Books - December 08

Lise Eliot - What's Going On In There?
Michael Lewis - Liar's Poker
Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
Henry Chang - Chinatown Beat
Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake
China Mieville - Perdido Street Station
Patrick O'Brian - Caesar
Patrick O'Brian - Hussein
Jon Fasman - The Geographer's Library


What's Going On In There is about child neural development, following the development of the senses and other abilities during pregnancy and the first few years of life. It tries to be scientific, which means it's kind of dry, but it also tries to be relevant to regular parents, which means it's not very rigorous. I got kind of bored with it, and I started to get irritated with the frequent citation of studies showing that if kid's don't experience such-and-such than they will develop this-and-that more slowly. None of these studies ever tried to show any long-term effects, only that the child's experiences will effect his development in the shorter term. well duh. I gave up after a few chapters.

Michael Lewis is a really good writer. I thought this one might be kind of dated because it's so immersed in the wall street culture of the 80s. But darned if pretty much every financial idea that's screwing us over right now wasn't invented more or less by the people Lewis writes about. For example, it's amusing (by which I mean sort of horrifying) to read in detail about the development of the current market for mortgage-backed securities. I've also read Lewis's Moneyball and have several more of his on my wishlist.

Use of Weapons is one of Banks's "Culture" books, but I haven't read any of the others. This one was kind of an interesting story about a lifelong warrior (and these people have very very long lives) who has all sorts of horrors in his past. He particularly still obsesses over what happened between himself, his brother, and his sisters hundreds of years ago; over the course of the book, we get bits and pieces of the story, with the full awful truth revealed at the end with a big twist. Along the way, we get lots of war. The returning again and again to a traumatic past, with a little more revealed each time, sort of reminded me of the central scene in "Catch-22", the bloody scene in the airplane. Though this book wasn't either as funny or as horrific as Catch-22 (probably because I didn't feel particular connected with the characters). Anyway, it was not bad.. I'm curious to read some of his other books.

Chinatown Beat is billed as a noir set in Chinatown. Which is what it is. It's awfully self-conscious about being a noir set in Chinatown though, and very concerned with identity. The main character is a Chinese-American detective working in Chinatown, and I swear he cannot have two consecutive thoughts without at least one of them being about the identity of a Chinese-American detective working in Chinatown. It's a little tiring. I mean, it's an interesting theme, but it'd be nice if there were a little more to the characters than their ethnicities and their jobs (the Chinese gangster, the racist Irish cop, etc). The book is billed as the first of a series; the second just came out and I'll check it out, in the hope that the writer (this is his first book, I think) settles into the characters and relaxes a little. Maybe without the need to establish his noir-in-Chinatown bona fides, he'll be able to focus on the story.

Newton's Wake was pretty goofy. It was entertaining, but there wasn't much to it really. It's one of a number of books in MacLeod's post-rapture universe (after all the robots and AIs become self-aware, kill most of mankind, and then disappear into other dimensions). There were interesting ideas and some okay writing; I'll probably try another of his books sometime just to see what else he's done, but this one was pretty forgettable.

Perdido Street Station is a sort of Dickensian steampunk fantasy story. It's set in a sprawling city much like Victorian London (at least, the Victorian London you often get in Dickens, or at least in things labeled "Dickensian" and in historical steampunkish adventures). There's science and sort-of magic. Electricity and other words are spelled with an extra "Y" to make them more steampunkish. Aside from people, the world includes bug-people, toad-people, bird-people, and cactus-people. Yes, cactus-people. Over the course of the story you also meet an interdimensional spider who speaks in poetry and is mainly interested in aesthetics, hypnotic-winged brain-sucking moths, hand-snake parasites who take over human (and other) hosts, and vacuum cleaners and other kinds of machinery that become intelligent and self-aware via a computer virus (these are of course analog computers, and the virus travels by punch-card, among other means). As you can tell, it's a bit of a kitchen-sink approach. Still, it's fairly captivating; at least there's a lot going on, and all kinds of crazy things stuffed in to it. The writing is fairly good in places, but Mieville does a little too much telling instead of showing, and he's clearly read too much Lovecraft.

About 30-40 years before he started writing the Aubrey/Maturin books, when he was 12-15, Patrick O'Brian wrote a little novel about a fearsome half panda, half snow leopard named Caesar and his adventures. It's unapologetically gruesome. Several of his family die straight off, and a lot of his early days are basically "I killed a pig and ate it; then I slept; then I killed a deer; then I sniffed around the village and killed a man when he shot at me; then I killed another pig". It's a very brief little book, but surprisingly entertaining. A few years later, O'Brian wrote a longer story about an Indian elephant driver named Hussein. In a loosely-connected series of episodes, Hussein rides elephants, meets beautiful women, fights a rival, buys a curse, and adventures all over India. Not especially deep, but also entertaining.

The Geographer's Library is another addition to that genre of the faux-literary + mystical alchemy/religion/whatever secretive order thriller that Dan Brown made so popular and for which he set the bar so, so low. This one is okay -- most of the actual minutes are not bad, but the whole thing adds up to a whole lot of nothing. Fasman's story involves a collection of objects collected by a 10th century scholar, which a mysterious organization has been pursuing, usually violently. But (spoiler) the objects don't turn out to have any real significance. They don't combine to make some powerful tool or weapon or Voltronesque robot; they're just a collection of things some guy thought were interesting. True, they all relate to alchemy I guess, but only really in a symbolic, poetic way. The story does involve a possibly magical alchemical object as well, which has (spoiler) been watched over by some people for 1000 years. But you know what? it doesn't really do anything. it might do something, but the people watch over it so that no one can do anything with it, and they are pretty successful so that nothing ever happens. The hero meets a girl, who (spoiler) sort of betrays him but not really and at the end he's just I guess wiser for the whole experience. I wouldn't be averse to another book from this guy (his 2nd, about Moscow, has gotten some decent reviews), but I can't really recommend this one unless you are really hard up.