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| 0374530718
| 9780374530716
| 0374530718
| 3.97
| 272,578
| 1991
| Mar 20, 2007
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it was amazing
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Hard to know what I could add to my previous review of Sophie’s World. I suppose in the 6 years that have passed since that second reading I have grow
Hard to know what I could add to my previous review of Sophie’s World. I suppose in the 6 years that have passed since that second reading I have grown and changed and that means my perspective on this book will have changed as well. But I stand by the earlier review, and now I’ll just elaborate. I bought this fresh copy of Sophie’s World as a gift; actually, I bought it twice over. One will go to a coworker about to go on parental leave. She requested some book recommendations, and this one in particular seemed to get her excited. The other copy was a birthday gift for my friend Amanda, who in addition to watching Doctor Who with me every Sunday also enjoys having philosophical conversations. There is no better book than this one to help give someone a grounding in the basics of philosophy while simultaneously awakening interesting questions in the mind. I took the liberty of underlining some of my favourite passages as I read her copy, even annotating here and there—I »å´Ç²Ô’t usually do that with birthday books, but this one is something special. Last time I reviewed this I concentrated on how deeply I loved Jostein Gaarder’s meta-fictional storytelling. Still do. This time, though, I have to marvel at just how cleverly he executes it. My jaw drops at the sheer amount of history and philosophy that he crams into this text, and the way he orchestrates the meta-fictional storyline to emphasize each of the various philosophical schools of thought just as Sophie learns about them. When you first read this novel, you’re probably too focused on the sheer density of its content to really notice these touches. So it’s these subsequent readings, when the explanations have the comforting cadence of familiarity, that allow you to notice just how intricately constructed Sophie’s World is. If I hadn’t given this novel 5 stars before, I would definitely be doing so now. The way Gaarder develops and frames Western philosophy is fascinating too. Towards the end of the book, as Alberto expounds upon Hegel, he observes: In fact, you cannot detach any philosopher, or any thought at all, from that philosopher’s or that thought’s historical context. But—and here I come to another point—because something new is always being added, reason is “progressive.â€� In other words, human knowledge is constantly expanding and progressing. I »å´Ç²Ô’t know if I entirely agree with this in a practical sense. Could we not have a future where knowledge has regressed? It is popular, these days, to imagine catastrophes of such an apocalyptic nature that the remnants of humanity lose all connection to their history and culture. I suppose this is arguably the “trivial caseâ€�, though, because it’s essentially a reset. What about some kind of world-wide, oppressive, authoritarian rule—Orwell-style? One could argue that there might always be torch-bearers, secret knowledge-keepers, etc. And perhaps I am simply guilty of taking this too literally; Hegel’s point is more that as long as we have the knowledge we will collectively continue to build upon itâ€�. See, this is the thing about this book, and about philosophy in general. It just gets you thinking. You »å´Ç²Ô’t always have to agree. You »å´Ç²Ô’t always have to fully understand a point. You just have to open your mind to listening to it, and then turn it over, examine it from different angles. I love the way Gaarder models that here through Sophie, the way she mixes credulity with scepticism, patience and open-mindedness with the kneejerk opinionated attitude common to most of us (and especially so among teens, natch). I’ve never really been one for small talk. I understand its usefulness and that it is hella weird to start asking strangers intensely personal questions. Yet, there are also impersonal questions that can nevertheless be very deep. These are the conversations I like to have. I like to ask questions that make people think. I like when my friends and I are talking, and they think they have a line of thought worked out towards a strong conclusion, until I ask a question—and they pause. And reconsider. And I love when my friends do that to me. Sometimes it’s lonely up in here. Without getting too solipsistic, we are all, all of us, somewhat alone in our brains. Philosophy is one of the few ways we can touch other human minds, because it is an exercise that requires us to be our most human selves. When I’m having a conversation of a philosophical nature with someone, I feel a little less alone. But you can’t always be with your friends. So I gave this book as a birthday gift. I give birthday books because they require a lot of thought, and I can write in them, and ultimately because they’re like giving pieces of yourself. Sophie’s World is a big piece of myself, I think. It’s a microcosm of how I want to approach the world, how I want to think, to learn, to teach. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 27, 2018
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Jan 30, 2018
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Jan 27, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0140272852
| 9780140272857
| 0140272852
| 3.82
| 596
| Nov 01, 1997
| Nov 25, 1997
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it was ok
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Sentences you thought you’d never read: Amistad (the movie) reminds me of Tropic Thunder. This seems like as good a time as any other to read Amistad, Sentences you thought you’d never read: Amistad (the movie) reminds me of Tropic Thunder. This seems like as good a time as any other to read Amistad, the novelization of the 1997 Spielberg film now played in high school history classes the world over (including in my Grade 12 history class). With only fuzzy memories of the film, I decided the $2 for this book at the library-affiliated used bookstore was a bargain. This past week in my English class of adult Indigenous learners, we’ve been talking about stereotypes and, in particular, Black Lives Matter and racism. Amistad tackles these very issues in a fictionalized version of the United States just a few decades before the Civil War. I »å´Ç²Ô’t remember much about the movie—it’s on Netflix, so maybe I’ll re-watch it at some point—except that it wasn’t half-bad despite starring Matthew McConaughey. That’s why the movie reminds me of Tropic Thunder, which is another exception to my general rule that I just »å´Ç²Ô’t want to watch movies with McConaughey in them. I can’t explain my completely irrational dislike of him, but there you have it. Anyway, I recall the movie as being “goodâ€� in that nineties-message-movie kind of way, plus-or-minus the hastily shellacked layers of historical commentary applied to the characters and sets. The movie and book are both very much aware that they are a story about slavery and freedom, and they are also very self-aware of the wider historical continuum, including the Civil War. The result is a kind of anachronistic imposition of twentieth-century ideas about nineteenth-century attitudes towards abolition and slavery. This book bills itself as “brilliantly narrated by Alexs Pateâ€�, and I spent some time trying to figure out if those awards were for writing. (Based on what I can read from his website, it looks like he’s gotten some awards for some of his other books, so maybe his writing was just constrained by an attempt to reproduce the screenplay too faithfully.) Amistad reminds me why I tend to avoid novelizations, because it feels brutally like one: all telling, no showing, with an omniscient narrator who spills everyone’s thoughts onto the page with the subtlety of a gossip columnist: Van Buren cared about the future of America. Slavery was too complicated and too interwoven into the fabric of American life to think that it could be eradicated by simply being against it. What good would that do anyway? This is simply execrable writing. It’s so patronizing; it sounds like someone trying to explain these issues to children. Not only overly simplistic, it’s just so obviously hammering on the book’s theme. I »å´Ç²Ô’t have an issue with didactic novels, but there is a point where the narrator’s intrusion into the story becomes grandstanding on a soapbox. Pate is approaching Doctorovian levels here, but unlike Doctorow his characters lack anything in the way of depth or a twinkle of humour—and unlike the movie, they »å´Ç²Ô’t have the performances of actors like Anthony Hopkins and Morgan Freeman to enjoy. It’s tempting to think that peeks inside the minds of characters like the narration above is adding depth to them, but it doesn’t. Instead these tidbits merely turn the characters into caricatures of their historical personae: Van Buren is a career politician who cares only about re-election; Calhoun is a dyed-in-the-wool slaveowner; Adams is an abolitionist who doesn’t like calling himself that, etc. While all or some of these representations might be accurate (I »å´Ç²Ô’t know enough about the history to judge), they are still one-dimensional. A single story, no matter how true, is still just a single story. Worse still, Amistad’s voice speaks to us from a position of hindsight. The narrator keeps dropping hints about looming Civil War, as if it were obvious to all the politicians at the time that war was going to happen. Again, not a scholar of American Civil War history here—and I’m sure that there were some politicians at the time who recognized and worried about the growing tension between the northern and southern states. But this is twenty years prior to the war, and while the Amistad played a role in exacerbating those tensions, there was still so much more yet to come. The book also grandstands on the idea that Amistad was this huge turning point in the American abolitionist movement, that it was somehow precedent-setting and opinion-changing in how people saw slavery. The narrator puts a “weight of historyâ€� tone into the storytelling, emphasizing the supposedly inherent backwardness of the anti-abolitionists and how it’s only a matter of time before the country finally does away with slavery. Some of these flaws are faults with the movie and screenplay, and so perhaps it is unfair to criticize a novelization for replicating them. But that presumes a novelization cannot fix or expand upon what happens onscreen—isn’t the kind of the point? Novelizations can be strong companions to a movie. Indeed, this book manages to bring depth to one group that isn’t well-represented onscreen: the Africans of the Amistad. They do not speak English, and so for most of the movie they lack a voice—or the voice is mediated through a translator, later on. This makes for an uncomfortable situation in which a movie about the humanity of Black people is told through a white saviour lens, as a bunch of landed white guys debate in the finest traditions of imperial Rome. Because he doesn’t have to use subtlitles, Pate has an opportunity to flesh out individuals from within the group, to emphasize differences in tribe and character—and he uses this opportunity to great advantage. Not only do we get a much better idea of what makes Cinque such a determined figure, but we also see the differing opinions among the Africans and their perspective on the matter. Still, even this small benefit is not really enough to save the book. I can’t recommend the novelization of Amistad. The movie itself, while far from perfect, is pretty entertaining and moving. The book, with its flat and surprisingly bad storytelling, doesn’t come close to capturing that. There are far superior works of literature available that deal with these issues in more interesting and complex ways (feel free to recommend some to me in the comments). ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 21, 2016
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Jul 21, 2016
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Jul 22, 2016
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| 1784295868
| 9781784295868
| 1784295868
| 4.00
| 23,724
| Sep 03, 2015
| Sep 03, 2015
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it was amazing
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**spoiler alert** Ugh, so many feelings. I’ve consciously been trying to write shorter reviews, but this is not going to be one of those. It will be s
**spoiler alert** Ugh, so many feelings. I’ve consciously been trying to write shorter reviews, but this is not going to be one of those. It will be spoilerific and angry—also, trigger warnings for rape and suicide. If you’re down for all that, buckle up—otherwise, I have literally more than a thousand other reviews you could read right now. Here’s one of the aptly-titled Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, which is funny and uplifting. Asking for It is neither of those things. But it is still amazing. This was the first book in Hannah Witton, Lucy Moon, and Leena Normsâ€� , a monthly club of books about sex and sexuality. Since it isn’t out in Canada until April, I ordered my copy from Book Depository in the UK. While they have free international shipping—so, yay!—it took a month to arrive—so, boo! They have up, as well as a . I really enjoyed the podcast discussion; it was frank, and it echoes many of the thoughts I had while/after reading. I read this book just as the sexual assault trial of Jian Ghomeshi is wrapping up. It’s huge news in Canada, and it’s so disheartening how the women who have been brave enough to testify are being dragged through the mud by men and women commentators alike. We continue to view rape and sexual assault as the most circumstantial of crimes and to question and harass people who make these complaints, essentially compounding their trauma. Asking for It is a concentrated dose of this social commentary. So let’s get into it. I was confused by Asking for It at first: Louise O’Neill is a fan of in media res, and she dumps you into the middle of Emma O’Donovan’s social life without so much as a by-the-way voiceover introduction. In the first few pages alone we’re strapped into a car filled with teenage girls, and I’m expected to start learning names? And who likes whom? Emma, while not full-on Regina George, is a bit of a Mean Girl, enough that you’re probably not going to find her very likable: she is vain, judgemental, and in some ways very shallow. This serves a two-fold purpose. Firstly, it’s a way for O’Neill to comment on how Emma has been raised and socialized: many of the adults in her life encourage her to think of her appearance as her social capital, and throughout the book Emma emphasizes that she acts the way she does because she likes being thought of as attractive and fuckable. She reacts with snide jealousy whenever there is the slightest hint that one of her friends might overshadow her in these areas. Secondly, Emma’s characterization belies the portrayal of rape victims as “goodâ€� or “virginalâ€� or “innocent.â€� Rape victims are people, and people are complex. And especially in the case of hormonal teenagers, people aren’t always very nice. O’Neill likes to make us work to sympathize with Emma at first, because she needs to point out that rape is rape is rape—any where, any time, to anyone. Emma’s character, of course, becomes a central question in the narrative of the Ballinatoom Girl that erupts after her story becomes common knowledge. It’s telling that her closest “friendsâ€� are the first to turn on her when the Facebook pictures surface without Emma’s context (or lack thereof). The idea that Emma’s promiscuity and sexually-active lifestyle is well-known among the teenagers of Ballinatoom becomes an excuse—she was, as the title, suggests, asking for it. It’s so important to dispel this idea, for it is one of the ways in which rape culture keeps its claws sunk deep into our society: consent has to be an ongoing process. The fact that someone consented last week, or last night, or five minutes ago, does not imply consent at that very moment. It doesn’t matter how often Emma has had sex with anyone—no one should assume she’s DTF as a result of her reputation. The fact that Emma herself seems to labour under this misconception is a heartbreaking but all-too-accurate part of Asking For It. The sex scene with Paul O’Brien is sooooo awkward to read â€� I was creeped out, almost to the point of ripping pages from the book just to make it go away. And it’s not just the rapey-ness of Paul’s actions or the way he treats her like an object to satisfy his lust â€� it’s Emma’s stream-of-consciousness reaction to what happens. She confides that she actually prefers the sexual tension that happens before sex—she likes being pursued, tantalizing and teasing men, especially in places like parties where others can see how adored she is. This is how she has been socialized to view herself: her self-worth is so tied up in how others value her body. In contrast, she seems never to have had sex for sex’s sake, and so she views that act in a very utilitarian light. One of the “bestâ€� moments in the book happens just prior to the rape scene: Emma victim-blames someone else. Her “friendâ€� Jamie is freaking out about being around a guy who took advantage of her, and Emma is not having any of it: “It’s happened to loads of people. It happens all the time. You wake up the next morning, and you regret it or you »å´Ç²Ô’t remember what happened exactly, but it’s easier not to make a fuss—â€� So, yeah. Emma pretty much throws the title of the book in Jamie’s face (and Ali literally does this to Emma, later). This is a great demonstration of internalized sexism: our society doesn’t just pit men against women but also women against other women. Although there is clearly an irony factor O’Neill is going for here, the scene also establishes that Asking for It is not about rape so much as rape culture. So then The Scene happens less than twenty pages after that, and I wanted to flip the table. I love how O’Neill uses repetition to capture the way that Emma tries to shut out her discomfort. She keeps saying things like “I »å´Ç²Ô’t feel wellâ€� and “I »å´Ç²Ô’t know.â€� This is a harrowing experience: O’Neill pulls no punches, with Emma’s internal monologue thinking all the while about how she needs to behave in order to be perceived the right way. It’s staggering: rather than just “oh, he’s hurting me; I »å´Ç²Ô’t want thisâ€� she’s focusing on how she doesn’t want to be thought of as a slut but also doesn’t want to come across as a cold bitch.feel lik See, it would never occur to me that such things would go through someone’s head while having sex (consensual or not). That’s just not something that my experiences and my gender and privilege have led me to consider. So I really appreciate being exposed to these perspectives. I feel like I have a robust understanding of rape culture and consent, but I still learned a lot from Asking for It. O’Neill kind of faked me out with The Scene, because it isn’t actually the rape that makes the news: that comes afterwards, and Emma can’t remember it. After skipping a year so that she can focus on the fallout of the entire town learning about that night, O’Neill shows us the many ways in which Emma’s suffering is not confined to that one night. This is the deleterious effect that rape culture has on rape victims. I could go on at even greater length about the second half of the book. I’ll focus on two things: Emma’s own state of mind, and the way her family behaves. What really got to me about the second half is how Emma is still struggling to process that night and everything that has come afterwards. When she first sees those photos, she slips from “meâ€� to “the girlâ€�, using this as a coping mechanism. Much later, she describes how she is almost obsessed with looking for “worseâ€� cases online—she doesn’t want to feel alone. Yet even though she has filed a complaint and had people side with her, she still feels guilty. She still interprets a lot of behaviour, even behaviour that might be supportive, as furtive accusations against her. I am fascinated by that—because this is all from Emma’s perspective, we cannot know what people’s intentions are behind the actions she interprets as blaming her. While some are obviously victim-blaming (like Father Michael, the bastard), others are more ambiguous (like Maggie’s behaviour). At one point Emma comments to us that Maggie seems to expect a cookie for trying to comforting or supportive. It’s an interesting observation and a reminder that even when we think we are being supportive of victims, they »å´Ç²Ô’t necessarily see it that way (and they are under no obligation to). Then there’s Emma’s parents. The whole scene where Emma’s mother is drunk and off-loading on Emma is awkward beyond belief. I’m like, “What are you doing to your daughter right now?