Books Read in 1996

This was Mike's favorite book some years ago, and he recommends it highly. I thought I'd give it a look-see, and I quite enjoyed it, though I think Invisible Cities is more successful overall, particularly in the unification of included short stories. I felt that some of the stories in t zero were a bit too contrived, like many of Escher's drawings, but some readers might love them for that very reason.

I did not enjoy Dubliners as much as I did A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, most likely because I tend to be a better reader of novels than of short stories.

This was another loan from Eric , and one I certainly wouldn't have picked out on my own, though it was quite enjoyable. I belly-laughed two or three times, which is quite rare for me.

This was used for Michael Jordan's Neural Networks class. It's good that Bishop concentrates on the pattern recognition side of the field, but is pretty useless as a practical guide. I didn't read the whole thing, by any means.

This came heartily recommended by Eric . I thought it was good, but it didn't really push my buttons. At the time it was written, however, it must have been quite controversial. It's not often you see such a literal literary treatment of "man's pursuit of pussy". I'm interested to read more of Roth's work, but I don't know how much "Angry Young Jew Schtick" I can take.

I read this on a flight from Boston to San Francisco, and found it very much to my taste. It's Mike's favorite book, and he graciously loaned me his copy, even though I haven't returned the books I borrowed from his fiancee about a year ago (yikes!). Calvino's "book" reads much like poetry, and I feel that I've only skimmed the surface of its depths. As I travelled to San Francisco and then on to Honolulu last week, the book constantly reminded me of how much these cities are similar to my home city of Boston, in spite of their outward differences. Not a profound observation, perhaps, but one worth considering.

This short "mystery" novel was quite interesting. If it was my first introduction to Nabokov and I knew nothing about him, I'd probably not want to read more. The writing is wonderful, but that only becomes obvious in the last few chapters. Nabokov was acutely aware of the literary cliches that he borrowed from, and this meta-awareness is wonderfully present in the prose, but cliche is still cliche. I won't reveal the ending, but it makes some of the early portions worth slogging through.

This was recommended by several people. I liked it, though not overly so. I find it interesting how much people like stories about infidelity.

This was one of the few Vonnegut novels I hadn't yet read. I picked up a used paperback copy some time ago, and finally got around to reading it, mostly because I needed something fairly breezy (yet entertaining) while I've been working these 60-80 hour weeks. I'm reminded, actually, of A Confederacy of Dunces, in terms of how "average" Americans are portrayed.

I tired of Lovecraft quickly, and regret not reading his stories back in high school, when I was on my Stephen King kick. I read only half of this collection, but I think it was enough for me to get the gist of his style and to make me realize that I don't really care to read any more.

An engaging novel by the Canadian writer. It was somewhat breezy but enjoyable.

I read roughly half of this collection, as I redesigned my own blackboard architecture. I'll probably come back to it at some point.

A Scanner Darkly is an excellent novel about drugs and the symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and drug users. It sports a great plot twist at the end as well.

This was my first introduction to Updike, and I'm impressed, but not overly so. While I found his prose to be interesting and well-detailed, I thought the plot pacing was odd, with very little action in the "middle half" and then a sudden race to the finish. I look forward to reading more of his work.

This was another of Eric's recommendations. I found it less engaging, and the characters less sympathetic, than he did. While it was humorous, it was not side-splittingly funny. I found Toole's satirization of 20th century America to be unfortunately accurate and rather depressing.

I re-read this for Ken Haase's seminar (Cognitive Theories of Everything). The ideas have been refreshed in my mind, but a means of implementation still seems tantalizingly out of reach.

Eric recommended this to me and let me borrow his copy. It's a breezy read, but engulfing at the same time, as it tells the modern day story of a Londoner on the road to nowhere, managing his used record shop and abused love life with nothing approaching aplomb. Hornby is dead on about male insecurity.

