Catch Up Post August -- December 2007

I haven't been posting for a while, so I thought I'd catch up by listing the books I've read since the last post here with a one or two sentence comment. Trying to do real reviews at this point would be too time consuming and I'd rather get up to speed fast and resume regular posting than risk falling so far behind that I don't bother to start posting again.

1. Pohl, Frederik. The Boy who Would Live Forever. New York: Tor, 2005. 384pp.

   Pretty typical late period Pohl. Kind of rambling and discursive, a bit weak on plot but full of lots of heart and enjoyable characters. Worth it for fans of Pohl's work or the Heechee books but probably not for the casual reader.

   
   
2. Hamilton, Donald. The Wrecking Crew. New York: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1960. 176pp.

   Another short sharp shock, the second in the Matt Helm series. Lots of twists and turns, hardboiled and noir, violent and cruel. Good stuff.

   
   
3. Wellington, David. 13 Bullets. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007. 336pp.

   Over the top horror at it's finest. A modern vampire vs. copy tale, violent and bloody, no refugees from Anne Rice-land either. the vampires are deliciously evil and demented.

   
   
4. Dozois, Gardner, ed. The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty Second Annual Collection. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. 704pp.

   Self-recommending. Full of great stories. Read it and it's brethren from previous and later years if you care about science fiction at the shorter lengths.

   
   
5. Stracher, Cameron. Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table. New York: Random House, 2007. 256pp.

   A heart-warming tale of a type-A workaholic dad who tries to slow down a bit and cook dinner for his family more often. A story of overwork, overstress, long commutes and crazy schedules. Mostly, Stracher makes it work.

   
   
6. Stephen Jones, ed. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: 16. New York: Carroll & Graff, 2005. 512pp.

   Another can't miss collection. I've been reading these for 10-plus years and I'm not sure if there's been an over all better selection than in this edition.

   
   
7. Scalzi, John. The Last Colony. New York: Tor, 2007. 320pp.

   A bit of a disappointment. A bit too talky and slow-moving compared to the previous installments with not enough emphasis on the action that has made Scalzi famous. Also, he really needs to expand this palette of characterization. Not everyone wise-cracks constantly. Also, the Perry/Jane/Zoe family unit is way too transparently Scalzi's own family for my liking. Again, to get to the next level as a novelist, he really needs to work on his characters.

   
   

Gawande, Atul, editor & Jesse Cohen, series editor. The best American science writing 2006. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. 362pp.

Greene, Brian, editor & Tim Folger, series editor. The best American science and nature writing 2006. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 290pp.

Zivkovic, Bora, editor. The open laboratory: The best writing on science blogs 2006. Chapel Hill, NC: Lulu.com/coturnix, 2007. 315pp.

First of all, these three books are all self-recommending. If you care about science, if you love good writing and especially if you can't get enough good writing about science then you have to buy and read these books. In the end, you won't be sorry with any or all of these books.

Two of them are from established series, Brian Greene's Best American Science & Nature Writing 2006 and Atul Gawande's Best American Science Writing 2006; as such, we really know what to expect from these books: high quality popular science journalism from the print media. And basically they both come through with representative volumes in their series. I'll talk about them in some detail, but not too much as, like I said, the series are known quantities. The third, Bora Zivkovic's Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006 is a totally new beast. The first in what will hopefully be a series collecting the best in recent science writing on science-related weblogs. This is a wild card; going in we really don't have too much of an idea of what to expect in terms of quality of writing or variety of coverage or even basic interest level of most of the pieces. To make matters even more uncertain, it's self-published using the print-on-demand service Lulu.com rather than a traditional publisher, so potentially quality control for both the physical and intellectual components could be an issue. As a result, I'll discuss this book in quite a bit more detail.

I'll discuss them in the order I read them.

First of all, Brian Greene's Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 (BASNW). Really solid, most of the articles were professional and interesting. Having read every book in the series since 2000, I can say that this volume does not shame the series at all. I especially like the way Greene uses the introduction to encourage us to see good science writing as a way to bridge C.P. Snow's famous Two Cultures, bringing together humanists and scientists around the warm glow of the scientific world view. A couple of the really notable stories this time around are John Hockenberry's "The Blogs of War" about soldiers blogging from Iraq and the free speech/military discipline issues around that. Another is Kevin Krajick's "The Mummy Doctor" about a man who's devoted his live to studying mummified human remains. Finally, I'd like to mention Charles C. Mann's "The Coming Death Shortage" about the oncoming population bulge in retired people and how it will effect western society, a fine article, one of the most thought provoking I've read in quite some time.

