I’ve been returning to this book off and on for the last two years and finally finished it.  In fairness, it’s five books in one volume, each covering a segment of the author’s geological journeys across the United States.

But don’t let 660 pages about rocks intimidate you. McPhee combines detailed explanations of geology with anecdotes from his travels and often amazing biographies of the geologists he travels with.

He manages to humanize a subject full of unfamiliar terms and nearly unimaginable timescales.  While you might occasionally get lost in the schists and faults and sutures and orogenies, you will come out seeing the world differently.

Most remarkable to me was how these scientists managed to imagine the unimaginable — to stand on a piece of earth and see how it looked tens and hundreds and thousands of millions of years ago — based only on clues in the rocks which are themselves moving in all directions, in the process being melted into magma, buried under mountains and seas, eroded, compressed, and deformed.

To take one not-so-small example, the summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.  The highest rocks on earth were born beneath an ancient sea.

This is a quick and easy read (I finished it in two days), but don’t let that fool you. It’s full of fascinating insights into our brains from the unique perspective of a neuroscientist who temporarily lost half of hers to a stroke. Her story is invaluable for stroke victims and their friends and families. But it can also help the rest of us understand what we are, how our brains process information to form our day to day personalities, and how to take ownership of that process to live a better life. For a preview of the topics covered in this book, you can see the author give a short presentation on it here.

Tags: books, Jill Bolte Taylor, science

The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton

This is a very insightful and well-written look at the Clinton presidency.  It falls flat in a few places, especially when he tries to talk about events in 2000-2001 under Bush (it was published in 2002).  But where he has the greater perspective of history, Klein does a great job of showing how Bill Clinton’s unique personality, talents, and flaws played out in his administration.

More importantly, we can see the political beginnings of issues like NAFTA and universal health care and people like Hillary Clinton and Mark Penn that have reemerged so prominently this year.  Knowing what’s happened since then gives the book an extra layer of meaning and enjoyment.  Klein also demonstrates the Clintons’ ability to weather scandals and Republican attacks through sheer persistence and a bunker mentality.  This may go a long way to explaining why Hillary is still in the race today.

Tags: Bill Clinton, books, clinton, hillary clinton, politics

While reading this book I kept thinking of this quote by Neil Gaiman: “Books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders. They do in my head, anyway.”

The stories in “Ladies of Grace Adieu” exist in the same universe as Clarke’s fantastic first book, “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.” Both masterfully blend together the Victorian English novel (think, Jane Eyre) with the equally strong tradition of British faery stories (think, A Midsummer Night’s Dream). While Strange and Norrell is the male book of that realm, centering around magicians, generals, and kings, Grace Adieu is clearly its female counterpart.

The female point-of-view of these stories provides a humorous subversiveness against the masculine pretensions of British and Faery society. In this setting, it works very well.

Even if you haven’t read Clarke’s first novel, this quick and entertaining read is an excellent way to step into her well-imagined world.

Tags: ladies of grace adieu, susanna clarke

Bear with me; I will be filling my nerd quotient for the week with this post.

I devoured the Lone Wolf books as a kid. They were sort of a “choose your own adventure plus.” It was the same format, where you turned to different sections of the book based on whatever decision you made, but they had more rpg elements like an inventory that you could carry from book to book, special abilities, and combats done with a random number table.

It turns out the author, Joe Dever, has allowed free online distribution of the whole series at Project Aon. There is no more flipping between pages due to the wonders of hyperlinking. They even have a handy StatsKeeper program that saves your progress and automates a lot of stuff that used to involve closing your eyes and jabbing a pencil eraser at the random number table (a method not without its charm).

Sometimes when you rediscover things you loved as a kid, they turn out to be quite awful from the perspective of an adult. But Lone Wolf books are still a fun read. Sure, they have the all the tropes and cliches of the pulp fantasy novel. But the battles are paced remarkably well, and there are plenty of cool monsters. I’m a bit surprised at how violent and bloody they are at times, but that just adds to the fun.

The online version is now more like an interactive fiction game, a la Infocom. I am a bit of a fogey in this regard, but I still think that none of today’s games, with all of their fancy graphics, have ever been able to capture the atmosphere of interactive fiction. The best of these games were genuine literature, and they engaged the imagination like only good literature can. All the old games, and even a lot of new ones, can be found at the interactive fiction archive. It’s a great time-waster, and you don’t feel quite as guilty as when you vanish a day into the stimulus-response abyss of most video games. Because you are reading!

Tags: Uncategorized