The Children Of Hurin, J. R. R. Tolkien

Title:		The Children Of Hurin
Author:		J. R. R. Tolkien
Rating:

This one has been done for some time, but I haven't managed to get around to reviewing it thanks to a tiny little job in my life of late. When that is done I'll be very happy. But leaving that a mystery for now, I need to review The Children Of Hurin by Tolkien.

Unlike some, I really like The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, but the rest of Tolkien's work is problematic for me. I know enough to understand he created a vast and complex history and mythology along with languages for the various races in notes and reference works. I know that the story of the one ring and Frodo Baggins is very late in that history, and that Sauron is a later evil, descended from the earlier and much more powerful Morgoth. It took several tries, but eventually I did slog my way through The Silmarillion though I remember basically nothing from it except the above tidbits, and the fact that the gods of Tolkien's mythology are called Valar.

As you can see my knowledge is very limited and incomplete. Oh well.

Then I learn that Christopher Tolkien has published yet another book in his father's name. For some reason it peaked my interest, so I looked it up and read a bit about it. I found myself heartened. I read that The Children Of Hurin has a different narrative style than The Silmarillion - more like Tolkien's big successes - and it tells a single story about a few characters, rather than summarizing hundreds or thousands of years of history.

It sounded good, so I got it.

But now that I've read it, I wish it were better than it actually is.

First off, though it is a single story about the wife and children of Hurin - one of Tolkien's favorite characters apparently - it isn't quite written in a typical story telling style. As you read it you learn, though much is told well, that it was clearly assembled from notes. There's something about the point of view and the narrator's perspective that kept me at a distance from the characters. I'm not familiar enough with English grammar terminology to put a name on it, but there's something slightly off in the presentation. Or at least there was for me.

Then there's the story itself, and it's hard to imagine a more bleak tale than this one. It mostly concerns Turin - the son of Hurin - and the horrible things that happen to him. He has two sisters and a mother that appear a bit as well. Most of the other actors are elves and men, though there is a brief interlude with some dwarves too, but don't look for hobbits here. This is thousands of years before The Hobbit takes place, and I'm not even sure they exist yet in Tolkien's world. But then I can't even correlate the map of the world with the one in The Lord Of The Rings, so I am clearly not the best source of information.

In any event, we're following a tiny part of the struggle against Morgoth in the first age of the earth, and both Hurin and Turin play significant roles in a way. To say more would be to give away important plot points and some of my readers may want to discover them on their own, so I won't even summarize the plot beyond saying that it is dark and sad. It's also a bit predictable, alas, and that reduced my pleasure while reading it.

And then there's the small matter of the appendices and introduction. My copy is 313 pages long in total, but the actual story itself starts on page 33 and ends on page 259. Thus it consumes only about two thirds of the book. The rest is introductory or supplementary materials of one sort or another, and in my case I found myself skimming over the appendixes. Yes, I know Tolkien spent much of his life working out all these little details, but they just don't hold my interest.

In summary, this book is much more approachable than The Silmarillion, but it's not on a par with The Lord Of The Rings. It's probably best appreciated by hard core Tolkien fans, and I clearly don't qualify as one of those.

America: The Book: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, Writers of The Daily Show

Title:		America: The Book: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
Author:		Writers of The Daily Show
Rating:

I've been slogging through this one for a long time now. Others have given it glowing reviews. Alas, I must be hugely out of touch with modern culture. I didn't laugh aloud even once while reading this. I rarely even cracked a smile.

To say the humor is heavy handed would be putting it mildly.

To say it made me sad - on a number of fronts - would be accurate.

I guess my biggest problems were (a) just how often the book descended into bathroom humor and (b) how often the non-bathroom humor was too close to the truth for me to be comfortable. An example of the latter issue: chapter 3 is titled "The President: King of Democracy". Has anyone actually watched the Bush administration accumulate power?

I found the book's layout - parodying high school civics class textbooks - to be mildly amusing, but only in that it showed me just how bad the layout of my old textbooks was. How I read those books - with all those asides and distractions - I'll never know,

Anyway, I found America: The Book to be somewhat repetitive, not particularly funny, and sometimes too close to reality to even be considered humor. I'm glad I got it through http://www.paperbackswap.com/ so it didn't really cost me anything. I'll send it on to someone else.

Managing Humans, Michael Lopp

Title:		Managing Humans
Author:		Michael Lopp
Rating:

This isn't one that most people are going to read, but for a select few it would be a good idea.

I've read a few books about software engineering management, but just a few. Of the ones I've read to date, far and away the best is titled Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister. For those wanting to learn some interesting and useful things about software development and management, Peopleware is hard to beat.

What Peopleware lacks - and it isn't much - is actual advice for software development managers on how to deal with real world situations. It takes a different route and looks at slightly different issues, and that's all well and good, but it's not enough. People who create software are a particularly odd form of humanity, with some issues and concerns that seem to be different from those found in others. In short, they're nerds. (Yes, I'm one too. I'm even proud of it, though I have been out of the business for a while now.) As a result, software developers need slightly different handling than others, so some pointed advice is called for.

Managing Humans is a book by a nerd manager about managing nerds. It's got stories that I (as a former software engineering manager) can relate to, and it's up to date about how companies are acting and treating people now - in late 2007. And it's got actual advice on relevant things, like what to do when an employee freaks out about something, how to handle reorgs and RIFs, detecting agendas in others, and so on. This is good useful stuff, and while some of it will apply regardless of what field you're in, some is pretty specific to software developers.

