Walking on the Moon

This is a translation of The Iliad by Edward Earl of Darby in 1862, unsurprisingly free for the kindle, my current e-book reader of choice. I’d read parts of The Iliad in high school and had been meaning to get back to it.  Things come up, however, and twenty some-odd years later I finally got around to it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the reading it, front to back.  I suspect that I would have enjoyed it less in high school, but now it was an endless parade of delights.

First of all, it’s a rip-roaring Hollywood blockbuster of a story.  It’s one bloody encounter after another, described vividly and in detail.  I tried to read Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur a few years ago and found it deadly dull.  A big part of the reason for that was how sterile and ethereal all the interactions and altercations were.  Sure Arthur “slew on the left and slew on the right” but that leaves it all pretty vague what was going on.  With Homer You Are There: he describes the various movements of the heroes and how they face each other to the point of telling where the victorious spear enters the loser’s body and just how the body came apart.  While I do not feel any great need to know that Hector decapitated someone as opposed to disemboweling them, the overall tone is much more detailed and close to the action.  As a result the characters and situations are more lively.  Mallory seemed like literature to me in the worst pretentious way; Homer feels like a story that gets retold and amplified by people.

The translation is also a source of fun.  I can imagine a very direct translation that tries to get the meaning across as clearly as possible to modern readers so that they can easily follow events from a couple thousand years ago. That’s not what the Earl provides at all.  Apparently he’s trying to capture the flavor of the ancient Greek, and not knowing any Greek I can’t tell how he did.  What I can say is that his translation has a quirky rhythm and flow all its own.  For example, evidently negation was an intensifier in ancient Greek, because no divine intervention takes place without at least three offsetting negations: “you should not hesitate to avoid throwing your spear.”  It’s all comprehensible, but just alien enough to remind you that Homer’s world is a different place.  It’s also all pretty consistent, which gives the text the flavor of a stylist rather than a translator.

I also enjoy the little shout-outs and digressions throughout that remind the reader that this was a history of the war and the warriors and communities that contributed to it.  It is pretty common to introduce a character and describe his history and personality in the space between a spear being thrown at him and dashing out his brains.  Longer digressions describing the founding of cities or the lineage of the heroes also pop up.  While all this diverts from the main plot, I find it charming that some Greek soldier otherwise lost to the mists of time gets a brief moment of immortality here.

So, overall, The Iliad is a lot of fun to read, and it certainly helps your literacy in the classics.

Strongly Recommended.

I’ve already mentioned this on Facebook, but Warren Ellis has brought another Elemental video to my attention.  You may want to give it some of yours.  Elemental is well liked here.

The full title of Michael Lewis’s book about the 2008 financial crisis is The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine, which is a little melodramatic.  But not much.

Lewis has made a career out of explaining fairly complicated numbers games and how they impact people’s real lives.  He’s taken on the stats geeks in baseball and Wall Street in earlier books that I haven’t read, but if The Big Short is any indication, Moneyball should be on my list soon.

Lewis dives into the shenanigans that drove the housing crisis with the knowledge of an insider and the eye of a journalist.  He covers the tricky financial instruments in enough detail that one can clearly see the amazing disregard for risk and greed for profit that pulled the bandwagon forward, but at a high enough level that the mathematics is never daunting.  If you want to understand the gears that inflated the bubble and the cords that tied all the banks together when it burst, this will explain it to you.

In addition to knowing and communicating the technical details, he assembles an interesting cast of characters who were working out the problems in real time.  It may surprise you that there were such people, but it’s a big world.  He does a good job bringing them to life and using their stories to tell the larger one that we all saw unfold.

Overall this is an indispensable book in understanding the recent financial crisis, and one that tells the story with clarity and wit.

Strongly Recommended.

A couple years ago, I wrote an interactive quiz for aviators to practice determining hold entries – mainly because I sucked at it.  At the suggestion of a user, I added a display mode to it.  You can check out the quiz.

