Looking Out To Sea

After however many pages and words and months I finished reading the last volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, The System of the World. Back in August I was effusive with my praise of part one but never got round to saying anything when I finished part two (The Confusion). So let this entry mark as my feelings on both.

Brilliant! Read them now!

Ahem. The two books that comprise The Confusion are the intertwined tale of piracy on the high seas, and political intrigue in the court of Versailles. They follow on from the events of Quicksilver though many other characters drop out and others become more important. It’s in The Confusion that many of the important links to Cryptonomicon become obvious — many of the family names which appear in that latter book first make an important appearance here — the Hacklhebers, Gotos and so on. It’s also in The Confusion that Stephenson lets his nerdy side really come to the fore. The chapter about the creation of phosphorous from urine was exciting and informative and hugely enjoyable — all that from chemistry, you ask, but it really was damn good reading.

The events which unfold at the very start of Quicksilver aren’t mentioned again for the remainder of Quicksilver and the entirety of The Confusion. All that is basically flashback. The thread is picked up again in The System of the World as one party attempts to reconcile the deep philosophical rift between Newton and Leibniz while another attempts to sabotage Newton’s work at the Royal Mint. Again we’ve got political intrigue combined with stunning action sequences that would overwhelm the audience of most heist movies.

Rather unusually for Neal Stephenson he manages to end everything too. Maybe given 2500 pages of writing he has finally worked himself into the right position to pull it all together. His other books have disappointed me on the last page, but I was very thankful that such an epic series ended right.

Make that investment! Read these books!

We’ve had so much success with recipes in the last few years that it’s sometimes easy to forget that some recipes are useless through and through. If you’re not very familiar with the general idea then it’s easy to get dragged far from the path by a instructions that are confusing or just downright wrong.

That’s what happened to me last week when I tried Scrummy Chocolate Swirl Shortbread from the Green & Blacks Chocolate Recipes book. I couldn’t really remember what the process for shortbread was so I just followed the instructions and ended up with something useless quite demoralising. I later checked Delia and James Martin’s respective recipes for shortbread and confirmed that the recipe in the Chocolate book is utter bobbins. Compare:

• Cream sugar into butter, then add flour.
• Mix dry ingredients then rub in butter.

The first one gets you a stiff dough, the second ones gets you breadcrumbs. And at that point there’s not much you can really do to pull it back — it’s not easy to decrumb crumbs.

I’ve just tried again, ignoring the mixing process they suggested in favour of Delia Smith’s instructions, and they seem much better. They’re cooling at the moment. Now I get to revisit the original recipe and mark it up for future occasions. I’m not sure if I should write proper instructions, or just score the whole thing out with “Wrong! Consult Delia!”. That would be more satisfying.

I read Jane Eyre and now I finally understand The Eyre Affair. The “original” ending in The Eyre Affair is not the real one, and the one which gets created is the real one (to some approximation: there are no time-travelling super-villains).

I was getting worried as the book went on because it seemed so much like the rubbish ending from The Eyre Affair was going to be the real one. That Jane really was going to India to be a missionary’s wife to the detestable St John Rivers. But she pulls it back from the brink.

So now that I’ve thoroughly spoiled the book for you, what’s it actually about? Well, it’s your standard fare of feisty young lass being brought up by an aunt who hates her. She’s sent off to school to have some docility and meekness beaten into her, which thankfully doesn’t work. Then there’s stuff about growing up and falling in love. It sounds bland in these terms but it’s pretty riveting when you’re inside it.

I picked up two books at last month’s book group but it’s taken me a wee while to get through this first one. It wasn’t the rollicking read I was hoping for.

Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs is about a group of programmers in the early 90s who leave Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup. It’s populated by the usual nerdy stereotypes — bearded millionaires, basement dweebs, greasy marketing guys and social misfits.

microserf (day 99)
© Jenny Spadafora

Tragically, none of it seems remotely interesting. All these smart people say nothing very interesting at all. The computer game which they create is not very interesting. Nothing very interesting happens to them in the creation of the game. It reaches completion without any hitches or even much in the way of work, as far as I can tell.

