Why I Read Books Aimed at Children

Because they’re amazing. The Golden Book of Facts and Figures by Bertha Morris Parker, in a section on money, has a heading for “Pacific Islands (New Britain, San Cristobel)”. The table below, describing items used as money and their relative value, reads (emphasis mine):

10 coconuts = 1 string white whales’ teeth.

10 strings of white teeth = 1 string of red whales’ teeth or 1 dog’s tooth.

10 strings of red teeth = 50 porpoise teeth.

500 porpoise teeth = 1 wife of good quality.

1 “marble” (shell) ring = 1 good pig.

Stunning. Also, I like that the order implies that “1 good pig” is more valuable than “1 wife of good quality.”

General Chemisty by H. G. Deming

As I was looking through my library, searching for a reference on chemistry, I came across this book: General Chemistry, 5th ed., by Horace G. Deming. The first edition was copyrighted in 1923, and this edition is copyrighted 1944 (though this particular book is from the fifth printing–October 1945). I skimmed through it a bit, and it seems like a really excellent book–better, anyway, than the chemistry books I had in school.

I’ve since read the first chapter, and I’m reminded why I like old books so well–the language used in modern books is so boring by comparison. For instance, Deming defines’ metallurgy as “the art or science of winning metals from their ores.” Of course, much of the ‘interesting’ word choice is due to simple shifts in language, and wouldn’t have been especially unusual at the time, but even so, older books often had some character not present in modern books; authors often wrote rather poetically, compared to the much simpler prose of modern books, devoid of ‘needless’ complexity of language. And, I find that language aside, there are many times interesting comments from the authors. For example, at the end of the first chapter (of fifty), “What Chemistry Is About”, Deming writes:

Thus, for those of us who make only a brief study of chemistry, the benefits to be expected are of an indirect nature. Increased capacity for enjoyment, a livelier interest in the world in which we live, a more intelligent attitude toward the great questions of the day–these are the by-products of a well-balanced education, including chemistry in its proper relation to other studies.

I would not expect such an aside in any modern chemistry textbook. Perhaps, for most students, it would not be a useful thing to say, but I would hope that some would have their fires of interest stoked by this comment. It’s a very optimistic view of the value of education, but I do not think optimism is a vice. And, of course, if I did not agree with the sentiment, I certainly wouldn’t have begun such an ambitious project as I have, to read many of the more important works of the Western canon. Naturally, ensuring I have a solid grounding in the sciences goes hand in hand with that.

So, I’ve set out a plan to read this within the next few months. Even reading quite slowly, at should finish the book in at most 90 days, and I don’t expect to actually take that long–the book is not quite 700 pages, counting the appendix. Of course, I shan’t be reading at quite the pace I might read some random novel, so I don’t expect to finish in a day or two, either; I must take care to read the book thoroughly, and not merely let the words pass from the pages to my eyes without continuing on to my brain.

The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away

Yesterday, I read The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away by Cory Doctorow. It reminds me quite a bit of 1984, though with rather more tech-speak than newspeak. A few thoughts, then:

The Order of Reflective Analytics seems to be a fairly transparent analogue of Google, so much that the Order calls its premises ‘campuses’ and gives the monks ’20 percent time’, as it is with Google. I mention this only because I wonder whether this will be recognizable in five years or ten. For the purposes of the story, internally, this really doesn’t matter, but it is important on the meta level. It’s true that Google stores a huge amount of data–taking myself as an example, they have my email, my chat logs, my search and browsing history, a fair number of documents I’ve written, code I’ve written, my photos, this blog, and probably several more things that aren’t coming to mind just now. Whether I can trust them to be ‘not evil’ is an important question, and the story wouldn’t be quite the same without that association.

On a less serious note, the word ‘pan’ leaped out at me. After reading it a few times, I concluded that it referred to a Personal Area Network, but I do wonder what fraction of the story’s readers will make that association. Unless something has happened lately that I’m not aware of, PAN isn’t a very popular acronym. I suppose it’s something of an easter egg–like I expect the Google references will be in a few years.

The story has a few inconsistencies, but they’re the sort that wouldn’t be too hard to write around, and I expect the story will be revised to correct them at some point. Reading the comments on the story was something like reading a mix of story reviews and bug reports–an interesting experience.

My opinion is that The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away is worth reading. Too, an MP3 is available for download of Cory Doctorow reading the story, for those who prefer audiobooks.

On the lifetime of a book

From the preface to the 1894 edition of Gypsy Breynton by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps:

“Having been asked to write a preface to the new edition of the Gypsy books, I am not a little perplexed. I was hardly more than a girl myself, when I recorded the history of this young person; and I find it hard, at this distance, to photograph her as she looks, or ought to look to-day.