Steven Waldman’s Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America is exactly the kind of writing I like to see on difficult matters of history.  The topic is charged because of the constant battle between Church and State and the politicizing of faith on both sides, but there are real lessons to learn from history.  Waldman leads the reader toward those lessons by looking at several key founders and examining both their personal faith and their contemporaneous opinions about how religion and the republic should interact.  He also provides the context for these decisions in terms of the religious and political forces of the times.

Though Waldman uses a few well known founders to motivate his discussions, he never forgets that these were extraordinary men who created popular political consensus.  Madison may have believed in a wall between Church and State, but he never lost sight of the fact that other positions had to be considered and ground conceded.  Appeals to Jefferson’s position on an issue should not ignore the fact that all of the founding documents and many actions on which we base that position were products of consensus.  The frustrating ambiguity of the First Amendment exists partially so that different constituencies can see what they want to in it and support it.

Despite that caveat, this is not a wishy-washy book.  Waldman calls the history as he sees it, whether he’s providing supporting evidence that Jefferson meant what he said about a wall between Church and State or arguing that none of his selected founders were Deists or Atheists.  Partisans on either side of modern Church and State debates will find some of their historical support kicked out from under them.

This is as it should be.  Waldman’s interested in a real understanding of the issues – religious and political – in the early years of the nation.  There are important differences in how religion was practiced that shape the founders’ views that imply those views require context, but not so much context that appeals to God are anything but what they seem.  Furthermore the founders do not speak with one voice.  Adams and Madison have very different views of the role of religion in moral and public life.  Beyond that their personal faith and their positions on how the government should deal with religions differ as well.

Overall this does a great job of getting the historical issues in place and showing how both the most respected minds of the era addressed them as well as how the country as a whole approached things.  I came away with a much better understanding of the period, the pressures, and how the decisions of the time were influenced.  Waldman does not pick a particularly strident position on any side and try to defend it.  These are some facts that will help the reader form their opinions, not positions to adopt or refute.

Recommended.

Last week 32169 went in for annual inspection, followed by a week of rain so that I couldn’t fly her.  Today I went out and flew around a little to make sure all was well.  You’d think that right after a big teardown inspection everything would be perfect, and usually that’s true, but it’s always a flight I approach with extra caution.  That’s why I didn’t fly her in the rain – something I’m usually just as happy to do.

Anyway, the flight was great and everything was pretty much perfect.  There was an added bonus.  I’d asked about painting my fuel caps and that had been done.  I’d picked up a new cap a couple years ago when on the road and had never gotten it painted.  Now it looks beautiful.  I feel like the plane has doubled in value!  Of course it hasn’t; used airplane values are not doing well lately.

Gaze on the beauty of my painted cap:

A white gas cap!

Incidentally, you know you fly the same plane a lot when you realize that after painting the caps, your mechanic has put them on the “wrong” wing tanks.  You know you’re whack-o when you fix that.

How The States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein, is an odd little book about history and geography of US states.  It’s fun to hang a little history lesson how each jog of the various state lines reflects a human interaction that’s fairly permanently etched into the landscape.  I was also happy to have found and read this on the Kindle.

The US is a federation of semi-autonomous states that joined together to gain their freedom.  This has a surprising effect on the shape of states.  The original 13 (or maybe 14 depending on how you feel about Vermont) were laid out according to the needs and sometimes the whims of the British monarchy.  As they came together, the disparities in state layouts and populations influenced the creation of the bicameral legislature.  That’s interesting enough, but the reaction of Congress was to attempt to maintain size and population parity of subsequent states.  That logical and surprising decision is one of the revelations of How the States…

There are others, from the concessions made to absorb Texas and California, to the multiple surveying errors – intentional or accidental – to the effects of the various natural features on the economy and geography of states.  Unsurprisingly, the Missouri compromise is visible in state boundaries, and the Civil War plays a role in Nevada’s borders.  There are surprisingly many good stories to tell about state lines.

