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A few years back, Law & Order had an episode where the killer planted a body part in the wreckage of the World Trade Center so that the crime would be covered up, looking instead like collateral damage from 9/11. It almost worked (but didn't, of course) and got me thinking that the same type of plot device could be used in a different historical context, for instance the London Blitzkrieg during World War II.

So of course I began working the idea around in my head: a body is found in the rubble of a London building, and it turns out to have been planted there to cover up a murder. But since I've very little experience reading detective fiction I've decided that rather than trying to put that idea to paper myself, some writer out there must already have tackled the subject of mystery fiction set during World War II London. And I'd rather like to read it.

So, the question: does anyone know of such fiction, and/or could point me in the right direction? (Besides Amazon and Google searches, I mean. I'll do that too, but those are no substitutes for actual recommendations.)

Two books are currently in my "active" pile right now (that is, that I'm actively reading):

Beer in America: The Early Years 1587-1840, by Gregg Smith. Interesting, though I just started. Too soon to tell if it's grabbing me as much as Ambitious Brew did.

Don Quixote. The "Wordsworth Classics" paperback edition, and truth be told I'm slogging rather slowly through it; I have a theory or two as to why.

First of all, it might be the translation; older or more "literary" translations seem to be drier, somehow, and lose the spirit of the original (e.g., rousing adventure story). I think a fresh(er) approach would work wonders.

Second, and this might be a symptom of translation, the format is incredibly dense and hard to follow—small type with run-on sentences and dialog that are all combined in single paragraphs that can span pages. Just breaking up the dialog into eye-friendly chunks would work wonders.

Finally, my current pet theory is that these classic literary authors were working without word processors, so editing and revising was such a pain in the ass that they just published first drafts. Which any editor will tell you are pretty unreadable.

Cervantes could have shaved off a good 50,000 words if he'd just had access to a computer. It would work wonders.

I mentioned awhile back that I received Neal Stephenson's Anathem for my birthday. This is his latest novel, a monstrous tome that weighs in at nearly 1000 pages, and was released in the latter half of last year. Early reviews seemed really lukewarm to me, in part because of the reveal that Stephenson employs a large invented vocabulary—which often seems to be a crutch or gimmick in the hands of inexperienced writers (not that Stephenson is one)—and in part because it seemed like following up The Baroque Cycle would be really, really hard.

Well, forget all that. Anathem is a fantastic book, and Stephenson's best to date. Not only has he matured as a writer (leaps and bounds past his earlier works), he's put together a tightly-plotted, internally consistent story that's just dripping with good ideas and has at least one jaw-dropping, mind-blowing concept that, well, becomes a key plot point.

And, this book actually comes to a solid, satisfying conclusion—one of the major criticisms I've had with his earlier works.

It's simply a joy to read, and I actually wanted to re-read it almost as soon as I'd finished. That's a difficult trick to pull off.

Since the year is now three-quarters over, I thought I'd post about some of the best books I've read so far for 2008. Yes, I'm keeping track (again).

Fiction:

• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. So, so messed up. Really curious to see how the movie turns out.
• World War Z, by Max Brooks. Really well-done zombie mockumentary.
• Coalescent, by Stephen Baxter. I actually found this book to be in some ways frustrating, but overall I think it was a well-done departure for Baxter. Though he does revert to some of his own cliches too.
• Hornet Flight, by Ken Follett. Very pleasantly surprised by this World War II-era thriller.
• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. Holy crap this is a most excellent book.
• Spook Country, by William Gibson. I really liked his earlier Pattern Recognition, and the same applies here.

Non-fiction:

• Ambitious Brew, by Maureen Ogle. A history of American brewing, from the mid-1800s onward. Very engaging.
• Cabin Fever, by William Sullivan. Simply a fun book to read.

I've read several beer/brewing books this year, but they were more technical and I don't really rate for that.

