Books Read in 2003

One of my favorite things about the year-end holiday break is the opportunity to relax and read for extended periods of time. I love to grab a page-turner and ignore the outside world. It's harder these days, with a two-year-old in the house and all, but given the right book, it's still possible.

Angels & Demons is a prequel to The Da Vinci Code. It follows the same formula as the current bestseller: a centuries old secret turns into a modern-day thriller. In this case, it centers on the Illuminati, who have hatched a plan to destroy the core of the Catholic Church — the Vatican itself. There's a time bomb ticking somewhere in Vatican City, and Cardinals are being murdered in a giant publicity stunt by an organization thought to be long defunct. Robert Langdon, Brown's dashing "symbologist", is caught in the middle, and he races to unravel the mystery that will lead him to the heart of the Illuminati in time to save the day.

Brown does a great job of creating page-turning suspense, and much of the chase is fascinating. The details of Roman architecture are interesting, and the pace is breathtaking. In the last 100 pages, however, my suspended disbelief came crashing down, as things became too implausible too quickly. The ending is an incredible stretch, but it's enjoyable even in its insanity.

In his day job, Dan Simmons writes brilliant speculative fiction, with near-perfect novels such as Ilium and Hyperion. But at night, he burns the midnight flame and cranks out greasy detective novels. Joe Kurtz is Simmons' Spenser, and Buffalo is his Boston. I can't quite fit in Hawk to this analogy, but if you've ever read any Robert B. Parker, you've already got the idea. The Joe Kurtz novels are "lightweight" in the same sense as Parker's, but a bit more bloody. There are no mindblowing ideas here, just gritty suspense, tense shootouts, and a handful of doublecrosses.

Hard as Nails may be the weakest of the Joe Kurtz novels — the twist ending isn't completely satisfying, and the Artful Dodger character is a little too surreal — but it's still ripping good entertainment. Simmons has never written a dull story, and his prose flows so well that it's easy to lose yourself in it for hours. This novel won't be nominated for any awards, but you could do a lot worse on a winter afternoon.

I've been reading Thomas Claburn's blog Lot 49 for a year or so, and I'm always impressed with his pithy, insightful jabs at current events. I was curious about his novel, Reflecting Fires, but a little hesitant to take the time to read something self-published. Happily, I needn't have worried.

Reflecting Fires is novel of ideas cast as a work of speculative fiction. The back cover claims that it is set in the distant future, against the backdrop of a war between man and machine, but you'd have a hard time figuring this out from the first fifty or so pages. Instead, you'd find yourself plunged into a disorienting world that seems feudal, to the point that you expect to have a scene featuring peasants wielding pitchforks and torches. There are little hints that some of the inhabitants of this world aren't quite human, and there's more than a little intrigue going on that you can't quite figure out, but Claburn does a good job of tossing the reader enough clues to keep up the interest level without giving away the novel's secrets too easily. After 100 pages, you're completely hooked, and over the course of the 150-odd remaining pages, the pieces fall into place, and it becomes clear that nothing in the novel is insignificant — it's all important to the story.

During my reading, I was reminded of two other novels. Reflecting Fires is similar to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun in the distant future feudal setting, and in the mostly subtle play of advanced technology in what is primarily a human story. It is also similar to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker in that clues are spread throughout the novel, and it takes most of the novel for the reader to piece together how the world works. I was pleased to note that upon rereading, the first few chapters made complete sense, and did not feel at all artificial. It's as if Claburn immersed himself in the world and then told the story as if he was an inhabitant. There are characters and subplots that I would have liked to see fleshed out more (Rose, Dahlia, Skye and Calx are all all interesting creations, but I feel as if I barely know them). The story line could easily bear the weight of a 400 page novel; as it stands, the writing borders on being too economical.

On a side note, I was saddened to see the "lexicon" inserted at the beginning of the book. Claburn uses many terms that are unique to this novel in their application, but I usually find it more rewarding to figure out what they mean from the context. I would have been happier if Claburn had reduced the number of jargon words by half and left it to the reader to gain his own understanding. (I make this same criticism of the American editions of Riddley Walker, which contain an entirely unnecessary glossary.)

I hope Claburn writes more. He has a fertile imagination, and his writing is solid.

I adored Helprin's Memoir From Antproof Case, and I had high hopes for his Winter's Tale, but my expectations were so shattered by the latter book that I waited almost six years to try another of his novels. I do like Refiner's Fire better than Winter's Tale, but my initial love of Helprin's writing has definitely faded.

Refiner's Fire is the life story of Marshall Pearl. In the opening scene, we meet Pearl on his deathbed in Haifa during the 1973 conflict, where he served as an Israeli soldier. After this brief opening, we're given a whirlwind tour of Pearl's life, probably intended to be "flashing before his eyes" as he nears death. His life starts in conflict, on an illegal immigrant ship in 1947, where he is orphaned during a battle. He is brought to New York by the boat's captain and adopted by a Jewish family. As he grows up, he has a series of outlandish adventures, from fighting the Rastafarians in Jamaica, to stowing away on a train, to working in a surreal slaughterhouse, and so on. He ends up in Israel, searching for his biological father, where he is conscripted into service and is near-mortally wounded. The novel ends on a poetic note that ties things up nicely.

