Too many books

The literal translation of this (German) title would be something like "Inkyheart". It's another book by the author of "Der Herr Der Diebe" (the Lord of Thieves), aimed at older kids. I prefer this term to "young adult", because I can perhaps be considered still an old kid, while my young adult days are long behind me. When reading in German, though, I proceed at the pace of a typical 7-year old, I think, so this was a pretty big book for me. Also, very few pictures.

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There's a (Gladwell-biased) summary in SEED magazine. It all began with Steven Pinker writing a review of Gladwell's latest (a series of essays taken from his New Yorker columns). Though there were some positive comments made, the last half of the review has a fairly harsh bottom line on not this book specifically, but more or less Gladwell's work generally.

It did remind me somewhat of this post by Joel Spolsky. Spolsky is less annoyed at the very core of Gladwell's modus operandi, but did seem to take some exception to his basic point in "Outliers" (just 'cause you're successful doesn't mean you're all that talented). Which, I have a feeling, is perhaps at least part of what is behind Pinker's problem with Gladwell's writing.

It all reminds me somewhat of the recent dust-up between Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, and Paul Krugman, regarding the global warming chapter of Superfreakonomics. It took a bit for it to become clear to me what I found similar, aside from them both being arguments between eggheads over topics most people don't like thinking about. What else makes them seem similar?

Oh, yeah. They're between people who have achieved great success in writing about technical topics, and people who have achieved even greater success. How much of this is jealousy? Also, some of the criticism in both cases seems to be "they are writing about things they aren't necessarily experts in". Which, while relevant, isn't a damning criticism, since most of the world's leading experts in any given topic aren't particularly good at explaining it to the rest of us. Gladwell and Levitt do know a lot more about the relavant topics than most of their readers. Having someone with an intermediate level of understanding is practically a necessity if any of it is to be conveyed to public understanding. Which it needs to be.

On the other hand, it's probably good for them to get called out on the occasional error, and who better to do it (and be listened to) than the people almost but not quite as popularly known?

Subtitle: Maria Sibylla Merian, and the Secrets of Metamorphosis. This is the (true) story of a woman who investigated the life history of insects. Along the way she dumped her husband, adopted and then dumped a religion, changed nationalities, then took off for the edges of civilization to study insects where no entomologist had gone before. Naturally, she took her unmarried daughter with her; she was 52 years old at the time. She established herself as an independent businesswoman, selling both her extraordinarily lifelike portraits and the specimens themselves to collectors.

All this speaks of a quite independent and industrious woman. The part that makes it almost difficult to believe, for me, is that she did it in the late 1600's, when many cities in Europe had laws making it illegal for a woman to sell her own prints.

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I've noticed that one distinction between fiction and non-fiction nowadays, stylistically, is the presence of subtitles. It's not an absolute rule, but non-fiction tends to have them, and fiction tends not to (unless you count "A Novel"). Setterfield gives us a variation on the "unreliable narrator" tale, with the protagonist role split between Margaret, a relatively young, sympathetic, and honest character, and Vida Winter, a relatively old, not very sympathetic, and fundamentally dishonest character. Not exactly a "whodunnit", much of the tension in this story is us wondering (along with Margaret, at least at first) whether or not Winter is telling the truth. She tells Margaret that she wants her to write her biography, which she has never truthfully told to anyone before, although she has told many false ones. What Margaret (and the readers) wonders is, whether or not this time it is the reality, or just one more fiction.

This is a device I very much enjoy, but it has its problems. If the protagonist of the story (which is Vida Winter, not Margaret) is not sympathetic, then the reader may not care enough about the story to get pulled in. We are given Margaret to care for, and she is given some unresolved issues in her past as well, so that we can care about it. Fundamentally, that doesn't work. Margaret comes across as a bit of a drama queen, making a lifelong crisis out of the fact that her twin sister died soon after childbirth. In this, she is following the example of her mother, who also never got over this. Plenty of people (after an appropriate period of grieving) DO get over this kind of thing, though, and I personally had to suppress the urge to reach into the pages of the book and shake both of them. If concern for Margaret's crisis were all that we had to keep us in this book, I would not have finished it.