This past year I kept track of all the books I read. Why, I'm not entirely sure, other than curiosity. All in all, not counting the large number of comics and comic trade paperbacks, I read 35½ books in 2007. (The "half" book was a book of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft; I'd read the first half ages ago.)

The ratio of fiction to non-fiction was about 2-to-1. And even though most of these books weren't actually published in 2007, that's irrelevant since that's when I read them and this list is simply based on my opinion anyway... just use it as a starting point for some really good reads.

(And while all the books I read were pretty good, these were the standouts.)

Best fiction books (no particular order)

• Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. I haven't yet read Gibson's latest (Spook Country), but Pattern Recognition was so amazingly well-done that it (finally) toppled Neuromancer as Gibson's best work.
• Halting State, by Charles Stross. This was the year I picked up and started reading Stross' work (four novels) and Halting State, the newest, is the best so far. Way fun and full of irritatingly thought-provoking ideas. In a good way, of course.
• Cell, by Stephen King. I already extolled the virtues of Cell here. Great book, tightly plotted, gripping and satisfying.
• The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx. Didn't see this one coming, but I was totally engrossed.

Best nonfiction books (no particular order)

• Collapse, by Jared Diamond. Like his last book, Diamond takes mountains of information and evidence and seemingly unconnected facts and weaves them all together effortlessly so as to make them seem completely obvious.
• The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. Historical medical detectives. Or "CSI: Victorian London." Whichever, it's really good. A little squicky, too.
• Listening for Coyote, by William Sullivan. Sullivan hiked across Oregon, from Port Orford (I think) to Hells Canyon, and kept a fantastically detailed diary along the way. Super readable and enjoyable.

Just to get something on here, jeez...

• Halting State by Charles Stross
• The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
• Collapse by Jared Diamond
• The Way We Ate by Jacqueline B. Williams

No real commentary, though I found all of these to be good. Particularly the Charlie Stross novels.

Sometime in the distant past when I put the link to my Amazon wishlist here on the site, I wondered if it would actually inspire people to buy me stuff from it or if it was just a vanity move (I use that wishlist as much as a bookmark system as an actual list of things I'd like to buy someday). I figure it was mostly a vanity thing; I truly did not expect anyone to buy me anything from it.

So imagine my surprise when a package from Amazon came to the door, with the book Halting State (newly added to my wishlist) inside. At first it was real head-scratcher; I didn't remember at first that I had published the wishlist link and then I was confused because it listed me at an older mailing address (one of something like the 6(!) addresses that Amazon had on file that had slipped through the cracks) but had made it here anyhow.

(I know, I'm supposed to be out on the leading edge of this internet thing, right?)

Once I realized what had happened, I was astounded; a PHP developer named Dave Ross had found my PHP stemmer script and it had saved him a lot of work (his words) and in gratitude, he bought the book for me. I guess I was astounded because I put those PHP scripts online for free, and I enjoy helping people out who have questions about them and incorporating improvements that they send to me; it's an open source thing, I suppose, and I'm just glad I can put something out there that's useful to people, but the thought of compensation didn't occur to me in this case.

Okay, enough being naive, get to the point. Thank you, Dave, for the extremely generous gift. I'm glad I was (indirectly) able to help you out. And I hope I can repay the favor sometime in the future.

It's the gift economy. Sometimes it rears up and slaps you in the face. In a good way.

Over the past week and a half I read through two zombie novels: Monster Island and Monster Nation, both by David Wellington. Now I'm the first to admit that I'm not a true aficionado of the zombie genre; aside from Stephen King's Cell, I can't think of any other books I've read, and I've only seen a handful of movies. That being said, I really enjoyed both books. They're well-written and entertaining, real page turners. If you don't mind the squick factor involved with the cannibalistic undead, of course.

But then, you know, zombies. If you pick up a book subtitled "A Zombie Novel", I'm guessing you don't mind that so much.

But the more interesting aspect to the novels were what drew me to them in the first place: the author first published them online on a blog, in serial format. In fact, he's publishing all of his (recent) novels online first, in the same way; it was based on the success of these blog novels that he landed a brick-and-mortar publisher to put his words to paper. That's cool. That's really cool.

