In which I review every book I've ever read

[Melville]

I haven't started any kind of project on here in a long while, so I decided to start a ridiculously ambitious one that I'll likely never finish, as opposed to the unambitious ones that I never finished in the past. (At some point I do intend to get back to that Other-People's-Favorite-Movies thread. I can't promise to try, but I'll try to try.) Anyway, in here I'll post extremely half-assed reviews of books of all varieties. The ordering of these reviews will be based on the whim of the moment. Expect updates to be sporadic and inconsequential.

Ratings are out of 10 and are mostly based on dim memories. Links to all the reviews can be found here: http://melvillian.wordpress.com/books/

[Melville]

1. Papillon (Henri Charriere, 1969)
Genre: adventure/pseudo-autobiography
My rating: 5

An entertaining adventure story, with lots of memorable prison breaks and sex with South American natives. Loosely based on the true story of the author’s time spent breaking out of various prisons and having sex with natives.

Quote: It was a knockout blow—a punch so overwhelming that I didn’t get back on my feet for fourteen years.


2. Five Equations that Changed the World (Michael Guillen, 1995)
Genre: popular science/biography
My rating: 1

Guillen tells the stories of some famous physicists and their equations that changed our understanding of the world and led to our current era of technological wonders. Unfortunately, he relates the stories as stories—and as vapid, simplistic ones—rather than as histories. He offers lame insights into the minds of historical figures, and he then says that their scientific discoveries were founded on the psychological quirks that he assigns to them. It’s a very poor description of science, dishonest in its treatment of history, and not very interesting storytelling in its own right.

Quote: For the last several months, thirteen-year-old Isaac Newton had been watching with curiosity while workmen built a windmill just outside the town of Grantham.


3. Altered States (Paddy Chayefsky, 1978)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 2

The main character is a scientist who cares only for cold rationality. In a keen bit of foreshadowing, he describes love as a mere fluctuation of chemicals. He begins experimenting with altered states of consciousness. He goes into an isolation tank and takes some hallucinogens. Next thing you know, he’s devolving into primitive man and finally into an amorphous blob. His experiments having gone too far, he realizes that only his wife’s love can save him!


4. The Grounding of Group Six (Julian F. Thompson, 1983)
Genre: juvenilia
My rating: 1

A group of trouble-making teenagers are sent to camp for the summer, only to realize that their frustrated parents have sent them there to be killed! But the guy assigned to kill them doesn’t have the heart for it, so in lieu of getting killed, they proceed to live it up in the woods and have sex. The prose is a kind of farcical attempt at rat-a-tat hardboiledness.

Quote: The people in their group, Group 6, were all sixteen, all five of them, and none of them was fat.


5. The House of Stairs (William Sleator, 1974)
Genre: young adult/sci-fi
My rating: 4

A group of teenagers wake up in a bizarre house of stairs with no exit. The house feeds them only when they dance. Later, it feeds them only when they beat one another. We eventually learn that it’s all part of a dastardly experiment designed to probe human behaviour…as was the style at the time. Commentary on dastardly experiments and human behaviour is implied.

Quote: His hands moved involuntarily to reach up and push the blindfold away from his eyes; and once again they were stopped by the cord that bound his wrists. But he did not struggle against the cord. Peter never struggled.


6. The Accidental Tourist (Anne Tyler, 1985)
Genre: self-discovery/men learning to loosen up
My rating: 1

A guy who lives according to rigid, absurd routines is divorced by his wife. After getting together with an eccentric, unintelligent, irritating woman, he learns the value of loosening up.

Quote: Macon wore a formal summer suit, his traveling suit—much more logical for traveling than jeans, he always said.


7. Il Postino (Antonio Skarmeta, 1985)
Genre: South American poeticism
My rating: 3

A small-town Chilean postman learns about life and love from the poet Pablo Neruda. The novel's simple, fluid prose, punctuated with the occasional bit of floweriness, strives to capture the simple romance of the thing, though not without a trace of irony. Anyway, I preferred the movie.

