Category: Books

I blog regularly about what music I’m listening to, so I thought for a change I’d write about what books I’ve been reading. Obviously I have plenty of reading time right now, so I’ll hit the highlights:

• “Death Note, Vols. 1-6” by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata amzn
  A fascinating series of Japanese manga illustrated novels. (Yes, you have to read them right-to-left.) Hannah turned me on to these, and I’ve been waiting patiently for each volume to be published. The story is lively and fun, the artwork is stunning.
• “Chindi”, “Deepsix”, “Omega”, “Eternity Road”, “The Engines Of God” and other works by Jack McDevitt amzn
  I found myself without a light read for a cross-country flight, so I browsed the science fiction section of the airport bookstore and picked up “Chindi”. I liked McDevitt’s style, and slipped into the easy trap of reading more and more….
• “Intelligent Thought : Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement “ edited by John Brockman amzn
  OK, this is preaching to the choir…. but there are some delightful essays in this collection. In part I bought it because I had so much fun reading…
• “What We Believe but Cannot Prove : Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty” edited by John Brockman amzn
  This “certainty” crap keeps coming up (see this nonsensical piece which P.Z. ranted about. The argument seems to be that people demand certainty, science can only provide approximations to the truth, so religion must fill the gap. The flaws in that argument are obvious: anyone who expects absolute certainty is unreasonable and delusional, and every time the “approximation” of science has confronted the “certainty” of religion, science has won. Other than that….
• “Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?” edited by Paul Kurtz et al amzn
  One more collection on the same subject.
• “Richard Dawkins : How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think “ edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley amzn
  In part a festschrift for Dawkins on the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, but more than that: an excellent summary of how the field has developed since then, and a frank assessment of what Dawkins got right and what he missed.
• “The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels” by Michael Watkins amzn
  As you might imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot about new jobs. In retrospect, it’s interesting that although I took on a number of roles at Sun – software engineer, manager, standards guru, CTO, director, researcher – I never actually planned for any of them. Perhaps I should have done so: this persuasive, and very readable book argues that success or failure in a job can depend critically on how you approach, and plan for, the first 90 days. Good stuff.
• “IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results” by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross amzn
  Of course, planning works best if you’re entering into a reasonably well-structured environment in which people actually understand the concept of governance: what decisions have to be made, who makes them, and how do we ensure that decision-making follows a predictable, repeatable, and transparent process. Obviously this is intimately connected to management culture, which is a long-standing interest of mine.
• “The Light Ages” by Ian R. MacLeod amzn
  An alternate history set in an industrial England suffused with magic: Philip Pullman chanelling Charles Dickens. (But not, as one rueful Amazon reviewer discovered, Jules Verne.) It’s not a quick or light read, and the author (or his editor) has a shaky grasp of personal pronouns(!), but I stuck with it and found it very rewarding.
• “A Nation Gone Blind : America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit” by Eric Larsen amzn
  Remember when debate revolved around facts and thinking, rather than rights, issues, and feelings? I do – just. Larsen’s polemic – impassioned without sacrificing reason and precision – skewers the bullshit that passes for analysis these days. Shades of Orwell, Upton Sinclair, and Paul Goodman.
• “The Fly in the Cathedral : How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom “ by Brian Cathcart amzn
  Brian Cathcart is an outstanding British journalist. He also happens to be a good friend of my mother’s, and she would often describe her conversations with him during the writing of this book. Rather than lugging a hardback copy home from England, I waited for the USA paperback edition. It’s a beautifully written story, really capturing the feeling of scientific research in pre-war Britain. If you want the hard science, look elsewhere: this is about the people and their times.

That’s enough for now. I’m still working on “On Intelligence”, “An Inconvenient Truth”, “Capacity Planning For Web Services”, and “Europe’s Macadam, America’s Tar”.

There’s a mind-blowing piece over at present simple: the kind of thing that makes you wonder what planet you’re on. The author (a lecturer language instructor) was talking to a group of students about reading:

I asked the other three students (there were only four) how much reading they did. All three of them said that they didn’t read books at all. Ever. They didn’t seem ashamed to admit this, even though they are all university students in their third or fourth years. They don’t even read textbooks. I asked. They said they didn’t need to, to pass their courses, and since they found reading hard work and didn’t enjoy it, what was the point?
Then one of them looked thoughtful. “Do you think reading is good for anything?” he asked. “Do you think people should read?”
He really wanted to know.
How do you answer questions like that?

I don’t know. How do you? (My emphasis, in case it matters.)

The NYT has just published a short review of Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. I’ve just finished reading it myself, and was planning to blog an enthusiastic review of this collection of essays, edited by Alan Grafen and Matt Ridley. The NYT has now saved me the trouble. Highly recommended.

The BBC quotes David Sexton from the Evening Standard: “The movie of The Da Vinci Code has one inestimable advantage over the novel. Utilising the moving picture, it has effectively eliminated most of Dan Brown’s plodding prose.”
(Dan Brown has the distinction of being the only author who has provoked me into flinging a book across the room in sheer annoyance. I was brought up to treat books properly, but this was too much. I bought one of his so-called “thrillers” to read on a cross-country flight, abandoned it after a few chapters, rediscovered it when I got home, and decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. It didn’t deserve it.)