Fortunately, we also have Vida Winter's tale, the mysteries within it, and the larger mystery of whether it was all true or not. This is a lot more fun to dwell on. Behind the cut, you will see massive spoilers, so if you wish to read it but haven't yet, perhaps you should browse elsewhere now. Also, go read this book, it was quite good.

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This is fiction of the grand, world-building type. Bas Lag is a complete world, and the canvas goes far beyond the frame of the book; there are places and people and events hinted at, that you see the merest reference to, that are left as untidy mysteries. The commonest failure of world-building storytellers is to make things too tidy, too easily confined within one tale, and Miéville has avoided this with a thoroughness bordering on mania. Bas Lag is messy. It is often repulsive. It is complicated, shadowy, disturbing, and often unsatisfying. And Miéville is a complete and total showoff.

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Subtitle: The Erotic Lives of Bugs. So you can calm down. Not a bad book, though.

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Subtitle: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends
The Eskimo languages do not have an extraordinarily large number of words for snow. JFK was not understood by Berliners to be saying that he was a jelly donut (the mayor of Berlin, and future chancellor, Willy Brandt, had proofread his speech beforehand). The Chevy Nova did not have problems selling in Latin America because of its name ("nova" was also the name of a leaded gasoline sold by Pemex, the Mexican oil company, for many years). Jazz did not originate from a term for sexual intercourse. This is a book out to take away your linguistic fun.
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Subtitle: The Rise of the Animal Kingdom
Wallace Arthur's kicking off point is a hypothetical space expedition from Mars to Earth. No Martians on board, just a space probe (similar to what we have sent to Mars), that safely lands on a beach somewhere on Earth. As the breathless Martian scientists wait for the first image beamed back from Earth, they see a...sandcastle. Let's say it's after all the tourists have gone home for the night, and the image the Martians get back is devoid of any direct pictures of any living thing.
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Subtitle: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World.
Tim Harford is a good economist. However, because economists are more like theologists than physicists (I'll explain that comment in a moment but you probably already know what I mean), this is not as useful as it might appear. It is entertaining, though.

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I have a few books on economics and psychology, and even a couple works of fiction, in the pile to review, but I'm skipping them today for a work with the subtitle: "In Search of the Shape of the Universe". I think part of why is related to one of the reasons why I like reading books on the history of math. Economics and psychology are inevitably filled with more challenging material emotionally; there is just a lot of (important and fascinating but) depressing material in any good book in those areas.

Math is an austere and spartan field, full of strange and beautiful results. It is also, and the is not the least of its charms, the sort of field where a man solves one of the field's most famous conundrums, is offered a one million dollar prize for it, and refuses it on principle.

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With obvious nods to the dadaist and surrealist traditions, Geisel takes the graphic novel in a different direction. A clearly political one.
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Subtitle: Survival of the Fittest. Imagine a cage match, with a younger Richard Dawkins and a non-deceased Stephen Jay Gould fighting it out. Except way geekier.

Also, even after Gould was dead, the contest continues.

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Subtitle: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease. I've noticed that the word "maverick" now sounds phony to me. You can make your own guess as to why. Anyway, Dr. Moalem is here to explain why disease (and our genetic predisposition to it) works differently than we think. Specifically, Moalem seems to be fascinated with how disease has left metaphorical scar tissue on our DNA.

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Subtitle: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future. A little over 200 million years ago, there was this Thing, called the P-T event (aka Permian-Triassic Extinction Event). About 54% of all families of species were completely exterminated. This requires every last species in the family to be killed off; many families that did survive still lost most of their diversity; over 80% of all genuses (genera) went extinct. The percentage of species lost is even higher, and even among species that survived, most of the individuals died. It's the only known mass extinction of insect species. It makes the asteroid impact that ended the dinosaurs look moderate by comparison. It was really, really, really bad.