Quote: He had made up his mind that, at an opportune moment, when the bard seemed to be in a good mood, he would hand the book to him along with his mail in the hope of procuring an autograph he could subsequently boast about to hypothetical gorgeous women he would someday meet in San Antonio, or possibly even in Santiago, which he planned to visit upon receipt of his second check.


8. King Arthur: His Knights and Their Ladies (Johanna Johnston, 1980)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 3

A very brief, simplified retelling of the story of King Arthur and his knights and their ladies. There are some good stories in there, but this telling of them is pretty bland.


9. Stuart Little (E.B. White, 1945)
Genre: children’s literature
My rating: 4

A woman gives birth to a mouse. The mouse leaves home for some sort of adventure, but then the story ends abruptly. wtf.

Quote: When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.


10. Weasel’s Luck (Michael Williams, 1989)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 1

A cowardly character finds himself in the midst of a fantastical adventure. Lame wink-wink genre tropes abound.

Quote: While the others were celebrating, I was cleaning my eldest brother Alfric’s chambers, sweeping away the daily confusion of soiled clothes, of bones, of melon rinds. It was like a midden in there, like an ogre’s den.

[Melville]

11. Kaz the Minotaur (Richard A. Knaak, 1990)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 2

After the end of the first Dragonwar, the renegade minotaur Kaz wanders around and has some adventures. Wouldn’t you know it, a villain of the Dragonwar is still lurking about, threatening to arise and wreak more Dragonwars at any moment…and only Kaz can stop him!

Quote: The one was an ogre, a course, brutish figure well over six feet tall and very wide. His face was flat, ugly, with long, vicious teeth, good for tearing flesh from either a meal or a foe.


12. God’s Equation (Amir Aczel, 2000)
Genre: popular science
My rating: 1

In case you haven’t heard, the universe seems to be expanding at an increasingly rapid rate. This whole book is about how that accelerating expansion can be explained by including a constant (the “cosmological constant”) in Einstein’s Equation. The constant plays the role of a fluid with negative pressure everywhere in space. Up until recently, the idea of including such a constant was though to be an ad hoc adjustment, and after Einstein originally introduced it to make his model of the universe eternal, he soon rescinded the idea and called it his greatest blunder. But now a lot of cosmologists like it because it fits observations. I’m not sure that this story warrants a whole book.

Quote: He knew why sunsets were red and why the sky was blue—Saul Perlmutter is an astrophysicist.


13. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1968)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 3

A very dry, overly explanatory version of the film. Clarke was upset that Kubrick changed so much. Thank god he did. The book has none of the enigma, none of the splendiferous views of humanity’s evolution, and no equivalent of the superb technique of the film. The view of humanity and evolution seems entirely externalized and materialistic, lacking in any real insight into what makes humanity what it is; it’s a social and empirical view of humanity, rather than a phenomenological one. It also seems far less interested in humanity’s evolution than it is in describing how that evolution was caused by an alien race. Clarke always seems interested primarily in explaining the nuts and bolts of how everything works. At the end, the Star Child destroys the Earth’s nuclear weapons. Meh.

Quote: In this barren and desiccated land, only the small or the swift or the fierce could flourish, or even hope to survive. The man-apes of the veldt were none of these things, and they were not flourishing; indeed, they were already far down the road to racial extinction.


14. 2010: Odyssey Two (Arthur C. Clarke, 1982)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

A follow up mission is sent to Jupiter to figure out what went wrong with the 2001 mission. David Bowman shows up as some kind of pure-energy phantom, rather than as the Star Child. Not much of interest happens. Jupiter turns into a sun, or something.

Quote: Even in this metric age, it was still the thousand-foot telescope, not the three-hundred-meter one.


15. 2061: Odyssey Three (Arthur C. Clarke, 1987)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

Some people land on Haley’s comet. Then they land on a moon of Jupiter to look at a giant mountain made of diamond. Apparently the core of Jupiter was an enormous diamond, and when Jupiter turned into a sun, it sent giant pieces of diamond flying. Or something. Again, not much really happens in this book.

