The Matchbox that ate a Forty-Ton Truck - Marcus Chown

Originally linked off of BoingBoing, I think this is the best physics book for non-physicists that I've ever read. Chown takes a really nice approach - picking something in the everyday world that you've probably noticed, and maybe wondered about, maybe not, and then linking it to some aspect of physics which we don't have any intuition about. For example, he points out that if you look out the window you can see your own faint reflection in the glass, as well as what's outside the window - because quantum effects are random, and some photons are randomly being reflected by the glass while others pass through. If the world were totally deterministic, then they would all either get reflected, or pass through, but it isn't - it's quantum, and the quantum world is dominated by probabilities.

It isn't all quantum physics. He throws in a lot of information about elementary particles, strong and weak nuclear force, the big bang, and finishes off with aliens. His style of constantly relating unfamiliar things back to the familiar really makes this book easy to read, and not get totally lost in like many popular physics books. Additionally the fact that each chapter stands alone means there's less chance of getting stuck on a concept and having to give up. It is written at a level that anyone with a high school physics education could read it (I think), but there were only a couple times where I felt irritated by unnecessary levels of detail. If you've got a degree in astronomy or particle physics, this would probably be boring, but I really felt like I learned something. There wasn't a lot that I hadn't seen before, but it was put together in a way that was interesting, and helped me make a lot of new connections.

So, if you like popular physics books, I think you'll love this one. If you're scared of popular physics books, you'll probably still really enjoy it. Chown manages to simplify some really difficult concepts without oversimplifying, and communicate them in a really engaging way. I definitely want to acquire a copy of this book if only to lend it around to everyone.

Fool's Run - Patricia McKillip

I love Patricia McKillip and I've read most of her fantasy novels, but this is the first SF novel of her's that I've encountered. I wasn't actually aware she had written any SF, and while it is certainly SF rather than fantasy, it has a lot more in common with her fantasy novels than with most other SF. Which is to say that her very unique voice plays just as well with space opera as with fairies. Not that this is space opera. I could totally see this same story, or a variant on it, working quite nicely in a fantasy setting, but there are so many elements to it that benefit from being set in a far-future society.

It is a story, set mostly on earth, or in near-earth orbit, of a band called Nova who get contracted to play a gig on "The Underworld", a prison colony orbiting the earth, which is going to be their ticket to fame and fortune. The Magician is the leader of the band, very interested in old-fashioned music, and slightly psychic. The Queen of Hearts is their 'cuber', cubes being a fancy new sort of drum incorporating some interesting visual effects, who is very obviously an enigma, and who subs in for their regular cuber at the last minute. The mystery of her past is unveiled as they reach the Underworld, and she is linked with the prisoner, Terra Viridian, who killed 1500 people 7 years ago for absolutely no reason.

There's a lot of psychic occurrences which give this the feel of a fantasy set in space. People acting on hunches, events converging, odd coincidences which may or may not be coincidental. But there are bits here and there that really benefit from the future tech. The instruments played by the band members are fabulous, as are the visual effects they use on stage. I don't know any other author who could possibly get you to imagine the sound and light show. The access system for the Underworld is quite futuristic and adds a lot. Radio communications is also really vital to the plot - being able to have people in physical different locations but communicating with each other in a semi-public fashion isn't something you can manage easily in a fantasy setting. So this isn't just a fantasy novel set in space, it really uses the technology, but it still manages to feel more like fantasy than SF.

A lovely story, like all of McKillip's other books it actually lets me see the world she's describing and in this particular case, hear it too.

Thomas the Rhymer - Ellen Kushner

Reviewed by Jo Walton over on Tor.com. This is a retelling of the fairy tale of True Thomas, and it is just beautiful. It is set in the past - Scotland in the 1300s - and the story is told in four voices. First we have Gavin, an old farmer, telling us about Thomas, the brash young harper who has wandered into Gavin's heart and home on his travels. Then Thomas continues the story as he is taken into Fairyland and lives there for 7 years as the consort of the Queen of Fairyland. Then Meg, Gavin's wife, takes up the tale when Thomas returns from Fairyland and tries to learn how to live life as a man again. Finally we have Elspeth, in love with Thomas before he vanished, and coming to love him again on his return - although this isn't easy as they have both been changed by the passage of time and the events of life, telling the tale of his life as a man unable to lie - and with the ability to see into the future.

The story is beautiful, and the style in which it is told is just wonderful. I love that it doesn't end with Thomas returning from Fairyland, and that the world has not stood still while he was away. People have changed, and Thomas has changed, and adjusting to these changes is not easy for anyone. Elspeth certainly didn't sit around waiting for Thomas to come home. Gavin has a great deal of trouble accepting that Thomas has been in Fairyland and isn't simply making up a new story. The personalities of the four main characters are wonderful, and having them each narrate different portions of the story is wonderful. You get to know each of them, but without the discontinuity of changing narrators every chapter as most stories would do. Thomas's adventures in Fairyland are also fascinating, but not quite as compelling as the rest of the story, however the song he writes while he is there is fabulous.