â€� Their palpable relief when Emma announces her intention to withdraw her complaint is disgusting, culminating in her mother’s ultimate betrayal: “They’re good boys really. This all just got out of hand.â€� Seriously. The most screwed up thing is that a year into this, Emma still believes, on some level, that this is all her fault. Bryan, who initially is horrible to Emma and then becomes her greatest champion, says, “I thought this was your fault,â€� and Emma confides to us, “It was my fault, but I couldn’t bear for Bryan to think that.â€� It’s not rational, and there are plenty of people reassuring her that she is not to blame, just like we’re told to do. But you know what? It hasn’t helped. And I am so angry that people made Emma into this broken person, and I am so angry that our society is such that and people grow up thinking any of this is normal. Because those boys who perpetrated Emma’s rape are victims too—not in the same way as Emma, not on the same level! But they were socialized to act the way they did. Rather than “boys will be boysâ€� bullshit, it’s a case of “patriarchy will make boys be rapistsâ€�: women deserve not to be raped, and men deserve not to be raised in a way that tarnishes their respect for women. Patriarchy and rape culture hurts us all. I want to conclude by offering my thoughts as an educator. Having never been an eighteen-year-old girl, and with sex never really a big part of my high school experience, I can sympathize but not identify with Emma and her group of friends. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that I identified instead with Ms McCarthy, the teacher who notices some other students looking at the photos of Emma on Facebook and sets the legal wheels turning that blow this whole thing up in Emma’s face. Thankfully, I have never had to deal with this particular situation. But I’ve sat where Ms McCarthy sat and listened to children talk about sensitive issues; I’ve had to tell them I can’t promise not to tell anyone else what they share, because I am obligated to report. And there are times when I have felt utterly helpless: sometimes the gulf between you and your students is just so inconceivably vast that even when you’re less than a decade older than them, you can’t cross it. I love that O’Neill manages to portray McCarthy as a human being, not just a representative of authority, even through Emma’s biased eyes (it’s the little details). McCarthy says all the right things, is clearly trying to be supportive, talks about believing Emma and being there for her. She does what I like to think I would do. And it’s absolutely completely one hundred per cent ineffective and unhelpful. Just as I’m angered by rape culture’s existence, I’m upset by the inadequate systems in place to help victims. It’s not for lack of trying, as we see in McCarthy’s rigorous adherence to procedure. But if this is the result, then those procedures are failing the people they are meant to help. O’Neill illustrates how powerless we can be: I like to think that, as a teacher, I can be someone my students would want to come to if they were in this position. But I know that no matter how much they might like or respect or feel comfortable around me, they would still see me as an adult who couldn’t possibly understand what they are going through. (And maybe they are right.) I »å´Ç²Ô’t have answers for these problems. But we need to be talking about them, and we need to find a way to do better. Hence why I love Asking for It. Certainly it’s not unique in its deft handling of rape, rape culture, and victim-blaming. Nevertheless, there are so many great elements at play that elevate it into a masterpiece (yeah, I’ll use the M-word). It captures the moment in time right now where teenagers leverage social media light-years ahead of adults, and the downsides of this activity. It is brutally honest in the way that rape tears down a person, psychologically, and stops them from building themselves back up. At its core, Asking for It is about consent. It is a cautionary tale about the way we are failing to inculcate the next generation with what it means to consent, with how to ask for it and how to give it. Those boys were not being good boys, and they should not have done all those terrible things to Emma. Yet Emma’s behaviour, the fact that she did not feel comfortable saying “Noâ€�, shows that she clearly hasn’t been given the right tools. She’s eighteen, nominally an adult—and we let her down. We need better sex ed, and we need it now. So I’ll leave you with those thoughts and . And I’ll remind you that there is hope, as seen in the case of . ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 10, 2016
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Feb 10, 2016
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Feb 10, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1596436581
| 9781596436589
| 1596436581
| 3.80
| 39,421
| Oct 14, 2014
| Oct 14, 2014
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liked it
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What happens when you meet someone online and you’re struck by a sudden need to help them, but they live on the other side of the world and »å´Ç²Ô’t spea
What happens when you meet someone online and you’re struck by a sudden need to help them, but they live on the other side of the world and »å´Ç²Ô’t speak English? Jen Wang and Cory Doctorow ponder the intricacies that teenagers have to deal with, often on their own, in our globalized world. There’s a lot to like about In Real Life, so let’s get into it. Firstly, the obvious: this is a story about gamers and gaming, but as the title implies, it treats these things as serious aspects of “real life.â€� Much like The Guild shows how a group of people manage to forge some pretty strong—albeit strange—bonds through gaming together, Anda’s experience playing Coarsegold changes her perspective on many real-world issues. Doctorow and Wang remind us that games are not merely distractions or diversions. They can be educational, informative, and thought-provoking—often unintentionally. Doctorow says in the introduction that this is a story about economics. That’s true, in that Anda learns the basics of labour issues and trade unions, as well as the slightly newer economy involved in gold farming. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention to those themes, though, because I never felt the economic message was all that overt—except perhaps at the very end, when Anda helps some of the other Chinese gold farmers to organize a little. Instead, what impressed me more was the way In Real Life charts Anda’s growth, particularly her self-confidence. I love the way Wang portrays Anda as a teenager who just happens to be overweight. There’s no big deal. The only time weight comes up is in the context of ice cream, and even then it’s Anda’s mother commenting about her ´Ú²¹³Ù³ó±ð°ù’s weight. Nevertheless, as you might expect, Anda’s physical appearance and nerdy interests mean she’s on the quiet side. It’s nice to see her grow and become more confident, and Wang very successfully uses visual storytelling to enhance this. For example, we see Anda peer down a supermarket aisle of haircare products—then cut to her dying her hair red to match her game avatar’s. In Real Life is body-positive, and it prominently features a variety of women and personalities. From aggressive, fiery Lucy/Sarge to the commanding, imposing Liza we get women with different attitudes and priorities. And then there’s Steph. When this skinny “prepâ€� girl crashes the Sci-Fi club asking for help starting a “board game club,â€� she gets rebuffed. And I totally thought it would be a case of the nerds “taking downâ€� the preppy girl for being mean—because that’s how we’re programmed to see the narrative. It’s so much more complex than that, and I really like the follow-up and payoff that happens near the end of the book. It’s an empowering reminder that people with different interests can work together. Similar to the no-big-deal portrayal of Anda’s body type, Wang and Doctorow also show her in a programming class, coding games, and in the Sci-Fi club, playing D&D like a boss. The message here is subtle but all-too-welcome: girls, you can be gamers; you can be coders; you can like D&D. It’s just something Anda does, and by making it background instead of foregrounding it as a “struggle,â€� they send the message that this is normal—as it should be. Other than Anda, most of the characters are not well-developed. Her parents in particular are pretty stock, with Anda’s mother stereotypically overreacting to Anda’s online activities. I understand the need, in some cases, for this kind of shorthand to advance the story. Still, it’s a noticeable shallow area in a graphic novel that otherwise reaches deeper than you might expect. In Real Life is a fun graphic novel that combines the best aspects of this form with Doctorow’s usual didactic flair. It’s a quick read—I read it in one sitting over lunch—but a worthwhile one. Despite this brevity, there is so much going on here. Adults like me can get a lot out of it, and I expect teenagers will also find it enjoyable and appealing. Above all else, while it shows challenges and onflict, its message is overwhelmingly positive and encouraging: you can do the thing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 19, 2015
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Dec 19, 2015
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Nov 27, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1853267309
| 9781853267307
| 1853267309
| 3.71
| 4,265
| 1866
| Sep 25, 1997
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really liked it
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I make no secret of the fact that I think George Eliot is a literary badass, and Felix Holt: The Radical is just the latest example of these well-dese
I make no secret of the fact that I think George Eliot is a literary badass, and Felix Holt: The Radical is just the latest example of these well-deserved credentials. This is essentially a political and legal thriller set in 1832 England on the cusp of the passage of the First Reform Act. (Among other things, the Reform Acts of the 1800s redefined the electoral districts for the English Parliament and expanded the franchise ever so slightly.) The sleepy English town of Treby finds itself the centre of political action during the latest election campaign. Harold Transome returns home after fifteen years abroad and decides to run as the Radical candidate, much to the surprise of his Tory family. Meanwhile, in typical Eliot fashion, the Felix Holt doesn’t show up for the first fifty pages of his own book! Despite Transome and Holt’s self-declared Radicalism, the two butt heads, and soon it’s obvious neither really embodies the label they’ve chosen. Meanwhile, a dastardly lawyer plots possible revenge against Transome, and it all hinges on the question of paternity and inheritance of a preacher’s daughter. You hooked yet? Because I know that the language in novels like this can be an obstacle to enjoying them. Eliot is a fan of lengthy sentences and even longer paragraphs. Her description belabours points until they become entire discourses; her dialogue is more of a series of speeches fired back and forth like broadside salvos. With this style, however, comes a consummate ability to draw out the most intricate descriptions of human foibles and fragility. We see this quite early in Eliot’s portrayal of the ageing Mrs Transome, and later when we delve into Esther’s motivations for obsessing over the strange and somewhat offensive Mr Holt. Unlike modern thrillers, which tend to sacrifice depth of character for depth of field in the action, Felix Holt is a character-driven thriller in which Eliot asks how our upbringing, gender, and political convictions influence the choices we make and how far we will go to get what we want. First, we have Harold Transome. He comes back home after living in “the Eastâ€� (mostly Smyrna), where he had a wife (who since died) and a kid (whom he mostly ignores, in that great fashion of the English gentility). Like many a man convinced of his competence, he essentially swoops down on Transome Court like the North Wind: we’re doing things the Harold Transome way, and if you »å´Ç²Ô’t like it, then tough. He engages the Transomesâ€� lawyer, Jermyn, as his election agent even while plotting to remove Jermyn at the most convenient opportunity. He ignores his mother and the tough time she’s been having of keeping up the estate—but that’s mostly because Transome ignores women in general, finding the weaker sex useless for everything except stroking his ego and likely stroking â€� well â€� you know what I mean. Transome runs as the Radical candidate for this district. I never completely understood why he was going for Parliament, except perhaps because he felt it was the prestigious thing to do. He certainly never evokes a sense of statesmanship. Although he good-naturedly (and naively) attempts to put a stop to the rabble-rousing activities Jermyn’s minion engages in on Transome’s behalf, Transome does not in and of himself spend much time espousing Radical views. His political allegiance seems more a reaction against the stagnant Toryism of the countryside than any conviction that England needs to change. I guess the most redeeming thing we can say about Transome is that he’s not a total dick. When he learns that Esther has legal claim to Transome Court, his first reaction is not to conceal the news but actually tell her and then kind-of-sort-of attempt to court her in the hopes he can keep the estate this way. (Now, the cynical would point out he’s just pre-empting the uncomfortable disclosure from Jermyn, and he obviously talks himself into loving Esther instead of harbouring true feelings for her. And there is something to that. But Transome is not a villain so much as an opportunistic upper–middle-class businessman; granted, the distinction between these two labels is not always clear.) Whereas Transome considers himself a “man of the worldâ€� in a quite literal sense and almost condescends to bring himself down to the worker’s level, Felix Holt is quite proud of his poverty. He looks down on the rich, in a moral sense. Like Transome, he identifies as a Radical but doesn’t necessarily embody that philosophy: he in fact discourages workers from getting it into their heads that they need to vote to effect political change. Holt wants everyone to behave nicely in the hopes that this will persuade the people in charge to be nicer in return. In her “Address to the Working Manâ€� included as an appendix to this edition, Eliot writes in Holt’s voice and explains that expanding the franchise to uneducated workers would be a bad idea right now, because it would encourage a kind of ignorant populism that would pull the country down. And so Felix Holt is fascinating, because it is not actually a very radical novel. At the time Eliot was writing it, of course, those in favour of Reform were seen as quite radical people (and then you had the unions, and later, the people advocating for secret ballots). But if anything, this novel shows that Eliot is herself calling only for gradual change. She doesn’t want workers to have the right to vote until they also have the education she feels is necessary for them to vote “properly.â€� I find this paradox fascinating, because in some ways she has hit on the crucial point: franchise is no good if the people enfranchised have little knowledge on which to base a decision. Simply guaranteeing everyone over 18 the right to vote is not enough, then; we are obligated to provide civic education—and in this respect, I »å´Ç²Ô’t think our present government does nearly enoughâ€�. So Holt, then, is the “common manâ€� who nevertheless acts as a voice of caution. He is continually trying to apply the brakes, as seen in his foolish and ill-fated attempt to curb the rioting on election day. It sometimes seems like Eliot focuses less on him than on any other main character. Nevertheless, his role as titular character is deserved more because he ties all the other characters together. He interacts with everyone else, subtly shaping the nature of the conversation. It is the not-quite-love-triangle among Holt, Esther, and Transome that precipitates the novel’s conclusion. In Esther we see Eliot wrestle with ideas of femininity, education of women, and the duties that children have for their parents. I’ve always lauded the way Eliot’s writing has a feminist tone for the Victorian period in which she lived; and, by all accounts, Mary Ann Evans was a pretty spectacular woman. Nevertheless, Esther demonstrates some of the limits of Eliot’s endorsement of “women’s liberation.â€� On one hand, Eliot mocks those women around Treby who look down on Esther for being “over-educatedâ€� for a preacher’s daughter and for putting on airs. On the other, she uses Felix as a foil for Esther’s ego and high opinion of herself: after a single meeting, Esther becomes desperate to prove to Felix at every turn that she can be humble and be open to being lead by a man (i.e., him) in matters of substance. Eliot places Esther in a role complementary to the men in her life: she must support and aid her ageing father; be led by the man she chooses as a husband; and nurture the children in her charge, whether it’s as a mother or a teacher. In this respect, while Eliot is quick to call out the double standards that adversely affect women’s quality of life, she is not quite ready to tear down conventional gender roles. Felix Holt culminates in an election, a riot, a trial, and shenanigans over estate ownership. It all ends in tears, and then a wedding, and finally a happily-ever-after, for most involved. The winds of change are evident throughout the novel, but the ending seems to assure us that all will go on as it largely was before: the rich will be rich, the poor will be poor, and there will be Tories and Whigs and the occasional Radical doing whatever it is men of means do in Parliament while your average worker drinks and works the mines. This is not, therefore, that radical of a book. But Eliot manages to deliver an amazing story full of intrigue, backstabbing, characters who are all out for themselves. I picked an excellent time to read this as well. And I »å´Ç²Ô’t just mean because Thanksgiving Saturday was unseasonably pleasant and I could read this outside while listening to the new Florence + the Machine album. No, I mean that in Canada we’re a week away from a federal election. The campaigning in this book reminded me of the lengthy campaigning happening here. Eliot’s coverage of the Reform Act is a potent reminder that we are lucky we have the right to vote—and by we, I »å´Ç²Ô’t just mean land-owning white men. While I completely understand why some people are discouraged by our political system and »å´Ç²Ô’t believe their vote will “count,â€� I’m still disappointed when someone I know shrugs off the idea that they should vote. It is a duty, and it is not one we should take for granted considering that some of us have had it for less than a century. And it’s certainly in the interests of the people in power to keep you from voting, particularly if you are young, or poor, or from a minority group and interested in expressing your opinions. This might sound trite, but one of the most radical things you can do as a Canadian on October 19 is vote. Go do it. And then go read Felix Holt. It’s far from my favourite Eliot novel, but it shows the beginnings of all the skill and ability with character and setting that makes her one of my favourite authors. Eliot manages to convey a sense of entirety, that microcosm of the human experience: she is not overly cynical or overly optimistic; she simply shows what is—and what might be. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 06, 2015
