“In the Beginning… was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson

by Rebecca

In the Beginning… was the Command Line
Neal Stephenson
1999

As an opening caveat, I should say that this is the first in what is likely to be a series of reviews of assigned readings. I read this book because one of my professors said to, rather than through any choice of my own. Arguably, I did make a higher-level choice to take the course, but since I’m writing a review of a book rather than the course, the caveat is still important.

I will say that I was delighted at the assignment.

This is the same author as Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon, all of which I loved. Stephenson has also written a variety of other books that I have not read, and given that this book came out in 1999 and I’m only just now reading it because it’s assigned, it should be evident that while I like this author, I choose books that I think look interesting rather than reading just anything he’s written as I do for a couple of other authors.

My first reaction is that this is a really useful introduction to the history of the personal computer. Despite the speed at which computer development happens, or maybe because of it, it’s a useful to understand what computer operating systems are and how they’ve developed and what the competing market pressures have been regarding them.

On the other hand, I’m reminded of why I am wary of interacting with authors and actors as people rather than simply enjoying their work. There are often occasions when I like a book or movie or whatever and don’t want that enjoyment to be tainted by the fact that I don’t care for the author or actor. (Robert Heinlein, I’m thinking of you. And, oh, Tom Cruise. Tom, Tom, Tom. Why?)

Stephenson isn’t too bad though. He seems like an okay sort of guy even when he’s writing a nonfiction essay and not writing with the voice of characters developed specifically to be sympathetic. However, there were multiple times when I wanted to argue back at the book and explain that while I didn’t understand the details of computers that he obviously does, a couple of his metaphors were still poorly applied and had internal inconsistencies, and the motives that he projects onto the people who act more like me than like him are not the motives that I actually have for my actions.

So, over all, this is not the most perfect book ever that simply, clearly, and correctly explains the history of operating systems. If you know such a book, please let me know, but I’m guessing it’s a logical impossibility. Instead, it makes a good attempt, succeeds at a good portion of it, introduces some interesting ideas to think about even if I don’t agree with all of them and does so with a sprinkling of fun, geeky humor.

Incidentally, the book is only 150 pages long and while it can be purchased from Amazon (which I did) or various physical bookstores, it’s also available online for free. If you’re interested in understanding more about computers without reading a computer book, go and read In the Beginning… was the Command Line.

Awards Season

by Kinsey

In addition to Oscar season, it’s also American Library Association Youth Media Award season! Am I the only one who remembers being gleeful when the Newberry Medal was announced each year? I didn’t care about the Caldecott (didn’t like picture books then, don’t like graphic novels now), but the Newberry was a highlight of my year. Would it be something I’d already read? Would it be a history book that wanted me to learn something (Lincoln: A Photobiography) or a story so fun I still reread it as an adult (The Westing Game)? The 2012 ALA winners were announced this week, although since I am actually not 10 years old anymore some of their other awards capture me more than the Newberry.

The Printz award is given to YA books, and we all know how I feel about YA. This year’s winner was Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley. The Honor Books were:

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, art by Maira Kalman
The Returning by Christine Hinwood
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

I haven’t read any of those–in fact, the only one I’ve heard of is The Scorpio Races. My experience with Maggie Stiefvater (fun fact: her last name means stepfather in German) is through an entertaining but slightly cheesy trilogy of werewolf books that starts with Shiver, but the reviews I’ve been seeing of The Scorpio Races are in another league so I’ll have to check that one out. Another fun fact about the Honor Books: Daniel Handler is also Lemony Snicket of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, so he’s doing well on several fronts.

Another award category that caught my eye is the Alex Awards for the 10 best adult books that appeal to teen audiences. For 2012 the list is:

Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin
In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard
The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan
The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Robopocalypse: A Novel by Daniel H. Wilson
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures by Caroline Preston
The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo

I have to say that I’m not entirely sure I understand this award. Looking at the award policies, it doesn’t appear that the authors have to think that teenagers will like their books, the awards committee simply gets to decide which are the 10 best books each year that have a special appeal to teen readers. But as former teenager who read lots of adult books, and as a current adult who reads lots of teen books, this award seems like it was made to give me a reading list. I think that Ready Player One might be up next.

Fate’s Edge by Ilona Andrews

by Rebecca

Fate’s Edge
Ilona Andrews
2011

As my last hurrah before starting a new semester, I read Fate’s Edge. Of the authors who are currently producing new books, Ilona Andrews is my favorite. However, she has two series and I prefer the other one.