A Primate's Memoir - Robert Sapolsky

This book is a lot of things all at once. It is the story of the time Robert Sapolsky spent in Africa studying a troupe of baboons (several months a year, over many many years), the story of how he grows up as a person and as a scientist, and it is the story of how a scientist can get so absorbed in a particular problem that they really can't see it from the outside anymore.

Yet another recommendation from Jo Walton's Tor.com blog. In fact, I don't think I could possibly write a better summary of it than she has. Especially what she has to say about the way he writes about animals and people.

I especially enjoyed learning what it is like to do this sort of research, where you spend months in the field, in very different conditions than your normal life, and then head back home to the lab again. Towards the end of the book many of the local baboons are getting sick, and there's a real mystery that Sapolsky has to solve - how are they getting sick and what needs to be done to stop it. He solves the mystery - figures out exactly where the illness is coming from. It isn't curable, but it is definitely preventable - except that in order to prevent it from spreading involves some local politics. There are some folks involved in totally illegal dealings who are making a lot of money, and incidentally making the baboons very sick. He is quite ready to point a finger at everything that's going on, to him the baboons are every bit as important as any individual human being, and yet when he goes to folks higher up, they are very reluctant to do anything about the situation. I was so involved in the story that I was every bit as incensed as he was that these scams were allowed to continue and endanger innocent lives...and then eventually things are explained fully. The ramifications of getting certain people into trouble on the whole park system and all the efforts at conservation that were going on. Simply heading to the authorities and solving this particular problem might help these specific baboons right now, but in the long run would probably hurt them, and would definitely hurt the overall conservation efforts, the park system, access to these areas for scientists. As a scientist you get really stuck in your little corner, working on your particular problem, and it is really easy to stop looking at the rest of the world. If you let yourself become too distracted you won't make any progress on your own work, but every so often you do have to take that step back and realize that there's a much bigger picture, that everyone has to deal with politics at some level, and that no matter how important what you're working on is, other things are important too. Some of them so important that you've just been taking them for granted.

This is a brilliant story. Sapolsky writes beautifully and the prose just flows. But at the same time as entertaining, he also manages to teach you a lot - about baboons, about being a scientist, about life in Africa, and about respect for people in general. This is a book I'd love to own, just to pass it around to everyone I know.

A Matter of Magic - Patricia C. Wrede

No idea where I read the review for this anymore, but the combination of a Regency setting, magic, and a young female heroine disguised as a boy on the streets of London sounded totally charming. And it was.

Kim is a street thief when she gets hired to search the wagon of Mairelon the Magician. He turns out to be an actual magician, rather than just a street performer, and convinces Kim that she should be working for him. She is incredibly drawn to Mairelon, at first to the lifestyle he is offering (meals! a safe place to sleep! warm clothes!) but then to Mairelon himself. The story feels very much like the Georgette Heyer Regency Romance novels I read a while back, but with lots of fun street slang to figure out.

One thing I especially liked about this was the relationship between Kim & Mairelon. There's obviously lots of suspicion initially, she's breaking into his caravan, he's offering her something that seems way too good to be true, but they both obviously really like each other, and enjoy one another's company. There aren't a whole lot of stupid miscommunications, and when confronted with things, they are open and honest. As usual, I just love reading a book where I'm not constantly wanting to smack one character or another upside the head.

Final note, the cover art is totally gorgeous. I'd love to have this as a full-sized poster. Or possibly I just want the dress she's wearing.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend

Cory Doctorow wrote about this series on BoingBoing, and the concept intrigued me. Adrian Mole is aging at the same rate as Cory...and just a bit older than myself. Cory's been reading them since they first came out, and I suspect this book in particular probably appeals to a 13 year old boy far more than it does to me, but I'm still inclined to keep reading even though I didn't find this story quite as compelling as Cory evidently did.

Townsend's gift is to make you choke with laughter and tears at once, to create a nebbishy antihero who is both terrible and lovable, and to torture him mercilessly for our benefit and edification.

This is the sort of comment that I read and think "Yes, this sounds fabulous" and then I start reading and realize that in fact, I don't really like anti-heros, and it bothers me when they are tortured unnecessarily, especially when they are the ones doing the stupid things and not realizing it. But I think that the reason I don't enjoy it might be the same reason that I had trouble enjoying Seinfeld - I hadn't realized that Seinfeld was supposed to be satire (they're charicatures, not characters), and this is supposed to be humor, not torture. We're encouraged to laugh at Adrian when he's being stupid, and to enjoy watching him do the occasional non-stupid thing. I do have a lot of difficulty watching people do stupid things, I find it incredibly irritating, and yet there's a really loveable side to Adrian which mostly you just get to see through other people's reactions to him.

