Reach and Pull

I was reading David Baldacci's Zero Day when it hit me. The hero, John Puller, keeps comparing himself with people from NCIS and other agencies. But he also likes to draw comparisons with people from the armed services — especially MPs.

John Puller is the Baldacci anti-version of Lee Child's character, Jack Reacher.

Then it turned out that it was true to some extent; in an interview with Janice Kaplan dated November 2011, Baldacci had discussed that idea. Ah well...

Latest Readings

Again, a pile of stuff has formed on my desk. And so I idly pick through the stuff, hoping that it doesn't testify too badly to my state of mind or testify badly to that state.

I have about twenty books. I was going to list them but the computer ate my list. And so it goes.

The Black Opera

I've always enjoyed reading the peculiar and amusing alternate-history narratives of Mary Gentle and John Whitbourn. Think of Neal Stephenson with subtle and conspiratorial humour, laced with almost-fact and plausible-historical.

It was with delight, therefore, that I opened my 1st-Edition copy of Mary Gentle's The Black Opera: A Novel of Opera, Volcanoes, and the Mind of God and found that it was all about the odd lacuna in human history between the Napoleonic Wars and the reign of Victoria Regina, and about the Two Scillies, and bel canto opera. Brilliant. And this is why I am laggardly in my posting these days.

What... ?

"What have you been reading these days?" asked the old friend.

"Do you really want a list?" I replied.

"Just tell me what's in the piles at your desk," said she.

And so, here:

1. Earnest Lau, From Mission to Church.
2. H.E. Wilson, Social Engineering in Singapore.
3. Andy Kirkpatrick, English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN.
4. Tu Wei-Ming, Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity.
5. Robert Winston, The Human Mind.
6. Robert Winston, Bad Ideas?
7. Sheri S Tepper,  The Waters Rising.
8. Gregory Maguire, What the Dickens.
9. Stephen Hunt, Jack Cloudie.
10. Alan K. Baker, The Martian Ambassador.
11. Alan K. Baker, The Feaster from the Stars.
12. Christopher Fowler,  Bryant & May and The Memory of Blood.
13. Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Collected John Carter of Mars (in 3 volumes).
14. Antonio L. Rappa, Globalization: An Asian Perspective on Modernity and Politics in America.
15. Emrys Chew (ed.),  Goh Keng Swee: A Legacy of Public Service.
16. Michael J. Sandel, Justice.
17. Theodore Gray, The Elements.

They're all in various stages of being read, having just been read enough, or being prepared for reading. Sometimes, I drive myself mad, working on stuff that has nothing to do with what I'm reading. Sigh.

Odd Jux

Right now, I am sitting back with a warm feeling of contented amusement percolating in me. Such moments do not last, but the memory can remain.

This feeling is upon me because I am contemplating two lovely hardback volumes sitting on the shelf together. The one on the left is a Subterranean Press collected edition of Barry Hughart's The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox; the one on the right is John Whitbourn's The Complete Binscombe Tales.

The first is a compendium of alarming novels about a China that never was; the second is a compendium of alarming short stories about an England that could very well be. Both overturn their respective myths with a good shot of common sense and a better shot of humour. Yet both are wildly fantastic.

How else to explain the continued survival of the evil Duke of Chin and assorted awful throwbacks to a distant and possibly imaginary suppressed Chinese past? How else to explain the horrified realisation that the return of Arthur would spell the doom of modern England — the Anglo-Saxons of the day being of course his worst enemies? And so it goes.

But what these two books really have in common is that they cater to the yearning in all of us for pasts that never were but could have been. Humans can't help but wonder about such things.

Subconscious Bookery

Like most bibliophiles or just plain readers, I normally arrange books by genre and theme. Crime and mystery, SF, fantasy, politics, historical fiction, whatever. But sometimes, a subconscious aesthetic takes over. And on some occasions, this can be pretty complex.

For example, on my top reading shelf is part of my chess collection. Besides the literally voluminous row of John Watson's Mastering the Chess Openings series, I've placed a few other books from the same publisher and a Practical Endgame Play: Mastering the Basics by Efstratios Grivas. Next to Grivas, of course, is Glenn Flear's Practical Endgame Play: Beyond the Basics.

