Geoff Arnold

Geeks ranking stuff

First we have Alec reporting on the Top 20 geek novels from blogs.guardian.co.uk. I hope the fact that Alec hasn't read Consider Phlebas doesn't mean that he's ignorant of Iain M. Banks' work.

Meanwhile, over at Slashdot the usual crowd is debating the merits of Space.com's best space movies poll. Like many Slashdotters, I find the concentration on the various Star Trek and Star Wars films is (a) inevitable in today's ADD world, and (b) really sad. If I could add one film to the list, it would be Silent Running, one of the most haunting movies ever made. (I also really enjoyed Serenity; it's a shame that it flopped so badly.)

What we need now is a "top space TV shows with no Star Trek connection" poll. Just think of it: Blake's 7, Space 1999, and more recently Firefly. Of course the top of the list will be Red Dwarf....

Truth

I visited my local Barnes & Noble this evening to pick up a handful of work-related books - necessary stuff, but unexciting. To compensate (yeah, yeah - pathetic excuse), I decided to treat myself to a philosophy book: Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide. Earlier this week I had read Andrew O'Hehir's review in Salon, which I heartily recommend; it's one of those delightful reviews that stays with you all the way to the bookshop. I got home and read the Introduction while steaming some asparagus.* By the time the stalks yielded to the tip of my knife, I was hooked. Partly it's Blackburn's stance - recognizing the strengths of the absolutist and relativist positions without sliding into the mushy ambivalence that he decries - but mostly it's the economy and clarity of his writing. I can tell that I'm going to enjoy this.

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* The humidity has finally broken, and I was able to turn off the A/C and open the house up. Bliss! I usually avoid cooking techniques that produce steam when it's really humid.

On not mounting the horse, and dressing to confuse

Zoomed up 880 to Oakland this evening to have dinner with Steve, Wendy, Chris and Celeste. We ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant with the unlikely name of Le Cheval on Clay Street. (OK, I know, it's the French colonial influence - but it still seems odd.) Just inside the door is a large bronze horse and a sign bearing the admonition noted above. The food was wonderful, from the firepot soup and the green mussels to the banana flambé desert. (Fire featured prominently, come to think of it.) And the wine list was varied, satisfying, and modestly priced. (Steve and I couldn't resist the Solaris Pinot Noir, for obvious reasons.) Highly recommended.

Before we ate, there was much trading of goodies. I'd recently completed Stephen Baxter's novel Evolution (B+ for science, B- for narrative, C for character development) and I traded it to Steve for Franklin Foer's How soccer explains the world. (Of course it does!) The "confusion" refers to an item that Chris had picked up for me: a royal blue, long-sleeved polo shirt proudly bearing the name of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in gold script. (There was also a Graduate Theological Union t-shirt for Merry.) So let's see, I wonder when Carson Kressley would recommend that a hard-core atheist should wear a Divinity School shirt?

A thoroughly enjoyable evening, to be repeated at the next opportunity. (Perhaps the end of September?) There was talk of sushi in Berkeley....

The Closed Circle

Following The Rotters' Club, I've now finished Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle. Excellent. So many circles: of understanding, of relationship, of power. Circles to get trapped inside, impotently, and circles to carry you inexorably forward, like great wheels. [OK, that's enough of that. - Ed.]

Anyway, it's a wonderful two-part novel. Even though Coe includes a synopsis of The Rotter's Club at the end of The Closed Circle ("just in case you've forgotten it"), the two books really have to be read as a single work. For those who bought the first book two or three years ago, the wait must have been unbearable....

What next? Based on Amazon.com reviews, I think I'll try The Winshaw Legacy next. (Mind you, I'm supposed to be reading up on M&A practices and storage virtualization....)

On being swept away by a book

My son Chris and his wife Celeste are visiting, and yesterday evening we all went out to dinner at Lucy's. After the meal, we walked across Coolidge Corner to the Brookline Booksmiths, our favourite local independent bookshop. I'm not sure why, but I picked up a new book by an author I didn't recognize: The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe. Although it focusses on Blair's Britain in the period 1999-2003, the story begins a generation before that: it follows the lives of the characters in Coe's earlier The Rotters' Club. That book was about a group of teenagers in Birmingham, growing up in the strange world of the 1970's - Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, strikes, IRA bombings, platform shoes, punk, and so much more. OK, now I was hooked. Clutching The Closed Circle firmly, I headed to the back of the store to find a copy of The Rotters' Club.

