More books?

The finally tally for the summer is 36 books, not counting the two laydowns. The winners of the summer are:

Best Fiction:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowlings
Until I Find You by John Irving
Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin -- winner of the "surprise of the summer" award

Best Non-Fiction:
109 East Palace by Jenet Connan
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl
Unforgiveable Blackness by Geoffrey C. Ward

I've enjoyed doing the reviews and will probably continue. It'd be nice, though, if anybody's out there. If you're still with me, post a comment so I know you're there. Would be nice to know if you've tried anything off the list and what you thought of it.

Back to Texas

Well, that's it for the summer. Tomorrow its back to the heat and humidity. It's hard to relocate but I guess we're ready except for the weather. Last night, we walked down to the village for a hamburger. I know its August, but we were both in jackets. Not sure it was even 60 degrees at 6:30 in the evening.

We're driving back and tomorrow will, in the course of a few hours, drive home the difference. We'll leave first thing in the morning -- it'll probably be 50 degrees at most. By the time we get out of the card for lunch, usually in Pueblo (an awful place), it'll be almost a 100 degrees! Oh, well. The upside is that college football season starts in a week!

Magic Street

Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. Really pretty mediocre. Too bad because Card is a great writer. His Ender series and the Alvin Marker series are terrific. This book is billed on the cover as the "long-awaited contemporary fantasy novel". Guess people won't be quite as eager for the next one.

Card, a middle-aged, white, Mormon, has tried to write a fantasy novel completely populated by middle-class blacks. It never particularly rings true in spite of his trying to throw a lot of ebonics in. The story is a pretty standard good-vs-evil battle. The premise is that Oberon, Titania and Puck are all real - the king and queen of faeries and their side kick. Oberon has been bound underground for ages and is finally escaping in to the "real" world. Its been before -- and far better.

Skip this one. If you want to read good fantasy stick with others that I've talked about this summer - Rowling, Coifer or Barker.

Freddy and Fredericka

Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin -- this turned in to one of the more pleasant surprises of the summer. The "book jacket summary" is that Freddy and Fredericka are the Prince and Princess of Wales -- he's got big ears and is quiet and scholarly, if a little goofy, while she's gorgeous in spite of her oversized nose, fashionable if a little spacey. Sound familiar? The pair get in to so much inadvertant trouble that Freddy's succession to the throne is called in to question. To determine if he's really king material, the two of them are sent on a quest -- they're parachuted in to New Jersey wearing nothing but rabbit fur bikinis and flight caps. There task is to conquer the United States and bring them back in to the fold of the British Empire.

As a premise, this one sounded a little suspect but, in spite of the books lenght (over 550 pages), I decided to give it a try. It had some great satirical possibilities and might be fun. Helprin has a good reputation as a "serious" writer -- in particular, a book called Winter's Tale.

The early parts of the book don't even try for satire. This is slapstick comedy at its best. It's hard to make slapstick work in print, but I found myself laughing hysterically at both throw aways and elaboarate scenarios. One example of each and then I'll leave to you. A throwaway -- of course, Freddy has to have had a torrid affair with an older woman. Here her name is Lady Boylinghotte. One elaborate and hysterical scene sends Prince Freddy chasing through a village after Fredericka's little dog. As part of this scene, he runs right through a wedding party in the village screaming the dogs name. The dog was named after Fredericka's oriental nutritionist (who died of malnutrition). The nutritionist and dog's name is Pha Kew.

In spite of all the laugh-out-loud funniness in this book, this, in the end turns out to be very different. Not to sound un-macho, but this book turns out to be just plain sweet. Its about self-sufficiency, nobility and, most of all, about love. Watching Freddy prove his worth to be king makes for a sensational and surprising read. You'll never think about Prince Charles the same again.

Two Trains Running

Two Trains Running by Andrew Vachss -- I'm still trying to figure what this book was about. It started as a reasonably interesting story about a small town crime boss under pressure from Mafia outsiders. The local boss was an interesting character -- a wheel chair bound polio victim having a lifelong incestuous affair with his sister. The outsiders are led by a violent, lower tier Mafia member sent from Chicago. Good potential.

