Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy

Title:		Blood Meridian
Author:		Cormac McCarthy
Rating:

I cannot read this book.  I read one and a half chapters and gave up.

A while back I read - and thoroughly disliked - The Road, another work by McCarthy.  It was, however, the only thing by him I had read, and I thought I would give him another try.

Mistake.  Big mistake.

This book is just about as unreadable as The Road.  The prose is deliberately stilted, and convention - like quotes around dialog and apostrophes in contractions - is ignored.

In a nutshell, it's junk.  I couldn't comfortably follow it, and was disinterested in it - and the characters involved - nearly immediately.

The only reason I am not giving it the worst possible rating is because I didn't finish it, and I cannot in good conscious do that to something I didn't fully read.  That said, I did flip around after giving up, and no, it clearly gets no better.   The complaints above apply from page one right through the end.

I won't be reading any more McCarthy.  Not my thing.

Illium and Olympos: Dan Simmons

Title:		Illium and Olympos
Author:		Dan Simmons
Rating:

Argh... lots of time spent on these before giving up.

I read all of Illium, the first in a 2 volume set by Dan Simmons set in the far future.  In it, for reasons that I still don't know, a group of gods and humans is acting out something like the story told in The Illiad but on a terraformed Mars, or something like that.  A set of humans on Earth is struggling to figure out what they really are, and a set of moravecs - effectively cyborgs that are mostly machine, with wetware brains interfaced to their computers - based around the outer planets is worried about unusual physics in the Mars area, and so sends a small team to investigate.

Olympos is the continuation of the story, but I stopped reading just under halfway through that book because it is all just too disjoint and silly for me to keep going.  Lots of things didn't make sense to me once Olympos got started, as if Simmons had a bunch of new things and ideas to add to the series at that point and just did so without worrying about how things interacted with the contents of Illium.

As a result, Simmons - famous for the Hyperion series - just couldn't make these work for me.

I was kind of OK with Illium, but none of the characters except the moravecs were all that interesting.  The humans on earth are too dumb to live, the humans (or whatever they are) bringing The Illiad to life have no business being where they are and are thus unexplained in an irritating way, the Greek gods they interact with are too arbitrary and stupid for words, and the "scholic" Hockenberry is so far beyond unexplained that his presence and actions drove me crazy.

These books are long and definitely needed a serious editing.  Illium clocks in at 725 pages in my paperback edition, while Olympos is 891 pages.  I know there is an argument saying that sometimes authors need that sort of room for their story, and I fully understand that, just not in this case.  Simmons needed to put these books on a serious diet.

If you really want to know, it was Setebos that drove me away.  Simmons is playing with a bunch of different literary references, well above and beyond The Illiad.  I was OK with that despite not having read most of them, but by the time we get descriptions of Setebos and what he/she/it is doing on at least one copy of Earth, I could no longer sustain the willing suspension of disbelief.  I plowed on for a while longer, but then stopped.  Whenever I had the time and desire to read but faced picking Olympos back up, I did something else instead.  After a week of not reading I decided the problem was serious enough to give up.

For me, Illium and Olympos are failures.  I suggest reading other things.

Ringworld, Larry Niven

Title:		Ringworld
Author:		Larry Niven
Rating:

Ringworld is probably Larry Niven's most famous work, having won both the Hugo and Nebula awards back in 1970 when it was first published. My previous experience with Niven's work, though, has left me cold. He's a hard science fiction writer and his characters have been very flat, to say the least. I hoped that Ringworld would be different.

It isn't.

It appears as though Niven had the idea for the ringworld and forced some characters and story together to give him a reason to write about the toy he'd invented. For me the result simply didn't work.

The toy itself - the ringworld - is an interesting idea, but other than some math about dimensions and spinning it to create gravity, everything else about it is pure, unadulterated fantasy. There are all kinds of impossible things going on here in the guise of "science": impossibly strong and thin wire, materials impervious to just about anything, multiple forms of FTL travel, unexplained failsafe systems, life extending substances, stasis fields, transmutation of one material into another, alien species, etc. One or even a few of these things would be fine in a science fiction work, particularly with some background and explanation, but Niven piles them up thick and just keeps going.

In short, he made up anything needed to let him talk about the idea of the ringworld itself. Everything other than the ring - characters, physics, story - was essentially superfluous. If he was a better writer I might have suspended disbelief, but that never happened. Not once.

Even worse, there were several places where the writing is so bad - or the copy I have is so poorly transcribed from the original - that after rereading a few paragraphs several times I had to give up and move on. Some things just didn't make sense at all.

In other places, despite the fact that the words and sentences held together, Niven didn't adequately describe the situation or action. After a while you just wind up accepting that he's not going to explain things well enough to make sense and forget about it. Not a good sign.

For amusement you can look it up on Wikipedia and read about other technical problems. There are quite a few.

I don't know why this book won any awards. It's not very good. My perception of Niven as a writer remains unchanged and I will avoid his work in the future. Too bad.

Bear v. Shark, Chris Bachelder

Title:		Bear v. Shark
Author:		Chris Bachelder
Rating:

I have no idea now where the recommendation for this book came from, but I am afraid I am going to disappoint someone.

