Category: Books

Salon‘s Andrew Leonard has a nice interview with Iain Banks today. Among other things, Banks explains why it’s taking so long to get The Algebraist published in the US – he’s switched publishers (again), and is working with a small outfit called Night Shade Books in San Francisco.
Checking their website, I see that they are also publishing Banks’ The State of the Art, including a $45 limited edition, signed by the author, with “material not in the trade edition”. Good grief! Are books going the same way as music CDs? At least I can tell exactly what the difference is between two different CDs – an extra track, or a video clip, or something. How do I know whether the added material in The State of the Art justifies replacing my existing paperback copy? I guess that a True Fan wouldn’t worry about such things….

During my day trip on Friday I was reading Glen Duncan’s Death of an Ordinary Man. I was drawn to it by the review in last week’s New York Times, and found it totally mesmerizing. The story is simple: the disembodied spirit of a man who has just died floats above his funeral, and follows the mourners to his wake, privy to the thoughts of (almost) all, repeatedly drawn into vortices of memory. He gradually realizes that he’s in this state in order to understand how and why he died. But to achieve this, he needs to understand how he lived. An unvarnished post-mortem examination of the minutiae of life: of relationships, family, children, love, passion, and loss. I find myself thinking back over the story: I think that I’ll have to re-read it, soon, to revisit some of the (appropriately) ambiguous passages with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Highly recommended, though not for the emotionally fragile (or the prudish).

Take one saccharine-sweet children’s book entitled “My Little Golden Book About God.” Replace bland text with the horrifying truth. The result: The Cuddly Menace. Please keep beverages away from your keyboard while reading. (This means you, Alec.)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Back on December 10, I reported that I’d acquired a new Iain M. Banks novel, The Algebraist. As I noted on my books page, Iain M. Banks is at the top of the list of authors I will buy sight unseen.
So how come I’m only reporting on it now?
This is an odd book. It’s fairly long (544 pages), and I found myself reading the first 300 pages relatively slowly. Huge amounts of detail, a back story stretching over billions of years, a wide variety of alien species for whom conventionally anthropomorphic thinking was unhelpful…. Over a couple of weeks I read on, fascinated, but only able to absorb one or two chapters at a sitting. And then on December 25th we flew out to Seattle, and after we returned I got sick, and the great grey tome sat there, unread.
As I surfaced from the flu, I hesitatingly picked up the book, and started back in. Fairly quickly, I found things changing. The tempo picks up, then becomes almost giddying as armadas of starships battle and needle-ships corkscrew through one wormhole after another, ricocheting around the universe like badly aimed fireworks. An underlying pattern on a galactic scale emerges, and is purposefully erased. Characters and plotlines are abruptly trashed. And as the deus ex machina recedes, the book ends on a wholly unexpected note. If the first 300 pages took me 10 days, the last 250 zipped by in 5 or 6 hours over two days.
I really don’t know how to judge this book. (I note that other reviewers have felt the same way.) Fundamentally it falls between two stools. There’s a taut, 300 page space opera in here just begging to get out: simplify the back story, eliminate half the characters and three quarters of the species, and let it rip. But there’s also a 1,200 page epic here, balancing the thoughtful and detailed preamble with a more complex and challenging quest for the central character and better resolution of some of the secondary themes. In either case I’d also want more autonomy for our human hero, rather than feeling that he’s simply dragged around the galaxy by forces larger than himself. It’s hard to identify and empathize with supercargo.
Overall, I’m really glad that I read the book: there are more ideas here than most sci-fi writers can achieve over a lifetime. But it’s frustrating. And US fans of Banks’ work will have to buy from the UK; there’s still no US publication date set as far as I can see.

From my list of “authors whose works I’ll buy sight unseen”, there’s a new book by Iain M. Banks: The Algebraist. This is a sprawling space opera, possibly stand-alone, possibly starting a new series – it’s not a Culture book. It’s set in a world galaxy in which all A.I. has been banned.

[Hardback edition just published in the UK; per Amazon.com, they don’t seem to have scheduled a US release date.]