Sounds good so far, right? Well, I was not impressed with the series of Marshall's adventures. Several of them serve no real purpose in the scheme of things (other than to show off Helprin's fertile imagination), and although they are interesting as vignettes, they don't all quite fit into the tapestry of the novel. Also, at times, Helprin gets a little carried away with his use of language and ends up obfuscating things unnecessarily.

This is a better book than Winter's Tale, and I was tempted to give it four stars, but in the end I don't think it quite deserves them. It's a good novel, but not great.

This is a lovely collection of short stories by the celebrated author. Chiang has won a slew of awards for his short fiction but has never written a novel. His work reads like a modern Borges, lightened with a little bit of Vonnegut, and twisted with a tiny bit of Philip K. Dick. It's a successful mix, though Chiang isn't nearly as prolific as any of those three authors, and his work is not always on the same level.

There are eight stories here, which apparently is everything Chiang has published. I particulary liked "Division By Zero", in which a mathematician loses her mind when she proves that mathematics is inconsistent, "Understand", a "Flowers for Algernon"-like tale of chemical enhancement with a interesting twist, and "Seventy-Two Letters", in which the genetic code of the golem is explored.

The collection is full of remarkable ideas and apt storytelling, but it feels like it's missing something. I found myself wanting — but failing — to love these works. I look forward to reading more by Chiang, though at this rate, it will be another decade before the next collection.

Norwegian Wood is more approachable — and more satisfying — than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Here, Murakami narrates a complex love story. It's more of a "pentangle" than a triangle, and it all revolves around Toru Watanabe, a lackadaisical college student in the late sixties, a hipster of sorts who reads F. Scott Fitzgerald and listens to Miles Davis. He's in love with his dead best-friend's girlfriend, Naoko, who has retreated to a remote sanatorium to recover from some psychological issues. At the same time, he tromps around Tokyo with his friend Nagasawa, having meaningless sexual flings with coeds and rationalizing them as mere physical release. He also has intense relationships with Midori (a classmate), and Reiko (Naoko's roommate). The novel is an exploration of Watanabe's morality as he negotiates (or, more typically, fails to negotiate) these various relationships with varying degrees of success.

Norwegian Wood is an interesting hybrid of Japanese and American culture. The pop culture references are uniformly American, but the setting is quite Japanese. The dialogue seems quite unnatural to me. Perhaps it's an artifact of the translation from Japanese to English, or perhaps it's intended, but the words seem stilted at times, almost like dubbed text in a bad kung foo movie. The novel ends in a very non-American (that is, non-Hollywood) manner, which is a very good thing. The conclusion is unexpected but feels just right. I enjoyed being immersed in Watanabe's world for a few days, but I'm not eager to revisit it.

Gibson's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, uses detachment from one's soul as a metaphor for the physical and mental effects of jet-lag (she supposes that the soul can't travel as fast as a jet, so it takes some time to catch up with you when you travel). Getting the hang of reading Gibson's prose is not unlike this feeling of disorientation. His descriptions of ordinary things are ornate, colorful, and always a little bit twisted, so that you feel a bit out of place until you get used to his style.

Up until now, Gibson's novels have been set in the future, but Pattern Recognition takes place in present day. The novel follows Cayce as she tracks down the elusive maker of "the footage", a set of disjoint film segments that has garnered a global following in various internet chat rooms and the attention of a wealthy entrepeneur. The mystery itself isn't all that compelling, but the characters are interesting, and there are a few interesting plot elements. This is the first novel I've read that's explicitly set in a post-9/11 world (one of the themes is Cayce's coming-to-terms with the disappearance of her father in Manhattan on that day), and Gibson treats it well. Although I was a little bit disappointed by the conclusion, I was quite satisfied by the journey.

I can't remember now how this book was recommended to me. I thought it had been mentioned by Glen , but now I can't find any mention of it on his site. Maybe it was the review on Bookslut , but I don't see how that would have driven me to purchase a copy. At any rate, I did get a copy a couple of months ago, and lookee here, now I've read it.

The Queen's Gambit is a fictional biography of Beth Harmon, an orphan, drug addict, and chess prodigy. It describes her rise from a Kentucky orphanage to the heights of the chess world. Along the way, she suffers from drug and alcohol addiction, and from poisonous personal relationships.

This is not a novel about chess per se, but chess does make up the warp and weft of the story. Tevis does an admirable job of making the many chess matches into compelling storytelling. I'm not a chess player, but I was intrigued by his accounts of strategy and of the shifting balance of power between two players.

Tevis's prose is workmanlike. There isn't a descriptive metaphor to be found in the entire novel. Instead, the plot holds center stage, and the sentences are as simple and direct as they could possibly be. I'm not usually a big fan of that style of writing, but it works here. [Before writing these notes, I read the first few pages of Gibson's Pattern Recognition — the writing style could hardly be more of a contrast.]

It's hard for me to believe that I've read over fifty books since I finished As She Climbed Across the Table. At the time, I wrote that I'd be willing to give Lethem another chance, and now I'm glad that I finally did so. Motherless Brooklyn is quite an improvement over Table.

In Brooklyn, Lethem spins a detective story of sorts, where the protagonist is a high-school dropout, an orphan with Tourette's syndrome. His name is Lionel Essrog, but his friends call him "freakshow", and he's been "adopted" by a small-time gangster named Frank Minna. When Minna is murdered during a job that goes badly, Lionel — fighting Tourettic tics and outbursts at every turn — attempts to find the killer and bring him to justice.

