Walking on the Moon

This is my third time through Zen and the Art, and I always find something new and interesting. Robert Persig’s work is a strange shaggy dog of a book that’s part philosophical treatise, part maybe-memoir, part reflections on the times.  I think some of it is indispensable, some of it is self-indulgent, some of it is brilliant, and some of it is misguided.  It’s a very open conversation with an interesting author.

The parts I invariably enjoy the most and get the most out of are the discussions of worldview and philosophy of seeing the world with a clear mind. Every time I’ve read it, I’ve found new and interesting insights and inspirations in these parts of the book, which are mainly the early parts.  These sections are an approachable, conversational description of, well, lots of things.  Of particular interest to me are the insights into how different people view technology, and how technologists (in particular) can benefit from arranging their thoughts on technology and problem solving.  There’s much more in here, and that description undersells it.

The parts I like less are the memoir and family drama associated with the main character coming to terms with the costs of acquiring this knowledge and trying to get recognition of that work from the academic orthodoxy. That’s certainly driven by my views on orthodoxy.  I don’t seek much validation from the orthodoxy about my worldview.  I try to keep an open mind when people smarter than me talk, but I really dislike arguments from authority.  The climactic parts of the memoir center around the author’s reaction to the authority unfairly crushing his attempt put forth his ideas.

I understand that the memoir wouldn’t be interesting if the system of thought wasn’t compelling. I empathize with the author’s sincere pain – and the pain of others rejected by the system. I understand that the 60’s and 70’s were different times, and that a frustrated philosopher couldn’t publish on the Internet and gain a following there.  But I still feel like so much of the angst and despair of the memoir was avoidable.

And then I wonder if that’s exactly the lesson Persig is trying to get across.  Zen and the Art is interesting because it does encourage looking at old things in new ways, probably including Zen and the Art. Or not.  I go back and forth.

Persig’s book remains a fascinating, consciousness-expanding work.

Strongly recommended.

Equoid is a novella by Charles Stross set in his Laundry Files world where he imagines unicorns as realized by H. P. Lovecraft. These things are all so distinctive that if you know the ingredients you’ll know if you’d like the pie.

I know Stross but not the Laundry Files, so this was a way to dip my toe in that water.  As a place for a new reader, it was a pretty good jumping on point.  I was intrigued by the references to other parts of the universe, but never distracted from the story.  The ideas were pure Stross, which is to say lunatic, inspired, and carried to their logical endpoints with gusto, detail and humanity.

Good fun.

Recommended.

I quite enjoyed Helene Wecker’s Golem and the Jinni. It’s a light fantasy set in the ghettoes of New York City in the late 1800’s wherein events conspire to loose a Jinni an an unbound Golem on the world. Wecker does a particularly good job of showing the reader both the city and the human condition through the eyes of her two fictional fish out of water.  There is something of a buddy-cop sound to the description: the Golem is tuned to people’s needs and lives to serve others while the Jinni is a swashbuckler who poorly understands consequences.  They do learn some of the expected lessons, but as with much of the book the execution elevates the tale.

The plot is well-constructed and detailed without being overly intricate, but my favorite parts were the introduction and set-up.  Wecker spends quite a bit of time introducing her protagonists and then introducing them to the city, doting on characters whose role in the plot is fairly minor.  This is a strength of the book.  I enjoyed watching these characters grope their way into the 1890’s and into human society by extension.  Each is reasonably realized, even when their incompleteness is intentional.  It is fun to see what they will do next, even without a driving plot.

The driving plot does arrive, wrongs are righted, old grudges worked out, characters redeemed – all the fantasy tropes.  That’s all executed competently.  I enjoyed watching it, but wasn’t gripped by it in the way I might be in a Cornwell tale.  I did come away wondering how the characters would react to all the derring-do, and that’s at least as interesting for me.

Recommended.

Sean Howe has produced an interesting and coherent history of Marvel Comics.  As a long time comics reader, I’ve certainly heard some of the stories related in here, but Howe excels at putting them into a coherent larger framework.

The Marvel company has had a collection of creators nearly as flamboyant as their published characters, and the temptation to make this a collection of just comics anecdotes must have been significant.  Howe does a nice job of hanging those anecdotes on the arc of the company itself as it moved from an upstart comics company, through a few fumbling attempts to reach other media, to today where some of the most popular and lucrative characters in the world are from Marvel.  He has an excellent sense of the overall narrative, which makes the book very readable.