The layout of the book makes it more a reference than a narrative.  After a short overview of principles and key national events, Stein proceeds state by state and border by border around the country.  The states are considered in alphabetical order, which means the same story gets told at least twice.  It can make it a little difficult to follow themes.  The fairly brief length also means that on some occasions, only the beginning of the story is in here. Still, this is a book that I expect to return to occasionally, when I forget why a particular blip is there on a boundary.

I was happy to see this on a Kindle for two reasons.  First, I found this odd thing in the Kindle store.  I was afraid that as I did more shopping on-line, the opportunities to run into interesting things like this would be reduced.  Apparently this is not the case.  Secondly, the book is chock full of maps that were generally easy to read in the Kindle.  I hadn’t been looking for a book full of maps to evaluate the Kindle’s illustration rendering, but I found one, and it was an enjoyable read.

One bit of Kindling that would have been nice would be better indexing.  Frequently part of a shared border’s story is told in one state’s entry and referenced in another.  These are not set up as Kindle cross references, so looking up the end of the reference is more painful than it needs to be.

Overall a fun book that told me a bunch about my country and my Kindle.

Recommended.

Like every other Kindle owner, I downloaded the free version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from Amazon. While I do have some criticisms of the collection, they’re mitigated by the facts that 1) this is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and 2) it’s free.

I was about to claim that I’m not much of a mystery reader, but I’ve been gushing about Raymond Chandler for a while now, so it’s probably pointless to try to defend that position.  I will say that I almost never read a mystery to try to beat the detective to the solution, but to see what the author brings to the story outside the genre trappings.  I’m not trying to stay ahead of Holmes – which would be difficult for no other reason than I don’t know enough minutae from the Victorian Age – but to visit his world.

I do genuinely enjoy Doyle’s stories.  His characterizations of Holmes’s cantankerous and logical character as well as the leads’ mutual affection are effortlessly communicated.  The tales and the company quickly become enjoyable, and Doyle mixes up the genre elements well enough that the stories never become completely formulaic.

That said, this isn’t a great collection either in terms of content – there are many missing stories – or in formatting for the Kindle.  Almost any unusual character is misrendered, to the point where any reference to currency was simply a blob with a number somewhere in the middle that may or may not be related to the sum in question.  While this did not pose an insurmountable problem for the stories, it was annoying.  Not that I remember the Victorian English Currency system, anyway.

Beyond the formatting of the text, the book itself didn’t take advantage of any of the Kindle features for navigation or visualization.  Iorich, which does, was a more pleasant navigation experience.  I like knowing roughly how far it is to the next chapter break, or, in Adventures, story conclusion.  Since it’s clear from the Kindle store that everyone gets this book, I was expecting more of a showcase.

As I say, my gripes should be taken as minor.  This is a free collection of Holmes stories; you can’t go wrong.

Recommended.

Carl Hiaasen writes some world class light fiction, and Star Island is no exception.  It’s a fast moving send up of paparazzi and their targets where everyone’s a bit larger than life and the plot’s twisty enough to hold your attention without being confusing.  Writing such a thing is harder than it looks.  Striking the right tone, keeping the characters likeable but interesting, and keeping the plot’s clockwork running but obscured is all a challenge.  Hiaasen does all that and adds the South Florida flavor that he’s well known for.

All that said, Star Island is a trifle.  I’d forgotten I’d read it until I was looking through my kindle’s book list to see how far behind I am on these reviews.  Fun, while it lasted, though.

Recommended.

The latest in Steven Brust‘s Vlad Taltos series was available for the Kindle, so I actually read it before it came out in paperback.  My reviews of the books in this series are usually shorter than the other capsules, partially because most of the Taltos stuff is like most of the Taltos stuff, though not in a particularly repetitious way.  There’s always some twist to them that keeps you reading, and the writing is fun and thoughtful.  At this point, the books feel more like chapters than books, and it’s a little hard to review them in isolation.

These are well executed novels in the fantasy genre that are part of an interlocking overall whole.  If that’s your thing, and it’s certainly mine, jump in.

Strongly recommended.