Reading Envy 009: Pirates and Noonday Demons

We are back! Starting with Episode 009, we will be posting a podcast every two weeks, on every other Tuesday.  Some will follow the book-based format while some might veer off onto other bookish topics.  We welcome your feedback as we continue to find our groove.

On Episode 009, Jenny brought three books to discuss: 

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
Varieties of Disturbance: Stories by Lydia Davis
Crux by Ramez Naam

Scott brought two books to talk about:

On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers
Hamlet's BlackBerry by William Powers

We also mentioned:
Declare by Tim Powers
Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 009: Pirates and Noonday Demons

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Five from NetGalley

I've been working through my list of approved titles in NetGalley by expiration date (reading the next to expire first).   If you are a book blogger or librarian and haven't signed up for an account, you should give it a try.  I only ask for books that I'm interested in, and if I'm not into what I try, I don't feel bad about setting it aside and letting the publisher know why.  I don't always get approved for everything I ask for, and that's okay too.  I only sign up for what I actually think I want to read, so I hope that helps.

Books from NetGalley are usually either review copies and so far unpublished, a pre-published draft, or a recently published title that they are trying to get extra press for.  Sometimes I'll read a book I really like months before it comes out.  This happened with The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.  I read and reviewed it in February, but it won't come out until June 4th in the USA.

In the past month, I have tried five books, but only finished four.  I thought I'd run through the titles in case someone who reads this blog sees something they might want to try too. 

The Yonahlosee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani
Publication Date: June 4, 2013 (USA)
Brief Description: A lush, sexy, evocative debut novel of family secrets and girls’-school rituals, set in the 1930s South.
My rating: 3/5 stars
What I liked: The setting (1930s Appalachia, girls camp), honest discussion of teenage sexuality, how the author keeps important details from the reader for most of the book.
Who I'd recommend it to: People who liked St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell (although it has less magic and more reality).

The First Rule of Swimming by Courtney Angela Brkic
Publication Date: May 28, 2013 (USA)
Brief Description: A woman must leave her island home to search for her missing sister-and confront the haunted history of her family.
My rating: 4/5 stars
What I liked: I'm interested in stories set in the Balkans, especially those that deal with the rebuilding or immigration of families. The story revolves around a mystery that travels between a tiny island in Croatia and New York City.
Who I'd recommend it to: People who have read The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, or anyone wanting to read more books set in the Balkans!

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Publication Date: March 12, 2013 (USA)
Brief Description: In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox.
My rating: 3/5 stars
What I liked: Another cold weather island, the recent connection to the tsunami, the intertwining stories.
Who I'd recommend it to: Someone who likes the slightly bizarre attempts of a lot of Japanese authors to infiltrate reality with touches of magic (or in this case, quantum reality).

Sea Change by S.M. Wheeler
Publication Date: June 18, 2013
Brief Description: The unhappy child of two powerful parents who despise each other, young Lilly turns to the ocean to find solace, which she finds in the form of the eloquent and intelligent sea monster Octavius, a kraken.
My rating: N/A, I stopped halfway through
Who I'd recommend it to: Anyone obsessed with the kraken, and I know you're out there.  People who enjoy fantasy novels and are looking for a different take or setting, especially those who don't mind quests and magic and spells.

Glass House 51 by John Hampell
Publication Date: March 23, 2013
Brief Description: Information on an individual can be so comprehensive, so insidiously granular and minute, that folks can become information “specimens” kept by perverse “collectors” . . . like butterflies in a virtual bottle.
My rating: 3/5 stars
What I liked: Short chapters make for a quick read, and the beginning with the introduction of the world (programmers, virtual spaces, etc) had me hooked that I read the first 300 pages keeping me up until 3 am.  Ultimately I'm not sure it paid off, but it had a strong start.
Who I'd recommend it to: People who have enjoyed Cory Doctorow's almost-fiction like Little Brother or Pirate Cinema (but I'm not going to make the comparison of 1984 that the author is hoping for).

Recommended Solutions for Google Reader

(xposted to JennyBakes.com)

Hey you, blog reader.  Do you access this blog through Google Reader?  If so, you should know that it will be shut down on July 1, 2013.  Happy birthday to me!  I use Google Reader as my blog and tumblr manager, and follow hundreds, maybe thousands of baking, reading, library, art, and music blogs.  At first I was grumpy, but I got some great ideas from friends and colleagues about what to do.  I have culled the suggestions into three solid replacement ideas for the RSS reader's functionality, and pass them along to you now.  Feel free to share the love.

NewsBlur
Free but not free, but my friend Jeff who has been using it thinks paying is worth it. 
He also says: "You can export your subscriptions into an opml file (from Reader) and then import them into Newsblur. It's not free for a premium account, but I don't mind paying for software when I think it's useful and will stick around."

