Books read in 2012

by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter

This is the final installment in the Time Odyssey trilogy (although the end of the book is quite a cliffhanger that indicates that Baxter is considering soldiering on on his own). The book incorporates almost every hard-science theme you can imagine, flitting from topic to topic and seeming to hurry through the story. It’s quite inconsistent in the way that they kept shuttling people all over the solar system when that’s obviously such a costly operation. Instead of gelling nicely (as with the subsequent Blindsight, reviewed below), it comes off as a clumsy way of stringing Deus Ex Machinae together in order to bring the book to its conclusion. The story is good, but the storytelling is less than stellar (no pun intended).[1]

by Peter Watts

A novel ostensibly in the hard-science science-fiction genre, but with a lot of wholly believable extrapolation and written very, very nicely in a terse form that evokes much more than it says (similar to William Gibson). The story is one of a first encounter with an alien civilization for an Earth 50 years in the future. The rendezvous is far outside the Oort cloud and involves a group of highly-specialized and evolved geniuses, among them a captain who is a vampire (it’s OK, it’s actually pretty cool and well-explained). The alien being(s) turn(s) out to be quite alien and communication is not a simple affair. Lots of great dialogue, great scenery, great technology and discussions of interesting scientific, psychological, linguistic and philosophical principles. It’s got everything but the kitchen sink in it, but it works. Highly recommended.

by William Gibson

Another story involving Hollis, Milgrim and Bigend, Gibson swerves even further into his obsession with branding (especially micro-branding) and the world of the very rich (none of the characters wants for anything really) and the way in which it interfaces with large-scale military, governmental and corporate organizations. It takes place in the modern-day (the teens of the 21st century) and Gibson’s style still manages to convey just how outlandishly amazing and cool so much of the technology we have is. It’s cool-hunting but done by cool characters in cool settings with very cool, terse dialogue and descriptions. Lovingly written and edited. The title alludes to an individual with no electronic history, no footprint in the digital world (Milgrim, in this case, whose drug habit pushed him off the grid for a decade). Highly recommended for fans of Gibson.

by Leo Tolstoy

A story of late nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy, interwoven with excursions into the philosophy of class, the divine and gender politics. The title character is hardly endearing, with a sense of entitlement shared by all of her class. They engender their own suffering, though their lives are absurdly easy by any standard. They suffer from first-world problems and complain about and are tortured endlessly by them. None of the characters has a visible source of income—save perhaps Levin, who lives in the country on an inherited estate and ostensibly farms it. The others are all almost consistently useless parasites and much of this is laid out descriptively in the book, leaving the reader to do the legwork in assuming that Tolstoy finds this sort of behavior and segmentation of society reprehensible (it’s not clear, actually). Unclear as well is the attitude toward science, especially when contrasted with religion. Religion runs deep among the nobility, but the younger generations have pretenses of knowing better, Levin (who seems to be the closest in philosophy to the author) included.

by Dambisa Moyo

That the foreword is written by Niall Ferguson is already enough to raise suspicion. Said foreword is filled with effusive praise for a book that “prescribes…strong medicine” that reflects an “African view of Africa’s economic problems”. But Moyo’s experience includes a stint at the World Bank, a Masters from Harvard, a Doctorate from Oxford and eight years with Goldman Sachs, all difficult to reconcile with an African experience. When Ms. Moyo was on the Colbert Report two years ago, she was underwhelming in her ability to defend or explain her thesis and the contents of the book bear out this lack of depth. It seems much more likely that she is feted because she’s young, pretty enough and is willing to say just what old white males want to say, but don’t dare to: namely, that Africa should suck it up and get on with generating the economic growth that its surfeit of resources and cheap labor have long promised. Not recommended.