Although Motherless Brooklyn is at face value a detective novel, it's really more of a character study, and Lethem explicitly pokes fun at some of the detective-story cliches as he uses them. Lionel Essrog is an interesting character, and I found myself rooting for him despite the fact that I never really liked him. (Come to think of it, none of the characters in the novel are at all likeable.) Overall, I enjoyed Motherless Brooklyn, but I'm not in a hurry to read more Lethem. He's a capable and talented writer, but I haven't fallen in love with his writing.

"Baroque" is an apt subtitle for this book. Stephenson's novel is densely packed with minute detail that, if one were forgiving, one might describe as ornament. I'm not feeling so generous, so I'm going to call it pedantic. It appears that Stephenson spent several years doing exhaustive research on the late 17th century, and then felt obliged to include everything he learned. So the slick, flowing images that are brought up by the title Quicksilver are exactly not embodied by this doorstop of a book.

That said, there is a lot of genuinely interesting information in Quicksilver. Stephenson has done an admirable job of making the setting very rich, and in giving his characters detailed backstories. However, in the midst of all this, he forgot to include a plot. There are a handful of excellent — but very short — plot-driven segments (the attack by pirate ships in Plymouth Bay; the siege of Vienna; Jack's pursuit into the mines), yet there's absolutely no sense of larger story, and these vignettes could have been done as short stories, saving about 800 pages of meandering. I understand that this is a three volume work, and I've only read the first third, but you'd think Stephenson would want to give his readers a compelling reason to read the followup works. Even the "cliffhanger" at the very end is anything but — we knew 900 pages earlier that the character in peril will live for quite some time longer. And we even know that he'll procreate, so there's no need to worry about his plumbing.

A lot of readers have pointed out the character parallels between Quicksilver and Cryptonomicon: there are Waterhouses, Shaftoes, and Roots in both novels. In fact, we're led to believe that Enoch Root is the same character in both. If so, it would appear that his lifespan is more than 300 years. It's hard to imagine an explanation that doesn't turn these "historical" fiction books into "science" fiction. Maybe Root's a time-traveller, or perhaps he's found an alchemical fountain-of-youth, or better yet, maybe he's the Wandering Jew. Or it may just be that Enoch Root is a name taken on by a sequence of people who have belonged to the same secret society through the ages. So far, any clues to his true nature have been obscured by Stephenson's dense thicket of prose.

It could be that Quicksilver is an extremely elaborate setup for a payoff that will come in the other two books of the "cycle" (Stephenson eschews the word "trilogy"). I will probably read book two, but I won't be in line at the bookstore the day it's released the way I was with this one. And Stephenson is going to have to work hard to get back into my good graces.

As a final note, I point you to The Metaweb , a collaborative hypertext exploration of the contents of The Baroque Cycle. Some of the answers may rest there.

Matt Ruff continues to evolve as a writer. Each of his three novels is completely unlike the others, and each is interesting in its own way. Although Sewer, Gas and Electric is the most fun, I would argue that Set This House In Order is the most mature.

In House, Ruff creates three fully flesh-and-blood characters, Andrew Gage, Penny Driver, and Julie Sivik, whose lives are complicated tremendously because Andrew and Penny both suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder. The point of view is divided primarily between the "core" personalities of Andrew and Penny, but each character has a half dozen "souls", with decidedly different personalities, so the interactions get to be quite rich.

On his website, Ruff explains that his portrayal of Multiple Personality Disorder is intended to be believable and self-consistent, but not necessary based in reality (MPD is not very well understood). I will vouch for the believability and consistency of the work, and go further to say that it's wholly involving and fascinating.

Happily, the strengths of the novel go beyond characterization. The plot arc is carefully constructed, with threads weaving in from the beginning and converging at the end, without ever being overly predictable. The end feels slightly rushed, and the epilogue is tacked on, but these are very minor quibbles.

Given my disdain for organized religion, and my general attitude of avoidance, it's a little bit ironic that two of the last three books I've read have been centered on bits of history that — if true — would deeply question the foundations of Christian faith. In the first of these novels, The Da Vinci Code, that piece of intrigue was the McGuffin that drove a page-turner suspense plot. In Requiem, it's more of a red herring in a psychological thriller.

I found Requiem after reading a review written by Glen Engel-Cox . It was through Glen's blog that I was introduced to Jonathan Carroll (whose novels I've enjoyed tremendously), and Glen explicitly mentions Carroll in his review, so I was sufficiently intrigued to acquire this book. Like Carroll, Joyce blends reality and fantasy in interesting ways. Unlike Carroll's fantasy, which often defies rational explanation, Joyce's deviations from reality could be explained as delusion or hallucination. There's definitely a more psychological bent to Joyce's writing, though the line between dementia and supernatural is a little unclear. The bottom line is that Requiem is a satisfying dark literary fantasy.

I try to keep an eye out for children's books with depth — the ones with a dark side, such as the His Dark Materials trilogy, or Coraline. I had come across several references to Louis Sachar's book Holes during the last year or so, and decided to give it a try.

Alas, Holes isn't in the same league as those other books. It has some intriguing elements (the spotted lizards, the holes, the Warden), but the final payoff isn't all that rewarding. I can understand why this appeals to pre-teens, but there isn't much here for adults.