NetVibes
A "social dashboard."
From the person who replaced me at DePauw: "I've been using Netvibes for years to aggregate RSS feeds into useful tabbed pages. It's easy to follow and keep up with. You can also create public pages of your own design. If you use that to subscribe to your own social media, you can create a centralized portal for others to see what you're sharing, everywhere. Also has a built-in play for podcast audio."

The Old Reader
It looks just like Google Reader before the last update or two.  Currently in beta, but vetted by my friend Jon in Virginia and a LifeHacker post (thanks Robyn!). 

There are several graphic-heavy apps or platform-specific apps, but I want something I can get to from everywhere, so I haven't bothered.

I hope this list is useful!  You have until July 1 to find a solution. 

Review of The Rapture of the Nerds

The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to most people. It would take a great deal of patience, delight in details relating to posthumanism and the singularity, and maybe some experience in virtual living. I enjoyed it because I'm just a big nerd, I guess.

Here's an example of the density of writing:
"Huw last saw her parents at their disembodiment; they'd already had avatars running around in the cloud for years, dipping into meatspace every now and again for a resynch with their slowcode bioinstances dirtside. When they were finally deconstituted into a fine powder of component molecules, it'd been a technicality, really, a final flourish in their transhumanifaction."

Really, if you're familiar with Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, both in their fiction but also in knowing what they themselves geek out about, this is probably the book for you. I've read more Doctorow than Stross, but follow both of them in Twitter, so I suppose I qualify!

My favorite bit of this book is the second chapterish section, where Huw is taken to South Carolina to serve as an ambassador of sorts. Only Charleston, SC, is known as Glory City, and is only filled with people who think they should have been taken in the rapture and weren't. Not exactly the friendliest place for an atheist to have to go. Because of the environmental catastrophe (he refers to the people living there as radioactive), Glory City is in a dome surrounded by chemical showers to keep out the ants. Ants live in continental supercolonies, and are the dominant species, at least in North America.

Along the way, Huw changes genders, and then gets taken into the singularity by his/her mother, or at least a version of her. I love her take on her qualms about living in the cloud:
"Her primary beef against the singularity has never been existential - it's aesthetic. The power to be a being of pure thought, the unlimited, unonstrained world of imagination, and we build a world of animated gifs, stupid sight gags, lame van-art avatars, stupid 'playful' environments, and brain-dead flame wars augmented by animated emoticons that allowed participants to express their hackneyed ad hominems, concern-trollery, and Godwin's law violations through the media of cartoon animals and oversized animated genitals."

To that, I say... word.

A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins

A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book comes out in October, but I got to read a copy early because of the Penguin First Flights program.

I found it impossible to read this book without thinking of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart*. It isn't exactly the same setting, but the main character and his much younger lover felt like they had been picked up and dropped into this book, with a few little tweaks. It was the most bizarre sense of déjà vu I've had as a reader. I get a little tired of middle aged male protagonists who don't know what they want out of life and fail at relationships. It is hard to find anything new in that.

But then, even though he reads like a middle-aged man, I find out that Neill isn't middle aged, but in his 30s. The way he is so jaded and releasing his 'porcelain youth,' he may as well be. Neill has a job helping to train a computer program to try to defeat the Turing test. They are using his father's journals, his father who committed suicide when he was in his late teens.

The techie talk got a bit exhausting, even for me, who enjoys books like The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood and Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker. The young girl character was uninteresting and flat. Joining cults, making bad decisions... yawn. I found myself slogging through it, forcing myself to finish. I'd say I reached a point where I wanted to keep reading about 40% in.

The bits I enjoyed were about far less happy relationships - Neill conversing with his dead father now embodied inside a computer, and secretly meeting his ex-wife for coffee. The flashbacks to his failed marriage are probably the best writing in the book - the pain feels very authentic. Next time, I'd want to see more pain!

* - Gary Shteyngart wrote one of the blurbs on this book. My world just crashed in on itself:
"A brainy, bright, laughter-through-tears, can’t-stop-reading-until-it's-over kind of novel. Fatherless daughters, mother-smothered sons, appealing ex-wives, mouthy high school drop-outs—damn, this book's got something for everyone!"
I imagine Mr. Shteyngart says such things because it reminded him so much of his own work! Ha!

Equations of Life by Simon Morden

Equations of Life by Simon Morden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this because it was nominated for the Philip K. Dick award in 2012, and I'm glad it showed up on that list as I hadn't come across it in any other way. Technically the entire trilogy is nominated.

This is set in a post-apocalyptic London (in the "Metrozone"), in a time where bombs have destroyed most of the world and countries like Japan have completely disappeared due to environmental disaster (war-related).