Along the way the characters have uninteresting conversations about… well, anything that strikes their fancy. As long as it remains uncontroversial and shallow they’ll talk about it — TV series, junk food, roads and buildings. But if there’s anything to be gleaned from these conversations it’s probably wrong. Even the one topic of conversation you would assume the techies could manage, computers, remains strangely beyond them. Who could seriously say something like “your body is your hard drive” who knew what either was?

The book is written as a diary, interspersed with pages of stream-of-consciousness word association. Nothing else irritated me quite as much as the word-association pages, because nothing else was quite so explicity saying look how goddamn deeeeeep I am.

In the last dozen pages the shallow characters of these people is thrown into stark relief, as something truly emotional and affecting happens. This really just illustrates how pointless the previous couple of hundred pages was, as we really know nothing about these people other than their ability to make dull conversation.

If you want to compare this tedious nonsense to something that is at least a real diary of a real programmer at a real startup, Jamie Zawinski has published diary excerpts from the early days of Netscape (then Mosaic). He at least mentions the programming once in a while.

So, now that this disappointment is over I’m going to start something which has been recommended by more people, Jane Eyre. This will also help me to put another recent book into its proper context.

I’ve just come to the end of Derek Robinson’s Goshawk Squadron, a sort of Catch 22 for First World War pilots in the Royal Flying Corps.

It’s a short book that drops the reader straight into the scene: an airfield in France, some miles behind the Western Front; unreliable planes; barely-trained pilots; jolly good chaps. It’s about well-educated English fellows who like cricket and wanted to do medicine and couldn’t dream of shooting someone in the back or taking part in something that’s not a fair fight. (Think Lieutenant George from Blackadder.) And how these men learn that war isn’t a fair fight and die regardless.

It’s not a harrowing book. There is no great trauma or emotional knife that gets twisted inside you. The characters drift through the book in a surreal manner very similar to the action of Catch 22. But slowly the force of the story picks you up and carries you aloft. So the inevitable fall at the end still leaves you a bit winded. It’s a completely compelling book. I’ve had trouble putting it down lately. Now it’s done and I don’t really want to read anything else until I’ve recovered a bit.

Another book down! I am now officially either a Terminator or a Cylon, though I never saw a Terminator relaxing with a good book so we’ll go with Cylon for now. (For context, see this comment.)

The latest book was The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. (Is that just like Ford? Or is it supposed to be pronounced Effin’ Ford?) It’s a light-hearted comedy detective novel, with little shots of science fiction and surreal horror. Robert Rankin meets Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams.

I read Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho a few years ago. (I definitely recommend it but it’s categorically not for the squeamish or faint-of-heart.) Many chapters are devoted to the main character’s analysis of Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis albums. These chapters meant nothing to me, though I understand from further reading that they were almost entirely fictional. Whole chapters devoted to demonstrating the narrator’s unreliable nature were completely lost on me.

Dodo ancora in viaggio!
©

Reading The Eyre Affair was similarly awkward. The central character is a literary detective, in the sense that she solves crimes to do with books, as well as being a detective in a book. There is a lot of detail about books in the alternate world of The Eyre Affair, but I’ve never read any of the books! What a doofus I am! You’ll get a lot more out of this book if you’ve read Jane Eyre and maybe Martin Chuzzlewit before. Alas I have not.

But this is not a criticism, except of me being ill-read. I enjoyed the book a lot. It was alternately subtle and slapstick. If you like witty wordplay and easy heroics this is your book. If you enjoy characters with silly names doing outlandish jobs, this is your book. If you love villains who revel in their own lack of morals, and know just when to employ a mad cackle, this is your book. If you enjoy time travel in fast cars and characters from novels coming to life, this is your book. And if you like dodos, how would you like one as a pet?

