Books Read in 2004

Codex is a lightweight literary thriller, quite a bit better than The Rule of Four, not as erudite or well-written as The Club Dumas, The Flanders Panel, The Grand Complication or A Case of Curiosities, and not quite the page-turner of The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons.

Grossman's novel centers on Edward, who is on a brief hiatus between jobs as he prepares to move to England. During what is supposed to be a vacation, he is drawn in to a search for an old document (the titular codex), and also into an addictive computer game. Grossman awkwardly sprinkles computer-jargon in his descriptive metaphors (e.g., "psychic RAM"), and those passages detract from what is otherwise decent workmanlike prose. The plot is fast-moving, and the conclusion is reasonably satisfying. This is decent escapist pulp for those of us who enjoy the kinds of books I listed above.

And so begins my 2004 Christmas book glut. Of the dozen books I received as gifts (possibly a new personal best) I cracked this one first and began my traditional holiday reading binge (newly improved with two screaming kids!).

The Flanders Panel shares many themes (antiquities, old men selling off heirlooms to thwart financial oblivion, and baroquely twisted plots to name a few) with The Club Dumas, but overall it's a better novel. The characters are more engaging, the plot is more tightly orchestrated, and the conclusion, though still stretching the boundaries of plausibility, is more satisfying. I was thoroughly immersed, and even though I had severe doubts through much of the novel's middle that Perez-Reverte could pull off a convincing ending, I was satisfied by the way the loose ends were tied up. The Flanders Panel is a well-written and brainy mystery/thriller.

Disappointing. For a novel that won both the Hugo and the Nebula, The Left Hand of Darkness is remarkably dull. It suffers from madeupworditis, a disease that afflicts many fantasy and science fiction writers, exhibited by prose littered with invented words that serve little more than to make the setting seem a bit more exotic. There are examples where the technique serves the novel (c.f., Riddley Walker — minus the unneeded glossary — for a terrificly successful example of this gambit), but this is not one of them.

There are some saving graces. The psychological aspects of the Envoy's journey are somewhat interesting, and perhaps the division of Winter's society into two dissimilar governments is an interesting juxtaposition against the lack of gender differences in their inhabitants. And perhaps there are layers of deeper meaning that I'm too dumb to see.

What I can say for certain is that I plodded through this novel, and I have no desire to ever read another one like it.

I loved John Varley's stories when I read them the first time back in 1996. At the time, I gave his collections Blue Champagne and The Persistence of Vision four-star ratings. My notes from back then are pretty dodgy, so I can't tell you exactly what I found so appealing about his stories, but I can definitely tell you that their appeal has faded somewhat. When I read Varley for the first time, I don't remember being hit over the head by his hippie-dippy free-love viewpoint, but reading this collection, my reaction was shock at how front-and-center and consistent that viewpoint is.

In this collection, I truly liked "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo", "Good Intentions" (primarily for the obvious secondary reading with George W. as one of the primary characters), and "The Bellman". Most of the other stories are pretty good, but not quite as good as I remembered.

Sometimes I read books not to learn anything new but to reinforce something I should have learned already. When I read David Allen's Getting Things Done back in March, I took several of its precepts to heart, and I even wrote a piece of software to help me implement the system. I recently picked up Ready For Anything to remind me of some of the details of the process, and I hoped to gain some new insights and techniques. Well, I succeeded in the former, but was disappointed in the latter.

Ready For Anything is a collection of David Allen's email newsletters turned into 52 mini essays on various aspects of the Getting Things Done system. It reaffirmed for me the importance of the Weekly Review and helped me realize that I wasn't being sufficiently rigorous about writing down the next physical action for each project in the system. With those tweaks, my personal implementation of Getting Things Done is improved, and therefore, it was useful for me to read the book, but I can't recommend it to a general audience. It's a bit too long-winded and meandering.

I had never heard of Arturo Perez-Reverte until a couple of weeks ago when my friend Beth suggested I would probably love his books. So, in my typical compulsive fashion, I ran out that night and bought a copy of The Club Dumas, which happened to be the only one of his books that evil megastore Barnes and Noble had in stock.

I'm glad I grabbed it. The Club Dumas is an engaging noir mystery, set in a world of old books, secret societies, and hints of mysticism. It's a well-written but infinitely more approachable Foucault's Pendulum, though with less meat. Literary references abound (primarily to Dumas' The Three Musketeers) but recognizing them is not a prerequisite for enjoying the story (lord knows I didn't recognize them — I remember nothing of Dumas).

I had a little bit of trouble following the plot in the first third of the novel, probably because it requires slightly more focused attention than I was able to give it, but I still enjoyed the texture of the prose, and I was satisfied with the way the threads were tied up at the end. I liked this much more than The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four, but not enough to rate it five stars. I'm looking forward to reading another of his books.

Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon is deserving of the Philip K. Dick prize it was awarded. It deftly places a noir detective story in a sci-fi future where the futuristic technology always serves the plot. Here, the McGuffin is "cortical stack" technology, which allows a person's memories to be "resleeved" in a new body. This makes interplanetary travel more practical than sending meat across the cosmos, and it leads to major changes in society, many of which Morgan illustrates.

The novel serves several purposes equally well. It introduces a compelling protagonist and fleshes out a compelling universe, both of which will surely return in future novels. It provides a gripping mystery/suspense/thriller, with plenty of twists and lots of good action sequences, but also with good characterization and a strong sense of place.

I may be overselling here, but this is the first self-contained SF novel I've read in a long time that fulfills the promise of the genre.

Lynch's book focuses on ways to force Photoshop Elements to let you use techniques that are commonly thought to be available only in the full version of Photoshop. In a sense, he succeeds. There are many techniques here (some of which are provided as plug-ins on an accompanying CD) that allow you to do various color separations and so forth. What's lacking, mostly, is good evidence that these techniques are that much better than what is included in Elements. Sure, I can see some times when a luminosity separation could be very useful, but for the most part these techniques seem like more trouble than they're worth.

Also, fully half the book is devoted to deeply hacking photographs by compositing and synthesizing graphic elements. I can see that being useful for someone doing this for a living, but if this is your job, shouln't you be using the full version of the software?