Quote: Dr. Heywood Floyd stared thoughtfully at the ever-changing panorama of the beautiful planet, only six thousand kilometres away, on which he could never walk again.


16. 3001: The Final Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1997)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

You know that astronaut who went drifting off into space in 2001? Well, in this book, some people find him and bring him back to life. He finds that the earth is now some kind of utopia with giant, diamond space elevators. There’s a threat of annihilation, but it all works out in the end. All of these books, beyond the first one, seem like a colossal waste of words. They’re all hopelessly dry and uneventful, with exceedingly little to say about their subject matter. They don’t seem to offer anything to anyone who isn’t fascinated by space and/or aliens. Bah.

Quote: Captain Dimitri Chandler [M2973.04.21/93.106/Mars//Space-Acad3005]—or “Dim” to his very best friends—was understandably annoyed. The message from Earth had taken six hours to reach the spacetug Goliath, here beyond the orbit of Neptune.


17. Some Fear Street book (R.L. Stine, a recent decade)
Genre: young adult horror
My rating: 1

I don’t remember the name of this book, but I’m pretty sure it involves a giant river of blood, and in the end the teenaged heroes realize that one or more of them had been dead the whole time. Or maybe they realize that they had killed somebody…possibly each other. Or something like that. In any case, I remember it sucking pretty hard.

Quote (from some other Fear Street book): Nora’s pen scratched against the paper. Dry again. Wearily she thought of dipping the point into the inkwell, changed her mind and, yawning, set the pen down on the small writing table.


18. Eaters of the Dead (Michael Crichton, 1976)
Genre: adventure/historical novel
My rating: 4

A 10th-century Arabian ambassador travels to northern Europe, where he becomes involved in the Norsemen’s Beowulf-inspired battle against a group of relic neanderthals. It’s framed as a “discovered” diary of the ambassador, and it’s heavy on the culture clash element of the story, when it’s not focused on the gory battle. I remember it being fairly entertaining. Lots of gory battling.


19. The Problems of Philosophy (Bertrand Russell, 1912)
Genre: analytic philosophy
My rating: 2

Russell gives a brief rundown of some of the major problems that are studied in philosophy. He focuses on what we can know and how we can know it. Unfortunately, I think basically everything he says is wrong. He starts off with the “obvious” statement that we can be certain of individual sense data; this statement is obvious in that it’s obviously wrong, since we do not begin with a discrete set of distinct data, but with a whole, undifferentiated perception. Breaking up the perception into discrete units is already an abstraction, and its results are not an immediately known certainty. The rest of the book doesn’t improve much on that beginning. Repeatedly, Russell profoundly misstates various philosophers’ ideas, particularly Kant’s and Hegel’s; and after stating them in a way that makes them seem false, he then dismisses them as such. He seems to strive for simplicity and clarity, but he then misses points by oversimplifying them. He endlessly takes things for granted, which is a fundamental problem in a book all about determining what we can know for certain. He also neglects to carefully define many of his ideas, and he occasionally gets lost in circular definitions.


20. The Legend of Huma (Richard Knaak, 1988)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 3

You remember Kaz the Minotaur? Well, that was a sequel to this book. So if you read the books in reverse order, then this one will tell you about Kaz’s backstory in the first Dragonwar. It’s a good war. Dragon-riding knights, minotaurs, and goblins all battle to the death. There are some pretty sweet wizards too.

Quote: The village, called Seridan, had been set upon by plague, starvation, and madness, each seeming to take turns and each killing many of the inhabitants. A lifetime ago, the village had been prosperous.

[Melville]

21. The Dungeon Master (William Dear, 1984)
Genre: true crime
My rating: 2

A private investigator tells the true story of his investigation into the disappearance of a teenager. It was initially thought that the teenager had gone nuts by playing a live-action version of Dungeons and Dragons in utility tunnels. But then it turned out that Dungeons and Dragons had nothing to do with anything.


22. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Harlan Ellison, 1967)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

In this short story, an evil computer kills the entire human race except for a few individuals, whom he torments for eternity. It’s poorly written, just piling up overstatements without any trace of nuance, wit or depth, and it centers on the most facile depiction of evil and misanthropy that I can imagine.

Quote: It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering sun-thing he had materialized, he sent down some manna. Tasted like boiled boar urine. We ate it.


23. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? (Richard Feynman, 1985)
Genre: memoir
My rating: 1

Feynman is probably the most characterly character in the history of physics. He’s renowned for doing unorthodox things. In this book, he basically comes off as an ostentatious, conceited jackass. At a restaurant, he leaves his tip inside an upside-down glass full of water, as a problem-solving test for the waitress. And he brags about his bongo-playing skills. Jackass.


24. Terminal Man (Michael Crichton, 1972)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

A man has seizures followed by blackouts in which he violently attacks people. Surgeons implant electrodes in his brain, with the notion that they can be used to abort a seizure. Unfortunately, it all goes wrong, the electrodes stimulate sexual pleasure, and the man starts purposely having seizures and going berserk. Uninteresting schlock.

Quote: Certainly Ellis had the attitude of a man determined to correct defects, to fix things up. That was what he always said to his patients: “We can fix you up.”


25. Farmer Giles of Ham (J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 3

A lighthearted fantasy set in a make-believe version of old England, it satirizes medieval dragon-slaying legends. It’s so slight that it isn’t very memorable, unfortunately.


26. Knowledge of Meaning (Larson & Segal, 1995)
Genre: linguistics textbook
My rating: 3

I wrote an essay about how this book’s philosophical stance is misguided and verges on meaninglessness. The authors integrate formal semantics into Chomsky’s version of axiomatic linguistics. Their basic premise is that all humans are born with a system of semantic rules encoded in their brain. Unfortunately, that premise doesn’t play into any of the actual semantic systems—axiomatized, symbolic rules for assigning meanings to sentences—that the authors devise. As such, it’s essentially a meaningless premise. The actual semantic systems are interesting enough, but they don’t accomplish much, and they certainly have nothing to say about the operations of our brains.


27. Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1984)
28. Dragons of Winter Night (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1985)
29. Dragons of Spring Dawning (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1985)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 1

Nothing but clichéd epic fantasy, in which a band of disparate characters embark on a quest to save the world. Deeply uninteresting in every way.

Quote: Flint Fireforge collapsed on a moss-covered boulder. His old dwarven bones had supported him long enough and were unwilling to continue their complaint.


30. Dragons of Summer Flame (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1995)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 1

Set a couple decades—and many novels—after the above trilogy, this story involves a huge war and the death of most of the series’ central characters. Why did I squander so many hours of my youth reading all these? I don’t know. I though they were garbage even at the time.

Quote: The knights’ black armor, adorned with skull and death lily, had been blessed by the high cleric, was supposed to withstand the vagaries of wind and rain, heat and cold. But their Dark Queen’s blessing was apparently not responding to this unseasonable heat wave.

[Melville]

31. The Legacy (R.A. Salvatore, 1992)
32. Starless Night (R.A. Salvatore, 1993)
33. Siege of Darkness (R.A. Salvatore, 1994)
34. Passage to Dawn (R.A. Salvatore, 1996)
35. The Silent Blade (R.A. Salvatore, 1998)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 3

These novels follow the adventures of Drizzt Do’Urden, a dark elf. The gist of the stories is that Drizzt is awesome and kicks a lot of ass. Open one of these books to a random page, and chances are you’ll read about Drizzt being awesome and kicking ass. Not only does he wield two scimitars in battle, but he has some kind of magic panther as a pet. Awesome.

Quote: No race in all the Realms better understands the word vengeance than the drow. Vengeance is their dessert at their daily table, the sweetness they taste upon their smirking lips as though it was the ultimate delicious pleasure. And so hungering did the drow come for me.


