GeekReads

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I purchased Stories of Your Life and Others based on a recommendation on a discussion forum, which in hindsight was an odd thing for me to do since I’ve been burned by random internet recommendations before. However, that recommendation came from Amazon.com reviews; this one came from the geeks on the Ars Technica OpenForum, and I should know better than to doubt those guys.

Stories is an amazing compilation of Ted Chiang’s work. He’s probably the most famous science fiction author you’ve never heard of – well, I’d never heard of him before anyway. He only writes short stories, and since his first was published in 1990, he has only written 13 in total (spread out quite evenly across two-and-a-bit decades). The man has won more awards than the number of pieces he’s written, and not just crappy unknown ones either – Hugo and Nebula awards.

Although it’s pitched as sci-fi, it fits uncomfortably with the popular notion of the genre as stories about technology and/or the future. The short stories in this book would be more accurately described as “high-level dreaming” (Wikipedia puts them into the rather unhelpful category of “speculative fiction”).

Themes range from the religious (buidling the biblical Tower of Babel) through socio-political (a drug that allows people to “turn off” the part of the brain that perceives and creates bias towards beauty), to things that people do normally associate with SF (aliens, maths, automata), but his treatment of these topics is unlike anything I’ve ever read before.

Two things that I greatly admire about Chiang are:

• how very far he goes in imagining the worlds that creates, often taking your breath away with the dizzying heights of his imagination, and
• the brevity of words – he writes extremely lucidly and communicates complex topics with an efficiency of words and depth of emotion that reminds me of Ursula Le Guin.

Stories of Your Life and Others is both the last book I finished in 2011 and also the best one, and I hope that through this first GeekReads book review of 2012, more people will be introduced to this great author.

Note: it's plain talk. Not plain speak or plain writing, because that would be... complicated.

Not long after I started with Access Testing, a job came along where a client asked for a readability assessment. Being the resident word nerd, they asked me to take a look into it. The client was a government department, so they were obliged to make sure that their website content was accessible to a wide range of people. The client mentioned a “Flesch-Kincaid” score, which I’d never heard of before. So after hitting up Google for the goods, I learned about readability tests. After pitching some samples of how their text could be improved, we didn’t hear anything else from the client, and so the issue was dropped and I forgot all about scoring text for reading ease and grade levels.

Fast forward 4 months. Jenny and I are looking through a little second-hand bookshop in Balmain, and she comes over to me with a book and say “I think you’ll like this – it might help you with your writing.” It was called The Art of Plain Talk and cost a grand total of $4. “Why not,” I thought, and bought it along with a few other things, without thinking too much on it. It wasn’t until I started reading, when the author started talking about his formula for measuring readability, that I figured out this was written by the Flesch from Flesch-Kincaid.

The book definitely lives up to its title. It’s the most readable book I’ve ever read on a learned topic, evidenced by the amount of time that it took for me to finish reading it (i.e. not much) – I’ve taken longer to read novels of a similar size. The most interesting thing about this book is that it was written in the 60′s (and my copy seems to date from that era too) and the examples that the professor gives are curiosities in themselves, being a sample of the writing and media of that time. More evidence of the author’s skill: I rarely bothered to read the examples of “difficult” text because they seemed so tedious. Then again, I didn’t bother to do any of the exercises either.

The real challenge will be to see whether my writing has improved as a result of it. I know in my mind that I have to untangle some of the sentence structures that I’ve become accustomed to writing, but it’s a hard habit to break.

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Just for fun, the Flesch-Kincaid score for the above:

Grade level: 11 (bad)
Reading Ease score: 51 (Fairly difficult)

The picture is strangely accurate, unlike many book covers which just go for an "interpretation" of the book's contents

Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of my Top 5 favourite books of all time. If you know me then you’ll know that this is no small accolade, especially considering that I’ve been consistent about this for more than a few months. I don’t keep “favourites” easily, so for me to still be speaking favourably about TTW means that it has taken a place in a very small and elite group of things.

It’d be a surprise for Niffenegger’s follow-up to match, let alone exceed the esteemed position of its predecessor. Indeed Her Fearful Symmetry is not her next Magnum Opus, but if it weren’t living in the shadows of glory, it might’ve been better received. In writing this delayed review, I still remember the book quite fondly despite going into it with a highly sceptical attitude, which means at the very least that it must have been pretty good – even if I didn’t want to admit it at the time.