Terry announced: “Book game (cause it isn’t really a meme): Nearest Book, Page 23, Fifth sentence, Posted, with explanation.” OK, here goes:

When we talk of a green sensation, this talk is not equivalent simply to talk of “a state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”.

This is from the Chalmer’s Conscious Mind book that I’ve talked about before; he’s recapitulating the standard philosophical idea of the phenomenal (“Known or derived through the senses rather than through the mind”). The paragraph continues:

We are talking about the phenomenal quality that generally occurs when a state is caused by grass and trees. If there is a causal analysis in the vicinity, it is something like “the kind of phenomenal state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”. The phenomenal element in the concept prevents an analysis in purely functional terms.

By the way, it looks as if the entire text of the book is online, although the diagrams are missing and (inevitably) the pagination doesn’t match the printed version.

(We played this game before – a few months back, IIRC – but unlike some of these blog games it’s pretty much guaranteed to be different each time around.)

Through reading Roger Housden’s extraordinary “Ten Poems…” anthologies (starting with Ten Poems to Change Your Life) I have become aware of the poems of Mary Oliver. (OK, I’m slow… Google shows over 52,000 hits for her name. At least I got there eventually.) My first impression was of an impatient Walt Whitman: a combination of transcendent vision with a fierce and uncompromising urgency. These are Emergency Broadcast System messages to one’s inner heart: save the only life you can: your own. Consider the opening of The Journey:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
But the message is not always a call to action: here are the opening lines of her Mockingbirds:
This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing
the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing
better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.
As I read more of Mary Oliver, I have come to reallize that those first few poems that I encountered in no way define or constrain her. There are many sides to Oliver’s work: romantic, visionary, organic, mimetic, mythic; above all grounded in nature. And yet I find myself particularly drawn to these direct, imperative pieces: Journey, the shocking West Wind 2, the absolution of Wild Geese, or the exhortation of Have You Ever Tried To Enter The Long Black Branches?, with its blunt question:
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Well? Are you?

It was one of the warmest Halloweens I can remember recently, and we’d put a carved and painted pumpkin outside, so I decided to sit outside to receive the trick-or-treaters. Although we got a lot of kids this year, they tended to come in gaggles, so I took a book out with me. I actually spent the time reading chapter 2 of Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind on Supervenience and Explanation. Supervenience is one of those cool logical/philosophical tools that leaves you wondering how you ever got by with fuzzy notions like “depends on”. Mind you, I am having difficulty working up a lot of sympathy for some of Chalmers’ ideas about consciousness – specifically, I can’t see why he finds phenomenal consciousness “surprising” and “troubling” – but as Dennett says, “explore before you deplore.”

I finished “The Project” last night: the reading of all seven volumes of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. I don’t have time to write a full review right now, but I found the final volume very satisfying indeed. King feels the need to defend his use of metafictional elements, but from my perspective no defense is necessary: they are wholly natural in this many-worlds context. The penultimate truth – that art is our defence against chaos – was nicely capped in the Coda.
This was a most enjoyable project. The last time I did this (read all of a long series of novels in order) was when I was a student in 1970; I decided to read every novel by Thomas Hardy during one summer. Exhausting and exhilarating.

It’s always dangerous to let me loose in a bookshop. Today I think I went a little over the top. Let me share the list of my acquisitions with you, in the “full disclosure” style of some self-help groups. Perhaps it will help. (But what would success look like?) In no particular order:

• Doom 3 Prima Official Game Guide
• BBC: The Weather by John Lynch (glorious coffee-table book on all aspects of the weather)
• Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton
• Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King (A colleague read about my Dark Tower project and insisted that I should read this one. “Stephen King nails the 60s and Vietnam.”)
• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (mixed reviews, but interesting)
• Cowboy Bebop #1 by Yutaka Nanten and Hajime Yatate (manga)
• What Philosophers Think edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom (Interviews with Searle, Dawkins, Don Cupitt, Mary Midgley, Hilary Putnam and others.)

Hmmm… a depressingly typical collection. I’ve got to start thinking outside the box.