This is the one book every user of Photoshop Elements should read. Like Kelby's Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers (based on Photoshop 7), this book provides a large array of very useful and easy-to-apply techniques for improving photographs in Photoshop. In spite of the fact that the content overlaps tremendously with Kelby's other book(s), I bought this version because it specifically covers many of the tools that are now available in Elements 3 for the first time.

By the way, Elements 3 is fantastic. The addition of the healing brush, drastic improvements to red-eye correction, and the full integration of the photo browser is a huge improvement over Elements 2. Both it and this book are highly recommended to digital photographers.

I am one of the 30-plus million adult Americans suffering from chronic insomnia. For about nine months now, I have been unable to sleep for more than about four hours before waking up to toss and turn for the rest of the night. Although this kind of insomnia can be a normal part of growing older, it is tremendously frustrating, and it leads one to become desparate for a solution. I tried a psychiatrist and my primary care doctor, both of whom were very quick to prescribe pills to help me sleep, but after trying several varieties, I haven't found anything that doesn't affect me adversely in the daytime. Side effects aside, who wants to be a slave to a pill to get a good night's sleep?

Dr. Jacobs's book outlines a comprehensive drug-free program for conquering insomnia. It starts with necessary background on insomnia, but the core is a set of six chapters focusing on six different strategies for gradually improving the quality and duration of sleep. The program is intended to be completed over six weeks, with each week adding a new chapter to the arsenal of strategies.

A large portion of the book is devoted to using the "relaxation response" and self-driven cognitive-behavioral therapy to reduce stress and improve one's mental outlook about sleep. Other parts cover proper sleep "hygiene", including the counter-intuitive advice to temporarily reduce one's overall time in bed in order to increase the percentage of time in bed actually spent sleeping.

There's a lot of good material here, and I can't do it justice in a brief review. As I write this, I'm just beginning to apply these strategies. In a few weeks, if it turns out that they've worked, I will change my rating to five stars and add a note here. I may even track down the Dr. Jacobs and give him a big kiss.

[January '05 Update: Well, it worked for me! I've been sleeping drug-free for two and a half months. Turns out that changing my attitudes about sleep, conforming to a consistent wake-up time, and having a carbohydrate snack (in my case, Cheerios cereal) just before bed does the trick. The Cheerios seem to be an absolute necessity, suggesting that my insomnia may have had something to do with my metabolism changing as I age.]

"Flow" is the state of being highly engaged in an activity that requires skill and attention. It's the kind of state where you get lost in what you're doing and lose track of time. When I bought this book, I was under the impression that it would give hints for reaching a state of "Flow", and that these techniques would be useful for improving productivity and enjoyment at work.

Well, what I found instead is closer to a book of New Age spiritualism. Csikszentmihalyi argues that being in the "Flow" state is what makes life worth living (I agree that it's a rewarding state, and one worth seeking out, but his stance is extreme). He spends a lot of time arguing that watching television is a bad use of time (no kidding, really?). There are a few interesting passages, but overall this is a very lightweight book.

This is another collection of nice nature photos with some entry-level commentary on technique and composition. John Shaw's Nature Photography Field Guide is a better overview, but Tharp's book is an enjoyable read, and the production values are pretty good. Unfortunately for me, I think that there is literally no information in this book that I haven't seen elsewhere. I seem to be at the point of diminishing returns in photography books . If you have any favorites to suggest, please let me know.

I think I've officially lost interest in David Foster Wallace's short fiction. This is probably a better collection than Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but my overall reaction is more negative, perhaps because I no longer have the mental energy to suss out whatever message Wallace is trying so hard to obfuscate. Granted: there is a sentence to die for on nearly every page, and there are interesting and unique elements in every story. However, it doesn't add up to an enjoyable experience for anybody but the most devoted pomo wonk.

There are eight stories in this collection, ranging from the devastatingly pithy three-page "Incarnations of Burned Children" (which, after reading, I put down the book and retreated into myself for an hour) to "Another Pioneer" consisting of a single, 20+ page paragraph. I enjoyed "Good Old Neon", but in the other stories, either the style got in the way of the substance, or the subject matter just didn't connect with me.

I'm still holding out hope that Infinite Jest wasn't a fluke. I read that first, and I've liked subsequent books less and less. Time for another novel, DFW!

Of the half-dozen or so photography-related books I've read in the last few months, this one is the worst. I'm very interested in learning to create better photographic compositions, and I've gleaned some useful hints from the other books I've read, as well as by studying good photographs. Here, however, in a book specifically devoted to composition, I found nothing new.

Not only that, the photographs in this volume are mostly not very good, at least to my eye. Many of them look extremely dated — like bad 1970s advertising photos — and the print quality is abysmal.

This is another solid thriller, but overall I liked Shutter Island a bit better. Perhaps this is because I wasn't as surprised by the plot twists (this time, I had solved the murder mystery about 100 pages before Lehane spelled it out). At any rate, this is still an enjoyable — if dark — novel. I'm not in a rush to read any more Lehane, but I probably will visit him again some time in the future.

A solid psychological thriller by the author of Mystic River. This was my first exposure to Lehane (though I've subsequently picked up the aforementioned bestseller). He writes transparent prose — it never gets in the way of the characters or the plot. The plot is perhaps a bit farfetched but nevertheless entertaining. I was never bored, and I was occasionally surprised by Lehane's twists.

de Botton's first novel is a post-modern treatise on the subject of love. It documents the arc of a relationship, from the excitement of the unknown at first meeting to the despair of romantic disintegration. The first few scenes are wonderful, but the novel bogs down under the author's style of dissertation. Even though it holds geniune insight into its subject, I frankly got a bit bored toward the end.

I usually steer clear of books on the bestseller lists for a reason. Nearly always, they become popular because they speak to the least common denominator in readers (and, of course, because the publishers spend bundles of money promoting them). With this book, however, I'd seen a couple of positive reviews in book blogs (e.g., Jessamyn ), and I usually enjoy literary thrillers, so I gave it a shot.

