Looking Out To Sea

There’s a book list that does the rounds on the internet, whose provenance I forget now (BBC viewers? Guardian readers?) — either way I’ve been working my way through it for a couple of years. Not with any great conviction, but if I’m not sure where to turn next for a book I’m open to selecting something from the list.

I thought I’d list my currently completed for now, to provide some kind of status update. I’m currently working on Wuthering Heights, which is proving much more enjoyable than I thought it might. Frankenstein on the other hand, which isn’t actually on the list anyway, was really boring and I gave up.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte — Really great, and now The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde) makes more sense
4. Harry Potter series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee — Not as good as I thought it might be
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
7. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
8. Catch-22, Joseph Heller — Fantastic and endlessly fertile source of cultural references
9. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien — Looking forward to the film!
10. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
11. Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
12. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis — Yeah, I don’t know who compiled this list. This is cheating!
13. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
14. Animal Farm, George Orwell
15. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown — I’m ashamed; but it was awful
16. Lord of the Flies, William Golding — Forced to hate it at school? Yes
17. Atonement, Ian McEwan — Brilliant, and the film’s not bad either
18. Life of Pi, Yann Martel — Don’t bother
19. Dune, Frank Herbert — Weird. For some reason I even read one of the sequels, though I didn’t even particularly enjoy the first book.
20. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
21. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
22. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas — A huge, creeping inexorable powerhouse of a book.
23. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
24. Dracula, Bram Stoker — Great fun and surprisingly creepy at times.
25. Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
26. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
27. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro — Quiet, reserved, evocative and restrained. Emotionally draining too.
28. Charlotte’s Web, EB White
29. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
30. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
31. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas — More whimsical than Monte Cristo, and a good sight shorter too!
32. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

Help, trapped in a cycle of not blogging that won’t stop. So many things that I have been enjoying that I want to mention, but that I can’t really bring to mind right now, and certainly not in an interesting fashion. Which means, a list!

• I bought myself a Kindle (third generation, but just wifi, not 3G) for reading stuff. In the first couple of weeks I was commuting by train and reading academic stuff. Since then I’ve been getting a lift and just reading for pleasure — which means a sub-list!

  • Bram Stoker’s Dracula: It’s strange reading a book that basically started a literary and cultural genre. I mean everything from Hammer Horror to Buffy, Twilight to Anne Rice has sprouted out of this book. It wasn’t the origin but it is by a long way the most famous Victorian vampire novel and it was interesting to see how much has been around from the start. The book is told in diary form, using snippets from the journals of Jonathan Harker, Abraham van Helsing as well as newspaper reports and other sources to “piece together” the story for the reader. It’s very effective and remarkably tense. My favourite scene is definitely the arrival in England of Count Dracula, told via newspaper clippings and the log kept by the captain of the ship that carried him. Sadly the part of Van Helsing, which gets more prominent as the book continues, is really badly written. I have never seen a worse depiction of a foreign speaker of English, it’s at least as bad as any Hammer Horror Dracula!
  • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped: I remember reading Treasure Island when I was younger (and I think I’ll re-read it soon) but couldn’t recall if I’d ever done this one. It was really enjoyable and the kind of thing I would have definitely enjoyed as a child. Non-stop adventure from the start.
  • Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: There have been so many awkward adaptations of this (or at least the Lilliput part) that it’s another strange one to read in its entirety. I quite liked the Ted Danson adaptation and from what I can remember it was fairly faithful to the parts Swift wrote, while including a lot of other stuff about Gulliver’s struggles to adapt to English society on his return. The first half you can read without much awareness of the political/satirical nature but it reaches a point where suddenly the author starts putting the boot in to “civilised society” and doesn’t really let up until the end of the book. Eminently readable, though if you find a copy riddled with footnotes I would abandon it immediately. The first copy I tried to read seemed to have more superscript letters than normal ones, and that really makes it a chore.

