Walking on the Moon

Bill Bryson has a knack for taking disparate facts and building them into an interesting narrative.  in 1927 he does this with significant aplomb, picking a few larger than life people and watching how their lives and times mesh and unmesh.

1927 is a good year for such a study of America.  It’s the year that Lindberg crossed the Atlantic, that the Yankees fielded perhaps the greatest baseball team ever – led by Babe Ruth, and that’s just the beginning. Bryson is a natural raconteur and he both provides the color commentary on the larger than life protagonists, and he generates the overarching narrative the pulls the whole thing together.

He doesn’t stay completely in 1927, of course.  There are activities that set context for what happens in ’27.  There are activities that have their real repercussions after 1927, though their roots are there.

Along the way Bryson shows us how 1927 reflects our time – show trials and pointless celebrity – and how it differs.  It’s compelling to see how much and how little we have changed as a nation.

Strongly Recommended.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity is a history of the development of the atomic bomb told in comics.  It shows off comic’s power in relating history rather than providing escapist entertainment very well.  It’s strengths are comics’ strengths and so are its weaknesses.

The main weakness is that compared to a pure text history of the same subject, there are less technical and historical details.  Everything is told primarily through images, not as text or illuminated manuscript, so details must be thinner.  The content difference is similar to the difference between reading a history and watching a documentary.

The strength is in the power of those images to draw the reader into the narrative.  Fetter-Vorm does a great job conveying the times through his depictions of places and events, and of capturing the minds of the protagonists through showing their faces and staging the various scenes.  While few statistics and dates come through, Trinity communicates more context and personality.

In addition to capturing the humans involved in this drama, Fetter-Vorm uses his images and layouts to make the science behind the bomb intuitive.  By using the sorts of images and analogies that were used at the time, he also keeps his sense of time and place intact, even while he is explaining abstract physics. It’s a nice, powerful use of the medium.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Manhattan Project and the personalities involved but have an interest, Trinity will draw you into that world powerfully.  It may spur you to read in more depth later to get additional details.

Strongly recommended.

I did read A Christmas Carol, and I do like to write at least a capsule here about everything I read.  Honestly, Carol has become so much a part of the popular culture that there’s not much at all to say about it.  In fact, the thing that struck me most is that the source material brings so little to the story that the movies, plays, comics, etc. have not.

Carol really is a simple, well-told story about a miserly old misanthrope who is led back to the path of righteousness by spectral visitors.  It’s been completely assimilated into the culture.  I didn’t get much new out of reading the original.

The classics are always difficult to meaningfully comment on. A Tale of Two Cities is primarily Dickens commenting on the Reign of Terror, as he commented on other injustices.  His literary chops are impeccable, so the work is brilliant.

Two things stand out to me.  First, he takes the position that the Reign of Terror was a predictable and natural reaction to abuses of power. It’s one thing to take that position academically.  Dickens constructed evocative characters and scenarios that bring these ideas home.  I wouldn’t say he creates believable characters and scenarios; there is quite a bit of high melodrama here.  High melodrama can be as much fun and have as much influence as more three dimensional construction.

That strong representation of how individual actions build to historic upheavals is enlightening and frightening. The feeling of both seeing how history happens and not being able to change it feels like a truth.

The greatest part of the book is the redemption of Sydney Carton. Again, this is melodrama of the first degree, including the uncanny likeness of Carton and Darnay as well as the relative merits of their characters.  And I know what happens – I’ve read Tale before. But Dickens’s ironic, mordant, determined prose moves me every time. The feeling of both the need for redemption and the seed of that redemption growing from that bad life is palpable and reassuring.  The allusions to Christ are not misplaced, despite them being a bit heavy.

That pure demonstration of the redemption of a man, and perhaps a nation, is what draws me back to A Tale of Two Cities.

Strongly recommended.

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.