Walking on the Moon

This is a short book taken from and extending Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture at CMU.  Pausch died of pancreatic cancer and gave this talk as a farewell to his colleagues and family.  The lecture was very well received and turned into this book.

It’s not a very long book, but it’s too long. The first half of it gives background on how the lecture came to be and gives something of an outline of how it was given.  This is all great stuff.  It’s honest and moving.  Pausch knows he can be a stereotypical professor – egotistical, over-analytic, etc. – and still lets that voice be heard.  Behind that is someone doing everything they can to come to terms with their imminent death.

Then the padding starts.  By the time Pausch is giving out productivity hints, it’s time to put up the book.

The first half (and one assumes the lecture on-line) is well worth checking out.  Stop there.

Tales of Pirx the Pilot is a collection of short stories by a giant of SF, Stanislaw Lem.  It’s the first Lem I’ve read, and definitely held my interest in many ways.  Lem does a great job of moving the tropes of being a working pilot into an SF world.  The jargon and technology is all extrapolated, but the feel of being a line pilot is very contemporary.

“Contemporary” has a bit of a timeless connotation here.  Lem wrote most of these stories before I was born, but the rhythms of flying for hire echo through the blog posts I read today about flying for the airlines.  One can see the details and assumptions that underlie them come from the 1960’s, but the beat is clearly timeless.

The stories themselves look like pulp science fiction from afar, but when the reader engages, they turn out to be a door into another more timeless fictional tradition.  There are stories that turn on the workings of a predicted technology, but this isn’t hard SF.  There is the wonder of faraway places and other planets (or moons, anyway), but the stories are all very human.  There’s a ghost story in here, and a locked room mystery. The trappings are rockets and astronauts, but the stories are all about people who are pilots.  Or people who are long distance truckers.  Or people who are sailors on wooden ships.  Or 21st century container ships.

Pirx and his fellows are not the first ones into a new world, but the ones who make a living travelling that world and seeing the odd corners of it. Consequently these are moody universal tales of walking the mundane unknown.

Recommended.

Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys is a quirky little collection of pieces on British engineering in the late 20th and early 21st Century. I’m not a dedicated anglophile, but I found plenty to like in his lively and unusual descriptions of the men and the challenges they faced.

British engineering is an odd subject in and of itself.  There are certainly great examples of it, but as Britain’s influence and empire contracted after WWII, so did the ambition and scope of its engineering projects.  Rather than leading the world’s efforts in creating transports and munitions, British engineers work at a smaller scale.  This adds a bittersweet tone to Spufford’s tour.

In addition to the wide-sweeping historical forces, from the 1980’s on British engineers were also blown by the winds of Thatcherism.  That government believed in small government and privitization of services in all aspects of service.  Keeping the funding flowing for, say, a space exploration agency going in that climate is well nigh impossible.  Spufford calls his government out on that pretty much continually across the periods when they are in power.

This adds up to a rich tale of little known efforts – some successful, others quixotic – set against a backdrop of historical sweep and villainy.  It’s delightful reading, perhaps because being an American gives me some distance. Spufford lets the reader see the great in the small as he describes some genuinely fascinating technological tinkering.  One of the strangest chapters is the description of the Concorde SST, which mostly revolves around the economic and marketing battles fought by British Airways to keep the plane flying, rather than the tech to make it go fast.

In addition to the big picture, the book entertained me because of its British audience.  If you’re writing for Brits, you certainly use a different set of homey analogies when describing technology.  Still, it was an unexpected pleasure to reverse engineer the analogies from the technologies.

Recommended.

Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle is one of the best ghost stories I’ve read in a long time.  It’s another one of those books recommended by Jo Walton that doesn’t fit into a particular genre.  If you come at it expecting a fantasy novel set in contemporary Houston, you won’t be disappointed.  If you come looking for a character study of a young man becoming an old man among the working poor of Texas oil towns, you won’t be disappointed there either.

What is unambiguous is that William Kennedy is a haunted man.  He sees ghosts throughout the city and his life.  That’s about where the definitiveness on ghosts ends, though.  Perfect Circle is perfectly consistent whether you decide Kennedy can can see the dead or hallucinates and has an active subconscious.  But whether supernatural or chemical, the past keeps reaching out and twisting Kennedy’s life.

