Reading Diary
1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson has written a lot of humorous travel books that my girlfriend is a fan of, and after she read this, which is kind of a super-condensed, highly readable account of the sum total of humankind's scientific knowledge, she reccomended it to me as some good light reading. She's a scientist, and I am emphatically not, so she's always trying to explain to me what she does at work and I just smile and nod, so she understood my need for a layman's guide to science. This book's only a couple years old, and I really wish it'd been around when I was in middle school and struggling through boring science classes. After I told my mom about it and she thought it sounded interesting, she picked up the new illustrated edition that was released recently, and that kind of thing would probably be better for explaining this stuff to kids (or science-adverse adults) than the text books they have in schools.
But then, since I'm a total layman, I have no idea how accurate or inaccurate the stuff is, although it seems to have been received pretty well by the scientific community, aside from one Amazon reviewer who says it's full of errors. Bryson's an American who's spent most of his adult life in England, and his writing style has kind of a dry British humor to it. He uses a lot of analogies to express the overwhelming scale of things like how long Earth's been around relative to the history of the universe, or how long humans have been around relative to the history of life on Earth, makes all this huge, intangible stuff just a little more intangible. And he focuses a lot on the individual scientists that made these discoveries with little compact biographies, even of the guys who were wrong, many of whom dedicated their life's work to some absurdly specific corner of scientific knowledge, only for their findings to become obsolete 20 years after their death. It really just impressed upon me how noble it is for anyone to try and expand human knowledge with the understanding of how slim the odds are that they'll discover anything significant.
2. Consider The Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
I got this back when it came out a little over a year ago, but kind of slowly made my way through it because about half of it was re-reading slightly different edits of pieces I'd already read when they first ran in various magazines and lit journals. I think I'll always value Wallace more as a non-fiction writer than a fiction writer, and A Supposedly Fun Thing is my favorite thing he's done, so I was looking pretty forward to this, although I don't think it ended being on the same level as its predecessor despite some really good pieces. It's still has some of the kind of observational detail he's great at, but Lobster feels a little like the work of a moralist, and an extremely squeamish liberal one at that, from the hand-wringing about boiling lobsters that derails the title piece from being a travelogue in the Supposedly vein to the obligatory 9/11 piece to the right wing radio host profile, which was nonetheless a pretty engrossing read. The John McCain campaign trail thing is pretty fascinating though and deals with politics in a more basic, honest way than anything else he's done. I guess I just wish there was a little more about the stuff he really cares about, like books (the Kafka and Dostoevsky pieces) and tennis (the Tracy Austin thing). The dictionary review, "Authority And American Usage" might be my single favorite piece he's done, though, ever it was originally published as "Tense Present" in Harper's. The Roger Federer piece that was in the NYTimes a few months ago was pretty good, too, I'm glad he's still doing essays for maybe a future collection. As much as people obsess over whether he'll do another novel after Infinite Jest, I think that's what I'm more interested to read. Actually, I'm not sure I've even read a novel since I was last required to for a college course, I've been on a big non-fiction tear for a while. So, if anyone has any good novel reccomendations, let me know.
3. Desperate Networks by Bill Carter
This was kind of an impulse buy I made while I was out in California and realized I'd be done with the Bryson book before the end of my trip and wanted another book to read. Carter is the NYT television critic who wrote that book about the Leno/Letterman late night wars that was turned into that really cheesy-looking TV movie, and this is his recent book about network politics and the convoluted process by which shows get on the air and become hits or flop. I just kind of have a fascination with hardcore show business backstabbing type stuff, which is why I tend to read Defamer as much as any music blog these days. Maybe because TV is, more than movies or music, the one medium where noone has any illusions that it's more commerce than art, and every action is made based on that understanding.
The writing isn't anything special, and a lot of times my interest is directly proportional to whether I actually watch the show it's discussing (like, I couldn't care less how Desperate Housewives got on the air, but reading about how C.S.I. came about was pretty interesting. I always thought that the pilot, where the young rookie C.S.I. officer got killed in the line of duty, really deliberately set the tone for the show, and I had no idea that that didn't happen in the original pilot but Les Moonves thought the actress was too pretty for the part and had her killed off). I sometimes wish the stories went a little further back into the history of network TV, not necessarily back to the dawn of television, which would be a whole other book, but at least further back than the Must See TV era (for instance, Friends is discussed extensively, and Seinfeld is not).