I had the same reaction to this that I have to some modern art, like a canvas painted all one color. I thought "I could write this. I could write a lot better than this guy did."

Nearly the entire book consists of very short (1-2 page) chapters describing the story of the Norman family as they travel to watch the second bear/shark battle. This is a parody of America, though, so while most of what we see is familiar, it's all deliberately exaggerated to the point of silliness.

In an attempt to heighten the effect, most dialog isn't quoted, characters talk past each other, and all kinds of events aren't really explained. Then end result is a ball of semi-related things that sort of make up a story, but a story without any reasonable ending. In fact, it's rather like the author couldn't come up with one, so he decided to leave it open and let the reader imagine his own.

In any case, I didn't find it funny, though others apparently do. It does contain a lot of social commentary, but only of the most blunt kind.

This is the author's first novel. I have no desire to read anything else by him, and I can't imagine why a publisher would spend money on this book. Not recommended.

The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

Title:		The Robber Bride
Author:		Margaret Atwood
Rating:

I didn't get this book. Of 466 pages it seemed as if 460 were back story, and there was little action of any kind. Instead we get a pseudo-drama, expressed in the thoughts and discussions of three women: Tony, Charis, and Roz. What little story we get revolves around a fourth woman, Zenia.

The three main characters are actually too well drawn. We don't need to know every little detail about their lives to understand why they might be reacting this way, but we get that detail in any case. And more. And still more.

Tony's a history professor with a specialization in battles. She's a fairly ineffective and self effacing person as well. Her real name is Antonia.

Charis is another ineffective character, but this time with no real talents she can earn a living from. She does, however, have a spiritual side that "works". Her real name is Karen.

Roz is a business woman - someone with power and money - but who is also hopeless in her own way. In this case it's her marriage she cannot manage. Her real name is Rosalind.

None of these characters has it all together. In fact, though they could each potentially be interesting in some sense, collectively I found them pretty annoying. They whine and worry but rarely do anything, and when they try they fail. Every time. Then they whine about failing. Roz's twin daughters are a lot more interesting than anyone else here, and they're only bit parts.

There might be something important about the fact that Tony, Roz, and Charis all operate under something other than their real names too, but if so I can't tell you what that might be.

Zenia is something else. She's a liar and a thief, and ruthless about getting whatever it is she wants - including the man each of the three main characters loves - but that's about all we learn of her. She's the central mystery around which the book is written and we never figure her out. Never.

The story is told mostly in flashbacks - sometimes nested - and it can be a bit hard to keep track of if you set the book down at the wrong point. Unfortunately I found it easy to set it down just about anywhere given the vast back story. Complicating matters, at least for me, is that I didn't really relate to any of the characters. They were either boring or irritating, but never become important or interesting.

The only reason I continued reading The Robber Bride is because I've read other work by Atwood and really enjoyed it. This one, however, just didn't work, at least not for me. It needed both something significant to happen and a resolution.

Oh, and I didn't like Charis's spiritual muck. Or rather, the fact that it "worked" in some way seemed wrong. If she'd believed in it but nothing had come of it, fine. Instead we get a couple of mystical but completely unexplained incidents that make no sense. Then again I'm less spiritual than most bricks, and such tripe is liable to irk me in any case.

Perhaps Atwood is making some feminist point, but if so I missed it, along with just about everything else.

If you want to read something good by Atwood, try The Handmaid's Tale, or Oryx and Crake. I'd skip this one.

The Iliad, Homer, translation by Richmond Lattimore

Title:		The Iliad
Author:		Homer
Translator:		Richmond Lattimore
Rating:

I may be showing my lack of cultural sensitivity here, but I pretty much hated every word of The Iliad. Honestly.

I am warned that some of my reaction may be the result of the translation. A friend - who reads both ancient and modern Greek fluently - tells me he dislikes the Lattimore translation. I suppose another translation might be better, but I can't believe it would make that much of a difference, as many of my complaints were with the content.

I realize that I am reading something that was written a long, long time ago. Thousands of years ago, in fact. Things have changed since then, but still, this really got up my nose.

Let's take something simple: half the text was a list of who killed who, some identifying description about the combatants, and the specifics of the kill. "Bob, who comes from Muncie Indiana and is the son of a tailor and a grocery clerk, killed Joe, who came from Arcadia California and managed a discount clothing store, by stabbing him with a spear in the head. His brains splashed out and he fell, with the dark mist closing over his eyes. Then Bob stripped off Joe's armor." Pages and pages of that sort of thing, varying only with the descriptions of the people and the nature of the killing stroke. To say it was monotonous would be putting it politely.

Then there was the matter of names. Hundreds of names, I suspect, of both people and places, that mean nothing to me. It was boring now, and I wonder about how it would have gone over when it was written. How many people would know those names and places even at the time?

The gods and their meddling bugged me too. Both the Trojans and the Greeks wind up praying to - and taking offense at - the perceived actions of Zeus and the other gods. It's pretty funny (taken from a modern point of view) that Zeus changes his mind so often about who is important and will therefore get the glory of the battle. But in all honesty I got really tired of the constant interfering and bickering among a bunch of nonexistent entities. They were the excuse used for whatever really happened in the battle, and it showed.