The Edge series has a wonderful premise:  There are two worlds, the Broken (our non-magical world) and the Weird (the magical realm), with the Edge as a thin stretch of land that divides the two realms. The Edge is essentially the gateway between both realms and is largely invisible to both as well. Plus, it’s the poor backwoods residents of either land who actually live there.

In this series, they’re our heroes.

This is an awesome premise!

I like it a lot.

A lot of the plot comes in from the fact that various lands in The Weird have rather tense relationships. It’s kind of Cold War-ish, with spies fighting spies and neither side wanting to really declare outright war unless they have a better chance of winning.

So there’s spies and magic and a long stretch of land that is best known for it’s violently clannish population and smuggling operations.

There is oodles of fun to be had there.

The weakness of the series is in the characters, who come across as fairly cookie-cutter standard romance-novel love-interests. However, each book in this series is slightly better than the one preceding it, and Fate’s Edge is the third book in the series, so it’s characters are the best yet.

One reason for the increasing complexity of the characters is that so far the pattern is that the next male protagonist is introduced as a side character in the preceding book. As a side character can’t be allowed to upstage the main hero of a book, the side characters are given flaws that make them lesser than the hero but also a lot more interesting and realistic. If Audrey and Kaldar, the pairing in this book, had been the main pair in the first book, I would have been a lot happier.

However, since a lot of the characters are introduced in the preceding books, I’m not really sure how well this book can stand on its own. To get a full sense of the world building, you definitely need to read the first two books.

So over all, it’s a good, fun read, and I do recommend it, but you have to choose between reading the first two first two books with their character issues or missing out on some of the awesome world-building.

Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder

by Rebecca

Touch of Power
Maria Snyder
2011

I read the first few (short) chapters on Amazon, got hooked, checked the book out from the library and read it in an evening. It was a fun light read that was pretty much just what I needed to relax with. It’s one of those books that balances between being a fantasy-adventure novel with a strong romance plot line and being a romance novel with a strong fantasy-adventure plotline.

I believe this is the second fantasy universe for this author, and while the universes have distinct rules of magic and society, the character dynamics in Touch of Power were really similar to those in Poison Study (the first book in the other universe). If you like the one, you’ll probably like the other, (I certainly did) but go in expecting the same type of thing rather than anything spectacularly new or inventive.

The plot is a really common one for romance novels: There are two secretly awesome people – sometimes their awesome is secret from the world, other times their awesome is just secret from each other – who each feel that the other person has wronged them in some way. They then proceed to act either aggressively or passive aggressively at each other in response and things escalate until a final showdown reveals that they have both misunderstood the situation and wronged the other, not in the original perceived acts but in their responses. This can be written at various levels of quality, but when done well it’s a wonderfully self-indulgent bit of character drama. When done poorly, it convinces me that both characters are judgmental idiots. Snyder does one of the better jobs of writing this plot line (although no where near as good as Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice) and manages to largely avoid the pitfall of idiocy.

In this book, Healers with magical healing abilities have been blamed for the great plague that swept the land and thus they are generally killed on sight. Our heroine is a Healer and our hero is a guy who badly needs someone healed and will do whatever it takes to help his friend. Under the circumstances, you can see why they start off with the wrong impression of each other. It was a great deal of fun seeing the characters struggle to work together and waiting to see when the big reveal would happen.

I’ll discuss that  a little more under the spoiler cut, but in general, this is a fun book. I enjoyed it and I recommend it the same way I would recommend a summer blockbuster or a soap opera. It’s not high literature, but I’m rarely in the mood for high literature. It’s fun and relaxing and should be enjoyed as such.

Continue reading →

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

by Kinsey

Remember when I complained about All These Things I’ve Done being so unsatisfying, because it was the first book in a planned series and all it did was set it up for interesting things to happen in later books? The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson does NOT have that problem. This is another YA fantasy book with a kick-ass young female protagonist, and another book that is leading off a planned series (The Shades of London), but this one walks the line between providing a complete story and setting up future action perfectly.