by James Wesley, Rawles

A novel about “Enders”—über-Patriots with mad military skills, a strong predilection for the Bible, a clear notion of male/female hierarchy and a mentality that never left the early 20th-century. Add a buttload of guns and ammo—oh, sweet Lord, the ammo—and you’ve got a recipe for a Galt’s Gulch full of able-bodied people fending off hordes of moochers who can’t care for themselves. The economy collapses because of hyper-inflation, which is a standard Tea-party bugaboo, but the scenario is completely laughable and could never happen. Not that financial collapse is not possible, but not like that. The author seemed quite taken with his own erudition, which from his point-of-view is probably galaxy-spanning rather than objectively severely limited and crude. The government is, of course, evil. The enders seem to be positively delighted that civilization crumbled—because they never really needed it anyway. People are slaughtered in this novel, but only really bad guys. Like terrorist/child-molesters (I’m not kidding). There’s not a lot of room for subtlety. Good to read one of these, but it’s hard to recommend to others other than for anthropological purposes.

by Robert Silverberg

A wonderful time-travel book in the grand tradition, with lots of sex. The title refers to the expression used in the future for going into the past; going “Down the line” moves you to the future relative to your current time. The book clearly shows the year in which it was written, as there is a whole lot of free lovin’ going on in the future. Time travel has become commonplace enough that there are guided tours of the past’s greatest moments. Tour groups resemble those that travel only through space (well, they travel through time as well, but rather at the same speed as everyone else and in the same direction, which is boring). The hero of the book becomes a tour guide in and around Constantinople and throughout the first millennium after Christ. Both the time-travel implications—can you meet yourself? What about loops? What if you sleep with an ancestor? How do you keep the continuum clean? What does that even mean? Are there multiple strands? Infinite strands?—and the history and culture of the various time periods are expertly presented. Pulcheria is a great character, especially after her foot-waggling fall. A fun and intriguing read; recommended.

by Roger Zelazny

Another time-travel novel, also masterfully told. In this world, time is a road built by an ancient race of dragons (sounds cheesy, but the way it’s described renders it unutterably cool). There are on- and off-ramps that certain members of diverse civilizations and races can access. Histories and futures that are more “likely” are well-kept whereas those that are less so become overgrown and ever-more-difficult to find. The story is of a gruff, ageless mercenary-type called Red Dorakeen who travels up and down the road, seeking a nebulous goal, accompanied by a portable, talking computer in the form of a book. He is beset by enemies unleashed on him by an arch-enemy who used to be a close friend. Supporting characters like the Marquis de Sade, Hitler and a couple of truly inspired assassins—the monk Timyin Tin is particularly cool—round out the cast. A fun and intriguing read; recommended.

by Stephen King

Four novellas, each dealing with marriage and male/female relationships in one way or another. One is a story of madness and desperate poverty in a marriage gone stale. What goes around comes around and ghosts are restless. Another is a fabulous story of revenge by a woman wronged, as only King can, replete with superhuman feats convincingly told. Then there is a deal-with-the-devil story but with a remorseless character instead of an eventually repentant one, happily screwing everyone around him as he gets just what he wants. And, finally, there is the story of a wife who slowly discovers that the man she married is not the man she thought he was. A discovery made innocently leads her to unravel her last decades with him and question everything. Recommended for anyone, but highly recommended for fans.

by Dean Baker

A concise, expertly-written and highly accessible novel describing the basics of macro-economics on a global level but primarily as it pertains to the U.S. The current economy is described in detail as well as the history that led to where we are now, including the repeal of various safeguards and the various crashes and recessions. Baker has been fighting the good fight for decades now and is not short of solutions, many of which are straightforward and easily implemented, if we would only stop worshiping wealth. Highly recommended for anyone.

by Leo Tolstoy

Where does one start in describing a 1300-page novel that follows 1220 pages of intricate detail of the lives of Russian nobles woven with step-by-step descriptions of 19th-century warfare with 80 pages of dense philosophy? The book tells the story of the invasion of Russia by Napoleon through the eyes of several noble families, the members of which undergo their own trials and tribulations. The characters are almost all unbelievably shallow, though one suspects deliberately so. I couldn’t tell you that I’d liked any of them. Pierre, Natasha, Nicholas Rostov, Andrew Oblonsky, Dolokhov, Denisov, Sonya, Boris, Julie, Mary, Helen, the list goes on. They all lived idle lives, lamenting their lack of purpose or reveling in their indolence. The main thrust of the novel is that war is useless and that the people to whom history ascribes greatness can be proven to have had nothing to do with the situations for which they have found themselves famous. History is not guided; it simply happens. Hard to recommend because of its sheer length, but Tolstoy is a master of prose and the translation I read was really, really good (I imagine).

