Leviathan - Scott Westerfeld

I would have inhaled this in a single sitting if I could have. Unfortunately there was a small girl who needed my attention and I had to put the book down.

I was a bit nervous when I picked this up, as it is quite thick, but it is actually a very quick read. The story flows nicely, and part of the bulk is due to think paper and gorgeous illustrations. Westerfeld commissioned the artwork himself which gave him much more control than authors usually have with this sort of thing. The illustrations really add to the story, it is an alternate history where you have 'Clankers' (who make really big, clanky, steampunk machines) and 'Darwinists' (who have taken genetic engineering in some really crazy directions) and both are far more understandable with the illustrations than they would be otherwise.

The other thing I loved about this was the two main characters. They are both children who are forced into adult situations. This is done very believably, and I think most kids would be able to empathize with them. The setting is quite interesting on its own, but the book is action-packed and easy to read (which is possibly why I like YA so much).

I've enjoyed all the books by Scott Westerfeld that I've read, but I think this is my favorite so far. I'm definitely looking forward to the sequel!

Camp Concentration - Thomas M. Disch

Once again, I read this because of a review by Jo Walton. She did a fantastic job of writing about the book without spoiling it, so you should go read that first.

I'm a bit conflicted about this book because while I liked the story, I didn't enjoy reading it. Although having finished it I am extremely tempted to re-read it as I suspect I might really enjoy it the second time around. One of the things you really need to do, in order to truly enjoy a book, is to trust the author. This story is about some normal folks becoming really super-intelligent, and as Jo says, this is hard to do. It is also something that I don't really trust most authors to do, although in retrospect I think Disch did a fine job of it.

The biggest problem was that I really disliked the main character. The entire book is his journal, and is being read as he writes it. Very similar to Agyar, but with a totally different feel - in this case the writer is a professional poet, writing in the journal is required of him, and he isn't the main character of the story in the same way that Jack is the main character in Agyar - he is meant to be writing about the other people in the prison, the actual subjects of the experiment. There are often responses inserted by the people reading the journal, and in many cases he writes things deliberately to provoke a response. There is a large chunk of text in the middle of the book where resorts to writing gibberish, and I found that incredibly annoying. Once I got past the gibberish (and realized that it wasn't going to be like that for the entire book) I understood the point of it (the folks reading his journal had been even more irritated by it than I had been), I wanted to go back and see what sort of structure I could find in it...but was too irritated to do so.

I think my lack of enjoyment of this is largely due to the fact that I react very emotionally towards books, especially the first time, and this book is very black. Dystopias sort of have to be. But I really missed the point with this story. There's the really obvious 'twist' which comes as a big surprise to the narrator, but not really a surprise to the reader, but there is quite a lot more going on. Many of the characters (prisoners, experimental subjects) are actually super-intelligent and are busy hiding this fact from the folks in charge. And because the text you are reading is being written for consumption by the folks in charge, you get fooled right along with them. Which is really quite ingenious. Now I just need to get over my revulsion towards the setting and re-read it, because I suspect I will really enjoy it the second time around.

Editing to add: I just re-read it, and while it didn't make me nearly as grumpy reading it the second time around, I still didn't really enjoy it. While the story is clever, I still don't like any of the characters, and there is a grittyness to SF written in the 60s which depresses me. I've noticed this mostly in short stories, but many authors writing back then seemed to be assuming that the future was very bleak. That overpopulation was going to be a huge problem, nuclear war was inevitable, and that the Russians were the ultimate evil. Maybe it is really a problem of projecting forward and imagining yourself in this very strange world of the future. You would probably hate it if you were suddenly transplanted 100 years into the future (or the past), but as Sky pointed out to me years ago, most people manage to be quite happy, no matter what their circumstances. Humans are incredibly resilient. Maybe someday we'll manage to kill ourselves off, but in the meantime we seem to manage to enjoy ourselves. I think happiness is what's missing from this story. Granted, the characters are all stuck in prison (whether prisoners or guards, they're still stuck), but there are some genuinely uplifting moments, and some wonderful descriptions of food...and yet none of the characters ever seem happy.