Rory is a New Orleans high school student who decides to attend a boarding school in London while her college professor parents are on sabbatical in England. Her school is in London’s East End, in the neighborhood where the Jack the Ripper killings took place and shortly after Rory arrives in town a copycat starts recreating the murders. As if that weren’t creepy enough, Rory begins to get the feeling that something strange is going on and that she can see things her classmates can’t. I’m sure you can all guess that something supernatural is going on and that Rory quickly finds herself at the heart of the mystery.

My favorite thing about this book is Rory’s voice–she’s funny and sarcastic and she sounds modern, like a teenager talking today (or at least, what I think teenagers today sound like). She also has a pretty distinctly Southern voice but doesn’t come off like a hick, which I (as a Southerner) always appreciate. The London stuff was nicely atmospheric and (without giving too much away) the fantasy side of things was sufficiently creepy. I also liked, as you probably guessed, that the book manages to wrap up a major mystery with a thrilling final action scene that provides a great deal of closure. But at the same time, the very last page of the book introduces a new twist that made me so excited about the possibilities of the next book I immediately went to Amazon to see if there was a publication date for book two (there’s not). The Name of the Star feels like the start of something new, while also being a satisfying story all by itself. My only small complaint is that it took a long time for things to get going, and a significant portion of the book is just Rory settling into school and having vaguely odd experiences that she doesn’t pay attention to but that the readers know are significant. As a reader, I like feeling smart enough to pick up on subtle hints but this almost tipped over into Rory seeming dumb, since I had figured things out and was just waiting for her to catch up. Since I read this on my Kindle I can be very precise about how much of the book was just working up to the real action and Rory’s discovery of the true nature of things: 47%, which seems like a lot. However, once things get going they are really going, and I suspect that in the future when folks read a few of the books in close succession the time spent introducing things will be less distracting. Again, minor quibble.

A while back BBCAmerica showed a mystery series called Whitechapel that was essentially this same plot, minus the supernatural element and told from the perspective of the detectives. If you find the Jack the Ripper aspect of the story interesting, you might also enjoy tracking down the TV series.

Death Comes to Pemberly

by Anna

By P.D. James

I read a very brief mention of this book a couple of days before Christmas, and thought to myself, “I better put a hold on that at the library.” I promptly forgot, of course, but on Christmas Day my wonderful father had bought it for me! I finished Comfort & Joy while on vacation, so was able to crack open Death Comes to Pemberly on the plane ride home.

Basically, Death Comes to Pemberly is an old-fashioned British murder mystery, picking up about 5 years after the end of Pride & Prejudice, centered around the married life of Elizabeth and Darcy. I’m normally a little ambivalent about novels that pick up where other famous novels ended, but a couple of things overcame that for me here: 1) I’m not actually a die-hard fan of Jane Austen, so her writing isn’t as sacrosanct for me as it is for many readers, and 2) P.D. James herself has her own excellent reputation as an author.

I have a vague memory of trying to read some of P.D. James’ other novels before, though I can’t remember which ones, and finding them a bit too…technical is the best word I can come up with, though it isn’t quite right. Anyway, her trying to pick up the style of Jane Austen corrects that for me, softening the prose and the characters, and while she can’t write exactly as Jane Austen does, I think she does a fairly good job of capturing the spirit of the characters. Darcy in particular is a surprisingly sympathetic character, and it is actually really interesting to get his perspective on events.

A not-too-long divergence: I feel like male characters in regency novels, even those written contemporarily, are often inaccessible. I think it is probably an accurate portrayal—that men at that time even more than now were expected to be stoic—but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how very young some of these characters are, and how unsure of themselves they must have been in spite of themselves.

P.D. James actually plays on that a bit, making more overt for modern audiences what Jane Austen might have expected her audience to already know, the responsibilities laid on older sons to carry on family duties at a very young age.

I enjoyed the book so much that I hate to even write a criticism (and I’m not convinced that it is a fault of the book), but an odd occurrence happened enough that I can’t quite overlook it. Several times while reading the book, I would turn the page to continue reading, and have to go back and check that I hadn’t accidentally turned two pages together, that there seemed to be the occasional jump in plot. Now, I should qualify this with mentioning that the entire time I was reading this book, I was recovering from a cold and was pretty well dosed with cold medicine, so I can’t say that I was firing on all cylinders, either.