Imagine if John Grisham had written Foucault's Pendulum from Umberto Eco's notes. What you'd have is eerily similar to The Da Vinci Code. On the Grisham side, it's a potboiler, full of plot twists and uncertain loyalties, as well as tremendously stilted dialogue and wooden descriptions. On the Eco side, you have a conspiracy that spans millenia, filled with mystical and religious symbolism. Together, what you have are two great tastes that taste great together: a ripping yarn with a fascinating backstory.

I was completely caught up in the historical mystery, though I was continually frustrated by Brown's writing craft. Several of the characters are cartoonish, and a few of the plot twists border on absurd. The whole thing reads like a screenplay (it would make a great movie, by the way).

I'm amused by the anger this novel has raised in many Catholics. Unless you buy into the conspiracy theory completely, the book can hardly be considered a criticism of the Catholic church. I'd love to say more, but I don't want to spoil the story for anyone.

The Da Vinci Code is trash, but it's very enjoyable trash.

Bill Bryson's latest book is an ambitious attempt to describe science's current view of humanity and our place in the universe, along with some backstory describing the people behind the scientific breakthroughs. In the 480 or so pages of prose, Bryson touches on everything from the big bang, to the makeup of the solar system, to elements, atoms, and quarks, to life itself, and to the fragility of our position in the universe.

It's a surprisingly successful undertaking. I hold three degrees in engineering, so it's fair to say that I know a thing or two about science. I've been exposed to most of the ideas in this book at one time or another, but never have I seen such a broad range of modern scientific thought articulated so well for a lay audience. Sure, Bryson probably spends too much time describing the social peccadilloes of famous (and not so famous) scientists, but although they are irrelevant to the value of the science, they do highlight the humanity of our scientific forefathers. I particularly appreciated that Bryson attempts to give credit to the scientists who first discovered particular phenomena rather than those who are credited by popular history.

If there's one core message in A Short History of Nearly Everything, it's that human life is precariously positioned. Geologically speaking, we've been on the planet for a infinitesimal timespan, and we've done a lot of things that are likely to throw the ecology of planet Earth sufficiently out of balance to force us into extinction. Surprisingly, no fingers are pointed (the environmental policies of the current Bush administration are incredibly destructive, but they are not mentioned). Clearly, Bryson makes his political points more subtly than I would.

I'm a big fan of the programming language Python, and I've been using it for most of my day-to-day programming for about three years. Python programs are easy to read, primarily because the language is powerful and concise, and the standard library is almost comprehensive. I've been writing scripts to do text processing for almost ten years, working with perl, html, sgml, xml, and now python on many different occasions.

So I was pleased that I learned a few new techniques and tricks in the opening chapters of David Mertz's book. The chapter on regular expressions is particularly good. However, I expected a lot more from the chapter on state machines. The basic discussion is okay, but the examples could be beefed up, and the presentation of the relevant library modules is frustrating. There's a ton of information about mx.TextTools, but not enough to really make sense of it, and all of the other modules are glossed over with almost zero detail.

In all, I'm disappointed. The book doesn't offer much to experienced programmers, and it's too complex for beginners.

I've been hearing good things about Pratchett's Discworld novels for quite a long time now, so I figured I'd pick one up and see for myself. Alas, I've found that they are not to my taste. The humor is all about juxtaposition and non-sequitur, and after you've read thirty pages, you learn to anticipate most of the jokes, or at least become inured to them. Back when I was twelve and thought Douglas Adams was the best writer on the planet, I would have loved this book. Now, however, I'm a little bored by it. That probably says more about me than it does about Pratchett's writing.

I have been on a health kick for almost eight months now. I've improved my diet, kept up a regular exercise program, and settled in at a comfortable weight after dropping fifteen or so pounds. I was very happy with what I learned from Weight Training for Dummies, and I've started to see some definition in my arms and shoulders, but I haven't been able to make much of a dent in my spare tire (I cut nearly two inches from my waistline, but there's still a lot of flab there).

So I was intrigued to discover The Testosterone Advantage Plan. The title borders on obnoxious, and there's a macho get-the-girl attitude that pops up here and there, but the book's subject matter makes a heckuva lot of sense. The volume is divided into three major parts: the background and philosophy, which argues that increasing testosterone through diet and exercise will maximize muscle gain and fat loss; the diet plan, which suggests consuming as much protein as your body can process (but no more, Dr. Atkins!), dividing the remainder of your calories evenly between carbohydrates and healthy fats; and the workout plan, which consists of three stages to be completed over nine weeks. There are lots of simple recipes and sample menus, and the exercise descriptions and photographs are very good.

I started the diet today (I'm modifying my existing diet rather than follow their menu explicitly), and I'll start the exercise regimen tomorrow. Based on everything I've read about weight training and nutrition, both in this book and others, I think this will be the best training program I've tried so far. I'll report back in a couple of months with the results.

[2003-10-30 - I just finished the 9-week plan, sticking very closely to the exercise program, and a little bit more loosely to the diet plan. I maintained my weight, which was what I wanted, and I built strength in some areas (I can do 8 chip-ups now, which more than doubles what I could do before). My arms and shoulders are a bit more defined, but I don't see any other changes to my body shape (my chest, bicep and waist measurements are exactly what they were two months ago). So the book didn't live up to its claims, but still, I'm not unhappy with the results.]

