50 in 2010

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50 In 2010 — Book 7 (A Study In Scarlett)

February 15, 2010 in Books | 2 comments

Seeing Sherlock Holmes during the Christmas Holidays kindled a desire to reread some of the stories. I really can’t remember the last time I actually sat down and read a Holmes story – college, at the latest. I have the Complete Sherlock Holmes in two volumes, but I also have some random copy of A Study in Scarlett. That’s the one I grabbed off the shelf and stuck my nose into for a few days.

For the Holmes novice, A Study is the first Holmes story and one of two novels. It’s still relatively short; my copy came in at about 150 pages. The novel gives us the first meeting of Holmes and Watson, their becoming roomates, and Watson’s introduction to the peculiar nature of Holmes’ talent and personality. There’s murder, of course, which Holmes solves in in about two days. Study is also about 30% flashback, as we get the entire backstory of the murderer which, as the novel says “involves Mormonism and revenge”. What’s not to like?

Reading this novel made me appreciate the film I saw even more. There are lots of tiny things in the movie that are taken from the novel. My favorite was the dog. There’s a very brief part in the book when Holmes and Watson are discussing if they are going to fit as roommates. Watson says he has a bulldog pup and asks if that will be a problem. Holmes says no, so Watson and the dog take up residence at 221B Baker Street. That dog shows up several time in the film, but full grown and often the subject of Holmes’ pharmacological testing!

Then there’s Holmes himself, who is a sort of likable jerk. He’s likeable because he’s interesting. He knows a lot about a lot of things (Watson has a list in the novel) and, let’s be honest, a roommate who solves crime is pretty cool. But he’s also extraordinarily arrogant, reckless, and moody. His opinion of himself is only exceeded by his talent for what he does. I’m not sure what it says about me that I held Holmes as a sort of hero in my youth, given my realization that he’s not a very nice person. But I did enjoy revisiting Baker Street for book 7.

50 in 2010 — Book 6 (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

February 7, 2010 in Books | No comments

When our friends Rich and Laura were here (it was Rich who got me on this 50 books thing), I was grumbling that these Harry Potter books may not have been the best choice for the 50. “They are just so long!”, I said. Laura said that they read so quickly, but I replied “but 800 pages is 800 pages!” Laura was right. I plowed through Order of the Phoenix in a week, even while busy at work.

Spoilers below, if you haven’t read the book yet and are planning to.

This wasn’t my favorite of the series so far, but I’ll certainly cop to it being good. Harry is 15 now and every bit the teenager. No one understands him. He’s angry all the time. He gets a girlfriend, sorta. That could all have resulted in a very annoying Harry and a very lame book. Rowling handled it well, however, externalizing those emotions and making some of Harry’s isolation literal. Dumbledore doesn’t talk to him for most of the book. Harry has legitimate abusive authority to rebel against when Hogwarts gets taken over by a new Headmaster.

It was also interesting to see Harry loose some of his innocence. He learns new things about his parents and Sirius that aren’t entirely rosy. He comes to understand more about Snape. And he directly faces the death of someone close to him. I thought the later was handled well, too. Harry’s anger and sadness was palpable without being overwrought. I felt bad for him.

Plus, there was a very cool wizard battle at the end, the first really big battle so far. That was tense, cool, and fun to read.

All in all, I am loving the series and really liked Order of the Phoenix.

50 in 2010 — Book 5 (You Don’t Have to be Rich)

January 31, 2010 in Books | No comments

As part of a New Year’s conversation about our financial situation, I picked up You Don’t Have to Be Rich off the shelf and started reading. I’ve had this book for a long time, purchasing it sometime during my stint at the Barnes and Noble in Charlottesville. I’d picked it up and read bits and pieces before, but never made the effort to read the whole thing. I plugged away at it this month in between my other books and finally finished a few days ago.

The financial advice contained in You Don’t Have to be Rich wasn’t anything new, but it was good to have it reinforced. The interesting thing about Chatzsky’s book was it was based on lots of survey data, so you’re able to compare your own financial habits with those of average Americans. The statistic that inspired the title was that, while happiness increases as more money is earned, that increase stops at around $50,000. After that, more money doesn’t mean more happiness (according to the survey).

No word on the BIG corollary, though. Mo money may or may not equal mo problems.

50 in 2010 — Book 4 (The Big Switch)

January 26, 2010 in Books | 2 comments

After a few books of fiction, I decided to switch things up (get it?!) and read something that was factually true (as opposed to being, say, metaphorically true). I subscribe to Nicholas Carr’s blog and find him smart and provocative, so I decided to check his latest book The Big Switch out from the university library. Honestly, I was a little surprised they had it, so score one for Dacus.