Stewart describes the haunting brilliantly.  Sometimes a ghost will intrude and wrench the story in new places.  Sometimes a casual observation will pull a haunted flashback out of Kennedy’s memory. And always, always, the haunted moments are real moments: a relative killed by their own foolishness, or by corporate greed, or by the failings of someone who loved them. We all get to see death and misery, and Stewart makes it explicit without robbing it of universality or power.

That probably sounds like a pretty oppressive book, but Stewart doesn’t just beat the reader down.  His protagonist is full of faults, but is a genial person to spend time with.  He’s got that whistling-past-the-graveyard sense of humor that so many outcasts adopt. It also helps that his good heart is evident early on as well.  Stewart shows us Kennedy at a dramatic time, but it’s easy to see why Kennedy has friends.

Perfect Circle is a ripping, spooky yarn with an interesting protagonist and excellent writing.

Strongly recommended.

Gary Pomerantz has put together a nice piece of sports journalism in Their Life’s Work.  Sports journalism, by its nature only matters to you if you care about the sport, and in this case the team, involved.  Because the topic is the late-1970’s Pittsburgh Steelers,  it’s probably the team and era I most care about in sports.  Pomerantz covers the emergence of the 1970’s Steelers with a raconteur’s touch, spinning out the yarns well known to football fans of the era with fresh aplomb.  All the largest figures of the era, management and players, are brought to life – most in their own words from interviews.  He retells the myths without completely overshadowing the blemishes.

In the second half of the book, Pomerantz looks at where these men and the Steelers institution have come 40 years later. Those monumental days have cast long shadows into most of the lives involved, and he does a good job capturing the many paths that led from being one of the greatest football teams in history. Some have been destroyed by the game – Mike Webster’s life after leaving the NFL was a prime driver for the current crisis in understanding traumatic brain injuries.  Some have flourished in ways that the game never touched.  And many are still part of NFL.

As interesting and important as following the players is, I was equally interested in the state of the team itself.  How the sons of storied owner Art Rooney came to terms with deciding who would run the team and how held my interest and I generally couldn’t care less about boardroom politics.  Keeping the Steelers as a franchise that conducts its business in a way that fans can be proud of is essential to the team’s appeal.  It’s revealing to see the difficulties involved with doing that when egos collide.

Many people will not care about any of this.  I do primarily because watching these men perform heroic feats on the field was a key part of my childhood, reinforced by my family’s closeness with the city and football culture there.  I idolized these guys, and some of my earliest reading was biographies of key players.  It’s equally interesting to look back on those times from a more mature perspective, and to see what became of these men after they fell off my radar.  Pomerantz brings it all to life.

Strongly recommended if you have any interest in the era.

Argentinian writer Angelica Gorodischer has put together a winning collection of short stories in Kalpa Imperial.  As with much interesting writing, the genre defies easy classification.  If you’re a SF reader, these might be light fantasy; if you’re more literary, they might be stories of magical realism.  I came to them from a recommendation from Jo Walton, so someone thinks they’re SF.

Regardless of which genre bucket you put them in, the stories are rewarding and enjoyable.  Each is a tale of some facet of an imaginary Empire told by a different anonymous storyteller.  Gorodischer gets the most out of those constraints, showcasing different storytelling styles and kinds of stories.  Each storyteller is different, and visible in the text, though how and why differs widely.  Most tellingly, each has a different reason for telling the stories.  There are compelling reflections on the reasons we tell stories and methods we tell them.

The stories range from the personal to the political.  There are stories of individual lives that shaped the Empire and histories of cities that make it up.  Each has a point without being overly didactic.

The writing itself is beautiful.  There are well-turned phrases and perfectly textured paragraphs embedded in these well told stories.  Ursula Le Guin did the translation, and did the writing justice.

Recommended.

I wasn’t very far into The Storied Life of A. J. Fikrey before I expected to hate it. Set on a small island off New England, a widower book store owner is presented with a set of unlikely challenges that push him back into the life of his small community with his only asset being his dormant love of books. It is perhaps the most twee set-up for a novel one can write, and I haven’t even mentioned the adorable, precocious moppet.  I don’t like twee, predictable books, but I liked this.