More and more, that seems to me to be the future of publishing.

Oh, and Wellington just had the third novel in his zombie trilogy published: Monster Planet. I'm debating whether to read it online first, or wait for the library to get the hardcopy in.

Don't let the title completely fool you, this entry is a rant, as much as anything else. And don't think that I'm some sort of pop culture otaku; I'm usually behind the curve when it comes to such things, especially music.

But I seem to consume a fair amount of it anyway, and so here we are.

What do I really have to say about pop culture? Read on...

So far this 2007 I've been consuming bunches of books. Kind of continuing my trend from last year, though based what I've gone through in these first six weeks of the year, my year-end list might be much larger.

• Lisey's Story, by Stephen King. His latest, pretty good but not the best he's ever written. I had a pretty good hunch where the plot was going and I was mostly right. What makes it interesting is all the backstory which is where all the real stuff is happening.
• Manifold: Origin, by Stephen Baxter. Rounding out the Manifold series he wrote (the first two of which I read in the last months of 2006). Interesting concepts, all of them (he wrote them as possible solutions/scenarios to the Fermi paradox), but one thing Baxter generally isn't good at is characterization. And Origin, plot-wise, is the weakest of the bunch; a lot of stuff happens that has nothing to do with the final reveal, or the overall point of the story.
• High Desert of Central Oregon and Bend in Central Oregon, both by Raymond Hatton, which I reviewed respectively on Hack Bend here and here.
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Sure to be controversial. Oddly enough, it's the first Dawkins book I've read, even though he's been publishing since the '70s. He's been called "Darwin's rottweiler," and that's pretty much in full force here.
• Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson. Pretty good read—it's Gibson, after all—but I think my least favorite of his three "Sprawl" novels. Neuromancer set a pretty high bar.
• I've been going through all the trade paperbacks of the Fables comic series (available at the library, which is very cool). This is a really brilliant series. The premise: All those fairy tales and fables of lore are real, but they've all been driven out of their worlds by a mysterious Adversary, and live in New York City in their own private and secret community named Fabletown. King Cole is the mayor, Snow White the deputy mayor, like that. For mature readers. I'm through the first seven trades, at least three were this year.
• The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. Pretty good, about the cholera outbreak in Victorian London in 1854 and how that changed science and cities.
• I'm also finishing up Bend, Overall by Scott Cook, though that's quite a bit shorter than most of the others. It's a guidebook read.

Next book will be fiction again. I haven't decided on one definitively yet; it's between Idoru (William Gibson), Wolves of the Calla or Cell (Stephen King), Singularity Sky (Charles Stross), and A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge). Or, perhaps I'll read several concurrently...

I've been on a reading tear over the summer, mostly all good books, and I thought I'd be a little self-indulgent and list what I've read with some comments.

• Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. It clocks in at something like 3,000 pages total, but it was by far the best thing I read this year. Maybe several years.
• Virtual Light, by William Gibson.
• Spam Kings, by Brian McWilliams.
• Gray Lensman and Second Stage Lensmen by E.E. Smith. Two middle volumes of what is often considered to be the "best space opera series of all time." Written in the '40s, so they're somewhat dated, but pretty good. I don't know about Best of All Time good, but worth a read nonetheless.
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein.
• A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr. Different from what I was expecting from the description on the back cover.
• Still slogging through Gödel, Escher, Bach. Unfinished.
• Across the River and Into the Trees, by Hemingway. Tough to get excited about this one.
• Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. I'm reading this one now, it's very good.

It's like my regular Lost Book Watch feature or something. Anyway, right there on the screen in your face, Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I don't know that it has anything to do with the overall theme or plot of the show; since Sawyer was reading it, I rather suspect the producers are just having fun with us.

"Us" being those people like myself who have nothing better to do than blog about the books that show up on Lost...