The story is written as his private diary, and he really comes off as insufferable at first. He's a teenage boy and definitely sees himself as the center of the universe, as well as way more intelligent than anyone else out there. He sure doesn't cut his parents any slack initially, but then as the story goes on, you realize that they definitely don't deserve it. He's laughably oblivious to the things going on in their lives, as children should be, but then he's forced to deal with the fact that neither of his parents actually have their lives together yet. His descriptions of his mother's interactions with the next-door-neighbor, Mr. Lucas, as the Lucases are going through their divorce, are totally hilarious because you can see exactly where this whole thing is headed, even though Adrian can't. His parents separation and his mother's descent into total self-indulgence is quite funny, mostly because of everyone else's reactions to it. Even though her behaviour is absolutely atrocious, it very clearly doesn't scar Adrian the way you might imagine if you were reading this story from any viewpoint other than his personal diary.

Adrian joins a club which is supposed to help the elderly for some very selfish reasons of his own, and yet once he gets used to Bert, his assigned person, it becomes clear that Adrian is actually an incredibly caring and unselfish person. He can be very self-aggrandizing when he wants to, and when he thinks it is going to get him attention or praise, but put him in a situation where someone is in need and he is able to help - and he just jumps right in and helps. For me, this was the turning point, once I saw how much Bert obviously liked Adrian, it became clear that Adrian wasn't just a stupid little kid who deserved my scorn...he just liked to think of himself that way.

And then there's Adrian's girlfriend, Pandora. She starts out dating his best friend Nigel (even though Nigel knows that Adrian likes her!), and then some other guy, but finally winds up with Adrian, and actually stays with Adrian for much longer than you might expect, especially considering that he got her deodorant as a Christmas present. The phone bills the two of them manage to rack up are quite hilarious.

On the whole, definitely not the sort of book I usually read, I did enjoy it (once I managed to start liking Adrian rather than just being irritated by him), and I think I might have a slightly easier time with it as Adrian gets older.

Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman

I've been a big fan of Neil Gaiman ever since Matt lent me the Sandman series back in undergrad. I don't remember when I started reading his journal regularly, but I've been reading it for many years now, and it is just awesome because I get to find out when all his new stuff is coming out. And that can be tricky, because he doesn't just stick to one genre or age category. Mostly I love everything I've read - a few of his short stories I haven't quite puzzled out yet, and some of his earlier stuff is a bit too dark for me, but I always enjoy it.

Anansi Boys is one of my favorites. It has scary bits, but there are lots of lighthearted and fun bits to balance those out. There's a lot of depth, and much to think about, but you don't need a serious background in comparative mythology to puzzle out who all the characters are, there is more than enough background material included in the book for everything to make sense. I suspect that a deeper understanding of African mythology would make the book even more interesting, but it isn't necessary.

Fat Charlie Nancy is living a totally unremarkable, and rather boring life. He has a boring little flat in London, a boring little fiancee who only started dating him because her mother disliked him so intently, and and extraordinarily boring little job. Fat Charlie is enjoying his boring little life, and fantasizing about how wonderful things will be once he and Rosie actually get married, right up until the day his irascible and thoroughly embarrassing father manages to die in the most embarrassing way imaginable (at least to Charlie), and is revealed to have been not just any old man, but in fact Anansi, the trickster god of African & Caribbean mythology. Also, Charlie discovers that he has a brother, Spider. Spider is the exact opposite of Charlie. Spider has no fear of social situations, and commonly has a string of women dangling off of him. He doesn't have a job, but he does have lots of money, and he appears to have inherited all of their father's magic. Spider waltzes right into Charlie's life, moves into his spare room, steals his fiancee, ruins his job, and lands him in jail. Charlie attempts to retaliate, bungles things horribly (with the help of some little old ladies who really were trying to help), and they both wind up on the run for their lives from some supernatural beings who are well and truly pissed off with Anansi. And don't mind taking this out on his sons. Charlie and Spider team up and eventually manage to overcome the supernatural threat to themselves, and then sort out the rest of the situation. In the process Charlie learns a lot about himself and all the things he has been repressing because of who his father was. It is a fabulous and hilarious adventure as well as a wonderful story about the power of stories.

Ultimately though, I think this is a coming of age story. But not a teenage story, it is the coming of age of people who already thought they had found their place in the world - except that it was the place they had wound up as a result of their parents, their community, and their own fears. It is about bursting free of artificial confines and becoming the person you actually want to be, deep down, doing the things that make you feel most alive, even if they scare you sometimes. It's about not letting yourself be defined by the bad things that have happened to you, and letting yourself love people, even if you don't always like them.

The story is wonderful. Lots of action, lots of insanity, wonderful little bits of magic. A lime. Fabulous characters. This is one that I will read over and over again, like going to visit an old friend.