Last month Helen’s mum picked up a copy of Quicksilver for a book group, but chose the wrong Quicksilver. (I don’t know which one she was supposed to buy, but I can only hope it wasn’t quite as long as this one!). She passed along to us the one she hadn’t meant to buy — Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

I enjoyed Quicksilver in the same way I used to enjoy Saturday afternoons watching the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. There’s nothing to beat a good fictionalised retelling of history. And Neal Stephenson’s stories are tinged with enough science fiction that when you read up on some fact or other and discover it to be true it makes things that much more fun.

The story is set in the mid-17th century — the newly-crowned Charles II and the newly-created Royal Society are important features of the story. The events of 1660-odd onward are recounted from the view of a not-brilliant Natural Philosopher, a vagabond and an escaped Turkish slave.

Apart from a much greater familiarity with Restoration-era England and the European royal family (let’s face, it is just one family) I also picked up more interesting facts like the origin of the word “dollar” and the surgical method for removing bladder stones. Which, not coincidentally, are also known as calculi.

The book is exciting — Plague! Fire! Invasion! — and devious, held together with encrypted letters and metaphors. There are interludes of absurdity, such as chapters written in the style of a Restoration comedy, and others devoted to slight-veiled descriptions of important scientific discoveries. The events of the story never seem to stray too far from reality.

If you’re looking for something engrossing, irreverent and enriching to get your mind around, this might well be the book you need.

Despite being over 900 pages long, this book comprises only the first part Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle series. I’m really looking forward to getting the next two, The Confusion and The System of the World.

This Sunday we’ve got another Potluck and Prose, the lazy person’s book group, where you don’t technically need to have read your book, and bringing one is only suggested. As long as you’ve got a dish then all is fine.

Thankfully, after a bad start with Swallows and Amazons which I took two months to get through, I’m on a roll. This month I finished my own Foundation and Helen’s book too, Flowers for Algernon. Since then I’ve also been reading Innocent When You Dream (a compilation of interviews with Tom Waits) and started Quicksilver.

This latter is another seriously hefty book from Neal Stephenson, and is something like a prequel to Cryptonomicon. I cannot praise Cryptonomicon enough and would recommend it to anyone who asked. It was a fictionalised account of cryptography in the Second World War and modern computing, and riveting to boot. In order to outdo himself, Stephenson has chosen “science” as his theme and “the Age of Enlightenment” his time period. I’m only a few chapters in but it’s not disappointing so far!

Back round to the other book group, for science stuff, the next few books have been announced. One in particular looks very interesting, and will no doubt be particularly enjoyable once I’ve finished Quicksilver. It is Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. That’s not until March next year though.

But before that we’ve got:

• How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood by Alison Gopnik, Patricia K Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff
• Genesis Machines by Martyn Amos, which I own and have read
• Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

This month for the book group we’ve both been reading science fiction stories. I had Foundation by Isaac Asimov and Helen read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. My book was quite short so I ended up reading them both.

I’ll have to give my thoughts to the group next Sunday so I have to work out what they are!

Foundation seemed very old-fashioned, even more old-fashioned than Swallows and Amazons. It really seems to be true that nothing dates faster than our idea of the future. The truth is, Foundation was mostly a Victorian adventure story set in the future — men with moustaches arguing things out over brandy and cigars and taking Science and Religion to the Heathens. For a book about the collapse of a galactic civilisation it really seemed like all the action took place in a single room, like it was really a stage play rather than a drama set across the full length of known space. Each scene was a set-piece where the Protagonist meets the Antagonist and subdues him with Superior Intellect.

The book is a collection of short stories in the lifetime of a small planet at the periphery of the aforementioned galactic empire. The empire is collapsing and various planetary warlords and tinpot dictators are appearing out of the anarchy. Each chapter was published as a self-contained story, each taking place a generation or two after the previous one. The central conceit of the whole series is the invention of “psychohistory”, a statistical method of predicting the behaviour of extremely large groups of people (ie, quadrillions of people). At the start of the first story the inventor of psychohistory predicts the imminent collapse of society and records a series of further predictions which are played back at appropriate points along the thousand-year lifetime of the planet, to coincide with the society overcoming some new problem that threatens that their lives.