By the time you get to the end, though, Vachss has introduced several local teenage gangs, some mysterious government agents (one of whom is nuts), the Klan, a gay neo-Nazi, an underground nascent black power group (including an old man who ran with Marcus Garvey) and a never identified group of gun runners. An these are just he primary plots.

Ultimately, even though the book is well written, there's two much confusions to make this a high-ranking novel.

What the Dormouse Said

What the Dormouse Said -- How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff. This one's going to have a pretty narrow audience, which is a shame since it's the very well told story of the birth of an industry. This is one of a number of books that do an excellent job of documenting the events and, more importantly, the people that created today's world of personal computers and the Internet. See the end of this review for a list of the other good ones in this category.

Markoff's not suprising premise is that the personal computer grew, in part, out of the dramatic shifts in society that came via the 60s counterculture and, in particular, all of the things that were going on in the San Francisco Bay area at the time. He weaves together highly technical stories from SAIL (the Stanford Artificial Inteligence Lab) and Doug Englebart's Augment project, with tales of comunes, sit-ins, anti-war protests and LSD trips. At the time, computers were still huge, expensive, "behind-the-wall" things that only an elite priesthood actually got to touch and use. In addition, the future of computer science was assumed to be in artificial intelligence -- using computers to replace human thought. Both of these flew in the face of the "power to the people" attitude of the times. Eventually, the ethos of the hippie world (and lot of LSD trips for the engineers led fairly directly to capitalizing on the continuous increase in computer power to produce a "one computer per person" world. You can even see, in things like The Whole Earth Catalog, the seeds of the Internet. You definitely see right in front of you in this book, the start of the ongoing "information should be free" versus "information should be a business" that we are still fighting today.

I also have to admit that I enjoy books like this because I know so many of the people that are talked about. I've met many of the characters in the book and a few, like J.C.R. Licklider and Larry Roberts, I knew quite well. I guess you know you're getting along when you remember the things in history books. It's good to know, though, that a lot of these things that are viewed as important history were actually things I was a part of. In reading this book, I, for the first time, have a little regret about leaving MIT for UT after my freshman year. There was an amazing amount of hinge-point innovation that happend in the last years of the 60s that I missed by not being in Cambridge.

If you're in to computers at all or you just have an interest in how today's world became what it is, I really recommend reading this book, along with as many of the following as you can stand:

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop -- I especially like this one since its about one of my mentors - J.C.R. Licklider -- one of the unsung heroes of the information age.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner -- the origins of the Internet.

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik -- great stories about Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) a place where all kinds of things where invented.

No Country For Old Men

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy with his first really popular book, All the Pretty Horses, established himself as one of the best current writers but one with very narrow appeal. This book is terrific, but it continues in the mold of McCarthy's other fiction and most readers won't find it appealing. There are two reasons for this -- his style and his underlying subject matter.

His style is unusual for a modern writer and can be very disconcerting and, to some, offputting. It can best be summed up as "choppy". McCarthy is a big fan of short, often incomplete sentences and, while this makes his book a quick read, it can make the narrative hard to follow. He's also a big fan of unquoted dialog, making it hard to distinguish his voice from his characters. Finally, from a style point of view, he is prone to off stage action. You'll be reading about characters and then, in the next section of the book, discover that something major has happened to them while you weren't looking. You have to pay close attention.

The underlying subject matter in all the McCarthy books that I've read is violence. His books are full of gruesome murders and other acts of violence. In that, he's not that dissimilar to other modern authors. The difference here is that, while not nearly as graphic as somebody like Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs), the violence in McCarthy is described casually, nonchalantly. It a lot of ways this makes it far more disturbing.

The basic plot line in No Country for Old Men is that Moss, a young hunter, stumbles on the aftermath of a pitched gun battle that is clearly a Texas drug deal gone bad. While he ignores the drugs he finds, Moss does walk away with a satchel containing over $2M. The book is about all that occurs as the criminals try to find Moss and the money. Ultimately, the book isn't real about crime and violence. You'll have to read it to find out what I mean.

