Rúnar
A delightful little story.
A major annoyance was that it's quite difficult to obtain this in America, except for a dumbed-down americanised version. The odd language in that version is distracting and out of place for a story set in Britain. Ultimately I binned “The Sorcerer's Stone” and bought a proper copy of “The Philosopher's Stone” on a trip to London.
The Way of Kings was recommended to me by several people independently of one another. One of them even went so far to say it was the best book they've ever read.
It is not a good book. It's 1001 pages of Brandon Sanderson presenting his cartoon world of Roshar in juvenile, trashy prose like:
He looked eastward, over the Shattered Plains. His home. His sepulcher. This life on them was ripping him apart. The bridgemen looked up to him, their leader, their saviour. But he had cracks in him, like the cracks in the stone here at the edges of the Plains.
Oh, Stormfather, Adolin thought, stomach twisting in pain. Jezerezeh, Kelek, and Ishi, Heralds above. Let me find a way to right this. Please. “I will return to Alethkar,” Dalinar said. “Though I hate to leave our army here down a Shardbearer.”
Geirmundar Saga Heljarskinns (“The Story of Geirmund Hellskin”) is a work of fiction in four layers, with four major characters.
The innermost layer is a 12th century manuscript that tells the story of Geirmund, a Norwegian king's illegitimate son, born in slavery, who rose to fame and became the head of a vast trading enterprise in Iceland during its age of settlement. The author, Brandur the prior of Flatey abbey, writes with great poetry, humour, and imagery. People who lived more than 1100 years ago come alive in the telling.
The next layer is the story of Brandur the prior. Through his writing of the saga of Geirmund, we get to know a little of his life in Flatey, a remote island off the coast of a remote island. We get to read his lonely thoughts on life, language, God, and sexuality.
The next layer is the story of the manuscript itself, and this is were things get Borgesian. We learn that the original was lost, and a copy made around the year 1400 is supposedly preserved in a private collection known only to a handful of people. The version published in this book has been painstakingly restored from a copy of that copy, made in the 1940s by someone who briefly had access to it (and whom, at the time, nobody believed). The story of this man is no less compelling than the story of Geirmund himself. Was he a madman or a con artist, or did he really find a suppressed history of Iceland?
The outer layer is a fictional account of the author's restoration of the story and reconstruction of the history it hints at. He suggests that the full story of Geirmund Hellskin has been systematically erased or omitted from written histories. Such books generally mention him only in passing, and much about him is shrouded in mystery and contradiction. The canonical narrative of the settlement of Iceland is that it was a community of Norse farmers, fostering justice and equality in the new land, eventually culminating in the establishment of a Christian nation. If the saga of Geirmund Hellskin is true, it challenges this notion in no small way. Geirmundur was a dark-skinned man with Asian features like his Siberian mother, and he was one of the first settlers of Iceland, along with his mother's Siberian kinsmen, his Norse friends, and Irish slaves. They came to Iceland not to farm, but to plunder its shores which at the time were teeming with walrus. Geirmundur established a vast hunting and trading network, and controlled nearly a quarter of Iceland's territory with large roaming armies. He was as close to a “king of Iceland” as there has ever been, and to say that he was not a good king is an understatement.
This is a masterwork of historical fiction, and of fictional history.
The Wise Man's Fear was overall rather jolly good. There's possibly slightly too much of it, and it did feel long-winded at times, especially the last quarter of it or so.
I expected there to be more development of the main plot line, but there really wasn't any to speak of. There's more development of the theme than the plot. The theme is that knowledge is power, and knowledge takes the form of stories, and what the book calls “deep names”. It's really a series of adventures where Kvothe learns something about himself or the world. And we get to know Kvothe quite well by the end.
I'm looking forward to the third volume.
It's been a while since I read a high fantasy novel, and this is a welcome return to the genre for me. I also get the feeling that Patrick Rothfuss and I grew up on some of the same fantasy literature and played the same tabletop RPGs.
This is a story within a story. The outer story is about a man who used to be somebody, but is now just waiting to die. The inner story is his account of his life. And while it's not the most mind-blowing story I've ever read, it's a damned good yarn. And since it's told not necessarily as it “really” was, but as this character is telling it, the story is essentialized and single-threaded.
This is also a story about stories. And names. There's a hint of a Platonic metaphysics that a “thing is really its name”, or that reality (as we see it) is made up of stories. More specifically that stories we tell ourselves about who we are actually affect who we ultimately become. And even if life is not really like that, it is like that in this story. Because it is a story. And so it breaks the fourth wall a little bit.
There's good writing in here, and also some bad. Rothfuss can write poetically, and he can also go on about music and mythology in his imaginary world a little bit longer than is strictly necessary. This is a problem I have with a lot of high fantasy. In stories set in our own world, we can draw on a vast cultural background whose roots reach back thousands of years. But in a made-up world the author can't draw on myths, legends, or archetypes without making them up. And often they're mentioned in passing as if the reader already knows what they mean, and so feels a bit like an alien visitor. And that pulls you out of the important part: the story.