Gabrielle Zevin has done an impressive piece of writing here. Everything about the plot and the character summaries is predictable and right out of the first literary novelist’s playbook. And there are no tricks.  The plot never twists so much as it turns like a well lit country road.  While there is a pleasure seeing what’s around each bend, there are no sudden wrenches of the wheel, or hard leans to take a surprising turn.  The reader ambles along a conventional plot.

Without propulsion from the plot or novel skeletons for the characters, it’s hard to see what’s interesting about Fikrey.  Zevin writes beautifully.  The meat she puts on the bones of her characters turns them into interesting folks to spend time with, even if their CV’s are pedestrian.  There are not a lot of phrases that provoke fireworks here, but all the writing engages the reader, making them see the characters’ world as the characters do.  Whether our CV’s are unique or common, we are all the stars of our own lives and that’s the impression Zevin creates here.

In addition, Zevin’s love of reading and storytelling is evident throughout. Given the set-up, she wants to comment on how books and stories influence our society.  Though the environment cries out for blunt commentary, Zevin never quite overplays her hand.  She does create a world of readers – some of them unlikely ones – and just lets them speak.  The result is more heartfelt than preachy.

Taken together, all this results in a very unlikely thing: a hangout book.  I’ve heard a hangout movie described as one that you watch to spend time with the characters, not to see the plot resolve.  You can put a hangout movie on in the background and enjoy your favorite parts without focusing how the characters you enjoy get out of a particular jam.  Fikrey is very much that kind of book for me.

Strongly recommended.

I love Kurt Vonnegut’s work.  At his best he sees the world with surprising clarity and expresses those sights with simple, clear language.  He can make the problems with the world look simple and comprehensible.  Not prefectable, or even improvable, but tractable.

If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? is a short collection of graduation speeches that Vonnegut gave.  It’s a good format for him.  He comes out, gives a bit of pithy advice and wishes the graduates good luck in this horrible and wonderful world.  He also keeps it short.  Lovely little mini-essays.

What’s probably most surprising are the mid-2000’s speeches that make many direct comments on current events.  I think of Vonnegut as a timeless figure, and hearing him bitch about US foreign policy brings him surprisingly down to earth.

A lot of this material is available on the web and other places, but I found the collection worth a couple dollars on Amazon.

Recommended.

Will Not Attend is a well composed set of personal essays. Adam Resnick tells each story with a careful pacing and a clear narrative.  They have tone appropriate to the incidents and he tuns many clever phrases.  These are beautifully written memoir essays.

While I got a lot out of the collection, I never got to the point where I was rooting for Resnick.  These are all necessarily told from his point of view, but I really can’t call him a protagonist.  Even after spending a book with him, I never come over to his side.

I also get the feeling this may be intentional.

He writes so well, that he may be trying to make these the memoirs of an unlikeable man just to show he can.  That’s not easy to pull off.  People want to be liked. Writers know how to manipulate sympathies.  If he indeed set out to write these pieces to achieve that effect, it’s an impressive feat.

I’m impressed, but not delighted.

It didn’t take long to read Douglas Coupland’s Worst. Person. Ever. He has a breezy, snarky style, turns a clever phrase, and keeps his plot twisting and turning alluringly.  The short chapters are like potato chips, easy to down and pick up the next. It would have been a great book to have on a transcontinental flight.

There are a lot of similarities between Person and Irvine Welsh’s Filth. Both feature reprobates from the United Kingdom.  They take some joy in taking the reader on a tour of the seedy side of their point of view character’s psyche, and both take no prisoners doing it.  Coupland, however, is writing a more superficial book.  There’s none of the subtext and misdirection that turns Filth on a dime in the last third.  None of these characters change meaningfully, nor do they ever garner much sympathy.

There are pleasures to be had in Person, for sure.  This is some quality snark and some snappy dialogue. The coincidences bring a demented bit of Dickens into the mix, and there are moments of enjoyable satire.  But as a whole, Coupland’s targets are a bit to east to skewer and his brush too broad for me.

More importantly, his characters are all pretty insufferable.  While it’s always clear who he’d like us to be rooting for, I wasn’t ever convinced.  I didn’t connect with any of these characters.  Hiaasen also writes some broad and often unlikeable characters, but he always sinks enough of a hook in me so that I have a stake in their fate.  I don’t much care what happens to any of the characters in Person.

I don’t regret reading Person at all – it was good fun while it lasted.  I suspect I won’t remember it in a month, though.