36. The Shining (Stephen King, 1977)
Genre: horror
My rating: 1

King’s prose is amateurish in its bluntness. His depiction of a descent into madness is superficial, and rather than enriching it, the horror elements only make it pointless.

Quote: Ullman stood five-five, and when he moved, it was with the prissy speed that seems to be the exclusive domain of all small plump men.


37. Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke, 1972)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

Astronauts journey to a mysterious spacecraft, which Clarke details at great length. Unfortunately, nothing happens there.


38. Elegies (Theognis, 6th century B.C.)
Genre: bemoaning of fate
My rating: 8

This collection of poems purports to give advice. But it’s mostly Theognis bitterly complaining about life. And he’s magnificent at it.

Quote:
But one thing's worst of all, more terrible
than death or any sickness: when you raise
children and give them all the tools of life,
and suffer greatly getting wealth for them,
and then they hate you, pray you'll die
and loath you as a beggar in their midst.
...
Ah, Poverty, you slut! Why do you stay?
Why love me when I hate you? Please betray
me for another man, and be his wife;
why must you always share my wretched life?
...
For man the best thing is never to be born,
never to look upon the sun's hot rays,
next best, to speed at once through Hades' gates
and lie beneath a piled-up heap of earth.


39. The Te of Piglet (Benjamin Hoff, 1992)
Genre: philosophy
My rating: 1

This book purports to elucidate the meaning of Te (virtue/power) via an analysis of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. But it’s mostly just Hoff complaining about modern life, with little apparent structure or unifying theme. And he’s not very good at it: a mediocre ranter at best. Allow me to quote some of his half-assed complaints*: “Modern people bloat life with pointless complications.” “Feminists make words too complicated.” “People run on paved paths rather than on natural grass.” Meh. He also casts most of Milne’s characters, such as Tigger, Owl, and Eeyore, as villains, dismissing the breadth of sympathy in the original stories. It’s all very overbearing in its scattershot bitterness. And usually I can’t get enough bitterness.

According to Wikipedia, “In 2006, Hoff published an essay online denouncing the publishing industry and announcing his resignation from book-writing.” That sounds about right.

*Not exact quotes.

[Melville]

40. Time of the Twins (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1986)
41. War of the Twins (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1986)
42. Test of the Twins (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1986)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 4

This trilogy is the sequel to the Dragons of Autumn, Winter, Spring trilogy. It centers on the only compelling character from that trilogy: a consumptive wizard with hourglass eyes, who started off as something of a hero but then went mad with power and dreams of becoming a god. In order to make those dreams a reality, he travels back in time with his entirely heroic twin brother. I can’t remember why time travel is involved in his quest to take over the universe, or how his twin brother comes along with him. But anyway, he’s a great tragic villain. And the relationship between him and his brother is actually well developed, and it becomes increasingly sad as the story progresses. I admit it: these books made me cry. Everything else in them is pretty lame though.

Quote: The dark waters of time swirled about the archmage’s black robes, carrying him and those with him forward through the years.


43. The Count of Monte Cristo, abridged-for-modern-readers version (Alexander Dumas, 1846; translator Lowell Blair)
Genre: adventure
My rating: 7.5

It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I discovered this novel is like 1300 pages long. The version I read as a kid is less than half that length. A friend of mine informed me that I missed out on many hundreds of pages describing Paris nightlife. Anyway, the basic story is pretty cool. A guy is framed, loses his beloved, is sent to an island-prison, stages an awesome escape by trading places with a dead man, finds an enormous fortune stashed on another island, and then plots his revenge on those who framed him. His revenge puts other revenge stories to shame. He doesn’t just kill people or anything so banal as that: he systematically destroys their lives with dazzling style. Eventually, he decides that he should value what he has in life, rather than bemoaning what he has lost and seeking revenge for its loss. But he comes to that decision only after wreaking his horrible vengeance. That seems like an easy way out, but whatever. The point is that the cover of the book calls it the most exciting adventure story ever told.