The story itself is both messy and recent, however, and still very much a part of living history.  Comics buffs like me enjoy hearing the stories of artistic give and take that led to the creation of these stories and characters.  On the other hand, who created what and how can be a matter of millions of dollars, and in some cases the living protagonists are fighting those battles in court. The Untold Story does a nice job of showing how those problems can arise when creators are riffing on ideas that they don’t know will go anywhere, but that become assets to a large company owned by no one the creators knew at the time.  Or worse, when the ideas become assets of a company paying people the creators did know at the time.  Conflicting accounts would be par for the course, even if the creators were not larger than life.

One of the somewhat distressing issues with The Untold Story is that it occasionally muffs its comics history.  These are generally little things – toy tie-in comics ascribed to the wrong franchises or alien names misspelled – but it is distressing that when so many of the facts are in dispute, a few indisputable ones are dropped.

Overall an interesting history of living events.

Recommended.

David Rakoff can write in a style that is so charming, playful, and amusing that the emotional depth of his work can catch the reader by surprise.  That’s the case with Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. It is a consistently diverting and enjoyable mosaic of lives that shifts from charming to profound when a few key connections are made.

The novel is told entirely in rhyming couplets, which presents challenges to writer and reader. For the reader it can be offputting and gimmicky, and I suspect that some will avoid Love because of the format.  For the writer, the difficulties of maintaining the form without letting the form be the book are substantial.  Too many forced rhymes or sentences split across couplets and the reader is yanked from the story.

Rakoff is up to the challenge, and more importantly has chosen the form to serve his purposes.  This form is a staple of children’s literature, and using it puts the reader into the mindset of absorbing a simple tale that will raise a smile. Rakoff delivers the simplicity and the smiles, but is ambitious enough to deliver a wallop as well.

Strongly Recommended.

I think what Jeff Noon is trying to pull off in Channel Sk1n is admirable, but his execution didn’t work for me.  This is a near-futurish SF novel set in a world (a UK, really) with obsessive ubiquitous media and reality TV gone to allegorical levels.  In it, a young pre-fab pop star is infected with a media eating virus while the record exec who made her is watching his daughter destroy herself on the most popular reality show.

That’s a fine premise for an SF novel.  The execution left me unsatisfied for a couple reasons.  First the descriptions of everything read like lyrics.  I understand that the POV character is a pop diva, and would think that way.  I like the idea of describing a world that way.  In practice, however, I felt like the proceedings were rendered episodic and obscure by it.  One of the reasons poetry can say a lot with a few words is that those words trigger associations with common experience.  That’s much harder to tap in a world that’s close but not quite the same.

Secondly, the world feels like its constructed as an allegory.  That can work, of course, but when the allegory is this bald-faced – pop-star-maker’s daughter signs up to go mad on national TV to get his attention – I need something out of the ordinary to make it palatable.  The other part of the allegory that I find off is that all kinds of technology is thrown around that isn’t different in kind from what is in the world today, but it all has different names.  I think that hurts the allegory by removing the world further from ours, and the poetic descriptions by blocking associations.

Overall, I found Channel Sk1n ambitious, but unsuccessful.

I think that the best discriminator between mystery readers is how much they care about the mystery.  I get the impression that there are folks out there who live for the most perfectly crafted puzzles.  They love puzzles that play fair, that challenge the intellect, that stand up to careful analysis long after the book is complete.  I am not one of those people; every mystery is a McGuffin to me.  I like to see interesting characters,  a sense of place, great writing – the sorts of things that make a great novel.  The mystery format can be a great structure on which to hang those elements, and Barry Fantoni does a nice job hanging his writing here.

The  hook – and one can almost always characterize a modern mystery by its hook – is that the eponymous private eye is in his eighties.  This fact is both central to the novel and peripheral to the proceedings.  Structurally, it doesn’t change the process of unravelling the mystery much at all.  Leg work is leg work, and an old man can work a .38 and a tough line as well as anyone.  There is refreshingly little outright violence, though.

Harry’s an interesting guy in how independent he is and how he sticks to being who he is.  I don’t mean independent in the sense of “not in a nursing home.” He is who he is.  He doesn’t seem to have close friends or family around, but he’s not the less for it.  He’s still who he wants to be.  It’s  nice to see a story about an older fellow that’s light on the lamentation.

I also liked Fantoni’s evocation of Florida.  This isn’t the Florida of Hiaasen, filled with crazies and wild beauty, but the Florida seen by a still adventurous older man.  There are no poetic passages about the Everglades, but you always know where you are.

Thematically Harry’s age plays large.  Underlying all of this are questions about the protagonist that loom large but aren’t directly answered.  Why is he doing this job at this age? is the big one, of course, but there are others about friends and family.  It turns out that the answer to the first answers the others, but not in a terribly direct way.  It’s a nice piece of understatement, leaving the big questions and the big answers for the reader to find and answer.

Overall, a fine little mystery with a  compelling protagonist and some nice ideas.

Recommended.