When we got home, I settled down to read The Rotters' Club. As the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer put it: "A thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred pages of wise comedy about teenage love's mortifications, then cold cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned." And I was hooked. After the "surprise", I put the book down, stunned, and went to bed. This morning I picked it up immediately after breakfast and read the next 300 pages without a break. It was one of those rare stories with which one has no choice in the matter; I felt as if I was being swept down a turbulent river, clinging onto a branch for support, and then finally being deposited on the bank, breathless. The last 32 pages are a stream of consciousness that is at once urgent and timeless.

Having finished, I did two things. First, I ordered an audio CD edition of the book for my mother in England; even though she is blind, I couldn't let her escape this tour de force of a story. And I went out to buy the necessary supplies to prepare enough gin and tonic to fortify me for the next chapter in the lives of these characters....

How It Works...The Computer

Someone has scanned in all the pages of the 1971 and 1979 editions of the Ladybird book How It Works...The Computer. This is wonderful stuff. I remember using the 1971 edition to explain to relatives (elderly, young, and just plain confused) what it was that I did for a living; I also bought the 1979 edition for my son, Chris, who was five at the time (and a voracious reader). Both pictures and text are priceless.

(Via Boing-Boing.)

On the guilty pleasure of reading a really bad book

This is going to be long - skip it if you're in a hurry.

Today I was at Sun's Santa Clara campus for an all day meeting of the DEs. We finished up on time, just after 5pm. The last session had left me feeling exhausted: a 20 minute presentation stretched to a relentless 40 minutes, followed by a complicated debate. I felt like a drink and some food (my body is still pretending that it's on East Coast time), but 5:30 seemed a bit early to eat. I therefore decided to drive over to the nearby Micro Center store and do what geeks do: ogle hardware and software. There's a passable Mexican restaurant in the same plaza (the Mexicali Grill), and I thought I might find a book or magazine to read over dinner.

The store was very quiet, and the few customers seemed to be lowering their voices as if they were in a library. I found nothing of interest in the Mac section, or the PDA accessories, or the magazines, or even the discount DVDs. (I wonder who buys those boxed collections of 20 horror movies from the 1950s, not to mention The Neverending Story Volume 2.) And so I made my way to the book section.

It just so happens that I've been discussing the possibility of doing some work with Sun's Network Storage Division, the group that sells such products as the StorEdge 9990 array and the QFS file system software. I'm quite familiar with our products, and I used to work on distributed file system software such as PC-NFS, but there are parts of the storage business that I know little about. So when I came across a large book about storage systems, I started browsing it. The table of contents looked promising. I checked the price: $5.99, reduced from around $50. I put this down to overstocking, bought a copy, and went off to have dinner and a bit of a read.

By the time I'd finished my salad, and a Silver Bullet margarita, I realized that I had acquired a Really Bad Book. It was weird: the organization was plausible, and by speed-reading I could sustain the illusion that it more or less flowed and made sense. But if I slowed down and looked carefully at individual sentences, they were gibberish: ungrammatical, rambling, cliché-ridden, and full of non-sequiturs. At first it was annoying, but by the time I reached the end of the first chapter it had become simply hilarious. Some examples, with original punctuation:

"The corollary, or trade-off to this condition, is the economics of speed and capacity to price."

"Within the SAN, these operations become more logical and have to coexist with other servers that share the fabric network and devices connected."

"Finally, as the sophistication of the centralized mainframe computers was downsized, the capability to house larger and larger databases demanded the deployment of the database server."

It goes on and on like that. Verb agreement is a matter of happenstance; dereferencing a pronoun should only be attempted by trained professionals. At times we seem to enter an Alice in Wonderland world of topsy turvy relationships:

"The most critical element of performance for a business application is its availability to its own data."

And sometimes a sentence seems to have been assembled by a surrealist playing with magnetic fridge poetry pieces; here's a final, glorious example.

"Unless the hardware and firmware release levels are inventoried and tracked in conjunction with the network, the NAS systems become unassociated storage servers unbound to the confines of the network in which they operate."

I cannot shake off the image of a row of NFS servers growing large, colourful wings and fluttering away like butterflies towards the setting sun - unbound, free of the confines of the network!! Excelsior!!!

[I've done my best not to identify this book or its author. If you figure it out, please keep quiet. There's no point in stirring the pot.]

When a short story gets the full treatment....

