Greek Complexity

Book review: The Intrusion of Jimmy

The Intrusion of Jimmy by PG Wodehouse (Rating: *****)

Not a laugh-riot all the way through like a typical Wodehouse but I loved it! The essence of the Wodehouse is there: an involved plot with the puppeteer juggling a hundred strings (to employ a mixed metaphor), all of which resolve themselves satisfactorily at the end. Add a superb understanding of human nature and a dollop of mirth, and there you have your pièce de résistance.

Book review: The Island

The Island by Peter Benchley (Rating: **)

Terror? What terror? I was terrified of falling asleep while reading this. He should have stopped after writing Jaws.

Pragmatic vegetarianism

Interesting article. JG is Jeff Goldberg, a journalist with The Atlantic. JF is Jonathan Safran Foer, a writer who recently published the book Eating Animals. 

Would normally have just stuck this on my radar feed but I thought I'd bung in a quote:

JG: When I was a vegetarian, the first thing I would cut out was mammals, because I figured that mammals are the closest species to me. Birds are more distant and fish are still more distant, but you argue very strongly that beef is actually the most humane thing to eat. Do you differentiate at all, on a moral scale, between eating mammals and eating birds and eating fish?

JF: Another way to think about this is how different does an animal have to be for us to simply regard it as a living thing. And I think this kind of dichotomous way of framing this - it does a real disservice to the conversation. Even the word 'vegetarian.' You were talking about cutting things out of your diet, instead of cutting down. There are an awful lot of people who care about this stuff and for reasons good or bad, just can't envision becoming vegetarian. So what do we do with that? Do we throw our hands up in air and say that since I'm not going to be perfect about this I'm completely off the hook. They will say, `I was a vegetarian for six years and I found myself at an airport and I was shaking from hunger so I ate some McNuggets and that was the end of my vegetarianism. It's just such a bizarre way of thinking about it.

I care about the environment, I try to buy good appliances, I certainly turn the lights off when I leave rooms, and so on and so forth, and yet I also fly. So should my getting off the plane say 'Okay, I know that was bad, so I'm now bad, I'm going to leave lights on, I'm going to let my car idle.' It's nuts. I wish people would talk about food in a way that was more similar to how we talk about the environment. The question of 'Are you an environmentalist or not?' is nonsense. It just doesn't make any sense.

JG: Something is better than nothing.

[...]

JF: Maybe one day the world will change, that we'll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it's inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn't matter right now. 

Book review: Freakonomics

Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt (Rating: ***¹/₂)

Yes, I finally read this.

I thought this book was only so-so. Perhaps all the hype surrounding it raised expectations too much but my problem with this was that it was a little dumbed down. Which isn't a bad thing in itself, it just means that the book targets a wide audience. But it wasn't for me. I don't want to have to wade through calculus when I read a book for leisure but it would be nice to be mentally challenged every so often. (Lest you think I'm being an insufferable know-it-all twit, read the book and judge for yourself!)

It's a book full of interesting anecdotes. You could pick it up, flip to any chapter at random and not be lost. Some would say that that's the beauty of it but I like my reading to be "progressive", if that makes sense. To be fair, the preface does say that the book has no overarching theme, no grand conclusions and all that, so it's not like I didn't have fair warning.

My other complaint about the book is that nearly all the examples written about are backward-looking. Meaning, look at some data and derive a relationship retrospectively. Implications for the future are few and far between, aside from the major one that intuitive answers aren't necessarily correct answers.

Overall, a good, accessible tome but without any blinding insights.

Book review: Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (rating: ?)

There must be some cultural references, references to philosophy, politics or social issues that I didn't get, because I didn't understand this book at all. When I finished reading it, I had a vague sense of some sort of symbolism that I was missing, but when I referred to the back cover (which I'd avoided reading until I read the book itself), it said something about Kafka's style being one of juxtaposing the absolutely frightening with the absolutely banal. If that's all it is, then, yes, I understood the book. Which doesn't mean I necessarily thought it was a great read. I'm not rating this one: I still think I didn't get what Kafka was trying to do.

Book review: Nice Work

Nice Work by David Lodge (***¹/₂)

I started reading this book thinking I would eventually rate it 4 or even 4.5 stars. Evocative prose, an understanding of human nature and societal issues, and a good start setting the stage for the main story. Plus the fact that it was short-listed for the Booker and had good reviews from some respected papers.

But it began to flag from that terrific start (a bit like the way I tend to cycle--full speed ahead for the first ten minutes and then barely hanging on for two hours). 4.5 dropped to 4 and eventually 3.5.

I don't generally like to leave off books halfway and this one certainly wasn't bad enough to do that. But gripping and compelling it stopped being about halfway through. It was as though Lodge had started with a very good broad framework for a storyline --issues he wanted to incorporate, characters he'd created, places he wanted to write about-- and had started work with enthusiasm and energy, only to begin wondering halfway through his story what specifically to say within his framework and how to say it.

The usage of tense puzzled me too. The first few chapters use the present tense to describe the present and the past tense to bring in history, which is a common literary device and works very well at the start of this book, but most of the rest of the book shifts to the past tense for no reason in particular, and the present makes a few appearances again towards the end, making one wonder how his tense choices come about at all.

The ending is awkward and unconvincing, as though Lodge contrived a way to tie up the loose ends and fulfil his obligations to his publisher --who no doubt paid a large advance based on the first two chapters-- and thereby put himself out of his misery.

I'm beginning to suspect professional reviewers don't really read the books they review.

New publishing model

[from collision detection] I'm mighty impressed by this:

Sci-fi author and blogger extraordinaire Cory Doctorow has for two years been experimenting with an intriguing publishing model: Every time he writes a novel, he sells the print edition at normal bookstore prices, but also freely gives away an electronic copy of the text online. His believes -- and I agree -- that an author's worst fear is not piracy but irrelevance: He'd rather have more people reading it than not. As it turns out, his strategy worked: The free giveaway created buzz and word-of-mouth, and his books have sold far more than his publishers originally expected.

What's particularly neat is that Doctorow is now releasing his books with licenses that allow people to make "derivative works" -- to remix, edit, or re-present the book in an entirely original format. Again, traditional publishers thought he was insane, and again they were wrong. Designers and webheads created all manner of cool byproducts that created yet even more buzz, and his sales went even higher. By allowing people to muck with his work, he effectively benefits from hundreds of hours of free labor of supercreative folks around the world.

The coolest remix of all? Second Life, the online virtual world, held a contest to see which of their player/citizens could design the coolest in-game version of Cory's latest book

This is a variant of honour system/tipping-jar systems that some online writers and websites have used in the past. Except that there is no tipping-jar in this case.

But then that is an oversimplification and misses a subtle point.

Whereas tipping-jar systems are exactly like their offline equivalents (buskers with a hat on the ground in front of them) in that the tip is a means of subsistence, Cory Doctorow's model is geared towards self-promotion. In that respect, the online version of his books is not the "product" -- it is "marketing collateral".

But even more, I love this man's model for "extended" self-promotion: how obvious and yet what genius to open his creations for others to make derivative works!

I will relate this story with great relish in future each time I hear someone doubting open source and/or the power of communities as legitimate models for making money outside the Internet world.

Link: collision detection: A virtual author.