I read this for Ken Haase's seminar (Cognitive Theories of Everything), as counterpoint to Minsky's The Society of Mind. Damasio makes the case that "mind" is inseparable from "body", because the chemical and neural environment of the body are vital communication channels of the brain. He offers interesting anecdotes of patients with pre-frontal brain lesions, who have all the traditional requisites for intelligence, but who cannot function normally because injury has made it impossible for emotion to inform their reasoning.

My wife and I read this one simultaneously, which was something of an experiment. I loved Nabokov's prose style in Lolita, particularly his constant wordplay, and while the subject matter is somewhat disturbing, it is treated honestly and powerfully.

Wallace has written a massive book about addiction, both to controlled substances and to "entertainment". His prose itself is addictive as it parallels the "anti-confluential" style of the "entertainments" created by J. O. Incandenza, the novel's absent pro/antagonist, whose video "Infinite Jest" is the ultimate addictive substance, tapping directly into the pleasure centers of the human brain. Most of the novel's interconnections are revealed (however often in a subtle manner), though I never was able to figure out the connection between Hal and Don Gately. Readers who enjoy Pynchon are likely to enjoy Wallace, though Infinite Jest is perhaps closer to Vineland than to Gravity's Rainbow in both feel and in ultimate reader satisfaction.

Of the three books written by Baker that I've read, The Fermata is the least satisfying. It seems to be an attempt by Baker to achieve a form of literary pornography, and it has been my experience that if a piece of pornography doesn't stroke one's particular fetish, it will seem distasteful. The two segments of "amateur" porn written by the novel's protagonist are particularly juvenile, perhaps even less clever or interesting than the material in alt.sex.stories. While the novel's "big idea" (a person who has the ability to "pause" the universe) is excellent, and the result is perhaps realistic (the person uses his ability to undress and fondle women), it is ultimately the domain of a good short story rather than a novel.

I found The Satanic Verses to be fairly difficult to understand, except on a very high level. I enjoyed the novel, particularly for Rushdie's clever turns of phrase (one example being the extended introduction of a woman mountain climber named Cone, who is ultimately referred to in a later punchline as "Ice Queen Cone", which I thought was awfully cute). His wordplay reminds me somewhat of Humbert's monologue in Nabokov's Lolita.

I didn't enjoy this quite as much as I enjoyed The Mezzanine, but it was still an enjoyable read. Baker is gifted with an ability to zero in on very interesting minutia, and this novel is full of it. Forget about plot —- this book is all about description and introspection.

Other than it's sheer bulk (1000+ pages in trade paperback!), I'm not sure why I put this down halfway through, only to pick it up nearly a year later. I'm glad I went back to it. Ellison is a fantastic writer: even while he adapts punctuational practice to his own purposes, he manages to create wonderfully detailed descriptions and often compelling stories. His work is varied in quality, and this collection covers the spectrum from his childhood scratchings to his masterpieces. I highly recommend this collection as a good starting point for the interested reader.

This was Varley's first collection of short stories, and it still stands up. I rather highly recommend all of Varley's short stories, but I've had worse luck with his novels.

Marvin Minsky recommended this book, suggesting that it contains wonderful insight into the workings of the mind. It was Baker's first novel, and it received excellent reviews. I enjoyed the microscopic detail used throughout the book, and I found the extensive footnotes to be a clever device for mimicking human thought processes, though I was occasionally bogged down by them. The Mezzanine is one of the best books I've read this year.

This was not a particularly good book. It presents an unconvincing future where "body-switching aliens" have invaded Earth, and the government is working on technology to match the alien ability. I would not recommend it to others.

Varley seems to have a great deal of insight into sexual roles, and his projected attitude is much like mine. I enjoyed Steel Beach much more than Titan, but not nearly as much as Blue Champagne. The novel dragged somewhat in places, and there were one or two extraneous characters (I'm thinking of Fox in particular). For the most part, however, it was very well written. I'm not up-to-date on sf as a genre, so I probably missed many references, but having read Stranger in a Strange Land, I did pick up on a lot of the Heinlein references, notably the character named "Valentine Michael Smith" (with quotes).