Hands up if you've ever thought of this plot for a science fiction story:

You discover an ancient device, frozen in a glacier, or embedded in fossils, or whatever. You're amazed to find that despite its age it seems to be mostly in working order, and shows evidence of having present-day components. It must be a time machine of some kind. You repair it. Eventually you inadvertently activate it, and find yourself, with the device, back in the Pleistocene. You realize that the bones found with the device were yours....

I'm sure that I'm not the only person who read H. G. Wells, extrapolated along the lines that I just indicated, and had a chuckle about the paradoxical implications. Where did the machine come from? Could the contemporary scientist choose not to take the action that causes the machine to operate? What are the precise scientific objections to the sequence (loop?) of events? And maybe there's a short story to be written about it.

This little speculation is the starting point for John Varley's new book Mammoth. He adds several twists, which I'll leave you to discover, but the basic plot is as I've described it. To flesh out the short story into a full length novel, Varley has used this tale as a vehicle for satire: satire of corporate capitalism, of entertainment-driven culture, of people's willingness to be manipulated. Along the way he makes a stab at the scientific and philosophical issues of time travel and causality, but - like the culture that he is satirizing - such reflective moments are swept away by the impulse to action, preferably accompanied by special effects.

The self-causing time machine is still a good idea for a short story, preferably without the Hollywood treatment. Varley has shown us that he is one of the best writers of short science fiction working today. Unfortunately this one got away from him, like a runaway mammoth.

I see John Varley has a new book out....

Mammoth. Varley is one of those writers that I'll buy sight unseen.

Book notes: "Radiant Cool"

Last year a friend recommended a "curious book" to me: Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. I started it back in December, but I couldn't get into it and set it aside. Last week I came across it and finished it in a couple of sessions. C'est la vie.

It's an odd book. The first two-thirds are a novel: a thriller/mystery involving a philosophy grad student, theories of consciousness, experimental stimulation of various cortical areas, overdoses of SSRIs, and a hyperfictional element which eventually engulfs the characters and the story. Some bits worked, some bits didn't, and overall I was a bit frustrated.

Then there's the last third of the book: the appendix. In this, Lloyd (professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT) expounds a theory (or at least a programme) of consciousness which has two primary strands: a recursive retention (and hence representation) model derived from Husserl, and a view of the distinctive role played by the representation of time. Now this fascinated me. Early in my Phil.of Mind course with Dennett, I asked several people about exactly this issue - what is the state of thinking on the philosophy of time, and its relationship to the mind. I was pointed at the work of Bas Van Frassen as representing perhaps the best view of the philosophy of time as it applies to science, but I found no satisfactory account of time in mind. Maybe Jerry Fodor can explain how temporal notions are handled in a LOT, but I'm still waiting.

Does Lloyd nail it? No, but that's just fine: he's asking the same questions that I'm interested in. I note that David Chalmers has published a piece on Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap; it will be interesting to compare his attempted rebuttal of a phenomenal account of consciousness with Lloyd's ideas. Anyway, the book is RECOMMENDED, mostly for the appendix.

"How America Lost Iraq"

I just finished Aaron Glantz's How America Lost Iraq. Essential reading. Like many others, including Glantz's editors at Pacifica, I opposed the war. What Glantz's account suggests is that - contrary to my prejudices - the U.S. actually had a chance to win the peace. They squandered the opportunity, and then came Fallujah.... What a stupid, incompetent, callous waste.

From Publisher's Weekly: The failure of the American adventure in Iraq is all the more tragic for its promising beginnings, according to this engrossing memoir of the occupation and insurgency. Glantz, a correspondent for the progressive Pacifica radio network, arrived in Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Against his editors' expectations, he discovered that, although tried by the chaos and lack of basic services, most Iraqis applauded the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Returning in 2004, he found that goodwill squandered, as Iraqis grew increasingly angry at the continuing absence of electricity and clean water, high unemployment, anarchy in the streets and mass imprisonment of innocent people by American soldiers who couldn't tell insurgents from civilians. With the brutal sieges of Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004, Glantz contends, the transformation of the United States in the eyes of Iraqis from liberator to oppressor was complete.