The Name of the Wind is a little bit Harry Potter, a little bit Ender's Game, and just a touch Plato's Republic. It's not a heavy read at all, and it took me less than a span of days to finish. Maybe the sequel will tell me exactly how long a “span” actually is.
This is a book of academic essays in two parts, on the topic of Ayn Rand's theory of concepts. The first part is an exposition of various aspects of the theory, starting with perception and going towards a detailed discussion of the Objectivist epistemology which centers on concepts and induction. The second part of the book is a discussion which contains various critiques of the theory and answers to those critiques.
The first half is thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking. As a computer scientist interested in artificial intelligence, it has helped clarify what processes are necessary to a conceptual consciousness, and in broad strokes how one might go about building one. Of course, this is an epistemology text, not a “cognitive science” text, so the discussion here is at a very high level.
Nearly all the essays are very well written and the authors say what they mean in a clear and concise manner. A couple of the essays in the second half are a little bit all over the place, though. But the replies help distill what is important to the discussion at hand.
The second half devolves at the end into a disagreement about perceptual fallibilism vs infallibilism. This is unfortunate because the perceptual level is the least interesting part of the theory (the conceptual is where the meat is). It's also unfortunate that the fallibilists in the group give only very hand-wavy explanations of their position. The final essay nicely calls out the equivocations and makes a compelling case for infallibilism.
Definitely recommended for anyone interested in modern developments in epistemology.
It's not often that I discover a book of poetry that I love from cover to cover, where every other verse is a gem that I delight in reciting to myself over and over. In fact, that has happened only twice. The first was Svartar Fjaðrir (“Black Feathers”) by Davíð Stefánsson. The second is the first book of this collection, Kvæði (“Poems”) by Snorri Hjartarson.
Here is my translation of the first poem in the book:
In valleys of wolves
A poem dwelt in my deserted forest
when the unborn spring lived in young wood.
With the coolness of morning, through the door of the sun
passed sleep, warm, fertile, and good.
From dew and fire, into the copper-red brush,
the morning sun wove the flowers of my dreams
and the frost felled the tears from their crowns
like a kiss on my brow.
And symphonies and flights of swans
from the south kindled the flames;
in the cloudless glory of spring my universe gleamed,
every road open and clear.
The brush sang, I played on a string,
I played with holy judgment,
I flew in flames on the wings of swans,
I slept in the white down of the breakers.
In a deep clearing it is haunted and dark.
A fog of frost rushes around the flowers
and covers the footprints of all that has passed
in the hairy vegetation of the underworld.
In fallen wings I lay wrapped.
The tethers bind no longer.
With new strength I shall strum the strings
and star the long night with fires.
Until my wished-for strength is resurrected
from the ashes of my poems and my heart.
From the mist and blackness shines a flight of swans
and the sun resides in me again.
Life and Fate is a profoundly moving novel. Set against the backdrop of the Second World War at the time of the Battle of Stalingrad, it braids together the individual stories of the members of a Russian family scattered throughout Russia and German-occupied Europe. It is many stories intertwined, with a great many point-of-view characters, each with their individual victories, defeats, and hopes for the future.
This sense of individuality is a major theme of the work. In the first chapter, which opens to a German labor camp, Grossman writes:
Among a million Russian huts you will never find even two that are exactly the same. Everything that lives is unique. It is unimaginable that two people, or two briar-roses, should be identical... If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate.
Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone's right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Martian. The premise is good, the story is told in an interesting style, the character is likable, and there's lots and lots of nerdery about chemistry and botany and engineering. It's also a clear commentary on the capabilities of reason, and there's an underlying premise that humans are basically awesome.
In a couple of places the excruciating detail of the main character's survival plans gets a little tiresome. It's all very quantitative. I can only read so many times exactly how many liters of liquid oxygen are required for a particular activity before my eyes glaze over. Also the character tries to keep it light (and himself sane, one supposes) by joking around a lot. Some of these jokes get a little hokey at times.
I really want to give it 3.5 stars, but in the end it was a very satisfying romp. It's a page-turner and I can definitely recommend it.
A fun little book with a lot of problems. Card's writing has its moments and some parts of this story are better developed than others. Large swathes of the plot just make me cringe, and none of the characters (including Ender most of the time) are endowed with any kind of agency. But there are some gems in here if you look. The scene where Ender teaches the other children how to play the battle game effectively is very satisfying. The author's theory of the relationship between war, victory, and peace is highly developed. The alien race, and their motive for attacking the Earth, is nicely plausible. But ultimately the story feels like a handful of good scenes and interesting ideas strung together by duct tape, bailing wire, and mormonism. Three stars because I liked it enough to pick up the second one.