I cannot say I agree with Lopp 100% of the time, however. The single largest issue I have is with NADD - Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. He makes a big deal here - and on his website http://randsinrepose.com/ - about NADD. He suggests that people who don't feel right unless they have a bunch of tasks going on at once are happy and productive when in their element, multitasking away. He calls them NADD sufferers, and he numbers himself among them. As it happens, I clearly do not suffer from NADD as he describes it, so my perspective may be a bit jaded, but when I read elsewhere in Managing Humans that bringing laptop computers to meetings is a bad idea I started to wonder.

Lopp doesn't like laptops in meetings because anyone with one is only giving both the meeting and his computer half (or less) of his attention. But wait... NADD suffers - including Lopp - live for (and like) this. According to him they're supposed to be good at multitasking and the context switch, and yet - also according to Lopp - they can't be good at those very things in meetings with a laptop in front of them? Hmmm. Somehow I don't think he can have it both ways. Either NADD sufferers can be good in meetings with their laptops present, or they cannot be good in any context with too many inputs going at once.

For me, a laptop in a meeting is a disaster unless I am using it only to take notes, and even then it can be a problem. But I'm definitely not a NADD sufferer, and thus my case isn't a good example. A former boss of mine is clearly a NADD sufferer, however, and I hated it when he brought his laptop into meetings. He was clearly less effective when it was there, and it was rude besides. But once I reached that conclusion, I started thinking about how he worked in general. Watching him was an exercise in watching a super-ball bounce around a room. He was always doing six things at once, and yet his to-do list was always huge, and often projects were backed up waiting on his deliverables. I don't think he was all that effective at getting things done if he let his NADD tendencies get out of hand. But, when he knuckled down and focused on just one thing for a few hours, he was amazingly productive - far and away the sharpest developer I have ever worked with or for.

The moral? Perhaps NADD isn't something to be thought of as an advantage. Perhaps it should even be stomped out in the workplace in order to gain productivity in the longer term. Anyway, my personal experiences make NADD look like a drawback and I'd like to see Lopp ponder that issue in more depth.

I also disagree with Lopp about annual reviews. He thinks they are important. Period. I hated them. Period. They were a waste of time and effort, and I never got anything useful out of them. As a manager I spent huge amounts of time researching and writing them, but if I was doing my job properly there were no surprises for my people in them anyway. And that's the key: if you're a good manager, you're keeping your people up to date on career things all year round. If you're a lousy manager, though, the review probably doesn't make up for the lack of communication that should have been going on before, and (even if it has good information in it), the employee getting it will hate it because it comes from you - the lousy manager. In a nutshell, reviews were a waste of time, both for the receiver and the presenter, and that's my considered opinion after 18+ years in the industry.

So Lopp and I don't always see the world in the same way. That's fine. You might agree with his perspective and ideas more than I do. If so, good. I like that because anyone who's doing the amount of thinking he is about these things is probably good at his or her job, and that's the important point.

In the end, most of Managing Humans is pretty good, and at least half of it is actually useful in day-to-day situations where you need advice on how to handle some particular event.

Recommended for current and future software development managers.

Firefly, The Official Companion, Vol 1, Joss Whedon

Title:		Firefly, The Official Companion, Vol 1
Author:		Joss Whedon
Rating:

This review could make me look like a total fan-boy, but I hope to avoid that.

When I acquired the DVDs of Firefly, it was because I'd seen them once and wanted to be able to watch them on occasion again without waiting for Netflix to get then to me.

When I ordered the DVDs from Amazon I did the search in all products instead of just in the DVD section. I was surprised to discover several books related to the series. They all wound up on my wish list - just for a place to put them - and a recent birthday wound up with two of them appearing as gifts. I really didn't know what to expect from this book as a result, but I enjoyed reading it.

It mostly contains the original shooting scripts for half the episodes of Firefly. I've enjoyed that kind of material in the past as it helps illuminate dialog I couldn't make out the final release, and it shows how things changed between the original writing and the final cut of the program or movie. In that regard, at least, this is a good read.

There are a few other things tossed in here just for kicks. Blurbs about each of the major characters, half an interview with Joss Whedon, and some odds and ends about specific props and what not. Most of that isn't as interesting to me as the actual scripts, but it's certainly not terrible or anything like that.

So if you liked the series, you might find this book interesting. I'm going to have to order volume two just to complete the set, and there are a couple of other things floating around out there that may have to come my way as well over time. So perhaps it is a fan-boy thing after all. Oh well.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Title:		The Road
Author:		Cormac McCarthy
Rating:

I wish I knew how to review this book. Frankly, I wish I had a consistent point of view about it.

On one hand, it was immensely irritating. There's no character development and no plot - to the extent that there is almost no action of any kind except walking. The characters have no names, and in fact there are no names anywhere in the book. Even worse, nothing here is ever explained. It's a post apocalyptic novel, but what caused the devastation is entirely unknown to the reader. From the perspective of the story, characters and setting, The Road is a complete bust.

And there are other things that irritated me. For some odd reason contractions that should end in "n't" (e.g. didn't) lack the apostrophe (e.g. didnt). Other uses of the apostrophe were normal. And dialog isn't quoted anywhere. Ever. Why does McCarthy change the rules of English usage in this book?

Beyond that there is the writing. It's simple and repetitive. Simple and repetitive. Really. Simple and repetitive. And irritating.

So there you have it. A lot of things about this book bugged me in various ways. I'd be tempted to give it a totally negative review and end it there, but...