Phil. of mind books

Herewith an almost complete list of the books in the philosophy of mind section of my collection:

Annas: Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind

Aune: Knowledge of the External World

Brook (ed.): Daniel Dennett

Cairns-Smith: Evolving the Mind

Chalmers: The Conscious Mind

Chalmers (ed.): Philosophy of Mind

Chomsky: Language and Mind

Chomsky: New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind

Churchland: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul

Churchland/Sejnowski: The Computational Brain

Crick: The Astonishing Hypothesis

Cummins/Cummins (eds.): Minds, Brains and Computers

Dennett: Brainchildren

Dennett: Brainstorms

Dennett: Consciousness Explained

Dennett: Content and Consciousness

Dennett: Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Dennett: Elbow Room

Dennett: Freedom Evolves

Dennett: Kinds of Minds

Dennett: Sweet Dreams

Dennett: The Intentional Stance

Dretske: Naturalizing the Mind

Dretske: Perception, Knowledge and Belief

Elton: Daniel Dennett

Flanagan: Consciousness Reconsidered

Flanagan: The Problem of the Soul

Flanagan: The Science of the Mind

Fodor: The Mind Doesn't Work That Way

Heil/Mele: Mental Causation

Honderich: On Consciousness

Hornsby: Simple Mindedness

Humphrey: A History of the Mind

Kim: Mind in a Physical World

Ludlow (ed.): There's Something About Mary

McCauley (ed.): The Churchlands and Their Critics

Millikan: Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories

Nagel: The View From Nowhere

Noë: Action in Perception

Noë (ed.): Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?

Parfit: Reasons and Persons

Perry: Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness

Ramachandran: A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness

Ramachandran/Blakeslee: Phantoms in the Brain

Ross (ed.): Dennett's Philosophy

Ryle: Concept of Mind

Searle: The Rediscovery of the Mind

Symons: On Dennett

Book recommendation: "Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness" by John Perry

During my recent Philosophy of Mind course I acquired a number of fascinating books in the field. In a couple of cases I read the book immediately from cover to cover; for most, I merely dipped into the book when I bought it, promising myself that I'd return to read it properly when time permitted. Well, time now permits, and I've had a wonderful time over the last week reading John Perry's Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness.

Obviously the most important thing about the book is the argument: a careful and detailed account of a stance, which Perry dubs antecedent physicalism, that addresses the recent neo-dualist arguments such as Chalmers' zombies, Kripke's modal C-fibers, and Jackson's Mary. Now these are targets that many philosophers have been taking aim at over recent years; what makes this book so delightful is the elegance and economy with which Perry mounts his particular attack. I found his treatment of knowledge as including both subject matter content and reflexive content more satisfactory than, for example, the idea of distinguishing between "know that" and "know how". The way that he adapted the "centered worlds" argument (which I think originated with Chalmers) has caused me to re-evaluate my attitude towards issues of possibility and conceivability: I think that centering worlds (by agent and time... but what else?) makes some kinds of modal argument much more plausible. (But conceivability still feels like a very slippery notion.)

The thing that really sets this book apart, however, is the quality of the writing: simple, clear, and direct. Perry avoids both over-cautious pedantry and hyperbole. So far I have encountered relatively few philosophers that can achieve this clarity: Christopher Hill and Fred Dretske come to mind.

Highly recommended.

More Hofstadter

One thing that Doug Hofstadter mentioned in his lecture yesterday was that many conventional ideas about physicalism - strict supervenience, law-like causality between the "levels" - are likely to be plain wrong: it seems likely that higher-level systems can be remarkably insensitive to changes in their physical underpinnings. So even though it is true that minds are implemented in brains, and brains are biological structures composed of cells and molecules and atoms which obey the laws of physics, that doesn't mean that one can (or should) look for law-like relations between mental properties and microphysical properties.¹ Of course functionalists don't have any problem with this. The objections seem to come, on the one hand, from philosophers like David Chalmers who see this gap as a reason to toss physicalism overboard, and on the other hand from neuroscientists like Christof Koch who expect to be able to build their house of neurobiological cards all the way up to the top.

While on this subject, Hofstadter recommended a new book by the Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe - reinventing physics from the bottom down. I picked up a copy this lunchtime. From the fly-leaf:

The edges of science, we're told, lie in the first nanofraction of a second of the Universe's existence, or else in realms so small that they can't be glimpsed even by the most sophisticated experimental techniques. But we haven't reached the end of science, Laughlin argues-only the end of reductionist thinking. If we consider the world of emergent properties instead, suddenly the deepest mysteries are as close as the nearest ice cube or grain of salt. And he goes farther: the most fundamental laws of physics - such as Newton's laws of motion and quantum mechanics - are in fact emergent. They are properties of large assemblages of matter, and when their exactness is examined too closely, it vanishes into nothing.

I suspect that this book may turn out to be more provocative than rigorous, but that's OK.