Bill Bryson has written a lot of humorous travel books that my girlfriend is a fan of, and after she read this, which is kind of a super-condensed, highly readable account of the sum total of humankind's scientific knowledge, she reccomended it to me as some good light reading. She's a scientist, and I am emphatically not, so she's always trying to explain to me what she does at work and I just smile and nod, so she understood my need for a layman's guide to science. This book's only a couple years old, and I really wish it'd been around when I was in middle school and struggling through boring science classes. After I told my mom about it and she thought it sounded interesting, she picked up the new illustrated edition that was released recently, and that kind of thing would probably be better for explaining this stuff to kids (or science-adverse adults) than the text books they have in schools.
But then, since I'm a total layman, I have no idea how accurate or inaccurate the stuff is, although it seems to have been received pretty well by the scientific community, aside from one Amazon reviewer who says it's full of errors. Bryson's an American who's spent most of his adult life in England, and his writing style has kind of a dry British humor to it. He uses a lot of analogies to express the overwhelming scale of things like how long Earth's been around relative to the history of the universe, or how long humans have been around relative to the history of life on Earth, makes all this huge, intangible stuff just a little more intangible. And he focuses a lot on the individual scientists that made these discoveries with little compact biographies, even of the guys who were wrong, many of whom dedicated their life's work to some absurdly specific corner of scientific knowledge, only for their findings to become obsolete 20 years after their death. It really just impressed upon me how noble it is for anyone to try and expand human knowledge with the understanding of how slim the odds are that they'll discover anything significant.
2. Consider The Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
I got this back when it came out a little over a year ago, but kind of slowly made my way through it because about half of it was re-reading slightly different edits of pieces I'd already read when they first ran in various magazines and lit journals. I think I'll always value Wallace more as a non-fiction writer than a fiction writer, and A Supposedly Fun Thing is my favorite thing he's done, so I was looking pretty forward to this, although I don't think it ended being on the same level as its predecessor despite some really good pieces. It's still has some of the kind of observational detail he's great at, but Lobster feels a little like the work of a moralist, and an extremely squeamish liberal one at that, from the hand-wringing about boiling lobsters that derails the title piece from being a travelogue in the Supposedly vein to the obligatory 9/11 piece to the right wing radio host profile, which was nonetheless a pretty engrossing read. The John McCain campaign trail thing is pretty fascinating though and deals with politics in a more basic, honest way than anything else he's done. I guess I just wish there was a little more about the stuff he really cares about, like books (the Kafka and Dostoevsky pieces) and tennis (the Tracy Austin thing). The dictionary review, "Authority And American Usage" might be my single favorite piece he's done, though, ever it was originally published as "Tense Present" in Harper's. The Roger Federer piece that was in the NYTimes a few months ago was pretty good, too, I'm glad he's still doing essays for maybe a future collection. As much as people obsess over whether he'll do another novel after Infinite Jest, I think that's what I'm more interested to read. Actually, I'm not sure I've even read a novel since I was last required to for a college course, I've been on a big non-fiction tear for a while. So, if anyone has any good novel reccomendations, let me know.
3. Desperate Networks by Bill Carter
This was kind of an impulse buy I made while I was out in California and realized I'd be done with the Bryson book before the end of my trip and wanted another book to read. Carter is the NYT television critic who wrote that book about the Leno/Letterman late night wars that was turned into that really cheesy-looking TV movie, and this is his recent book about network politics and the convoluted process by which shows get on the air and become hits or flop. I just kind of have a fascination with hardcore show business backstabbing type stuff, which is why I tend to read Defamer as much as any music blog these days. Maybe because TV is, more than movies or music, the one medium where noone has any illusions that it's more commerce than art, and every action is made based on that understanding.
The writing isn't anything special, and a lot of times my interest is directly proportional to whether I actually watch the show it's discussing (like, I couldn't care less how Desperate Housewives got on the air, but reading about how C.S.I. came about was pretty interesting. I always thought that the pilot, where the young rookie C.S.I. officer got killed in the line of duty, really deliberately set the tone for the show, and I had no idea that that didn't happen in the original pilot but Les Moonves thought the actress was too pretty for the part and had her killed off). I sometimes wish the stories went a little further back into the history of network TV, not necessarily back to the dawn of television, which would be a whole other book, but at least further back than the Must See TV era (for instance, Friends is discussed extensively, and Seinfeld is not).
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 11:13 AM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
Anonymous : 3:25 PM