Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Books

  • The Years of Rice and Salt

    Over the weekend I finished reading The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Fantastic book, albeit one that defied my expectations, and I thought I’d write a short review.

    I picked this book up because I loved the concept: an alternate history novel that explores the question, what if the Black Death of the 14th century wiped out 99% of Europe? The world becomes dominated by Islam and Buddhism, the Chinese discover America, Christianity is a footnote in history.

    It’s divided into ten Books (basically chapters), each of which covers a later time and place as the alternate history unfolds. The breadth and scope of this project is surprising and mind-boggling; Robinson has gone to an obsessive level of thought and detail in constructing this history, and it’s entirely believable. The amount of research must have been enormous.

    It surprised me on several levels; the main one was the storytelling technique Robinson used in tying each story in the ten Books together to provide a sense of continuity while keeping each distinct. I won’t go into detail here—the Amazon reviews do, and I think that spoils it a bit—and while I had my doubts, it ultimately works.

    This isn’t science fiction in the die-hard sense, though (insomuch as alternate history tends to get classified as science fiction because nobody really knows how else to classify it). It’s much more a meditation on sociology, religion, history, politics, etc., on a world-wide scale. Very different than what I thought it would be. Yet very good. I totally recommend it.

  • Orion

    The February issue of Discover Magazine has an interesting article about Project Orion: a project that was developed during the ’50s and ’60s to build a spaceship that was as big as a skyscraper, weighed eight million pounds, and was propelled by—get this—nuclear bombs.

    While Discover’s article was good, focusing more on the people and policies involved, Wikipedia’s Project Orion page is excellent, and delves much more into the hard science. It sounds on the one hand totally insane and on the other hand perfectly logical and obvious. But you gotta wonder at the audacity of a design that would have required 800 (or more) nuclear explosions just to lift the ship into Earth orbit 300 miles up…

    Interestingly, an Orion ship is a major plot point in one of my all-time favorite science fiction books, Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A great book, probably the best alien invasion story out there, period—Niven and Pournelle simply rock. What else can I say? I totally recommend it. It would make a perfect movie, done right, but if nothing else, read the book.

  • The Book Barn

    I stopped in at The Book Barn in downtown Bend today, looking for a particular book or two, and I have to say, I was a little disappointed. They have a nice space (formerly occupied by the Chelsea Lane wine shop), but it just seemed, I don’t know, sparse. I can’t really quantify it more than that, but it’s not the Book Barn I remember of yesteryear, when they were across the street (Minnesota street), occupying two stories, and were about three times as big.

    At least they’re one of the “old time” businesses that are hanging on downtown, though.

  • I’m Just Here For the Food

    I don’t know why exactly, but for some reason I always think in terms of buying and owning a book when I want to read it. And if the money’s not handy (it usually isn’t), I resign myself to possibly getting the book as a gift for my birthday or Christmas. Ironically, I almost never think of the library, so it’s always pleasant to “discover” how good and useful the library is.

    Today I picked up I’m Just Here For the Food from the library, a book I’ve been coveting for some time now but (of course) hadn’t been willing to shell out the $32.50 (ouch!) for. (I just started it but so far, it’s a really good book. It already answered one of the main questions I have from Alton Brown‘s TV show—why does he use kosher salt all the time?) And since I rediscovered how nice the library is, I’ve already added 3 other books to my account to keep an eye on via the online interface.

    Online? Yeah, the Deschutes Public Library website has a complete catalog interface that lets you do, well, anything via the web that you can do in the library: search the catalog, request items from other libraries, place holds… okay, this isn’t news to people who are, well, literate and visit the library. But I still think it’s pretty nifty.

    So go visit a library! They rock!

  • Doctorow on DRM

    So, I’m a little behind on this: Cory Doctorow‘s Microsoft Research DRM talk that he presented on June 17 and subsequently made available online for free. Very good. Though I do differ from this opinion he gives on ebooks:

    Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things….