Samuil Petrovitch is around 20, having recently escaped from St. Petersburg and working as a graduate physics student, when he ends up helping someone who is being kidnapped. He gets involved in a situation involving Russian mobsters, Yakuza, and ends up with technology going crazy.

The story is fast-paced and has a lot of bits to make my geeky heart happy, including mathematicians who might be cracking the code to time travel in the midst of the chaos, a main character who swears in Russian, a nun who just happens to have the biggest gun of anyone, and a new Japan created in a virtual space. Samuil is written to be complex, but the age of the characters really got to me - Maddy and Sam are both around 20 and I just kept thinking how much more I'd believe their actions and powers of deduction if they were at least in their 30s.

I think I may actually read the next book.

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
Around the world: 4 of 52 countries (South Africa)
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Publisher summary:

You think you know what’s going on? You think you know who’s really in power? You have No. Fucking. Idea. Moxyland is an ultra-smart thriller about technological progress, and the freedoms it removes. In the near future, four hip young things live in a world where your online identity is at least as important as your physical one. Getting disconnected is a punishment worse than imprisonment, but someone’s got to stand up to government inc., whatever the cost.

This might be one instance where an audiobook has the potential to lead a reader (listener) into confusion more than reading the print might do. Moxyland is read by Nico Evers-Swindell, best known for his portrayal of Prince William in the made-for-tv movie William & Kate. While he does a good job with the voices and South African accents, the intertwining stories are hard to keep up with, particularly with the way the reader is dumped right into the center of everything already going on.

That's how living in a totalitarian, nearly-post-Apartheid South Africa can be sometimes. The four main characters in Moxyland don't seem to have a grasp of the big picture either, and can hardly keep up with navigating the landscape where your cellphone can punish you, viruses can be used as crowd control, and your body can be turned into an irrevocable product advertisement.  There isn't much that is easily discernible as being distinctly South African, except the threads of apartheid that have forever changed the political and interpersonal climate, little turns of phrase like ending a sentence with "good as," and the names.  I had read so many Booker nominees and other books set in South Africa, that I really wanted a different experience for this country's pick.  Mission accomplished, except it was probably closer to other books I read a lot of, because of the themes.

This has tastes of William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, and the realism is helped by the ten years Beukes spent as a journalist, where she started thinking "What would happen if...?" The world she has created is scary, but not difficult to imagine. After all, some of us are already living it.

Part of this review was cross-posted on SFFAudio.com.

The Information by James Gleick

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have a soft spot for mathematics. The more complicated and obtuse it gets, the more I like it. It is probably best I didn't figure this out earlier in life, because I might have pursued it and gone crazy. So I enjoy reading about it from time to time.

In The Information, Gleick speaks to the interplay between mathematical progress with science, culture, information theory, and really the development of society. It is an incredible overview of topics ranging from logic to communication to memes. It is DENSE. I spread my reading over a few weeks, a chapter here, a chapter there. When the information started going over my head, I gleefully skimmed it until I could sink back in. The formulas meant very little but then he put musical fragments into it with no explanation, and at least I understood those.

The chapter that first captured me detailed the history of the OED. I loved the logic chapter, talking about Boole and his contributions, someone very important to library theory and I never really knew anything about where all of that came from. It was the last chapter, as well as the epilogue, where Gleick steps beyond his thorough research to offer a few opinions on the direction of information and information overload, that I think the book really shines, or at least, where it was most interesting/useful to me.

I don't know enough to speak to the accuracy of this book, but I feel like I learned a lot, as well as adding a bunch of other books to read to my list that he cites. I will also be ordering it for the academic library where I work, and using it in a presentation I'm giving in February! Win/win/win.

"When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. For the same reason, mechanisms of search - engines, in cyberspace - find needles in haystacks. By now we've learned that it is not enough for information to exist."

"Too much information, and so much of it lost. An unindexed Internet site is in the same limbo as a misshelved library book. This is why the successful and powerful business enterprises of the information economy are built on filtering and searching."

"Infinite possibility is good, not bad. Meaningless disorder is to be challenged, not feared. Language maps a boundless world of objects and sensations and combinations onto a finite space. The world changes, always mixing the static with the ephemeral.... Everyone's language is different. We can be overwhelmed or we can be emboldened."

"We want the Demon, you see,' wrote Stanislaw Lem, 'to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future.'"

"As ever, it is the choice that informs us... Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work."

"The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information."

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The story of Steve Jobs is fascinating and bewildering. He was clearly not a nice person, to say the least. His first wife described him as "englightened yet cruel," two qualities I can't reconcile with one another.

At the same time, Jobs was integral into how every person uses technology today. His belief in the importance of perfection in design and his ruthless ambition might be unmatched in any person left living, and I honestly don't know if the world can do without him.