On the other hand, there was something that kept me reading despite all of the above. At times it seemed The Road was more like poetry than prose, and that may have brought me back at points. (It was very easy to put this book down - even mid-sentence. But oddly I did come back to it.) The story is broken into bite sized bits - sometimes just a single sentence or two, sometimes a few paragraphs long. They're kind of like potato chips - reading just one is hard to do for some reason, even if you know it's not good for you.

In addition, that simple, repetitive style is related to the subject matter - walking a very long way in an inhospitable world. That may also have played on my subconscious and kept me interested when I should have gone off and done other things.

But just like someone who eats an entire bag of potato chips, I came away feeling unfulfilled. I learned nothing here - not about the characters or the people they meet, not about the world they inhabit, and not about anything else for that matter. I've read glowing reviews claiming the book shows off the wonderful bond of father and son. Nope. Some say the book discusses the human condition. I don't think so. As an exercise in story telling The Road is a failure. Maybe, as an exercise in prose poetry, it is a bit more interesting, but even then it's about 280 pages too long.

I'm not sure what McCarthy was trying to accomplish when he wrote this, and that is the clearest indication of the problem. I'm in the minority here, I know. Many others loved this book. I simply can't bring myself to that point. I've read a lot of post apocalyptic fiction over the years and this simply isn't that good.

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 Busker, Brian McNeill

Title:		The Busker
Author:		Brian McNeill
Rating:

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did, and that frustrates me. You see, I've met the author. He's a widely acclaimed musician, and (I think I have this right) he's Head of the Scottish Music Department at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. I've seen him play three times in very small venues and he is a wonderful performer. Amazing.

Some time back I learned he was an author, and since I liked his music so much I thought I'd try his printed works. He's written two: The Busker and To Answer The Peacock.

The Busker is a mystery novel set in Europe before German reunification. Alex Fraser - the hero, and a busker with an unfortunate criminal record - winds up in the middle of a complex set of relationships and crimes, the genesis of which dates back to a nasty event taking place before WWII. In trying to unravel these things for an old friend, he winds up going out on a limb to save the life of a child.

For those who don't know, a busker is someone who plays music for coins and donations on the streets. Brian McNeill has spent a lot of time busking, and he knows the trade well.

As I say, I really wanted to enjoy this book, but it was hard to do. I found it jumpy - cutting away from some scenes before I was sure what was going on, and coming into others too late to let me figure things out. It's also full of historical references and locations that meant little or nothing to me as a rather poorly educated (about international history, at least) American. In sum, it was difficult to follow. So difficult, in fact, that at times when I got lost I'd just set it down and do something else for a while. Not good.

As I ponder this, I wonder if there isn't an unusual reason for my reaction. McNeill writes wonderful song lyrics for his own works, and it is possible that the skill set needed to write lyrics is different from that needed to write prose. Song lyrics are - by nature - shorter and tend towards the more evocative, even mysterious. Perhaps the tendency to write in that style made The Busker hard for me to follow. I'm not sure, but it is a thought.

Beyond that, however, I thought there were too many coincidences in Alex's work on this mystery. He winds up with a wealthy backer, for example. That would be fine on its own, but he often gets help from total strangers who should - by all rights - turn him over to the police and forget him. I found him leading a bit too charmed an existence, despite the fact that he doesn't have an easy time of it in this story.

As I have said before, however, mystery novels aren't something I read a lot, so my expectations may not be quite right for the genre. Others may find it better, though the only reference to a book review of it I could find via google was a broken link to a review that panned the book. Oh well.

If despite the above you'd like to get a copy of The Busker or To Answer The Peacock do NOT order directly from amazon.com. These books weren't released in the US as far as I can tell, so the only copies available here are rare used editions at astronomically high prices. I ordered my copies from amazon.co.uk, and that worked out to much lower prices, and one of the books - when it arrives - will be new. I suspect there is a general lesson there as well: check a lot of sources before agreeing to pay $70 for a used book.

More information about Brian McNeill himself can be found here: http://www.brianmcneill.co.uk/, and if you get the chance to see him live in concert do NOT pass it up. He's warm and funny and charming. He tells great stories about the songs he's playing, and he can play Scottish music astoundingly well.

I hope To Answer The Peacock is more to my taste.

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling

Title:		Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows
Author:		J. K. Rowling
Rating:

Like about 11 million other people in the US, I got my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on its release date - July 21, 2007. Mine came in the mail, so I didn't get it until the afternoon, and as my weekend was pretty booked up with other events I didn't get to spend a lot of time reading it until Monday.

So what can I say about this book without spoiling it?

I can tell you that I enjoyed it. It's 750 pages long and I read all but the first 150 pages or so in two sittings on a single day. Looked at that way, it clearly held my attention. I set aside another book I was in the middle of to read this one, and I'm not sorry I did so.

It's also a complex book. A lot is happening, and yet Harry spends a lot of time waiting for news and information. And a lot of the plot depends heavily on events in the previous book or two. I read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince back in July of 2005, which is long enough ago that a good many of the details have slipped my mind by now, so I had to go with the flow when there were obvious references to something in an earlier book that I couldn't recall. But despite that I think Rowling does a pretty good job of winding up all the loose ends. She actually provides resolution on most of the outstanding issues I can remember from the previous books. (Contrast that with the way The End didn't clear up many questions in the Lemony Snicket series.)