The ostensible premise of The Big Switch is that the emergence of cloud computing (everything is on the Net) is the emergence of computing as a utility. Thus, it can be compared to the emergence of electricity as a public utility. That sounded pretty interesting to me. I didn’t know anything about the electrification of the U.S. I am a user of the cloud but am always wary of its costs. I’m interested in how technology changes who we are. I had high expectations.

Those expectations were met for a few chapters, as Carr narrated Edison’s vision of electricity and how that vision was taken up by Insull to turn electrification from a private industry into a public one. The book gets into history and economics as it relates the subsequent development of things like the punch-card tabulator and the mainframe model of computing. I found part one really interesting from a historical and sociological perspective. Carr claims, for example, that electrification was largely responsible for the emergence of the American middle class in the 20th Century, due to the type of work it allowed.

The book went off the rails a bit for me in part 2. Initially, I was caught up in Carr’s assessment of how the cloud has the potential to change how we work and live, and not always for the better. The cloud, for example, allows work that previously took many people to complete to be done by even fewer, thus resulting in a higher concentration of wealth. But I soon grew tired of assessments that were simplistic and occasionally veered into alarmist territory. Wasn’t something similar true for industrialization? Didn’t it take fewer people to make a boat in a factory than a boat by hand? The difference was we made a lot more boats. Carr also claims that “technology is morally neutral” but then goes on to enumerate all the negative social consequences of the cloud. That demonstrates that such technology is not morally neutral; it represents the prioritization of a certain set of values and a certain set of human activities over others. No neutrality there, if one has a more robust understanding of value and technology.

Carr, I think, is right to poke many holes in the utopian vision offered by some proponents of the cloud. I appreciated his argument about how corporate interests rule the net and how such interests get wealthy by convincing others to add value to sites for free. (Facebook, for example, wouldn’t be worth anything without all of us using it for everything). But, now that I’ve thought about it, that assessment only takes us so far. We do get some value back in exchange for the value we put in (he says as he types this in Google Docs and posts in WordPress), whether such value is utility, fun, or networking. And the fact that some gain value from convincing others to work for little or free isn’t a cloud issue, it’s a capitalist issue. Granted, we need to be a little more savvy about our rate of exchange. Carr helps with that, I think, but it’s a little too doom and gloom for me.

50 in 2010 — Book 3 (The Mystery of the Rogue’s Reunion)

January 18, 2010 in Books | No comments

One of the things I collect are the Three Investigator Mystery Series books. The Three Investigators was a book series, like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, aimed at kids. It featured three teenagers going around solving crimes in Los Angeles who were initially sponsored by Alfred Hitchcock. I inherited a few of the hardcovers when I was a boy and promptly became addicted, buying (or begging) for any of these I could find. Then, you could still find them at retail bookstores, but now it seems they’ve faded to the used book bin. I’m not sure why I liked Jupiter, Pete, and Bob better than either Joe and Frank Hardy or Nancy. I think it had something to do with the fact that these kids couldn’t drive and had a very cool “office” in Jupiter’s uncle’s junkyard. I accumulated 17 of the softcovers in addition to those five original hardbacks before I grew out of them, onto more serious works like the Dragonlance series. Now, wherever I go, whenever I wander into a used bookshop (I say wander like it’s an accident. The reality is I’m scanning the internet for local places whenever we visit anywhere), I look for these books. They’re surprisingly hard to find. I’ve only run across a few as an adult and I’ve never seen one of the hardcovers other than the ones I own. That’s why I was so excited when my friend Rich told me he’d found The Mystery of the Rogue’s Reunion at Read it Again, Sam in Charlottesville. He delivered it a few weekends ago when he and his wife came down for a visit.

This is the first new Three Investigators book I’ve read in a long time and, purely from a writing standpoint, the book isn’t that great. The plot deals with a cast reunion of The Wee Rogues, a Little Rascals like show that Jupiter starred in as a child. Some silver cups get stolen and someone gets kidnapped. Jupiter solves the case and is impressed with himself, as usual. Pete almost tackles someone. Bob looks some stuff up in the library. Hector Sebastian, a fictional mystery writer who is a patron of the Investigators (he replaced Alfred Hitchcock), makes the group cheeseburgers. My guess is this is probably a weaker book in the series generally, but I’m sure some of my feelings are due to my age. Still, it was a fun read from a nostalgic point of view. And now I have another book in the series.