by Warren Fellows

The subtitle summarizes the book: Twelve years of hell in a Bangkok prison. Fellows freely admits that the first quarter-century of his life was sordid though not particularly so. He drifted into a life of minor crime, grafting and grifting in a minor way until he became a drug courier. He led a relatively charmed life for a few years (it’s hard to tell how many) and then was busted in Thailand with a suitcase full of heroin. He was sent to a horrific Thai prison staffed by horrific sadists and endured there for over three years. The punishment far exceeds anything that can be considered civilized: no privacy, incredible overcrowding, disease, malnutrition, beatings and torture, isolation, darkness and, ironically, drugs and drugs and drugs to escape the everyday. It’s amazing that anyone could survive so long (most don’t). Once convicted, he eventually ended up in an even more notoriously horrific prison—Bang Kwang or “Big Tiger”—for nine more years.

Somewhat unevenly written, but the well-written parts are poetry and really evoke feelings of horror. Let the following passages serve as examples:

“The difficulty in telling this story—my whole story, in fact—is that there is no way for me to communicate duration of time to you. It may have taken a minute for you to have read of my position in this punishment cell, but I was in this position for a whole month. How do I convey that to you? There are no markers with which I can measure. The only way for you to come close to experiencing this is to read the previous paragraph over and over, every minute of every day, for a whole month. But nobody could do that without going mad with frustration.”

“I was walking down the road to the front gate, that same road that I had walked up so many years ago. I saw that nothing had changed. There were the lush gardens and the flies and the stench of the sewage and the rubbish tip. It was as if nothing had happened at all. Bang Kwang was a vacuum in which time came to a stop, while the rest of the world drifted on by. I turned and looked back at Big Tiger and it was alive. This was a living thing.”

by David Sedaris

Easily the best collection I’ve read from Mr. Sedaris. Hilarious from start to finish and I found myself laughing out loud at several points and annoyed/entertained my friends by reading aloud largely context-free passages and then braying like a donkey. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but while the times-on-hard-drugs stories were incredibly good, it was the moving-to-France ones that really hit home—See you again yesterday, the eponymous Me Talk Pretty One Day and Jesus Shaves (“He nice, the Jesus.”) and Picka Pocketoni are all good. His stories about his family, though, those are just out of this world: You Can’t Kill the Rooster and I’ll Eat What He’s Wearing are too bizarre to be true—although I suspect that there is more than a kernel of truth to many of his stories. It doesn’t matter, the mantle of America’s modern-day Mark Twain rests firmly on this man’s shoulders.

by Richard C. Morais

A book about an Indian family that moves from Bombay to England to France. The first two parts are quite evocatively written, about Mumbai and the French Jura, respectively. The prose is at times a bit heavy-handed with its metaphor, but the author sticks to his idea of comparing lovely things in nature to lovely food and mostly makes it work. It’s in the third—and longest—part that he lost my attention, when his hero goes to Paris and, seemingly without pathos, effort, muss, fuss or doubt, climbs to the top of the food world.

The author’s politics also figure much more heavily here and it feels almost as if he was faking his empathy for the simpler, more natural first chapters. The hero ends up running a €350-per-person restaurant and is still portrayed as unfairly beleaguered by an overly restrictive and regulated French socialist state, eager to squeeze every centime it can from the hard-working upper classes. There is a lengthy and largely uninformed diatribe on French worker relations (chapter 17) that portray an upside-down world in which the workers hold their employers for ransom.[2] With his mask off, he in no way differs from the Rand Pauls of the world, happy to draw broad conclusions in favor of disbanding the government based on cherry-picked anecdotes. At any rate, it felt quite out of place, as did the ever-more-extravagant settings, menus and detailed descriptions of food items, wines and appliances.

