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

For the first time in a long time, we went and saw a rock show at a bar.

I was in a guitar store last week looking for a new electric when I saw a flyer for a "prog rock" night at a bar about 30 minutes from our place. There were two bands, Parallels, a Yes tribute band, and Trilogy, a Rush tribute band. The show was supposed to start at 8 PM but didn't get going till close to 9:30 so we only got to see one of the bands, Parallels. From the looks of things, it looks like 8 PM was just a mistake and they would have started at 9PM but they were having problems getting the sound right.

Parallels did a pretty good job of covering Yes songs like Heart of the Sunrise and Roundabout and even did a few surprises like Gates of Delirium. As is to be expected at a rock show, the sound was fairly awful. I'm not sure why 90% of live rock music has such terrible sound mixing even when they have dedicated sound people.

Overall, it was a fun night even with the late start.

I just finished Starfish by Peter Watts, his first book and the first book in a trilogy dealing with a group of people who become adapted to living at extreme ocean depths.

Watts has a very dark take on human nature -- all the characters in his books that I have read have featured characters with very damaged psyches.

In Starfish, the corporation setting up operations to facilities at extreme ocean depths theorizes that people who have been through severe personal stress situations, whether as abuser or abusee, will be best able to tolerate the conditions found there. Combine those characters with the claustrophobic environs, a dystopian world and an unexpected threat and you have the core of Starfish.

Even though the characters and situations are very grim, they are at least interesting and Watts speculations on human nature are engaging if not convincing. If you're tolerant of the dark themes and anti-heroes, Starfish is a good read and I will probably follow up with the other books in the trilogy.

Amazon link: Starfish

We just saw the movie Stardust, based on the novel of the same name by Neil Gaiman.

An interesting thing has happened since the critical and box office success of the Lord of the Rings movies - Hollywood has finally come around to taking fantasy movies seriously. In the 1980's, fantasy movies were meant to be quick, cheap money makers mostly aimed at either kids (see Krull or Beast Master) or very stupid adults (see Conan the Barbarian or The Sword and the Sorcerer). They were more likely to have novelizations than to be based on novels. Even as special effects got cheaper and more effective, major studios did not spend the time or energy to work on decent stories and acting to go with the new effects (see Dungeons and Dragons).

The major change after the success of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies seems to be that Hollywood has realized that it has a ton of quality source material available to it. One of the anticipated Christmas releases for this year is an adaptation of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights (under it's American title The Golden Compass) and the previews before Stardust included The Spiderwick Chronicles and an adaptation of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, recently renamed as The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (presumably to cash in on all the successful films with colons in the title).

This increase in the number of fantasy films has also allowed for a little diversity to slip in - not all of the films have to be large scale epics like Lord of the Rings. Instead some of the lighter novels, like Stardust, can be developed. The creators were fairly obviously trying to duplicate the feel of the mix of comedy and action from The Princess Bride, the best fantasy film released before Lord of the Rings, but with only mixed success.

Stardust is enjoyable but not a classic like those movies. Sadly, it looks like it will not make back its $70M budget. A few more expensive failures like that and this new golden age of fantasy films could quickly draw to a close.

Today I finished A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, the Pulitzer Prize winning comic novel and one of the most disappointing books I've read.

I picked it up after reading about the problems people have run into trying to put together a movie version but I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would give this book a prize, want to make a movie out of it, or even recommend it to anyone else.

The characters aren't sympathetic, realistic or even interesting in any way. The only word I can come up with to describe them is squalid. They wander from one absurd situation to another with little rhyme or reason, forcing the reader to alternate between annoyance and boredom. Absurdity in itself isn't a problem - people who know me, know that I have a soft spot for absurd comedy of all types - but this book simply fails to be funny. I think I laughed at most once while reading it and I almost abandoned it a few times over the last week.


Very strongly not recommended.

Amazon Link (for masochists only): A Confederacy of Dunces

I just finished The Loser's Club by John Lekich, a YA book by a Vancouver author recommended to my by a friend.

The Loser's Club is the story a group of outcasts in a Vancouver school who are brought together by the extortion of a bully. As you might expect in a YA book, they end up triumphing in the end but there are some unexpected twists along the way as they interact with the adults in their lives and find their way from losing to winning. In some ways, it's pretty standard fare but it is well written and enjoyable.

This weekend we saw a play, Oda Oak Oracle, one of only two English language plays by Ethiopian poet-laureate Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin and The Simpson's Movie.

The play had some nice moments but was a little too slow moving and over-wrought for my taste.

The Simpson's Movie was pretty good - not as funny as some of the best episodes from when it was in it's prime but better than a lot of the current episodes with a few very funny bits. Recommended for fans.

Amazon Link: The Losers' Club