I've been informally keeping track of the books that appear on Lost, so of course I caught tonight's little Easter egg. Anyone else catch the title of the book Locke was shaking through when Sawyer found him in the hatch? The text on the cover read "Owl Creek Bridge", and a quick sweep on Wikipedia reveals:

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a short story by Ambrose Bierce originally written in 1886.... [It] is the story of a man who is sentenced to death by hanging at the Owl Creek Bridge of the title.

You can go to the page to read the spoilers about it, I won't reveal them here. What's interesting is, I remember seeing this on an old episode of The Twilight Zone!

I don't know if it's supposed to fit into the show's mythology, or the writers just liked the book enough to put it in there and mess with people's heads. I suppose that could go either way...

It's amazing what they're publishing in For Dummies books these days... I almost wish I had made this up:

Pit Bulls for Dummies

This just makes me laugh. The fact that it's for real just makes this that much more irrationally funny to me...

An idea, and a question (or the other way around). I've always liked astronomy; growing up I had several astronomy books and a small telescope, I eagerly consumed news and information about space (I had a newspaper photo clipping of Saturn as taken from Voyager taped to my wall), and I took Astronomy for my physics elective in college, and one thing that always struck me was how outdated the various books I had were, even though they were relatively new (at the time I got them). You would read some theoretical composition of Jupiter's atmosphere even as data was coming in updating and contradicting the old information.

So I was thinking the other day of the planet Pluto and how it has three moons now (I don't remember the context), and how this information could potentially change some fundamental conception of the solar system, and yet it would probably take a year, maybe 18 months before this would make it into the latest and greatest book on astronomy. And I thought, wouldn't it be neat if there was an open (as in open source) astronomy book online somewhere, maybe like a wiki, that was textbook-quality and was kept up-to-date with the latest discoveries? People could freely access it, print it out, download a copy, whatever, and it would always be relevant.

The question: Does such a thing exist already? Now, I'm familiar with Wikibooks, the self-described "open-content textbooks collection," but their Astronomy book is paltry at best. (It might make a good starting point, though.) So does anyone know of something like this?

If not, I might start it myself. It would make a neat hobby, at the very least.

(And if it worked, this would make a good model for other books that could be open and possibly wiki-fied. I've got a few ideas.)

No, my title doesn't really have to do with anything... I just thought I'd use the first thing that popped to mind when I started this entry. This is pretty much a plain-vanilla blog entry, with some ramblings about books and such.

I've been reading Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson lately, getting close to the end. It and Red Mars—great books. I'm not sure if I'm going to start reading Blue Mars (the final book in the trilogy) right away, or start something else; I've been anxious to start Quicksilver, of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, but that's a monster book in its own right... Plus, I'm halfway through How the Mind Works, by Stephen Pinker, and that's pretty interesting stuff, too.

What's sad awesome is I went and bought a bunch more books with my gift card and Christmas money. I'd better get reading!

I'll have some more 2005 wrap-up stuff written tomorrow, too. And I'll do another "Chuggnutt Zeitgeist" chock-full of stats and trivia. Perfect for all the navel gazers out there. Executive summary: traffic was up from 2004. Nice, eh?

Blogging has been light lately because I've been reading The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven, and just finished it up last night. It was a decent enough novel, and a decent sequel to the original Ringworld, though I think I liked the original better.

Niven does a great job of building a complex, consistent universe and then coming up with logical, consistent solutions to the puzzles he throws at his characters. And the Ringworld—and his Known Space universe—is a compelling one to play in. This story is no different. He brings back most of the characters from the first book, 23 years later, and drops them on the Ringworld with a seemingly impossible task: save it before it crashes into the sun. (The first book merely had them explore and ultimately escape when things went wrong.) He pulls this off in a satisfying way.

One of things I thought was weak to the point of distracting was the overuse of interspecies sex. Niven contrived this practice among the Ringworld natives as a bargaining tool, to seal deals, to avoid mating within a species, and just as a general titillating contrivance. Yeah, odd, and unconvincing. It smacks of "dirty old man" syndrome, or a cheap male fantasy (a world with free no-strings-attached sex!). There's nothing explicit or pornographic—it's just annoying. There's no real point to it, it just seems gratuitous, and that makes weak writing.

