintains it for a few books but his first attempt is of mixed quality. Crichton doesn't have the ear for dialogue that Leonard has or the ability to paint a scene and use a setting to add colour like Hiasen. He also seems to be trying for a lighter, more humorous touch but he doesn't quite pull it off.

Amazon Link: Next

I just finished A Meeting at Corvallis by S.M. Stirling, the third in his post-apocalypse/post-technology series. I wrote about the second book in the series, The Protector's War here.

The third book is better than the second. The bottom line is that if you started the series with Dies the Fire, you might be interested enough to keep reading. If not, this book isn't going to get you started. It's barely acceptable as a sequel but would be nothing as a stand-alone novel.

In this book, the conflict between the two main groups of heroes and the tyrant who has taken over what used to Oregon come to a head. Some of the characters are well drawn but most are fairly wooden.

Amazon Link: A Meeting at Corvallis

I just finished Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres.

Super Crunchers is about what kinds of things can be learned by using basic statistical tools on huge data sets. The use of this kind of analysis is moving from universities, where "management science" or "operations research" disciplines have been advocating this kind of analysis for years, to the real world and this book discusses a few well known examples.

This book is very basic in what it presents - if you've ever taken even a basic statistics course you will be already aware of most of the tools discussed for data analysis. Some of the stories are interesting but the book feels like it has gone too far in trying to be accessible to the layman. Ayres is a practicing economist who does data analysis for a living but he comes across more like a journalist who takes the claims of the so-called "super crunchers" without a grain of salt. I'd like to have heard more about the limitations and pit-falls of this kind of analysis.

Amazon Link: Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

This weekend, I finished Gardens of the Moon by Steve Erikson and Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.

Gardens of the Moon is the first book of a large fantasy series that I first ran across on my last trip to Canada. Most of the books in the series were prominently displayed in the fantasy sections of most bookstores I went to, which was a little bit of a surprise since I had never heard of the series before. I spend enough time in bookstores, both here and back home, that I couldn't figure out how a whole series of books could come out between my visits. None of them had the first book of the series, but they looked a little interesting, so I found it at the library here.

Overall, it's a weak start to a series. By the end of the book, the various plot strands got a little more interesting but nothing in the book inspired me enough to actively seek out the rest of the series, unless I'm looking for long books to read on a flight. If this series looks interesting to you, I'd recommend that you check out Glen Cook's Black Company books instead. They have a similar feel but are a lot more compact and the writing is of a higher quality.

I also read the kid's fantasy book, Howl's Moving Castle. I saw the animated movie version by Hayao Miyazaki a few weeks ago. The movie is pretty confusing and I thought reading the book might help me make sense out of it. The movie and the book differ a fair amount but it did help me sort out some of the plot in the film.

It's a nice, short book so I'd recommend it.


Amazon Links: Gardens of the Moon, Howl's Moving Castle

Last night, I went to see California's premier Western Swing band, Lost Weekend, at the Freight and Salvage.

I was feeling under the weather but I've heard good things about Lost Weekend and missed seeing them a number of times, so I felt I should go anyways. It turned out to be the right decision because they put on a great show! Even though I listen to a lot of very modern jazz, particularly since my girlfriend favours the more modern ECM/free jazz styles, my taste runs more to pre-be-bop styles. And even though I mainly play bluegrass, I've also played some western swing rhythm. In fact, the only real public performance I've been part of was playing rhythm guitar for an acoustic swing show.

From looking at their calendar, Lost Weekend only plays in California so if you're not local, you're out of luck. But if you are local, I highly recommend them.

Here is a video of them playing at the Freight back in 1989 (with John Reischman on mandolin!):



And here is a more recent Freight performance:

Last night, we attended the San Francisco Opera's presentation of Mozart's The Magic Flute.