I was also reminded of modern athletes who cross themselves or otherwise perform some obvious prayer after scoring or winning in some sporting event, only the Greeks and the Trojans were at least honest enough to admit that the gods could also favor the other side.

On top of that I found the constant descriptions of the offerings to the gods got more than a bit revolting. So many animals and people were killed (just in this one book) to keep the gods happy. And what does Zeus need with all those bits of the fat of the various animals slaughtered in his name?

In the end the gods were more of a distraction and an annoyance than any real part of the story. Maybe if I was a believer I'd feel differently.

Human behavior is on display here too, and that drove me crazy. The Trojan and Greek cultures were abominable. Prowess in battle was all important and women were nothing more than objects possessed by men. I'd like to think humanity has improved since this was written, but I'm afraid it hasn't come nearly far enough to make me happy.

Finally we get into actual story issues. For those not familiar with it, The Iliad discusses a portion of the fall of Troy. The infamous 1000 ships came to Troy to get Helen back, but it was something like ten years of siege later that the conflict finally came to an end and Troy was wiped out. The Iliad covers some but not all of that final conflict.

There were all kinds of issues with the story itself. In places it made no sense in terms of locations and descriptions. In other places the meddling of the gods turned a battle into some sort of supernatural contest, which we know didn't really happen that way.

More disturbing, though, are the main events that are and aren't covered in the story. Why, for example, do we spend a lot of time on the siege and the fighting up to and including the death of Hektor, but then not cover the actual fall of Troy itself? We don't even get the death of Achilleus, though we are told he is fated to die very soon, before he can go home. There's something wrong with a narrative structure that doesn't actually tell the main point of the story.

I suppose I could be wrong. Maybe the main point of the story is the death of Hektor, but if so then it should be entirely recast and a lot of other things left out to spend more time on the events going on around him.

And why is the second to the last chapter entirely devoted to a series of games and contests the Greeks play amongst themselves after Hektor is killed? It's chariot racing, boxing, wrestling, and the like, but it seems radically out of place and unimportant. If it really did take place in history - say a champion of the Greeks (who might have been named Achilleus) managed to kill a champion of the Trojans (who might have been named Hektor) - would they really have paused all activity to spend an entire day playing games in celebration? And if they did, wouldn't the Trojans have done something useful during that time? That chapter felt entirely out of place.

The final chapter deals with the return of Hektor's corpse to the Trojans, which is accomplished only with more meddling from Zeus and his buddies. Silly. I would have found the Greeks more human and approachable if they'd returned Hektor's body to Priam themselves, without needing Zeus (prodded by Apollo), Iris, Thetis, and Hermes to make it happen.

In all I think The Iliad shows humanity in an awful light. I found the writing (or perhaps the translation) to be repetitive and stilted. It actively impeded comprehension of the story to the point that I'm not even sure what the author thought the important story points were.

Yes, it's a "classic" in the sense that it has survived over a very long period of time, and it may be important as a result, but I'm sorry to say that my impression of it as literature is not good.

Sadly, I cannot recommend The Iliad.

Gardens Of The Moon, Steven Erikson

Title:		Gardens Of The Moon
Author:		Steven Erikson
Rating:

Gardens of the Moon is book 1 of a projected ten volume fantasy series. It's full of action and warfare, magic, political intrigue, assassins, thieves, and so on. It was recommended by a friend, so I ordered a copy from paperbackswap.com.

As it happens, what we have here is a HUGE pile of back story. Erikson's history is vast and deep. His notes about any single place he mentions - and he mentions a lot of places - must include at least 5 or 6 conquests spread out among the various races that have peopled his planet. If you want a world with history, this one has it.

But that's about all it's got. His characters are mostly cardboard cut-outs, with very little in the way of real depth, and despite the fact that they live in a world with all that history, we never understand it. Facts from that history are thrown at us as if we should know them, but there is no cohesive way to piece them together. And it gets worse. There are maps at the front of the book, but they don't cover everything described, and it was only at the very end that I learned one of the major characters was "2 continents away" from where she'd started out. Excuse me?

There are many different groups or individuals that could be viewed as major characters, but we have very little to go on for motivations, and they mostly react to things going on around them. Some of those potential major characters are on stage only briefly throughout the course of the novel, so we don't really even know if they're important. And as for that plot they're supposed to be a part of, it's almost a random series of events. Things - sometimes very improbable things that we as readers have no way to know anything about or anticipate - just happen, and these people (or creatures, or gods, or whatever) are bounced about like pieces on a checker board during a 6.5 earthquake. Whenever one of those potentially important characters winds up in a precarious position, we find ourselves introduced to a new player who gets him or her out of the jam. Sometimes those new players are mortals, other times they're not. Usually we had no idea they even existed when they are slapped in our face.

Another thing that pushes characters about is magic. Vast quantities of totally unexplained magic. We don't even get good descriptions of what is going on when magic is involved. And (of course) there are a zillion different types of magic - and a flock of gods, some current, some ancient, and some dead, but all (apparently) capable of other types of magic - that we're supposed to keep track of. Or maybe Erikson doesn't care that we can't keep track of it. I honestly couldn't say.