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Oct 11, 2015
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Oct 06, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0297853430
| 9780297853435
| 0297853430
| 3.44
| 824
| 2008
| Jan 01, 2008
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did not like it
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What is this I »å´Ç²Ô’t even. Argh, my brain hurts. Where did it all start going so wrong? Was it when the sexually ambiguous cadre of private female shoc What is this I »å´Ç²Ô’t even. Argh, my brain hurts. Where did it all start going so wrong? Was it when the sexually ambiguous cadre of private female shock troops seized the recreation of the Titanic in order to force its first-class passengers to toil at menial labour in an effort to rehabilitate them? Or was it earlier than that, when the ludicrously one-dimensional antagonists unleash a clone army of aborted foetuses on unsuspecting would-be parents? Or maybe even earlier, when a lone philosopher discovers that his tutee is in fact a sociopathic clone of his employer? The Philosopher’s Apprentice is just â€� odd. And not good odd, like Christopher Moore or Nick Harkaway or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. All of those authorsâ€� writing has something in common with James Morrow’s slightly absurdist deconstruction of Western morality â€� but they manage to create a coherent story while they are being absurd, whereas Morrow seems more interested in sandwiching in yet another layer of plot twists. Part of me worries that I dislike this book not for its merits (or lack thereof) but because it »å¾±»å²Ô’t turn out to be what I expected. From the description, the premise sounded like an Emile-inspired take on Sophie’s World . I was looking for another romp through the history of Western philosophical thought, this time with a focus on morality and ethics. Instead, Morrow discards this pretence of philosophical discourse fairly early on. Mason discovers Londa’s true nature, and he quickly concludes her moral education so that the rest of the story can happen (if that is, indeed, the correct word for the train wreck that follows). It’s one thing to write a book steeped in philosophical thought that also stimulates a reader’s own thoughts. Sophie’s World accomplishes this through its overtly didactic tones. Umberto Eco’s numerous novels are similar, with his characters wrestling over philosophical dilemmas that are integral to the plot. Morrow, on the other hand, keeps his philosophical discourse on the surface. The Philosopher’s Apprentice is a volatile headache of intertextual allusions and philosopher name-dropping. And while this is consistent with the idea of Mason’s character—one wouldn’t expect a doctoral candidate in philosophy to explain the nuances of various philosophers when he is narrating his life story—it does the reader no favours. Reading this made me feel like what someone a few decades from now will probably feel when they listen to the pop-culture–laden dialogue of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer: a mixture of annoyance and confusion because they »å´Ç²Ô’t understand the references. Now, I could get past that if, beneath this surface layer, there were a more compelling story into which I could sink my teeth. Alas, nothing like that seems apparent. Mason reminds me of Michael Youngs from Making History : delusional and self-absorbed, obsessed with achieving his place in academic history through a masterpiece thesis of staggering genius. I »å´Ç²Ô’t really feel sorry for any of the things that happen to Mason, as absurd and undeserved as they might be. I »å´Ç²Ô’t really feel sorry for many of the characters, because they »å´Ç²Ô’t feel like real people. I want to call The Philosopher’s Apprentice allegorical, because that’s the only way to excuse the naked characterization that happens here. There is no attempt to make any of these characters seem like actual human beings; rather, they are a hodgepodge of caricatures, plot devices, and set pieces. They seem just as lost in this illogical and convoluted tale as we readers are; at least we have the option of leaving the story. Mason and his companions are trapped within the confines of these pages, doomed forever to live out this story over and over. Is Hell perhaps becoming a character trapped in a terrible story? I just »å´Ç²Ô’t get this book. Maybe I’m not smart enough, not well-read enough or well-studied enough in philosophy, so I »å´Ç²Ô’t deserve to get it. I’m the last person to charge that literature needs to be accessible to be good. But I want to believe that, issues of accessibility aside, the story within this book just isn’t very good. Morrow makes a big deal of the fact that Mason is supposed to be Londa’s conscience, that her actions flow inexorably from an inconsistently developed code of ethics laid over her innately sociopathic mind. As far as I can tell, though, her actions seem arbitrary and driven more by plot than character motivations. The Philosopher’s Apprentice is a hot mess, but not the kind of hot mess you want in your bedroom. There are far better books that manage to mix philosophy with good story telling—just indulge in a little of The Name of the Rose , Foucault’s Pendulum , or Sophie’s World to see what I mean. I’ll give Morrow credit for some of his ideas here, but it took a lot of effort to eke out much enjoyment from this book. ...more |
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1
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Jul 15, 2014
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Jul 19, 2014
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Jul 15, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0425256308
| 9780425256305
| 0425256308
| 3.85
| 5,793
| Jul 01, 2013
| Jun 24, 2014
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it was ok
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Space is big. Hugely, mind-bogglingly big. Travelling across the vast distances of space is daunting, especially if faster-than-light travel proves im
Space is big. Hugely, mind-bogglingly big. Travelling across the vast distances of space is daunting, especially if faster-than-light travel proves impossible. In Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross rejects the luxuries of hyperdrive or warp speed in favour of good, old-fashioned laser-based transmissions of data—and people, who are just another type of data, after all. In such a universe, debt and the tracking of it is of great importance. Krina Alizond-114 has travelled to the Dojima System to meet up with her sib, Ana. She tries to get to the water world of Shin-Tethys, but her journey is fraught with sidesteps and misadventures. Even when she arrives on Shin-Tethys, tracking down Ana proves more difficult and dangerous than she would like. Krina isn’t a spy or a secret agent; she’s a forensic accountant who delights in unravelling the history of “FTL scams.â€� But she and Ana have stumbled on something quite naughty, and it seems several parties are after them as a result. What Krina and Ana find could undermine the entire interstellar economy. They could get very, very rich, or they could get very, very dead. Although nominally set in the same universe as Saturn’s Children , Neptune’s Brood inherits the continuity of its setting but, at several centuriesâ€� remove, not so much plot or characters—it’s much more of a standalone book than a sequel. I read Saturn’s Children 5 years ago and remember nothing about it, and that »å¾±»å²Ô’t detract from my enjoyment of this book at all. Like many of Strossâ€� books, Neptune’s Brood features a first-person protagonist who spends a significant amount of time expositioning at the reader. Fans of his Laundry Files series will recognize echoes of Bob’s narration in here, as Krina explains to us the arcane and complicated financial instruments that underpin galactic colonization. Along the way, we’re also treated to some ideas about what the future of “humanityâ€� will be in an era where “Fragileâ€� baseline humans are all but extinct and posthuman “metahumansâ€� are the order of the day. When your soul can be dumped and forked and your bodyplan altered at will, what exactly is your identity anymore? The idea of lineages (which was explored somewhat in Saturn’s Children, if I recall correctly, but which I »å´Ç²Ô’t remember) is interesting. Instead of sexual reproduction, metahumans in Neptune’s Brood reproduce by forking their personalities, making little alterations here and there, then instantiating them in new bodies. Depending on your lineage, you’re generally expected to work off the debt created by your instantiation—a kind of indentured neoteny. Then you’re free to strike off on your own, as Krina’s lineage mater, Sondra, did so many centuries ago. You can beam yourself to another solar system via the laser beacons that communicate across the vast interstellar gulfs. And then you can wake up in a new body and find a new purpose in life. As Stross explains how the interstellar economy is built on a Ponzi scheme of expensive colonization journeys, he explains that every colony goes deep into debt upon its founding. It solicits immigrants via its brand new beacon. It’s not quite clear to me how, in a world where personalities seem copyable, why individual people might be valuable resources—surely you can just buy a pirated copy of a group of personalities with the skills your colony needs? Stross dangles tantalizing ideas about how life as a metahuman opens up new possibilities for memory and identity; nevertheless, there are avenues unexplored in this book that leave me with so many questions. As far as the plot goes, it’s serviceable. Krina is looking for her lost sib, and she’s willing to go to extreme lengths to do so. Along the way, we meet some volatile and interesting characters, and we’re treated to a few different, imaginative types of environments for metahuman life. My chief problem with Neptune’s Brood is Krina herself. She’s just a very bland protagonist, spending so much time reacting rather than acting. Largely she spends her time in othersâ€� power, and that’s just not as interesting to experience. This is particularly evident towards the end of the book, where she gets kidnapped and then spends a chapter swimming through the depths of Shin-Tethys towards a meeting where all will be explained—no choice in the matter there, really. Even towards the end, where she does have a modicum of say in what happens, her options are so Byzantine to the reader’s understanding that it’s still not much fun. Stross himself admits in his crib sheet for the novel that the ending is inadequate, and I fully agree. It’s abrupt and underwhelming compared to the rest of the novel. Just as it’s getting “goodâ€� in the sense that we know who the enemies actually are and Krina is in a position to begin flexing her agency â€� we’re done. You might get the impression from this review that I »å¾±»å²Ô’t like Neptune’s Brood. That’s not entirely accurate. It’s a really thoughtful and interesting space opera, but like a lot of science fiction, ideas at the expense of story usually aren’t enough for me. I enjoyed reading it, but I can’t say I’m excited by it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 10, 2018
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Oct 12, 2018
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Feb 02, 2013
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0765329085
| 9780765329080
| 0765329085
| 3.73
| 5,705
| Oct 02, 2012
| Oct 02, 2012
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liked it
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I »å´Ç²Ô’t really know how to start this review, because this is a very important topic for me. It should be an important topic for anyone who loves book
I »å´Ç²Ô’t really know how to start this review, because this is a very important topic for me. It should be an important topic for anyone who loves books. Although Pirate Cinema concerns not-so-exaggerated attempts to stop people from copying and remixing movies, much of the same rhetoric around copyright has been applied to books. Libraries for ebooks because publishers are freaked out that electronic files exist and can be shared. (And let’s not even get started on DRM.) Amazon is not just trying but succeeding in revolutionizing a lot of the publishing industry, particularly around self-publishing, and not in a way that is necessarily good for creators. And that’s the fundamental lie that Cory Doctorow exposes in Pirate Cinema. The companies and lobbyists behind increasingly draconian copyright regimes always claim that copyright is necessary for creators to flourish. They paint a bleak picture of a world where piracy discourages people from creating stuff because they won’t get paid. I suppose they have a point—I have no clue how our civilization survived without art for all those thousands of years before we had copyright! So the conflict in this book, and indeed in real life, is not between pirates and creators. It’s between corporations and people, with the former wanting control over created content and the latter wanting â€� well, culture. As he has done with other books, such as the seminal Little Brother , Doctorow sees a trend in our society that he doesn’t like. So he has extrapolated it—just a little, because most of what happens in this book has been or is happening in some form somewhere today. And he tries to show why he thinks the world should be different, and why it matters that we fight. This is polemical, no doubt about it, and not always for the best. The bad guys are caricaturish, almost moustache-twirling in how naughty Doctorow depicts them. Even as someone who is very sympathetic to Doctorow’s cause, I have to wish that there had been a little more nuance here. While I love that Doctorow takes the time to explain parts of the UK parliamentary system to readers, it might have been nice if we also learned something about how copyright actually works. Still, this is a compelling book, and not just on a philosophical level. The characters are fun. Trent is a mixed bag as a protagonist: at times he’s sympathetic, other times he’s not very likable—a very believable portrayal, in other words, of a teenage boy who is a little too clever for his own good. I appreciate, too, that Doctorow doesn’t make him too much of a genius at everything. For example, Trent freely admits he doesn’t know that much about computers—he knows enough to Google around for instructions and commands to run, and he is very good at video editing, but those are his limits. The pacing is also great—good enough to almost make me forget the lumpy infodumpy parts of the book. Doctorow never really lets us get comfortable with a status quo. First Trent leaves home and spends some time wandering London before lucking into a friendship that opens a lot of doors for him (literally). When he loses that laptop with the finished cut of his Holy Grail of Scot Colford remixes, I was almost as heartbroken as he was. But that’s the point—Doctorow needs to establish that it’s not the product that matters to Trent so much as the love, the act of creating. Really, what Pirate Cinema boils down to is a strong argument in favour of a more distributed notion of creativity. This scares the monolithic corporations that have a lot of power right now, because they »å´Ç²Ô’t know how to control it or make money off it. Pirate Cinema also captures the senses of dread and defeatism that lurk beneath any massive campaign for public change. Trent and his friends, even the fiery 26, are often discouraged when things they try »å´Ç²Ô’t seem to make a difference to the public. They are up against lobbyists who have almost inexhaustible resources. Doctorow just casually discusses some of the reasons politicians listen to these companies rather than their constituents—whether it’s the lavish weekend getaway or the fear of being expelled from one’s party, something usually convinces them. This dysfunctionality, and the sense that the people we elect aren’t actually representing our interests any more, is very concerning. And it’s not surprising that libertarians find a lot to like about Doctorow’s novels. As a YA novel, this is pretty good. The love story between Trent and 26 is neither contrived nor overly romantic. I liked the ending. Although I agree with those who think it’s abrupt as an epilogue, the writing was on the wall much earlier in the story, and it’s a very realistic way for their story to conclude. But I think the best thing about Pirate Cinema as a YA novel is simply its ability to educate and get younger readers thinking about these issues in a political way. Even if one doesn’t agree with what Doctorow argues here, it opens the door for critical discussions. Beyond that, it’s a fun story with good characters and a strong message. That the message threatens to overwhelm those other two aspects at times is par for the course with Doctorow. I hesitate to call it unsophisticated, because it deals with fairly complicated issues. Let’s go with straightforward. There isn’t much in the way of subtext here. I’m biased, though. Like I said at the beginning, copyright and the way corporations appear eager to own our culture so that we may merely consume it really concerns me. It’s an issue I feel passionate about, so I enjoyed Doctorow sharing his own passion for this subject in a suitably fictional form. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 03, 2015
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Jul 04, 2015
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Oct 08, 2012
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Hardcover
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| 0752809253
| 9780752809250
| 0752809253
| 4.11
| 10,478
| Sep 1997
| Jul 1998
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liked it
