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Books read May

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This is much more like it. Eleven Twelve books read this month, a much more respectable number than I’d managed so far. Some excellent books read as well, as you can see below..

Life — Richard Fortey
Fortey is perhaps the best living natural history writer. Here he tackles the entire story of life on Earth, from its beginnings four billion years ago to us, intermixed with his personal research and recollections. Fortey is the kind of writer who could make the telephone book interesting, let alone a subject like this he is genuinely passionate about.

Kraken — China Miéville
Miéville’s latest novel is a fantasy romp set in contemporary London, where things are not quite what they seem.

Big Planet — Jack Vance
An early Vance novel of planetary romance, which I’ve last read myself a few decades ago. Slightly disappointing as my memory was better than the book turned out to be.

Next of Kin — Eric Frank Russell
An entertaining but slight space adventure story by somebody I’ve read very little of so far.

The Steam-Driven Boy — John Sladek
A collection of not very good New Age Wave stories that haven’t aged well. It’s all a bit too clever-clever and lazy.

Dry Store Room No. 1 — Richard Fortey
The second Fortey book I read this month, which is a look at how the Natural History Museum functions — part collection of entertaining anecdotes, part history, part autobiography. As everything Fortey does, its worth reading.

Why Buildings Fall Down — Matthys Levy & Mario Salvador
Two architects look at various examples of buildings falling down and why they do so. Very good, very clear at explaining complicated realities in a form even an ignoramus like me can understand without doing violence to them.

The 9th Directive — Adam Hall
Adam Hall is a British thriller writer I learned about through Charlie Stross. Found this novel at a jumble sale and read it in a day. Interesting Cold War thriller story written in a very flat affect style.

The British Tanks 1915-19 — David Fletcher
A sufficiently anorak look at the earliest British tanks and how they came to be. Lots of great archive pictures.

The Fox-Magic Murders — Robert van Gulik
The last ever Judge Dee story Robert van Gulik wrote, as he died shortly after. A classic detective story set in Ancient but historical China.

Foundation — Isaac Asimov
The stories that launched a thousand Galactic Empires. The first in the classic Foundation trilogy. Hari Seldon, the greatest psychohistorian ever predicts the fall of the Empire and hatches a plan to shorten the inevitable barbarism that will follow…

Foundation and Empire — Isaac Asimov
Second in the classic trilogy — now with actual female characters. The Foundation confronts the old empire and is then confronted by the Mule, the one factor psychohistory could not predict.

Second Foundation — Isaac Asimov
Third in the classic trilogy, to which no sequels were ever written. The Mule is vanquished, but now Foundation stands against Foundation…

Pay no attention to the software behind the curtain

Amsterdam, geekdom, posts interesting only to me, video
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Bit of a bother with my bike today. A couple of weeks ago I had finally gotten a new bike, after my last one had been stolen more than a year ago. At the hospital S. is unfortunately still in there’s a bike repair place which also sells secondhand ones and when I looked there they had a nice, proper Raleigh bike, one of those that you can’t help but ride sitting up ramrod straight, for less than 200 euro. In very nice condition and looking as if it came straight out of the fifties, I was a bit wary of leaving it out on the streets. Which is why I usually stall it in the underground automated parking at the ferry when I go to work. And this uses some sort of Windows based software to do all the work, which I know because the first time I wanted to use it, it had blue screened. Not a good start, but I had been using it without problems ever since.

Until today. Checked my bike in with no problems; wanted to check it out tonight, no go. The chip and pin machine, with which you pay and which uses your bank card to recognise which bike you’re attempting to collect, was borked. So I called the emergency line, they asked the usual questions, then got me called back by somebody with some clue, he asked for the last four digits of my bank pass, then used that to locate and get my bike. The video above shows the physical side of that process; thanks to the monitor screen normally used to explain the system, I got to see the software side of things. It could’ve been an old skool DOS programme, a light blue background with hideously big buttons, with a list of ticky boxes in red (occupied) or green (free) followed by the bank pass number (only the last four digits shown iirc) the customer had used. The admin checked mine and hit the button “get bike” et viola, there it was.

As a card carrying geek it’s always interesting to get such a look at the software behind the curtain — and because it was a nice hot day, I had no problem waiting a bit longer than normal to get my bike either!