On the downside, I found two things in this book that I didn't quite believe. Call them questions about the story or plot that I didn't get answered. These were both new with this volume, and I'm not sure how to take them. I won't go into details as I don't want to ruin the book for those who haven't yet read it. You can send me an email if you want to know what they were.

The last major comment I have is that the book presents a lot of new background information on a major character in the series, and much of it comes (to me, at least) as a surprise. Again, I don't want to spoil anything for others, but suffice it to say that I spent a lot of time reevaluating someone while reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and that isn't something I anticipated.

Overall I think Rowling did a pretty good job of winding things up. I need to spend some time with a serious Harry Potter fanatic I know and discuss my questions with her. I'm curious about how she feels now that the series is over. It's been a lot of years waiting for the books to arrive, and I hope she feels the end is up to the level of the rest of it. I thought so.

Mind you, none of this is "Great Literature" (tm) in my mind. It's escapist fantasy, and IMHO there are some weak spots in the way Rowling writes - her choice of certain words in particular - but escapism is fine with me, and she holds the story together regardless of my reservations.

I'll have to reread the entire series at some point - back to back to back - to get a better overview of it all, and to have each book fresh in my mind when I read the next one. More of the details will stick with me then, and it may be a somewhat different experience as a result.

I wonder what Rowling will do next?

A Feast For Crows, George R. R. Martin

Title:		A Feast For Crows
Author:		George R. R. Martin
Rating:

I've now digested A Feast For Crows, book four in George R. R. Martin's twelve step program to cause readers to despise fantasy literature.

Well, wait a minute. That statement may be a bit too strong. After all, there are things to like about this book. Let's see...

There are some good (as in well written) characters here. And there are some interesting plot lines as well. In fact, I think the writing here may be better than the writing in the first three books. But right about there I start to run out of complementary material.

The first problem with A Feast For Crows is Martin's desperate need for an editor, preferably a samurai with a very, very sharp sword. Martin only discusses (or even mentions) about half of the major characters from the first three books here. The rest go mute and vanish for a thousand pages. If you were interested in what happened to Tyrion, for example, you're out of luck in this volume. But that means you've got a thousand pages of what? Well, read them and find out. Don't look for spoilers here. But a strong editor that could stand up to Martin and get him to whittle things down a tad (say, 50% or more) would be welcome.

And then there is the matter of the plot. Many of the the plot lines in here - and there are a lot of them - serve no obvious purpose. I liken it to that part of a chess game where the players are positioning their pieces so they can do great things, but for some number of moves not much appears to happen from an outside perspective. Don't get me wrong, some of these plot lines might have made good stories (or even novels) on their own, but causing us all to wade through them to learn very little about the overall war and world is irritating.

And finally we hit my chief complaint: the vast number of characters. We may only be following half the main characters from the first three books, but we have a ton of new ones to full up these pages. And, of course, they all know each other. By the time Martin has finished this saga any main character he might have left alive will have to die of a brain seizure as a result of trying to remember all the names of all the knights and lords he or she has met or known during their sorry life. And that doesn't include the courtesans and bards and maesters and magi and brothers and all their various titles and relationships to him or her and each other and on and on and on. One can imagine Martin pondering on some obscure plot point as follows:

"Hmmm... Jaime needs to meet someone that he knows in this instance, and the relationship must be slightly strained. Let's see, starting from the dawn of history and tracing through two hundred and twelve generations, it can be his mother's brother's wife's sister's great-grand-mother's half-niece who married into the wrong family first and started a blood feud when she killed her first husband. He can have met her at court once, when he was three and she was nine. He will remember it because of the color of her eyes and the way she always says the words 'my lord' in a high squeaky voice. Yeah. That works."

As you can imagine, this is another place where afore mentioned samurai editor would be useful.

A vision: John Belushi in full samurai regalia, swinging his sword at a three thousand page manuscript. Pages or parts of pages fly everywhere so it looks like it is snowing, and he is screaming: "Too long! Must remove fifty main characters and twenty sub-plots by morning!"

Sorry.

So, in the end, what do I think?

I think these books are overrated. They aren't terrible, but they aren't on a par with the greats of fantasy literature. I'll probably muddle through the fifth volume when it appears, but I'm in no hurry, so I'll wait to get a copy from paperbackswap.com, and I'll pass it on when I am done, as I am doing now with A Feast For Crows.

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.

A Disgrace To The Profession, Charles Newton and Gretchen Kauffman

Title:		A Disgrace To The Profession
Authors:		Charles Newton and Gretchen Kauffman
Rating:

Summer starts today, so I finally get around to writing the review for a book about school teachers. Go figure.

Doug reviewed A Disgrace To The Profession some time back, and as a result of his review I added it to my list. Eventually paperbackswap.com came up with a copy, and I've now read it. Doug's review is pretty much spot on. The story and characters are interesting, but the writing is amateurish. I found it a bit distracting, as I suspect Doug did.

The one thing I might say that Doug didn't is that the book suffers a bit from being a propaganda piece instead of just a story. The authors cram in all kinds of diatribe about various teaching issues that don't directly affect the plot. Yes, I know these issues are real, and yes I understand that the purpose of the book is to make the reader aware of just how bad teachers have it, but it did muck up the story a bit.

I am unlikely ever to teach children. Teaching adults (where "adult" is defined as junior college and older) is a possibility in various ways, but not teaching kids. But even so, this book was interesting, and it makes me wonder if there are any good fixes out there for the problems our kids, schools and teachers face. A Disgrace To The Profession isn't exactly full of suggested solutions for the myriad problems it points out.