Now for the bad news. I always have a few quibbles with these books, and this one is no exception. One of the unfortunate things is that the quibbles always seem to be similar. First of all, 25 stories, only 2 women. Ok, Natalie Angier is pretty well the best science writer out there and she's one of the two. But you have to think that 2 out of 25 is pretty pathetic. Secondly, of 25 stories, 7 were from The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. Either Greene or (more likely) the series editor really need to get out more. As well, 6 were from Scientific American, another huge problem. SciAm tends a bit towards a kind of homogenized earnest dullness in thier articles, which while perfect for what they're trying to accomplish, tends to wear on you after a while. Greene should have made an effort to include a bit more diversity in his selections. Another quibble was that there was basically no nature writing, maybe 1.5 articles out of the total.

Next comes Atul Gawande's The Best American Science Writing 2006 (BASW). This is a particularly terrific example of a science essay collection. I think Gawande has done an exemplary job putting this book together. I've read a few of his essays in previous volumes of the various series and they were all excellent; I will try to track down his recent book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science.

He sets the tone for BASW right up front in the introduction:

So then what would the definition of the best science writing be? The clearest, most completely objective answer is: the best science writing is science writing that is cool. Even better, this particular year the best science writing is science writing that I think is cool...

I like science writing to be clear and to be interesting to scientists and nonscientists alike. I like it to be smart. I like it, every once in a while, to be funny. I like science writing to have a beginning, middle, and end -- to tell a story whenever possible.

Now that's a manifesto I can live with! And it seems that Gawande and I have very similar tastes in science writing, because I thought an awful lot of the stories he chose were really cool. In particular I'd like to mention Tom Mueller's "Your Move" about the developers of the super chess computer Hydra, Alan Weisman's "Earth without People" which describes how long it would take the planet to revert to its natural state if suddenly all humans were just to disappear. It a great article, very thought provoking and very moving, in a strange way. I also really enjoyed Neil Swidey's "What Makes People Gay" about the genetic and/or developmental origins of homosexuality. A good article is often one that leaves you with more questions, more uncertainty, than when you started. Finally, one of the truly finest stories I've read in any of the volumes of these stories is Richard Preston's "Climbing the Redwoods" about the great redwood forests in the north west -- climbing, exploring the treetops and canopy and hanging out with the dedicated researchers trying to save the redwoods.

A couple of small quibbles with Gawande's book are, of course, inevitable. Again, only two women out of 21 contributors is a little small. With fully six items from The New Yorker and four from The New York Times, and a bunch from the other slick magazines, Gawande suffers a bit from the lack of diversity of sources I noted with the Greene book altough not to the same extent and not as damaging to the quality of the book. For this particular kind of book, choose The New Yorker over Scientific American any day.

Finally, we come to Bora Zivkovic's The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006 (OLBWSB). There's an interesting story behind this one: scientist Bora Zivkovic and some of his colleagues in North Carolina decided to organize a one-day science blogger conference for January 21, 2007, hoping to attract a bunch of bloggers to come and talk about what they do and get to know each other face to face. To commemorate that project, he came up with the idea to edit an anthology of the best recent science blog postings. Unfortunately, by that time it was December 2006 so there was very little time to solicit, compile, edit and publish the book. Well, using the power of the blogosphere and the print-on-demand powers of Lulu.com, he pulled it off (you can read more about the genesis of the book and conference here and here and order the book here).

Needless to say, this was a labour of love that certainly didn't take the full 9 months to be born. The important question is, how does it shape up to the other two? At first glance it seems that Zivkovic set himself an impossible task trying to pull something decent together, both in terms of the presentation and the quality of the content, in such a short period of time. We can probably only expect something shoddy and half-assed -- right? Well, I'm happy to say that all fears of disaster were certainly not justified -- anyone that pays attention to Zivkovic's blog knows that he's smart, capable, dedicated and without a doubt energetic and that he wouldn't let something unworthy out the door. Being a long-term fan of his blog (A Blog Around the Clock, part of the important ScienceBlogs stable), I was pretty sure I would be happy with the book and was looking forward to reading it as soon as he announced the project on his blog. And I wasn't disappointed. The book is very good indeed, better than even I expected. Zivkovic and the mighty forces of the science blogosphere that he drew upon have not let us down.