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I want to give this book five stars. I want to give this book one star. It’s amazing. It’s terrible. Keeping Earth habitable is a pressing concern toda I want to give this book five stars. I want to give this book one star. It’s amazing. It’s terrible. Keeping Earth habitable is a pressing concern today. Even if we manage to avoid eco-catastrophe (and I’m optimistic on this), that’s only a small hurdle in the grand scheme of the cosmos. We only have about a billion years left before the Sun swells so much that it cooks the atmosphere. A few billion years after that, the Sun will engulf Earth itself—bye, bye, homeworld. Even if we manage to emigrate to the outer solar system or other solar systems entirely, we’re still just buying time until the end of the universe—whether it’s heat death or a Big Crunch or something else entirely. We can’t outrun eternity. Of course, if we are around in a billion, let alone ten billion years, I somehow doubt we would recognize our future selves. Considering how much we differ from our hominin ancestors a million years ago, I suspect that evolution—natural or artificially-induced—will carry us away from this body plan. If we are going to migrate, we will adapt our forms—in body, or just in mind. Diaspora is a vision of a possible future, one in which humanity has diversified itself, speciated itself, and it attempting to find a way to survive. Diaspora is a challenging novel, intentionally so. It is no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled posthumanity. By the thirtieth century, humanity exists in three forms: flesh humans on Earth, embodied robots floating around the outer solar system, and polises of minds running as software on immense architectures. The main characters are exclusively minds from a polis. After an unanticipated, unexplained gamma-ray burst irradiates Earth, precipitating the extinction of flesh humanity, these minds resolve to explain the phenomenon and find a way of protecting humanity from it in the future. This triggers a strange and wonderful exploration of physical space and theoretical physics, and more mathematical exposition than you can shake a stick at. The bulk of this book is a discussion of high-level mathematics and highly theoretical, even speculative, physics. Everything from high-energy wormholes to alternative universe topologies makes an appearance here. As a mathematician, and one who loves the abstract, axiomatic fields, I enjoyed most of this. It’s nice to step into someone else’s series of “what ifâ€� scenarios. When these are combined with the exploration of the physical universe and encounters with extraterrestrial life, it’s even cooler. The ideas that Egan explores here are intriguing enough to make me want to give Diaspora 5 stars—if it were a blog post, maybe. Greg Egan bypasses the conventional structure of a novel, giving us instead mathematical musings in four acts. Technically Diaspora has everything a novel needs: characters, dialogue, even a plot. But with nature as the sole antagonist, the threats in this book are extremely distant. They are existential (though I hesitate to use that word when these characters are cloning themselves thousands of times over), but only in the most distant sense. This is literally a book about the end of the world as we »å´Ç²Ô’t know it, and it’s almost as difficult for me to wrap my head around as the physics and mathematics are. I think it would be tempting to seize upon the very abstract subject matter and level the charge that Diaspora is difficult because, with so many posthumans leaving flesh behind for a sixteen-dimensional universe, it loses something of what it means to be human. I understand why some people would feel this way, but I »å´Ç²Ô’t think it’s the case at all. In spite of the very technical and dry dialogue between these characters, Egan makes it clear that their main concern—other than survival—is the preservation of humanity. There are, if not conflicts, then arguments between characters about the best path to take to remain human—the merits of flesh versus software, the perils of solipsism. Indeed, Diaspora is about the ultimate quest to remain human in spite of the universe itself stacking the deck against you. I’m not going to give Diaspora five stars, because I think other authors have done this better while still delivering a very compelling story. I’m not going to give Diaspora one star, because it is an amazing collection of ideas and dialogues about humanity, progress, and physics. It’s like a really trippy blog post, just masquerading as a novel because novels, like bow ties, are cool. And like anything pretending to be something it’s not, Diaspora isn’t quite as satisfying as the conventional novel we’ve been trained to enjoy. It’s not bad, but different, and anything too different has to work a lot harder to earn acclaim. I’m willing to meet it halfway, so I’ll give it a solid three stars. I majored in math and minored in English and philosophy; I’m teaching math and English to high school students come this fall. The intersectionality of this novel is kind of tailor-made for me—I suspect other people might have a hard time with it, and I want to be very upfront with this opinion lest my enthusiasm for the subject lead you astray. But if you are willing to make the effort and tolerate the paper-thin plot, then â€� wow. Yeah, in a way, totally worth it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 22, 2012
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Jul 24, 2012
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Jul 22, 2012
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0547577532
| 9780547577531
| 0547577532
| 3.50
| 29,230
| Oct 25, 2010
| Nov 08, 2011
|
really liked it
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I like to try to pretend I’m not a literature snob. I like to try to pretend that all I care about in a book is a good story, that genres are meaningl
I like to try to pretend I’m not a literature snob. I like to try to pretend that all I care about in a book is a good story, that genres are meaningless, and that authors who are experimental or who go to great lengths to show off their vast intellects are, generally, more trouble than they are worth. I like peeling back the layers of hype and praise piled upon popular books and to get at the soft nougat of story at the centre and judge it based on the quality of that alone. Except all that pretending not to be pretentious falls apart the moment I have to talk about Umberto Eco. I can’t quite call him my favourite author, because that is an absolute I »å´Ç²Ô’t feel comfortable using. How does one necessarily compare and rank two authors whose style and range are completely different? No, Eco is not my all-time favourite, but he is unquestionably a writer of the highest calibre, a literary juggernaut with all the pretentious baggage such a label implies. Whenever I read something by Umberto Eco, I am always struck by how incredibly smart he is. His books are practically saturated with knowledge and intellect in such a way that I am immediately confronted with how little I know—and I love that feeling. More importantly, Eco doesn’t make me feel stupid as a result of this ignorance. Instead, his books display an evident love for knowledge, a joy for life and literature—a feeling so close to what I feel when I read, that it’s probably not a surprise I would feel so at home with these books. For my fourth annual Eco read I chose The Prague Cemetery purely because it was published in English this year. I feel a little more connected by reading a book that is so recent, and it definitely affected how I interpreted the story. The Prague Cemetery seems, almost from the beginning, like it is more accessible than some of Eco’s other novels. It certainly isn’t as lengthy or as dense as The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum . Yet there is a dark and very difficult aspect to The Prague Cemetery that almost made me hesitate with it. This book is venomous. It opens with a misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic rant by the main character, Captain Simonini. Simonini, an expatriate Italian living in France as a forger and sometime-espionage expert begins recounting his childhood in Italy in the form of a diary. We learn the genesis of his hatred for Jews, his first involvement in forgery and espionage, and eventually, how he came to end up in Paris, France. This autobiographical narrative is as fascinating as it is repugnant. Simonini’s anti-Semitism latches onto everything he touches, spreading into his every endeavour like a virulent and pernicious weed. I found several passages difficult to read, because Eco does not cut corners and does not hold back: he creates a main character who is, in no uncertain times, unlikable and unsympathetic. And I still somehow found myself hoping he wouldn’t get killed. (He is really bad at the espionage thing.) Then we come to chapter 5, in which the narration gets taken up by Abbé Dalla Piccola. And here’s where it gets interesting. Who is Piccola? Is he an alter-ego of Simonini’s? Or is he a person in his own right? Simonini keeps waking with gaps in his memories and reading these notes from Piccola, whose apartment is connected to his by a long, dank corridor filled with makeup and costumes. Yet as Simonini recalls his life story, there are mentions of a Piccola external to him. And so the identities of Simonini and Piccola and their relationship is ambiguous, at least at first. Ultimately Eco resolves it with uncharacteristic clarity. Until then, however, Piccola along with the Narrator complete the novel’s triumvirate of (unreliable) narrative voices. Together, these two manage to balance out the vitriolic Simonini and make the narrative more interesting. The Prague Cemetery is intimately connected to European history, particularly that of Italy, Germany, and France, in the late nineteenth century. Those of us whose educations are sorely lacking in this area will feel somewhat lost, which is why Wikipedia is such a valuable resource. Reading about the unification of Italy and France under Napoleon III gave me a glimpse into why Eco might be so fascinated by conspiracy theory. Sensationalist rhetoric of authors like Dan Brown aside, conspiracy underpins much of European history, never far away as one reads about the intricate intrigue that brought down kings and queens, priests and pontiffs. And Eco places Simonini right in the middle of it: first embedding him with the Carbonari and Garibaldi’s red shorts, then transplanting him to France on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war. Simonini’s experience as a forger means that his superiors expected him to produce evidence that would support the agenda of the month. Communists, socialists, or monarchists—it »å¾±»å²Ô’t matter: you name them, and Simonini would fabricate something to implicate them. He goes as far as actually constructing conspiracies of his own in order to expose them to his superiors. Simonini is delightfully devious—much too devious, in fact, for his own good. He invariably incurs the displeasure of his superiors, which is why he found himself in France in the first place. Ultimately Simonini becomes obsessed with marketing a manuscript. This manuscript finally becomes , a real fraudulent document. Set in the eponymous and eerie cemetery in Prague, the manuscript purports to disclose the plans of Jewish leaders for world domination. This is Simonini’s masterpiece, a story woven from ideas culled from fiction and non-fiction throughout the past century, created in such a way as to appear legitimate enough for those who might have a use for anti-Semitic propaganda. And though he knows it is his own fabrication, Simonini is utterly convinced of the document’s veracity in spirit. He does not doubt that a Zionist conspiracy for world domination exists and is in motion, and so he feels justified in manufacturing evidence that exposes this “truthâ€�. Eco brilliantly takes us into the mind of a conspiracy theorist and an anti-Semite, exposing the psychology of such a person. The document that becomes The Protocols is but one example of the larger set of conspiracies that bloom in the shadows of European politics. Through Simonini we see how various groups, from intelligence offices to the Jesuits, make use of conspiracy theories and propaganda to suit their own ends—essentially, Eco weaves conspiracies about conspiracies. And the most successful participants in these political games are those who do not have (or at least do not indulge) their personal enmities toward different groups. Simonini’s passionate hatred of Jews is a liability, because it warps his every action and provides a motivation that could sometimes be political inconvenient. Even as his Russian contacts discuss using the Jews as scapegoats because they happen to be around, Simonini’s French handler initially tells him that they aren’t interested in pursuing anti-Semitic propaganda “for nowâ€�. There's a cold-blooded, calculated, ruthless side to all this hate speech that often seems to get lost (at least in my opinion) when viewed through the lens of the world after the Second World War. For some of these people, hating Jews wasn’t personal; it was just part of the job, and only when expedient. Although it ends about thirty years prior to the rise of the Nazis, The Prague Cemetery foreshadows the rising wave of anti-Semitism in Europe. World War II is rather like a singularity, in that sometimes it is difficult to look at the history leading up to it and not be influenced by what came after. We concentrated so much on anti-Semitism during and after World War II that we never really discussed how it was already a regular feature in Europe by the time Hitler came on the scene. So I appreciate being reminded of this fact and seeing a depiction of anti-Semitic attitudes prior to the Holocaust. The Prague Cemetery offers an interesting historical perspective in addition to all its fascinating fixations with conspiracy and religion. Finally, we have the mystery surrounding Simonini himself. Who is he, and how is he related to the Abbé Dalla Piccola? The Prague Cemetery reminded me of The Island of the Day Before . Both feature a character who might be imaginary; in both, the narrative is the reconstruction by an unnamed Narrator of papers written by the main character. And there are echoes of Eco’s other works as well, his recurring themes running strongly throughout this book. For all that is recognizably Eco, however, The Prague Cemetery remains fresh and original. Eco’s books are difficult. There’s no question about that. I mean, he’s a semiotician, so he is fascinated by symbols and meaning, and that’s obvious from the way his works experiment with the nature of storytelling and of fiction itself. In his postscript to The Name of the Rose he talks about how the first hundred pages were designed to “construct the readerâ€� he needed for the rest of the novel—and yeah, that’s a little condescending. So I can see why people would be unwilling to invest the mental effort needed to digest Eco’s books, and I »å´Ç²Ô’t blame them. But you »å´Ç²Ô’t know what you might be missing until you try. So at the risk of destroying my illusions that I am anything other than a literature snob, I have to extol Umberto Eco as a writer. Because, for me, the feeling I get reading an Eco book is as close to the feeling I imagine I should have reading any book. I »å´Ç²Ô’t know if that makes any sense â€� there’s just something about the way Eco writes that makes me hyper-aware of the act of reading yet does not detract from my enjoyment of the text itself. Eco’s books embody the pleasure that should be implicit in the act of reading, and I can think of no higher praise to give a writer. ...more |
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Dec 28, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 0425152251
| 9780425152256
| 0425152251
| 3.97
| 272,578
| 1991
| Mar 1996
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it was amazing
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**spoiler alert** Check out an updated review from 2018! "It's a bagatelle." These words have been knocking around my mind ever since grade 10, when th **spoiler alert** Check out an updated review from 2018! "It's a bagatelle." These words have been knocking around my mind ever since grade 10, when the world's most awesome English teacher introduced me to Sophie's World. (For those of you not in the know, I'm referring to Ms. Sukalo. She also brought her remarkable energy and attitude to drama class, much to the enrichment of myself and my classmates. And she allowed a small group of us to form a lunchtime Shakespeare book club, but that is a story for another day. She's moved on to teach in New York. We still talk. I wanted to be a teacher long before I met Ms. Sukalo, but it's safe to say she showed me what kind of teacher I wanted to be.) I confess that the fact Sophie's World is translated from Norwegian completely escaped me the first time I read it. This time, it was obvious—and I want to express my admiration for the translator's skill, for this is a work that relies more heavily on the nuances of language than most. Also, I originally didn't know how well-received this novel has been, both in Norway and elsewhere in the world, to the tune of being the #1 bestseller in Norway for three years. (Go Norway! Keep that philosophy alive.) For me, however, Sophie's World will forever be associated with the halcyon days of grade 10 English, and with everything it has taught me. This book broadened more than my vocabulary: it taught me history, philosophy, even some science; and it made me think about the tenuous relationship between fiction and reality. Ever since reading it in grade 10, this book has been stalking me. Although my memory of the particulars faded, I recalled the title and the general premise, and with my penchant for philosophy electives in university, Sophie's World has always been quick to come to mind. A few years ago, this copy showed up in a box of books I acquired from a friend who moved away. It is a tattered and much-worn paperback: spine broken, duct tape obscuring half the back cover copy, the bottom left corner of the front cover completely gone, and the cover itself slowly peeling away from the spine. And that makes it perfect. I am never going to get rid of this book until it literally falls to pieces in my hands. And then I will go out and buy a brand new copy the very same day. What is it about Sophie's World that holds me captive? Really, it's all there in the subtitle: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. OK, I suppose that for the average kid (or adult, for that matter), such a subtitle says nothing more than, "Walk away now." For me though, it's the equivalent of a flashing, neon sign that reads, "This book is made of pure crack." Sophie's World is unabashedly a didactic novel. I find this very appealing. Moreover, unlike many such novels, it also has an excellent story and a vibrant, wondrous protagonist. As Sophie Amundsen learns philosophy from her teacher, Alberto, we learn philosophy too. But we also get to watch Sophie, a 14-year-old approaching her fifteenth birthday, grow and mature as a person thanks to her experiences. By "mature" I don't mean "become more adult-like", because that is exactly what Alberto wants to prevent. Prior to receiving her course on philosophy in the mail, Sophie is like any 14-year-old girl, thinking about school, friends, her parents, and of course, turning fifteen. That all changes: She had never thought so hard before! She was no longer a child—but she wasn't really grown up either. Sophie realized that she had already begun to crawl down into the cozy rabbit's fur, the very same rabbit that had been pulled from the top hat of the universe. But the philosopher had stopped her. He—or was it a she?