In general, I like the stuff Niven and Jerry Pournelle produce together better than just Niven's work alone—although granted, I've only read these first two Ringworld novels, and he has quite a body of work that I haven't touched, so it may not be a fair comparison.

Overall, Engineers is a good summer read. Watch out for sequel-itis, though: you defintely need to read the original Ringworld to follow what's going on. (And speaking of sequel-itis, I observe that there are two more sequels in this series... good grief...)

The latest book I'm immersed in (one of them, anyway) is A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. So far I'm hooked (I'm about a quarter of the way into it), it's totally compelling science fiction. And it's a refreshing reminder that there's really no limit to what you can do, story-wise, with well-done sci-fi.

Ah, it's always nice to have the "summer vacation" from TV and have time to catch up on my reading :).

Over the weekend I finished reading The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Fantastic book, albeit one that defied my expectations, and I thought I'd write a short review.

I picked this book up because I loved the concept: an alternate history novel that explores the question, what if the Black Death of the 14th century wiped out 99% of Europe? The world becomes dominated by Islam and Buddhism, the Chinese discover America, Christianity is a footnote in history.

It's divided into ten Books (basically chapters), each of which covers a later time and place as the alternate history unfolds. The breadth and scope of this project is surprising and mind-boggling; Robinson has gone to an obsessive level of thought and detail in constructing this history, and it's entirely believable. The amount of research must have been enormous.

It surprised me on several levels; the main one was the storytelling technique Robinson used in tying each story in the ten Books together to provide a sense of continuity while keeping each distinct. I won't go into detail here—the Amazon reviews do, and I think that spoils it a bit—and while I had my doubts, it ultimately works.

This isn't science fiction in the die-hard sense, though (insomuch as alternate history tends to get classified as science fiction because nobody really knows how else to classify it). It's much more a meditation on sociology, religion, history, politics, etc., on a world-wide scale. Very different than what I thought it would be. Yet very good. I totally recommend it.

The February issue of Discover Magazine has an interesting article about Project Orion: a project that was developed during the '50s and '60s to build a spaceship that was as big as a skyscraper, weighed eight million pounds, and was propelled by—get this—nuclear bombs.

While Discover's article was good, focusing more on the people and policies involved, Wikipedia's Project Orion page is excellent, and delves much more into the hard science. It sounds on the one hand totally insane and on the other hand perfectly logical and obvious. But you gotta wonder at the audacity of a design that would have required 800 (or more) nuclear explosions just to lift the ship into Earth orbit 300 miles up...

Interestingly, an Orion ship is a major plot point in one of my all-time favorite science fiction books, Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A great book, probably the best alien invasion story out there, period—Niven and Pournelle simply rock. What else can I say? I totally recommend it. It would make a perfect movie, done right, but if nothing else, read the book.

I don't know why exactly, but for some reason I always think in terms of buying and owning a book when I want to read it. And if the money's not handy (it usually isn't), I resign myself to possibly getting the book as a gift for my birthday or Christmas. Ironically, I almost never think of the library, so it's always pleasant to "discover" how good and useful the library is.

Today I picked up I'm Just Here For the Food from the library, a book I've been coveting for some time now but (of course) hadn't been willing to shell out the $32.50 (ouch!) for. (I just started it but so far, it's a really good book. It already answered one of the main questions I have from Alton Brown's TV show—why does he use kosher salt all the time?) And since I rediscovered how nice the library is, I've already added 3 other books to my account to keep an eye on via the online interface.

Online? Yeah, the Deschutes Public Library website has a complete catalog interface that lets you do, well, anything via the web that you can do in the library: search the catalog, request items from other libraries, place holds... okay, this isn't news to people who are, well, literate and visit the library. But I still think it's pretty nifty.

So go visit a library! They rock!