In a nutshell I couldn't follow the story, I got tired of the "here's something you didn't know" method of dealing with things, the characters (who could have been memorable) aren't, and it was all just too contrived.

So why did I finish it? I could have quit after 50 or 100 pages, but I didn't. I did regularly put it down - sometimes mid sentence - simply because I was sick of it, but came back and finished it in the end. (It took a while... I've been busy and this hasn't been a fun read.)

At some level I think Erikson has affected me in a manner similar to Martin's Fire & Ice series. There are major issues with it, but I kept reading in the vain hope that I would figure things out, or that it would all make sense at some point. Sadly that point never came.

With Erikson I don't think I'm going to bother continuing. Reading a few reviews on amazon.com I am convinced that the later volumes are more of the same and I have far too many other things to read to bother with them. That's a shame, but such is life.

Some people will love Gardens of the Moon, but not me.

Radio On, Sarah Vowell

Title:		Radio On
Author:		Sarah Vowell
Rating:

I've liked other work by Sarah Vowell, and I enjoy her pieces on NPR, but this book hits all kinds of hot buttons for me.

Let's start with the premise. The author spends a year listening to the radio - a lot - and keeping a journal about the experience. Those journal entries are the contents of the book, listed by date, station frequency and call letters. There are a few other things scattered in there too, but mostly it's journal entries. As such, it's not all that coherent. There isn't a story line, plot, history, or even a guiding theme to hold them together.

Actually, I suppose it could be argued there is a theme of sorts: Vowell's hatred of just about everything she mentions. But if vitriol is all that's supposed to hold this collection of paragraphs together, it didn't work for me.

Vowell's not shy about letting her opinions out. She has nothing but scorn for Rush Limbaugh. (That, at least, I can agree with.) Her taste in music is critical to her existence, and those who disagree with her are entirely in the wrong. With the exception of a few bits of ancient history (Elvis, for example) she mentions almost exclusively bands and artists that I've never heard of or never listen to. (For the record, I don't listen to Elvis either, but at least I've heard of him.) Kurt Cobain figures heavily into her rock god pantheon, as does Courtney Love. You're clearly a waste of skin if you can't name every song these people have been involved with.

Sadly I can see myself in her rant to a degree. My own musical preferences were completely different, but there was a time when I thought the "right" music was all important. Thankfully I got over that phase shortly after leaving college. Vowell is (or was) still stuck there over ten years after she graduated. Looking back, I was an ass about things like this on far too many occasions, but at this point I can admit it and move on. It's not clear that Vowell can do so.

Yet more things are wrong with this diatribe. Vowell has absolutely nothing good to say about any radio station except KGLT, the college station she worked for. She does like Ira Glass - famous for his NPR program This American Life - but everything on WBEZ except his show is terrible. The DJs on the myriad of other stations she mentions are all held up as examples of stupidity, or - at the very least - cluelessness. You can get a sense of the depth of her disgust from this quote, taken from the back cover, where you'd normally expect to find some blurb recommending the book in question:

"Vowell's touch is about as delicate as Teddy Kennedy's after a pitcher of martinis."
-- Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

In reality, though, I could set all of those issues aside. At some level I can even relate to it, as I have my own inner grouch who wants to complain about everything and everyone. Admittedly I don't usually let him out long enough to write a 230 page trade paperback, but I can identify with at least some of what she's whining, grousing, and bitching about. But what bothered me most is that Vowell holds everyone up to a higher standard than herself, fails to admit the purpose of things, or both.

By way of example, she excoriates NPR (National Public Radio) in many, many places. As far as I can tell, only Ira Glass's work there has any value. She calls out the various programs by name, trashing them repeatedly, and does the same for the various people who work there. It matters not what your race, gender, or vocal characteristics are, if you work on All Things Considered or Morning Edition it is quite obvious that Vowell finds you repulsive. Not quite as repulsive as Rush Limbaugh, but damn close.

With that as a background, it comes as no surprise that she complains bitterly - and mentions it again later - that one of the NPR announcers working on Morning Edition or All Things Considered (sorry, I didn't mark the pages where I saw this, and I can't bring myself to read it all again just to find the exact quotes) worries about screwing things up. She complains that this is an attitude she never saw back in the good old days working at KGLT. They were happy to screw up. They clowned around all the time.

Excuse me? You're trying to compare some Podunk college radio station staff with those of a major national news program, and because they differ in how much they worry about screwing things up you're bothered? To the point of rage?

But it doesn't end there. Elsewhere in these pages Vowell admits to being a teacher at an art school. Guess what? She found herself nervous early on because people were listening to her and writing down what she said.

Surely I'm not the only one to see the irony there? She rants that the people at NPR are afraid of screwing up, but can't see that she, herself, has the same issue in front of her class? To be afraid of making an error in public is only natural. Surely she knows that. And yet she can't acknowledge the difference between Bob Edwards messing up on Morning Edition and Tom the two-bit DJ doing so on the local college station. Given her other writings, I honestly thought she was smarter than that.