—had grabbed her by the back of the neck and pulled her up again to the tip of the fur where she had played as a child. And there, on the outermost tips of the fine hairs, she was once again seeing the world for the first time. I love that last line in particular. Philosophy is neither dry nor dusty; it is far from esoteric. It is the means by which we can liberate ourselves from the quotidian and the ordinary and see what the universe is: a place full of continuous sensation and wonder. And life? Life is more than mere survival, more than the dreary daily drudge work of sleeping, eating, working, cleaning. But if one wants to escape that vicious cycle and be awesome, one needs to think philosophically. While an understanding of the history of Western philosophy isn't strictly necessary, it certainly helps. The subtitle of Sophie's World is not exaggerating: it covers the history of philosophy—albeit mostly Western philosophy. (To his credit, Gaarder does mention Eastern philosophy several times, talking about Hinduism's relationship with pantheism and comparing Buddha to Kierkegaard.) Through Alberto, Gaarder covers the earliest Greeks—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenedes, Anaxagoras—through to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, all the way up to the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophers and then the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century thinkers of Marx, Darwin, and Freud. This is an incredibly powerful and compelling way to present philosophy, for it provides a sense of the provenance of philosophical ideas. We see how Socrates influenced Plato, and how Aristotle's interest in the natural world was in turn a reaction against Plato's obsession with divine forms. In particular, I loved learning about the impact of Greek philosophy on Christianity, including Augustine's attempts at syncretism, and the preservation of the Greek philosophers through the Arabs and the Byzantine Empire. Later, Alberto conveys the respective zeitgeists of the Renaissance, the Baroque period, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic period. It's a whirlwind tour but one that manages to hit all the right notes. As a grade 10 student largely ignorant of such history, it had a huge impact on me. Now I am more knowledgeable, but thanks to Sophie's mix of adolescent credulity and scepticism, it all feels new again. Of course, any such survey is bound to be incomplete in some way. Constraints of the novel's length, as well as dramatic requirements of the plot, mean that Gaarder cannot devote equal space and time to philosophers who might deserve it. He has to gloss over the contributions of the likes of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Bertrand Russell. While Gaarder begins his history quite broadly, a comprehensive theme quickly emerges, centred around the question of the nature of reality and our ability to perceive it as it truly is. As it turns out, Sophie's world is not such a straightforward place after all: Sophie, Alberto, and her entire world are in fact the creations of a UN major, Albert Knag. Sophie's World is a philosophical novel Knag wrote as a fifteenth birthday gift for his daughter, Hilde. The major scatters various birthday greetings to Hilde throughout the story: mostly they are in the form of birthday postcards, but sometimes he shows off. One time he writes them on the inside of an unpeeled banana. When this happens, Alberto likes to scowl and mutter something about bagatelles and how the major should be ashamed of himself for playing god with his creations in this manner. He then observes: "…it is feasible that they, too, are nothing of the mind." Sophie then goes on to speculate that, if this is possible, then it is also possible that the hidden author behind Hilde and Albert's actions is himself a character in a book: "Of course it is, Sophie. That's also a possibility. And if that is the way it is, it means he is permitting us to have this philosophical conversation in order to present this possibility. He wishes to emphasize that he, too, is a helpless shadow, and that this book, in which Hilde and Sophie appear, is in reality a textbook on philosophy." Oh. As Hilde and Sophie's birthday approaches, Alberto and Sophie conspire to escape the book. Gaarder cranks the meta-fictional deconstruction up to 11 when Alberto and Sophie succeed at this goal. And there my spoilers shall end, because I want you to read the book and am only going to tease you by whetting your appetite for what will prove to be a wild and amazing ride. I love this meta-fictional aspect of Sophie's World almost as much as I love how Gaarder encapsulates Western philosophy. This unique storytelling device is one of the reasons this book has stuck with me through the years; it has always been that "book where the characters escape from the book". Yet it's so much more than a mere bagatelle. Gaarder could have just had Alberto mention Berkeley's speculations and the possibility that we are all shadows on the cave wall, but would it have had the same impact? Putting these philosophical ideas into action, as it were, forces the reader to confront them and process them. More importantly, for the character of Sophie Amundsen, it offers hope—both the literal hope of escaping the major's control, but also a thematic escape from the expectations of society. Alberto does not sugar-coat his history. He doesn't hide from Sophie the misogynistic aspects of Aristotle and Hegel, and he laments the dearth of women in his story of philosophy—but when he can, he mentions those women who do play a role, such as Olympe de Gouges. So it is significant that Gaarder chose a young woman to be his protagonist. And with his meta-fictional escape plan, he empowers Sophie, saying, "Yes, fourteen-year-old girl, you can defy the expectations of your parents, of your teachers, of your society. You can be who you want to be, your own person. You can be a philosopher, and you can be awesome." I can't think of anything more uplifting than teaching a young person to think for themselves and question everything. Sophie's World. Read it. ...more |
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Jun 28, 2011
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May 29, 2011
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Paperback
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| B0DLT3G97X
| 4.01
| 342,161
| Jan 01, 1968
| 1988
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it was amazing
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This what A Wizard of Earthsea taught me: * To know a thing's true name is to know its nature. * Don't fuck with dragons (unless you know their true n This what A Wizard of Earthsea taught me: * To know a thing's true name is to know its nature. * Don't fuck with dragons (unless you know their true names). * Summoning the spirits of the dead is a bad idea, especially on a schoolboy dare. * Truly changing your form is dangerous, because you can become lost in the aspect you assume. * If you find yourself hunted, turn it around and become the hunter. * Above all else, know yourself. I don't know how I acquired this particular copy of A Wizard of Earthsea. It's an old, 1977 reprint that is, aside from its yellowing pages, in remarkably good condition for something that, in its day, cost $1.50 in Canada or 50 p in the UK. It bears no evidence of a previous owner, be that person, library, or used bookstore. Perhaps someone gave it to me. However I got it, I remember that I read A Wizard of Earthsea for a second time through this copy. I read it mostly in the backseat of my mom's van and then in a hair salon while waiting for her to get her hair done. So this book is firmly ensconced in my mind as a book I read "when I was younger," and I associate it with my childhood (even though I suspect I was probably in my early teens). When I first came upon China Miéville a few years ago, I was an adult and approached his books with an adult's ideas about fantasy. I've only ever known Miéville's works through the eyes of adulthood, and that is something outside of my control, but it definitely affects how I view his works. In contrast, Ursula K. Le Guin has been with me my entire life, stalking me, if you will. Curiously enough, her books have never played the formative role in my reading, especially my fantasy reading, that others like The Belgariad, A Song of Ice and Fire, or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy have done. I don't have a pithy story about reading a Le Guin book as a child or adolescent that then opened my eyes and inspired me to read more fantasy. So it's all the more intriguing that I distinctly remember Le Guin being in my life ever since childhood. I don't remember when I first read one of her books, only that I did. And when I pick up A Wizard of Earthsea, I'm connected to my childhood, to that memory of this particular copy, as well as to memories of reading fantasy in general. This is a gateway book, and that's why it means so much to me. If you don't have this type of connection to Le Guin or to A Wizard of Earthsea, I can understand how easy it is to dismiss this book as a 2- or 3-star endeavour. It's a condensed story with a small cast of characters who aren't necessarily the most intriguing bunch you'll ever meet. There's a lot of narration and exposition covering most of Ged's childhood and adolescent years. It's not exactly the big-budget, epic type of fantasy story that is so popular now. Nor is Ged your typical fantasy farm boy Called to be the Chosen One. He's a wizard of no small talent who, because he's a cocky adolescent boy, screws up and spends no small part of his adult life attempting to rectify the mistake. There's a lot of darkness in this book. It reminds me, this time around, of Arthurian legends: well-meaning, valorous people struggling against their darker selves, and sometimes losing. Even the Knights of the Round Table had the advantage of knowing they were heroes though—Ged is not a hero; he's just this guy, you know? He's not preternaturally gifted with good sense, so like any inexperienced adolescent, he makes bad decisions and is full of flaws. He ditches his master on Gont, Ogion, to go learn wizardry at Roke because he's eager to learn "real magic." He feels like Ogion is holding him back (we readers, of course, recognize that Ogion is the wise sensei who teaches his student the value of wisdom and work first). At Roke, Ged allows himself to be manipulated into magical pissing contests by his rival, Jasper. The result is the escape of a "shadow" into the world of Earthsea, and its encounter with Ged leaves it with some of his power and a hunger to absorb the rest of his aspect. This would be bad, for Ged, and for the world. But A Wizard for Earthsea shares with Arthurian legend that underlying motif of temptation and the sin of pride: people and magic continually tempt Ged, and his successes are measured in the varying degrees by which he overcomes and rejects those temptations. Sometimes he fails miserably, resulting in the unleashing of a gebbeth into the world! Other times, he succeeds admirably, such as in the case of the dragon Yevaud. Ged's encounter with the dragon of Pendor is nominally what turns him into a legendary "dragonlord." He manages to learn the dragon's true name, and with it he wrangles from the dragon a promise never to fly to the Archipelago. The safety of the islands of Earthsea thus secure, he departs Pendor to resume his life and his apparently-eternal flight from the gebbeth. Ged's confrontation with Yevaud is right out of the classical "man versus beast battle of wits" canon. What stuck with me for the rest of the book, however, was how Ged deals with Yevaud's brood. He ruthlessly does battle with these dragonspawn, killing six of them. Dragons in Le Guin's Earthsea are predators but intelligent ones: their speech is the same Old Speech from which Earthsea wizards draw power. So I can't help but feel that in slaying these creatures, Ged is wreaking destruction on a much larger scale. He's destroying something unique and wonderful, even if it is dangerous to humans. And Ged is rather cavalier about it: he goes to Pendor because he's decided to leave the town he was protecting from possible dragon attacks, and before he goes he wants to ensure the town will be safe. This is his first act of major wizardry as a full-fledged wizard, and it is interesting that it is one of destruction, even if it benefits those he swore to protect. After his encounter with Yevaud, Ged bums around Earthsea for a little while, faces another great trial, and almost doesn't survive. Fortunately he finds his way back to Ogion, who sets him straight and gives him the best possible advice: If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you turn you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter. If you read A Wizard of Earthsea as a straight fantasy story about good versus evil and wizards and dragons, you will probably be disappointed. Read this way, it's a good book, but it isn't great. It's too brief to be a satisfying epic meal. The strength of Wizard of Earthsea is neither its style nor its substance but its subtext. This book embodies "literary fiction" a lot better than much of what gets marketed under that term today. The cover of my edition, aside from its regrettable whitewashing of the characters, seems to support the idea that this is a children's book. The brief description on the back of the book continues this illusion: "A tale of wizards, dragons and terrifying shadows, in which the young wizard Sparrowhawk strives to destroy the evil shadow-beast he has let loose on the world." This description does not do the book justice, nor do I think calling A Wizard of Earthsea a "children's book" does any favours for the book or for children. This is not a children's book any more than other books that children or adults might read are "adult books." This is a book, a book for children and for adults, and frankly one that people should read early and often. I read A Wizard of Earthsea as a child, again as an adolescent, and now I've read it as an adult. Each time, I've read it slightly differently, and it has told me different things; my opinions of Le Guin and her works have changed as my perspective changes from childhood to adulthood. For me, A Wizard of Earthsea is memorable and magical because of what it teaches through its story. It deserves five stars because, for a fantastic tale at a slim 200 pages, this book seems to contain an inordinate amount of truth. My Reviews of the Earthsea series: The Tombs of Atuan � ...more |
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| 0140259198
| 9780140259193
| 0140259198
| 3.49
| 16,041
| Sep 1994
| Nov 1996
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really liked it
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Reading a book by Umberto Eco has become a yearly tradition since I joined Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, and for 2010 I just managed to squeeze The Island of the Day Bef
Reading a book by Umberto Eco has become a yearly tradition since I joined Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, and for 2010 I just managed to squeeze The Island of the Day Before under the wire. For the past two years, each Eco book has also made its respective year's list of the best ten books I read that year. If The Island does not join them in this honour, it is only because I have been lucky enough to read so many other great books in 2010. However, this is not a retrospective on my reading over the entire year; this is a book review. The reason I read one and only one Umberto Eco book is that Eco, more than any other author I have ever encountered, makes me think. His books are not transparent and not easy to read, but they are so good. The Name of the Rose was a fascinating medieval mystery that fanned the flames of my interest in medieval rhetoric. And do not get me started about Foucault's Pendulum , which remains one of my favourite books. Eco is erudite and eloquent in his style. He shows off his knowledge of history, but it's not done solely to impress the reader or display how much more he knows of the seventeenth century. Instead, Eco invites us to share in that knowledge through this narrative. In so doing, not only do we learn about this period, but we get exposed to Baroque ways of thinking and reasoning through the use of metaphor, allegory, and syllogism. At first, The Island of the Day Before seemed like it would employ the same meta-fictional ambiguity present in Foucault's Pendulum. When Roberto, himself the sole survivor of the shipwrecked Amaryllis arrives on the anchored yet abandoned Daphne, he soon discovers he is not alone. Someone else is stealing eggs from the hens, rummaging through the letters he writes to his lost, unrequited love: in short, there is an Intruder aboard. Roberto spends several chapters exploring the Daphne and trying to discover the nature of this Intruder. Who could it be? Another survivor from the Amaryllis? More likely, someone left aboard from the Daphne. Except the way that the narrator presents Roberto's search for this Intruder, interspersed with more flashbacks to his life growing up in La Griva, his coming-of-age at Casale, and his itinerant adventures in France, I started wondering if the Intruder was even real. It seemed more likely that the Intruder was like Ferrante, Roberto's imagined older brother banished for crimes unknown. One person cautioned me not to see too many similarities between these two books. He is right: for one thing, the Intruder turned out to be real. That disappointed me at first, but I quickly adapted. After all, Eco's style is just so enchanting that it is impossible to stay mad at him for long, even when his narratives do not take the turns you want or expect. Plus, the metamorphosis of the Intruder into Father Caspar gives Roberto a welcome companion on the Daphne and provides us with numerous interesting conversations and debates. Eco gives us a crash course in Baroque methods of argument and reasoning as Caspar and Roberto debate heliocentrism and physics. I love the way Eco captures the modes of thinking of the time. We and the narrator both know about John Harrison and that Galileo and Copernicus were indeed correct. But Eco is so good at portraying an authentic seventeenth-century mindset. I loved the flashbacks too. Eco reminds me why I tend to prefer British historical fiction: continental European history is so damn convoluted! You have all these little city-states, republics, kingdoms related through marriage and blood and empires that may or may not have control over their protectorates. It is not at all unified, often confusing, and very chaotic. But I loved reading about Roberto's involvement at Casale, his suspicions that Ferrante was the traitor, and his subsequent troubles in Paris. Roberto is an interesting character: not all that smart, but very educated and, above all, imaginative. This last quality proves essential for helping him survive, although it is also rather dangerous. Imagination is the quintessential ingredient to The Island of the Day Before. It allows Roberto to conjure up his brother, Ferrante, and later create an entire Romance in which he is the hero, Ferrante the villain, and Lilia the love interest. Also, imagination allows the narrator to construct this story we're reading from the extant papers written by Roberto. It is important to remember that the story does not come directly from Roberto. Roberto begins by writing several letters to Lilia, whom our narrator first calls "the Lady." Later, after the Intruder has been introduced as Father Caspar, those letters stop, but Roberto continues to record his observations and his actions. Yet he did not record everything, and not everything he recorded survived and made its way to our narrator's hands intact. And how do we know our narrator does not have some sort of bias or agenda? So there is a necessary amount of interpolation and extrapolation happening here, resulting from not one but two unreliable narrators. This hearkens back to Foucault's Pendulum. More than anything, I think Eco loves to experiment with the substance of stories as vehicles of thought. He isn't experimenting with story structure in the sense of how one tells a story but in the sense of how the story conveys his impressions of the Baroque period. The result are arguments and conversations between Roberto and people like Cardinal Mazarin or Father Caspar about longitude and the heliocentric theory. And then there is Padre Emanuele's Aristotelian Telescope, a machine made to construct metaphors! The most obvious way to experiment with this particular story lies in its resolution. The Island of the Day Before is, at its core, a castaway story. Indeed, I was wary when I began reading, because with castaway stories, you basically have two options: either the castaway gets rescued, or he dies. So I was interested to see which route Eco would take with Roberto's shipwreck aboard the Daphne. At some point, I reasoned, Roberto would have to visit the island. But Eco dangled this goal in front of me like a carrot, drawing out Roberto's eventual departure across the hundred-eightieth meridian and into the "day before" for the length of the entire book. And it was worth the wait. The Island of the Day Before did not impress me quite as much as the two other books I have read. I lay the blame for this squarely at Roberto's feet, because as a protagonist he is quite different from Adso and Casaubon, who were both learned and literary fellows. Roberto, while educated and literate, is nobility. Despite his presence at Casale, he knows little of real war and has spent a good amount of his time carousing through the less reputable streets of Paris. He is endearing more for his helplessness and his predicament than out of any true empathy he inspires; I want him to succeed and survive more because no one deserves to be shipwrecked on a ship. But if I were shipwrecked on a ship, I hope it's because I'm in an Umberto Eco novel. I hope I would get to stare longingly at an island trapped one day in my past and construct a romance of my own devising for my lost love, who has been seduced by my evil yet fictitious older brother. I hope I would get to converse with a rather odd Jesuit who probably meets an untimely end trying to reach the island. Although, truth be told, I would much rather be the narrator, who seems the best off of any Eco's characters. The Island of the Day Before is delectable. It is not my favourite book by Umberto Eco, but it has all the hallmarks that make him one of my favourite authors—and in fact, I think I would recommend this book to people who are interested in Eco but not sure if they could make it through The Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum. This is the same, yet different. Even though it is not quite as impressive, it is no less wonderful. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 26, 2010