Anathem - Neal Stephenson

Anathem totally blew me away. I've been a fan of Neal Stephenson since I read the first couple pages of Snowcrash. There were bits of Cryptonomicon that made me laugh so hard I fell out of my chair. I've even read The Big U (he's improved dramatically since then, Big U is fun but really really awful).

The world of Anathem is so different from our world that an average writer would need to devote the first 10 chapters to description and a historical summary. Stephenson manages to focus on the familiar and then explain the differences as they become relevant. I never needed to just keep reading in the hopes that things would start to make sense eventually. I didn't wind up partway through the book needing to start over because I finally had enough information for the first chapter to make sense. He got the flow of story and flow of information absolutely perfect. He also managed to make a very alien world and culture feel extremely comfortable.

Given the awesomeness of the setting, this would be a good book even if the story itself wasn't all that great, but that isn't the case at all. The story is fascinating and the plot unfolds at just the right pace to keep you riveted without being overwhelmed. I'm totally in love with the Socratic dialogue all the way through, the style of communication that's used to teach new ideas by leading you through the entire thought process so that you get to make the discovery yourself (or get totally planed by the person leading the dialogue). The dictionary definitions starting each new segment - the fact that you've often encountered the word before with just enough context to make sense of it, but are now getting the full definition and derivation of the word with all of its different nuances - were totally amazing. The language is almost an evolving character in the story. Words can have different meanings depending on who is using them (which could wind up being totally confusing, but Stephenson manages the context so well that it doesn't).

I do need to read this again. I didn't pay nearly enough attention to the whole Rhetor/Incanter history as I wish I had. It didn't feel quite as relevant to the story as it wound up being. I really thought the book was going to be very different than it actually was. I was surprised by the turn things took halfway through, and yet it was a good surprise rather than a bad one. Surprise is a great thing coming at the very end of a mystery, but coming halfway through a book like this, turning the story in a completely unexpected direction - could be very upsetting if done wrong.

This was a fabulous book. It is only overwhelming because it is so long, but it isn't at all hard to read - the plot and the characters keep things moving along quite nicely.

Stories of your life and others - Ted Chiang

Jo Walton reviewed this on Tor recently. I'm not usually wild about short stories, I often feel like I'm missing the point or that I don't quite have enough time to empathize with the characters. But her comments about Chiang being good at getting the story arc exactly right so that you know the things you need to know at exactly the point you need to know them made me hopeful that I wouldn't wind up feeling frustrated by these stories. And it was a good choice - they were all awesome.

What he does a lot of is looking at weird worldviews as if they were real. He asks a lot of "what if" questions. What if the world really worked like this? What if they really had built the Tower of Babylon? What would the engineering challenges have been? What would they have found? What would happen if someone found a simple and elegant proof that mathematics is inconsistent? What would happen to someone who didn't see time as linear?

The stories are fabulous. The ideas behind them were all interesting. I never had that horrible feeling that I had entirely missed the point of the story. The characters were engaging (I didn't really like the super-smart guy, but I think that was kind of the point) and the stories all made sense in a very satisfying way.

The one about the mathematician who discovered a basic inconsistency was awesome. It was as if she had woken up in the Matrix, except the Matrix wasn't being run by evil beings out to get us, it was just the way things are, always have been, and always will be. When she explains this to other people, the ones who understand it at the level she does get horribly upset and depressed, but only a very few are really capable of that. Everyone else mostly just ignores it. Either they have a theoretical understanding of the situation but can mostly just get on with their lives, or they simply cannot grasp that this in any way affects them. I found her reactions, her colleagues, and her husband to be fascinating.

This is exactly what a book of short stories should be. Totally engaging, satisfying the first time you read it, with enough depth to make you want to re-read.

The visual display of quantitative information - Edward R. Tufte

I was pointed towards this book by Information is Beautiful, a wonderful blog devoted to making beautiful, useful, and truthful info-graphics. Since this is something I also need to do professionally, I'm pretty fascinated.

The book was excellent. For one thing, Tufte practices as he preaches. The graphics and the text flow together beautifully. His points are all very well illustrated. There is lots of white space which makes it much easier to read everything. The examples are all clear, and pretty, and often entertaining (my favorite was the graph that was so cluttered, that when it was reproduced in another publication they managed to leave out the data without noticing).