I'm not a big fan of opera but this is my favourite so far. Opera's mix of drama and music just doesn't work for me. The plot usually moves much too slowly while the music is usually better without the need to fit into the plot. One reason that I liked The Magic Flute more than some of the others I've seen is that the plot in act I moves quickly

I have some friends who are big opera fans and they would probably give me a hard time for living so close to a world class opera and not taking advantage, but I have managed to see a few live operas here, including Fidelio, The Flying Dutchman and Tristan and Isolde. Later this year, they are also doing Das Rheingold but I will probably skip it since it is an modern staging that will probably annoy me too much.

I just finished Les Paul:An Americal Original by Mary Alice Shaughnessy, a biography of the musician and inventor.

Les Paul is a pretty cool guy, though it sounds that like a lot of artists, he's kind of a bastard to the people in his life. Aside from being an accomplished jazz player and having a ton of hit records back in the 50s with his wife, Mary Ford, and playing with many of the biggest stars of the day, like Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, he also was an innovator in early solid body electric guitars and recording technology, particularly multi-track recording.

Like a lot of artists from that era, he was wiped off the charts by the rise of rock and roll and the dominance of teenagers in pop culture. Today, most people probably have no idea who Les Paul is. If anything, they might know his name from the line of Gibson guitars.

Here's a fun video of him playing Tiger Rag with his wife:



Of course, Les was also a pioneer in using backing tracks so they are probably either playing along with a backing track or just faking it.

Amazon Link: Les Paul: An American Original

This morning I finished The Lady in the Loch by Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, a pseudo-historical mystery/fantasy with Sir Walter Scott as the main character.

It seems popular these days to write fantasy books that combine historical figures with new stories. Some, like Tim Powers, try to be careful to stick to actual historical events while taking advantage of gaps in the historical record to establish a secret or hidden history. Others, like Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, just take a historical character as a starting point and create an alternate history.

In the alternate history of The Lady in the Loch, Sir Walter Scott became sheriff of Edinburgh instead of Selkirk and magic and ghosts are well known and commonplace. Scott gets involved in a series of murders involving a band of Travellers and Dr. Frankenstein-ish serial killer.

It's not a bad book but the mystery isn't particularly interesting and the phonetically spelled Scottish English of many of the characters starts out tiresome and gets more irritating from there.

Amazon Link: The Lady in the Loch

I just finished Berlin Diary, William L. Shirer's journal kept while he was a radio journalist in Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1941.

This is one of the best books I have read in a while. I've read a few books about WW2, including Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but this one is probably the most interesting. It has the advantage of being a contemporaneous account of Germany from just after the Nazi party took power to part way through the war. It is fascinating to read accounts of the big crisis of the day without hindsight to put them into a specific narrative.

It gives a wonderful feel for what it was like inside Germany before and during the war, while the populace both worshipped and feared Hitler as he consolidated his power in Germany and slowly exposed the weaknesses in the post WWI European order.

The only flaw in this fascinating book is that Shirer left Germany in December of 1940, so he never got to see and write about German reaction to Germany turning on it's ally, the Soviet Union, and opening the long dreaded Eastern front and to America being brought into the war by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

Amazon Link: Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941

Yesterday I finished The Surgeon's Mate by Patrick O'Brian, the 7th book in his Aubrey-Maturin series. I'm slowly working through re-reading all 20 books in the series.

I accidentally read one of the books out of order, but since I've read them before, I guess there's no harm done. I skipped ahead to the 8th book, The Ionian Mission, and then back to this one.

Amazon Link: The Surgeon's Mate

Yesterday morning I finished What's So Funny by Donald Westlake, the 13th, and latest, in his series of comic crime novels featuring John Dortmunder.

What's So Funny is a good, but fairly typical, entry in the series. Not a lot of surprises or outstanding events but a good read with lots of the dry humour that runs through the series.

Amazon Link: What's So Funny?

This morning I finished Crowded with Genius by James Buchan.

It's about Edinburgh in the second half of the 18th century, after the Second Jacobite Rising, when Scotland hosted many important intellectuals and artists of the Enlightenment, including David Hume, Adam Smith, James Boswell and Robbie Burns.