Perhaps those solutions were deliberately left as an exercise for the reader.

Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Title:		Jailbird
Author:		Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rating:

Vonnegut's books are hit or miss for me. I know some people love every word he writes while others can't stand him, but I seem to waffle about, each book I've read being different in significant ways from the others. Prior to Jailbird I've read the following by "Uncle Kurt", and I rate them as listed:

• Cat's Cradle, Great
• Timequake, Good
• Slaughterhouse-Five, OK
• Breakfast of Champions, Poor

With that as background, you can see that I'm never quite sure what I am going to wander into when I start another if his offerings. As a result, I can say that Jailbird was a mildly pleasant surprise.

There is some plot to Jailbird, though not much, really, and we learn about it in strange ways - flashbacks, references to future events, and other oddities. We're following, in a very roundabout fashion, the life of Walter F. Starbuck. He's a very, very minor figure from the Watergate mess, and he's just getting out of jail when we meet him.

For my taste, there are a few too many coincidences in Walter's life, particularly right as he gets out of prison, but that's a minor quibble here. The characters are interesting, and there is at least something of a story to follow.

The best part of the book, though, has to be the introduction. Vonnegut spent 40 pages writing introductory remarks about things, mostly related to the contents of the novel in some way. Those pages were interesting reading for me, and may help explain why I found the rest of the novel better than something like Breakfast of Champions.

If you're a hard-core Vonnegut fan, you'll already have read this one. If you're a hard-core wanna-be, you'll need to read it, and you should. For the rest of us, it's reasonable, but Cat's Cradle is a much better story by the same author. I'd put it above Jailbird by a fairly wide margin.

Oh, by the way, Kilgore Trout's name makes an appearance in here, for those tracking him. Oddly, I cannot reconcile it with other KT appearances that I've read. I guess it isn't necessary that Vonnegut be consistent in how he treats those characters that cross novels, but it was a bit distracting to me.

A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 2, Anthony Boucher

Title:		A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 2
Editor:		Anthony Boucher
Rating:

Well, I didn't actually expect to get to this right away, but they way things fell out, it happened. As with volume one, this is a collection of SF from the 1940s and 1950s. It was only slightly better than the first volume, sadly. Read on for the details about the specific contents:

• Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. A short novel about an odd change in the way people think - actually in the physics of the world causing people to think more clearly and rapidly. I found this rather painful reading. Predictable as well.
  
  
• Bullard Reflects by Malcom Jameson. A short story that left me entirely cold. I suspect it was supposed to be humorous but it was just pathetic.
  
  
• The Lost Years by Oscar Lewis. This isn't SF, it's alternate history, though I suspect that category didn't exist when this collection was assembled. It's a short story describing what might have happened had Abraham Lincoln survived the assassination. I found it interesting reading.
  
  
• Dead Center by Judith Merril. A hard SF short story about early rocket flight and moon exploration. Sadly it just doesn't hold up to reality in hindsight.
  
  
• Lost Art by George O. Smith. A hard SF story full of improbable jargon about human engineers attempting to understand and reverse-engineer a Martian electrical device. Implausible in the extreme, sadly.
  
  
• The Other Side Of The Sky by Arthur C. Clark. A short story presenting the memories and tales of someone working on an early space station. Clark writes hard SF here, and much of what he writes is close enough to reality to give it a pass even now, but he can't tell a story about people well at all. A shame, really.
  
  
• The Man Who Sold The Moon by Robert A. Heinlein. A bad novella by a supposed master - one I can rarely read. This one describes early moon exploration assuming that it was driven by companies rather than governments. Among the vast number of irritating things about this story was the implicit claim that one person could design an entire moon transport vehicle. I don't know why I finished this one... I certainly kept hoping it would end.
  
  
• Magic City by Nelson S. Bond. A post apocalyptic tale in which the survivors start down the path to regaining some of the lost knowledge of their forbears. Predictable and pedantic.
  
  
• The Morning Of The Day They Did It by E. B. White. An end-of-civilization short story of no merit at all. It was supposed to be hard SF at the time, but in reality it got things so wrong - even then - that I can't imagine why it was reprinted here.
  
  
• Piggy Bank by Henry Kuttner. Another short story that would have been better left un-reprinted. This one documents the downfall of a wealthy man as a result of his own greed. The entire thing can only be described as silly.
  
  
• Letters From Laura by Mildred Clingerman. A bad short story about time travel. Pointless.
  
  
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. A novel, bridging the SF/fantasy gap in my mind. I'm of mixed opinions about this one. Early on I hated it, and hoped it would end, but it grew on me for some reason. It's frankly not believable, and the main character goes through too much change to be realistic, but somehow the story kept it together. I haven't read anything else by Bester, so I don't know what else he's written, but this one at least wound up interesting in the end.

As with the first volume, many of the giants of SF are represented here, and nearly all fail to produce what I would call good work.

I have no other comments except this: in both of these volumes I kept running into characters who smoke. The action of smoking appears in probably 80% of the items included in both volumes. Why? I know smoking was cool in the 50's, but was it really that entwined with our culture? I shudder to think about it.

A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 1, Anthony Boucher

Title:		A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 1
Editor:		Anthony Boucher
Rating:

This was a waste of time. I kept reading only out of the hope that the next item in this anthology would be better. They really weren't. And there is a second volume to this tome and I am not at all sure I am going to bother trying to sled through it the way I did this one.