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Dec 29, 2010
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Jul 11, 2010
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765322161
| 9780765322166
| 0765322161
| 3.80
| 6,534
| May 11, 2010
| May 11, 2010
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really liked it
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I »å´Ç²Ô’t much like economics. I like Cory Doctorow’s metaphor here in For the Win of the economy like a train: most people have no idea where it’s goin
I »å´Ç²Ô’t much like economics. I like Cory Doctorow’s metaphor here in For the Win of the economy like a train: most people have no idea where it’s going, or whether the driver is even still alive; while economists speculate on all of this, some people pay attention to them while others just ignore them entirely and watch the scenery go by. I »å´Ç²Ô’t much like economics, but I guess I should admit that the economy is important. Similarly, I won’t accept the cop-out idea that it’s impossible to comprehend economics unless you’re some kind of genius. That’s why I love Doctorow’s didactic novels: he is so good at taking a subject he is clearly passionate about and breaking it down into easier-to-understand lessons. So, yes, For the Win has a lot of pointed lectures about economic theories, from investments and hedge funds to shortselling and market panic—but it’s all couched in examples from fictitious game economies. I love that. The cast of this novel is also stunning. Doctorow assembles quite a diverse bunch: Chinese gold farmers and dissidents, Indonesian labour rights advocates, Indian gold farmer–busting gamers, etc. There are gamers and economists, concerned parents and bemused traditional union leaders. Most importantly, these characters »å´Ç²Ô’t always get along. Mala and Yasmin’s opinions diverge in Dharavi, only for the two to be drawn back together after a dangerous confrontation. Even then, they »å´Ç²Ô’t always see eye-to-eye. I like stories where the protagonists have this kind of low-level conflict—conflict not for drama’s sake, mind you, but in the service of acknowledging that it is seldom clear what the “rightâ€� thing to do is. Most of the main characters change quite a bit. Doctorow allows some time to elapse between each major part of the novel. By skipping forward in this way, he can bring us to new and interesting impasses, whether it’s the rift between Mala and Yasmin or Wei-Dong’s crazy plan to smuggle himself into China. One notable impression this makes is how privileged I am, as a Western reader, compared to many of the characters in this book. There is a deceptive and dangerous idea that somehow technology, particularly the Internet, is somehow going to liberate people in developing nations from oppression and unjust labour and create a more equal society. That’s clearly not the case here: Mala and her army have access to the Internet, but it’s just another tool that her boss uses to keep her oppressed and dependent on him for income and protection. On the flip side, Doctorow shows us how the Internet and related technologies can be forces for good, when used as one might use any other tool. The Webbly gold farmers take the very same economies that others use to oppress them and, by cornering the gold markets, take those economies hostage for their own ends. Doctorow distills the basic tenets of union and labour philosophy in a very simple way: one or two people standing up for themselves will end badly; nearly everyone standing up for each other makes a statement so loud the world can hear. The resolution is somewhat unrealistic, perhaps, in its scope, although there are tinges of bittersweetness to it. It’s appropriate enough given the big, dramatic nature of the entire plot. And throughout the novel, Doctorow shows realistically enough the brutal ways in which those in power respond to people’s attempts to organize and unionize; he does not pull his punches there. He makes me feel such pitch-perfect pathos for these characters, both the ones who suffer and the ones who survive. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush of the moment and that feeling of power and triumph; he encourages you to get a piece of that elation. There’s so much more going on, though, and he captures that too. For the Win has a great deal of nuance, then. It’s not light reading, in the sense that Doctorow does digress on many points economical. But he does this through examples in games and game economies. He takes the topical—but global—idea of games and how those make money for companies and marries it with the issue of cheap and abusive labour practices. The result is a sometimes bizarre but somewhat brilliant piece of contemporary science fiction, and I, for one, feel much improved and much entertained having read it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 28, 2016
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May 30, 2016
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May 07, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0771011423
| 9780771011429
| 0771011423
| 3.90
| 13,425
| 2006
| Mar 24, 2009
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it was ok
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I love it when a book leaves me feeling so deeply ambivalent. I mean, I would prefer it if I could just outright love Genesis, no ambivalence necessar
I love it when a book leaves me feeling so deeply ambivalent. I mean, I would prefer it if I could just outright love Genesis, no ambivalence necessary. But I would rather ambivalence than apathy. Bernard Beckett has clearly put a lot of effort into crafting this deep, philosophical dialogue. It’s a beautifully constructed piece of literature. But I also »å¾±»å²Ô’t really like it that much. Anaximander, or Anax as she is called, is taking her Exam for entrance into the Academy, the school/university/ruling body of this wonderful little island set in a post-apocalyptic world after humanity’s Fall, if you will. Anax tells the three Examiners about the life of Adam Forde, a disruptive element who lived near the beginning of the Republic. At first it seems like the story is about how Adam allowed a young woman trying to reach the Republic in a boat live instead of executing her on sight. Actually, though, this is a story about artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and the capacity within ourselves to do violence—and what that means to be human. Genesis is essentially an extended philosophical dialogue between Anax and the Examiners, with a story-within-the-story element where Anax is telling us about Adam’s life and his eventual, philosophical debates with an AI named Art. Immediately I was disappointed. I think some of my disappointment comes from what I expected, given the name and the cover copy—together, these just screamed “standard YA dystopiaâ€� in my head, and that’s what I was thinking about when I started reading. Never mind that the book kind of transcends that somewhat overdone setting. When you get right down to it, though, reading a whole book—albeit a short one—about someone taking an oral exam is just â€� um, dull. Even with the story-in-a-story, there’s just too much stasis. Anax grows and changes very little throughout the book, and everyone except her and Adam (and maybe Art) are very vague, stock characters. Genesis wrestles with deep, thought-provoking questions—yet as a story, it’s actually very shallow. There is little enough plot here. I really admire this moxie on Beckett’s part. And, as my recent re-read of Sophie’s World, or any number of my reviews of Doctorow or Stephenson works, will attest, I’m happy to read books that are more philosophy than they are well-executed stories. Still â€� when you get right down to it, the story is the thing. Genesis is a philosophical dialogue that is only barely dressed up as a story, and it doesn’t quite pass muster for me. Even if I could set that aside, the philosophical elements »å¾±»å²Ô’t stir up much thought from me either. Beckett really only skims the surface of these ideas. I »å´Ç²Ô’t think this novel is actually very YA, so I »å´Ç²Ô’t think that’s an excuse—and even if it were YA, I think teens can handle more than Beckett throws at us here. Adam’s conversations with a smarmy and self-satisfied Art are more grating than gratifying. The twist at the end is uninteresting, because there really is no consequence to it. As an arthouse style move, I suppose it’s supposed to put the cherry on top of the clever cake Beckett has just spent an hour unveiling for us. In the end, Genesis reminds me why I love novels so much. It’s really easy, actually, to do what Beckett does here, and just carve out any semblance of plot or story. This might work better as some kind of small-cast play (tighten up the scenes, of course, add in a swordfight or twoâ€�). It’s much more difficult to take these kinds of deep ideas and then tell them through allegory. I think there is a lot of good, thoughtful stuff in this book, and I’m not sorry I gave it a shot. But it »å¾±»å²Ô’t leave my jaw wide open or my mind blown to pieces. It’s just kind of â€� a book, with good parts and bad. I »å´Ç²Ô’t want to diminish what Beckett manages to do here, but I’m also not that impressed. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 23, 2018
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Feb 24, 2018
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Apr 19, 2010
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0441783589
| 4.01
| 239,354
| Dec 1959
| May 1987
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really liked it
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To be completely honest, boot camp was my favourite part of this book. Everything after that seemed like a long denouement until the inevitable final
To be completely honest, boot camp was my favourite part of this book. Everything after that seemed like a long denouement until the inevitable final page; boot camp was where the real character development happens. And this is an intensely character-driven book. Some people are critical of it because it lacks a plot, and they're correct on that point. It's not short on conflict, however. The conflict is just very personal. Also, I find Heinlein's descriptions of military disposition and protocol fascinating—more fascinating even than the action, which is probably a good thing, considering how many times Heinlein has Johnnie say something like, "I won't describe this next part. . . ." Since we acknowledge that this piece is part propaganda and all polemic, making a connection between the narrator and the reader is essential. Heinlein gives Johnnie a voice that does just that. We understand why he's signing up for the Mobile Infantry, why he contemplates dropping out of boot camp, and why he stays in. (Heinlein's choice of writing in the first person was apt, but once or twice it leads to contrived circumstances required for Johnnie to overhear other peoples' conversations.) Above all, Johnnie Rico is fallible: he isn't the super-competent action hero we often see in contemporary military thrillers. In fact, he's just a kid, which is no doubt why this novel appeals to adolescent readers. Johnnie's experience at boot camp changes him (for the better, we're supposed to believe), moulds him from boy to man. I must admit, Heinlein makes military life seem very appealing in certain respects: discipline, but fair discipline; training; camaraderie, etc. It is an idealized portrayal though. When I first contemplated my review, I was going to laud Starship Troopers for its "realistic" portrayal of soldiering. But then I thought better of it and realized that, while there is some realism here, Heinlein omits quite a bit. Like, all the bad stuff. Johnnie experiences mild hardship at boot camp, people around him die in training and in combat, and he nearly dies himself in the climactic encounter with the Bugs. Yet he never undergoes a real crisis. He contemplates dropping out once or twice, and his mother dies, but Johnnie doesn't seriously question his convictions. Nor does he face any real challenges to his decision to "go career" and become an officer. Johnnie isn't perfect, and he makes mistakes, but all his mistakes are minor and easy to overlook. I suppose it's a tribute to Heinlein's skill as a writer that I almost overlooked this flaw in the book. I was so interested in learning what happens to Johnnie that I didn't notice, while reading, that nothing bad happens. A lack of realism does not a bad book make; after all, this is science fiction! And what's with that, anyway? Some reviewers seem to think that Starship Troopers is unnecessarily science fiction, that one could transpose the protagonist to a contemporary or twentieth-century war setting and tell the same story, with the same themes. Not so. The "starship" in Starship Troopers is integral to this book. Firstly, Heinlein needs the faceless alien enemy always within grasp of a science fiction narrative. The Bugs are not human and do not even have a recognizably human hierarchy. They are, as their name implies if not their physiognomy, a collective, colony-oriented species, like ants or bees. This is important, because Heinlein needs an enemy with whom we can't sympathize. If Starship Troopers were set in a non-science fiction contemporary Earth, then the enemies would have to be humans. And that would mean having to refute whatever philosophy espoused by the human enemies. The Bug philosophy, if they have one, is irrelevant to the conflict: they're trying to expand into human territory, and humanity is resisting by taking the war to them. Since they lack human motivations, we don't have to stop and question whether their side has a compelling reason for acting as it does. Secondly, there's something appealing about the "soldier of the future" that Johnnie Rico exemplifies. This may be related to the individualist/"army of one" mentality that [American:] society is prone to endorse. Heinlein embodies this mentality in the novum of the powered suit, which literally turns a single soldier into a walking, talking zone of destruction. When suited up, one becomes "more" of a solider, because the powered suit isn't a vehicle so much as it is an extension of one's own body. One isn't operating a weapon so much as one is the weapon now. The final, and hopefully obvious, reason is that Heinlein needs the fictitious Terran Federation as an example of his ideal government. No such example exists on contemporary Earth; indeed, it's precisely a situation like this that calls for the "thought experiment" laboratory of science fiction. Starship Troopers isn't meant to be predictive; Heinlein isn't saying that he thinks we'll be battling bugs for real estate in the 22nd century. Instead, the 22nd century is just a convenient setting in which Heinlein can construct the society he needs for his polemic. Regardless of how one feels about the contents of that polemic, Starship Troopers is a wonderful example of what science fiction can accomplish that non-genre fiction would find difficult. I've been ignoring the actual philosophy belonging to Starship Troopers, because I don't want my opinion of that philosophy to distort my review of the book. You should read this book, even if you don't agree with Heinlein's politics. The issue of what form of government is best is far from settled. We have, in Canada and the United States, a "total representative democracy," as Heinlein might call it. Everyone theoretically can vote, although in practice our democracy puts limits on franchise—the Federation's limits are just more overt and widely applicable. So already, the prevailing philosophies and Heinlein's philosophy agree that enfranchisement isn't a right so much as a privilege; contemporary democracies just tend to extend the privilege to everyone of a certain age by default. (My personal view is that a shadow oligarchy is the best form of government in theory; by shadow, I mean that the public shouldn't be aware of the oligarchy's existence. Yes, that means we could have a shadow oligarchy right now and not know about it, although I'm not so paranoid as to actually suggest that. Anyway, there are numerous practical problems with this form of government such that it's probably a very bad idea to implement it in the real world, and it's not really germane to Starship Troopers, so I'll end this aside now.) You have to give Heinlein credit for not only discussing the problems with his contemporary society but for proposing solutions. There's a trend in non-fiction these days to identify aggressively the "problem" but then hide behind a claim that the book is just "an analysis" and offer no actual solution to the problem. Sometimes the author is a good enough writer to get away with this, and I still enjoy the book. Most often it's just annoying. Heinlein identifies what he sees as problems with his society and says, "This is how we can fix it." Kudos! Heinlein's idea of limiting franchise to those who have served in the military (or an equivalent service organization) is interesting. I think it makes more sense, in a way, to make such a responsibility voluntary rather than use conscription, such as Switzerland does: if people want to vote, they have to serve, but they aren't required to vote. The resistance Johnnie encounters from the recruiting officer makes it clear that, at least in peacetime, the military is burdened with having to find "make-work" projects for all the people determined to gain citizenship. This isn't exactly an evil fascist enterprise to mould everyone into automatons. There's a benefit to Heinlein's model that he makes explicitly clear toward the end of the book: So what difference is there between our voters and wielders of franchise in the past? . . . Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. There's two key phrases there: voluntary and personal advantage. Conscription might force people to experience a taste of military life, but it removes any element of choice from the equation: everyone has to serve, so how do we determine who wants the responsibilities that come along with service? Also, Heinlein believes that those who have served, on average, value the group over personal gain. We see this in contemporary politics all the time: if one candidate has had military service, he or she may find this an advantage, because it confirms him or her as "patriot," i.e., someone willing to put the safety of the country above his or her personal survival. Don't you want people like that governing your country? I find Heinlein's argument for limiting franchise intriguing and not as silly as some critics claim. Still, the conscientious objector in me questions whether his harsh approach to justice is necessary. He seems to be making certain assumptions about how rational we are, as human beings and particularly as children, that are worth a deeper investigation than we see here. That is, I wonder if there is a better way to determine who should qualify for franchise than military service. That isn't a question Starship Troopers tries to answer, which is fine. It still tries to answer questions worth asking. So read the book. And ask them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 20, 2010