And beyond the beyond? I note that this is where my collection of guides to philosophy and my little collection of theological philosophy by Peter Kreeft. Indeed, my Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Kreeft and Tacelli sits right next to Flear's book.

It's interesting to see how those books got there. You would guess at several reasons. But you would possibly be wrong (indeed, since there are fewer real reasons than guesses, some of you would certainly be wrong).

Meanwhile, I marvel at my subconscious ingenuity.

The Pile On My Desk

Sometimes you think of a post title, and then it occurs to you that 'The Colour Out Of Space' would be an equally good title. It does funny things to your mind.

But here I have in front of me a pile, indeed. And the pile is full of stuff which I am reading, have been reading, or will have read in a while. Besides the obvious fiction, which includes much Peter Beagle (an interest rekindled by a unicorn), Philip Reeve, Andrea Camilleri, China Miéville and Gail Carriger, I also have much not-so-obviously-fiction which might even be non-fiction.

It is this latter class which I will now describe.

I have the following on and around my desk right now, all partly read:

• Michael Sandel's Justice;
• Bryan Turner's The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies;
• Tu Wei-Ming's Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity;
• Simon Winchester's Atlantic;
• John Kay's Obliquity;
• Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto;
• Nassir Ghaemi's A First-Rate Madness; and
• Lee Kuan Yew's My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore's Bilingual Journey.

I have no idea what will emerge from this confluence, but the last time this kind of stuff interacted, I found myself two book chapters and a thesis to the good. I cannot wait to see strange beast will soon slouch its way through the Internet to be born.

In Earnest

Today I spent the afternoon carefully opening many books, the collection of my late principal, a man of great integrity, hugely varied interests, and a magpie mind which seized on facts and built palaces out of them. We were looking through the books in order to sort them out and think of a new home for them. There were more than a thousand of them.

In the curious, vacant disorder that accompanies the departure of a man who lived alone, I found an unopened drawer. It contained little brown notebooks.

They were his travel diaries; more than that, they were shared diaries co-written by his late wife, a wonderful lady who had passed on in untimely fashion decades ago. They chronicled the mundane events and the wonderful events of each day in small, meticulous writing. They had pizza one day. They spent £5 on a souvenir for an uncle. They had lists, and tables, and terse descriptions of days which they had clearly enjoyed together.

The books had not been touched for a very long while. I shut their drawer carefully, stabbed by a moment of melancholy sharpened to a sudden point.

We Never Talk About My Brother

Probably because we talk more about my mother. Haha...

That said, I am now the happy owner of a new Peter S Beagle book, one which I have wanted but which I could not easily obtain when I first wanted it. That kind of thing happens when you're overtaken by life's events: you forget what you wanted as time passes, and it is only serendipity which brings it back to you.

I have imbibed Beagle in five previous doses: Lila The Werewolf; The Last Unicorn ; Come, Lady Death ; A Fine And Private Place; Tamsin. This one comes pre-divided into smaller doses. Yum.

Book Alert: The Dervish House

Ian McDonald's The Dervish House is rich and beautiful. It is a tale of nanotechnology, faith, the illusions of the world and their impact on humanity. It is a very human novel, firmly grounded in hüzün, the melancholic sense of decline which appears unique to Istanbul, once Constantinople, once Byzantium.

The novel begins with a suicide bomber on a crowded tram who kills nobody but herself, and unleashes angels of all kinds.

It's the story of Ayse, owner of a gallery of antiquities; Can, the almost permanently earplugged boy who controls nanobots; Georgios, an old radical 'experimental economist' who deals in information and probability; Adnan the rogue trader who is about to pull off the deal of the millennium with a little help from some friends; Necdet, who has begun to see the djinn and, more disturbingly, Hizir the Green Wanderer.

Most of all, it is a novel of Istanbul, mother of cities, daughter of its own rape.