The Rule of Four is clearly being marketed to the people who have kept The Da Vinci Code at the top of the bestseller list for well over a year. There are some similarities between the novels: long-hidden secrets, mysterious Renaissance figures, and — lest I forget — awkward writing. Caldwell and Thomason try much harder than Dan Brown to create characters with depth, and they succeed in creating colorful backgrounds for the protagonists. Unfortunately, there's a lot of detail that is only ornamental, and they don't come close to Brown in the area where he excels: page-to-page suspense. The Rule of Four isn't bad, but it's also not great. If you want to read a well-written literary mystery, try Allen Kurzweil's The Grand Complication.

A nice overview of techniques for nature photography with a lot of gorgeous photographs given as examples (the reproduction quality is quite good — these photos just pop ). There is a fair amount of material that is specific to film photography, but there is plenty here for those of us who shoot digital. I found the discussion of lenses good, and the extended discussion of close-up photography very useful. I had been pining for a macro lens, but I'm now convinced that I'll be able to do just fine with a $50 diopter mounted on my existing lens.

Bill B. loaned me this as potential inspiration for my photography. It's a collection of nature photographs made by Eliot Porter accompanied by an essay and a handful of captions by James Gleick (author of Chaos). About half of the photographs are truly stunning — they vividly capture the gorgeous complexity of waves, lava, and plant life. Some of the others look a bit ordinary to my eye, but your mileage may vary. There's nothing new in Gleick's essay, but the juxtaposition of text and image sometimes leads to renewed insight.

I'm inspired to trek out into the woods and to the shore to look for chaotic patterns. I very much like the abstract beauty of this kind of photography when it's done well. I have no delusions of making art of this quality, but it's fun to try (and it's a helluva lot cheaper to hang your own 8x10 prints than to buy them from a pro).

This is another strong outing from China Mieville. Like Perdido Street Station and The Scar, Iron Council is set in the world of Bas Lag, and it is infused with the politics of its major city, New Crobuzon. As in those other books, Mieville creates a rich tapestry of characters and setting, and he proves again the fertility of his imagination. Having finished the novel, my mental images of the Iron Council itself are as vivid and unforgettable as those of the Armada in The Scar.

Two of the characters, Judah and Ori, are drawn with great detail, and they are among Mieville's best characters to date. Many of the other characters, Ann-Hari, Qurabin, Cutter, Spiral Jacobs, and Drogon, are intriguing, but are intentionally left draped in mystery. Mieville loves to give minor details without ever revealing the whole picture — a device that makes the reader feel immersed in an unfamiliar world.

To be honest, when I only had fifty pages left to read in this novel, I wasn't sure Mieville was going to be able to pull off a convincing ending — there were several loose threads and a few seemingly inconsequential characters — but in the end, it's a coherent whole, and the final twists turn out to be pretty-much inevitable. If you are new to Bas Lag, start with the other novels, but don't skip this one.

Nicholson Baker's latest novel is one of his least successful. The subject matter is highly controversial (the novel is about a guy telling his friend about his plan to assassinate President Bush), and it seems that controversy may be the whole point of the undertaking. The novel consists entirely of dialogue between Jay and Ben, wherein Jay explains his plans (involving remote control flying saws and "homing" bullets), and Ben tries to talk him out of it. During the course of the conversation, Baker points out some of the evils committed by Bush and his administration, but there isn't any kind of coherent political diatribe here — it's assumed that the reader already knows the details.

Baker's great strength as a writer is his ability to focus his descriptive powers on the daily minutia that normal people never notice, but he does very little of that in this slim volume. He's not very good at writing believable dialogue, and this effort isn't as good as what he achieved in Vox. I'm all for controversy, and I'd sure like to see Bush out of the White House, but I expected a lot more from the author of one of my all-time favorite books (The Mezzanine). Bottom line: Baker is a good writer, but this may be his least successful novel to date.

Bryson is an entertaining writer, and this book is better than the other two of his that I've read (A Short History of Nearly Everything and In a Sunburned Country). Here, he describes his adventures while hiking portions of the Appalacian Trail. The trail itself is a 2,000+ mile behemoth stretching along nearly the entire Eastern coast of the United States, along the Appalacian mountain range. It is one of our national treasures in spite of its relative obscurity, and Bryson aptly conveys his sense of awe, both at its majesty and at the tremendous willpower it requires of its hikers.

The book is informative, often amusing, and never boring. I'm inspired to head out into the woods, though I'll probably continue to stick to day hikes.

This book angers me tremendously, not in and of itself, but in regard to the complementary book that will never — could never — exist. That book is of course "Bush's Plan for America", and the reason it can never exist is that as soon as anybody read it, they'd ride him out of Washington on a rail. It is refreshing to have a politician present a detailed set of values and the outline of a real plan, and to have them explicitly state that they intend to be held accountable to it if they are elected. And this is exactly what the Kerry/Edwards ticket has done. This book presents their plan to increase security, rebuild America's moral standing, strengthen the economy, and improve both education and health care.

It is unlikely that any American voter would agree with Kerry and Edwards on every part of their plan, but a side-by-side comparison of it with the record of the Bush administration reveals that nearly every item in the Kerry/Edwards plan is a step in the right direction. Given the deceitful, spin-happy, "if you're not with us, you're a traitor" attitude of the incumbent, it's not hard to make a strong case to any voter with enough conscience and intelligence to read a book like this.

I'm not a Democrat, but I can point to dozens of moral crimes against America committed by Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, and the rest of their twisted, deceitful administration. I'm disgusted with the way they manipulate the media — coming within inches of bald-faced lies, knowing that the media won't point out the abuses of the truth. I'm also disgusted with the way they are treating John Kerry. For all his faults, Kerry has a long and honorable public record. Although Bush was a drunk for nearly all of his adult life, and almost certainly shirked his National Guard duties during Vietnam, and Cheney is a bonafide corporate criminal, Kerry and his campaign have focused their venom almost exclusively on Bush's policies. In contrast, the Bush campaign twists every Kerry speech into an out-of-context soundbite that tries to make Kerry look weaker than Bush.

I hope that a lot of American voters read this book. You can download it for free at Kerry's web site .

Freeman Patterson is a skilled photographer and teacher who prefers to shoot with 35mm SLR cameras. There's a spirituality in his approach that resonates in his books. He uses photography as a means to commune with nature, and his enthusiasm is contagious.

