Blah Blah Blah: What to do when words don't work by Dan Roam

Started: Dec. 18, 2012
Finished: Jan. 28, 2013
Pages: 331

This book has two characters:  the hummingbird and the fox, who we met in the recent past when we read Thinking, Fast and Slow by David Kahneman.  But in that book the quick-thinking, visual, and reactive hummingbird was called "System 1", while the verbose and analytic fox was called "System 2".

Why a hummingbird and a fox?  Because Dan Roam has a different aim than Kahneman.  Roam isn't explaining how brains work.  He simply wants to help us convey our ideas more effectively, and the fact that he switches the non-informative terms   "System 1" and "System 2"to something more immediately graspable is a perfect illustration of the kind of thing that Blah blah blah is trying to teach you to do.

This book was recommended to me by a "Visual Literacy" initiative at work that is intended to encourage us to include more graphical content in our writing.  The book is a perfect tool for that purpose.  It talks a little bit about why doing so is useful, but mostly focuses on describing a variety of heuristics that can help you transform your blah blah blah to combinations of graphics and text that will have a greater impact.

I'm planning to photocopy a few summary pages so that I can keep them handy while others on my team read the book.

Time Traders by Andre Norton

Started: 20 January, 2013
Finished: 24 January, 2013
Pages: 220

Andre Norton wrote the very first SF novel that I ever read:  a boy's own adventure novel set in space.   I was.....11, 12?   I don't remember it exactly, but it had a big influence on my reading.  I've been reading SF ever since.

Why?  Well, that's an essay for another time, but the short version would be something like "entertainment and ideas".   Like most popular pulp fiction, you can argue about what's entertaining.  But Time Traders has a strong plot with lots of action. It's easy to get caught up in the story of the misfit bad boy who starts life on the wrong foot, but makes good through his cleverness and courage.   As for ideas:  how captivating is the idea that you could somehow travel to another time?  And that the people there would have different religions, and customs, and skills and traditions? Pretty heady stuff when you're twelve.  

Time Traders isn't that first SF book that I read more than 30 years ago.  It's one of a very similar set of novels that Norton wrote in the 50s and 60s.  As a kids book of that era I can no real fault with it, and mocking it would just be mocking the social conventions of that time.

 But although I can credit Ms. Norton with introducing me to a lifetime's worth of interesting reading, I do have a beef.  Norton was an American.  She wasn't very cosmopolitan, and she wasn't necessarily very smart.  And along with authors like Poul Anderson she inculcated me with the subconscious belief that somehow learning a language with native fluency was something that anyone could accomplish with a few weeks' concerted effort.  Fie!  You blighted my language learning efforts, when I first had an opportunity to study French in high school in my unilingual Prairie city.  Somehow, I felt that something was terribly wrong with both my instructor and me when I could barely communicate and hardly understand anyone in Paris after three years of As.  :-)

Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Started: 12 Jan 2013
Finished: 16 Jan 2013
Pages: 206

I'd never heard of Josephine Tey until I picked up this book in a second-hand bookstore.  But she's apparently also one of the classic authors of the British golden age of detective fiction.  Daughter of Time was published in 1951, the last of her 10 or so books.

This is an unusual mystery:  the detective spends the entire novel flat on his back in a hospital bed and never meets the criminal or any of the principals in the case.  How could he?  Everyone involved has been dead for more than 400 years.

The detective's day job is at Scotland Yard.  But he needs something to do while he recovers from an injury, and ends up investigating the story of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower with the help of some history books and an assistant with time to kill in the British Library.  He approaches the historical puzzle using the same techniques he would in reviewing a modern case.

The end result is a very entertaining read that will have you googling for additional information about the Plantagenets and Tudors.

Are you my mother? A comic drama by Alison Bechdel

Started: 26 December, 2012

Finished: 8 January, 2013

Pages: 290

First things first:  this is not a picture book about a baby bird searching for its mother and finding a SNERT.  

Or, maybe it is....kind of.

Have you heard of graphic novels?  Well, this is a graphic memoir:  that is, a memoir written in the form of a comic.  And this version of Are you my mother? is about the author's struggle to make sense of her relationship with her mother. It's by Alison Bechdel,  the creator of  Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running serial comic that you could hardly have missed if you read feminist newspapers in the late 80s and 90s.  

 I started it at the inlaws over Christmas and puzzled my partner's mom.  She wanted to know why I wasn't chuckling while I was reading.  Wasn't it comics?   Well, yes.  But it's a natural question.  Although there are now"serious" comics, our collective default assumption is that stories told with pictures are stories for children. (Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense, really.  After all:  movies.)

So why don't we think of pictorial stories written on paper as serious?