This anthology was compiled in the 1959 and mostly appears to contain material published in the early 1950s. These pieces are almost all very, very dated. Most are just plain poor in my opinion. They include:

• Re-Birth by John Wyndham. A short novel about a post atomic apocalypse society. 125 pages of trudging predictability.
  
  
• The Shape Of Things That Came by Richard Deming. A short story that might have been fascinating in 1950 but is horribly out of place in 2007.
  
  
• Pillar Of Fire by Ray Bradbury. I know he's supposed to be this god-like author, but this wasn't a winner for me. And in fact, viewed with our sensibilities in 2007, he'd probably be locked up for writing this now, particularly if he wrote it as a kid or in college. It's basically a horror story, though, set somewhere in the future, with a couple mentions of rockets that probably caused people to think of it as SF. Not in my definition, but...
  
  
• Waldo by Robert Heinlein. Now I know why mechanical devices that manipulate items in place of people's hands are called "waldoes", but beyond that there isn't anything to recommend this novella. I've always had trouble with Heinlein, but this is problematic in an entirely different way from his later works. Waldo is boring. His later works are patently offensive.
  
  
• The Father Thing by Philip K. Dick. Another horror story; definitely not SF. I am starting to think that much early SF was actually horror in disguise, and that renders it much less interesting to me.
  
  
• The Children's Hour by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. This one borders on fantasy, rather than SF, and it's a pretty dull tale of a relationship doomed to failure.
  
  
• Gomez by C. M. Kornbluth. A childish tale - though perhaps not from the POV of 1953 or so - about someone working out important atomic secrets on his own. Other than enhancing my impression of the paranoia of the 1950s about our atomic secrets, there's nothing of interest here.
  
  
• The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff by Theodore Sturgeon. This novella is probably the strongest entry in the book. Again it bordered more on fantasy than SF, but it was actually centered on a whole series of complex relationships, and kept me interested as a result. Not enough to re-read it, but it was OK.
  
  
• Sandra by George P. Elliott. I have no idea why this was included in a volume of SF. I'd call it an alternate history piece, I guess. The central idea is that slavery still exists (the time of the story is not specified, nor is it easy to determine from context) and the main character presents in writing the development of the relationship with his female slave. I found the entire thing pointless and offensive.
  
  
• Beyond Space And Time by Joel Townsley Rogers. A travesty of a hard SF story. I'd never heard of Joel Townsley Rogers before reading this, and I hope I never hear of him again. A quick google search tells me that he was prolific. I'll continue to avoid him, and if you're ever offered the chance to read this short story, don't bother. It's the worst of the lot in this book.
  
  
• The Martian Crown Jewels by Poul Anderson. A rather predictable pseudo-locked room mystery set in the future and involving space travel. Yawn.
  
  
• The Weapon Shops Of Isher by A. E. van Vogt. An oddball novella with some appeal, but I found it slow going for reasons I am not entirely sure I understand. There are a few interrelated plot lines and a reasonably well fleshed out universe, but something seemed lacking.

And there you have it. Many of the giants of SF have pieces in this collection, and my impression is mostly not good. To be honest, the editor states that he was trying to "get together a great deal of good reading in modern (1938-1950) s.f. which had been overlooked by earlier anthologists". I suggest there is a reason these works were overlooked.

As a sociological study, however, there is a tiny bit of interest here. Female characters are scarce and female leads are even less common, everyone smokes, and the predictions for the future are mostly lame. None of those is a good reason to read this volume - or these works in other locations - but if you were making a study of just how far wrong SF can go, this might be an interesting place to start.

All Things Bright And Beautiful, James Herriot

Title:		All Things Bright And Beautiful
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:

A short review here. All Things Bright And Beautiful is just as good as All Creatures Great And Small. The writing is wonderful and the stories uplifting, even when they are addressing something sad.

If you haven't read these books, you should. There's a reason they were best sellers.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Sarah Vowell

Title:		The Partly Cloudy Patriot
Author:		Sarah Vowell
Rating:

After completing the previous thousand page monster - A Storm Of Swords - I desperately needed a change of pace, so I made sure that I got one when I next dipped into my TBR pile. The Partly Cloudy Patriot is a collection of essays and articles written by Sarah Vowell. I'd originally planned on reading one or two at a sitting, but instead I gulped the whole book down in a single day, and probably avoided a lot of things I should have been doing as a result.

In a nutshell, I like Sarah Vowell. Her politics is probably close to my own. Her simple and honest atheism is an attraction. Her writing is can be funny or serious or persuasive and is great to read. I cannot claim to be a history buff, but I find reading about her history fetish interesting. I think what I find most refreshing, though, is her open embrace of complexity, and even hypocrisy. Almost nothing in the world of human relations is simply black or white. It's all shades of gray, and in these essays Vowell clearly acknowledges that. At times she almost revels in it.

Vowell writes in an approachable and fun style, but she can be serious when needed. Not all of the essays in here work as well as they might; some are better than others. But most are good or very good, and some, like the the title essay - written shortly after 9/11 - are great. I'd like to share a couple of quotes, just to bring home the nature of what she does.

From The First Thanksgiving: When I invited my mom and dad to come to New York City to have Thanksgiving at my house, I never expected them to say yes. Not only had they never been to New York, they had never been east of the Mississippi. Nor had they ever visited me. I've always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I'm here to tell you that dreams really do come true.

From The Partly Cloudy Patriot: The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.

Also From The Partly Cloudy Patriot: I will say that, in September [2001, after 9/11], atheism was a lonely creed. Not because atheists have no god to turn to, but because everyone else forgot about us.