Absolutely loved it. Can't wait for the second half. Highly recommended.

Ilium is Simmons at his best: sprawling science fiction with good characters and a mind-boggling story arc. The primary action in Ilium takes place on Earth and Mars, some two millenia in the future, where entities who have fashioned themselves after the Greek gods are replaying the siege of Ilium from The Iliad. The cast includes the gods, the Greek heroes, some post-technological humans, a resurrected Iliad scholar, and a pair of autonomous robots, or moravecs. The humans don't know how to boil water, the moravecs contemplate Shakespeare and Proust, and Hockenberry (the scholar) plays out a Homer-erotic (sorry, couldn't resist) fantasy. It's a heady and intoxicating mix.

If Ilium were written by any other author, I'd worry that there were too many loose ends to be tied up in the second half of this epic (to be titled Olympos), but I'm entirely confident in Dan Simmons to follow through with a satisfying conclusion. Even as is, Ilium almost stands on its own. There are a few examples of deus ex machina, some of which Simmons points out as such, that I hope will be justified in the second book.

On a side note, it appears to me that the character Daeman is being set up as an everyman hero, and therein lies my chief criticism — admittedly a minor quibble — of Ilium. I am somewhat unsatisfied with his story arc so far. To date, his evolution has been a little bit unbelievable, and he hasn't been given very sufficient depth.

One final bit of praise: any novel that inspires its readers to study Homer, Shakespeare, and/or Proust, is to be celebrated. None of those sources are prerequisites for enjoying Ilium (lord knows, I've never read much of any of them), but I suspect they'd enrich the experience. Between now and the release of Olympos, I may well take a look at The Iliad and The Tempest.

The premise of this collection is interesting: gather a bunch of good writers, both mainstream and not, and have them put aside their literary pretensions and write ripping good yarns. If only it lived up to that promise.

I didn't finish reading this collection so much as I gave up on it. I read all but three of the pieces in their entirety, but I couldn't be bothered reading more than ten pages of the Eggers, Moody, and Chabon stories. If you are going to write a short story, make sure that you've engaged the reader within the first few pages. I'm sometimes willing to give a novel 100-150 pages to grab hold, but short works have to have something going for them right from the beginning. (To be fair, Moody's entry grabbed hold at the start, but started dragging its heels after a few pages.)

Some of the shorter pieces in this collection are pretty good. I particularly liked Glen David Gold's contribution (and I heartily recommend his novel Carter Beats the Devil).

I also want to mention the aesthetics of the book itself. It's pretty much the standard trade paperback size, but for some unknown reason, the publisher/editor decided to print two narrow columns on each page, making the text nearly unreadable. Also, there are missing words and misprints in almost every story.

Bottom line: steer clear.

I've said many times before that Dan Simmons is one of my favorite writers, partly because he hops genres with ease, but mainly because he writes highly descriptive but never obfuscated prose, and because his ideas are usually quite fresh.

Summer Sketches is autobiography. In it, Simmons writes about the places he traveled to during Summer vacation (while he was a teacher), the notebooks he kept, and how the experiences of visiting various places had an impact on the settings and atmospheres of several of his stories and novels. The book is filled with reproductions of his notebooks, including wonderful hand-drawn sketches of various settings and people, as well as long-hand notes. These reproductions are accompanied by extensive anecdotes and relevant excerpts from Simmons' fiction. It's a rare and wonderful insight into the craft of writing, and it should give hope to writers with day jobs.

If you are a writer or a Simmons fan and I've piqued your interest, I must now apologize. You are going to have a hard time finding a copy of this book at a fair price. I believe there were only five thousand copies printed, most of which were signed by the author. I got mine through an Amazon partner for about $35, but there aren't a lot of copies available at prices that low (many resellers are looking to get over $100). It's a slim volume, but for me it was well worth the price.

The title of this book should be Why You Aren't Qualified To Do Cryptography and the final chapter should be made into a preface. As it stands, you read almost 400 pages of dense technical explanations describing how to make certain decisions while designing a cryptographic system, and then the authors say: "you really need to hire an expert to do it for you". Since this book is marketed as a practical guide to building cryptographic systems, that's a painful bait-and-switch.

Not only that, but they put the "Practical" part of the title on the wrong book. Schneier's book, Applied Cryptography, actually gives you diagrams showing how to implement the various ingredients that go into a cryptographic system; this book does not. This one describes a few protocols and basically says, use this one with these parameters. Which is fine for a manager who needs to make a decision about what product to purchase, but then why read 400 pages of dense technical jargon to reach that decision?

I haven't finished reading Applied Cryptography, but I'm willing to bet that my conclusion will be that that book is much more valuable, and that Practical Cryptography should have been condensed to a single chapter as part of Schneier's third edition.

This, the fifth installment in the Harry Potter septology, is one of the best so far, though it has its fair share of problems. My main complaint is that the plot unfolds too slowly for most of the novel's bulk (there's a lot going on but not much point to a lot of it), and then Rowling tries to make up for it by cramming a million things into the last 125 pages. It never feels like the students are at school; it seems like they attend class a couple of times, play one Quiddich match, and then it's time for Christmas break (Am I the only one who finds it funny that wizards celebrate Christmas? This sure isn't a Philip Pullman novel.).