Thanks a lot, Rich! If anyone else sees some Three Investigator books hanging around their local used bookstore, let me know.

50 in 2010 — Book 2 (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

January 13, 2010 in Books | 6 comments

As with any of my thoughts on books, films, or whatnot, there are spoilers below. I don’t think that matters so much here, as I am probably the only person in the world who hasn’t read all the Harry Potter books who doesn’t consider them part of a liberal satanic plot to corrupt the young.

I first read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2000, not too long after it came out in paperback. My thoughts then were “A nice book I would have loved if I were 12.” I didn’t think much more about it and let the whole Potter mania pass me by. As Sarah deftly reminded me, we did see the first movie when it came out in theatres, but that was about it. I’m not sure what made me want to read the whole series now; likely just a desire for some fun reading and finally feeling the need to belatedly get involved in the cultural phenomenon. Plus, I think it’s latent hostility to Twilight.

I read the first three books in the three or so weeks between the end of classes and the new year, then started Goblet of Fire on the 1st. My brief summary of the first three:

Sorcerer’s Stone — Good, but it’s still really a kids book. Nothing wrong with that, but never engaged me beyond a certain level.

Chamber of Secrets — Again, good, but really juvenile fiction. I liked the diary device. Nice suspense regarding whether Harry was the Slytherin heir, but the deus ex machina ending that wrapped everything up really made it feel like a kids book.

Prisoner of Azkaban — A major step forward in complexity, maturity, and, well, length. The dementors were scary. The story was complex and did a good job keeping me in suspense regarding Sirius and what was going on there. Everything does not work out nicely in the end, with Sirius exiled because no one will believe that he was framed. We get the first hints of love interests. And we get to see more and more of the wizard world. What I think is nice about the Rowling stories is that she engages in “world-building” only in service to the story. We get details of the wizarding world, but only as Harry sees them. And fundamentally, the story is about him, not about Rowling showing off her cool creation (which is where a lot of fantasy series go awry).

Goblet of Fire — Holy. Freaking. Crap. Diggory dies! Voldemort returns! Dumbledore is at odds with the Ministry of Magic! Hermionie likes Ron! Wow.If it isn’t already obvious, I really liked this one. Not only did I really like it — I was impressed by it. I thought Rowling fairly skillfully wove together the fantastic (it is a wizard school, after all) with the common (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all). These common elements — the burgeoning feelings toward the opposite sex, the petty arguments between friends that drag on for days when you are 13, the different ways boys and girls handle conflict — made me fully turn from caring about the characters as vehicles for plot to caring about them, well, as people. Rowling even extends this to minor characters, as when we (via Harry via a magic device) learn what happen to Neville’s parents. It’s a simple and relatively quick way to give a minor character that had been fairly one dimensional some depth. And, whoah, about the plot itself! No clear resolution. The book ends in struggle, setting things up nicely for the rest of the series. Things turn Epic in a way that reminded me of the end of The Two Towers — a gathering of breath before the plunge. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Except I can, because these books have officially gone from Books In Which I Want to Know What Happens to Books That I Will Be Sad to Finish Because I Will Never Be Able To Read Them For The First Time Again.

Ever have books like that?

50 in 2010 — Book One

January 7, 2010 in Books, Comics | No comments

My brother regifted me some graphic novels for Christmas, two of which were new Vertigo Crime titles. I am not at all in the comic book know anymore, so I hadn’t heard of Vertigo Crime. From the looks of them, each novel is written by a crime novelist or other non-comic author. They look like novels, not graphic novels — hardcover, small (about 5 x7), but are illustrated in black and white. I’ve read two so far, but since I’ve only read one since the new year, I’ll just count that one.

That one is Filthy Rich, written by Brian Azzarello with art by Victor Santos. I know Azzarello is a comic writer (100 Bullets and others), but his comics are crime-centric, which is why I guess he got tapped to write the first Vertigo Crime book. Filthy Rich is straight-forward noir, with the square-jawed protagonist, assorted femme fatales, lots of sex, and plenty of double crossing. While I didn’t think it broke any new ground, I enjoyed the book for what is was, knocking it out in about 30 minutes while Sarah put Eleanor to bed. The lead, an ex-football star called “Junk”, is a car salesman who gets hired to chaperone the owner’s daughter. He gets involved with her and high society and quickly finds himself in over his head.

Santos’ art is good for this sort of thing. Thin lines and lots of shadows hide what needs to be hidden. I didn’t really get into the way he draws women, though — they seemed to be caricatured while the men seemed more realistic. Overall, it was a good read.