And then, as mentioned above, there's her unwillingness to acknowledge the purpose of things. The NPR programs she hates with so much passion for their their "boring" presentation and "snooty" announcers are actually doing the right thing. They're serious news programs. They tell people about the important events of the day; they do not air artsy, experimental radio pieces that no one will understand. They address a much larger audience - millions, not hundreds - and while a few whoopee cushions and some rambling, selected news headlines for college kids might be amusing, it doesn't (and cannot) do the same job as All Things Considered. Vowell can't see this, and aims a huge barrage of insults at quite a few excellent programs and people as a result. They do not deserve such treatment.

I can be an opinionated SOB, and I'd guess that some things I've written have or will offend some. But I hope I'm a bit less hysterical in my presentation than Vowell, and more willing to see others in the light of reason.

Radio On was published in 1996, and Vowell suffered through some nasty political times given her particular views on the world - Newt Gingrich, for example. Perhaps that added to her misery and lead her to be more harsh than she should have been. And obviously she was younger then, about 28, I believe. Maybe she has (or will) mellow with age. But none of those things excuses the gross mistreatment of others I found in this book. I'd skip it.

Last And First Men, Olaf Stapledon

Title:		Last And First Men
Author:		Olaf Stapledon
Rating:

Last And First Men is an SF novel by Olaf Stapledon, first published in 1931. I didn't finish it. In fact, I barely started it. I read about 30 pages over the course of several weeks, hating every moment of it, and decided that I had better things to do.

"Why were you I trying to read it?" I hear you ask. Well, that's el dogo's fault. As you'll see if you chase that link, in 2007 he reviewed a different book by Stapledon titled Star Maker. Based on his review, it sounded interesting and I thought I'd try it. Then I did some research and got a copy of this volume that contains both novels Last And First Men and Star Maker. According to a tiny blurb I read on paperbackswap.com, these two novels are related, with Star Maker being "in a sense" a sequel to Last And First Men.

OK, I thought, I'll start at the beginning and read them both. Ha!

What I should have picked up on from el dogo's review was this: "Stapledon is one of those guys who's more admired than read, and there are reasons for that. His prose style is rather dry and stuffy, almost Victorian."

Now I can't really make any claims about Star Maker. When I gave up on Last And First Men I read a few paragraphs from random pages of Star Maker to see if it differed in any useful way from what I'd been reading. It didn't seem to, so I didn't even bother trying it.

What I can say is that Last And First Men is one long, boring, inaccurate, pedantic, rub-your-nose-in-bad-smelling-stuff, diatribe. It's full of racial and nationalistic stereotypes, bad science, and fluffy thinking, and that's just in the first 30 pages.

El dogo called the writing style a "long dispassionate observation" in his review, which sounds so much nicer than my description, but he actually liked what he read, so I'll acknowledge the validity of his point of view. My impression is obviously somewhat different, so I will continue to use my more colorful terms to describe what I read when needed.

In any event, I found what I read of Last And First Men to be dry as dust, and offensive to boot. It may be that Stapledon is one of the greats of early SF, but for me he's entirely unreadable. I note that someone else on paperbackswap.com wants this book when I'm done with it, and I'll be happy to let it go.

The Dangerous Book For Boys, Gonn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden

Title:		The Dangerous Book For Boys
Authors:		Gonn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden
Rating:

For the second time in 2007 I am hugely unimpressed by a book that collected great gobs of praise in the press. This time around, it's The Dangerous Book For Boys that I can't stand.

If you've never heard of this book before I have to ask what rock you've been living under. I get very little media myself and I couldn't miss all the gushing press about this thing. But given what I heard - and despite all the praise - it didn't seem like my cup of tea, so I didn't buy one. But then I was given a copy by a friend and I correspondingly felt obliged to read it.

If you're really not familiar with it, the general idea is that boys today don't grow up with the same sort of experiences that the authors (at least) had, and that's bad. So they've written short bits of text - almost essays - on all kinds of subjects they think modern boys ought to know something about, bundled them up in a book, and set loose a PR machine somewhere.

Now my childhood wasn't all that limited. My dad did teach me a few things - particularly the way around a workshop - so I figured that even if I knew a lot what was in here I'd still enjoy the journey. And it started off promisingly enough with directions for folding the "best paper airplane in the world" and moving on to a description of the seven wonders of the ancient world. That ate up all of eight pages, and I thought it was going well.

Alas, there it starts to go off track, and it gets worse as it goes.

The next section is on how to tie five different knots. Sounds simple, right? And it should be, but the pictures are terrible, and trying to understand the knots from them is awful. I've seen much better descriptions elsewhere.

A few pages later we get the answer to the question "How do you tell the age of a tree?" The answer, and I quote the first sentence verbatim: "You cut it down and count the rings." Excuse me? Yes, technically this is accurate, but is that the right way to phrase it? Do we want boys randomly cutting down trees? Do we even want them thinking that doing so is acceptable in any case, just to determine the age of the tree? A small point, I admit, but it bugged me.

And it goes on and on. There are horrible errors here that an editor should have found and fixed. A simple example from a section about the Wright brothers: "In order to be able to fly with added weight from the engine, propellers, and reinforcements to the structure they had to increase the wingspan to more than 500 square feet, up from 165 square feet in the glider." Ahem. Wingspan is a linear measurement (of distance - specifically the distance from one wingtip to the other), not a measure of wing area. There are many misstatements like this scattered throughout the book.