I've noticed now that my reading of this series has suffered for having seen the first two movie adaptations. I can't help but hear some of the characters in the voices of the actors who played them (particularly Hermione, Hagrid, and Ron Weasley), and this is particularly problematic for Hermione and Ron, who should have matured in the book. I've managed to create my own internal versions of Snape and Harry (the Dumbledore and McGonagall in the movies matched my imagination), so they were less of a problem. And I can't help but picture Neville Longbottom as Ralph Wiggum from the Simpsons. Of course, I can't fault Rowling for the movies or my own bizarre associations.

As a final note, I'm becoming more and more intrigued by Professor Snape, and I sincerely hope that he gets to play a more prominent role in the last two novels. Dumbledore is still too much of a God figure, and it would be very exciting to see him be the next character killed off. But that's probably just me.

If you've been reading my weblog for a few months, you know that I've been exercising regularly since the beginning of the year. Currently I'm working out about four times a week for about forty-five minutes each. Two of those workouts consist primarily of strength training with dumbbells, and two are aerobic workouts on an elliptic trainer. Since January, I've dropped about 15 pounds, lost an inch-and-a-half from my waist, and reduced my body fat (according to a fat-monitoring bathroom scale) from 20% to under 16%. I was sidelined for about five weeks after a neck injury, but I'm back on track now.

Strength Training Anatomy is a work of art as well as a useful reference guide. It was recommended to me by Anderson Mills , who read some of my earlier blog entries about fitness books. Each page of the book centers on a drawing showing proper form for a common exercise. The people in the drawings are cutaways showing musculature and somtimes skeletal structure. The primary muscles for the particular exercise are highlighted in red. Each drawing is accompanied by simple instructions for performing the exercise using proper form.

Although Strength Training Anatomy doesn't really supply me with any new exercises, it does show me exactly which muscles I'm working, and I can use that knowledge to make sure that I'm doing the exercises properly and exhausting the right muscles. Even without that benefit, it's still just really cool to look at.

The Dante Club is a novel that revolves around Longfellow's translation of The Divine Comedy. The plot is centered on a series of murders that are related to Dante's masterpiece. This is Pearl's first novel, and it shows. His prose is a bit forced and often much too elaborate for the simple whodunnit at the core of the novel. The plot moves much too sluggishly at first, and then turns into a potboiler only in the last fifty pages. It's a decent read, but not a harbinger of great writing to come.

A disappointing genre novel. Anderson explores a future world where humans have learned to "hopscotch" — that is, swap bodies. It has the potential to be an interesting premise, and Anderson takes a shot at examining some of the psychological and philosophical issues that it suggests. However, this is done within a scattershot plot; instead of a 400 page arc, we're presented with a handful of episodes that come together awkwardly and unsatisfyingly at the end. It would have been better if Anderson had concentrated on one sub-plot (perhaps Mordecai Ob's drug abuse) in depth instead of giving everything shallow coverage.

Cialdini explains the psychological principles underlying influence. Each chapter is devoted to a different "weapon of influence": Reciprocation, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority, and Scarcity. For each, Cialdini describes how the "weapons" are exploited, gives experimental evidence showing their power, and gives some hints about how to combat them. On the down side, this is a blueprint for sleazy salesmen and advertisers, but on the up side, it will open the eyes of consumers who read it. This book was not what I was expecting, but it was worthwhile.

Let me admit first that I was never particularly engaged by this book. I read it in small chunks, mainly while sitting in bed preparing to fall asleep. From that perspective, the disjoint narrative of Whitehead's book was not a good impedance match to my available attention span. I'm not even certain as I write this that I could reconstruct all of the important plot elements. What I got from the novel instead was a strong sense of place — of a sterile urban environment in some vague dystopia — and a relatively weak sense of character. Whitehead's sentence-level writing is clever but doesn't flow well. He's full of good ideas, but doesn't work hard enough to make his writing lucid. This is probably a better book than I'm giving it credit for, but I'm not that impressed.

Google Hacks is a detailed examination of the enormously popular Google search engine. It explains all of the various search syntaxes that are available, and gives reasonable insight into when it is useful to try different variations. It also explores a wide range of tools built on top of Google, or on the Google APIs . I found about half of these to be interesting, and the rest pretty useless. Most of the examples that require programming use the hideous Perl language for the example code. If you aren't a Perl programmer, you will have no hope whatsoever of understanding the code (I programmed in Perl extensively for several years, but haven't used it much since 1999, and I couldn't understand the syntax in the examples). The isolated Python examples are much more readable, but there aren't many of them.

These minor faults aside, the book is worthwhile. Even if you consider yourself a seasoned search-engine jock, you will find useful new techniques in this book, and it's worth your time to check it out.

I enjoyed The Name of the Rose tremendously, so I began Eco's latest novel, which takes place in the 12th century, with great anticipation. And it is with tremendous disappointment that I report how little I enjoyed the novel. Eco is erudite to a fault; he knows more about everything than you do, and he loves to steep his writing in inconsequential details. When this detail is hung on a murder-mystery (as in Name of the Rose) or in worldwide conspiracy (as in Foucault's Pendulum), the result is entertaining. Here, where the only plot is the far-fetched tale of a pathological liar, the result is just boring. If the story had centered on Baudolino's studies in Paris, or on the seige of Alessandria, or on the Fourth Crusade's pillaging of Constantinople, Eco might have maintained my interest. But unfortunately he moves from set-piece to set-piece with little logic and not enough sense of place and time.