Our Crowd

Our Crowd, The Greatest Jewish Families of New York by Stephen Birmingham -- Guggenheims, Loebs, Lehmans, Schiffs -- a lot of the names that were synonymous with big money finance in the 19th and 20th centuries are the subject of this book. Its about big money, big family, big society. It traces a lot of these families from the old country through their struggles as new immigrants. The founders of these dynasties, almost exclusively, started penniless. They went initially in to fields where you could started with little or no money -- they were peddlers and junk men. They started far away from the financial centers in New York in places like St. Louis and Birmingham. As they made a little money, they'd move up -- from the goods they could carry on their back they'd earn enough money to buy a horse and wagon. From there, enough to buy a small store.

Eventually, these early pioneers learned that dealing more purely in money -- loans, bonds, stocks -- could make them wealthy. They secured their wealth for the first hundred years or more by keeping the new companies -- Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and others -- in the family. They brought brothers over from the Europe and made them partners. As time went on they added their sons to the rosters.

Once they became wealthy, the book describes how they spent and gave away their money. Some of these families gave away $40-100 million in the late 19th and early 20th century -- a huge amount of money. They also learned to spend -- throwing amazing parties and buying incredible art collections, while still remaining excluded from the gentile high society of people like Morgan and Astor.

The book itself is a little slow at times, but, especially if you're interested in finance, a fascinating read. Its part of a series called "Classic Bestsellers" that is reprinting books that were popular decades ago, so its a little disconcerting to have the book take the perspective of the 60s when it was written. The book concludes before the rash of Wall Street mergers that have taken place in the last few decades so the story is incomplete.

Winning the Future

Winning the Future by Newt Gingrich -- if you've been following this blog since the beginning, you know that, back in June, I went to hear Gingrich speech. He was interesting enough that I bought his new political manifesto, Winning the Future - A 21st Century Contract with America. Whatever your politics, this is a book you should read if, for no other reason, than it is clearly a blueprint for a potential Gingrich run for the presidency in the next election.

I've got to say that I found myself agreeing with Gingrich's statements far more than I expected to! Of course, the devil is always in the details, but a lot of what he says makes sense. I won't go through it all, but here are some examples:

-- Social Security -- this is probably the most honest and forthcoming discussion from the conservative camp that I've seen. Of course, Gingrich is definitely in favor of private retirement accounts. The difference here is that, unlike the current administration, Gingrich admits that these accounts will, in the short run (decades), make the SS system worse. He's willing to admit that benefit cuts, in one form or another, will definitely be necessary unless we're willing to dramatically increase the payroll tax on our children. This is just arithmetic - fewer and fewer payers for more and more retirees, but nobody seems willing to face up the problem - Democrats or Republicans. Somewhere along the line, the "safety net" of Social Security has become an "entitlement". When Roosevelt first proposed this system, the age at which benefits began to be paid was actually above the average life expectancy. How its more than a decade below life expectancy. In only a few years, I'm eligible to draw a social security check -- the system was never meant to pay people who could support themselves.

-- Activist Courts -- I know that, as a liberal, I'm supposed to like the way our courts have worked, but we need to be aware that court biases change over the years. The question is how should our courts operate. There's clearly a fine line between interpreting law and creating law, but there's no question that, since the 60s, the courts have become a legislating body. If you look a the Supreme Court, this means that five people (a majority of the Supremes) can create US law! No matter what your beliefs about the decisions themselves, this is not the way a democracy is supposed to work! I point at the recent "imminent domain" decision as a great example of court gone wild. Something needs to be done.

-- Science and Math education -- Gringrich strongly proposes major improvements in science and math education and recognizes that this is a survival strategy in a world where, in particular, India and China are putting major resources in to improving their ability to innovate. He also shows a willingness to think out of the box. For example, he proposes trying a program where high school kids can actually earn money by doing well in more difficult courses.

Those are just a few examples and there are definitely places where I don't agree with some of the things he's proposed in this book. I should also warn that, if you're a liberal or lean a little left, pick this book up with a thick skin. He blames a lot of problems, in strident tones, on the "left leaning elite".

On the other hand, if you're getting tired of the extreme political polarization and our increasing willingness to get nothing done on principal, you should read through this. Whatever else you may think of Gingrich, this is one smart guy and, given the charisma I saw in his brief speech this summer, he could make a serious run at the presidency. I'm no longer as convinced as I was that this would be a bad thing!