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Feb 21, 2010
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Feb 20, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0380788624
| 9780380788620
| 0380788624
| 4.23
| 115,066
| May 1999
| May 03, 2000
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did not like it
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Look, this isn’t really a novel. Huh. Is there an echo in here? I was thinking it had been several years since I last read a Neal Stephenson novel, but Look, this isn’t really a novel. Huh. Is there an echo in here? I was thinking it had been several years since I last read a Neal Stephenson novel, but it turns out to be just under a year. I borrowed Cryptonomicon from a friend’s mother, because it’s truly not on that I’m a mathematician by training yet haven’t read the most mathematical Stephenson work. I put off reading it for a few weeks, because I knew that it would take a while. This past week was probably not the best week to read it—then again, would there have been a best week? I got lots of programming done on my website while avoiding this book, though. This book is ostensibly about codes and code-breaking. I’d liken it to The Imitation Game, except I also have managed to skip that one somehow—and anyway, Alan Turing and Bletchley Park feature much less prominently here. Rather, Cryptonomicon follows a fictional friend of Turing’s, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who is a genius codebreaker. Waterhouse serves in the American armed forces during World War II, where he breaks codes (duh) and gets involved in other unlikely shenanigans. Stephenson develops this plot in parallel with one set in the present day (which is to say, 1999, which is, gosh, 18 years ago now). Lawrence’s grandson, Randy, ends up interacting with the descendants of many of the other characters from Lawrence’s story, as he and a friend try to set up a data haven off the coast of the Philippines. That’s ostensibly the plot, but like I said, this isn’t really a novel and the story isn’t really a story. It’s more of a loose narrative framework around which Stephenson erects pages-long diatribes on coding, computer science, mathematics, and other very nerdy stuff. It is much like his later efforts of Anathem and Seveneves, which are more about the philosophy of mathematics and how humanity might adapt to life in space, respectively, although of the three novels this one might have something most recognizable as a plot. I’m not afraid to admit to skimming large portions of this novel. It’s not necessary to â€� experience â€� every word of Cryptonomicon to follow it. The connections among the characters are fairly heavy-handed, with Stephenson giving the reader plenty of opportunities to notice a familiar name, symbol, or meme showing up in a different place and time. Additionally, I can tolerate the fairly frequent tangents Stephenson has his characters go off on to explain one mathematical or cryptological concept or other; I’m less tolerant of how this spills over into the descriptions of simplest actions. Randy can’t possibly open his car door, no—this occasions nothing less than three meaty paragraphs on the manufacture of his car and the way the angle of the car door makes Randy think about a line of Perl code he wrote back in his university days. Perl, by the way, is a script people often use on UNIXâ€�. Seriously, this book is not a well-edited, well-paced, well-plotted adventure. It’s Neal Stephenson making shit up about guys named Lawrence and Randy so he can tell you all the cool computer things he knows. And to his credit, he manages to often be entertaining while doing so. For the most part, I enjoyed the segments that follow Lawrence. The role of code-breaking in World War II, and its concurrent stimulation of the invention of electronic computing, is an interesting subject that is often overlooked in historical treatments of that time. In addition to explaining how certain code systems worked and how the Allies broke these codes, Stephenson also takes the time to show us, rather than merely tell us, how encrypted communications were essential to the war effort. Moreover, he also points out the difficulty of breaking codes in wartime: you »å´Ç²Ô’t want the enemy to know their codes are broken, because then they will change to a different code. So you have to throw them off the scent, so to speak, and create fake reasons for why you knew what the enemy was going to do. I »å´Ç²Ô’t know how accurate this is to actual activities during the war, but it’s a fun corollary thought experiment to the whole activity of intercepting and reading enemy messages. There’s also a fair amount of humour in here. I liked the highly fictionalized, summarized communiques between Bischoff and Donitz. I liked the portrayal of Colonel Comstock’s preparations for a meeting with Lawrence, girding himself and his team as if they were about to go into an actual battle. Similarly, although I was less enamoured of the present-day plot and characters, I still like the general ideas. Stephenson was ahead of the curve when it came to talking about cryptocurrencies and even data havens. These ideas seem almost saturated, old hat here in 2017—but I imagine that in 1999, when the Web was still kind of a space for hackers and academics and military types, it was all cutting edge. Stephenson makes a strong case that there are different types of heroism, and that having a strong technical background can be just as valuable as being able to fight or being educated in a scholarly field like law. I just wish that I »å¾±»å²Ô’t have to wade through so much dull or outright dumb stuff to get to the good bits of this book. This is the third book in a row I’m dragging for having a rubbish depiction of women. Honestly, people, it isn’t hard, but let’s go over the basics again so we stop screwing this up. Maybe you should have women as main characters? There are very few named women characters in this book. Most of them exist as sexual and romantic interests for the men, who are the main characters. Maybe your women should exist for reasons other than sexytimes? Amy Shaftoe is the closest we get to a female main character in this book. She is not a viewpoint character. She does not have an appreciable arc. She has an illusion of agency, but this is largely undermined by her purpose to exist as a manic pixie dreamgirl for Randy. Stephenson seems to confuse “strong female characterâ€� with “does lots of physical stuff/wears a leather jacket/I must imply that she might be a lesbian at least five timesâ€�. Maybe you should stop being creepy? Cryptonomicon is super male-gazey in about every sense of the term. The narrator constantly mentions how much Lawrence or Randy need to masturbate, have sex, or otherwise ejaculate before they can “focusâ€�. The male characters from both time periods make sexist remarks, talk about women, look at and objectify women, etc., in ways that are boorish and chauvinistic and stereotypical. There are more examples of this than I can count or possibly mention here. At one point, Randy and Avi are discussing a lawsuit directed at their fledgling company. Avi compares the lawsuit with a mating ritual, saying that their company is a “desirable femaleâ€� and the lawsuit bringer wants to mate with them, and this is his way of posturing. Later in the novel, Randy spends a few pages mulling over how some women are “just wiredâ€� to want to be submissive to men, and that’s why Charlene ended up leaving him, because of course as a computer god, his brain can’t possibly be wired to understand little things like social cues. (It’s actually amazing, in a way, how Stephenson can manage to perpetuate stereotypes against both women and male nerds at the same time.) It’s gross, is what it is. In any other book it would be bad enough. What really bothers me about its presence in Cryptonomicon is how it compounds, and has perhaps even influenced, given its age and status in the genre now, the portrayal of technologically-adept/minded folks (call them nerds, geeks, hackers, whatever). Young women interested in cryptography deserve to read a story about cryptography without constantly seeing the few female characters in the book objectified or reduced down to “biologically, women want to submit and have sex!â€� Young men shouldn’t see this kind of behaviour rationalized or played for laughs; they shouldn’t receive the message that nerds are somehow “programmedâ€� to be socially awkward and therefore it’s OK to be creepy and male gazey all the time. So Cryptonomicon is a book with a bunch of good bits too few and scattered among less good or downright weird and gross bits that I »å¾±»å²Ô’t much appreciate. The mathematical, code-breaking parts of this book are goodâ€�really good. But, I mean, I kind of wish I had access to an abridged version with just those parts? Because wading through the, say, 80% of the book that isn’t those parts is just not worth the effort. Honestly, so far the best depiction of mathematics in fiction I’ve come across is The Housekeeper and the Professor , which doesn’t only depict math but also humanizes it intensely. (And before you ask, no, I haven’t read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but I certainly plan to steal—uh, borrow—a copy lying around school one of these days.) Cryptonomicon tries to be a math nerd’s wet dream, but Stephenson’s insistence on mentioning his male charactersâ€� wet dreams just doesn’t work for me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 11, 2017
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Feb 19, 2017
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Jan 22, 2010
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140167935
| 9780140167931
| B000TQ9MT0
| 4.02
| 6,662
| Nov 20, 1972
| Jan 01, 1992
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it was amazing
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The Manticore begins by betraying us. Dunstan Ramsay, that incorrigible saint-chasing old man who provided the heart and soul and voice of Fifth Busin
The Manticore begins by betraying us. Dunstan Ramsay, that incorrigible saint-chasing old man who provided the heart and soul and voice of Fifth Business, is no longer our narrator. Instead, this is the story of David Staunton, the son of Dunstan's lifelong frenemy, Boy Staunton. At the end of Fifth Business, Boy dies, and now David has gone to Zurich seeking the wisdom of a Jungian analyst to make sense of his behaviour since his father's death. Partly an exploration of the psychology of Jung and partly a work of biographical fiction akin to Fifth Business, The Manticore is a journey into David's past and into his psyche. The analysis is both more and less than a framing device. It allows Davies to depart from some of the entrenched conventions of the modern novel, rendering David's narration in the form of journal-like entries interspersed with script-like dialogue between himself and Dr. von Haller. The events intersect tangentially with those of Fifth Business, providing at times a different perspective on characters familiar from the first book. Probably the most interesting differences are David's thoughts on Ramsay himself, of course, as well as how David perceives his father's character. However, this is not just a retelling of Fifth Business; after all, David was a minor player in that book, barely on the reader's radar and notable only, really, because he happens to be Boy's son. The Manticore gives David his own history, fleshing him out as a person, and also gives him his own voice, one quite distinct from Ramsay's. Though this is the "Deptford trilogy," the return to Deptford in this book is brief and not all that notable. The village is not depicted here so much as mentioned as a milieu for some of David's boyhood experiences with his grandfather and his ever-present nanny/housekeeper/maternal figure, Netty. Indeed, places and locations are much less prominent in The Manticore than they were in Fifth Business. I'll hazard that this is because David, telling this in the form of his analytic journey, is focusing on the people of his past, not the places. The characters, though always at arms-length from us, are much more important than where they are or what they're doing. And in this case, because we are interested in learning how David projects his own thoughts and feelings onto other people, the somewhat surreal quality of the other characters is not a problem but an advantage. This is one of the few times where a character is actually allowed to be an archetype rather than a three-dimensional person. As von Haller guides David through his analysis, she points out how the people in his life have assumed various aspects within his conscious and unconscious mind. His sister, Caroline; Netty; his mother, Leola; his stepmother, Denyse; and his first and only love, Judith, have all at times carried the role of the Anima. His law professor, Pargetter, is the Magus, and onto Netty's brother David projects his own Shadow. The characters in The Manticore morph from people into Jungian archetypes before our very eyes. I'm hesitant to comment on how Davies incorporates Jung, because all I've learned about Jungian philosophy has been through the Deptford trilogy. So it's entirely possible Davies has gotten something wrong. With that caveat in mind, however, I quite enjoy the Deptford trilogy as a vehicle for Jungian philosophy. I imagine alone the subject might be rather dry, whereas this is a kind of "case study" that provides more suitable material. Davies also includes a subtle tension between Jungian and Freudian methodologies: he overtly pans the latter at certain points, but one of the "subplots," if you will, concerns David's ongoing sexual abstinence. If The Manticore were written using Freudian analysis instead, this would likely be the centrepiece of the entire book. And while David's sexual life is important to understanding him, it's only one part of the puzzle. I have to admit that I find Jung's psychology more appealing than Freud's, as much as I find any psychology appealing (which is not very). I mean, it asks us to look at the people in our lives in terms of archetypes and deconstruct how we project our desires upon them, interpreting them to fit into roles we define. This is very literary way of viewing the world, and hence appeals to me, a lover of literature. Archetypes are always very mythological, which recalls Ramsay's syncretism of history and myth and his obsession with saints. Just as, in Ramsay's view, history consists of repeating patterns of myth, each person's life consists of repeating patterns of archetypes, as we project these archetypes onto our new acquaintances. There's a very comforting dualism at work here between the psychology of the individual and the psychology of the society. Not being a student of psychology or well-versed in Jung's theories and his critics, of course, I don't know how well they stand up to further scrutiny. For the purposes of a novel, however, they are quite compelling. For all his endorsement of Jungian psychology, though, I think Davies injects a healthy amount of psychological agnosticism into The Manticore as well. By that I mean, he rather slyly advocates for making one's own decisions and having the courage to analyze oneself when appropriate. He reminds us that Freud, Jung, Adler, et al all had to begin somewhere: Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too? That's from Liesl, who reprises her role as sceptic and Devil's advocate. Jung's archetypes did not just spring forth from the head of Zeus fully-formed; no, he developed them over time through his own reflection and introspection. Hence, any psychology theory is not the end of the framework of one's analysis; it's only the beginning. It provides tools and training to start an individual down the long road, where the journey lasts a lifetime and the destination is always beyond the horizon. If The Manticore has one flaw, it's that it's not Fifth Business. Such is my admiration for the first book in this trilogy: I have a hard time giving The Manticore five stars, though I think it's quite worthy of each and every one. I understand why Davies chose to depart from the voice of Ramsay in this book, and David is a competent replacement—but he's not Ramsay. He can't be. And though I know it's not rational, this not-being-Ramsay is a stumbling block in my enjoyment of this book. But I got over it. I had to. The Manticore is both a companion and a sequel to Fifth Business: it revisits and continues events from the previous book, while providing a whole parallel biography that's rich in its own way. While it's not necessary for you to have read Fifth Business to read The Manticore, I don't see why you would skip the first book. Similarly, if you read Fifth Business it's possible to stop and never open this book—but in that case, I think you would be making a mistake. It's not that they are meant to be read together, but the books of the Deptford trilogy are like the movements in a single, encompassing symphony. Each is its own piece, exquisite, but it's the sum total of all three books that elevates them from excellent to truly remarkable. The Manticore builds upon the themes begun in Fifth Business, and all the while it tells us the story of another man attempting to make sense of the death of his father. My Reviews of the Deptford Trilogy: � Fifth Business | World of Wonders � ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Apr 12, 2011
not set
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Apr 14, 2011
not set
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Dec 07, 2009
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765312794
| 9780765312792
| 0765312794
| 3.72
| 5,870
| Oct 27, 2009
| Oct 27, 2009
|
it was ok
|
Economics is weird. The economy is a social system. Once upon a time, it was based somewhat in reality, with gold standards and natural resources form