I think from those quotes you can see both the humor and the seriousness of her work. These essays are worth reading, and I hope Sarah Vowell keeps on writing for a long, long time. It's nice to have someone of about my age write like this and make points I think are funny, important, or both.

A Storm Of Swords, George R. R. Martin

Title:		A Storm Of Swords
Author:		George R. R. Martin
Rating:

What to say about A Storm Of Swords?

Well, to start off with, it's big. Really big. Huge. Immense. Massive. You could stun an ox with this hunk of dead tree. The problem with this bigness, however, is that Martin desperately needs an editor. At least partly as a result of that I am growing less and less thrilled with his story telling as A Song Of Ice And Fire slogs along. Oh, and did I mention that it's big?

What else can I tell you without giving things away?

Well, as I have said before - in my reviews of previous volumes in this saga - Martin is willing to kill off characters you've come to know. Characters you've bonded with over thousands (literally) of pages of text. It's more than a bit disconcerting to have that happen and yet know that the story is still going to go on for thousands more pages.

Yes, this willingness to knock off anyone amounts to a more "real" take on fantasy literature, but it is hard on the reader. And that's the place where - for my money - Martin falls down a bit on the job. Perhaps he only falls to one knee or some such, but he does stumble. You see, his story telling doesn't fit any of the normal patterns - hero defeats villain, hero dies trying, etc. Instead we follow an enormous cast of characters through an outrageously complicated series of events. We need notes to track everyone involved and what they've done (and said) to whom. And we cannot assume that any given character is a hero, villain, or even that he or she will be alive at the end of the chapter we're reading. Not having a clue about who to root for causes me some discomfort after something like 2400 pages of text.

Martin's prose is fine. Not stellar, but fine. His character development is, a bit, well... prolonged. And this is where he needs the aforementioned editor. There are entire chapters that could be replaced by single paragraphs. I love and respect good character development, but Martin does it to such an extent that I wind up wishing for him to get back to the plot. An entire chapter can often be summarized in 2 or 3 simple sentences. True it wouldn't be quite as good a read in summary form, but if it were a couple of paragraphs (or even a couple of pages) it would often be just fine.

I'll read the next tome - A Feast For Crows - but I'm getting less patient with both Martin's tendency to excess verbiage and his odd narrative structure, completely lacking in even semi-well defined heroes and villains. I don't promise to read the entire series as it is finished. I may have more important things to do.

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Title:		Slaughterhouse-Five
Author:		Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rating:

I continue not to understand (or possibly appreciate) Kurt Vonnegut. I really enjoyed Cat's Cradle, but thus far nothing else of his has worked for me. Slaughterhouse-Five is the latest case in point.

I know it's a classic piece of science fiction, but I just don't get it. It's not funny. The characters aren't well developed. The prose is simple to the point of monotony. I'm writing like Vonnegut now. Ugh.

The front cover of my copy has the following gushing review on it:

Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.
- The Boston Globe

I didn't feel much poignancy here, and I never even cracked a smile, let alone found anything "hilarious". Compassion? Maybe, but not for his characters. They're all cardboard cutouts. And that "thundering moral statement"? Ummm... war is bad. Yeah. That's deep. Maybe that moral would have meant more if I'd cared about any of the characters in the story.

The best thing about this book was the first chapter, which was really an introduction that explains (in some measure) that at least parts of the book are true and autobiographical. I appreciated that far more than the rest of the content.

Oh well. I have a few more Vonnegut works in my TBR pile. I wonder how they will fare?

The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins

Title:		The God Delusion
Author:		Richard Dawkins
Rating:

Some time back I reviewed a book by Sam Harris - Letter To A Christian Nation - a cry for change in our nation. Among other things, it discusses how atheists are treated and begs for improvement.

Dawkins has a different agenda in The God Delusion. In it he sets out to disprove the existence of god to the best of anyone's ability, to show the places that we give religion undue respect, and to debunk the case for it's underlying necessity in our daily lives. I think he succeeds admirably, and in the process he centralizes and summarizes a lot of good arguments that atheists have made over the years. I'm sorry to report, however, that despite Dawkins's extensive and well researched efforts, not everyone will be persuaded.

I've been in an email conversation with a friend (John) about religion, faith, and related topics for months. He and I read The God Delusion at the same time, and at least in the case of John, Dawkins didn't get a convert. I don't fully understand it, but I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I cannot understand it. Let me try to explain.

For me, the single most important human quality is reason. Without it we're merely a collection of animal instincts stuck together in an ungainly body, the current product of an ongoing evolutionary process that is clearly not directed or controlled. But reason is something wonderful. It's a product of evolution, of course, but it is an amazing ability. With it we can do things no other species we know of can even contemplate. We can build complex tools to learn more about our world and expand upon our limited senses. We can inquire into the nature of the world around us, and refine our models of how and why it works to a degree no other creature on this planet can envision.

From the weird realm of quantum mechanics, to the 14 billion (give or take) year old universe, to the millions of light years that separate galaxies, to the nature of light itself, things that are not accessible to our senses have been teased apart and understood in ways that religion cannot and could never approach. The universe is an amazing place, full of unexpected things, chances to learn, and opportunities to use our reason to unravel the mysteries of why and how things happen. Science is the method, driven by reason and curiosity, that opens these vistas to us. There is nothing else - no other "way of knowing" - that even comes close to science as a vehicle for understanding.