I don't have an answer to that.  Constant advances in printing technology throughout the 20th century made printed pictures ubiquitous.  And other than a few 19th century political cartoons, comics really began in the 20th century.  But for the most part using pictures as well as text to tell a story was only done when the subject matter of the story was something that was hard to imagine otherwise:  when the characters in the stories were talking mice, say, or the story was about a extra-strong flying man.

Which brings us to the book at hand. What is added by telling Bechdel's story in comic form?

Well, I guess the most obvious thing that the pictures add is emotional impact and immediacy.  Being told that her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was 7 years old is different than watching a small and vulnerable girl pretend not to mind that her mother is walking away from her bed.

Using drawings also permits Bechdel to use compression and inference to tell parts of her story. There is a sequence of frames that recounts a year that she spent in therapy by showing her and her therapist facing each other across a room, while a tree visible in the window behind them cycles through the seasons.

Drawings also allow her to give information that would be difficult to convey otherwise.  Being told that Bechdel has been in therapy for her entire adult life is different seeing a timeline that simultaneously shows both the duration of every love relationship she's ever had and the duration of every therapist she's ever had. (wow:  I can't even imagine therapy playing that kind of role in my life.)

So....Bechdel could likely have told her story in text alone.  But telling it as a comic definitely gives her additional tools.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

Started: 31 December 2012
Finished: 5 January 2013
Pages: 422

"Ivan you idiot!" is a recurring refrain throughout the Vorkosigan series.  Now, Ivan gets his day in the sun, and we get to see how he manages for himself when his hyper-active, hyper-intelligent, and hyper-successful cousin Miles is busy elsewhere.

How does it work?  It's nice to get a different angle on the Barrayarian universe. Frankly, I found the last two Miles books sub-par.  Lois McMaster Bujold has a living to make of course, and the Miles series is both a familiar haven and a sure way to make a few bucks.  But now that Miles is grown up, through his career crisis, and safely married, the zing has gone out of his adventures.

Does a book focused on Ivan revive the series?  Well, if you weren't already a devotee, I don't think this one would inspire you to read all of the rest.  But Lois McMaster Bujold can still write a more entertaining story on her bad days than most can pull off on their good days, so I'm not sorry I picked it up.

****If this entire review is entirely puzzling, it just means that you aren't a devotee of science fiction adventure series.....  Dont' worry, there's "Nothing to see here" .....****

Snobbery with violence by M.C. Beaton

Started: Dec. 25, 2012
Finished: Jan. 4, 2012
Pages: 248

Thanks for the plane book Jennifer!  It was also a great insomnia book.  You also need something entertaining and unchallenging at 3 am when you just can't sleep. A British cozy mystery was just the ticket.

One interesting point:  the heroine is an Edwardian debutante, but I was initially confused about the time period.  All of the talk of girl's "seasons" and husband-hunting seemed more suited to a book set a century earlier, and inconsistent with electricity, telephones, and motor cars.  But we just started watching Downton Abbey last night.  Both are set in about 1912, and the television show also showed just the same kinds of very formal traditional social conventions in place.  Interesting.  I guess that's why the British aristocracy feel that the First World War ended an era.

Best books?

I started this blog last February, so it's too early to summarize my year's reading and the experience of blogging about it for a year.  But now that the New Year has come and gone, it does seem like it's time to summarize the books of 2012.

Best books so far?  Yes, it needs to be plural:

• Best nonfiction:  Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemen.  Thought-provoking.
• Best fiction:  The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.  She's matured so much as a writer since she wrote The Bean Trees.
• Best SF: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.  Dark, unlovable, and brilliant.
Runners up:
• Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts.  Well-written period piece, with more than a soupcon of irony.
• Ready Player One by Eric Cline.  Just fun, even if the last third of the book was a little disappointing.
• Best poetry: Memory's Daughter by Alice Major

I could pick out more "bests".  But I don't really think of mysteries in that way.  And I didn't read enough of any other type of book to really judge a category.

Second Chances by Susan Schwartz

Started: Dec. 13, 2012
Finished: Dec. 30, 2012
Pages:454

"Don't judge a book by it's cover".  There's a dictum meant to be ignored, particularly when you're reading SF.   Covers are marketing.  The cover is the brand.  This one looks like it could be authored by David Weber, and true to the cover it's military SF.

But Susan Schartz isn't David Weber, and this is not a rousing tale of daring do and heroism.  It's about idealism, dishonour, shame, and the search for redemption.  Note I said "search".  Not all searches are entirely successful, after all.  

I can't whole-heartedly recommend this book. Unlike (at least my memory) of Silk Roads and Shadows, the writing is sometimes quite wooden.  But I won't condemn it either.  The character of Jim is drawn with some sophistication, and if it's a little hard to believe the actions that lead to his downfall, well, he finds his own actions inexplicable.  And somehow that seems more real than otherwise.