It's just not a very good story. Sure, we've all met and worked with people who might fall under the author's Expert Beginner “archetypes”. But I don't think the author makes a very compelling case for what motivates these people, or why it matters. It's all a lot of anecdotes and hypotheticals, tied together with rationalism. He also never considers that one may stop being an expert beginner, or how that might happen.
Tragic and underwhelming.
This is a wonderful book. On the surface, it seems that such a commonplace thing as water might not be very interesting. But the chemical/electrical properties of ordinary water molecules turn out to be tremendously rich and surprising. Pollack presents this subject with unbridled enthusiasm and passion for discovery. The explanations of the process of ice formation, and of the “water battery”, are worth the price of admission by themselves. You will never look at water the same way again. But more than that, this book is an invitation to science. It implicitly gives you the idea that you don't need to become highly specialized in order to be a scientist. You can just take something as ordinary as water, ask some fundamental questions about it, perform experiments, and see what you discover.
In Iceland we learn about Jörgen Jörgensen, the “dog day king”, as a transient curiosity. The version we learn is that he came to Iceland, declared himself king, and was soon arrested by imperial authorities. But the full story is much more fantastic than that. Sarah Bakewell gives us a riveting account of the life of this extraordinary gentleman. We hear of his swashbuckling adventures in the South Pacific; the founding of a colony in Tasmania; and a trading expedition to Iceland that ended in a coup d'état, a declaration of independence, and his rule as “Lord Protector” for a summer. The most incredible thing about this story is that it's all perfectly true. This is a glimpse into a world that no longer exists, through the eyes of a man the likes of which we may never see again.
Natural selection presents only half the story of evolution: the fittest survive. The other half has long been presented as “random permutations over millennia eventually hit upon innovations”. But this book provides a much more thorough understanding of how and why the fittest arrive. Wagner explains what it is about biological systems that causes evolution to occur, and draws some conclusions about non-living systems as well. A really excellent book that makes a highly technical subject accessible to everyone. Wagner backs up his theory of innovability with a great deal of data and research.
Makes the historical, economic, and moral case for laissez-faire capitalism in terse no-nonsense prose. Ties the abstract principle of individual rights to everyday reality through lots and lots of emotionally powerful concrete examples. Reserving the fifth star because I would have liked to see formal references to the bibliography throughout, and fewer copyediting errors.
This is a seminar given by Peikoff in the 1980s, turned into a book. The style is, being a lecture, very informal. But Peikoff has an exceptionally clear way of thinking and explaining, and his conversational style works very well here.
This is much more than a book about Objectivism. The strategies laid out in the first half apply equally well to any topic whatsoever. It's more of a course on understanding how to understand. The second half then applies these strategies to Ayn Rand's philosophic system, but not before applying them to other philosophic systems against which Objectivism is then contrasted.
This is a wonderful book, highly recommended to anyone at all interested in philosophy.
A model for well-written scientific books
This classic text explains the structure and function of an epigenetic switch employed by the incredibly simple genome of a common virus.
It reads like a code review of an ingenious piece of software. It starts with a high level overview and iterates to reveal more detail. Every detail is then traced back to an actual reproducible experiment. So at the end we don't only know how the phage works, but also how we know it.
The Kindle version does have a few typesetting problems that interfere mildly with comprehension of the material.
To my own surprise, I had not read The Lord of the Rings before now. When I was a teenager, many of my friends had read it, but I never did because I thought it would be a slog. I loved fantasy literature, I played D&D, and I had read LotR in the form of graphic novels. In a way, this story was so ubiquitous in the culture around me that I thought it would be unnecessary to actually read it.
Having just finished reading Fellowship, I can say that I love this book and I'm thankful for the time I got to spend with it. I found it strangely gripping. Even though I already know the story, and I know the fate of all the characters and how it ends, I could not put it down.
It's not that the story is necessarily well constructed, because it's not. It starts out slow, and then slows down. But it doesn't matter, because Tolkien's skill at wordcraft is such that I could read him describe the contents of his cupboard and still be enthralled. The purpose of this book isn't so much to tell a story (though it does do that) as it is to let you inhabit Middle Earth for the mere spectacle of it. And Tolkien brings his world to life in a way that not many authors can.
I'm looking forward to the Two Towers.
Presents Ayn Rand's perfectly straightforward theory of volition, and contrasts it with other theories of the nature of free will. Makes the case that volition (free will) is the basis for scientific inquiry, and indeed all philosophy. Well presented.
Extraordinary.
The first two thirds of this last installment of The Lord of the Rings are some of the best storytelling I've read in the English language. The very end is also tremendously satisfying and beautiful.
There is a quite boring bit after the quest is completed and before the ending, concerning “Sharky” and the hobbits' return to the Shire. After what has gone on before that, it's rather anticlimactic. I can see why Tolkien would want to include it though—he wanted to dramatise the fact that after such a journey, not everyone can come home, and also to comfort us in that some can. For The Lord of The Rings is not so much a story as it is a journey through Middle Earth, and it's nice to end the journey as it began—in the comfortable setting of a hobbit hole.