[UPDATE: I've now read the first 6 chapters of the book. It's WONDERFUL!!! Thought-provoking, mind-bending, funny, profound.... I'll post a full review in a few days.]

¹ If this sounds poorly worded, blame me - this is my interpretation, not Douglas's exact words.

Salon on Iain Banks and "The Algebraist"

Salon's Andrew Leonard has a nice interview with Iain Banks today. Among other things, Banks explains why it's taking so long to get The Algebraist published in the US - he's switched publishers (again), and is working with a small outfit called Night Shade Books in San Francisco.

Checking their website, I see that they are also publishing Banks' The State of the Art, including a $45 limited edition, signed by the author, with "material not in the trade edition". Good grief! Are books going the same way as music CDs? At least I can tell exactly what the difference is between two different CDs - an extra track, or a video clip, or something. How do I know whether the added material in The State of the Art justifies replacing my existing paperback copy? I guess that a True Fan wouldn't worry about such things....

Book notes: Death of an Ordinary Man

During my day trip on Friday I was reading Glen Duncan's Death of an Ordinary Man. I was drawn to it by the review in last week's New York Times, and found it totally mesmerizing. The story is simple: the disembodied spirit of a man who has just died floats above his funeral, and follows the mourners to his wake, privy to the thoughts of (almost) all, repeatedly drawn into vortices of memory. He gradually realizes that he's in this state in order to understand how and why he died. But to achieve this, he needs to understand how he lived. An unvarnished post-mortem examination of the minutiae of life: of relationships, family, children, love, passion, and loss. I find myself thinking back over the story: I think that I'll have to re-read it, soon, to revisit some of the (appropriately) ambiguous passages with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Highly recommended, though not for the emotionally fragile (or the prudish).

Review: Iain M. Banks: "The Algebraist"

Back on December 10, I reported that I'd acquired a new Iain M. Banks novel, The Algebraist. As I noted on my books page, Iain M. Banks is at the top of the list of authors I will buy sight unseen.

So how come I'm only reporting on it now?

This is an odd book. It's fairly long (544 pages), and I found myself reading the first 300 pages relatively slowly. Huge amounts of detail, a back story stretching over billions of years, a wide variety of alien species for whom conventionally anthropomorphic thinking was unhelpful.... Over a couple of weeks I read on, fascinated, but only able to absorb one or two chapters at a sitting. And then on December 25th we flew out to Seattle, and after we returned I got sick, and the great grey tome sat there, unread.

As I surfaced from the flu, I hesitatingly picked up the book, and started back in. Fairly quickly, I found things changing. The tempo picks up, then becomes almost giddying as armadas of starships battle and needle-ships corkscrew through one wormhole after another, ricocheting around the universe like badly aimed fireworks. An underlying pattern on a galactic scale emerges, and is purposefully erased. Characters and plotlines are abruptly trashed. And as the deus ex machina recedes, the book ends on a wholly unexpected note. If the first 300 pages took me 10 days, the last 250 zipped by in 5 or 6 hours over two days.

I really don't know how to judge this book. (I note that other reviewers have felt the same way.) Fundamentally it falls between two stools. There's a taut, 300 page space opera in here just begging to get out: simplify the back story, eliminate half the characters and three quarters of the species, and let it rip. But there's also a 1,200 page epic here, balancing the thoughtful and detailed preamble with a more complex and challenging quest for the central character and better resolution of some of the secondary themes. In either case I'd also want more autonomy for our human hero, rather than feeling that he's simply dragged around the galaxy by forces larger than himself. It's hard to identify and empathize with supercargo.

Overall, I'm really glad that I read the book: there are more ideas here than most sci-fi writers can achieve over a lifetime. But it's frustrating. And US fans of Banks' work will have to buy from the UK; there's still no US publication date set as far as I can see.

New Iain M. Banks: "The Algebraist"

From my list of "authors whose works I'll buy sight unseen", there's a new book by Iain M. Banks: The Algebraist. This is a sprawling space opera, possibly stand-alone, possibly starting a new series - it's not a Culture book. It's set in a world galaxy in which all A.I. has been banned.

[Hardback edition just published in the UK; per Amazon.com, they don't seem to have scheduled a US release date.]

Book game, again

Terry announced: "Book game (cause it isn't really a meme): Nearest Book, Page 23, Fifth sentence, Posted, with explanation." OK, here goes:

When we talk of a green sensation, this talk is not equivalent simply to talk of “a state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”.