This book is aimed at film rather than digital photographers, so there's some discussion that's irrelevant to me. However, there are dozens of excellent photographs, each accompanied by a short paragraph giving the reader some context, often also giving useful strategies for learning to see similar photographic opportunities. The text is pleasant, though it is filled more with "come on, you can do it" encouragement than with useful tips.

This book is one of three that I recently ordered, so I'm hoping there's not a lot of overlap between his books. If nothing else, I'll have a lot of well-made photos to look to for inspiration.

[Note to the other obsessive-compulsives out there: this is the 400th book I've read since I started keeping track online on January 1st, 1995. An arbitrary milestone, but a milestone nonetheless.]

Thursday Next is a Special Operative in the LiteraTec division, a literature spook living in an alternate Britain, where time travel is somewhat commonplace, and it's literally (no pun intended) possible to enter the pages of a novel. If it sounds farfetched, it is. The New York Times describes the heroine as "part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew, and part Dirty Harry". Upping the pop culture ante even further, the Wall Street Journal claims that this novel "combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer". USA Today brings in the reference I'm tempted to make: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Although The Eyre Affair does share elements with each of the aforementioned pop culture icons, it isn't quite as good or as interesting as any of them. The narrative stumbles along somewhat for 200 pages (not unlike a Douglas Adams book, but without all of his estimable charm) before really finding its legs for the climax (I greatly enjoyed the last 75 pages). This novel will appeal especially to fans of Jane Eyre, but if, like me, you read the book almost 20 years ago and you barely remember the plot, your fascination level will be moderate at best. Fforde clearly has a potent imagination, but I think he needs a better editor. The Eyre Affair is often amusing, sometimes confusing, and worthwhile as lightweight fantasy with literary references (if not ambitions).

I've owned Aaland's book for more than a year, and I've read sections of it several times, but until now, I'd never pored through the whole thing. For beginning and intermediate Photoshop Elements users, it's a useful text. Aaland covers a wide range of editing techniques, giving mostly straightforward instructions. On the topic of layers, Aaland's text falls flat; it was only by reading Kelby's book that I was able to gain a good working understanding of their expressive power.

For a book with the audacious subtitle "The Art of Digital Photography", Aaland's volume falls quite short with regard to the photographs themselves. Many of the retouches in his examples are blatantly obvious, and they make Photoshop Elements look like a toy. The techniques used to generate the examples are sound, but it will require a more artful eye than is evident here to use them tastefully.

I've flipped through a handful of books on Photoshop editing techniques and found most of them to be overly simplistic or too geared toward web publishing and Ebay. I was thrilled when searching on Amazon to learn several very useful and nonobvious tricks in the handful of pages of Kelby's book that were available online. So I bought it, in spite of the fact that it covers Photoshop 7 rather than Elements (which is what I own).

Having read the entire book, I don't entirely regret my choice. It is true that much of the content of this book is useless in Elements, since the necessary tools and menus just aren't available. However, there are enough useful techniques, and the presentation is given in such a straightforward "here's how to fix this problem" manner, that I believe I've received my money's worth.

The bottom line is that in a weekend of experimentation with the material presented in this book, I have gained a great deal of confidence in my Photoshop abilities, and the results are visible in my photos. (It doesn't hurt that I also recently purchased the NeatImage noise-reduction plug-in, which does a tremendous job.)

Grace Marks was convicted of murder during the mid-nineteenth century, and she spent most of her life in prison, though history is somewhat unclear about her guilt or innocence. In this novel, Margaret Atwood takes the known facts of the case and fills in the blanks with her imagination, yielding a plausible but dull story.

Most of the novel consists of the interactions between Grace and her confessor, a proto-psychologist named Dr. Simon Jordan. We hear Grace's own words as she tells her story to Dr. Jordan, but we're also privy to certain things happening around her of which she is not aware. Atwood's explanation of the murderous events is quite believable.

There are some interesting elements here, but Grace is a long-winded narrator. There are lots of details that create an intricate character portrait, but I frankly found them to be boring, and I struggled to finish the novel.

I recently decided to upgrade my point-and-shoot digital camera (the wonderfully tiny Canon S400) to the new and acclaimed Nikon D-70 DSLR. With all of its available control parameters, it seemed a good idea to learn a bit more about the fundamentals of photography, so I trekked to a local bookstore and browsed for a while, until I came across this book. I've been a fan of DK's travel guides for several years — they're beautifully produced, blending excellent illustrations with stunning photographs, and the information contained within is just as complete as any other mainstream guidebook. With Hedgecoe's book, I immediately recognized the production values. There are dozens of illustrations and literally more than a thousand color photographs in this volume, each tagged with focal length, aperture, and shutter speed.

The photos are wonderful in their own right, but the accompanying text is also very clear and helpful. This book is very much aimed at photographers who are beginning to learn about the art, and it touches briefly on dozens of subjects rather than focus on a few in depth. I learned a lot from reading it, and I've been able to put many of the lessons to use in the two weeks I've had my new camera.

I've been shooting with a digital camera for almost four years, and I bought this book a year or so ago after reading a review that highlighted a couple of pointers I had never previously considered. The one in particular that caught my interest was using a pair of polarized sunglasses in front of a point-and-shoot camera lens when a proper polarizing filter isn't available. It's obvious in retrospect, but it's a good technique to have in your bag of tricks. Story's pocket guide contains some other useful techniques, as well as a bunch of useful rules of thumb for amateur photographers. It's written clearly and aimed at beginners, and I think it's successful in its aim: providing a useful reference you can stash in your camera bag. There's a second edition available (in color) that appears to be an improvement over the first.

King Rat was Mieville's first novel, and it displays a few signs of his later greatness, but it is much less satisfying than either Perdido Street Station or The Scar. Unlike his later books (and the upcoming, eagerly anticipated, Iron Council), which are set in the fictional world of Bas Lag, King Rat is part of the tiny fantasy sub-genre which sets mythological elements against a modern background of seedy underworld (c.f., Lisa Goldstein's Dark Cities Underground and Gaiman's Neverwhere).