Each story takes place as some slow-burning problem comes to a head and just in the nick of time some Übermensch steps into the breach. Every single damn time it looks like their society is about to come a cropper someone with amazing intellect and wit and guile manages to manipulate the situation so the threat is deflected and the force of the attack is used against the attacker. It’s interplanetary political judo, innit?

I read another of the ‘Foundation’ books when I was younger but don’t remember liking or disliking it particularly. It’s strange that it seems so silly when given a fresh reading now that I’m old enough to understand it. I didn’t dislike the stories but they were rather juvenile and not very well written. The characters were interchangeable and I found it fairly difficult to determine who would turn out to be the central character in each story. They were all rather boring people.

The second one was Flowers for Algernon. It’s set in the “present day”, which I guess was some time in the sixties. The story is told through a series of diary-style reports written by Charlie Gordon, a retarded man who later undergoes an experimental procedure to increase his intelligence. The simplicity of this approach is devastatingly effective in the opening chapters. We see the events of Charlie’s life through his eyes, but can infer all the details which he misses from the narration. It’s a really saddening experience to watch Charlie stumble through things and having people who he thinks are his friends take advantage of him.

The Algernon of the title is the lab mouse who was made super-intelligent and which led the scientists in the story to try the technique on humans. Charlie becomes more intelligent but remains emotionally immature, while Algernon begins to regress. By this stage Charlie is clever enough to understand the experiment he was put through and discovers why Algernon — and ultimately Charlie — only had a short-lived brilliance.

The closing chapters of the story follow Charlie’s own regression. It’s sad and sickening, like watching someone lose their faculties to dementia over the course of a dozen pages. The frustration is palpable, as the books around him become harder to understand, his writing skills deteriorate, his concentration drops and his memory fades. It’s a book with many questions and no answers — and it’s hard to even know if the questions are good — but it’s well worth your time.

This month’s book at the Science & Society Reading Group was The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, a fairly recent publication edited by Richard Dawkins. It’s a collection of excerpts and articles from twentieth century writing about science — mostly written by working scientists themselves.

The essays were all chosen by Dawkins so it’s not surprising that there’s quite a heavy biology and evolution bias. But there are other exciting things too — Conway’s game of life, an introduction to Shannon’s information theory, and a fair amount of physics and cosmology. There are also the strange and frivolous, poems and fantastical stories, and that category of things which Douglas Hofstadter writes.

I think the only person who finished the book had read it last year and couldn’t remember much about it. The rest of us were still working on it. I think I was the only person not reading through in order, but hopping from article to article depending on what caught my interest. It meant there was a very small overlap between what I had read and what everyone else had read.

I was worried that much of the conversation would be taken up by nature/nurture conversations (which had got quite tedious the previous session when we discussed the movie XXY). It turns out I was foolish and naive — the main topic of conversation was bitching about that Richard Dawkins. Apparently he’s quite opinionated in his introduction; too much for some of my fellow readers anyway. I didn’t really notice this belligerent tone so I guess we just read different passages…

Overall there was a general unease with the book. Many others thought it wasn’t as focussed as it could be, with too many small and disparate ideas. And some people, confusingly, thought it wasn’t challenging enough. Maybe this was a natural effect of a roomful of biologists reading many of the biology-heavy essays at the beginning of the book. I don’t know. But I do feel I have a lot more to read. Every time I brought up the articles which interested me, everyone else hadn’t read them. How disappointing.

One interesting aspect about this book — and this is something I have noticed elsewhere — is the complete absence of the third science. Where is chemistry? Where are the popular writers for chemistry? Even asking chemists seems to draw a blank.

There has been no decision made about what we’ll read next. Suggestions mooted so far have been some philosophy (particularly, Russell’s History of Western Philosophy or some Daniel Dennett, who is easier to tie in with the science focus of the group). In my own reading list I have Gödel Escher Bach and The Annotated Turing, though I fear suggesting the Turing book to a mixed group of readers would not go well!

Does anyone have other “accessible science writing” suggestions I could put forward? In the past they’ve had Bad Science and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Maybe good scientist biographies exist too?