But it gets worse. There is a section here on first aid, and in there it discusses CPR. The description is slipshod at best, so following it is problematic in any case, but the real problem is that it is just plain wrong. I know this. I am re-certified in CPR every quarter as part of my volunteer fire department training, and I assist at a Red Cross first aid class as well. No one teaches the initial thump on the chest with a fist anymore - that went out a long time ago - but it's still here in this book. That's just plain stupid. They should have done some (OK... a lot of) fact checking before publishing this. If the only first aid book you have is the one brief chapter in The Dangerous Book for Boys I sure don't want to be your patient. Just let me die in peace.

Other sections are basically pointless. The piece on pirates seems like it would be great for boys of a certain age, but it's entirely lacking any interesting content. An opportunity was missed there to tell both the good and the bad; instead nothing much was said at all. Another example: the book includes brief rules sets for both rugby and soccer, but don't try to use them. There's no overall description of the game, and the rules as written are almost unintelligible.

Finally there is the question of why they included some things in here. How many descriptions and diagrams of famous battles do boys really need? Why build a go cart without any kind of brake? And on and on and on.

In all, I question just about every aspect of this book. I don't think the authors included some things they should have, and they definitely included things they shouldn't have. I know they didn't fact check some entries, and that makes others suspect in my eyes. By the time I was two thirds of the way through it, I seriously considered setting is aside and never finishing it. It's that bad.

If you're the parent of a boy, you may find some things described in here are interesting and should be taught, but overall I can't imagine using this book as a resource for that process.

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

Title:		The Kite Runner
Author:		Khaled Hosseini
Rating:

The Kite Runner was a much hyped book in the recent past. It seemed for a while that I couldn't go anywhere without reading or hearing something about how wonderful and important it was. But despite that, it didn't seem all that interesting to me from the descriptions I heard.

Then my wife wanted to read it, so I got a copy via paperbackswap.com and eventually she cracked it open.

And she put it down again almost immediately, saying she hated the main character.

Oh my. Now what to think? Well, perhaps I won't be as bothered by him as she is, and it really has a ton of gushing reviews behind it. It can't be all that bad.

Oh yes it can. It absolutely can be that bad.

I read 104 of 371 pages. That was all I could stand, so I don't get credit for reading the whole thing. But I'd rather have needles stuck in my eyes than have to read the rest of it.

The prose is serviceable at best, and certainly not "poetic" as so many reviews claim. The main character is simply awful. There is no hint in anything I read of any kind of redemption coming, though the reviews all say it happens. If so, the author gave me no hint that this creep is worth knowing. He's repulsive in the extreme.

I'm a busy person, and I want to read things I enjoy when I read fiction. Non-fiction is different; I generally read it to learn something specific, and that implies that the characters are real, so I am reading about someone's actual deeds. That's fine with me. Reality means something, and I can deal with it.

On the fiction front (where this book resides) I often read works featuring anti-heroes and/or people that do awful things, but somehow there's something different about The Kite Runner that makes it simply bad, instead of interesting or relevant. I can't envision it as a study in character development, for example, because I didn't find the history or motivations of the main character consistent and believable. They appeared entirely fabricated by the author to unsettle the reader. If so, he achieved his intent, but I doubt that's what he really meant to do. I suspect he wanted us to feel for this character somehow, and that only made things worse for me. The clunking story line and unbelievable actions wouldn't let me do that, so I just wound up hating every page.

My advice on this one is to skip it, but I know I am way out of step with the rest of the planet on this issue.

In The Days Of The Comet, H. G. Wells

Title:		In The Days Of The Comet
Author:		H. G. Wells
Rating:

In The Days Of The Comet is the last H. G. Wells I am going to read, and I am glad this exercise is over. An approximate rating (on a scale from worst to best of: Terrible, Lousy, Poor, Neutral, OK, Good, Great) of the various Wells novels I have read in this collection looks like this:

Rating			Title
	OK		The Time Machine
	Poor		The Island Of Dr. Moreau
	Good		The Invisible Man
	Good		The War Of The Worlds
	Lousy		The First Men In The Moon
	Terrible		The Food Of The Gods
	Lousy		In The Days Of The Comet

As I started reading this last book I had The Food Of The Gods on my brain, and it wasn't pleasant. I expected In The Days Of The Comet to be just as bad, as Wells was spiraling down into social commentary in these later works and (I suspected) getting less and less connected to reality. As it happens, In The Days Of The Comet isn't quite as bad as I thought it would be, but it still wasn't good.

As a work of science fiction it is undeniably weak. Actually it is a love story of sorts with a socialist twist. The fact that it is science fiction is only peripheral to the story. Most of what is here is boring exposition about the life of the hero just before a comet impacts the earth. He's completely uninteresting (like the rest of Wells's heroes), his actions are unbelievable, and the story doesn't really go anywhere. I kept thinking I should put the book down and read something more interesting, but there was a comet hanging over everything (literally) and I kept wondering just how he would get it back into the story and make it do something interesting. So I stupidly kept reading; a tactical error on my part.

