Well, here we are at another one of the multi book report posts. Do you guys prefer this digest form or is it better when I post just one book at a time?
You see, when I post one book at a time, I start feeling like all I talk about is books, and that starts feeling .. um .. very unsatisfying. I do have to do something with myself or I’ll go insane, but when I am forced to take that step back and realize that what I do is Read Books .. well, then I start feeling really pathetically useless as a human being.
But then I’ll read something I really want to share, or I’ll read many that I want to share a little, and it just reaches critical mass in my head and I’m posting a 3-book post. Again.
So, if you’d rather see one book, one report, let me know and I’ll get over myself. If you don’t mind the multi book reports, just let me float along as is and I’ll stop wondering if the multi-book format is acceptable.
I guess it would be more acceptable (in my head) if the three books had anything in common. But they rarely do … case in point …
The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
Amazon
As the French Revolution got started, one of the things the idealist revolutionaries decided to do was reform all the measurement systems and go metric. Their invented metric system was to reform all human activity into these rational units, based on idealist notions of equality, reason, science … all very French Revolution stuff (pre-Terror, that is). So they have metric length, weight, volume, time, etc. (though the metric calendar and metric clock never really caught on). But it can’t be merely good enough – these measures have to be worthy of the idealists who conceived them. They have to be perfect. They have to be the final definitive word on the concept of all measurements.
So … as the French Revolution is ramping up and deciding whether or not to become the Terror, these two proto-geographers are sent out on a geodetic survey of the French countryside. While the political world is falling apart and the rest of the world may be following suit, these two guys spend almost a decade walking the length of the nation (one the north and one the south) and measuring their latitude and longitude as precisely as they can, so that they can return home (if Paris is still standing) and calculate the precise circumference of the globe, so that the meter can be precisely set as a fraction of that circumference.
OK .. the whole setup is Just Crazy, but things go up a notch when one of them – the one who went South – finds himself (due to political realities, ie, Spain is now at war with France) taken back to a spot in Spain where he was a year or so ago, and since he’s bored and they let him keep his equipment, he re-measures the lat/long from where he is now, just a few miles from where he was last year …. and the two measurements DON’T MATCH.
This is where things get really crazy. He can’t stand that his measurements don’t match. This is the Definitive Measurement For All Time. He is the Chosen Representative Of The Perfection Which Is Science. So … he does what any reasonable person would do and goes flat out crazy. He falsifies his data. He refuses to turn over his records. He becomes paranoid about his assistants and his bosses.
The falsified records are used to establish the length of the meter. The scientific community lauds the astonishing self-consistency of his data; so much better than that of his colleague whose data is occasionally whole centimeters off. The scientific community would love for him to publish his records and doesn’t understand why he seems so twitchy about it. Eventually, he dies, the records pass to the other member of the geodetic team (the guy who went North), and he spots the falsification but goes ahead and publishes. His idea is that you just gather data as best you can and let the results sort themselves out – tres modern, eh?
And the final, sad thing … scientific progress comes around, calculus develops the concept of error – that there is a difference between accuracy and precision, that error might not have anything to do with you. And with those tools, folks have gone back to those original measurements .. turns out the contemporary model of the planet didn’t fully compensate for the difference in real-world surface features. There wasn’t anything wrong with his (first guys) data at all .. the equation itself was faulty and didn’t fully account for the difference in elevation from his two measurements.
The guy went crazy, the meter is based on falsified data, and it was All For NOTHING!!
The book was great. Detailed this quixotic mission beautifully, detailed the personalities of the key players beautifully. His prose was clear, his chapters were well organized, his idea was well presented. Very good book.
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
Amazon
I have been told I should read this book for a while; pretty much since it came out.
Well. You should all read this book. It is awesome.
The primary author has autism and a PhD, she has a real empathy for animals and is able to pull in the medical, psychiatric, and neurologic data to back up her intuited hypothesis. In this book, she looks at the emotional lives of animals, how that connects with the brain structures and functions, the different similarities between brain structures of animals, people with autism, and ‘normal’ people, what the continuum of perception and emotion and mental processing is and might be betwixt these three groups.