…

And now, the publishers tell me that Gypsy is thirty years old, and that girls who were not so much as born when I knew the little lady, are her readers and her friends to-day.

Thirty years old? Indeed, it is more than that! For is it not thirty years since the publication of her memoirs? And was she, at that time, possibly sixteen? Forty-six years? Incredible! How in the world did Gypsy ” grow up ?” For that was before toboggans and telephones, before bicycles and electric cars, before bangs and puffed sleeves, before girls studied Greek, and golf-capes came in. Did she go to college ? For the Annex, and Smith, and Wellesley were not. Did she have a career? Or take a husband? Did she edit a Quarterly Review, or sing a baby to sleep? Did she write poetry, or make pies? Did she practice medicine, or matrimony? Who knows? Not even the author of her being.”

Bridget Jones’s Diary

A few days ago, I read Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, published 1998 by Picador, ISBN 0-330-33277-5. 320 pages.

This one was moderately enjoyable, although I liked it less than Pride and Prejudice, to be honest. Despite that Bridget Jones was a fairly sympathetic character, I didn’t feel like she was very likeable. From the start, Bridget is placed in some rather unenviable situations: paraded before a strange man by her friends and family, having various difficulties with Daniel, thwarted by chance (and a hair dryer) from having her first date with Mark Darcy. Unfortunately, her responses to these situations are somewhat less that admirable; regularly, she reacts by getting blind drunk and insulting the male half of the species, usually while eating and smoking quite a lot more than she ought to, given her goals of losing weight and stopping smoking. I do not mean to say that her reactions are not understandable, but they don’t tend to lead me to like her very much.

Bridget is set up in a role meant to be analogous to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, but where Elizabeth is funny, confident, and sometimes unfortunately powerless, Bridget seems merely acerbic, irresolute, and fairly useless. Even in the moments that she is meant to seem admirable, it feels forced. Take, for example, a situation near the end of the book. It is necessary to convince Bridget’s mother to come downstairs, and Bridget attempts to do this:

‘OK. Leave it to me,’ I said, and walked to the bottom of the stairs.
‘Mum!’ I yelled. ‘I can’t find any savory doilies.’
Everyone held their breath. There was no response.
‘Try again,’ whispered Mark, looking at me admiringly.

Granted, this book is written as Bridget’s diary, so it is she who is interpreting his look as admiring rather than, conceivably, exasperated, irritated, or annoyed, but it is not Bridget’s interpretation that concerns me. Rather, it is Fielding’s writing, for it is her responsibility to convince us to suspend our disbelief, to cause us to come to like her heroine, to cause us to feel worried for Bridget’s sake; in my opinion, Fielding fails at these tasks quite prodigiously.

I have considered that perhaps Bridget Jones was not meant to be a likeable character; perhaps she was intended as an anti-hero of sorts. Wikipedia tells me that “Fielding often lampooned society’s obsession with women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan and criticised wider societal trends in Britain at the time.” If Bridget was not intended to be likeable, then certainly Fielding may be forgiven for not making her so, but that would still leave me in the situation of having read 320 pages about the trials and tribulations of a woman I don’t much like, whose problems do not much interest me. As an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones’s Diary was worth reading, but I think I would not have read it otherwise, and I do not foresee myself reading it again for pleasure.

Reading

I’ve decided to record how many pages I’ve read as an incentive to keep up with my backlog of books to read.

First: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Published 1981 by Watermill Press, ISBN 0-89375-611-3. 520 pages.

This book was required reading for a class, but still fairly interesting. The first hundred pages or so seemed somewhat dull, but I enjoyed it more as the book continued. I have been trying to decide how reliable the narrator is; in the last hundred pages the view we are presented of Darcy especially is very different from that we are given in the first. It is true that Elizabeth was unfair to Darcy in the beginning, and we are never meant to think him quite so horrible as she does, but I am not certain to what extent Darcy’s improvement is real change, as opposed to a different viewpoint presented by a narrator who is very sympathetic to Elizabeth.

Second: Lucius the Club by Michael Allen. Published 2007 by Kingsfield Publications, ISBN 978-1-903988-15-2. 44 pages.

This book is available for free download as well; it is published under a creative commons license.

The author was kind enough to send me an autographed copy of this book at his own expense, a few months ago. I am quite embarrassed to say that I didn’t quite manage to complete it until just a couple of days ago; each time I thought to myself that I would spend a few minutes and read it, something came up. However, I did complete it at last, and I am glad I did. Lucius the Club isn’t quite a mystery, although it might seem so to the titular character, and we, too, may be surprised by what he learns. I shall simply quote the back of the book: “Lucius the Club committed a murder – and forty years later he found out why.” It’s short, but entertaining; very much worth reading.