This one came with glowing reviews from DAn , whose opinion I generally value. The stories were excellent, reminding me somewhat of Raymond Carver, but with more wry humor and less of a dark side. Moore is an outstanding writer.

A decent novella, though somewhat predictable, I thought.

I loved The Gold Bug Variations so much that I leapt into this one. Some of the neural net discussions are pretty wacky, but there is some actual insight into how minds work. In all, a very good book, but not without flaws.

Eric rather strongly recommended this one. It was wonderfully written — both a great story and a great telling of it. This book is more a novel for scientists than laypersons, but could be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in genetics.

This is actually quite good. It provides a number of techniques for getting more out of books, particularly (but not limited to) non-fiction ones. The authors have a very strong view of what is and is not worth reading carefully, which often made me laugh.

I expected this to be somewhat trashy, given that it was part of my summer "trash" list, but it was actually quite good. Varley is a talented short story writer. I rather strongly disliked the only novel I read by him ( Titan), but maybe I'll give him another shot.

More summer trash...not great.

My first summer trash...This is a decent thriller, but pulp nonetheless.

Kind of "pre-summer" trash...This had an interesting plot idea: the brain of a wealthy industrial leader (male) is transplanted into the body of his beautiful young female assistant. It could have gone in a lot of directions from there. Heinlein chose to explore a few of the psychological problems that might arise from such a ridiculous premise. I think the ending was successful, but he could have cut out about 1/3 of the book's length without losing much.

Dark. Depressing. Just like real life. The title story was wonderful, but almost all of the others left me feeling a bit cold.

This, of course, was the basis for the wonderful Blade Runner movie. The movie is faithful to the tone of the book, and to many of the details. I wish that both had concentrated a bit more on the moral issues that might arise when there are manufactured people who are nearly indistinguishable from humans. The book deals with those issues more directly, but not to my satisfaction. Dick's prose is uncomplicated and straightforward — his main strength seems to lie in the creation of morally interesting plot elements.

I hadn't read this until this year, though I was familiar with most of the "adventures". I thought the wordplay was cute and occasionally very witty, but overall, this didn't do much for me.

Sophie's World is a "novel about the history of philosophy". It works well as a light history, but not so well as a novel. Gaarder obviously intended for his novel to be read by people of a wide range of ages. It is probably ideal for a late high-school or early-college reader, but not for someone who has had an introductory course in philosophy (except maybe as a review). I recommend this book, but with a slight hesitation.

This is a great introduction to the language, but only for people with a fair amount of programming experience. The concepts of object-oriented programming were already burned into my brain from other reading. I used this book to learn the syntax I needed to write my first blackboard system in C++.

My only regret in reading Vineland was that I did not read it in a shorter period of time. Without doubt, it is a much more approachable book than Gravity's Rainbow. It has a fairly simple, well-threaded plot, and relatively few main characters. It is a very humorous novel, though much of the humor is black in nature. Pynchon's stream-of-consciousness style is full of beautiful detail, but is difficult to follow at times, and I doubt that he will ever be one of my favorite authors.

This is the first piece of existential fiction that I have read — at least that I can remember. I'm extremely sympathetic toward the main character in this story, who is utterly rational and emotionally detached. I fear that in a similar situation I would share his fate. My only real deviation from the existentialist philosophy is that I rather strongly believe that human existence is understandable in idealistic and scientific terms (though perhaps not in all it's wonderful complexity, by a single person). The Stranger is dark — wonderfully so. One of the last scenes, in which the protagonist speaks with a prison chaplain, was extraordinarily deep and described perfectly how I feel when talking to religious people about human existence and related issues.

I read Consciousness Explained at a good time, relative to my progression of thought regarding intelligence and AI. I'm not terribly interested in the holy wars that accompany this kind of thing, and I'm quite happy to side with Dennett's "explanation" of consciousness. I'm a little troubled by the sheer number of people who insist that there are ineffable qualities without which there would be no life, intelligence, consciousness, etc. It's too bad that most of those people will never pay attention to Dawkins, Minsky, and Dennett.