  As you can see I’m working my way through all the free stuff available, of which there is a substantial chunk on Project Gutenberg. Recommendations for classics are always welcome. Some authors are obviously well-represented but it would be nice to know if there are any books in particular that people think I should investigate.

• Capoeira is continuing — I’m even beginning to enjoy the roda on Sunday, which I’m trying to attend as often as I can. I’ve started going to the training twice a week most weeks. Getting a job really put paid to the amount of effort I can devote to training/exercise in my own time. But it’s getting much warmer these days so maybe I can get the grass cut outside so we can practise in the garden. Last week I was even practising on the Meadows. Who knows whether people were laughing or just didn’t notice/care… most probably the latter.
• I made a big batch of baguettes the other day, for a sandwich-based birthday party, and was complimented from many quarters. But then people will sell you their children if you provide fresh bread sandwiches!
• I haven’t done any SICP study since I started working again but I’ve just got in touch with my co-conspirators and we’ve agreed a meeting date, which might just be a chance to catch up socially but will hopefully lead back to studying and learning again.
• Of course now I’ve started a list I’m obliged to add enough entries to make it worthwhile, but I can’t think of anything else. How have you been?

I’m in a new job. I’ve done one week, so my life has mostly been on hold while I work out how things will fit together. I’m working for Honeywell Security writing embedded software. Similar to before but in alarm systems instead of networking.

The job requires a hefty commute — at least two hours each way if things go well, but between delayed trains and poor weather it’s sometimes an extra half hour on top of that. Which means I get up at 5.30, leave the house before 6.30 and get home in the evening around 7 o’clock. You can see why the rest of my life has been a bit quiet. I’m having to rethink how I look at the week. The arrival of the weekend is important and precious!

I’m still learning the ins and outs of work but the people are all very friendly and helpful, which makes the travelling more bearable. Spending hours travelling to and from a hateful job would be horrible. I spend an hour on the train each way which has given me more time for other things. I’ve been splitting my travelling activities, so that in the morning I read the freebie Metro for a bit and then do some “thinking” to limber up for the day. Recently I’ve been doing simple program calculation exercises, deriving the fusion rules for fold/unfold or map/map and so on. I’m really interested in the idea of deriving correct and efficient programs from executable specification.

(Just to show you what I’m talking about, this is the fold/unfold fusion rule. Let us say there are two functions, foldr and unfoldr defined as follows:

foldr f z     [] = z
foldr f z (x:xs) = f (foldr f z xs)
 
unfoldr g s = case g s of
                Nothing     -> []
                Just (x,s') -> x : unfoldr g s'

The function foldr combines a list of elements according to the function f and unfoldr creates a list of elements from the seed s. We might use foldr to define a product function which combines the elements of the list by multiplying them together:

product = foldr (*) 1

And we might create a list of elements from 1 to n with an unfold.

enumTo n = unfoldr step 1
  where step s = if s>n then Nothing else Just (s, s+1)

The observant reader will have noticed that combining these two separate functions will give us factorial, the product of numbers from 1 to n — first we create the numbers 1 to n, then we multiply them all together.

factorial = product . enumTo

The inefficiency is that enumTo works on producing a list which is consumed by product. The elements are inserted into a list only to be removed straight away. Can we omit the redundant list production? It turns out we can, and we can do it for all cases where foldr operates on the result of unfoldr. The product and enumTo are specific instances of a general method which we can use to fuse production and consumption of values.

This fusion rule can be demonstrated by algebraic manipulation of the programs we’ve defined so far. We’ll call the unfoldr and then foldr by the name hylo, with the naive implementation shown:

hylo f z g = foldr f z . unfoldr g

The equational style here facilitates some nice rearrangements which help to assert their correctness from step to step. Let’s see how this works — each line will be justified by some comment in braces:

  hylo f z g s
= { definition from above }
  foldr f z (unfoldr g s)
= { definition of unfoldr }
  foldr f z (case g s of
                  Nothing     -> []
                  Just (x,s') -> x : unfoldr g s')
= { push foldr into result }
  case g s of
       Nothing     -> foldr f z []
       Just (x,s') -> foldr f z (x : unfoldr g s')
= { foldr on empty lists }
  case g s of
       Nothing     -> z
       Just (x,s') -> foldr f z (x : unfoldr g s')
= { foldr on non-empty lists }
  case g s of
       Nothing     -> z
       Just (x,s') -> f x (foldr f z (unfoldr g s'))
= { definition of hylo }
  case g s of
       Nothing     -> z
       Just (x,s') -> f x (hylo f z g s')

