The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

Coraline by Neil Gaiman. This is a young adult/older kid’s book about a young girl who finds herself in an alternate world with an evil version of her parents. Entertaining, though slight – and there is going to be a stop-action movie of it made by Tim Burton coming out this year. (And oh – Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, which I wrote about here previously, just won a Newberry Medal. Well deserved, in my view.)

The Sharing Knife: Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold. I’m a big fan of Bujold – she’s one of the handful of authors who I’ll read whenever she comes out with a new book. I’m much less of a fan of this series, which is a combination romance and fantasy-adventure. Not bad, but not her strongest work. But this, volume four, appears to be the end, so I can look forward to having her write in other worlds again.

I am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. I mentioned this in my last blog post. This book examines the nature of human consciousness, walking a fine line between those who claim that consciousness results in some mystical quantity (often referred to as a “soul”), and those who would say that we’re all only a bunch of particles doing their particle thing. Instead, Hofstadter sees our brains as being symbol processing machines that are sufficiently complex to represent and reflect on ourselves. In other words, we are complex feedback loops, capable not only of presenting photographic feedback (as happens, for example, when you turn a TV camera on a television that shows what that camera is recording), but of containing ourselves as a complex symbol susceptible to detailed analytical reflection. Add in a dollop of some of the more interesting math of the twentieth century (the work of Kurt Goedel, who managed to prove that there are truths outside of any mathematical system that cannot be proven using the tools of that system) and you have a book that deeply impressed me.

I’ll go even further: this book has come closest of anything that I’ve ever come across to matching what I think is the source of the self, and will, after some thought, probably go on the short list of books that had a profound impact on the way I think about the world. I’m probably going to write more about this here in the weeks to come – I’m still processing it, deciding where I agree and disagree with Hofstadter, figuring how it all fits into my own world view. But for now, I leave you with this observation by Hofstadter: consciousness is an illusion viewed by an illusion, lacking the solid reality of the things out in the world, but nevertheless real in the eye of the illusion. And we, of course, are the illusion.

It’s been several months since I’ve last listed what I’m reading.  I’ve read many good pages in that time, though, so let’s catch up with a special year’s-end edition.

– The Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin.  A huge fantasy series, four books and counting, each book running from 800-1000 pages.  My kids love them, which pretty much make them required reading for me, if only so that I understand the dinner conversation.  I’ve read all four: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows.  The books center around a massive civil war set in a fantasy world that is a rough analog of England in the high medieval period, with some clear overtones of the War of the Roses, but with magic, undead, and dragons thrown in for good measure.

I’ve got a love-hate relationship with these books.  They are entertaining, with a vast array of generally interesting characters.  But they often lack narrative drive, they bludgeon the reader with ugly war scenes (please, George – I’ve read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror (which I highly recommend, by the way) – I get that medieval warfare is an ugly thing, one village full of raped and mutilated peasants is enough), and much of the plot is driven by characters doing truly stupid things, which always annoys me.  Most of all, we’re already at around 4000 pages, the story shows no sign of nearing a close.

I’m a fan of large sprawling novels: I don’t believe a book really gets going until around page 800.  But Tolkien and Tolstoy both managed to tell their war stories in around 1200 pages – does Martin’s war really require an order of magnitude more?

So tentatively recommended, but there are definitely some caveats here.  Most of all, Martin, who says there’s still at least three more volumes to go, is already three years late on volume 5, and is getting a little long in the tooth.  Commit to these, and you may be committing to a series that will never reach its end.

– No such caveats for The Graveyard Book, by Neal Gaiman.  Published as a young-adult novel, I found this to be an absolute delight.

The book opens with a dark stranger called “the man Jack” stalking through a dark house with knife in hand.  Having just killed the parents and older child, the man Jack is in search of one last victim, a toddler.  But the unnamed child slips away to a nearby graveyard where he is taken in by the Owenses, a couple of ghosts, who, after arguing about who he looks like, conclude that he looks “like nobody but himself.”  Thus, they name him Nobody Owens, or Bod for short.