It deserves its BSFA award. It is so much better than anything of William Gibson without having to descend into jargon, and it is a proper novel too. It will appeal to people who study development and post-colonialism and all that. Most of all, it will appeal not only to hardcore techie SF readers, but those who love good writing with character development and a sense of atmosphere. Rating: at least 9/10.

Librarious

This morning I spent a few hours doing something I've not done for ages. I went over to my library in the west and did some curating. The physical and intellectual effort of moving books around until they were in the right places was a great sensation. Unused muscles all round. Mice had built nests in my physiognomy.

On the Preservation of Books

The Player of Games recently asked me a question that I'd not thought too much about. He asked how I keep my books from yellowing.

Over forty years of book-collecting, I've learnt that cheap books will crumble within your lifetime, or even half your lifetime (one has to be optimistic). But there are some things that retard the aging process for common stuff in a tropical environment.

Here are some things that seem to work. But many of you probably know of them already, and may have some of your own to share. (If you do, please comment!)

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To keep tomes from yellowing, keep them in air-conditioned dim rooms. This keeps humidity normal, since the local humidity usually ranges from 40%-85%. Lighting should be low-energy, like diffuse yellow stuff; indirect and not focussed on the books themselves. The human eye works best in low-light conditions anyway.

Like oxidation of metal, oxidation of books is fastest when energy, oxygen and water are present in large quantities. Take away the damp and the heat (or light), and the paper lasts longer. Note however that total dryness will age books too, by dehydration of the bulk material.

I find that dusting books with those Magiclean lint-free disposable cloths is best. Never use damp material, and if you are cleaning shelves, use a dust-lifting soapy solution and make sure all the dirt and soap are removed, and the shelves completely dried, before putting books back.

Leave rows of books with at least 1 cm of breathing space in between. If you pack books very tightly, heat is not so easily dispersed. If you leave too much space, dust accumulates.

Books near the roof get more heat because of conduction and convection. Try to have one of those dead insulating spaces or a well-ventilated open space between your top shelf and the ceiling. Of course, open space also collects dust.

I have a catalogue of about 8,000 books of all shapes and sizes. My immediate male ancestor has more. This makes for a house that somehow was never completely tidy at its best, and is now not even anywhere near its best — since I moved out, my progenitor has expanded his territory and I have transferred most of my holdings into the West. Thank goodness we got rid of all the Reader's Digests.

Be careful, all ye who seek to make yourselves a library. The life of a librarian is not an easy one, whether accidental or incidental.

Bibliophobia

People are afraid of books, people worship books blindly, people are attempting to do away with books, the tide of young people who are not comfortable with books is rising. These are some impressions I've received over the last few years.

I think a lot of this stems from one common root. People are unfamiliar with books.

The child who doesn't like to read is one who has had the reading behaviour displaced, most often by some other kind of visual and/or tactile input. If you keep a child bored and put him in a library, he will eventually succumb to bibliophilia because that is his only useful choice.

Instinctively, most parents resist such manipulation when it comes to books, although they are not averse to using other kinds of manipulation with respect to food, sleep and toilet training. It is part of the mystique of the book — some will worship, some will fear, most will set aside as special.

But the book is still the best way to deliver content. It is a compact and persistent data source in which comprehension is delivered not by point-and-click but by the enforcement of a specific kind of cognitive process that is the foundation of the entire education system of the world. It requires symbol recognition and processing at several levels, and metacognition above that.

My prescription is that if you want a child to have a lower chance of being ADHD, subliterate, or just plain barbaric, you should take most of the toys and games away and leave him in a library or bookstore. When you meet, talk about books, model the intelligent reader, and (if you like) teach him to discard trash about Blue Ocean Strategies and suchlike.

Word of the Day: Cauldron

There are many legends about cauldrons. The infamous Black Cauldron of Celtic myth (and Disney appropriation via Lloyd Alexander) which spawned undead warriors was once the healing cauldron of Diancecht, physician of the gods. A cauldron brewed knowledge, divination, mysteries. A cauldron was used for brewing potions, elixirs, draughts of magical power. A Chinese legend holds that the same cauldron has been brewing the same soup for centuries in a certain village; the villagers just top it up with water when the level drops or add more fuel if it's getting cold. But a cauldron can be all of that because of its origin.