While it seems like an interesting topic, this book doesn't do a good job of presenting it. Buchan jumps from topic to topic and from year to year seemingly at random. He continually drops references in the early part of the book that are either not explained until later sections of the book or are not explained well at all. It ended up feeling like a collection of random anecdotes about people who lived in Edinburgh but had no connection or underlying theme to tie them together.

Quite disappointing.

Amazon Link: Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind

I just finished Singularity Sky, the first novel by Charles Stross.

I've read a few books by Stross but this one is by far my favourite. I can finally see why he is so popular and considered one of the rising stars in SF writing. Like a few of his contemporaries, Alastair Reynolds and Ken MacLeod, Stross is one of the a new age of British SF authors that like to mix some hard science in with space opera and the current fascination with the Singularity. The result is usually convoluted and plot heavy books but they also have a decent hand with characters.

Another trait he seems to share with a lot of his British peers is a soft spot for socialism in one form or another. It is one of the most retro things about them. Back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, during SF's golden age, a common assumption was that the future belonged to socialism or some form of technocratic central planning. Eventually, the field has drifted away from this idea as the actual evidence of the 20th century proved central planning to be nightmare and more and more serious economists demonstrated that central planning was not only flawed based on the evidence but couldn't even work theoretically. If a political model was evident in most SF from the 70s through the end of the millenium, the assumption was more often than not that a capitalist system had survived. Of course, it was usually some kind of dystopian capitalist system where multinationals had replaced governments and abused everyone in sight, but the assumption was still there.

But it seems a lot of British writers have been raised with a soft spot for socialism and the idea of the end of scarcity due to nanotechnology or some post-Singularity event has given them the inspiration to revive the Glorious Socialist Future, but usually of an anarcho-socialist or syndicalist variant rather than the standard communist/fascist axis that dominated the 20th century.

Sadly, even though their political ideas are so silly, they tend to write good novels! Why is it that socialist writers are mostly better writers than capitalists? Is it because the capitalists have better things to do with their time?


Amazon Link: Singularity Sky

Last night I finished From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, one of the earliest works of science fiction.

It's a short read, with only a minimal plot and minor characterization work. As others have pointed out, it is surprising how much Verne gets right about what it would actually take to send a person to the moon. His canon is not realistic, but the launch site, transit times and other considerations are not far off what was used for the actual Apollo launches.

It also has a surprising, and fairly abrupt, ending.

Amazon Link: From the Earth to the Moon

This morning I finished You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem.

This Lethem's latest book, and the first one of his that I have read. It tells the story of the quirky characters that make up a rock band that is in the early stages of being a band. They play music together, fool around together and interact with some other extremely artsy characters along the way.

The book starts slow but picks up after the band gets its first gig at an art event put on by a friend. There are strange complications as the band gets some strange new lyrics from an odd source that push them into new directions.

Overall, I liked it even though the characters were a little hard to understand. A few of them were complete ciphers while the others were more sympathetic but acted in odd, seemingly random ways at time.


Amazon Link: You Don't Love Me Yet

I just finished The First American by H.W. Brands, a quite enjoyable biography of Benjamin Franklin.

In addition to covering Franklin's life, this book also provides a portrait of life in America when it was still just British colonies fighting with French colonies. I'd known the basics about Franklin since grade school but I didn't realize just how central he was to a lot of the pre-American Revolution diplomacy with Britain or to the work he did during the Revolutionary War while in France.

Franklin's transition from a loyal British subject to an advocate for independence is particularly interesting. Franklin stayed true to what he considered true English principles of rights, virtue and liberty all along and only when he was convinced that the British Parliament would not fairly apply those values to it's own colonies did he strongly defend those principles by urging his countrymen to break away from British rule and to stay the course when the war was going against them.

If you are interested in early American history or Enlightenment society, I'd recommend this book.

Amazon Link: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin