Books Read in 2002

The Book of the New Sun is not a series that can be understood in one reading. Wolfe admits this in the last twenty pages, after a whirlwind of apparent Deus ex machina during the final chapters. There's so much going on in the 800 pages of this novel that has no apparent relevance when it happens, but which turns out to be important 400 pages later, that there's no way for a normal reader to make sense of it in one go. Alas, now that I know the ending and some of the novel's secrets, I have little interest in revisiting it.

I realize that I'm not being entirely fair to a series of novels that has won many awards and the adulation of the critics, but there's only so much work I'm willing to do to enjoy a novel. I'm reminded of Infinite Jest in that regard, but I loved Wallace's wordplay and I found his characters worth getting to know. In contrast, Wolfe's writing is very stylized and only the narrator achieves any depth of characterization.

Wolfe's creation is very ambitious, and he has created a fantasy world with much potential, but the story arc as a whole has many of the qualities of a shaggy-dog tale — ever more outlandish adventures ending without a good punchline. On these points, another obvious comparison is Tolkien, but Wolfe falls short there too: Urth is no Middle Earth.

I'm not really a comics fan. I read X-Men and a few other comic book series back in the early 80s, and I've read Watchmen, Jimmy Corrigan, and one of the Sandman graphic novels, but none of them really blew me away. I appreciate the craft of the artwork and design, but haven't yet found any comics that grab my intellect like a good novel (I suspect I could get caught up in Sandman, but there's no way I'm spending hundreds of dollars to read the whole series).

With that as background, McCloud's book is a valiant attempt to teach an appreciation of the history and complexity of comics. He does not talk much about the surface craft, but instead concentrates on the underlying conceptual space that comics operate within. It's a very interesting treatment that applies not only to comics but also to every other artform. He does spend quite a bit of effort describing the aspects of comics that distinguish them from other art, and those sections are very well done. Understanding Comics is a worthwhile read, and I'm motivated to check out a few more examples of the artform (Spiegelman's Maus is high on my list, as is Eisner's Comics & Sequential Art).

This book could well merit a four-star rating, but I won't know until I read the second half of the series. Having never read Wolfe before, I don't know whether or not I can trust him as a writer to tie things together in an acceptable manner. So far, he has raised far more questions than he has answered. Although I've enjoyed the journey so far, and I'm interested in finishing the series, I am a bit worried that it won't have been worth the effort.

I am greatly enjoying Carroll's work. Sleeping in Flame is even better than Bones of the Moon. In this outing, Carroll goes sixty pages before weaving in any fantastic elements, giving the reader time to soak up the setting and characters. I think that the ending is a bit short and sudden (I won't ruin it by saying more), but I enjoyed the novel from start to finish. Recommended.

I hadn't heard of Jonathan Carroll before this week, but after reading about him on Glen Engel-Cox's Blog and then doing some searching online, it was clear to me that Carroll is an author I would like. I ran out to the nearest bookstore and picked up Bones of the Moon. I'm glad that I did so. Carroll is an extremely engaging writer. His prose style is deceptively spare, and I very much enjoy the way he progressively blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. I'm now in the enviable position of having a half-dozen novels to read by a writer I know I'll enjoy.

Although none of this material was surprising, and I learned surprisingly little, this book holds a good concentration of knowledge about good design.

This how-to guide to Photoshop Elements is frustratingly thin. It does manage to point out some useful techniques, but it's firmly aimed at a rank beginner, and I didn't learn as much as I would have liked.

This book did not start off well for me. I'm not a fan of fantasy novels with main characters who are not human (few authors can justify such extravagance). Perdido Street Station introduces Garuda ("bird-man") and Khepri (half woman/half insect) characters within the first few pages, and I nearly stopped reading, but I'm glad I persevered. Perdido Street Station is extremely well written. It has many strange elements, but nearly all of them serve the story. Mieville is a very descriptive writer, and though he uses the word "palimpsest" way too many times (and I think there must be a different meaning of the word in England, because the way he uses it doesn't match the definition in my dictionary), he grabbed my attention within 75 pages and hooked me. I think Perdido Street Station is a better novel than American Gods and probably should have won the Hugo this year.

A quite pleasant sci-fi diversion, and a new take on time travel.

The title is ridiculous, unless it was intended as sarcasm. There is nothing revolutionary about the material in this book. Rather, it contains a small handful of useful scientific results and for most people, it boils down to one thing primarily: arrange your sleep schedule so that you wake up (without needing an alarm clock) at the same time everyday. If you are in the rather large minority with serious sleep problems (chronic insomnia, apnea, etc., see a doctor). Don't take sleeping pills. Don't consume caffeine within a few hours of bedtime.

The book may end up being somewhat worthwhile for me in that it did get me to reconsider my sleep habits, and I'm trying these days to get more sleep. If it pays off with the benefits Dr. Maas promises, I may well change the rating I'm giving the book now.

I am not afraid of books that challenge the reader. Infinite Jest and The Gold-Bug Variations are two of my favorite books from recent years, and I very much enjoyed reading Gravity's Rainbow. Dhalgren has a reputation as a particularly difficult but excellent book, and at Eric's urging, I dove into it.

Alas, Dhalgren isn't in the same class as the other books I mentioned. It starts out with great promise, plunging the reader into a startling post-apocalyptic mid-American city. The descriptions are richly textured, and there are a handful of intriguing elements (e.g., the optical chains, the appearance of a second moon, etc.). At the sentence level, the novel is very rich.

In my opinion, the mark of a great novel is that it lives by its own rules and that it contains most of the elements you need to understand it. Here is where Dhalgren falls flat. The only "rule" of the text is that there are no real rules. The pieces never come together; there is no reason for the novel to contain many of its elements.

Worse, the novel is filled with one semi-pornographic sexual encounter after another. Delany does this well, but after the umpteenth time, I failed to see the point. I'm not a prude, and I am interested in gaining insight into the mind of a bisexual black man in the early 70s, but I didn't really get that, nor did I get much else.

I'm giving Dhalgren three stars because there are some wonderful elements in it, and I was captivated for the first 200 pages as I began to understand what was going on. I'd give it four stars if Delany edited 200-300 pages out of the middle, and I'd give it five if he tied a few of the many loose ends together. Dhalgren is an important book, but it's not a great book.

Coupland rides the zeitgeist again with this interesting exploration of American pop culture centered in the airbrushed world of Hollywood. The characters are drawn well, and the plot is substantial enough to keep the reader's attention. Altogether a pleasant read.

Nicholas Christopher is now on my must-read list. Franklin Flyer is a novel of magic realism with the magic dial turned down to one. In that way, it reminds me of Carter Beats the Devil. Here, we have a wonderful protagonist, a colorful cast of characters, an inventive pseudohistorical plot, and a short-story ending. Recommended.

Another solid potboiler by Dan Simmons. One of the wonderful things for me about reading this novel was that so many vivid images jumped to mind from the previous installation in the Joe Kurtz series, Hardcase. I was shocked at how much I remembered visually, and I attribute this to Simmons' clever writing. Lightweight fun.

This "comic book" novel was not at all what I expected. It's very dark, a bit plodding, and a little too clever for its own good. The World's Fair flashbacks are wonderful, and the illustrations there really stand out. The overall graphic design is wonderful, but I had a hard time caring for any of the characters.

I picked this out at Wordsworths while hanging out with Adam on one of his too-rare trips to Boston. We each bought a copy, and I'm curious to know what he thought of his.

I, frankly, was disappointed. Lethem seeds an interesting premise: the protagonist's girlfriend falls in love with a laboratory curiosity — a void with a peculiar sort of intelligence. Although Lethem explores this idea in an interesting way, the characters are never developed such that you'd really care what happens to them. No one in the novel is likable, and the twist ending leaves you thinking "so what?" This short novel probably should have been a short story. Lethem shows enough promise, however, that I'll willing to try something else by him.

Disappointing, but adequate.

The best presentation I've seen for beginners.

Good information, but not a good first book on Go.

A very dark, but wonderful, children's tale.

This is the best of the children's books I've read recently. Fun.

A fun romp for the pre-teen set, but doesn't quite hold adult interest.

Quite disappointing after reading Ellison's screenplay.

This is DeLillo's most bizarre offering to date. The paragraph-level writing is superb, as usual, but the novella as a whole does not hold together that well. It is dark and haunting and poetic, but in my opinion it favors style over substance. I really didn't care much for it.

A very enjoyable and informative history of cryptography written as a battle between code-makers and code-breakers. Recommended.

A solid time-travel novel by one of my favorite SF authors. His short stories are still his best work, but I'll take what I can get.

UML Distilled is a fast-paced overview of the UML techniques for object-oriented software design. It was useful for me, as a quick-start guide for drawing some of the UML diagrams (which I plan to use initially for documentation of already-designed software, later for planning refactoring of existing code, and finally for design of new software applications). The book assumes a lot of familiarity with object-oriented concepts, so it's not the place to begin if you're just starting out with OO concepts.

After you get past the irony in this book's title, you will find a good presentation of a number of typical mistakes that C programmers make and some good suggestions of ways to avoid them. This book isn't as good as McConnell's Code Complete, but it's not aimed at the same audience. Where McConnell focuses on design and programming techniques in a language-agnostic manner, Maguire focuses entirely on C examples. Of course, many of Maguire's techniques can be transfered fairly easily to other languages, but you have to do that translation yourself.

There are a lot of good pointers to resources in this book, and some decent (I think) investment advice. Some of the calculations used in the examples are misleading (and a few are just plain wrong), so you need to watch out for that. It would have been helpful to do a side-by-side analysis of the effective returns of various investments (including tax implications), but this was not included anywhere (nor have I seen such a thing anywhere else).

This is one of the better time-travel novels I've read. Chalker takes the paradoxes of time travel very seriously, and attempts to create a story that avoids or resolves most of them. The end result is good in that he is largely successful. The plot is engaging, and its twists are interesting. Where the novel fails is in depth of characterization and both sentence- and page-level craft.

Interface is very much like a Michael Crichton book ( Terminal Man, for example). It has the same level of pseudoscience and the same loopy plot style. It's as good as Crichton, and as bad. Fun, but not lasting.

A Winter Haunting is a sequel to Simmons' Summer of Night. It's not one of Simmons' stronger outings, but it isn't bad. Recommended to fans only. Newcomers should start with Hyperion or The Crook Factory to see what Simmons is capable of.

In spite of the relatively low rating I'm giving it, this is actually one of Powers' better books. I'd recommend it as a place to start within his work, in part because it touches on all of the themes he explores elsewhere, but primarily because it's self-contained, unlike Last Call.

The Feast of Love begins with the postmodern conceit of making the author the narrator, but in the third person. Richard Powers did this to more interesting effect in Galatea 2.2, where the author is an essential player in the novel. Baxter, in contrast, quickly takes a backseat and lets his Ann Arbor neighbors tell the story (in which he plays no real part). The interconnections of the characters and their different viewpoints is interesting, as is the cast itself. In all, The Feast of Love is good as a literary exercise, but it never quite becomes compelling reading.

This is a fine first novel. Carter Beats the Devil is based on events in the life of Charles Carter, a magician who performed during the 1920s. Although much of the source material is based on real-life events, the story is highly entertaining, suspenseful, and fascinating. Gold's prose is very clean and engaging. Recommended.