This book is not easy to get through, and it is not at all easy to work through all of its ideas. I'm glad, however, that I pushed through it at this point in the development of my "education" and personal philosophy. For the most part, I'm sympathetic to Hofstadter's views, especially where they resonate with Minsky's. The dialogues in this book are very well crafted, and they offer good insight into the themes of the book's chapters. On a critical note, Hofstadter seems a overly proud of his own cleverness at times. I would love to see an expansion of some of the art and music ideas presented by someone with a deeper expertise, but for a book by a single author, Godel, Escher, Bach is remarkably deep. My favorite passage at this point is Prelude, Ant Fugue , which significantly enhanced my understanding of insect colonies and emergent behavior.

This is an amalgamation of personal anecdotes from the wonderful allegorical writer. I greatly enjoyed his novels, most of which I read between 10th and 12th grade. I fear that I may have overlooked some of their significance, but I haven't been inspired to re-read them yet.

This is Rushdie's most recent collection of short stories. It is my first introduction to his work, so I hope it's a good place to start. The stories in the "East" section are pure allegory, to my reading. The stories in the other sections were more satisfying, perhaps because I understood them better. I'm looking forward to reading Midnight's Children.

This book is an attempt to visualize what might have happened if Germany and Japan had "won" World War II. The "reality shift" themes and the theme of dependence on an oracle are particulary interesting, displaying Dick's sharp understanding and rather deep thinking. I'm impressed by Dick's writing (this was my first exposure to it), and I look forward to reading more.

Gravity's Rainbow is the most difficult book I have ever read. In it, Pynchon weaves a fabulously dense web of paranoia, sexual conquest, and yin/yang. I can't claim to understand all of the symbolism (or even all of the plot, dammit!), but it was a wonderful experience to read a book on such a large scale in which every phrase is exquisitely crafted. I'm told that this book should be read more than once, and I look forward to having a second go at it at some time when I can devote a solid two weeks to it.

This appeared to be a collection of cogent articles arguing against organized religion and in favor of "nice people". On the surface, it sounds like my personal philosophy, but I have to say that many of his arguments are flawed. In much the same way that his Principia Mathematica failed to be a "complete" system of mathematics, his attempts to "prove" that organized religion is bad are no more bulletproof than Christianity's insistence on blind faith. Regardless, his liberalism was extremely progressive for the time of writing (the early part of this century), and many of his arguments are worth considering. I didn't read all of the essays; they got pretty repetitive.

It is easy to spot the rather strong influence that Borges had on Eco. The Name of the Rose is filled to the brim with Borgesian themes: non-existent books, labyrinths, libraries, etc. These short stories are sublime.

Endymion is the third of four proposed books in the Hyperion saga, and I had been wanting to start it for a while. Overall, this was an enjoyable, albeit quick, read. Without a doubt, Simmons has created an intriguing universe, with much relevance to our own. I can't wait for the next one.

It is increasingly apparent that Eco's essays are very much in the spirt of Dave Barry's, with a substantially greater intellectual bent and much less of a need to resort to non-sequitor as a humor form. These essays are all worth reading, though the one about the 3 owls left me confused. I think that you need to understand where the poem came from to "get it".

This one was something of a guilty pleasure. Michael Crichton's books aren't particularly interesting stylistically, but for a plot-only romp with a half-baked scientific understanding, they are unmatched. This was not one of his better books, though it was much more enjoyable than Disclosure, whose entire plot I had predicted by the time I was 1/3 of the way through it.

The time has come for me to digest this one. From my few brief encounters with the Society of Mind theories, I'm strongly impressed by their ability to explain such elusive properties as "consciousness", "mind", and perhaps "soul", in much the same way that Dawkins, channeling Darwin, explains "life". The ideas are deep, but at the same time extraordinarily simple and easy to understand.