The other thing present in the story is the hero's view of society. He's a vociferous but uninformed socialist, and Wells goes on at great length describing how unfair society is through his character's speech. The problem is that his presentation of things is so one-sided that I cannot assess how accurate it is, nor how seriously I should take it. The information is old (having been published in 1906) and my connection to that time in history is weak at best. Maybe people at the time could assess it better than I can.

Anyway, we slog through a lot of pages of this. It goes on forever. And then - finally - the comet hits earth. Given today's knowledge of comets we'd expect all kinds of bad things to happen: earthquakes, tidal waves, nasty weather for months, and possibly a mass extinction event. Wells didn't have the benefit of our deeper understanding of comets, so perhaps he can be forgiven for thinking that a comet could hit the earth and do no real damage.

What this comet does on impact, though, is change the nitrogen in the atmosphere in some mystical way so that every human on the planet is suddenly enlightened, or something like that. I will spare you the details, and that isn't hard because Wells isn't particularly clear on them either. The comet hits, the atmosphere changes, everyone falls asleep for a minimum of three hours, and when they wake up everyone thinks much more clearly. If you're thinking "Huh?", you're asking a very good question. In fact, though, if Wells had tried to include some complex explanation for what happens to make people "better", I'd have really hated this book, as I did with The Food Of The Gods, since the science would be entirely wrong. This is more like a fantasy, and you just have to let it slide.

But you can't let it slide entirely, and when Wells goes off to start talking (at great, dry and boring length again) about how the world is so much better after the comet, he again gives us a socialist rant of epic proportions, complete with multiple statements about how the entire idea of owning something (like land) has been abandoned to everyone's betterment. But as with the science, the specifics about how society will be so much better are not spelled out with the exception of the lack of property and one or two other nits. It's a bit like that old TV commercial. I kept thinking: "Where's the beef?"

Finally there is a mystery character here that is never adequately explained. The story is being written down by the hero, but there is someone else reading what he's written. Who he is, where he comes from, and why he matters is never dealt with. It's odd, and it feels entirely out of place, though it does give Wells the chance to suggest that his hero finally "settled down" in a family arrangement of sorts with two wives, and one of those wives had another husband too. Four adults sharing their lives (and loves, we're to read between the lines) together. The horror! But perhaps in 1906 that was a really racy idea.

In the end I have to pronounce this book a failure. It's not as bad a failure as The Food Of The Gods, but it is a failure none the less. If you're thinking of reading it, I suggest you go find yourself some other, more modern and well thought out political polemic and read it instead. You might learn something, which won't happen with In The Days Of The Comet.

The First Men In The Moon, H. G. Wells

Title:		The First Men In The Moon
Author:		H. G. Wells
Rating:

This book went on forever, and it wasn't fun reading. Wells continues to bang his drum about evolution and politics, here setting it all on the moon.

The book is broken into two pieces, and for all I can tell they were written at different times. It's almost as if he wrote the first part, decided it was too short, or didn't cover something he wanted to discuss, or someone paid him to write more, so he did.

If you've ever heard the term "cavorite," it comes from this book. It is a material that is impervious to all forms of radiation, including gravity. As such, it is used in the construction of a space ship to take our heroes to the moon. Once there they meet a complicated society, fail utterly to understand it, and one of them leaves the other behind. Later he picks up radio broadcasts from the one left behind documenting more about the moon's inhabitants. (That's the second part of the two part story.)

Wells cannot seem to write about people I care about or for. I am willing to put up with a lot from my hero (or anti-hero) depending on the outcome and what sort of changes they go through. Wells writes about dull people who do not change and who are vaguely nauseating from today's perspective. Cavor and Bedford both fit that bill.

Beyond that, the science is just awful here. The book was written in 1901 so I should give it a break, but I simply cannot do it. There is just no way to rescue the science presented here.

So, combine poor characters with weak science and a long winded tale in which the author tries do drive home some (still unclear to me) point about society, evolution, and conflict, and you get a lot of wasted time. Of all the Wells I have read so far, this is the least interesting. Only time will tell if it continues to hold that position in my hierarchy.

Oh, I should mention that there are elements in the moon society here that strongly resemble things from Brave New World. If Aldous Huxley knowingly cribbed from The First Men In The Moon while creating his dystopian vision of the future, then (a) I am really sorry he spent the time reading it and (b) he did a much better job than Wells did.

Calculating God, Robert J. Sawyer (spoilers)

Title:		Calculating God
Author:		Robert J. Sawyer
Rating:

Warning: spoilers appear all over this review.

What an irritating book. Grrrrr.

Some time back this book was reviewed in Skeptical Inquirer - the magazine of CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal) - and there was something of a furor over it. The reviewer didn't like it, and said so. A bunch of people jumped in on both sides of the issue as I recall (my issues are long gone now). Some defended the book as a work of fiction while others thought it was significant in some way - some bad way that I don't exactly recall. My wife bought the book to try to figure out first hand what the problem was. I'm only getting to it now, quite a while later.

I'm going to say that the book is bad, but probably not for the same reasons that the CSICOP reviewer did.

First off, let me state that I am open to many things in fiction. I have no problem with religion being an important part of a work, but what happens here is just plain silly.