—Anna

The Great Night, by Chris Adrian

by Kinsey

Chris Adrian’s The Great Night has been getting fabulous reviews everywhere, including on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, my favorite podcast ever and the thing that makes my commute bearable. The book is billed as a retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in modern-day San Francisco. I liked the book and would recommend it, but I think anyone interested in reading it should keep two things in mind:

1) It’s more “inspired by” than a retelling. This is not Clueless, where you can find an exact parallel to almost every character and plot point. Yes, there are fairies and it is Midsummer Eve, but from there the plot’s relation to Shakespeare’s play gets hazier. In this version, Titania and Oberon rule the fairy world under a San Francisco park, but their marriage is breaking under the weight of their grief over the death of a human changeling boy they had adopted. Puck is not, well, puck-ish but is (to quote NPR’s PCHH) a Big Bad who is freed from service to the King and Queen and is now out for revenge. Humans are involved, but it’s not two pairs of lovers, it’s three single city residents all on their way to the same party, who get trapped in the park when Puck is freed. And remember the “rude mechanicals,” like Bottom with the donkey’s head? In this story those are the homeless people also trapped in the park during Puck’s rampage.

2) The tone is . . . dark. I know that the play deals with themes that are not all sunshine and roses, including the fickleness of love, our lack of free will, etc. But I’ve always thought of the play as one of Shakepeare’s works that is is easy to watch–everyone lives, it’s funny and pretty and there is usually music and people dressed up in fairy wings. But this is not a happy book, or a playful book, or a light-hearted book. It’s overall theme is one of loss, and how people chose to deal with their losses. Titania and Oberon were suffering from the death of (what they considered) their child, while the human characters are all struggling to figure out how to carry on with their lives after their own tragedies.

But while it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, it is a beautiful book. I don’t particularly like San Francisco (in fairness, I’ve only been there once and it was in June, which is apparently the February of San Francisco), but Adrian’s descriptions make it seem like the city that would have fairies, if any one did. The passages where Titania’s changeling son is dying are both spell-binding and heartbreaking. She’s not a likeable character, but her grief is so real it is painful to read. She and Oberon are forced to take the boy to a human hospital for treatment, and the absurdity of the fairies trying to interact with and understand the human world is striking. I’ve obviously never been in this situation, but I wonder if a hospital–specifically the children’s cancer ward–would seem just as surreal and otherworldly to any parent with critically ill child. When the author is not writing critical beloved books, he’s a pediatric oncologist (don’t we all feel unaccomplished now?) and the parts of the book that talk about medical treatments and hospitals and doctors’ lives have a feeling of authenticity. I also enjoyed how the storylines of the various characters, human and fairy, overlapped in unexpected ways. I don’t want to give anything way, but I found the connections very satisfying.

This is a book that requires some faith–you have to read along and trust that the story and relatonships between the characters will become clear, but it’s one that has stayed with me days after I finished it.

Comfort & Joy

by Anna

By India Knight

I checked this book out from the library after Kinsey discussed it in her post about recommended holiday readings, and it was a very good holiday book indeed.

Here’s the thing about Comfort & Joy: the narrator, Clara, feels just like a very good friend. I wish I could just sit down and chat with her, hearing her opinions about life and sharing my opinions and just comparing our viewpoints. Just like with any friend, most of the time I think she’s very smart and interesting, and sometimes I think she’s being silly and melodramatic, and sometimes I imagine that she would think that I was being the same.

The book is broken up into three years’ worth of Christmases (or Christmi, to use an inside joke from the book). Five pages in, I had my first laugh-out-loud moment; seven pages in, I felt Knight had already perfectly captured an aspect of Christmas with this quote:

“That’s the thing about presents, isn’t it? Especially Christmas ones. The judiciously chosen present, the perfect gift, is offered up in the spirit of atonement and regeneration. It says, ‘Look, I know I don’t call as often as I should, and I know you think I’m grumpy and short-tempered’—insert your own personal failings here; I’m merely précising mine—‘but the thing is, I know you so well and I love you so much that I have bought you the perfect thing. And so now everything’s okay, at least for today.’ Which is all very lovely but a great deal easier said than done, and which is why I can feel the hair at the back of my neck curling with heat and stress.”

Honestly, it actually felt a little odd reading it at my own family Christmas. It is so realistic and engrossing (with some similarities but mostly very different from my own life) that I felt like I was almost experiencing two realities layered on top of each other.

