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.