I really wanted to like this history of Commodore by Brian Bagnall, but I ultimately disliked the writing too much.  The topic itself is interesting.  Commodore produced some great pioneering hardware and introduced a lot of people to computing.  I had Commodore machines in high school and graduate school.  Supporters of the company and the technology tend to be fans for life, so I was very curious to hear about the company history.

But, man, 500+ pages without getting to the Amiga line is a lot of text.

It doesn’t help that Bagnall tells his story completely from the words of his interviewees without interpreting at all.  He often makes an assertion, then produces quote from a participant that says the exact same things, and then moves on.  There isn’t enough attempt to provide a context or an understanding of the whole picture.

There’s a good argument that this first book should be about Commodore’s founder and CEO pulling them into the computer business and then being ridden out of the company.  It’s a compelling narrative, and the CEO in question seems so larger-than-life that a book about him is a sure winner.  But Bagnall gets lost in minutae that don’t advance the overall story.  Those side trips are more often than not about technical issues, but I never got the feeling that Bagnall understood what was interesting and important about them in the big picture.

I got the feeling that Bagnall conducted his interviews, broke out the interviews into chronologically ordered quotes and framed each quote in a paragraph.  That makes for a decent high school term paper, but over 500 pages, it gets old quick.

Brendan Koerner has found an amazing corner of history to explore and does it with verve.  The corner is the rash of skyjackings from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s, and it’s amazing to the point of unbelievability. I’m old enough that I remember comics using getting skyjacked to Cuba as a punchline, but even in the late 70’s it seemed stale and overblown. Skyjackings always seemed rare to me, and air travel simple and safe.  Mentally disturbed people shot public figures to get in the news; they didn’t reroute aircraft.

But, oh, things were not always thus.  If I were 10 years older, skyjacking punchlines would not seem like “take my wife” lines, but like the edgy references they were. The golden age of skyjacking was short lived – about a decade – but spectacular.  Before the airlines finally began using metal detectors, skyjackings were a weekly occurrence – if not more frequent.  Koerner uses a particular 1972 skyjacking as a case study/framing story and there were 2 skyjackings that day.

It is a fascinating and alien world where the airlines are fighting metal detectors as impractical and intrusive in the face of armed passengers frequently commandeering aircraft.  And the skyjackers are an amazing lot as well.  Some want to get the attention of the media, some want the money, some want to leave the country.  One fellow flees to Italy and becomes a celebrity and movie star based on the skyjacking notoriety. As, I say, fascinating.

Koerner’s framing story captures the spirit of the times by following a specific case.  A troubled veteran and his hippy girlfriend carry out a less-than-precision operation that takes them to Algeria to  join a set of Black Panthers in exile.  The original plan was homesteading in Australia after a stopover in Vietnam, but improvisation is apparently a hijacker’s best friend.

Koerner follows them as they appear and disappear, joining Paris society and eventually (for at least one of them) wending their way back to the US. It’s a remarkable story, and the backdrop and snippets of other skyjacking tales capture a nigh-unbelieveable period in American history with clarity and style.

Highly recommended.

This is the first novel I have read by John LeCarre, and it is excellent. He’s well known as one of the grandmasters of spy fiction – a genre I have some affection for – but I’ve never picked one of his works up before.  I won’t hesitate to pick one up in the future.

Unlike many spy novels I’ve read, Truth draws the reader in from the first sentence.  I was expecting some scene setting, and then the intricate plot coming into focus.  Instead, LeCarre drops the reader in media res with taut, suspenseful writing that amps the tension up immediately.  And he does that in a description of an older diplomat pacing the floor of a motel room.  That bit of writerly craft is awesome to behold in and of itself.

From there we get a tangled web of deceit and compromise that ensnares disparate characters.  There are a few who are moustache-twirlingly evil, but not many really.  By and large we get to see a set of reasonable, even virtuous, people who construct an undeniably twisty set of circumstances and actions that lead to a tragedy.

Conscience and other forces crack the uneasy and distributed alliance, and much of the book is how and how much that collusion cracks.

The characters and their lives are believable, as is the technology and the machinations that are the problems.

Many spy/adventure novels are very much escapism.  Good guys make last second escapes, and the bad guys go to prison or the grave as punishment.  The world is saved and laurels are passed around.  Truth is not like that at all. These characters live in a world that is real enough that none of that is automatic. LeCarre shows us a world where what is right is abundantly clear, but where doing what is right costs more than a sane person would pay.  Often more than one can pay. It’s  not so much a world of shades of grey in morality, but of the compromises one faces because everyone seems to be making compromises.

One is left with a thrilling, well-written adventure yarn that shows a realistic world of moral appeasement.  It’s tough to do better than that.

Strongly recommended.