Category: book-reviews

Last spring, I was taking a look at what I'd been reading recently. I read a lot of novels. Reading a novel seems to be my default state. I read a lot of science fiction, some crime novels, some historical fiction, some "straight" fiction (whatever that really is). But what I noticed was that the authors I tend to read skew very male. I decided I needed to do something about that, if only because I was probably missing some great stuff. So for six months I decided to read only novels written by women.

And I was right! I was missing some great stuff. I read about 60 novels in those six months, and discovered some amazing things that I really wish I'd known about before. Here are a few of the stand-outs.

by Eric Schlosser

My reading list recently has been chock-full of light-hearted and mood-lifting material: some Irvine Welsh novels (always guaranteed to shed a gentle light on all that's best about the human condition), a long book about clinical depression, M. R. Carey's interesting sort-of-zombie apocalypse/extreme mycology novel, The Girl With All The Gifts, de Becker's The Gift Of Fear, a book all about fear and violence, and Piper Kerman's prison memoir, Orange Is The New Black (which did spoil the mood a little having a few sparks of hope in among the gloom).

Among all this bleakness and blackness, Command and Control somehow manages to stand out as a particularly grim monument to human folly and our collective crimes against all sense and reason. It's a book about nuclear weapons, so it never really had much chance of being too jolly, but even so, Schlosser's decision to focus in parallel on US nuclear doctrine and nuclear weapons safety makes for some horrifying reading. It's something of a mystery how we made it through the Cold War without either a "hot" war or at least some sort of unintended detonation of a nuclear weapon.

Second round of "many books"...

I've been doing quite a bit of reading lately, so I have 28 novels to review! All but one are from series of novels, so that's not quite as daunting as it sounds. Still, I'll split this into two posts to make it manageable.

by Robert Harris; Laurent Binet & Sam Taylor

These two books are tied together by the name of Reinhard Heydrich. I can't think of a polite way of describing Heydrich. He was one of the architects of the Holocaust, a fervid Nazi, and an all-round total bastard. Hitler called him "the man with the iron heart", which gives you some kind of idea of what kind of a git he was.

In the real world, Heydrich dies in 1942 from injuries sustained during an assassination attempt by Czech and Slovak commandos while he was "Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia". In the world of Fatherland, he survives, the Germans win the Second World War and Europe languishes under Nazi rule, with a sympathetic administration in the USA led by Kennedy (père rather than fils) providing no effective check on their activities. Heydrich continues in his role as second-in-command of the SS and goes on being as much as a bastard as ever.

by Gerald Jay Sussman & Jack Wisdom (with Will Farr)

This book follows very much in the mould of Sussman & Wisdom's Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics in that it's an attempt to take a body of mathematics (differential geometry here, classical mechanics in SICM) and to "computationalise" it, i.e. to use computer programs to make the mathematical structures involved manifest in a way that a more traditional approach to these subjects doesn't.

This computational viewpoint is a very powerful one to adopt, for a number of reasons.

by Douglas Hoftstadter

I first read GEB about 25 years ago, as far as I can remember. I'm not sure how much I took from it then (I was about 16 years old and knew a little bit of maths, but it was my first exposure to logic and the theory of computation), although I do remember the dialogues and all the wonderful Escher pictures.

I picked up a copy again recently as a result of reading an interview with Hofstadter in The Atlantic. The book has aged really well, with just a few technological fossils from the 1970s (record players playing records that they cannot play, for instance). Hofstadter has a timeless and almost overwhelmingly fecund imagination, bubbling over with novel ideas that seem to pop up from nowhere. His description of the thought process that led to the construction of one of the dialogues (each of which is modelled on a piece of Bach's music and attempts to explore questions of linguistics or metamathematics on a number of levels at once) gives an impression of a mind of almost obsessional twistiness, trying to pack as many ideas as possible into the smallest possible amount of text using puns, structure and patterns at all available levels. It's quite wonderful.

I've read a couple of books about North Korea recently, neither of which were much fun. The first was Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. This was interesting partially for the "arm's length" approach that Demick had to take -- the only North Koreans she could find to talk to were escapees from the Kim regime living in the US or South Korea. Despite those limitations, Demick does a good job (as far as I can tell) of portraying the day-to-day challenges of life in North Korea. The most striking thing? The pettiness of the regime: the megalomania and the monuments to Kim père et fils is one thing, but the Songbun system of what sociologists call "ascribed status" is almost biblical in its horror. So your grandfather found himself on the wrong side of the border at the end of the Korean War? Tough luck, sister, you're on the Dear Leader's shit list. Three generations dumped into the "hostile class". Fuck yeah. I'd be hostile too. No opportunities for employment, constant suspicion from the authorities and the stooges they recruit from the population (who can blame anyone for what they do in that sort of environment? any one of us would probably end up being a stooge too if we could -- choice is a luxury in North Korea), and the constant fear of incarceration for one misspoken word. And all the while, the Kims live in luxury and mismanage the country into famine and destitution. Demick's description of the kochebi, "wandering swallows", homeless orphans whose parents had died in the famine of the 1990s, is depressing as hell.

by Peter Seibel

I like the premise of this book -- find some of the best programmers out there and talk to them about their craft (or art, or science, if you prefer). First thing to say though, is that the list of interviewees tells you something about the state of the computing industry today: out of fifteen people interviewed, only one is a woman. Of the other fourteen, all of them are white men. You can argue that most of these people are pretty senior and are mostly more a product of the culture of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s than now, but still. I'll come back to this in a minute, because it turns out that the interview with the sole woman, Fran Allen, was one of the most interesting.

by Nils Nilsson

Nils Nilsson has been involved in artificial intelligence research more or less since the inception of the field in the late 1950s. (He's probably best known for his work on Shakey the robot, A* search, and his idea of teleo-reactive planning.) This makes him ideally placed to write a history of artificial intelligence.

by Ian Cobain

It used to be that there was a tiny splinter of a fragment of me that was proud to be British. Tolerance, fair play, all that nonsense. Glossing over Blighty's imperial adventures, surely we could be just a little proud of the legacy of our great nation? Nothing jingoistic, of course, just a low-key sort of inoffensive smugness.