The book recounts Bod’s childhood raised in the cemetery by the various ghosts who “live” within, with each chapter taking place two years after the last one.  Young Bod learns much from the ghosts, including how to fade into invisibility, how to instill a frightful chill, and to avoid the ghouls and the less reputable residents.  Finally, when the man Jack returns to take care of unfinished business, Bod is ready, and the final confrontation is a delight that ties together many of the threads that sprang up in the various chapters.

I always love Gaiman’s work, and I particularly loved this one – recommended for anyone.

– Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully.  I was talking with a friend recently about the battle of Midway, the turning point in WWII in the Pacific, when the American navy, after being dominated by the Japanese for the six months following Pearl Harbor, finally struck back, sinking four Japanese carriers and seizing the initiative for the remainder of the Pacific war.  (Yeah, I know.  I’m a geek, with lots of geeky friends.  So?)  I mentioned a couple of the standard points told about that battle, how the American torpedo bombers came in low and were shot up by the Japanese fighters, but that put the fighters out of position when the American dive bombers came swooping down from on high to sink the carriers, and how the carriers blew up quickly because their decks were crammed with aircraft getting ready to go attack the Americans.  He gave me a knowing look and said that I really needed to read Shattered Sword, how it would change everything I thought I knew about the battle.  And so I did.

I’m happy to report that the book is excellent, and showed how wrong I was.  Shattered Sword is a revisionist history of the battle of Midway, told largely from the point of view of the Japanese forces, that challenges much of the common wisdom about the battle.  (Those two points I mention above, for example, don’t survive Parshall and Tully’s analysis.)  Apparently, much of the common wisdom was based on the writings of Fuchida Mitsuo, a Japanese officer at the battle, who wrote an early self-serving account of the battle, one that has shaped much of the American understanding of what was the Japanese experienced during the battle.  But Fuchida’s account has been largely debunked in Japan for the past 20 years, though that news hasn’t reached American historians until recently.

The book does an excellent job of describing Japanese naval doctrine, the political maneuvering in their naval command that led to the Midway plan, and the tactics and operational approaches that the Japanese navy used.  That is coupled by a detailed recounting of the day of the battle, one that covers both the military actions, the efforts of the crews of the damaged ships to save them, and detailed descriptions of what it was like to escape from the burning hanger deck of a bombed aircraft carrier.  If you enjoy military history, and thought you knew what happened at Midway, I strongly recommend this book.

Haven’t posted my reads in a while.  Which doesn’t mean I’m not reading…

– Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government, by Gregory Levey.  A memoir of Levey’s time working for the Israeli government.  Levey was going to law school in New York and getting bored, so he decided to apply for an internship with the Israeli delegation to the UN.  (Levey is Canadian, but he is Jewish.)  He was told that they did not have interns, but they offered him a job as a speech writer instead.  Thus began his career with the Israeli government, which eventually led to his moving to Israel and working as a speech writer on Ariel Sharon’s staff.  It’s a pretty funny book, largely centered on the various mistakes that Levey made along the way (including one time that he cast Israel’s vote on a UN resolution without actually knowing what that resolution was, and another time when he used the remnants of his high school French to translate a statement from the French government, a translation that ended up in several news stories, and one where he was not at all confident of his accuracy).  A funny book, though certainly light.

– The Civil War by Shelby Foote.  Somehow, over several years of reading about the Civil War, I’ve never gotten around to reading Shelby Foote’s massive three-volume history.  I’m coming to regret the lapse.  Foote was a novelist who wrote a history of the war, and it is an excellent read.  Further, it reads like a novelist’s view on the war – Foote’s descriptions of the various generals and politicians read like a novelist’s descriptions, complete with piercing eyes and dark black hair.  The books mostly cover the military aspects of the war – if you want detailed discussions of the economics, you should look elsewhere.  I’m through the first two volumes now – putting the third aside for a while.  But they have been a great joy.

One note on the Foote trilogy: I’m finding a real joy in reading his take on the late unpleasantness.  It’s a story that I know well, but hearing Foote’s version makes it fresh.  I’ll also note that while Foote clearly has sympathies for the south, I don’t find them overwhelming.  On the whole, I think he presents a balanced view.  (Though he does degenerate into Lee hero-worship sometimes.  It isn’t too bad, all in all.)