In this case, the setting is London and the mythological element is the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The protagonist, Saul Garamond, is suddenly thrust into a conflict he doesn't understand, in which he is forced to come to terms with a burdensome heritage and engage an ancient enemy.

Mieville succeeds in creating a murky atmosphere, and (mostly) in making Garamond's character compelling, but the supporting cast are only sketched, and although Mieville tries hard to weave Jungle (drum and bass) music into the warp and woof of the novel, he is only partially successful. The climactic nightclub scene is like the rave scene in the second Matrix movie — vaguely exciting but definitely disappointing. The final showdown is anticlimactic (the bad guy's "secret" weapon is patently obvious 100 pages earlier), and although the denouement yields a somewhat unexpected relationship twist, it's not enough to pull the novel much above mediocrity.

If you are new to Mieville, start with Perdido Street Station, and come back to this only if you turn into a die-hard fan. King Rat isn't bad, but it's a long shot from his best work.

It has been over eight years since I last read a Michael Crichton book (the disappointing Lost World). Back twelve years ago or so, I devoured nearly all of his novels — when I was an engineering undergrad, I couldn't get enough of his fast-paced, science-based thrillers. Specifically, I remember liking Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain quite a lot. But after a while, Crichton's formula became apparent, the plots of the novels become more and more predictable, and I grew bored with his writing.

So it was purely as "comfort food" that I picked up Timeline. I didn't expect much, and I wasn't disappointed. This particular entry in Crichton's oeuvre centers on time travel, made possible by quantum computers and wormholes. All of the pseudoscience is actually a setup for Crichton to pen a swashbuckling adventure set in medieval France. I give him props for doing his research — there's lots of detail in the architecture and societal conventions he describes. As I've come to expect, the characters are all done in caricature, and there are plot holes you could drive a school bus through.

One plot hole in particular I can't help pointing out. One of Crichton's characters explains away time travel paradoxes with the parallel universe defense. Which is fine, except that the characters shouldn't be able to change history in their own universe. But they do, in two notable occurences. Oh well. It's still fun.

Into the Deep is a weak followup to Grimwood's excellent Replay. If you've read Replay, you will recognize the subject matter in this novel as the basis for the "Starsea" film in that book. Cetacean (dolphin/whale/etc.) intelligence was clearly one of Grimwood's passions, and the idea of humankind's first encounter with non-human intelligence (especially with creatures on our own planet) has the capacity to fuel a great novel, but this isn't it. I'm having a hard time putting my finger on what exactly disappointed me, but all I can definitively say is that I was never completely engaged by the story, and Grimwood's writing here seemed much less tight than it was in Replay.

1-2-3 Magic presents some simple strategies for discouraging unwanted behavior in young children, The process boils down to giving two abbreviated warnings before enforcing a timeout (the duration of which is based on the child's age). Given how easy it is to let your kids walk all over you, there's a lot to be said for having a straightforward approach to maintaining an appropriate level of control. Phelan does a fine job of describing what to do, but doesn't give enough justification for why his approach is better than others. I think it's worth trying, but I can't yet report on how effective it is.

David Foster Wallace is very smart and clever, and he's very fond of making sure you, the reader, never forget it. Although his "look at how well I use the English language" approach works well for me in the context of a novel (such as the fantastic Infinite Jest), it doesn't quite hold together in the context of a book on mathematical history.

I'm not afraid of math. I have advanced degrees in electical engineering and computer science, and my mother is fond of recalling the time when I insisted to my first-grade teacher that you could subtract a larger number from a smaller number if you allowed for negative numbers. And the time I excoriated my high-school geometry teacher for giving our class a nonsensical problem that was based on a "swingset" in a plane. So, it's not fear of mathematics that made this book unappealing.

I think the problem here is a mismatch of form and content. Wallace is clearly educated well-enough to truly understand transfinite math, and he's sufficiently skilled as an historian to put the details in order, but somehow the presentation, in an incredibly dense 300 pages, doesn't quite work. The footnotes too often have a tinge of condescension, and the build-up of concepts is too slow in some places; too fast in others.

As a result, I struggled to maintain momentum as I read. It didn't help that I had to look up a word in the dictionary every few pages (the A-Lex software on my PDA was a huge time-saver there). In the end, I understand infinity a little bit better, and I expanded my vocabulary infinitesimally (that's a lame joke, I know). However, I don't know anyone to whom I could in good faith recommend this book.

My cholesterol numbers aren't terrific, so I've been making incremental changes to my diet for the last fifteen months with the goal of improving my "ratio" and my health in general. At the same time, I've been trying to reduce my body fat percentage by losing a little weight and increasing my strength. I've read a few exercise books that touch on nutrition, and I've been regularly reading Men's Health magazine and the Consumer Reports "On Health" newsletter. I've also tried to apply some common sense to the task, taking an "everything in moderation" approach. With this strategy, I was decreasing my intake of trans fats and processed grains, and increasing my intake of whole grains, poly- and mono-unsaturated oils. Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy affirms the changes I've made and suggests a few more.

Willett's approach to nutrition is based on rock-solid science. He's not interested in fads, and he's very circumspect in his recommendations. All of the advice he gives in this book is based on long-term, large-scale nutritional studies, and he provides plenty of supporting evidence for his claims without ever becoming pedantic. He details an alternative to the USDA food pyramid that isn't paid for by special interests (such as the dairy- and grain- farmers lobbies). The advice boils down to (roughly in order of importance):

1. maintain a stable, healthy weight
2. replace saturated fats and trans fats with unsaturated fats
3. substitute whole-grain carbohydrates for refined-grain carbohydrates
4. choose healthier sources of protein by trading red meat for nuts, beans, chicken, and fish
5. eat plenty of vegetables and fruits (in as wide a variety as possible)
6. use alcohol in moderation
7. take a daily multivitamin for insurance (Vitamin E supplements look like a good bet for most people too)

There's nothing Earth-shaking here, and it lines up very well with the Mediterranean and low-glycemic diets (though it doesn't exclude some alternative approaches). I can't recommend this highly enough to anyone who cares about eating well to improve their health. It may be a little more expensive to eat right, but it's a worthwhile investment.