If TTW was Niffenegger’s attempt at writing science fiction, then Symmetry is her attempt at a ghost story. She takes another crack at dealing with love and loss, but it’s neither as wrenching or satisfying with this setup.

The events of the book begins with the death of Elspeth. She has an estranged twin living in America, but in a gesture with an unclear motive, she leaves her estate, near Highgate Cemetary in London, to her nieces – who are also twins. Enter Julia and Valentina, two teenage girls who have yet to figure out what they need or want in life apart from each other. They travel to the England to work out what they want, and in the process become involved in Elspeth’s life and the people in it. Elspeth herself, meanwhile, has not quite passed on.

Niffenegger spent a considerable amount of time immersing herself in Highgate Cemetary, to the point where she was giving tours (including one attended by her friend Neil Gaiman, which partly informed his The Graveyard Book). So the setting of the book is meticulously described, and thoroughly believable. The characters though, are a little less well realised in comparison, and while the metaphysical contrivance is interesting and imaginative, the author never really seems sure about what to do with it or where to take it, and the story meaders around it from start to finish.

But that aside, Niffenegger still manages to keep you wanting to turn the pages, and before you know it you’ve finished. So even though I was predisposed to being critical of this book, I went along for the ride and found it to be quite enjoyable.

No thanks to the hosting issue that saw my blogs effectively offline for the most part of last month, I’ve got heaps of reviews to catch up on, so here’s a quick round up of a two non-fiction books that I got through last month.

Words Words Words, by David Crystal

What's it about again?

David Crystal is a man passionate about words. He is to linguistics what Richard Feynman was to quantum physics, or Carl Sagan to Cosmology although sadly the study of words and language doesn’t elicit the same emotional tug as the inner workings of reality or the imagination-filling possibilities of space.

Off the back of How Language Works, Crystal zooms in from the macro to the micro, looking at the atomic parts of communication. Like the othe book, he takes the reader on a whirlwind tour in each chapter, showing the enormity of the subject but keeping things light and entertaining, not overwhelming the reader, through the use of amusing anecdotes and interesting trivia.

A much more readable book that the title or topic suggests. Recommended to anybody with even a passing interest in language.

How To Draw Manga Style, by Ilya-San & Yahya El-Droubie

Does anybody else find this picture anatomically disturbing (and I don't just mean her pneumatic chest)?

I picked this up cheaply at the Borders closing down sale and read it in dribs and drabs over last last few months. The text is amiable but dry, and seems to be the efforts of a few passionate amateurs who thought they might be able to make a buck putting something together as cheaply as possible. It shows mostly in the quality of the artwork, which, while competently rendered, seems to have all been sourced from cheap Chinese artists – there’s barely a Japanese name to be found in the book (the odd nom-de-plume of one of the authors – “Ilya-san” – notwithstanding).

It’s one of those books that sits in the awkward “in between” category: too lacking in soul and energy to attract beginners beyond the initial premise, and too simplistic and preachy to be of any use to veterans.

Suffice to say, you won’t be seeing manga-style drawings in my blogs any time soon. I’ll stick to my crude pencil drawings.

With the release of each new Terry Pratchett novel, I start prattling on about how remarkable it is that he’s still cranking them out, what with his Early Onset Alzheimers and all. Yet since Sir Terry first publicly announced that he had the disease back in 2007 (with its source going back to a minor stroke which he suffered around 2004-2005), he’s written and published many books, including Unseen Academicals and Nation, and at the time of writing this post, about to release another called Snuff.

This review though, is about I Shall Wear Midnight. It’s going back a bit now – it was released last year. I’ve been tardy with my reviews and it’s been several weeks since I finished reading this, but also because I waited until this was out in paperback before picking it up, so that it would match the previous 3 books in the Tiffany Aching series which I already own (an aside: despite tracking down a copy from the exact same imprint, Corgi, it still turned out to be a different size and shape to the others… geek rage!)

As for the contents of the book, I found it to be enjoyable, but probably less so than the previous ones. Jokes stemming from the antics of the Wee Free Men are starting to wear thin, and because Tiffany is grown up now (in body but much more in mind), some of her charm has worn off.

This series was always aimed more at children, but in Midnight‘s case Pratchett seems to have been bogged down by this limitation, and the result has lost the freshness of the earlier books, and also lacks the wit and sophistication of the “core” Discworld novels.

Unless you’re a perfectionist or die-hard Pratchett fan, you can probably safely give this one a miss.