First and foremost, the premise of the novel is completely unbelievable. Aliens come to earth (fine so far) and the first one to appear lands in Canada (again, fine so far). Said alien is a spider like thing (again, fine) and it comes to the Royal Ontario Museum to see a paleontologist. (We're still fine.) And the alien settles in with our hero from the museum to study earth's fossil record.

Now wait just a minute.

I'm willing to buy that the aliens can get here, that they aren't that much ahead of us technologically, etc. I'll even grant that they might be interested in our fossil record for one reason or another, but they cannot possibly be so stupid as to fail to take into account the political ramifications of their arrival. After all, they've been monitoring us for some time - long enough to speak various earth languages pretty well. Their arrival is going to throw our planet into chaos on umpteen different levels, but they - and the author - just pretend that issue doesn't exist.

But never mind that. They're here because they're looking for God. They're seeking the creator of the universe, and we're a step along that path. We're quickly told Earth is the third planet currently harboring intelligent life that they know of, that each planet had the same number of mass extinction events in its history, and they were all at the same points in time.

Ummm.... wait. We've just been told something patently absurd. But the author is using it as a major premise in his plot. OK. I'll do my best to open really wide and swallow that one. Continuing...

Then we're told that the aliens are all religious - that the presence of God is a fact in their eyes. And then a lot of mumbo-jumbo is thrown at us to support that. (It all amounts to the anthropic principle, for those who follow that sort of thing.) But our aliens have knowledge we don't have, and it proves that a creator must have had a hand in the mix. No argument allowed.

OK... I'm not done yet, but I have to stop here for a moment and say that there was something really aggravating about the way all of this was dumped on me as the reader. Our hero doesn't challenge things as he should (or would, given his training and background) and I don't buy it. I know that fiction assumes some things that aren't true to tell whatever tale is being told, and I can accept that. Science fiction has to go farther in that way than many other kinds of fiction for various reasons, and I can accept that too. But this particular telling just plain didn't work. Far too many impossible things in a row, with only the authority of the aliens telling us this to back it up. After a while, I just couldn't stomach it any more. But back to the content of the book.

Our hero spends the next N chapters - where N is far too large a number - in conversation with his alien friend. Unfortunately these chapters all read like creationist (and particularly Intelligent Design) apologist tracts. They're crap. But the author can (and does) resort regularly to the fact that the aliens know more than we do, and so they can simply assure our hero that they're right. Many times I set this book down wondering just what I was reading. It sounded like it came from some ID publishing house so often it was depressing.

Then we get a pointless sub-plot about some wacky creationists that bombed an abortion clinic and are now going to do other dastardly deeds that impact our hero and his alien friends. That sub-plot has no business here. It's entirely useless, but I digress, as did the author.

And then we get to the end of the book, where all kinds of things are revealed. "God" turns out to be some sort of organism (yes, a biological organism) that existed in a previous cycle of our closed universe and somehow adjusted the parameters for the next cycle so that there would be intelligent life here.

I'm going to digress here again. As best we know, the universe is not closed, and we knew that in 2000 when this book was published. The universe is expanding at an increasing rate. As best we can tell, it will not come back together in a "Big Crunch" so it's open. Sawyer tries to use science all over in here to back things up, but he gets it wrong, and this is just another example. Grrr. OK back to the book again...

This "God"/organism has plans for us too. Plans that help it get reborn. Huh? Wait. It's already here. It's been meddling in evolution on at least three planets for hundreds of millions - if not billions - of years. And it does something spectacular right under our nose too, so clearly it is already "here" and capable of doing big important things. But it needs us (specifically our DNA) to be reborn? Something makes no sense at all. (Anyone remember Kirk asking "Why does God need a starship?" in one of the Star Trek movies?)

I'll avoid telling you about the other intelligent life forms out there that are missing now. Just assume that the aliens tell you there are some, and that our hero has theories about where they went - theories based on no evidence. But our alien friends eventually believe them.

I guess in the end even the IDers will hate this book because "God" turns out to be something less than the omniscient, omnipotent, personal deity that Christianity predicts. That sort of conclusion - that life here was created by some other species "out there" in space somewhere - would be just fine with me, but the rest of the book was so irritating that when the conclusion finally arrived I was just pissed off about it.

As an exercise in writing craft, the book isn't that good either. Sometimes the hero is believable, particularly as he interacts with his family, but much of it is flat and fails to seem real, or even reasonable. And why is it told in first person from the point of view of someone who dies at the end? There is actually text at the end where the narrator talks about his last words, in the past tense, as in after he died. Excuse me? Nothing in this book explains that.

Finally, I have to state again that the author simply ignores the reality of what real contact with aliens would be like. Even if the aliens simply didn't talk to the authorities, everyone they interacted with would be grilled at huge length after each and every interaction. Our hero - a mucky-muck at the museum - would have no time to do or see anything other than the alien and the myriad people who want to know more about the alien, its society, technology, etc. He wouldn't even get to sleep given the demands on his time. The book was simply not believable in this area, and I found that really bothersome given the way he tried to keep it grounded in reality in other places.

As you can see, I didn't like this book. I did finish it, but looking back I really wonder why. There was nothing new raised by it as far as I can see, and the willing suspension of disbelief never happened.

Skip this one.