First, the good news. There's quite good variety in the posts, some longer and most quite short and to the point. That's something I appreciated about this book, the authors get right down to business with no wasted space, reflecting the more hit and run nature of blogs. Also, I appreciated the nice mix of tone, some serious, almost Scientific American-y, some very technical descriptions of some scientific principle, some very sophisticated literature review articles. On the other hand, there were also some pieces with more light-hearted intent, some personal essays and slice of life stories. Evolution vs. intelligent design, global warming deniers and other hot topics were also well covered. I would also like to note a much better percentage of women contributors than the others as well as several non-American voices excluded by definition from the other two. (10 11 women and at least 8 13 non-US out of 50 -- many authors are pseudonymous or don't give easily found location information so these numbers are approximate). The average quality of the writing might be a touch lower than the other two books, but only a little and, to my mind, understandable and almost inevitable in a collection that privileges non-professional writers; the flip-side is that we're getting so much of the information directly from the professional scientists so a few infelicities of style are more than compensated for. There are lots of great bloggers represented in this book, a few I'm certainly adding to my blogroll.

Now for a few individual highlights, although choosing three or four out of 50 is a tough task. The first article that really stood out for me was Zivkovic's own "Everything you ever Wanted to Know about Sleep (but Were Afraid to Ask)" where is gives a lot of information about sleep patterns and habits in a highly digestible and enjoyable fashion. Afarensis' "Lessons from Kennewick" was also very interesting and enjoyable. He talks about some of the important issues surrounding studying ancient human remains while still being respectful of what those remains represent to people today. Skeptico's "What the (Bleep) Were they Thinking" is a great demolition of the film What the (Bleep) Do We Know, which purported to be about how quantum theory supports various new age-y ideas but was really a load of crap. Finally, I'd also like to mention the post from John Hawks's Weblog "Selection, Nuclear Genetic Variation, and mtDNA" which was a bit too technical for me, but was a great example of the kind of review-type essay that's so valuable on the web. You can read the original posts for all the entries in the book here. And before I forget, Lulu.com does a great job on the physical book; it's comparable in quality to the best of trade paperbacks.

There always room for some constructive criticism; most of the quibbles I'm going to mention are obviously a result of the book being put together so quickly. Nevertheless, some issues need to be raised. First of all, there were a few cases where the short author bios at the beginning of each article needed to be expanded a bit. There were a couple of posts from group blogs where the actual author (which Munger from Cognitive Daily) wasn't mentioned or where an author's name is known but it wasn't mentioned in the bio (Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars). A few other hings of that nature, too.

I also found that the subject areas of the blogs were a little more restricted than I would like. The concentration of the life sciences posts, for example, was a bit high, but that reflects the focus of ScienceBlogs platform and of Zivkovic's blog where most of the post recruiting was done. I would have liked to see more on computing and engineering, for example. But again, the short time frame meant that people not plugged into the ScienceBlogs universe would unlikely have found out in time. The fact that Zivkovic also used a panel of volunteers to vote on submitted posts also may have lead to a bit less diversity of subjects -- first-past-the-post systems always reduce diversity at the margins. As an example, I was quite surprised not to see any posts on women in science. I hope Zivkovic uses a stronger editorial hand next time giving the book an even better balance and a stronger personality. But to reiterate, I loved this book so these criticisms are only meant in the most constructive way.

So, after a look at the individual trees, can we take a look at the forest as well? In other words, can I see any major differences in the kind of material in the various books? First of all, BASNW and BASW are composed of professionally written pieces, done for money by professional journalists. The stories are, on average, longer and more structured. They'll take an in-depth topic and explain from start to finish. Often it'll be obvious that no expense was spared in researching the article. The journalists get to travel around, interviewing scientists, visiting their labs or accompanying them on their field work. This leads to really interesting, human stories about the women and men doing the science. On the other hand, the blog postings are a little more all over map. Ranging from screeds against religious zealots and climate change deniers to short essays explicating a very particular scientific or philosophical concept to heartfelt personal essays, they reflect an amazing diversity of thought and opinion. I look forward to reviewing the next iteration of all three of these books this time next year. My final verdict? If I had to rank them, I'd put BASW in first a little; it's definitely the most purely entertaining of the three. A little behind BASW is OLBWSB, which is also a little ahead of BASNW. But, I'm really glad I have all three of these books and would unhesitatingly suggest them to anyone interested in science. I would recommend them to any academic or public library. High school and middle school kids would also really enjoy them. I know my 14 year old is next in line to read them around here!

