Best of 2007 Reading

Here are my five-star reads from 2007: You can see some of my reading jags in here, with lots of communism and Warren Ellis. Not a lot of super-great teen reading, though.

The Cold War: a new history by John Lewis Gaddis
1984, Orwell
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Martin Amis
The secret world of American communism, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov
Nextwave, agents of H.A.T.E. Vol. 1, This is what they want, Warren Ellis
Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis
Fell. Volume 1, Feral city, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Ben Templesmith
The campfire collection: thrilling, chilling tales of alien encounters, edited by Gina Hyams

Teen reading
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian, by Sherman Alexie ; art by Ellen Forney
The wall: growing up behind the Iron Curtain / Peter Sís (Y)
Again Sís does a fantastic job combining a great story with great illustrations. I really liked it. Five stars.

Horseradish : bitter truths you can’t avoid / Lemony Snicket (Y)
I got a recommendation from a pal, but was let down by the fact that, while amusing, it seems like a Jack Handey retread. Two stars.

Monkey portraits / photographs by Jill Greenberg (Y)
Fun to make your face recognition fight to interpret monkey faces. Great portraits. Four stars.

I’d tell you I love you, but then I’d have to kill you / Ally Carter (Y)
At first thought it was just a (well paced) teen spy school book, but developed much more as the book went on. Well done. Three stars.

But what kind?

My favorite part of the Oscars is watching the Cavalcade of Death, the tribute to the artists who died the previous year. The New York Times has their own cavalcade (but pictures for only 27 of them, including a very upsetting one of Marcel Marceau out of makeup). So far, my favorite is:

“Joseph E. Gallo, 87, winemaker who turned to cheese.”

What a tragic way to die!

Alexie, again

Here are the books that Junior really likes in the book The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian:

The Grapes of Wrath
Catcher in the Rye
Fat Kid Rules the World
Tangerine
Feed
Catalyst
Invisible Man
Fools Crow
Jar of Fools

Are they sloppy or just crazy?

I’m a big fan of the BBC News website (and go to some trouble to get to the Domestic version—and not just because it doesn’t have ads), though every so often they run a piece that makes me (usually not literally) tilt my head and say “Huh?” With few exceptions, these stories are in the Health section. Here’s today’s example: the headline is “Humour ‘comes from Testosterone’”; a more accurate summary of the article would be “Men were ruder to unicyclist than women; researcher concludes hormones are the reason, and further fancies this has something to do with humour.”

“The idea that unicycling is intrinsically funny does not explain the findings,” said Professor Shuster.
The simplest explanation, he says, is the effect of male hormones such as testosterone.
“The difference between the men and women was absolutely remarkable and consistent,” said Professor Shuster.

Ah, the simplest explanation. The “study” appears so badly designed that I’m not convinced there are any findings, much less that hormones are the simplest explanation. Oy.

I Am a Strange Loop Review

I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter. Non-fiction. I am (it turns out, several months later) not going to be able to say in this review everything that I want to. IAaSL is at a first approximation a deeper exploration of some of the recurring themes in Hofstadter’s work: most notably, consciousness (which he asserts is equivalent to a “soul”, and I don’t see a lot of reason to differ on that point), how it arises, and what it means.
Hofstadter spends a lot of time in the book asserting that my model of you is an extension of your consciousness. For a number of reasons, I am unable to buy it: I’m fully prepared to accept that my consciousness is more or less an accident of the way my senses work, and, especially, how my sensory/processing system feeds back into itself. My model of me, though, is based on observations of my actions, not the same direct feedback that brought me to consciousness. Similarly, my model of you doesn’t have any direct feedback relationship with your senses. Yes, you can tell me what you know about why you do things, but 1) no one has perfect knowledge of why one does things, and 2) your reports are delayed by time and filtered by both your senses and your model of you. My model of you is never going to surprise me with some insight into itself.
The time-sensitivity in feedback is, I think, a vital element that I’m not sure Hofstadter sufficiently respects. I’m fascinated by the study that showed our inability to tickle ourselves is very tightly time-limited (if you delay the result of my action enough (and it doesn’t take much), I will find it more tickling than if you don’t).
One thought that keeps coming up for me goes something like this: I am (i.e., my consciousness is) the total of my memories and my sensory input. So, who am I when I’m amnesiac? And variations on that theme. I find that a much more interesting rat hole to climb down than debating whether a loved one lives on (in anything more than a metaphorical sense) in the memories of others.
Thought-provoking, as Hofstadter always is, but not his best-directed effort.