Each step should be clearly equivalent to the one before and the one after, but by the end we have a definition for hylo which doesn’t construct a useless list.

hylo f z g s = case g s of
                 Nothing     -> z
                 Just (x,s') -> f x (hylo f z g s')

Naturally we can use the original definitions of product and enumTo to create an optimised factorial using this logic. The result is that factorial doesn’t create a redundant list either:

factorial n = hylo (*) 1 step
  where step s = if s > n then Nothing else Just (s,s+1)

I think this is beautiful result despite its obvious simplicity. However this has been a long digression, so I’ll stop now. But if you found it interesting I encourage you to check out work on “program calculation”, “program derivation”, “algebra of programming”, “origami programming” and so on.)

My evening journeys have been spent unwinding with a book, though the evening trains are noisier. I’m reading Brighton Rock right now and it’s good though the story makes me feel quite uncomfortable at times. One of the characters seems close to doing something wild and dangerous and it’s a fight between “must find out what happens” and “can’t bear to read any more” on a daily basis.

I hope week two will be easier and I will start to feel like my routine is falling into place. Watch this space.

Right now I’m reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. It’s really enjoyable so far — whimsical and witty like a 19th-century The Princess Bride (not inconceivable). I’ve got a big ol’ pile of things to get through after that. I still have a book from my birthday in June and a bunch from Christmas too. I came away from last night’s book group with two more — Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili. I’d been swithering over this one until I noticed the author. He has produced some great science television so I thought his book might be worth it. And Under Milk Wood, a play I associate strongly with my father though I’ve never heard or read it. But I’ve been quoted it a lot!

I took along Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf but no-one was interested. I think a lot of people had book overload and weren’t taking new ones to read. We’re not having our next meeting until March so there will be plenty of time for people to finish the books they’ve got. Hopefully I can deplete my to-read pile slightly by then.

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray at least a week ago and I’ve been struggling to put into words what I thought about it ever since. It’s a pretty slim novel but it took me a few weeks to get through so it obviously wasn’t enthralling.

My main problem, I think, was that it had a plot but no story. I felt no desire to read on other than to find out how the plot resolved. The characters were bland at best, and often both hateful and boring. Dorian Gray wishes that his portrait would get older instead of him, which seems to stop him maturing at all. The book was originally much shorter, and it shows — I felt there was a lot of filler which expanded it from a short story to a novel.

I got a lot more enjoyment from the introduction which placed the book in a historical context and recounted some of the reactions to its publication. It’s strange how some books are more fun to read about than they are to read.

Incidentally, I object to the inclusion of an introduction which serves to give away large segments of the plot. So much so that they required a pre-introduction to tell you not to read the introduction until you’d read the book. Wouldn’t it just be more appropriate to put the spoilers at the end and call it something else?

It’s about this time of the month when I finish whatever book that I picked up from book group and decide to write about it. Then when the next meeting comes around I’ve forgotten what I said at the time and just blabber incoherently about some vague ideas I had. Or is that what I do here?

Just finished Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (first book I’ve read by him). Probably most neatly described as “fantasy steampunk” since it gathers in all of the elements you’d expect from these genres: a land of strange beasts and many sapient species, real magic, mechanical calculating machines and steam-driven engines in an early industrial society.