P.S. The book also includes an extensive section with recipes. I can't comment on those, since I don't have much interest in them myself.

I have been on a health kick since January, 2003. I've lost 18 pounds and increased my strength through a combination of diet (everything in moderation except for trans- and saturated-fats, which are minimized, and fiber and unsaturated fat, which are increased) and exercise (weight lifting and aerobic, for a total of about 3-4 hours per week). I've read a total of six books on fitness and strength training, including this one. I picked it up after reading the glowing review in Cool Tools.

Body for Life is a motivational guide as much as or more so than an exercise guide, and Phillips spends the bulk of the book trying to "psyche up" the reader. I won't comment on how successful he is at that undertaking, since I pretty much ignored those parts. When he finally starts talking about exercise and diet, I started paying close attention. And I was pleased to see that nearly everything he proposes is consistent with what I've learned from the other exercise books I've read — it may even improve upon them slightly (specifically, Phillips's program is simple ).

The Body for Life program boils down to six workouts per week: three 45-minute weight-training sessions intermingled with three 20-minute aerobic sessions. All of the workouts are based on interval training, which I have not done much of previously, and which Phillips suggests is one of the keys to getting good results. To complement the workouts, Phillips recommends a fairly sensible and very simple diet plan, consisting of six small-ish meals per day, each made up of one serving of protein and one serving of carbohydrates, plus a couple of additional veggie servings inserted whenever. All of this makes good nutritional sense, and I expect that it probably does lead to decreased body fat and increased strength when combined with a fairly aggressive workout program.

On the down side, Phillips is a little too quick to recommend his company's "nutrition" shakes as a meal replacement. I'm sure they are fine, but they are quite expensive, and I bet he's making a killing off of them.

I'll be following the 12 week program starting in a few days. I'll let you know how it goes.

I recently came across a link on TJIC's blog to a set of notes on how alpha geeks keep their lives organized . It's a mess of a text file, but there are some decent hints there. Getting Things Done is recommended at the end, and after checking the reviews on Amazon, I bought a copy.

I've flirted with getting organized several times over the years, but until recently, my life was simple enough to mostly keep in my head, so I never stuck with any particular tools or schemes for schedules and project details. My relative laziness with regard to organization changed recently with the addition of new responsibilities at work and some upcoming changes in my home life. For the first time, I have more things going on than I can keep track of without help.

Happily, David Allen's book has some solid techniques for dealing with the potential insanity of multiple projects. The central tenet of the book is "get everything out of your head and into a trusted system so that you can focus on the task at hand". This makes perfect sense, and Allen presents a simple, proven system for accomplishing it.

As a strategy, I give it enthusiastic thumbs-up. As a book, I'm not so pleased. Getting Things Done is much longer than it needs to be (I think it could be credibly summarized in twenty pages), yet Allen misses the opportunity to give detailed examples of how to use a PDA or computer-based PIM to embody his techniques. There is enough detail that it's not too hard to fill in the blanks, but in the week or so that I've been using the process, I've discovered several PDA tricks that could easily merit a chapter in the book.

Mark Haddon's protagonist, Christopher, is an autistic boy who discovers that his neighbor's dog has been murdered. The novel is told entirely in Christopher's own words, as he tries to solve the case. It's a fabulous gambit, and one that pays off in an entirely unexpected way.

I haven't read very many books whose narrator has a mental illness or deficiency, and I suspect that it's hard to create a successful novel in this genre. In recent memory, I can certainly point to Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order (Multiple Personality Disorder) and Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette's) as successful examples, and although I liked Ruff's book more, I'm much more comfortable recommending Haddon's novel to a wide audience. It's straightforward without ever being obvious; it's by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming; it's often funny, without ever taking potshots at the protagonist; and it feels very real. I particularly recommend it to geeks like myself who sometimes find themselves more comfortable solving a math problem than interacting with other people.

(A shoutout to XTC-geeks: the novel is set in Swindon, England, the home of Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding. An irrelevant coincidence, of course.)

Kevin Kelly, former Executive Editor of Wired magazine and editor of the Whole Earth Review, is passionate about "Cool Tools". He and his collaborators seek out "books, gadgets, software, videos, maps, hardware, materials, websites or gear that are extraordinary, little-known, or reliably handy" in a wide range of hobbies and passions. If you happen to be interested in any of the areas they cover, Kelly's Cool Tools website is a fantastic reference. I've been reading it for half a year or so, and although I haven't run out and bought anything that he's suggested, I've made note of several things that I may pick up sometime later.

The Cool Tools book is a self-published compendium of information culled from the website, so strictly speaking, there's no need to pay for it when you can get the information for free online. I find, however, that I like to dogear and mark up catalogs, so I decided to buy the print version. I marked up dozens of pages, and although I'm not running out to buy anything, there are probably 50 or so items that I can see myself seeking out during the next couple of years, particularly as my son reaches school-age.

Each entry in the book features a review from either Kelly or one of his cohorts. The reviews focus on why each item is the best tool for its particular application, and at least in the areas with which I'm familiar, the picks are spot-on. I will defnitely avoid the medical items (in my opinion, Kelly has no business recommending herbs or medicines to his readers), but for camping and other outdoor activities, and for science and natural history, the recommendations look great.

Finally, a warning of sorts: the production values of this book are quite poor. Many of the pictures are hard to see, and the whole thing was obviously put together by Kelly himself without an editor or visual designer. That said, those flaws didn't bother me a bit.

The problem with pseudo-academic books without proper bibliographies is that if you find one error or non-scientific conclusion, the entire contents of the book and the credibility of the author are thrown into question. I have no doubt that most of Restak's claims are valid, but there was at least one that really rubbed me the wrong way.

Restak makes a classic argument from authority when he claims without justification that Mozart's music is somehow uniquely able to improve brain function (he doesn't state it quite so bluntly, but the intended conclusion is quite clear). When I was studying psychoacoustics in graduate school, I knew people who did research studying the effect of music on the brain, and they pretty vehemently argued that the "Mozart effect" was a crock. Just about any harmonic music can have a positive effect; there's nothing magic about Mozart. That conclusion doesn't sell CDs to insecure parents or make the nightly news, so we're inundated with "Baby Mozart" tripe.