The word 'cauldron', like Spanish calderon or Italian calderone comes from Latin calor ('heat'), to calidus ('warm', 'heated'), to calidarium ('hot bath', 'heat sink'). The word 'scald' comes from Latin excaldare — 'to seethe, to immerse in hot water'. A cauldron is therefore a large vessel where things are immersed and left to cook as their essences diffuse and mix within fire-heated fluid. A cauldron is a melting-pot, a mixing-pot, a messing-pot.

My head feels like that sometimes. Right now, on my desk, are books I am currently reading. I don't know how my brain works, but it's restless and its menu of the moment consists of

• Garry Kasparov's On Modern Chess: Part 3 — Kasparov vs Karpov 1986-87
  
• Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System
  
• Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman edited by Wagner, Golden and Bissette
  
• Peter Kreeft's illuminating commentary on Pascal, Christianity for Modern Pagans
  
• a bunch of papers I'm supposed to read and integrate into my thesis by tomorrow
  
• a long delayed notice of dental appointment
  
• the latest issue of Science

which is a whole lot too much. The cauldron overflows, and my feet hurt. Maybe I need a hot bath.

Atlantean Biography

I have just been exposed to a volume on the life and times of the local Atlantis. It's a cheery book, but for some reason, it reminds me of what people used to call 'Regency Romance' and which most people who know such things associate with that grand old dame, Georgette Heyer.

It's full of those 'more about this person later' moments and the whole thing somehow feels like a comedy of manners rather than the reasonably serious history it really is. It really is. There's a lot of meat on these bones, but it still reminds me of a paper I once heard on the seamy underside of Atlantean history (yes, madame, you know who you are... *grin* )

The production values of this tome are pretty good. It is hefty but not overly so. The layout and illustrations work reasonably well and you feel that it's a book you can settle down with. The book cover has an amusing collage of legendary Atlanteans and proto-Atlanteans, all juxtaposed to make things spicier than they ought to be. The Thunderer leans out over the book title, the Gnome is at his left elbow, and so on.

It's a good read. I recommend it. Don't worry about the amazing-looking author names. Treat the book on its own merits.

Anathem

Some time ago, somebody said I should gather my entries from all my blogs and the places where I submit poetry, edit it a bit, structure the mass, and make it into a book. Occasionally, I think it might work, and I toy with that idea a bit.

Once in a while, I shelve the idea semipermanently because somebody's writing has impressed me so much that it rubs my face into the inferiority of my writing. This has happened so far with both Iain Banks (see official site) and Neil Gaiman (official site here).

However, with Neal Stephenson, what gets to me is the sheer baroque exuberance and depth of construction that he is able to muster. His writing is sometimes too dense, too full of half-ideas and full-ideas. Of late, however, I've been digesting his latest book, Anathem.

I think that it's a beautiful ideas book. Any student of epistemology or of ideas about knowledge, in general, should read this book very carefully. Go to the website and explore the links. It's not easy work, but if you can digest this book, it becomes a lot easier to understand the ideas people have come up with about reality.

I don't think I've ever recommended a work of fiction as a textbook for anything except literature. This is one rare exception; I think all serious students of mathematics (as opposed to those who do math just because they have to) should read this book. In fact students of philosophy, history, and the natural sciences would also benefit a lot.

Well, at this point you'll notice I haven't actually said anything about the plot or the characters. I think that if you're not going to read the book, it won't matter; if you do, it's best you find everything out for yourself. Or go to Stephenson's site and explore, before you decide to take the plunge.

Impressions of Two Nobel Economists

I've been reading stuff by two winners of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences: Amartya Sen (1998) and Paul Krugman (2008). They are separated by about 20 years of age and 10 years between prizes.

I have to say that I find Sen much more readable; Krugman's style is dry to me, hard to get into. Sen's subject matter is more universal: what is the role of reason in ethics, what is justice, what kind of balance should we seek between human freedoms and economic development.

I find myself slipping Sen-ward. Not that Krugman is bad; he is very alive in his own way, although not lively. I read his The Accidental Theorist years ago; I am still working through The Conscience of a Liberal. But I would put Krugman aside for Glen Cook, which I wouldn't do with Sen.