The book is quite hefty and nothing definite happens until halfway. Then it got very compelling and I raced through the second half in much shorter time. Initially I found the descriptive language quite ponderous and found myself rereading paragraphs more often than normal because I couldn’t wring sense out of it. (I was also reading quite late at night, which doesn’t help.) The language didn’t get any more direct the further I read, but I got used to it and it was easier when I was more engaged.

It was hard to take some of the creatures in the story seriously for a long time. They’re the kind of bad scifi/fantasy that really bugs me about Dr Who — sentient walking cactus people? (They have to file down their spines so they can hold stuff properly.) A species that has human female bodies but the entire body of a scarab beetle as a head? Of course these are entirely logical evolutionary outcomes for any world…

Once you’re over the absurdity of what you’re reading it’s an enjoyable book. One of the later characters, the Weaver, is a brilliant trickster — a kind of Ungoliant character with the personality of the Cheshire cat — a huge, dangerous spider that hums nonsense verse to itself while flitting through the world to fix things for its own aesthetic purposes.

For all that, I have come to the conclusion that the story doesn’t really hang together. The threat to be defeated is a natural one, but one which is almost-invincible and has an insatiable appetite for people. I fully understand that invading predators can be an incredible threat to an ecosystem, but normally they fit somewhere into their own environment. But it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that magical, soul-sucking, hypnotising eight-metre dragons which can taste conscious thought on the wind… would be a localised phenomenon wherever they live.

So while I did enjoy the book, it’s not one you want to think about — in fact, it helps if you think about it less than a traditional “high fantasy” novel.

This month’s book group find was A Close Run Thing, the adventures of Cornet Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons during the events of the Napoleonic War(s), particularly Waterloo. Hervey comes across as a nice person, what Sharpe would refer to as a killing officer, not a murdering officer.

It bears a lot of comparison to Sharpe, except Hervey is a proper bastard officer rather than a soldier raised from the ranks. Hervey is the most junior officer in his regiment, but as is customary for this type of novel he excels himself and is frequently highlighted to the senior commanders for promotion. But since Hervey is the son of a country vicar, and therefore not very rich compared to many of the other officers, a lot of the book is concerned with the commission system, and being able to afford a promotion that is offered.

He also dwells a lot on duty, especially in his brief stint in Ireland where his role appears to be military muscle to allow factors to throw people off the land. He gets in a bit of trouble for being a gentleman rather than a thug, though it all works out in the end. He’s a quick lad though somewhat dim when it comes to affairs of the heart.

The story was fairly easy to follow though the occasional deep-dive into horse terminology left me a bit lost. Still, as long as you basically know what a horse is you can follow along reasonably well. It’s not a very action-packed story, as it basically spans the last battle before Napoleon is exiled to Elba, and the battle at Waterloo after his return, and the period of peace-time in the middle. So the middle chunk is Matthew Hervey in England and Ireland, not officially at war. I’ve not read Sharpe or Hornblower, only seen the TV adaptations, but I get the impression that they tend to be more action-packed than this, or at least more intriguing.

It’s a “short month” this time between book group meetings, so I didn’t take anything very challenging. I’ve also still got North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell) which I’m making some sort of headway with. I was told it gets better from the opening few chapters, so I’ll let you know. Last weekend I picked up a few very cheap paperbacks in Barnardo’s on Leith Walk. I think it was about £1.50 for Unseen Academicals, Whisky Galore! and The Three Musketeers which I like to think was a pretty decent bargain.

So in the last month I’ve read:

• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Graphic Novel. This is my book-group book, which is really fun. I think you’d have to be familiar with the original original to enjoy the tribute. Essentially it’s Austen’s classic with heavy zombie/kung fu influences. (I bet you didn’t know the Bennett sisters trained with Shaolin monks, did you?) The artistry was a bit disappointing, and confusing in some parts, but the wit of the language married to the absurdity of the Undead more than made up for the visual flaws. I’m very tempted to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the novel now, to make the most of the bits I enjoyed.
• Unseen Academicals (Terry Pratchett). The city of Ankh-Morpork discovers football — and good quality pies — in good style. Short(crust) and easy to digest, and very enjoyable.