Naturally, Peter Ward thinks he knows why it happened, and he thinks something like it is going to happen again, soon.

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Subtitle: Evolution, Extinction, and Economics. The cover of my copy of this book shows the dodo bird, the betamaxx, a car which I'm going to guess is the Edsel, and the Titanic. As you can tell from this, Paul Ormerod is not content to examine failure in just one field. Businesses and species, technologies and ecosystems are all examined. We discover that the term "half-life" can be usefully deployed when looking at members of the Largest 100 Companies in the United States list, and also to species. Failure is a complex topic.

It is also, in some ways, an apt description of this book.

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Subtitle: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. David Quammen, one is not surprised to learn, lives in Montana. The dust jacket picture shows him dressed for cold weather, with a mustache and just the right amount of grey hair to look grizzled. Writers whose topic of choice is biological science can be divided into two archetypal groups: the ones who peer through a microscope at a dissected insect, and the ones who go on snowmobiles into Siberia to catch a glimpse of tigers in winter. Quammen is most decidedly in the latter group.

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Subtitle: A biography of Latin. There are books, there are books for nerds, and then there are books for nerds which eschew such topics as physics or history (way too mainstream), and instead are entirely about the language Latin. We have hit a new level of geekiness here. I feel right at home.

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Umberto Eco first came to my attention when I saw the movie "The Name of the Rose". I read the book, and found that, in addition to the murder mystery which the movie showed, this book was also a story of political and theological conflict, with a large dose of medieval reference as well. The author obviously has no fear, and it is a wonder he manages to be published, given that he writes on such forbidding topics, and in Italian to boot. The reason he gets away with it, of course, is that he is great.

This book is considerably different. It is non-fiction. It is a collection of essays bundled together. It is written on a topic (current world politics) which many others have written about. No blackened tongues in this book. There will be no movie version, either. If you thought "Name of the Rose" was dark subject matter, wait until you seem him write about Berlusconi. The very last word in the book is "Death".

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I bought this book in a bookstore called Waterstone's in London. I believe it sat in my "to be read someday" pile for about four years before I actually got around to it recently. What determines which books get read immediately and which languish for years? Nothing I can put my finger on exactly, certainly not anything related to how interesting it looks.

It's publication date, however, is 1998, so it was over a decade old before I read it. With a field as fast-moving as brain research, that could be fatal. However, I dove into it anyway, if for no other reason than to clear a spot on my "need to read" shelf (I have a self-imposed rule of not letting my purchases get further in advance of my consumption than this small shelf will hold).

Of course, this self-imposed rule doesn't mean I have to finish it; reading just enough to decide it is worthless will do as well.

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Subtitle: A Medical Mystery. The family of the book's title has a curse worthy of a novel from Poe or Lovecraft. Around middle age or later, apparently healthy men and women (going back at least six generations) will first notice that their pupils are constricted to tiny points, and that they have trouble sleeping. As the disease, for which no treatment is known, progresses, they will become ever more desperate for sleep, and unsurprisingly (perhaps in part as a result) less and less sane. The disease takes months to kill its victims, but is 100% fatal, and the family members who stay by their side see them disintegrate (mentally, and to a certain degree physically) before their eyes, but with agonizing slowness.

Welcome to the world of prion diseases. Sometimes an inherited condition, sometimes introduced by environmental factors, what prions have in common is that they are not alive, have no DNA, are inheritable or even infectious, and are poorly (if at all) understood even today.

But D.T. Max, the author, is just getting started. Woven into this tale are government incompetence on a scale large enough to get people killed, deception, backstabbing, pedophilia, and cannibalism. Incredibly, instead of being sensationalist, all of this lurid material is crucially relevant to the tale. Which, by the way, is told by an author who has a similar condition.

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