Now take even a moderate religious believer like John. For him, there comes a point where faith cuts in. A point where, despite evidence, reason, logic and all the things make humans so unique on this planet - the very things that keep us from living as bands of hunter-gatherers in the jungle - he sets aside all that to say "God did this."

I must respectfully - and with great bewilderment at the faith John and others espouse - disagree.

There is no evidence for god. None. Oh some claim they've proved he exists. They haven't, and Dawkins explains why. Some claim they've experienced revelation directly, but they don't understand just how odd and fragile the human brain is, and the amazing things it can be made to do under the right circumstances. Revelation fails to impress, and again, Dawkins explains why. Others demand that religion must be true because it is a civilizing force, that our morals come from it, and therefore it has power. Dawkins shows the fallacy of those arguments as well. Dawkins also asks the obvious question: why does the believer never ask where this god came from? Who or what created him? Isn't this god at least as unlikely as the universe it supposedly created? In fact, as Dawkins points out, he's even less likely.

After years of reflection and discussion with others - including many of faith - it's become obvious there is nothing supernatural in the world; no god or gods created us. Dawkins nicely collects and summarizes much of the information I've used to come to that point of view, and he pushes some of the conclusions a bit farther than I had on my own.

Don't get me wrong. Assuredly there are natural things that we don't yet understand and haven't yet encountered, but to assert there is some special force/presence/power/energy/spirit (or whatever you want to call it) in the universe that is somehow outside of human experience, well, that's just making up stories.

I know someone who had imaginary friends when she was a child. She talked to them; they followed behind when her family went somewhere in the car. They had names and behaviors and all kinds of specific qualities. But over time she outgrew them. As a youngster they were very real, but as she aged she realized they weren't there and the game ended. If it hadn't ended she'd be called mentally ill and treated for the condition. Deservedly so.

Religion - or any belief in the supernatural for that matter, be it god, ghosts or astrology or auras or whatever you like - is that same kind of childhood fantasy, but still present long after it should have been outgrown. And formal religion is the most pernicious case of all. Thanks to a set of deeply rooted cultural expectations I - and everyone else - must show religion all kinds of extra respect that we don't have to show towards similar beliefs. Criticize astrology and few will mind. Criticize Islam or Christianity and you're (possibly literally) taking your life into your hands.

And faith - the ability to discard reason for the invisible man in the sky - there I just cannot go. John has that kind of faith. He's not a biblical literalist, thankfully, and in fact I'm not exactly sure what religion he would claim to follow. Perhaps he isn't sure himself. But strip away the garb of any religion and you get to the same point, a place where the believer says "I accept X on faith alone" or (even worse in my mind) "I deny X, despite all the evidence in favor of it, because my faith requires that I deny it". This is the thing that I cannot comprehend, the gulf I cannot cross: the denial of reason and evidence for an unfounded and false belief.

I've tried to understand it over the years. I've talked to believers of various sorts and asked all kinds of questions, framing things in different ways trying to find the limits of their faith, or learn why and how they believe what they do. In the end I always come away lost. For me, there is nothing that I know - or think I know - that isn't subject to revision and correction. Reproducible evidence from a reputable source is all I ask and I'll stop believing in X and start believing in Y. John - and apparently 95% of the population of the US - doesn't feel that way. For them there are simply some truths - given to them via scripture or revelation or trained into them by their parents and their religious leaders - that simply cannot be questioned. To my mind that denies humanity's best and most precious attribute: reason.

Dawkins has to admit the same puzzlement that I do in dealings with the truly faithful so he cannot end that confusion. But he does well on everything else in this volume. The God Delusion is an excellent resource if you wind up in discussions about religion. Dawkins is very well read - on both sides of the issue - and quotes from all kinds of sources regularly. His logic is impeccable, and his writing approachable. This isn't a dense, scholarly tome. Instead it's a fun and sometimes funny book that happens to discuss a serious topic, one that has been without effective criticism far too long.

And at the end he provides a hefty bibliography and a list of organizations that people looking for help in escaping religion can turn to. If you're one of those whose faith is wavering or who is wondering about the value of the religion you were taught, please read this book. There is a lot of real value in here, and the honesty with which is is presented is refreshing.

This is a powerful book. But it's not a call to arms. It's not asking atheists to rise up in open rebellion in the streets. Dawkins is a very good scientist, and he makes his case clearly and logically. It's for the rest of us - those who share his view of the world - to determine how we will act. As it should be.

All Creatures Great And Small, James Herriot

Title:		All Creatures Great And Small
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:

Call me a sentimental old fool, but I love this book. All Creatures Great And Small was the first book by James Herriot. It's a memoir of his first couple of years working as a veterinary surgeon in Yorkshire. It's also wonderful reading, plain and simple.

It's easy to look up James Herriot and find out that it was the pen name of James Alfred (Alf) Wight. You can find out a lot about his life and times if you spend even a moment or two looking. The Wikipedia entry seems pretty good, http://www.jamesherriot.org/ is available, and there are probably many other places to look as well.

But the real wonder here is the book itself. These short tales - some sad, some happy, some touching - grab the reader and simply will not let go. I last read this book over twenty years ago and it turns out I remembered far more of it than I thought possible. The author's love of the countryside, his patients, partners, and clients shines through. Every fifth page makes me laugh, cry, or giggle out loud, so for me, reading this alone is probably best.

If I ever manage to take up writing in a more serious way, I hope whatever I produce results in even one tenth of the reaction I have to All Creatures Great And Small.

If you need a reason to smile, or a refresher on some of the good things in life, pick up a copy of this book. You won't be sorry you did.