Quote: He told himself that it was the hatred of men, not the vengeance of God, which had plunged him into the abyss where he now found himself. He doomed these unknown men to all the tortures his fiery imagination could contrive, but even the cruelest ones seemed too mild and too short for them, for after the torment would come death, which would bring them, if not rest, at least the insensibility which resembles it.


44. Fifty Famous Fairy Tales (unknown author, 1965)
Genre: fairy tales
My Rating: 6.5

For some reason this book doesn’t seem to have an author. It credits the illustrator (Robert J. Lee), but no author. That seems pretty strange. Anyway, the stories are mostly European (Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer, etc.), with a few thrown in from the Arabian Nights. The only thing I remember about the book is a very short story in which a mother and daughter start weeping about the death of the child that the daughter imagines she might eventually have. It’s pretty funny.

I like how fairy tales are so random, with things happening seemingly arbitrarily and often violently. They seem imbued with a certain odd mix of spontaneity, inexplicability, and whimsy, giving them an absurd humor and otherworldly wonder. More stories should be like that.

Quote: “Ah,” she thought, “some day I shall be married and I shall have a baby boy and name him Stoyan.” But no sooner had she thought this than she imagined that the child would die.
“Oy, O!” she cried. “My poor dead son.” And she wept.
The girl was gone so long that her mother came to look for her. The good woman was greatly astonished to find the girl sitting under the tree and weeping as if her heart would break.
“Daughter, daughter,” cried the woman. “What ails you?”
“Boo-hoo-hoo,” sobbed the girl. “If I should have a son and he should die! Oy, O! My poor dead little Stoyan.”
On hearing this the woman burst into tears also and cried out, “Oh, my poor dead grandson. Oh, the pity of it.”


45. Nothing but the Truth: A Documentary Novel (Avi, 1991)
Genre: young adult social commentary
Rating: 4

A teenager is punished for humming during the national anthem. The incident is blown out of proportion and incites a media frenzy and a national debate about freedom of speech and patriotism. Finally, the teenager is transferred to another school which proudly supports his right to sing along to the national anthem. But in the book’s final lines, we discover that the kid doesn’t know the words. The whole thing is a commentary on the state of modern education and media, you see. The story is told with a variety of styles, making use of diary entries, memos, and play-like dialogues. I don’t remember it too well, but I’m sure the mix of styles furthers the story’s themes of misinformation and politicking run amok by embedding it within an uncertain, intersubjective textual structure. Pretty clever.

Quote: Coach Jamison saw me in the hall and said he wanted to make sure I’m trying out for the track team!!!!

[Melville]

46. The BFG (Roald Dahl, 1982)
Genre: immoral tales for children
Rating: 1

There’s a big friendly giant with big ears who doesn’t eat children. He and a young girl hatch a plot to stop all the big unfriendly giants from eating children. When I read this as a kid, I was enraged by the fact that the giant had no qualms about eating bacon for breakfast.

Quote: Her throat, like her whole body, was frozen with fright.
This was the witching hour all right.


47. Celestial Encounters: the Origins of Chaos and Stability (Diacu and Holmes, 1999)
Genre: popular science
Rating: 7

This is probably the best popular science book I’ve read, with a lot more technical detail than is usual, but still with a lively discussion of the history and scientists involved in it. The main subject is dynamical systems theory; in particular, it centers on the n-body problem, which consists of determining the motion of n objects subject to one another’s mutual force of gravity. This is the underlying problem of celestial mechanics, which essentially consists of determining planetary orbits. In 1885, King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway offered a prize to whoever could determine the solution to the n-body problem. The prize was awarded to Poincaré (now one of the most famous mathematicians in history), who actually failed to solve the problem, but in so doing created an entirely new field of mathematics. His pioneering work led to the modern theory of dynamical systems, which is the study of the qualitative behaviour of solutions to systems of ordinary differential equations. Starting from this story, the book proceeds to survey the history of celestial mechanics and dynamical systems theory. The main thing to know about dynamical systems theory is that the set of solutions to a set of equations forms a cool shape in something called phase space, and dynamical systems textbooks and research articles are hence filled with lots of cool pictures of these shapes.