I'd highly recommend this for anyone who ever has to put together a presentation. Even just as a book to read, it is quite entertaining. The horrible things people have to do and with graphs are just hilarious.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

I heard about this book in several places, but it was this "Big Idea" write-up that really made me want to read it. Most of the reviews I had read focused on the plot - which seemed entirely ok but not something I was running out to go read. The Big Idea write-up was Cherie herself explaining how she had tweaked all the historical elements to ramp up the level of technology available, and the number of people living in Seattle around the time she wanted. Also not something that particularly intrigued me. I'm quite able to suspend disbelief, and I'm not a history geek, so this didn't grab me. What made me decide I really needed to read the book was the introductory quote she decided to use:

In this age of invention the science of arms has made great progress. In fact, the most remarkable inventions have been made since the prolonged wars of Europe in the early part of the century, and the short Italian campaign of France in 1859 served to illustrate how great a power the engines of destruction can exert.

From (and I am not making this up, this is the book’s full title): History of the Great Rebellion. From its commencement to its close, giving an account of its origin, The Secession of the Southern States, and the Formation of the Confederate Government, the concentration of the Military and Financial resources of the federal government, the development of its vast power, the raising, organizing, and equipping of the contending armies and navies; lucid, vivid, and accurate descriptions of battles and bombardments, sieges and surrender of forts, captured batteries, etc., etc.; the immense financial resources and comprehensive measures of the government, the enthusiasm and patriotic contributions of the people, together with sketches of the lives of all the eminent statesmen and military and naval commanders, with a full and complete index. From Official Sources. By Thomas P. Kettell.

Yup, it is the fact that she decided to use a quote where the title of the book was longer than the actual quote as the introductory quote for her novel. This was the point at which I realized I loved her sense of humour, which meant it was very likely I would love the book. And I did. I inhaled it practically in a single sitting. The two main characters (Briar and her son Zeke) are great. The folks they interact with are also great. She really got things right about how young teenagers make their decisions compared with how adults make decisions - and who they decide to trust, and why. The setting was a lot of fun. The zombies were awesome (which I wasn't expecting, I'm not really crazy about zombies). The supporting characters were pretty great. And the underlying mystery (why is Briar so absolutely convinced that her husband died during the disaster?) was very well handled. It was a great story and very well told.

Agyar - Steven Brust

I picked up Agyar after reading this review by Jo Walton.

What I love about this book is the way it is written. Jack has found an old typewriter and is simply writing to help pass the time while he waits for something to happen. He used to write a long time ago, but is very out of practice. And he is writing with a typewriter, so you are getting a totally unedited first draft. I'm really impressed that Brust managed to write something that feels very unpolished and fresh off the typewriter, and yet make it a story that moves along so nicely and with interesting character development. I think it must be really hard to do this style of thing, when too much action is happening, obviously the main character is not spending as much time in front of the typewriter. When he's sitting around bored, he has lots of time to write, but not nearly as much to say. Very much like a blog.

Spoilers ahead.

The thing which originally intrigued me about this book was the observation by Jo Walton and many of her commenters that this is the sort of book where you don't figure out quite what is going on until near the end, which means that the first time reading it is very special, and re-reading leads to a very different experience. I love this sort of thing, although unless it is done extremely well it is quite frustrating. Now possibly just knowing that there was something more going on made me pay extra attention. Or maybe, like one person commented, the cover of the book gives you a significant hint, but I figured out who & what Jack Agyar was after only a few pages.

He forgets the name of his date, his initial interaction with Jill isn't just slick, it is downright predatory. His awareness of the animals on the street as they walk to Jill's house, and his pause on the doorstep to be formally invited into the house. To me this explains things very nicely, and in a way that I find particularly appealing. I like being led to a conclusion, being given all the clues I need and having things made fairly obvious, without having my nose rubbed in it. If the book were to start with the line "Jack was a vampire" then all the extra details would just be annoying, sure he's world-weary, has supernatural senses, needs to be invited in. Instead you get to have a gradual realization that he isn't entirely normal, then not entirely human, and then you start to see some stereotypical vampiry things. Maybe Brust intends for people not to figure things out until later in the book, but to me he made things blatantly obvious in the first chapter. Which is totally fine by me. I don't think it would be especially fun to read this through without knowing that Jack is a vampire...but maybe that's because I haven't tried and won't get to.