Update 2007.03.02: Updated numbers of women and non-US contrbutors based on comment by Bora Zivkovic (coturnix) on the other blog.

Jones, Stephen and Kim Newman, eds. Horror: Another 100 best books. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.456pp.

This is a great book based on a great idea. Ask 100 people in the extended horror fiction family to write a short essay about their favourite book and then publish the results. If you can get authors like Robert Silverberg, Poppy Brite, Nancy Collins, ST Joshi, David Morrell and a whole bunch of others, you're in business. I liked this book a lot, as well as the first book in the series published a few years ago, Horror: 100 best books. It's a great thing to leave around the house and read a chapter or two here and there -- I've been reading the darn thing since June and just finished it today. I actually read all the chapters in sequence, something I've not done yet with the original book. There are also books in the series on science fiction and fantasy. I hope to give all three of those this same treatment one day; in fact, I think I'll be putting the sf one at my bedside today. One great thing about these books is that they also have additional reading lists at the end. This one has the TOC from Horror: 100 best books as well as a year by year listing of important books from 458 BCE (The Oresteia by Aeschylus) to 2005 (The mysteries by Lisa Tuttle).

The best thing about a book like this is that is introduces you to books and authors you've never heard of or didn't know much about and gets you excited about trying out there works. It also gives you a chance to judge your own comprehensiveness in genre reading, letting you know if there are serious gaps.

By way of a meme-y thing, I present the list of 100 here, with the ones I've read bolded and the ones I want to get around to reading in italics. Many of the later, of course, suggested by my reading of the essay in the book. Many thanks to the link here for saving me a lot of typing.

1. Robert Silverberg on The Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur
   
2. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro on Pikovaia Dama/The Queen of Spades by Aleksandr Puchkin
   
3. Elizabeth Hand on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
   
4. Doug Bradley on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
   
5. Jay Lake on Rekopiz Znaleziony w Saragossie/The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan, Count Potocki
   
6. K.W. Jeter on New Grub Street by George Gissing
   
7. David J. Skal on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
   
8. Les Edwards on The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
   
9. Tony Richards on The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
   
10. Rick Hautala on The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" by William Hope Hodgson
    
11. Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier on Le fantome de l'Opera/The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
    
12. Tim Lucas on Fantomas by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allan
    
13. Christopher Wicking on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft
    
14. Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden on They Return at Evening by H.R. Wakefield
    
15. Sydney J. Bounds on Creep, Shadow! By A. Merritt
    
16. Chaz Brenchley on The Trail of Fu Manchu
    
17. Stephen Volk on The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley
    
18. Gahan Wilson on The Haunted Omnibus ed. Alexander Laing
    
19. Robert Weinberg on The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane
    
20. T.M. Wright on L'Etranger/The Stranger by Albert Camus
    
21. David A. Sutton on Sleep No More: Twenty Masterpieces of Horror for the Connoisseur ed. August Derleth
    
22. Storm Constantine on Lost Worlds by Clark Ashton Smith
    
23. Stefan Dziemianowicz on Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales by Henry S. Whitehead
    
24. Gwyneth Jones on Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural ed. Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser
    