Meanwhile, I've had another look at Sam Huntington. Oh dear, he's full of nonsense.

Literature By Formula

I remember that in my second lecture on Science (which I've mentioned a couple of times in my last few posts), I had occasion to talk about the science of literature. Famous fellows like Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell (and of course, their great thematic ancestor, Sir James Frazer) have of course attempted to codify the origins of human narrative in their own ways. You can also add to their number people such as Robert Heinlein of SF fame and many others.

But here is a summary of the various basic plots that a story can consist of, and what they might mean in terms of the seasons of a man's life, or the tone of it, or the politics of it. It makes for bitter-sweet reading, but also farce and beauty. Without further ado, I present to you...

Literary Formulae

Mar-Apr:

• Boy meets girl
• Spring
• Comedy
• Liberal-Conservative

This is the most innocent phase of the hero's life; it's all about beginnings, ideals, and youth.

May-Jun:

• Boy grows up
• Early Summer
• Comedy-Romance
• Conservative

This part is mostly innocent, but it's also the season in which things begin to get serious.

Jul-Aug:

• Boy goes questing
• Late Summer
• Romance
• Anarchistic

This is the phase in which things begin to turn, and the hero questions his identity and purpose.

Sep-Oct:

• Boy saves world
• Autumn
• Tragedy
• Anarchistic-Radical

This is when the hero discovers what he thinks his purpose is, and his ideals and ideas are tempered by bitter experience.

Nov-Dec:

• Boy comes home
• Early Winter
• Tragedy-Satire
• Radical

Of course, when the boy returns, he is not the same boy, and neither is his home the same home...

Jan-Feb:

• Boy grows old/dies
• Late Winter
• Satire
• Liberal

By this time, our boy has reached the point in what's left of his life at which he feels he can say anything and do anything.

(Sources: Campbell, Frye, Gellis, Heinlein, White et al)

There's an interesting afternote to all this. The infamous David Eddings was very frank about how his best-selling novels were written to prove that books could be written to a formula and make lots of money. To prove it, he wrote five fat books, then wrote the same thing again a different way, and made twice as much money. If you were one of those suckers who enjoyed the Belgariad and the Malloreon as much as I did, consider yourself a victim of literary science.

Seven Centuries, Badly Edited

I have in my hands a volume which should have been a very good book. This tome is a 700-year history of Atlantis, from its days as an early pirate colony mercantile stopover (see appropriate etymology here) to its days as a global city and light of the south.

The choice of material is excellent. The layout is fine. The format is accessible. The whole enterprise is digestible. But the one big problem is the editing. Whoever edited this book was not very concerned about typos and grammar; was not very concerned about style and vigor of expression.

For example:

"We hope that this long-sighted view of the Atlantean past will provide a corrective perspective to the myopic view of what is Atlantis after 1965."

Dire, dire, bad, bad, stuff. Attempted joke, major fail. And 'post-1965 Atlantis' would sound so much better than the clunky 'what is Atlantis after 1965.' It's like that all over the place; this quote was taken from the preface.

I very much wanted to like this book. I am afraid that I can't.

Folio 2009/2010

It's that time of year again, when I have to make decisions between Impossible Journeys (Matthew Lyons) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John Le Carré), between The Authentic Gospel of Jesus (Geza Vermes) and The Persian Expedition (Xenophon), between Lord of the Flies (William Golding) and The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton), between James Watson's The Double Helix and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines.

How does one choose between Dorian Gray and Robin Hood? Or The Great Game (Peter Hopkirk) and Empires of the Word (Nicholas Ostler)? It is always difficult, and yet it is always easy. You buy them all, realising that for the earnings of two hours' work, you will gain eight hours of pleasure, repeatable at will.

So now... Bede or Xenophone? Short stories or poetry? Argh... those who have always sneered at the hypothetical choice of books or food have obviously never been enthralled by a book that keeps you reading until you forget you're supposed to have had dinner, gone to bed, or met your date.

But those are other stories, and I shall not say more for now.