Locked Rooms

Locked Rooms By Laurie R. King -- a lot of authors have tried over the years to continue the most famous detective series of them all -- Sherlock Holmes. I've tried a number of them and have to say that King's "Mary Russell" series is probably the best of them. King's twist is that, late in life, Holmes forms first a partnership and then a marriage with Mary Russell, a woman much younger than him but, in many ways, his intellectual equal. King writes in a style very much like Arthur Conan Doyle and constructs storylines that are nearly as clever as the originals. (Interestly, Conan Doyle rates a couple of mentions in this latest book -- Sherlock doesn't much like him!)

Locked Rooms is the 8th book in this series. Each book stands reasonably well on its on, but significant portions of each book's plotline does depend on prior books. While you can pick this one up, its better to start the series at the beginning.

In the prior 8 books, we've been given only a few glimpses of Mary Russell's past. We know that she's an orphan -- her parents and brother were killed in a car accident years before we first meet her. Mary was a passenger in the car, but was thrown clear and was the only survivor. This book concentrates on filling in this story and the history of her family becomes the crux of the mystery in this latest book. Mary and Sherlock have undertaken a trip to San Francisco to take care of family business issues. Mary learns that in a late codicil to his will, her father has stipulated that no one can enter the family home unless accompanied by a family member and, of course, Russell, close to 20 years later is the only one left. As Holmes would say, with that "the game's afoot"!

Its unlikely that these books will appeal to Holmes purist. The thought of Holmes married would mortify them. But if you want a good fun read, this is a great series.

Skeletons on the Zahara

Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King. An interesting story. This is the non-fiction account of the crew of a ship that wrecks on the coast of Africa around 1815. The crew (and one pig) make it to shore but encounter one disaster after another. They are separated and taken as slaves by the Arab natives. This author studied the journals of two crew members, including the ship captain, that were published shortly after some of the crew made it back to civilization.

The book goes in to great detail about the lives of the crew as, for months, they are slaves to nomads traversing the Sahara Desert. The hardships are pretty devasting and, in fact, it makes the book pretty gruesome in places -- if you're easily disturbed, you want to skip this one or at least skim the descriptions of the physical hardships the crew members go through.

The writing style is a little stilted and, eventually, it gets a little repetitive. Not to be insensitve, but "sold to new owner, beaten, starved, baked in the desert....repeat", gets a little old after a while. That said, to somebody who thinks "hardship" is having to turn the air conditioner colder, this was an eye opener. Its hard to believe this is 200 years ago. Even harder to believe that there are still parts of the world that haven't change from the difficult life depicted in this book.

The Big Over Easy

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde -- Fforde has built up somewhat of a cult following with his first three books -- the Thursday Next series. The premise of that series is that there are ways to jump back and forth between "reality" and books. Next is a detective who solves crimes that involve literary characters like Jane Eyre. The series is good, but you always get the feeling that Fforde is straining to be clever and, by the third book of that series, it was starting to get old.

Well, with his new book, Fforde obviously decided "the hell with it -- if I'm going to be silly, let's pull out all the stops.". Surprisingly, the result was a very funny, but still well plotted murder mystery. You know right off that this isn't going to be particularly heavy when you learn that the murder victim is Humpty (actually Humperdink) Dumpty! At first, the detectives on the case, Jack Spratt and his sidekick, Mary Mary, suspect suicide. Dumpty had been clinically depressed for years with, of course, Easter being the hardest time for him. Finding the bullet holes after the crushed shell is reconstructed sends the police off in a whole new direction.

I know, I know, it sounds pretty stupid but it was actually very entertaining. Its laugh-out-loud funny in places and it definetely turns in to a page turner by the end. The overly familiar characters are given hysterical new twists that keep you interesting and actually caring about these nursery rhyme people. For example, at one point, Spratt thinks he recognizes the MO of a related murder as being the style of the now-jailed underworld leader, Giorgio Porgia. See what I mean.

This is a good way to waste a day or so -- quick read and fun. Especially if you're tring to tackle some serious reading or school work, The Big Over Easy (get it?) is a good way to take a break.