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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.

—-

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.

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.

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.

It should be noted that the "bloody" is about the full extent of the bad language in the book (although "eff", "effing" and "effed" appear liberally.

Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, writes in a way that gets to me on a deep, instinctual level. The nitpicking pedantry, the sense that the world is terribly wrong (and I am right), and the uppity British humour, are all things that resonate with me and my core sensibilities.

Nevermind my enlightenment after David Crystal slammed “Trussians” for being ignorant in their intolerance of incorrect punctuation; as soon as I picked up Talk to the Hand, I was immediately back to my old ways again, nodding vehemently in agreement when Truss writes:

I now can’t abide many, many things, and am actually always on the look-out for more things to find completely unacceptable. Whenever I hear of someone being “gluten intolerant” or “lactose intolerant”, for example, I feel I’ve been missing out. I want to be gluten intolerant too. I mean, how much longer do we have to put up with that gluten crap?

This isn’t a book about etiquette. As Truss says, the time for those has long gone due to the prevalence of moral relativism. Instead, she provides “six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door.”

It’s a funny read if you like this sort of thing. She litters the chapters with many observations and amusing anecdotes from her own life, and selections from some old tomes on etiquette, which really highlight the difference between how the way things are now and how they used to be. There are some very pointed barbs directed at the British, causing me to wonder if Lynne might have an American twin sister who could please kindly write the American version of this book…

Anh Do's not only the happiest refugee, but also a shining example for all Australians

For those who haven’t heard of him, Anh Do is a popular Australian comedian and TV personality. Released prior to the recent political debate, The Happiest Refugee is his memoir, and in it he recounts his life’s story from the time when he was living in Vietnam during the war-torn communist era, his family’s harrowing escape from the country, and then life in Australia as an immigrant.

Do speaks very candidly about a great number of things in his past, including his relationship with his father, who was a pillar of the family until tragic circumstances led to his leaving his wife and kids; he even manages to uncover a family secret that’d been kept by his grandmother for years until asked about it in the researching of the book!

I was inspired by this amazing and touching story, and his enthusiasm, drive and attitude makes you proud to be able to call him a fellow Aussie. Granted, not all refugees are going to be as driven as he and his family were, and many will drown against the adversity of poverty that caused the Do family to flourish. But it gives the reader a deeper insight into the challenges that refugee families face, and how it’s not all  regretting the past and sucking on the teat of welfare handouts.

Along with Go Back To Where You Came From, the recent SBS documentary, The Happiest Refugee should be compulsory reading for anyone who’s interested in gaining insight into the plight of refugees.

Looks like a snake if you squint, dunnit?

You may or may not have noticed the “Currently reading” byline beneath the title of this blog, which because of the nature of its positioning, appears on every page. I started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan at around the same time that interest in the film of (nearly) the same name starring Natalie Portman was peaking in its post-Oscars glow, which amusingly led to a large number of search hits.

It’s this kind of serendipity that Taleb (or NNT as he often refers to himself) champions in this book. The unpredictable occurances which in hindsight seem obvious; so obvious that our minds feel compelled to join the dots retrospectively and think that we could’ve somehow worked it forward if we’d only thought to look.

The author’s writing is very self conscious, often setting out structure, positioning the reader, etc. It gives the impression of a writer who is struggling to contain his idea, but is trying his best to ensure that the reader doesn’t get lost. He succeeds in that much, and I found the text more accessible than if it were a purely intellectual work. At first his laconic, laid-back style seemed pedestrian to the point of being boorish, but his idea was so compelling to me – crystalising many of thoughts that I myself had thought, that I was fully engaged for a good part of the book.

Then the topic of applying the Black Swan idea to reality. Buried right in the middle of the book – like the miserly contents of a cheaply made BBQ pork bun – is a few precious nuggets of practical advice that one might find useful, in the same sense as the 10 commandments against the rest of the Holy Bible. Even then it’s very begrudgingly given, but reasonably so because of the author’s unreserved antagonism towards false frameworks and formulae.

In fact, Taleb gets downright rude. The latter part of the book is almost solely dedicated to the intellectual destruction of his opponents: economists and academics participating in “the Great Intellectual Fraud” of Gaussian bell curve modelling. It’s by far the bitchiest content I’ve ever read in this genre. NNT basically lays the smack down on why virtually every model is wrong, how there’s not much you can do about it, and then proceeds to name names, especially those who have crossed the author in some way. Even the Nobel Prize (specifically the one for Economics) cops a hammering.