Last book group I picked up two books but didn’t get round to reading either for ages. The second one, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, is proving too difficult so I might just abandon it where I am. I certainly don’t think I’ll get it read by next weekend.

What have I read then?

Three to See the King (Magnus Mills) is a strange tale about a man who lives in a tin house on a desert plane, a mile or so away from other people who live in their lone tin houses. The story follows the fate of a grand excavation, with thousands of people trying to build a new township with tin houses. The prose is very flat and the humour dry and deadpan. Whatever I picked up from this book I’m sure I missed most of it. It was interesting, though really I’m not sure if I recommend it.

Pandaemonium is Christopher Brookmyre’s latest homage to computer games.

The premise of Doom is relocated from the moons of Mars to the wilds of Scotland (but of course…) and the lone marine replaced by schoolchildren, teachers and a couple of Catholic priests. And it’s great.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson) is pretty popular these days. This and the two sequels seem to sit permanently on the Amazon bestseller list. I can only partially see why. The story is fairly involving, with a few interesting mysteries unravelled by the end, but the writing is absolutely atrocious. Most of the time it’s not descended to the Dan Brown level but occasionally the tone of the prose is so badly off-kilter it makes you wonder if it was written by a native speaker. Of course, it wasn’t written by a native speaker, so the real question is whether this wooden and lumpen writing is an accurate reflection of Larsson’s Swedish source text, or whether the translator was just an idiot.

I’ve managed to get a lot of reading done in the past few weeks, so maybe it’s time to mention a few. Most of these came from the book swap group.

• Measuring the Universe by Kitty Ferguson

  A kind of history of geometry and cosmology, to answer the question, “how do we measure things that we can’t hold a yardstick against?”. It covers the history of the ancient Hellenic philosophers who calculated the diameter of the Earth, the distance to the Moon, and so on, right up to the discovery of the size and shape of the Milky Way and the distance to the furthest reaches of the Universe. It was interesting to see how much we currently know is very modern knowledge. Before the 1920s we didn’t know there were other galaxies! I also liked learning about the contributions made by people who I’m familiar with through their namesakes — the Cassinis, the Hubbles, the Oorts.

• The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan

  Richard Morgan is more known for his hard-edged post-cyberpunk science fiction. This is his first foray into “high fantasy”, the realm of dragons, gods and barbarian adventurers with big swords. This book had most of the above, including what I believe to be the first gay sword-wielding hero — a move so obvious in hindsight it is hard to believe it’s taken this long. I enjoyed the book a lot but felt the point of the villains eluded me, and the ending lacked satisfaction. More than enough sex and blood-letting to count as a Richard Morgan book though.

• Wicked by Gregory Maguire

  This one took me by surprise. I suppose it’s not totally odd that book with the tagline “inspired the hit musical and sold two million copies” would be worth trying but I was still very pleased by everything that it delivered. It’s the life story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West from L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She is an outcast from the start, being born green and allergic to water, in a little rural town in Munchkinland. I felt quite caught up in the events of her life and as the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz began to overlap with Wicked it was quite painful, knowing that she would soon die from a bucket of water, her dreams unfulfilled and her friends tormented by the despotic Wizard. I’ve added the two sequels to my wishlist.

• Dark Entries by Ian Rankin and Werther Dell’Edera

  The one book on this list which didn’t come from the book group, this is a graphic novel written by the same Ian Rankin who writes the Rebus novels. It’s a very short (I read it in an evening) John Constantine novel about a Big Brother-style reality show whose contestants are having horrifying visions. Constantine is brought in to exorcise the house or otherwise get to the bottom of the problem, though things don’t go according to plan. The drawing was strangely out-of-kilter with the story — the London graffiti with American spelling, the dialogue describing Highland Park as a whiskey-with-an-e alongside a picture of the bottle showing whisky-without-an-e. It all just seemed badly put together, and the failure to decide whether the story was darkly comic or properly horrific didn’t help. Maybe not bother.