I don’t know if this book would be understandable to people lacking in mathematical background, but I find the subject to be one of the more interesting ones in science.

[Melville]

Books I actually find interesting will appear eventually.

[monolith94]

The 2001 - 3001 series isn't nearly that bad. Neither is the BFG, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, or Rendezvous With Rama. Ridiculous. They're not great literature but they're unworthy of 1s.

[Melville]

The 2001 - 3001 series isn't nearly that bad. Neither is the BFG, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, or Rendezvous With Rama. Ridiculous. They're not great literature but they're unworthy of 1s.

Your vehemence is appreciated. My ratings are not intended to represent some objective measure of quality. I found Clarke's books intensely uninteresting and Feynman's intensely irritating. My rating for the BFG is entirely based on my rage as a child.

EDIT: this post sounds more serious than it was intended to be. It's all in good fun. Of course the ratings, not to mention the reviews, are ridiculous. Not only am I not intending objectivity, I'm also not intending consistency or cogency.

[Melville]

48. Heart of Darkness (Conrad, 1902)
Genre: existential river-journey
Rating: 10

The ultimate (hero's) journey down a river and an examination of what that means: removal of the existential constraints of society, the structures of social ideals, conceptual apparatuses, and relationships. Appropriately, then, imperialism is construed as largely absurd: a rudderless voyage into the unknown, into a place where the invading society’s social reality and ideals are bereft of their foundation. However, in this vacuum of social constructs, in the removal of said existential constraints, the river-borne men have the opportunity to make of themselves existential gods, free to define their own ideals, ideals they can impose upon the new world into which they drift. And this transcendence of social reality, this Übermenschian capacity to define ideals, places the invaders in an existentially dominant position, compelling the locals to see in them religious idols. Ideally suited to this thematic exploration, Conrad’s prose cloaks the river in an enrapturing mood of doom, omnipresent and irresistible. Absolute hubris and the resulting existential horror have never been more perfectly expressed.

Quotes:

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceedings, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.


I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.


“The horror! The horror!”

[Melville]

49. Discipline & Punish (Foucault, 1975)
Genre: continental philosophy
Rating: 7.5

Foucault’s thesis is that the creation of the modern justice system, with its use of prison terms as its default punishment, stems less from the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment and more from the emergence of a new overarching system of power: with the rise of capitalism and the middle class, power relationships became based on perpetual observation and discipline, designed to create and enforce a complex social structure with maximal economy and efficiency, and the justice system naturally followed suit by enforcing that structure's norms. Sometimes Foucault's interpretations seem a bit far fetched, but his style of extracting underlying ideologies from mountains of primary sources is always interesting. The focused thesis also makes this more compelling than, say, Madness and Civilization.

Quote: Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle.

[Milky Joe]

48. Heart of Darkness (Conrad, 1902)
Genre: existential river-journey
Rating: 10

The ultimate (hero's) journey down a river and an examination of what that means: removal of the existential constraints of society, the structures of social ideals, conceptual apparatuses, and relationships. Appropriately, then, imperialism is construed as largely absurd: a rudderless voyage into the unknown, into a place where the invading society’s social reality and ideals are bereft of their foundation. However, in this vacuum of social constructs, in the removal of said existential constraints, the river-borne men have the opportunity to make of themselves existential gods, free to define their own ideals, ideals they can impose upon the new world into which they drift. And this transcendence of social reality, this Übermenschian capacity to define ideals, places the invaders in an existentially dominant position, compelling the locals to see in them religious idols. Ideally suited to this thematic exploration, Conrad’s prose cloaks the river in an enrapturing mood of doom, omnipresent and irresistible. Absolute hubris and the resulting existential horror have never been more perfectly expressed.

So lemme ask, does this book have anything to do with existentialism?

[Winston*]

My favourite part of Heart of Darkness was the racism.

I don't understand the BFG review Melville.

[Melville]

So lemme ask, does this book have anything to do with existentialism?