—Anna

The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

by Kinsey

Happy 2012, everyone! My year started off with someone backing into my car on New Year’s Eve and a wave of bitter, bitter cold sweeping over my city, as if even the weather was buckling down and getting back to work. Nonetheless, I had a wonderful holiday and am really excited about what 2012, especially what new books I will read. I plan to do a fair amount of traveling the first part of this year and am actually looking forward to the time in airports and on buses to get some reading done. Nothing like winter travel to ensure that you will have hours and hours to nothing but read and watch your flights get delayed.

To finish up my 2011 books, the best thing I read over the holidays was The Magician King by Lev Grossman, which is the sequel to The Magicians. I raved about how much I loved The Magicians and I liked the follow-up just as much. I don’t want to say anything about the plot of characters, because it could spoil things for people who haven’t read the first one, so let me just say that I thought they were both great, everyone should go read them both, and I am very much looking forward to the planned third book.

The book I can talk about is also great, although in a different way. The Girl of Fire and Thornsis the latest in my winter string of YA books featuring kick-ass female protagonists, and it’s my favorite so far. Elisa is the younger princess of a small country and as the book starts she is being married off to the king of a neighboring land, as part of a treaty that will unite the two nations against an aggressive enemy that is threatening them both. Elisa is smart and understands the political necessity of the marriage, but she is also insecure, overweight, in the shadow of her capable older sister, and overwhelmed at the idea of being queen of a foreign nation. And when she gets to her new home she learns that her husband hasn’t told anyone they’re married, leaving her stuck in the middle of a political mess. To top it all off, Elisa is the one child chosen by God every 100 years to bear the Godstone, a sign that she has been selected to perform a great service, but she has so little faith in herself that she is scared she won’t even recognize the service when she sees it.

From this starting point, the book follows a military and political storyline as the country prepares for war, but the real focus is Elisa’s development as a person and a leader. There is a terrible trope in fiction (both YA and adult) in which the fat girl loses weight and finds herself, and I had a moment of panic early in this book when I thought that was where things might be going. However, Carson does a great job of showing how Elisa doesn’t become an entirely new (thin) person, but uses the skills and intelligence she always had to rise to the occasion and do what needs to be done. Yes, she loses weight along the way (why can’t a character just be fat and awesome for once?) but it’s made clear that this is not the most important change. Elisa’s voice is so clear throughout the story that her progression from scared teenager to capable adult feels like real, believable growth.

I will also say this: The Girl of Fire and Thorns surprised me constantly. As much as I love YA books, they can sometimes be predictable, and there were a few plots twists in this one that I did not expect at all. And while there could be a sequel that continues the story, and I would happily spend more time with Elisa, this is a complete and satisfying book all on it’s own. I’ve still got a pile of YA fantasy waiting for me, but I suspect this one will stay very high on my list.

some readings about readers

by Anna

I’ve run across a couple of readings this past month, celebrating readers (sort of).

The first was an article in Scientific American Mind magazine, titled “In the Mind of Others,” and subtitled “Reading fiction can strengthen your social ties and even change your personality.”

The article initially left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, seeming to say, “You know that weirdo that is always reading alone? They might not be as dumb as we all thought!” The intro to the article spends a bit of time describing insulting assumptions about readers that I hadn’t totally realized were common (“people who read a lot of fiction are socially withdrawn bookworms who use novels as an escape from reality”), and then debunking them.

After I got over my initial bristling, though there were some interesting accounts of the experiments themselves. One tests viewers’ abilities to recognize emotions from just photos of eyes, with the premise that fiction-readers are more empathetic to other people’s emotions and will thus get better results.

Over the holidays, my whole family took it (being a very quiz-happy group), including one nonfiction reader and one non-reader, and all six of us fell comfortably in the average zone, so our very small pool did not demonstrate significant results, but did make for an interesting hour as we all compared our results. (There was some extensive joking that men seemed to read almost all female expressions as “desiring” or “flirtatious.”)

The main conclusion I took from reading this article was that I am not partial to reading scientific articles. (The four-and-a-half page article took me three days to actually get through.)

The second reading, forwarded to me by a friend who had also sent it on to her son, was a blog entry. Called “A Girl You Should Date,” it cuts through all the scientific pedantry that I’d previously been struggling through in Scientific American Mind, to create a very poetic epistle celebrating female readers. I don’t agree with every single thing it says (I do not like to be asked what I’m reading while I’m currently engrossed in a book), but it makes me feel good about myself and I’m glad that it got put out there.

—Anna