John Kenneth Galbraith died yesterday, age 97. I don’t want to debate the merits of his ideas, merely to mention his significance for me. Back in the spring of 1966 I was 15 years old, coming up on my GCE “O [Ordinary] Level” examinations, and trying to decide which three subjects to specialize in for 6th form. (Sixth form covered two years – “lower sixth” and “upper sixth” – and culminated in “A [Advanced] Level” examinations, and possibly even “S [Special] Levels”.) Mathematics was an obvious choice, but what else? Both classics and science appealed.
And then I came across a copy of J. K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, read it from cover to cover, and was seized with the economist’s world-view. I learned of Galbraith’s influence on American politics, especially the Kennedy administration, and I was intrigued by the idea of an academic discipline with a real political impact. (1966 was the first year that I really became politically aware, and even active.) I read more, including two journals in the school library (the Economist, which is still going strong, and the Statist, which disappeared a few years later), and bits of Lipsey‘s Positive Economics. I was hooked. Inspired by J. K. Galbraith, I would study economics. And I did so, right up to the end of my first year at Essex University, when computer science drove out everything else.
And what about my third “A Level” subject? I annoyed my classics master by deciding against Latin, and eventually settled on geography. (Thinking back, I’m not sure why; I remember liking the fact that it was the only really interdisciplinary syllabus.) However when I got back to school in September, I ran into a problem: the timetable couldn’t accomodate the combination of maths, economics and geography. Reluctantly I replaced geography with physics, which turned out to be mostly applied maths. There were still some scheduling issues – all but two of those who took maths and physics were also taking chemistry, and the science teachers occasionally traded lab slots – but it all worked out OK.

Andrew Sullivan has a couple of guest bloggers while he’s visiting England (sniff!). One of them, Walter Kirn, grabbed my attention with an account of how he’s writing his new novel…

…spinning a tale before one knows the ending, and doing so without the opportunity to double back and fiddle with the beginning, is storytelling in its wild, natural state…. Next time you make up a children’s bedtime story, you’ll see exactly what I mean. The only direction is onward. Trust in inspiration, not second thoughts. In foresight, not hindsight. In spells, not science. And glance around the bedroom for ideas. That painting of a sailing ship? It’s time to send one of your characters to sea, perhaps. That other painting of an idyllic farm? That’s what your character dreams of once he’s shipwrecked on the barren Pacific island.

What a lovely way to think about story-telling: as a performance, not as designing something to fit into a book-shaped container.

This is what I love about the blogosphere.
One of the blogs I read regularly is Shelley Powers’ Burningbird. This evening she posted a long piece which began with a plug for a blog she really likes, 3 Quarks Daily. Shelley is usually reliable, so I clicked over and browsed, and came across this item with an excerpt from a longer interview at ReadySteadyBook. I read the first two sentences, and I was hooked:

Marek Kohn is a writer who lives in Brighton. His most recent book, A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination, looks at the key thinkers behind the development of evolutionary theory in Britain, and why these ideas have thrived better in Britain than in other countries.

I read the whole thing, and it was one of those extraordinarily stimulating experiences, the kind that sends your mind running off in fifteen different and FASCINATING directions.
And a few minutes ago I didn’t know that 3 Quarks Daily, ReadySteadyBook, or Marek Kohn even existed. That’s why I love about the blogosphere – those gloriously serendipitous experiences.

Today’s NYT Book Review includes more letters criticising Wieseltier’s review of Dan Dennett’s book. I particularly enjoyed this contribution by the composer Scott Johnson:

In his review of “Breaking the Spell,” Leon Wieseltier couldn’t resist the reflexive accusation that building a worldview on a scientific base is reductive, and as is often the case, he trotted out the existence of art to capture our sympathies. As a composer, I am weary of being commandeered as evidence of supernatural forces. Unlike Wieseltier, I do not find it difficult to “envisage the biological utilities” of the “Missa Solemnis”; it merely requires a chain with more than one link. Art, particularly religious and nationalistic art, has powerful social effects. Human beings have achieved their stunning success by becoming master cooperators, and emotions that drive us toward shared experience are prominent among the inspirations and outcomes of everything from grand public art to intimate love songs. Our emotion-filled social lives are the direct result of biologically endowed capacities for communication, from language to the delicate network of expressive muscles in our faces, and even our private imaginations bear the imprint. Awareness that I’m participating in this chain of capabilities in no way deprives music of its wonder; it enhances it.

Lindsay (a.k.a. Majikthise) just posted a pretty thorough review of Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell”. Recommended.

I’m blogging this from the top deck of the Oxford Tube, an express bus to London. It’s 7:30, and we should arrive soon after 9. This gives me time to dig in to the book of the moment: “Conversations on Consciousness” by Susan Blackmore.. (She of the multicolored hair!) It consists of lightly-edited conversations that she recorded with 21 philosophers and neuroscience researchers, from Dennett and the Churchlands to Koch, Penrose and Crick. I picked it up at Blackwells on Thursday, and I’m really enjoying it. The conversations are arranged alphabetically, and so far I’m up to Susan Greenfield. (OK, so not all of the pieces are equally enjoyable!!) Recommended.