The further I read, the more it felt like Dan Brown—also known for pointing out things like the brand of a refrigerator—or Stieg Larsson, whose characters are also singularly successful millionaires, attractive, with women throwing themselves at their feet. Even his previously somewhat charming food-as-metaphor started to unravel disastrously, when his “sommelier […] had the inspired idea to twin the partridge with the 1996 Côtes du Rhône Cuvée Romaine, a robust red redolent of dogs panting and on point in the lushness of a summer hunt.” Not only pretentious nearly beyond all imagining, but also almost certainly not aware of what redolent means. Recommendation? Read only the first two parts and leave off the end. Also, he’s missing a hyphen in the book’s title.

by Cormac McCarthy

Bleakness. Despair. A gray, ashy road winding into dimly lit mists. The overcast horizon lying just over the next hill reveals listlessly churning clouds, heavy with rain. Repeat for hundreds of pages. I forgot to put in a bookmark after about 40 pages and it took me a few minutes to find my place again because each chapter looked just like the one before and after it. The story is of a man and his son fighting their hungry, bored, weak and hopeless way through a post-apocalyptic America. The disaster is presented as fact, with no time wasted on explanations. It’s a tone poem of sorts, repeatedly describing the same scene in various ways to hammer home the bleakness. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll realize that the almost unbearably annoying kid in the movie nailed his role. The kid in the book is arguably worse. Spoiler alert: my theory is that the kid doesn’t even exist, that he’s a figment of the man’s imagination, a sign of his madness.

by Mark Twain

The narrator takes a steamship journey across the Atlantic from America to the Old World, jaunting from the Canary Islands to Gibraltar to Paris, Italy, Greece, Turkey and then a long jaunt through the Middle East. Twain is at his snarky best with tongue firmly in cheek as he describes the splendors of Europe through the lens of a jaded, modern man—and taking into account the tourist-trap nature of many of these locations, even in the 1800s. There are descriptive passages that are so evocatively written that it takes your breath away—you’ll read them two or three times. The man was truly an utter master of the written (English) word.

In an attempt to loosely describe the tone of the journal/travelogue, I list the following, several main themes that cropped up now and again:

• The beauty of the Middle East is enjoyed more in reflection than live. This is primarily due to two reasons:

  1. The people of the Middle East are, on the whole, quite poor and beg almost incessantly for “bucksheesh”. Their din drives out all thought, philosophical contemplation and enjoyment.
  2. The landscape of the Middle East is far from inspiring and gains appeal only through association with historical figures and events, many of them fabricated.
• Despite these shortcomings, most travelers to the Middle East—indeed any place that, in reality, is not what it’s cracked up to be—will, in retrospect, pluck those shining moments from a desert of desolate, wasted time and come to the conclusion that they not only enjoyed their trip, but that it was a rapturous epiphany. Those travelers without the imagination to do so themselves will gladly begin early by parroting the rapturous ravings of others (usually Tour-Guide authors) while they are still there, resulting in them rather incongruously depicting a barren desert as a lush paradise in the rush to complete their their future readers’ brainwashing.
• The pilgrims along on his journey were all inveterate thieves, smashing “specimens” from every relic, wall, building and monument that they encountered.
• There were a hell of a lot of quarantines in those days. In almost every port they landed, the ship was quarantined and they had to smuggle themselves ashore in order to enjoy the sights.
• Billiards tables anywhere but America are in a horrible state of affairs, including the cues.
• Lake Tahoe is the most beautiful place on Earth and nothing compares.

by Microsoft

Typescript is a statically typed overlay language for Javascript. The primary purpose of the language is to bring some order to the chaos that is Javascript development. Typescript does not have a runtime; it is intended that Javascript be generated from it, in a process amply and precisely described throughout the specification. The transformation is, for the most part, elegant and concise and reflects the kind of Javascript that a seasoned and disciplined developer would write. Typescript achieves these results with a much more concise, readable, maintainable, expressive and powerful language.