Books read April

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I’m still reading nowhere near as much as I read last year or the year before. Because I bought a lot of science fiction this month I also read a lot of science fiction.

The Raw Shark Texts — Steven Hall
What if books and words contained a whole ecosystem and somewhere out there a great word shark is hunting you?

The Night Sessions — Ken MacLeod
A thematic sequel to The Execution Channel.

The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy — Avram Davidson
A not quite serious collection of Ruritarian mystery stories. Somewhat slight perhaps, but a pleasure to read if only for Davidson’s writing voice. Because he clearly had fun writing these stories, you the reader have almost as much fun reading them.

The Gate of Worlds — Robert Silverberg
An unknown to me and minor Silverberg novel, telling the adventures of a young English adventurer in the Americas of a world where the Black Plague was much lethal than our own and England has only recently thrown off the Ottoman yoke. Not very interesting, partially because of its meandering plot.

This Is Not a Game — Walter Jon Williams
I’ve already talked about this novel before. This is a great novel and recommended to anybody who liked Charlie Stross’ Halting State.

The Legion of Time — Jack Williamson
One of the classic time travel/alternate world stories, which introduced the concept of “Jonbar points”, where a decision made one way or another (will a small boy pick up a magnet or a pebble) has huge consequences for how future history plays out. I wanted to say that this was a good story, but unfortunately I can’t; of historical interest only.

After World’s End — Jack Williamson
Though the cover doesn’t mention it, The Legion of Time came bound with a second novel, the hero of which is a contemporary rocket explorer who manages to get stuck in cold sleep in a cometary orbit in the Solar System for a million years. This enables him to play a leading role in the uprising of humans against their robot masters.

The Legion of Space — Jack Williamson
I couldn’t not read this after The Legion of Time. It’s much better, the Three Musketeers in Space! Because it moves much quicker the stereotyping and flat characterisation didn’t have as much time to annoy me.

Dawn of the Dumb — Charlie Brooker
A collection of Brooker’s television criticism and other columns. If you like his writing, this is like a box of candy and it takes discipline not to gobble them all up in one go.

World War Z — Max Brooks
A cult hit a few years ago (show you how “hip” and “with it” I am), this is an oral history of a worldwide, Night of the Living Death style zombie outbreak. It was good enough and scary enough to keep me up till 2:30 AM reading it, then caused me trouble sleeping.

Also read, but not finished: the second book in Steph Swainston’s Castle trilogy, as well as Richard Fortey’s Life.

Not a great day

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Today my parents and I went the funeral of one of my uncles, who died relatively unexpectedly last Friday. As could be expected considering his background, the funeral service was on the churchy side, not my cup of tea but it suited him. Much less personal than is probably the norm today but the vicar did well in linking his life with the readings chosen for the service. It all left me a bit maudlin and wondering what my own funeral would be like. Everybody has that don’t they, these worries about whether anybody would actually turn up and what will be said about you?

What made this day so bad wasn’t the funeral but the trip to it. It should have taken two hours or so with the train, from Amsterdam to the wild woolly East of the country, with a couple of changeovers, but it took almost four. We left more than an hour and a half earlier than we needed to yet still couldn’t make the start of the service. A power failure twenty minutes out from Amsterdam meant our train had to turn back, we had to travel over Utrecht to Amersfoort instead of going there directly and because the changeover in Utrecht had only a margin of one minute (and our train was five minutes late anyway) which meant another half hour delay on top of the more than an hour already suffered. Bye bye margin of error…

Looking at my picture, you know you can trust me

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Bearded men are just more trustworthy, unless we’re in our underwear:

A recent study in the Journal of Marketing Communications found that men with beards were deemed more credible than those who were clean-shaven. The study showed participants pictures of men endorsing certain products. In some photos, the men were clean-shaven. In others, the same men had beards. Participants thought the men with beards had greater expertise and were significantly more trustworthy when they were endorsing products like cell phones and toothpaste.

But, oddly, men with beards were slightly less effective than smooth-cheeked fellows in underwear advertisements. Apparently we don’t want Zach Galifianakis selling us boxers.

I started growing my beard at eighteen because I was tired of shaving each morning. Now you know you can trust anything I say…