If this was the only lapse, I'd give Restak a break, but there are other passages where he recommends very specific exercises that the reader can do to (supposedly) improve memory function. Perhaps these exercises do have some effect on the brain, but Restak gives no evidence to support that claim, and I'm not buying it. He also provides virtually no data to support his claim that one can fend off Alzheimer's disease by following his recommendations.

On the other hand, some of the other arguments make more sense. I agree that playing word games and strategy games (such as chess) can probably improve one's ability to see novel connections between objects and concepts, and I do believe that listening to and playing music is an extraordinarily worthwhile activity. And I do intend to follow Restak's suggestion to start keeping a private electronic journal to help make connections between ideas over time.

A few weeks ago, Glen Engel-Cox asked me where the female writers were in my list of favorite authors. I didn't have a good answer then, but I think I have a partial answer now.

I mean, it's not as if I go out of my way to avoid writers without a Y chromosome. It's just that the writers that speak most directly to me, the ones where I understand most of the "in" jokes, the ones whose prose I find myself savoring, are men. Three of my absolute favorites are Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen — three white men, each 10-15 years older than I, who write complex literary fiction. I have a tremendous amount in common with these writers. Setting aside the obvious fact that I'm a crappy writer, we share a cultural background, an interest in pop culture and science, and a love of language. Until today, I had never thought about how similar they are (I had never realized how close they are in age — all early-to-mid forties), but I guess that helps explain why I look up to them and why I take such pleasure in their writing. I'm interested in reading widely and diversely, but the white American male writer 15 years my senior has been my literary center for nearly ten years and will probably continue to be so for a while yet.

How To Be Alone is an essay collection, and as such, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Franzen tackles Alzheimers, privacy, the importance of the literary novel, the ailing postal service in Chicago, prisons, his brush with Oprah, and more. The more recent essays are better than the older ones, perhaps because Franzen has become more comfortable with his voice over the years, but all of them are worthwhile. Of course, if you aren't like me, a 30-something white American guy with a penchant for artful prose, your mileage may vary.

I'm a casual fan of Philip K. Dick's work. I very much enjoyed A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and The Man in the High Castle, and I love the movies Blade Runner and Minority Report , so I approached this collection with elevated expectations.

Naturally, I was disappointed. The book doesn't provide any contextual material for the included stories — there is no preface, no appendix, not a single introduction — indeed, there is not even a listing of previous publication dates. So, without doing additional research, we're given no clue where these stories fall in Dick's oeuvre. I suspect that some of these stories are from early on in his career, because they seem a bit juvenile, but I honestly don't care enough to dig up the information myself. Dick's typical themes are present here, including inability to distinguish man from machine, time paradox, exaggeration and juxtaposition of cultures, etc., but they are more fully realized in his novels. Most of the included stories sport twist endings that may have been surprising when these stories were first released, but they are entirely predictable today. A punchline doesn't always work so well when you see it coming.

Philip K. Dick was a writer with wonderful ideas, and he could execute a fairly intricate plot to make a (sometimes) deep philosophical point, but he was not a prose artist by any stretch of the term. I don't remember his novels well enough to make a fair comparison to the stories, but I vaguely remember them being better than this.

Pi Patel is a survivor. During his emigration from India, the boat carrying his family (and many of the animals from their zoo) capsizes, and Pi is stranded on a lifeboat, where he struggles — in the company of a full-grown Bengal tiger — to survive for several months until finally running aground in Mexico.

Warning! The following paragraphs contain spoilers.

The "unreliable narrator" is a difficult gambit to pull off, especially in a novel with only one human character, and although Martel succeeds better here than, for instance, Eco did with Baudolino, the result is not entirely satisfying. Throughout the bulk of the novel, the story of Pi's voyage with Richard Parker (the aforementioned tiger) is stated as fact, and the details are sufficiently realistic (even though the story is at times quite farfetched) that the reader suspends disbelief and drifts along with Pi across the Pacific.

For me, this suspension succeeded until Pi landed on the "carnivorous island"; this section strained Pi's credibility as a narrator sufficiently that I lost faith in the novel and really began to wonder what Yann Martel was up to. It was only in the last twenty pages, when Pi tells a different version of the story to the authorities, that things began to make sense. The animals on Pi's voyage were stand-ins for humans, and Pi's story is entirely metaphorical — actually, allegorical is probably a more appropriate term.

My wife disagrees with my interpretation. She thinks Pi's story about the tiger was "the truth" and that the alternate version was simply "telling the authorities what they wanted to hear". Perhaps that says more about my wife and me than it does about the novel.

I had glanced through this book several times starting about three years ago, but have only now managed to read it from cover to cover. Object-orientation (OO) is a very specific mindset for programming — one that does not always come easily for those who were steeped in procedural programming for decades (I started programming around 1980). For simple applications, OO is overkill, but it can make complex systems managable, in large part by compartmentalizing the data representations into units whose structure maps naturally onto the problem domain.

As one gains experience with OO systems, patterns (similar sets of relationships among objects) begin to become apparent in designs, and the more readily one can recognize the appropriate places to apply these patterns, the more quickly a reasonable design can be fashioned. This book collects twenty-three such patterns, divided into three groups (five creational, seven structural, and eleven behavioral). Each pattern is discussed in great detail, with several standard section headings: intent (executive soundbite), also known as (other names for the pattern), motivation (why the pattern is a good idea) applicability (situations that merit its use), structure (a diagram showing a high-level view of how it works), participants (a brief functional description of the objects in the diagram), collaborations (other patterns that are closely related), consequences (some possible gotchas), implementation (some things to keep in mind when writing the code), and sample code (in C++ and smalltalk). The book also contains a useful reference table in the front bookend and a couple of useful appendices.

One important thing to keep in mind is that Design Patterns is not a step-by-step exposition, and it's not meant to be absorbed in one pass. It's a reference book, and the intent is that the reader should become familiar enough with the twenty-three patterns it contains that when a particular pattern would be useful in a design, he can quickly find the relevant details and refresh his memory. It also serves to add a bunch of useful terms to the programmer's lexicon, thereby facilitating communication of complex ideas between programmers.