Because of changes in my own working life, I think I was reading this wanting to know what Steve Jobs could teach me. Is it possible to apply his concepts of belief in a superior product, collaboration, and territory without being an unpleasant human being?

I think Isaacson portrays his strengths and weaknesses in what seems to be a fair light, and I enjoyed the progression through this one man's amazing life. If Jobs isn't someone I would want to model myself after, at least I can develop a greater appreciation for what one person can accomplish in even a shortened lifetime.

The research is thorough but the writing gets a bit repetitive - that's what happens when a book rushes to print, I suppose. I'd give it 3.5 stars if I could. To Steve Job's story (and not this book itself), I give 5 stars.

Jobs on how one of his earlier trips to India changed his ways:
"If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present tense. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment.  You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it."

An example of Jobs' many eccentricities and strange health practices:
"There was also the issue of his hygiene. He was still convinced, against all evidence, that his vegan diets meant that he didn't need to use a deodorant or take regular showers.  'We would have to literally put him out the door and tell him to go take a shower,' said Markkula. 'At meetings we had to look at his dirty feet.' Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues."

A useful tidbit:
"There falls a shadow, as T.S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important."

From an engineer who left Apple:
"I thoroughly enjoy talking with him, and I admire his ideas, practical perspective, and energy. But I just don't feel that he provides the trusting supportive, relaxed environment that I need."

One of the many comments on his reality distortion:
"You realize that it can't be true, but somehow he makes it true."
"You did the impossible, because you didn't realize it was impossible."

On inspiring your workers:
"'I've learned over the years that when you have really good people you don't have to baby them,' Jobs later explained. 'By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.'"
"I've found people who can't wait to fall into line behind a good strategy, but there just hasn't been one."
"I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company."
"What are the ten things we should be doing next?" (and then cross out bottom 7)

"Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do... that's true for companies, and it's true for products."

Reading Envy - To-Read Pile Edition

I am picturing the book I am envying other people reading right now.  I don't typically buy books when they are brand new, but since joining a few online book clubs and joining in on podcasts where people are always talking about new releases gives me major reading envy!

I already used my Audible credits downloading Ready Player One and The Night Circus, which I just finished a half hour ago (and was really great!). I'm not sure I'd tackle a Neal Stephenson book in audio format, although I hear Reamde is pretty accessible (in other words: not anything like The Baroque Cycle).

Still. I have books sitting around that are from the new books section at the public library (meaning I only had two weeks to start with), on loan from other libraries through interlibrary loan (and with short checkout periods, no renewals allowed), or books I need to read before I have a discussion.

Here is what is on my "must return to the library soon" pile:

• On Canaan's Side (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and although it wasn't shortlisted, I still want to read it)
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood  (I think I read about this in the New York Times, or maybe Wired Magazine)
• Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (recommended by Happy Herbivore in an entry about vegan weight loss
• The Thing Around Your Neck  (short stories by Adichie, I meant to read this before I did a research session with the African Short Story class and there's still time!)
• African Short Stories (I've made it through West Africa so far)
• Stand on Zanzibar (due back to another library soon, but I only have about 100 pages left)
• Rainbows End (due back to another library, started today, wanted to read it before listening to two podcasts discussing it)

 I won't even get into the to-read piles around my house.  Clearly I have plenty to read and do NOT need to buy Reamde.  What are you envying?

Book Review - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

I remember Nicholas Carr because of an article he wrote back in 2008, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. According to his notes on The Shallows, he actually expanded on the ideas of the article to write the book.

I picked up this book for a variety of reasons. As a librarian who often does information literacy/fluency instruction, I want to learn as much as I can about how students think and process information. We make decisions all the time about materials - do we stick with print or order eBooks? Is an online periodical sufficient? Can we discard our print reference collection? The answers are not always easy. I can't shake Nicholson Baker and his harsh judgment on libraries, ever since reading Double Fold, and that was also in the back of my mind as I read. The Shallows is a clear picture of where information has come from compared to how we tend to access it and use it in the present day.

The other perspective I'm bringing to this is that of a reader, a great lover of the printed page, of holding a book in my hands and shutting out the world. Carr discusses changing attitudes toward reading at great length. People abandoning the idea of reading because the internet makes it easier, because they no longer "have to," or because they are finding entertainment elsewhere.

"We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.' The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the 'power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital' or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of 'an increasingly arcane hobby.'" (108)

The idea of deep reading gets discussed, as well as what it can do for a learner to shut off everything and focus on reading an entire book, rather than living solely in the shallow world of the internet. I also enjoyed the bits about the history of the printed page, and all the prophets of doom throughout the centuries who have wrongly predicted the end of the book.

I think this is a valuable read for anyone interested in how people learn, how technology changes our brains, and the value of reading.