That splinter of a fragment had been feeling a bit dull and lustreless for a while now. We had Afghanistan, Iraq and associated war crimes, the "War on Terror" (a.k.a. Bash A Brown Person For Britain), all the NSA/GCHQ spying revelations, and on and on it went. And of course Tony Blair isn't rotting in a cell in The Hague which, if you ever needed another one, is a glaring signal that whatever justice there is in the world, it never intrudes into the worlds of the "great" and the "good".

And then I read Cruel Britannia. Oh jolly day.

by Harry Connolly

Child of Fire, Game of Cages, Circle of Enemies

I have a bit of a science fiction and fantasy habit. If you read a lot of SF&F, it can be hard to find the diamonds among the dross. For some reason, the sub-genre usually called urban fantasy has more than its fair share of dross, which made it a pleasant surprise to discover Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces series. These three novels (plus a more recently published prequel) hit a lot of the usual urban fantasy tropes (fairly violent, noirish characters, magic that isn't all ponies and rainbows, a "world behind the world") but it confounds a lot of others in ways that make it anything but dross.

All of which makes it hard to understand why these books haven't been much more successful than they have, and why Connolly has had to abandon the series for the moment to concentrate on other things. From what he says, his publisher (Del Rey) was unfailingly supportive, but the market just doesn't seem to like what he was writing. He wrote a long blog article about why this might be, but it makes little sense -- the most common complaints about the series are about the things that make it interesting and different!

by Octavia Butler

Dawn, Adulthood Rites & Imago

I think I remember reading part of one of these books when I was very much younger. I don't remember getting a lot out of it, so I'm very glad that I reread them again now. There's a lot to think about here.

by Francis Spufford

How do you make a book about central economic planning in the Soviet Union into an entertaining page-turner? You do what Francis Spufford did with Red Plenty, a book that is almost impossible to classify, a mix of fact and fiction and dramatised might-have-beens, plausible if not quite verisimilitudinous narratives populated by a melange of real historical personages and imagined characters.

A couple of more substantial (in length) books I read over Christmas were Neal Stephenson's latest and the first of Tim Powers' Fisher King series. I liked them both.

After the rather dreary spy novels, time for something a bit more fluffy.

I did a spot of reading over the Christmas and New Year holidays. In fact, reading was more or less all I did. Apart from walking the dog, spending time with Rita and eating myself silly. I read enough to write a lot of book review posts, but I'll restrain myself to three or so... First off, spy stories.

by John Bradshaw

Those of us who live with small furry friends have a vested interest in understanding what our beasties are thinking. They don't talk, they won't use SurveyMonkey, and they sometimes act like they're not human at all, no matter how we might like to think of them as little people in dog costumes. But never fear. There is a whole industry out there that promises to help you interpret your dog's slightest ear flick and nose twitch, that will allow you to correct all "undesirable" canine behaviours back to the acceptable human norms, that will turn you into a veritable Dr. Dolittle.

Just one little problem. Most of what you read is wrong, and quite a lot of it is harmful. Dominate your dog! Tame the wolf in your home! Show your pooch who's boss! All complete crap, based on romantic story-telling and what makes good TV, rather than on decent science.

In In Defence Of Dogs, John Bradshaw, a researcher in canine behaviour at the University of Bristol (although he has appeared on TV, including The Colbert Report!) presents some of the recent thinking on dog behaviour, based on, of all things, scientific research.

by Mark Kac & Stanislaw Ulam

This interesting little book, published in 1968, is the result of a collaboration between two of the great figures of 20th century mathematics. Although known mostly for his work on the Manhattan Project and later associated applied mathematics efforts (I first learnt of his work after being told to read about the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem by my PhD supervisor), Ulam began his career as a pure mathematician, working on problems in general topology. (His autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician, is well worth a read.) Kac, best known for asking "Can one hear the shape of a drum?", made major contributions to probability theory. Kac and Ulam got to know each other in Poland, then both made the move to the United States during the Second World War.

by Roger S. Bivand, Edzer J. Pebesma & Virgilio Gómez-Rubio

I recently had to do a bunch of geostatistical analysis on some climate data (to be specific, using universal kriging to interpolate a time series of solar radiation data covering the region I'm working on to a different grid). I started off trying to use the geostatistical analysis toolbox in ArcGIS, which works fine as far as it goes, but seems to be very difficult indeed to access via ArcGIS's Python scripting interface. Since I had 36 years of daily data to process, doing it by hand was not an option.

by China Miéville

Can you unsee? Can you unhear? If I ask you not to think of a tiny green rhinoceros wearing a straw hat, can you do it?