This year, then, I have read only 564 pages. Fortunately (perhaps), I have several dozen books sitting in my closet waiting for me, so I shall not, I hope, be long in increasing that number.

Google celebrates Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week is 29 September through 6 October, and Google Book Search has put up a nice page listing some of the banned books with links to search for them with Google Book Search. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as useful as it might be.

A number of these books are freely-available, public domain books (for instance: The Call of the Wild by Jack London; The Jungle by Upton Sinclair; Ulysses by James Joyce) and part of what makes Google Book Search really useful is that (in addition to searching through snippets of many books) you can read public domain books online. The banned books page on Google Book Search makes no mention of which books have editions available for online reading, which is really a shame.

This aside, though, I am glad that google is putting up a page for this at all; the positively obscene number of challenges that many of these classic books get is something that ought to be better-known to all. It’s frightening how many great books people want to remove from our schools and libraries in order to ‘protect the children’ from ‘dangerous thoughts’.

Of course, the proper way to celebrate Banned Books Week is to actually read a banned book. I remember that The Jungle was discussed in a modern history class I once took, and it is available online (and I imagine at my university library as well), so I may try to read it in the coming weeks. It’d be a little late as a celebration, but still probably worthwhile. I’d encourage everyone to do the same.

My Library

Google Books has a new feature: “My Library”. It’s a very basic system that allows you to keep a list of the books you own (provided they are listed in Google Book Search), together with labels, ratings, and reviews.

I really like the idea; I’ve been trying out various ‘social library’ sites in an attempt to find one that I could use. It’s not as easy as it might seem, since many of them either require some form of payment or lack features I need. Of course, google books library also lacks features I need, but I can at least be fairly certain it won’t disappear when the creator goes broke.

I’d be willing to forgive the lack of features, since it’s pretty likely that google will be adding more features as time goes by, but there is one difficulty: not every book I have is listed in their index, and there’s no way for me to add a book myself. Now, it’s totally reasonable that they don’t just let anyone add a book–the database would be quite useless fairly quickly. However, it’s missing some books that I would really expect to find; for example, the hardcover editions of the Harry Potter books that I bought a few years ago aren’t in there (nor, I think were the paperbacks). There is almost certainly some other edition of those books listed, but I want to add the correct edition.

Still, I think it’ll be worth giving it a try. Maybe if google pushes this, it’ll be successful and useful. I hope so, anyway. My library is here.

Vows and Honor

I finished Vows and Honor by Mercedes Lackey a few days ago. I must say that I liked these two better than the trilogy centering on Talia which I read a while ago. Vows and Honor is about Tarma and Kethry, two characters first introduced in MZB‘s Sword and Sorceress series. I’ll have to see about getting some of those if the stories in them are anywhere near as good as Vows and Honor.

I want to start reading Lord of Light soon, but I’ve just downloaded The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton) from Project Gutenberg. It’s too much to read at once (16 volumes, in fact), but I’d like to read some of it, anyway.

These things aside, I hope I can accomplish something useful today. I stayed up very late (or rather very early; it was nearly 7 AM) last night working on some things, but when I set my alarm I somehow managed not to turn it on (which is odd since it turns itself on automatically when set; but I digress) and as a result slept entirely through my classes. This is especially bad since some of the things I was staying up to finish were homework assignments that I meant to turn in, but I suppose it’s more important that I complete them and learn what they have to teach than that I turn them in. That’s how I’m rationalizing it, anyway.

Between Silk and Cyanide Redux

I’ve just finished Between Silk and Cyanide, after much procrastination, and I maintain my high opinion of it. The end of the book wasn’t completely satisfying, but this I can forgive, since the book recounts true events, and life isn’t always completely satisfying.

I’ve still got a stack of books yet to read, so I suppose I’d better get started on those before I’ve got to return them. Additionally, I’ve got a copy of Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. MarkCC (of Good Math, Bad Math) recommended it, among others, and since I agreed with most of his comments for the books that I had read, I thought it’d be as good a place as any to get recommendations.

I also would like to get a copy of Witch World by Andre Norton some time soon. I’m sure I’ve read at least one book by Andre Norton (although I can’t recall which, just now), and I’d like to read the Witch World series since I hear that it’s quite good. Actually, I believe that I have a few of her books in my library at home; I’ll have to check into it and see.

Finally, and totally unrelated, I’ve begun playing MapleStory in my spare time. It’s a nice, free 2D action MMORPG. I really ought to be doing more worthwhile things than playing games, but I fear that I’m not terribly industrious at the best of times. It’s a week until spring break, so this is far from the best of times for my industry.

I’ll end here, since I’d like to make an effort to read Vows and Honor before I have to return it.