The bottom line is that Design Patterns is a classic programming text, and it should probably be on the desk of all but the most guru-ish OO gods.

A Case of Curiosities was Allen Kurzweil's first novel. It's a rock-solid piece of literary fiction, set in the eighteenth century and centered on a young boy named Claude Page. Claude starts the novel at the hands of a conniving surgeon and ends it at the hands of a French mob. Along the way, he develops a wide range of artistic and scientific skills, which ultimately lead to an invention that could be his downfall. His friends and colleagues are a colorful bunch, ranging from a secretive mentor, to a despicable seller of pornographic books, a taxidermist, and a free-thinking coach driver.

As with The Grand Complication, his other novel, Kurzweil's writing here is structured in a very contrived way that he is careful to point out at the very end. I'm actually a bit of a fan of this kind of structure (minus the shoving-your-nose-in-it finish), as long as it's done well (which in this case it mostly is) and doesn't stand in the way of telling a good story. The prose itself is often clever; Kurweil is pretty good at wordplay, and he isn't afraid to show it.

I'm not completely enamored with Kurzweil's writing, but I'll certainly keep a lookout for his future novels. WIth his first two, he's off to a good start.

I used to read a lot of horror novels. Up until about 1994, I had read every published novel and story collection by Stephen King and Clive Barker, as well as all of Anne Rice's Vampire and Witch books. I stopped reading them because they got to be boring; there were either major plot problems (particularly with Rice, who can't end a novel to save her life) or the ideas had become uninteresting or derivative. To me, the mark of a good novel in this genre is self-consistency, with reasonable justification of the various plot elements. Dan Simmons usually manages this, and it's why I'm still reading his novels today (though his recent "horror" efforts have been among his weakest).

Jeff Mariotte's novel is okay, but it fails because too much of the plot is only tangentially relevant to the core story. He's got a stock premise: a vague, undefined evil is blooming beneath what is essentially an anarchic trailer park, and three people from different backgrounds come together to try to stop it. There are a couple of wonderful scenes; in particular, I thought Lucy's chase through the valley was very well done, but it is emblematic of the novel's flaws. In my opinion, Lucy is the most interesting character, and she has the best subplots, but in the end, she's completely irrelevant to the story's core, and that frustrates me tremendously. Good ingredients are necessary — but not sufficient — for creating a good meal; you have to use them in the right proportions and they all have to contribute to the whole.

I received both The Grand Complication and A Case of Curiosities for Christmas, and I glanced them over quickly before choosing Complication as my first exposure to Allen Kurzweil. I had no way of knowing this when I made my decision, but it turns out that the book I chose is a sequel of sorts to the one I passed over; the book I neglected is actually a character of sorts in the one I selected (and in a very meta way, one character in the present book is projected back into the other novel). Confused? Don't be...it makes sense when you read it.

Kurzweil is a bit of a pedant, but in an endearing way. His protagonist, Alexander Short, is a librarian who is slightly eccentric (this is true of all good librarians, right?). His quirks include constantly taking cryptic notes in a book attached to his waist, and his interests include secret compartments. When he is contracted by a curious older man to help find a missing objet d'art, the reader is drawn into an unorthodox mystery. About two thirds of the way through the 360 pages of the novel proper, Kurzweil bogs down, but he recovers with a couple of satisfying twists, and the ending is apropos.

Kurzweil's prose is quirky, but with good reason. The characters are strange but consistent, and there is clearly a lot of scholarship behind the story itself. I'm very curious to read another of his novels to make a comparison.

I had never heard of Ken Grimwood or his novel Replay until I read Glen's memorial , written shortly after Grimwood's death. Between that and the fact that the novel had won the World Fantasy Award forBest Novel in 1988, it was a no-brainer that I should read this book. I received a copy this year for Christmas, and now that I have read it, consider me a fan — Replay is wonderful.

In Replay, Grimwood takes a simple science fiction premise — a man relives 25 years of his life over and over — leavens it with a couple of complications (one is that his "replays" keep getting shorter), and plays it out to one of several possible conclusions. What makes the novel interesting is that Grimwood gradually reveals the "rules" governing the novel's universe, and he consistently brings in new wrinkles with every cycle. I don't want to reveal more, because part of the wonder of the novel is the continual surprise laced with the perfect logic that marks the progression. The prose itself is workmanlike but descriptive. Grimwood was clearly not a show-off, but he obviously worked hard at his writing mechanics to make things very readable and never boring.

The end result is not just a successful science fiction story; it's a thoughtful commentary on life itself. It is life-affirming and a little bit heart-breaking. I found myself close to tears after reading one particularly good passage, and after I turned the final page, I sat for quite awhile, thinking about how I'm living my own life.

Thanks, Glen, for bringing this novel to my attention. I can't say (yet) that it changed my life, but it's the kind of novel that has that potential.

In Dark Cities Underground, Lisa Goldstein uses Egyptian mythology and children's stories (Peter Pan, Alice, Wind in the Willows) as the backdrop for a gripping fantasy. She creates a world in which the subway systems of the world (in particular San Francisco's BART and London's Underground) are interconnected as part of a vast "Nether Land" into which children routinely venture, returning with outlandish stories that their parents sometimes publish as fantasy. The protagonist, Jerry, was one such child. He's grown now and struggling to come to terms with his childhood, particularly with his estranged mother (who grew rich publishing Jerry's childhood tales). He joins Ruthie Berry, a writer working on a book about Jerry's story, on a journey that takes them deep into the underworld.

Goldstein paces the story well, bringing in interesting elements at every turn without ever making them seem contrived. The world she creates has been compared to the work of Jonathan Carroll, but other than the theme of childhood stories being tinged with reality (as in Carroll's The Land of Laughs), the connection is weak. Carroll usually blends fantastic elements more subtly into the "real" world, such that the characters aren't always sure where the magic begins; Goldstein, in constrast, clearly demarcates the two worlds. This, of course, is not to say that one approach is better than the other, but rather just to point out a difference. Goldstein also works less at characterization, and doesn't provide any really likable characters. That said, I was consistently entertained by her writing and always curious about what would happen at the next turn. Dark Cities Underground is quick and enjoyable dark fantasy.