Garner's book is a little thin on content, but it does describe a dozen or so techniques for making yourself more effective in social situations. I am a bit too shy for my own good, so every little bit helps.

Dale Carnegie's book is full of techniques that — applied incorrectly — will make you come across to other people like a used car salesman. If you can dig deep inside yourself and use these techniques with real sincerity, then they could quite possibly improve your ability to relate to, and to influence, other people. I set out to read it because I'm too shy for my own good in social situations.

The book is broken into four major sections: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People, Six Ways to Make People Like You, How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking, and Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment. Each section offers a handful of ideas backed up with dozens of examples. Unfortunately, many of the examples are outdated; people just don't interact in 2003 the way they did in 1937 when the book was first published. Many other examples are too free in their interpretation of causality; I wasn't convinced that the use of the Carnegie's techniques really caused the situation to turn out the way it did. I finished the book thinking that Dale Carnegie was a bit too much a used-car salesman for my taste.

Another disappointing software book. The concept of Test Driven Development is solid: use unit tests to drive the development of your code. Like in Extreme Programming, Kent Beck's writing style is facile, to the point of almost complete superficiality. The first half of the book describes — in overwraught detail — the development of a trivial example of code, one that any half-decent programmer could design and code in an hour. It appeared that the second major section would describe how to use xUnit (specifically PyUnit) to build test suites for code, but instead it is a pedantic exercise in building a superficial version of PyUnit, written with lousy Python programming style.

Reading this book was not, however, a complete waste of time. By spending time thinking about using tests to drive development, I've arrived at my own conclusions about what techniques to try. I can't, however, recommend this book to anyone else.

Every year or so, I get an urge to read some computer programming books and see if I can jolt myself out my current set of habits. Extreme Programming (XP) has been a big buzzword over the last few years. I had some vague ideas about what XP was (pair programming, writing tests first), but I never really gave it much thought.

The environment that I program in does not lend itself to software development practices involving lots of detailed planning. I work alone or in a small group, with ever-changing program requirements, and my deliverables are working prototype code and high-level documentation. So, the "embrace change" part of this book's title got my attention. However, this treatise on XP is not going to help me much. I'm convinced of the necessity of automated unit and functional testing, and I know that I need an approach that can react well to changing requirements, but I'm not convinced by the author's arguments in favor of XP as a solution. I'm also not that impressed with his facile writing style.

I'm not sure if The Scar is actually a lot better than Perdido Street Station, or if I just enjoyed it a lot more because I now know better what to expect from Mieville. Either way, I'm very impressed by The Scar. Mieville has created a well-balanced fantasy/sci-fi novel with an ambitious story arc, a handful of well-drawn characters, and a sustained set of climaxes that build on each other until they arrive at a very satisfying conclusion.

On a side note, I'm particularly intrigued by the Uther Doul character; I'd be very interested in reading about his life leading up to his time on Armada. On the down side, I would have liked to see the Brucolac character developed a bit more.

I recommend Mieville's work heartily. It's not a timeless masterpiece, but it is an outstanding work of fiction.

White Apples is another strong outing from Jonathan Carroll. Although I prefer his novels when they explore the relationships between the characters more deeply, this novel flows well from beginning to end (it is better constructed than The Wooden Sea). Although the ending feels tacked-on to some degree, it is satisfying enough.

At this point, now that I've read all of Carroll's books that are in print in the United States, I don't think I'll go out of my way to get copies of his other books. The six that I've read so far have given me a pretty firm picture of his writing, and although I'm sure that I'd enjoy reading his other books, I don't think they would offer me anything new.

This is the fitness book I was looking for. The authors do a great job of explaining why you need to do things a certain way, and they do it with a sense of humor that is never obnoxious. I now have a much better understanding of how often I can work on various muscle groups, why I shouldn't neglect any of them, and how to structure my own workout program.

I fail to see why (other than marketing concerns) this book couldn't be combined with Fitness for Dummies as a single volume. There are only about 20 pages worth of material in that book that are really useful, but which are not already covered in this one. I'm thinking in particular of the alternate way to compute the target heart-rate zone for aerobic exercise (one that makes better sense for people with high resting heart rates). That addition would take only one paragraph.

Reading this book has caused me to reduce my rating of 8 Minutes in the Morning. Now that I know more about exercise, I can see that Cruise's program has some deficiencies that I'll correct in my own workouts. For example, his exercises only target each muscle group once each week; to make real changes, you need to exercise each group twice each week. I like the idea of short workouts in the morning, and Cruise's program has got me in the habit of working out regularly, but that alone is not going to get me the results I want very efficiently.

Imagine my surprise while browsing through Wordsworth's in Harvard Square, to find a collection of novellas by one of my favorite writers — a collection that had been published months before, but of which I had no knowledge. I stood there in confusion for a minute or so before running to pay at the register and making off with my unexpected treasure.

This particular collection is a long-awaited return to science fiction for Dan Simmons, and it is mostly very successful. I found three of the five novellas excellent, and the others okay (I didn't really get the one about the Jews in the distant future). The return to the Hyperion universe in one piece was a joy. The final piece, which revolves around the Russian space program, is particularly topical in these weeks after the space shuttle Columbia disaster.