    First, screen resolution is an issue, because I have yet to see a device small enough to be casually portable that has a resolution that I could stand to read for more than a few minutes. (My Clié comes close, it has a decent display, but it’s too small, so you have to scroll a lot more, which breaks the comfortable reading flow.) The resolution on a desktop monitor, or even a laptop? Sure, those are good enough—I stare at one all day and read everything from plain email to colorized snippets of code—but I ain’t lugging my 17-inch CRT to the couch with me to read.

    Second, I think the “tactile” argument for real books that he points out here is really about why real books will never go away, not why ebooks will fail. Seems hollow, doesn’t seem to ring true here. Odd.

    But then he’s right back on track:

    New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list….

     

    Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you’re done.

    Excellent article. Get on over and read the whole thing.

  • The Da Vinci Code

    Jeez, it looks like I’ve taken a blog sabbatical around here. July must be that kind of month. Anyway…

    So, probably against my better judgement, I read The Da Vinci Code over the last week. (My parents loaned it to me.) It wasn’t nearly as earth-shattering as some people would have you believe (especially since I already read the source material, Holy Blood, Holy Grail a number of years ago), but overall I found it mostly, well, amateurish—poorly written.

    I mean, the writing just doesn’t follow the rules for good writing. Things like showing versus telling, dialogue, triangulation, stuff like that. It’s distracting, sloppy. And yet—and yet—this book is a huge bestseller. Huge. So what’s the formula?

    Short chapters that are quick and easy to read, keeping the pages turning. Characters that are easily identifiable. Chase scenes. And of course, a conspiracy, everybody loves a conspiracy. Especially one with a lot of religious iconographic mystery behind it.

    I don’t know if this points more to the state of bestselling fiction today or to the level of the average reader. But on the bright side, it should give hope to all aspiring writes of bestsellers out there.

  • Books

    My wife finished packing up nearly all the books today, in preparation for the move next month. I only kept a few out, on-hand; in the spirit of useless lists, here’s what’s left on my shelf:

    And a couple of books on cheese I borrowed from my mother.

  • Beer for Dummies

    Amusingly, at the library today I picked up Beer for Dummies. Not because I need to learn more about beer (well, not entirely; beer is one of the few topics I have some in-depth knowledge on), but because I like the “Dummies” books and want to see how well the topic of beer is treated. A quick survey of the contents reveals a decent spread:

    • Ingredients
    • Brewing and homebrewing beer
    • Cooking with beer
    • Serving and tasting
    • Travel
    • Breweriana

    Should be an interesting read.

  • Balance

    I found this passage from Frontier Doctor to be particularly interesting:

    When I came to eastern Oregon in 1905, all of the beautiful pine timber was an open park-like forest, without any underbrush, where game could be seen for a long distance. Each summer there were many forest fires, the vast majority of which were caused by lightning. As there was no underbrush, these fires consumed nothing but the dead pine needles, cones and twigs that had been blown to the ground by the winds. The little blaze, only a few inches high, crept slowly over the ground and cleaned the floor of the forest of all debris, killing the pine beetles on the ground, but did no damage whatever to the green trees. There were a few dead trees scattered through the forest that had been killed by the pine beetles. These dead trees almost invariable took fire and burned up and the beetles with them. It was these annual fires which had existed for centuries that had produced the beautiful open forests free from dangerous underbrush, and killed so many of the pine beetles that they were held in check. The tiny blaze of these fires was not hot enough to injure the pine seed. When the timber was cut off and the sun was allowed to strike the ground, these little pine seeds began to germinate and a new second growth of trees immediately sprang up.

     

    No one tried to put these annual fires out, as they were known to be a benefit to the timber. When the big lumber companies began to buy the timber, their representatives in the field saw to it that their holding were burned over every year. If the lightning did not start enough fires, the timber men started more of them.

    Nearly one hundred years later, I’ve never known these forests not to be thick with underbrush, and the “normal” forest fire is a raging inferno that destroys everything it touches.

    What happened? Ignorance. As usual.

  • Chickens and Books

    A couple of links I found interesting. First is to All Consuming, “a website that watches weblogs for books that they’re talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis.” Kinda cool. The other is to an article on Kuro5hin titled “Raising the Humble Chicken,” which is kind of random but good. I grew up with chickens; if we didn’t live inside the city limits, I think I’d try to convince my wife to let me get some.