25. Joel Lane on The Opener of the Way by Robert Bloch
    
26. Christopher Fowler on Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
    
27. Gary Gianni on Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson
    
28. Randy Broecker on Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson
    
29. Tanith Lee on Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen
    
30. Lucius Shepard on Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell
    
31. David Bischoff on House of Flesh by Bruno Fischer
    
32. Anne Billson on Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier
    
33. Nancy A. Collins on The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
    
34. Laurence Staig on The Third Ghost Book ed. Lady Cynthia Asquith
    
35. Andy Duncan on The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
    
36. John Gordon on The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
    
37. Norman Partridge on The Hunger and Other Stories by Charles Beaumont
    
38. Robert Irwin on The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
    
39. Mark Morris on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
    
40. Howard Waldrop on A Scent of New-Mown Hay by John Blackburn
    
41. Ed Gorman on A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson
    
42. Muriel Gray on The Weirdstone of Brinsingamen by Alan Garner
    
43. Terry Dowling on Tales of Terror ed. Charles Higham
    
44. Peter Atkins on Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon
    
45. Jack Womack on We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
    
46. Darrell Schweitzer on The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell
    
47. Peter Crowther on Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
    
48. Ian MacLeod on The Collector by John Fowles
    
49. Glen Hirshberg on Who Fears the Devil? By Manly Wade Wellman
    
50. Simon Clark on A Wrinkle in the Skin by John Christopher
    
51. Nancy Holder on Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
    
52. Ellen Datlow on The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural Selected by
    the Editors of Playboy
    
53. Terry Lamsley on Pages from Cold Point by Paul Bowles
    
54. John Farris on Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
    
55. Stephen Baxter on The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg
    
56. Elizabeth Massie on Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon
    
57. P.N. Elrod on The Night Stalker by Jeff Rice
    
58. Michael Swanwick on Blood Sport by Robert F. Jones
    
59. Nicholas Royle on Nightshade by Derek Marlowe
    
60. Roz Kaveney on Peace by Gene Wolfe
    
61. David Drake on The Year of the Sex Olympics: Three TV Plays by Nigel Kneale
    
62. Marc Laidlaw on Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber
    
63. Paul McAuley on The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
    
64. Jo Fletcher on Darkness Weaves With Many Shades by Karl Edward Wagner
    
65. Sir Christopher Frayling on The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
    
66. Thomas Ligotti on Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler
    
67. D.F. Lewis on The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen by Elizabeth Bowen
    
68. Christopher Golden on Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror ed. Kirby McCauley
    
69. John Burke on Tales from the Nightside by Charles L. Grant
    
70. Yvonne Navarro on They Thirst by Robert R. McCammon
    
71. Poppy Z. Brite on The Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell
    
72. David Stuart Davies on The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
    
73. Michael Marshall Smith on Pet Sematary by Stephen King
    
74. Anthony Timpone on Clive Barker's Books of Blood Volumes One, Two, and Three by Clive Barker
    
75. Nancy Kilpatrick on Perfume: The Story of a Murdered by Patrick Suskind
    
76. Bill Sheehan on Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier
    
77. Kelly Link on Strange Toys by Patricia Geary
    
78. Allen Koszowski on The Dark Descent ed. David G. Hartwell
    
79. Graham Joyce on Misery by Stephen King
    
80. Frank M. Robinson on The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
    
81. Mark Chadbuurn on Prime Evil ed. Douglas E. Winter
    
82. Jay Russell on By Bizarre Hands: Stories by Joe R. Landsdale by Joe R. Lansdale
    
83. Peter H. Cannon on The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath
    
84. David Morrell on Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons
    
85. Stephen R. Bissette on From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
    
86. David McGillivray on American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
    
87. Brian Hodge on Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite
    
88. China Mieville on The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison
    
89. Adam Simon on Flicker by Theodore Roszak
    
90. Paul Di Filippo on X, Y by Michael Blumlein
    
91. Caitlin R. Kiernan on Skin by Kathe Koja
    
92. Tananarive Due on Throat Sprockets: A Novel of Erotic Obsession by Tim Lucas
    
93. Simon R. Green on The Off Season: A Victorian Sequel by Jack Cady
    
94. S.T. Joshi on The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti
    
95. Roberta Lannes on A Sight for Sore Eyes by Ruth Rendell
    
96. Michael Shea on Reprisal by Mitchell Smith
    
97. John Pelan on A Haunting Beauty by Sir Charles Birkin
    
98. Jeff VanderMeer on House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
    
99. Richard A. Lupoff on Feesters in the Lake & Other Stories by Bob Leman
    
100. Tim Lebbon on More Tomorrow & Other Stories by Michael Marshall Smith

Hmmm. Only 21 read (23/100 in the first book), not that impressive for someone who likes to think they're a horror fan. On the other hand, I do tend to do best on sf lists with horror in the middle and fantasy worst, so it's not too surprising. The good news is that there's lots of good reading ahead for me to catch up!