The Black Swan is one of those books that offers intellectual emancipation. But like a domesticated animal released into the wild, I found myself not knowing what to do with the newfound freedom, and as a result reverting back to my old ways. It has caused me to think differently about things, and look much more skeptically at certain “facts” presented by the media (although in that regard I needed no help. The media are already under full assualt by blogs like Grog’s Gamut and books such as Lindsay Tanner’s recently released Sideshow).

At least now I know better than to trust Economists.

I'm really curious about the weird abbreviation of the author's name. In other editions I found on the Web, he's given as "William P. Young"

I’ve been burned by Christian fiction before, and tend to steer well clear of it these days. However, this book was recommended to my wife by people in her Master of Counselling course (at a Christian college). These people are as disposed to being intellectually honest with their belief as you’re likely to find amongst any Christians you meet, and it looked to be a short and easy read, so I tentatively picked it up.

The main plot point deals with how the protagonist, Mackenzie “Mack” Allen Phillips, deals with faith issues and what he calls “The Great Sadness” resulting from the kidnap and murder of his youngest daughter. In the process he receives an invitation from God (literally) to revisit The Shack, the site where the murder took place. There, he has an …unusual encounter with The Creator.

The author probably thinks himself very clever, deliberately breaking stereotypes and preconceived notions, challenging Christians to rethink their perception of God. The problem though, is that the very nature of Faith is its dogmatism; its fingers-in-ears approach to anything that doesn’t conform with their very specific beliefs. So in contrast to the broad audience that this book pitches itself to, I fear it might actually have very limited appeal; specifically, a very small group of liberal Christians (particularly white Americans – the narative reeks of white guilt).

As if in acknowledgement of this, to try and broaden its appeal amongst believers, the book contains no fewer than 23 separate quotes from Christians in various positions of importance or influence, with some explicitly spelled out (e.g. “Patrick M. Roddy. Emmy Award-winning producer for ABC News”) and others cryptically not (“Chyril Walker, PhD”).

As to the story itself, it’s pure fantasy. There’s a certain discomfort in using the fictional construct to present (theological) “truths” in this way, because there’s always the tension in the mind of trying to reconcile what’s real with what’s not. In the case of Christian fiction, and especially so with The Shack, the problem is that the author oversteps the boundaries of what a person might be prepared to accept as real, given the empirical observations in daily life – the failures, the disappointments, the unexplainable. As much as the book attempts to address the theological perspective of these things through the metaphors used, it’s no comfort at all that once you finish reading, the wonders presented remain safely tucked away inside the pages, wholly apart from reality.

If you’re looking for an intellectual discourse, this book isn’t for you. Even though the premise of the story ostensibly offers to answer “the difficult questions”, what it actually does is to present the liberal Christians’ views on the character and nature of God, from which they derive a context for understanding. If that all sounds a bit too airy-fairy and not your cup of tea, then I suggest picking up The Spirit-Filled Believer’s Handbook, by Derek Prince, instead. I found that to be much more straightforward and informative.

If you’re an ardent unbeliever, The Shack will just seem like another nauseating piece of televangelist-style Christian propaganda.

"A novel" is totally necessary, otherwise the casual browser flicking through pages might mistake this book for non-fiction.

When a geek and aspiring writer comes across writing this good, he can’t help but hate it: hate how the author actually knows how the world works in the way that he only thinks he knows; hate how realistic and compelling his characters are; hate how he can’t stop turning the pages even though the socio-political commentary is like being forced to watch back-to-back episodes of Question Time; and hate how the author was able to completely obey Elmore Leonard’s third rule, which states “Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.” So it’s mainly through the green eyes of envy that I criticise Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen.

Somehow, “biting social commentary” doesn’t quite cut it – even Wikipedia puts it into the patently ridiculous categories of “hysterical realism” and “post-postmodernism”. After the initial prologue that sets up the story of the Berglund family, Franzen turns on his “shouty old man” mode and unleashes a torrent that might well include every single thought he’s ever had about the woes of modern America: the environment, politics, music, relationships, multiculturalism, parenting and even youth. After reading it you feel like no stone was left unturned in his quest to expose every problem there is with the country.

Every character, as realistic, fully realised and compelling as they all are, felt like platforms for Franzen to preach on his pet topics. Toward the end I became so tired of his cynicism that I wanted to disagree with him even though deep down I’d already accepted everything he’d said as true.

The book does end on a positive note, but against the sheer weight of oppression that preceded it, pales into sentimental inconsequence, satisfying only the emotional need of the reader and providing nothing to quell the misanthropic rage that the rest of the book incites.

Freedom is a scathing portrait of modern day America, but having said that it might be possible for a talented screenplay writer to strip off the veneer of loathing and reveal the interesting character studies that lie beneath. In other words (I never thought I’d say this): wait for the movie.