Simmons is unlike most of the other authors I enjoy. His prose has a poetry of simplicity and is never shrouded in clever language. His writing is straightforward, but the simplicity is almost desceptive; there is depth, but you won't find it in wordplay. I don't recommend this collection as a starting point for Simmons' work — his novels are better — but Worlds Enough & Time will be a treat for long-time fans.

A solid overview of how to get fit, which boils down to: do weight training four times a week, and get aerobic exercise at least that many times. And don't forget to stretch when you're done. Okay, I'm being a bit facile because I didn't learn very much from this book. I will be making some changes to my workout plan after I finish the 28 day program from 8 Minutes in the Morning, but they'll be based on a book that focuses on weight training.

As of this writing, I'm 6.5 weeks into my aerobic program, and 18 days into the 28-day weight training program. I've already lost ten pounds and brought my body fat down to 18.5%, which was my original goal; my modified goal is to lose another five pounds, and to get my body fat down to 16%. I should be able to get there in a month or two if I don't give up.

A Box of Matches is a return-to-form for Baker. Like his first two novels, The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, it is a novel of minutia, filled to the brim with obsessive detail steeped in keen observation.

As with the previous books, there is no plot per se. This, however, is not a liability, but rather a strength of Baker's writing. He makes the reader more aware of sensation and place, and that is a worthwhile accomplishment. Although A Box of Matches doesn't really hold up to The Mezzanine, it is at least as good as Baker's other books. Recommended.

Like millions of other Americans, I made a New Year's resolution to get into better physical shape. Like most of them, I am also lazy. I need exercise to be a small time commitment, and I need mental distraction while I'm doing it.

Two years ago, I bought an elliptical trainer and put it in my basement. I could read a magazine or listen to music while getting an aerobic workout, and I could do it whenever I had a free hour. Great, but I didn't exercise frequently enough. This year, I did myself one better by hooking up TiVo to my house cable wiring and putting an old TV in the basement. Now, I can watch the shows that my wife doesn't care about and get fit at the same time. Works great, and I've lost about 7 pounds in under five weeks by exercising for 40 minutes about four times a week, and by trimming my diet slightly.

I understand, however, that aerobic exercise and diet isn't a complete answer — I will lose weight, but I'll be losing lean muscle as well as fat, and that's not a long-term solution. So I bought a scale that measures body fat (so I could servo to that number instead of my weight), and I shopped around for a strength-training program that I could stick with. It had to be doable at home with dumbbells and a weight bench (for convenience) and require only a relatively small time commitment (I can't deal mentally with long workouts).

With a little searching, I found Jorge Cruise's book. It purports to provide a 28 day series of 8 minute morning workouts with minimal equipment requirements. I read through the book, quickly dismissing most of the dietary stuff (I believe in the old adage "everything in moderation"), and I focused on the morning workouts. The exercises rotate though the various body parts, working on two per day, and they seem to be laid out sensibly. So far, I've been doing the workout for a week, and I feel good; I'm mildly sore in a few places, but in a good way. The exercises take more like 15 minutes than the advertised 8 if you actually warm up a little before and then stretch afterward, but this is something I can make part of my morning routine, especially when I can do the exercises right in my bedroom.

I'll stick with the routine for the 28 days, and then re-evaluate, but I'm feeling pretty confident in the program. The book has a lot of stuff in it that I'm not interested in, but the workout plan is worth the $11 I paid for it.

[Update: After reading Weight Training for Dummies, I like this book a lot less. I've finished the 28 day program, but I'll be designing my own program based on Neporent and Schosberg's book from now on. Cruise's book is good for motivating you to work out, but that's not enough.]

The Land of Laughs is one of the best Jonathan Carroll books I've read so far. Only Sleeping In Flame and The Marriage of Sticks come really close. Here, the love story isn't painted as beautifully, but the fantasy backstory more than makes up for it. The ending is a one-two punch of plot twists that I found to be very satisfying. Highly recommended.

The Wooden Sea is quite a departure from Carroll's other work. The fantastic elements begin right at the start of the book, and like in his other novels, Carroll builds the suspense about what's really going on. Unlike his other books, however, he never ties things together with any conviction. Sure, things are "explained away", but not convincingly, and there seems to be little purpose behind the story. The writing is good at the micro level, but the overall structure is lousy. Disappointing.

It is a little hard to believe that it has been almost ten years since I read most of Gibson's work ( Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome and Virtual Light). When reading Idoru a couple of years back, I wondered if I was misremembering how good Gibson's work was. I remember being pretty blown away by Neuromancer, but Idoru really wasn't in the same class.

Good news, then. In All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson returns to form. The novel maintains a handful of very loosely related plot lines, all of which come together in the final third. The convenience of the ending would be a problem in many books, but the concept of "nodal points" is central to the novel, and it wouldn't be right to end it any other way. Gibson's prose is razor-sharp in many places, and although it took some time for me to get into the storyline, I was hooked after fifty pages.

I'm rapidly becoming a fan of Carroll's writing. The Marriage of Sticks begins like the two other novels of his that I've read, with a beautifully evoked love story involving engaging characters. After 100 pages or so, strange elements enter, and the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred. This novel in particular is very similar in structure to Sleeping in Flame; the two stories share several important plot elements, and though I liked the twist end of The Marriage of Sticks somewhat better, I think that the mythology of Sleeping in Flame hangs together more coherently. Now I have to decide whether to dive into another Carroll novel or to save them for later.