This is from the Chalmer's Conscious Mind book that I've talked about before; he's recapitulating the standard philosophical idea of the phenomenal ("Known or derived through the senses rather than through the mind"). The paragraph continues:

We are talking about the phenomenal quality that generally occurs when a state is caused by grass and trees. If there is a causal analysis in the vicinity, it is something like “the kind of phenomenal state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”. The phenomenal element in the concept prevents an analysis in purely functional terms.

By the way, it looks as if the entire text of the book is online, although the diagrams are missing and (inevitably) the pagination doesn't match the printed version.

(We played this game before - a few months back, IIRC - but unlike some of these blog games it's pretty much guaranteed to be different each time around.)

The completion of "The Project"

I finished "The Project" last night: the reading of all seven volumes of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. I don't have time to write a full review right now, but I found the final volume very satisfying indeed. King feels the need to defend his use of metafictional elements, but from my perspective no defense is necessary: they are wholly natural in this many-worlds context. The penultimate truth - that art is our defence against chaos - was nicely capped in the Coda.

This was a most enjoyable project. The last time I did this (read all of a long series of novels in order) was when I was a student in 1970; I decided to read every novel by Thomas Hardy during one summer. Exhausting and exhilarating.

Confessions of a biblioholic

It's always dangerous to let me loose in a bookshop. Today I think I went a little over the top. Let me share the list of my acquisitions with you, in the "full disclosure" style of some self-help groups. Perhaps it will help. (But what would success look like?) In no particular order:

• Doom 3 Prima Official Game Guide
• BBC: The Weather by John Lynch (glorious coffee-table book on all aspects of the weather)
• Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton
• Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King (A colleague read about my Dark Tower project and insisted that I should read this one. "Stephen King nails the 60s and Vietnam.")
• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (mixed reviews, but interesting)
• Cowboy Bebop #1 by Yutaka Nanten and Hajime Yatate (manga)
• What Philosophers Think edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom (Interviews with Searle, Dawkins, Don Cupitt, Mary Midgley, Hilary Putnam and others.)

Hmmm... a depressingly typical collection. I've got to start thinking outside the box.

Update on The Project

As I mentioned, I'm in the middle of a project to read the first six of Stephen King's Dark Tower books in time to be ready when the seventh and final volume is published in mid-September. I'm pleased to report that it's going well: I finished the fifth volume, Wolves of the Calla, late last night (which provoked some weird and wonderful dreams!), and this evening I picked up a copy of Song of Susannah. At this rate I'll be done well before September 21st, even allowing for a week in England between now and then. The trip to England - specifically to Oxford - will, of course, include at least one visit to Blackwell's bookshop in Broad Street, pictured here. I definitely won't run short of reading material....

I almost forgot to mention the project....

A few weeks ago I decided that it was time to start reading Stephen King's epic series The Dark Tower. I figured that if I timed it just right I'd be ready to start on the final, seventh volume when it's published on September 18th. So far things are on track: I'm half way through Wizard and Glass, the fourth volume in the series. Volume 5, Wolves of the Calla, is sitting on the table, ready and waiting. And I'm enjoying the whole project immensely.

Oddly, I've never been a great reader of Stephen King until this year. I don't enjoy horror for its own sake, in literature or film. (A couple of days ago I started watching the movie of Dreamcatcher on TV and wound up turning it off and walking away. The image of a guy sitting on a blood-spattered toilet seat trying to stop a monster from getting out just didn't appeal to me.) Now this may seem odd, since I'm a huge fan of Clive Barker: I think that Imajica is a true masterpiece, even if Barker's version of Dante's Inferno includes many fearsome monstrosities. It works because it's a great story. Whatever the genre, first there has to be a story, and too much horror fiction subordinates narrative to adrenaline. (Frankly, I though that The Silence of the Lambs was unwatchable.)

I came to Stephen King via George R. Stewart. His classic 1949 novel Earth Abides posed some deep questions about the nature of "civilization" through the device of a plague that wipes out most of humanity. After reading it, I was curious how Stephen King had used the same idea in The Stand. Instead of philosophy, I found a fragment of an epic, apocalyptic story. Only a fragment: there were clearly many chapters preceding and following what I was reading (even if it was 1200 pages long). After this, I read The Green Mile, and I was hooked.

So the time is right. I'm usually a fast reader, but I think I can pace myself. By early September I'll be ready for Song of Susannah, and then The Dark Tower itself.

Sock

Vacation reading: Sock, by Penn Jillette. Brilliant. New York, sex, rock'n'roll, murder and philosophy chanelled by a sock monkey. Read it.