Economics is weird. The economy is a social system. Once upon a time, it was based somewhat in reality, with gold standards and natural resources forming a large part of this anchor. At present, it has transformed into a mostly speculative beast, the taming of which is the goal of any number of hedge fund managers, stock market analysts, and economics professors with cushy degrees from Ivy League or wannabe-Ivy League schools. To make matters worse, the economy is based on the behaviour of people. And people, as a group, are not only irrational but stupid. So the economy is in for a treat. Makers is to economics what Little Brother is to national security and civil liberties. Cory Doctorow ventures into that curious nexus of technological innovation, outdated corporate laws, dinosaur business models perpetuated by incumbent players, and strong-willed individuals who want to rock the boat. Although definitely science fiction, like Little Brother this book invokes technology that is available in the present day, focusing on the differences such technology is making rather than speculating upon the differences technology will make. In some sense we have always lived in an information economy, because ultimately it all comes down to information in one form or another. Yet the information economy has never been more obvious in the present era, because technology has removed the barrier to the exchange of pure information. This so-called digital economy threatens incumbent business models—and the corporations that became successful through such models—because digital often turns scarcity into plenty. Makers uses 3D printers to represent this transition to plenty. But this is more than just making things; it's about what we choose to make. The point of the DIY ("do it yourself") movement is making objects—designing them, constructing them, watching them succeed or fail or adapt to new purposes—is a rewarding effort. Lester and Perry are innovators, and that's what makes them essential to Kettlewell's New Work vision. In a society that tends toward individualism, corporations like Google are succeeding by embracing that individualism, encouraging the creativity of individuals and small groups, then reaping the ideas that result. New Work is the ultimate corporate takeover, harnessing the very bootstraps-entrepreneurial strategy so praised in the United States to generate huge new profits. It is both terrifying and amazing. Of course, those corporations entrenched in the old paradigms will resist. This is where the law enters the story. Intellectual property law is a morass of complicated statutes, precedents, and procedures. Unfortunately, sometimes corporations will use these laws to eliminate competition. Those corporations want the law to remain as it is—or favour them even more—even as the government faces pressure to change the law in the face of changing technologies and business models. Disney (somewhat predictably, knowing Doctorow) plays the role of corporate antagonist in Makers. Everything goes swimmingly with the ride until pieces of Disney rides begin appearing in it; then Disney slaps the ride with an injunction and a trademark infringement lawsuit. Although the conflict presents Disney as the Big Bad Corporation out to get the Little Guy, the resolution is more nuanced and realistic in its views. Lester and Perry compromise, make a deal with a Disney executive, in return for personal creative freedom. Makers is not about revolution but evolution. Its tone may sound anti-corporation at times, but really it is only anti-dinosaur. Those corporations that adapt will survive. I revel in the way Makers chronicles some of the challenges facing corporations and individuals alike. That is about all it is good at doing, however. The characters are flat, and the story meanders through a flow chart of plot points Doctorow feels are essential to his theme. The jacket copy is somewhat misleading; it implies that Lester's "fatkins" treatment causes his falling out with Perry. While fatkins was a contributing factor, Lester and Perry's relationship deteriorates for several reasons, the main one being time and diverging interests. I don't blame Doctorow for the jacket copy. I do, however, expect deeper stories than what Makers delivers. Every problem the protagonists face can be conquered by a combination of message board posts, blogging, and passing it off to the legal experts. There is one obnoxious antagonist who is a straw man for anti-innovation bloggers (the kinds of sticks-in-the-mud who are unhappy whenever anyone is successful, and usually when they fail too). To be fair, the characters do change and learn from their conflicts. Lester and Perry's relationship transforms dramatically; Susan's life changes as she follows her dream; Sammy starts off as a suit and discovers he can have his cake and eat it too. So I'm even more puzzled than I usually am, because for all the dynamics in their relationships, these characters have no chemistry. For example, consider the scene in which Kettlewell admits to having an affair (we saw this coming). There is no drama, no repercussions. Nothing fundamentally changes after this admission. He could have said, "I am going to paint my white picket fence with a different brand of white paint" and engendered the same reader response. I just do not feel invested in these characters or their plights. But maybe that's just Kettlewell—after all, he is a minor character. Surely we feel more inclined toward drama over Lester and Perry? Not really. Hilda, whom Lester dubs Yoko, becomes an unwilling wedge between the two DIY-ers (we saw this coming). Hilda and Perry just sort of hook up and have a one night stand, and suddenly it's love. But Hilda never really does anything Yoko-ish. Lester is the one who has created a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing Perry away in response to a stimulus that isn't there, projecting his own desires for distance. Still, the arguments Lester and Perry have do not feel like arguments. They are dialogues from two slightly different perspectives to communicate a point. Speaking of Perry and Hilda, let's talk about the sex scenes. Or not. Awkward. . . . Moving on. Makers starts with a bang but ends with a whimper. The quality of the prose remains consistent—consistently mediocre—but while the story starts strong, it soon becomes streamlined and perfunctory, like it's a Disney ride and we're just sitting there, watching it happen. Despite a Big Bad Corporation coming over for dinner and spats among the protagonists about the best way to run the rides, I never felt like the stakes were very high or that anyone had much to lose. As much as I love the premise and the execution of its ideas, Makers is much ado about nothing as far as I'm concerned. I thought Little Brother rocked hard enough to make it one of my . With that book, Doctorow offers up a polemic, yes, but one that is truly worth the time, even if one disagrees with his argument. Makers lacks that worthwhile attribute. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 04, 2010
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Jul 07, 2010
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Nov 15, 2009
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0441016790
| 9780441016792
| 0441016790
| 3.82
| 8,383
| Apr 07, 2009
| Apr 07, 2009
|
it was amazing
|
Seldom does a book live up to blurbs like "Unforgettable. Impossible to put down," as Jack McDevitt says of Wake. Usually, such claims are empty hype,
Seldom does a book live up to blurbs like "Unforgettable. Impossible to put down," as Jack McDevitt says of Wake. Usually, such claims are empty hype, even when the book is good. Not so with Wake. I agree wholeheartedly with McDevitt, for I was 100 pages into the novel before realizing it was 2 AM and I should probably get some sleep. There's no way that Wake could be mistaken for "an action-packed thrill ride" or any of those other tired blurb clichés floating around in the critique pool, but "impossible to put down" definitely describes the opening to Robert J. Sawyer's new trilogy about an emerging artificial intelligence. For a fairly short volume, and one that lacks any sort of action or suspense, there's a lot packed into Wake. The central plot, which deals with Caitlin Decter's bid to gain sight and how this leads her to discover the Web's emergent intelligence, happens against a backdrop of the ongoing information wars in China and research into primate intelligence in the United States. Sawyer makes accurate allusions to current technology and scientific developments. This sense of scope and style reminds me of how Cory Doctorow writes about technology in his books. With ease, these authors transcribe to paper actions and descriptions about technology we use every day but don't always pause to understand how we use it. Moreover, because the descriptions are accurate, Sawyer is educating the less technologically-adept even as he immerses us in this very human plot. So kudos. I call the plot of this book "human," even though it concerns an AI, because the nature of being human is the motif that connects all of the disparate subplots in Wake. I wish that something beyond theme connected these subplots; the critic in me has to profess disappointment that Hobo the chimp's story is only tangential to Caitlin's, at least for now. This is a structural issue with the narrative, however, and it doesn't detract from the thematic brilliance of Sawyer's writing. Caitlin often refers to Helen Keller and her writing, as well as a book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind . She mentions Keller's descriptions of what her thought processes were like before she learned how to communicate and interact with the external world. Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness similarly discusses a theory about a turning point in human history where the two halves of the brain managed to talk to each other and act on conscious thoughts instead of instinct. In China, the Communist Party decides to kill several thousand people in a remote province to eliminate the threat of H5N1. To prevent the Chinese people from seeing the inevitable backlash of the world media, it severs all communication outside of China. These are the actions of humans, yet the idea of killing thousands of people merely to prevent the spread of an infection seems, at least to me, very inhuman. Then there's the bonobo-chimpanzee hybrid, Hobo, who can communicate via sign language and startles everyone when he paints representational art—a profile of one of his researchers—instead of the typical abstract pictures so far produced by non-human primates. The way Sawyer portrays Hobo makes him seem far more human than he actually is, and this is where, as a sceptic, I have to balk. Artificial intelligence aside, this is probably the part of the book that relies the most on extrapolation of something we haven't achieved yet. I do believe it's possible for apes to use sign language to communicate intelligently; don't get me wrong. And Sawyer's portrayal of Hobo's humanity serves its purpose of parallelling the development of the Web AI. This final piece of the plot puzzle is what connects the other three, of course. When China puts up the Great Firewall, it severs this non-sentient entity into two, suddenly enabling it to begin conceiving of time and eventually abstract thought. From there, it begins to learn and teach itself new concepts, something that continues up to and after Caitlin discovers its existence. Sawyer does his best to portray the alien nature of this intelligence's journey toward sentience while still describing it in terms we can comprehend. For the most part, he pulls this off, although I preferred the observations that Caitlin, her father, and Dr. Kuroda make about the intelligence's composition as cellular automata over Sawyer's first-person depictions of the intelligence. The former were just so unique yet tantalizing, since it really drives home the point that the Web is a fluctuating network of constant streaming data and not some sort of static series of Facebook pages and Google search results all stored in a database and delivered to your browser when you hit "Go." To return to the motif of humanity, however, I'd like to point out a section toward the end of the book, in which Caitlin leads the emerging intelligence to Wikipedia, which it consumes eagerly, and then onto Project Gutenberg: And then, and then, and thenâ€� Firstly, I'd like to note that Sawyer has described precisely how I feel about books, about reading in general, and about wonderful libraries like Project Gutenberg. But if you're reading this review, you're probably on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, and you probably understand, so I won't belabour that point. Secondly, while Sawyer is far from the first SF author or scientist to make this point, it's an important one when it comes to discussing how to deal with an artificial intelligence, should we create one or should one emerge spontaneously as it does in Wake. It's going to learn. Fast. And the information we feed it will determine what opinions it forms about humanity. Read over that last paragraph again. In eight hours, the AI consumes the sum total of Project Gutenberg's library (this is after it's partaken in Wikipedia and in Cyc, an encyclopedia tool specifically designed for teaching AIs). In so doing, it has consumed all these myriad works of humanity, works that talk about being human, whether they're philosophy or fiction or scientific in origin . . . and it's seen our history. How we've treated each other, continue to treat each other, and how we've treated this planet. An intelligence that emerges from the World Wide Web emerges from the combined knowledge and information that we humans put on the Web. So even if this intelligence itself is not human, everything it learns is going to be a product of humanity, at least at first. Whether consciously or not, we're going to shape the first opinions of an emergent intelligence. It's something worth considering. Beyond the human angle, Sawyer's crammed so much in here that I'm not sure where to start. So let's talk about Caitlin's blindness. I'm not blind, so I'm certainly not congenitally blind, and as such, I'll never really know what Caitlin's world is like. Yet Sawyer at least gave me an inkling of what it's like to be blind, both from a conceptual perspective and a technological one. One thing I noticed is that instead of providing visual descriptions of places and people around Caitlin, Sawyer is always careful to describe in terms of sound, touch, and smell. Caitlin concludes Dr. Kuroda is tall because of the direction from which his voice comes but heavy because of the way he wheezes. We don't know if he's bald or has thick hair or blue eyes. As someone who doesn't really visualize things when I read, I didn't miss the lack of visual description and appreciated this change. Sawyer also introduced me to how the blind and visually-impaired interact with the Web. Oh, I already knew about screenreaders like JAWS and refreshable Braille displays, etc., but this was the first time I'd really thought about how they get used. For Caitlin, this was all just normal for her, and through her eyes I began to understand how it was possible to interact with the world in this way. And beyond her blindness, as a person, Caitlin is a well-thought-out character. She's "feisty" as the jacket copy promises, but she isn't perfect—she has a few melt-downs and tantrums. Still, Sawyer manages to make her a realistic LiveJournal-using, ebook-reading, iPod-listening teen without making her into a caricature or stereotype. Now if only she could kick that nasty exposition habit she develops in the second third of the book. . . . This is why it was so hard to put down Wake and why the first thing I did upon waking today was pick it up and finish it. Sawyer makes me think, but he also makes me look at stuff I already think about in different ways. He does this with Caitlin, and he also does this with China. "The Great Firewall of China" is a pretty well-known term on the Web. Most people are aware of the Chinese government's tight control over the Internet in China, both in terms of access and in terms of content—Google's controversial decision to censor its search results, China's tendency to block websites that it finds too seditious or inappropriate, the spyware built into the networks and the computers themselves, etc. Let's be honest for a moment. For those of us reading Wake in North America or Europe, that's half a world away, and the public consciousness has a fleeting attention span. Sawyer reminds us that the oppression in China has been ongoing for decades now, and even if the People's Republic is doomed as some projections claim, that won't stop them from committing further atrocities before they fade into history. Fortunately, it isn't all grim: dissidents are using the Internet to fight back. And while the increasing globalization of the economy does prop up the communist government, it also makes it harder for that government to simply cut off all ties from the outside world. Unlike North Korea, which has fewer people and doesn't make stuff for Wal-Mart, China is dependent on the outside world. The Web connects us, and even when censored, offers hope for freedom. We live in exciting times. Well, I suspect that we've always lived in exciting times ever since our bicameral minds fused and we started to keep track of time. But don't doubt that here and now, the present, is full of wonders. Just as Apollo 8's photographs of Earth from space changed how we perceive ourselves, so too is the Web changing how we interact. The advancements in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology . . . everything we uncover only shows that there's more to learn, but if you thought the Renaissance was exciting, just recall that we know so much more now. We can be terrible, cruel, nearly insane . . . but when we come together to do good, we can be a wonderful species. Wake reminded me of that, of the good and the bad about humanity, of the incredible events and discoveries happening all around us every day. It reaffirmed my desire to read and watch and grow and know more, my love of learning, and my love of life. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 30, 2009
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Oct 20, 2009
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Hardcover
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|
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|
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my rating |
|
|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.97
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 30, 2018
|
Jan 27, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.82
|
it was ok
|
Jul 21, 2016
|
Jul 22, 2016
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|||||
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| 4.00
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 10, 2016
|
Feb 10, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
liked it
|
Dec 19, 2015
|
Nov 27, 2015
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|||||
|
| 3.71
|
really liked it
|
Oct 11, 2015
|
Oct 06, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.44
|
did not like it
|
Jul 19, 2014
|
Jul 15, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 3.85
|
it was ok
|
Oct 12, 2018
|
Feb 02, 2013
|
|||||
|
| 3.73
|
liked it
|
Jul 04, 2015
|
Oct 08, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 4.11
|
liked it
|
Jul 24, 2012
|
Jul 22, 2012
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|||||
|
| 3.50
|
really liked it
|
Dec 30, 2011
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Dec 28, 2011
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|||||
|
| 3.97
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 28, 2011
|
May 29, 2011
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|||||
|
| 4.01
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 04, 2011
not set
not set
|
Apr 03, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.49
|
really liked it
|
Dec 29, 2010
|
Jul 11, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
really liked it
|
May 30, 2016
|
May 07, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 3.90
|
it was ok
|
Feb 24, 2018
|
Apr 19, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.01
|
really liked it
|
Feb 21, 2010
|
Feb 20, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.23
|
did not like it
|
Feb 19, 2017
|
Jan 22, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 14, 2011
not set
|
Dec 07, 2009
|
|||||
|
| 3.72
|
it was ok
|
Jul 07, 2010
|
Nov 15, 2009
|
|||||
|
| 3.82
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 30, 2009
|
Oct 20, 2009
|
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