I tried to include at least one reference to it in each sentence, but decided that would be a bit much.

[Melville]

I don't understand the BFG review Melville.

My child-self thought the giant, as well as the author, was a reprehensible hypocrite!

[Derek]

Genre: immoral tales for children

:lol:

I also love the "abridged-for-modern-readers version" tag for Count of Monte Cristo. I suppose "shortened-for-lazy-or-ADD-riddled-teens version" wasn't as catchy.

[Winston*]

My child-self thought the giant, as well as the author, was a reprehensible hypocrite!

Your child self thought a giant eating pig meat and a giant eating human meat was equatable? I think your child self had a misguided sense of moral outage.

[Melville]

Your child self thought a giant eating pig meat and a giant eating human meat was equatable? I think your child self had a misguided sense of moral outage.

I can't recall the precise details of my child-self's thought process, but I think he thought that the giant's ethical considerations about eating the one should be accompanied by an ethical consideration about eating the other, rather than a blithe assumption that one was wrong while the other was right. My child-self demanded philosophical perspicuity.

[Melville]

Might add some more to this one later.

50. Moby Dick (Melville, 1851)
Genre: whaling exegesis and mad philosophy
Rating: 10

“Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation.” —Hawthorne

On why the exegeses on whaling and mad philosophies, which constitute much of the book, besides being masterpieces of ironic humour and glorious, burning bombast, are not only essential, but form the thematic and structural foundation of the novel: As the opening section of quotations outlines, the novel's purpose is an examination of humanity's attempt to understand the unknown (as Melville would say, all that lies beyond human ken). This "understanding" is construed as a violent act of ratiocination and definition, forcing the unknown into physical and conceptual bounds. The whaling jargon is essential as a representation of this process; the violent act of making-known must be realized and precise within the text. More importantly, the novel is about the endless ambiguities within this attempt to conquer the unknown. These ambiguities are emphasized by the structure of the book, which operates as a sequence of oscillations between modes of discourse—the grand epic, the discussions of whaling, the discussions of the metaphorical or metaphysical import of the white whale, Ishmael's ongoing autobiography of sorts, and so on. The text itself realizes and exemplifies the ambiguities within its own narrative.

Quotes:

On cannibals: Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, then for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

On sperm whales' water spout being vapour: He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.

On the significance of Moby Dick's whiteness: The palsied universe lies before us a leper.

On misery: "I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?"

[lovejuice]

just curious. have you ever had to use this book?



I hate hate hate hate hate it so much. this is the book that makes me not studying physics for phd.

[Melville]

just curious. have you ever had to use this book?



I hate hate hate hate hate it so much. this is the book that makes me not studying physics for phd.

Nope. In undergrad I used a book by Gasiorowicz, and in grad school I used a book by Hecht. But I barely opened either of them. They were both pretty bad.

[Sven]

I love this. Will be keeping an eye out for updates, for sure.

[Melville]

51. A Brief History of Time (Hawking, 1988)
Genre: popular science
Rating: 8

With this book, Stephen Hawking convinced me to pursue an education in physics. Damn his eyes.

Highlights include a discussion of why time runs forward rather than backward. Lowlights include a misleading discussion of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Quote: If one assumes the no boundary condition for the universe, we shall see that there must be well-defined thermodynamic and cosmological arrows of time, but they will not point in the same direction for the whole history of the universe. However, I shall argue that it is only when they do point in the same direction that conditions are suitable for the development of intelligent beings who can ask the question: why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

[lovejuice]

24. Terminal ManUninteresting schlock.

you forgot to mention the most inane part. the man is afraid machines are going to take over the world. what kind of nut-case doctors put an electode in such a brain?

26. Knowledge of Meaning (Larson & Segal, 1995)
Genre: linguistics textbook
My rating: 3

Their basic premise is that all humans are born with a system of semantic rules encoded in their brain.

do you also have some problems with chomskian linguistic theory, since I think this is pretty much what it is? (I've never read Chomsky's linguistic book though, but that's the impression I got from reading Pinkus.) because i do.