She is most familiar with cows, horses, and dogs, so they form the base of most of her examples. However, she also includes observations from marine mammals, cats, other primates, and birds. And the thing is, so much of what she’s saying just makes sense. It may not be anything you’ve thought of before, but when you read it, it’s so very clear. Like a whole book of ‘Aha!’ moments. I even got to test one of them while reading … I’d just finished the chapter on visual perception, and because I was looking for it, noticed that Mileva was just totally fixated on a particular spot of the wall. I got down at her level, looked at that spot .. and sure enough, it was exactly the type of pattern the book highlit as being exceptionally mind-catching for an animal. I went over, changed the pattern, and Mileva was then able to interact with me, to not stare at the wall.
When I finished, I felt like I understood the cats better, understood all animals a bit better, understood autism a bit better, and even understood my own mental processing a bit better. And even with all that understanding, it was a very easy read – the ideas just sort of flow off the page and into your head.
All Very Cool Stuff.
Sunshine
Amazon
And now for something Completely Different.
Different from the other books I’ve just reviewed, from the type of books I’ve been reading in the last umpteen years, from the other books the author has written … Completely Different (sort of).
I’ve read almost everything Robin McKinley has written, barring 3 books (that I know of). Pretty firmly in the fantasy/fiction, fairy tale re-write, young adult section. And then there’s Sunshine. Vampire novel, and enough violence and sex to keep it waaaay away from the young adults.
It was marvelous.
I got it and read it all that very night in one great reading marathon. I was caught in the book, a rare sensation that I just love. And not one that I allow unless the book really earns it. And this was no Harry Potter, swallow the pages whole thing; this was dense text with words like deliquesce and mise en scene. I had to go look mise en scene up (after I finished the book). And when an author can send me scuttling to a dictionary, I just love them for it. (barring pretentious authors trying to intimidate by using a thesaurus to mimic a vocabulary. I still look the word up, but it makes me huffy. I mean – amanuensis? Puh-leassse..)
I don’t know how Sunshine compares to the rest of the vampire genre (since I haven’t read any other vampire novels). But it was good; McKinley has a way of painting a scene and making it real, even when it’s a fairy tale .. or a vampire. My only complaint is that it had too much in common with some of her other books – certain pivotal moments and certain particular phrases seemed to echo her other works a bit too directly. Con, the vampire, spoke and acted too much like the Beast in Beauty; the final Sunshine/Con/Bo conflict, confrontation, and conflict resolution played out too similarly to the same Aerin/Luthe/Agsdad situation in Hero and the Crown. So in certain respects, it seemed less like a new story as it seemed like a new variation on an old theme. But the old theme is a good theme, so it’s not too much of a complaint.
And besides, I’ve already reworked my version of the final confrontation and subsequent conflict resolution, and in a way that makes me perfectly happy. So I don’t have to be too bothered by it any more. 😀
I’ve already re-read it (I got it last Thursday). It’s firmly in my repertoire of tales now, and I very glad to have made its acquaintance. McKinley really is an exceptionally good storycrafter. I should go read Dragonhaven…..
You know i love your book reports, however you decide to present them. Actually, you could devote a whole blog to nothing but book reports and i would read it. I know i am slightly biased… i am sitting here trying to be honest with myself as i ask, if i stumbled across a blog that was nothing but book reports on books like you read, written in the way you write them, would i read it, and i think i would. But because when i read your reports here i hear the tones of your voice and because it just plain delights me that my daughter reads such a wide variety of books, i suppose, being honest, i enjoy your reports more for knowing you, and your being mine. Though i do think they are interesting on their own merit.
I know that you would be pleased if i ran down to the library and checked out the books you review. I am going to have to get myself a purse sized notebook to make lists in. (I used to have one and found it very useful.) Then i could jot down names of books and when i do go to the library i could look for them.
Of these books, i would be more likely to read the one by McKinley and the one on autism. The one on the measure of the world i think i would more like to have you tell me in more detail and/or watch a well done PBS show based on the story. (Lazy lazy lazy television watcher)