Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog. I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much. However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books. They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts. I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.
Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up. Here are 5 more of them.
On Writing, by Stephen King
Pretty good book about writing. King offers some folksy, but ultimately helpful, advise on writing. There is a lot in this book about his own life, but that seems to be pretty common in these sorts of books. Among the writing books I have read, King is most forceful in his admonitions to read a lot and write a lot. Beyond this, he offers some pretty good practical advice on cutting unnecessary plot point and back story and avoiding adverbs. This is the kind of direct advice many writers look for. I had a snobbish time in my twenties when I didn’t want to admit that I liked King. I am over that. He writes good books even if he isn’t always a good writer. This is a distinction that I think he could appreciate, given the content of the rest of his book on writing.
I have read this book before (it has been a while) and I was reminded of his candor about his own life, particularly about his alcoholism and about the van collision that nearly killed him. He is a fearlessly honest writer who genuinely wants to tell good stories. I can dig it.
Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Read the first book, Children of Time, a year or more ago for sf book club and really liked it. I think I missed some key elements of this early on and didn’t really catch the full meaning. This happens sometimes when I read. I miss part of the beginning and the whole rest of the novel is just playing catch up. Maybe this is why I like to re-read books so much.
Anyway, it was good but I wish I had paid more attention at the beginning.
Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
I read this book about 20 years ago when I was in college and thinking about a life of writing. I don’t remember what I thought of it at the time, though I have taken at least one important lesson from it. Lamott has one chapter called “Shitty First Drafts” and this was something that I would make my own writing students read. It tells us that first drafts should, indeed, be shitty. They aren't meant for public consumption and don’t have to look like it. They are messy because they are a part of the process and can be a place to explore and take chances. I like this a lot and have tried to use it in my writing and impart it to my students.
There are also a lot of references to god that I don’t find particularly edifying, or anything that might be even notionally helpful to beginning writers. At one point, she wants us to get rid of perfectionism in writing, a fine goal. However, there is some nonsense about this being easier if you believe in god and zero explanation of why this might be so. These allusions to religion probably make sense to the author, and might work for other christian believers, but there needs to be more connective tissue between the concept and the work. I didn’t see it most of the time. I would like to at least see the concept in action.
Overall, I have one big like and one big dislike of this book. I like the fact that, like Stephen King in On Writing, she pushes the axiom that writers must write. They do it because they want to and because they find value in it and in stories. Lamott encourages writers to find their particular audience (one writer’s audience may be a parent, a child, etc.) and to write for that audience without regard for publication. I like this. She provides one particularly useful exercise based on this. When hitting a stumbling point in writing, she advises writing a letter to a friend that explains a character’s motivation or why a particular point is important, or whatever the sticking point is. I do this a lot, not necessarily in letter form, but I write about my writing a lot. The big dislike that I have is that Lamott keeps pushing a particular view of writing and perspective that doesn’t square with my writing or what I think should be a part of everyone’s writing. Frequently she will question why a writer is writing if they do not share some quality, such as naive wonder, a belief in god, a kind of innocence, or somesuch. This crops up a couple of times and I thought it was unnerving each time. She writes that writers need to seek the truth, and I think that this is right, but not in the objectified way that I take her to mean it. To me, this reveals too much of the personal drive to write and not a proper piece of advice on writing as such. Coupled with this, and equally irritating, Lamott frequently posits her writing students as wide-eyed fame seekers who poo-poo real advice on writing. She repeatedly warns the reader that publication will not solve all of their problems. Why this piece of advice is in this book, I cannot tell. It is something that may be worthwhile mentioning in an undergraduate writing workshop, but probably not anywhere else. It isn’t so much that I think this is untrue as it is unhelpful. Anyone who believes it will never trust someone saying otherwise and no one else really needs to hear it. But I say obvious things, too. So I don’t begrudge it too much.
I wrote the first half of this a week or so ago and just want to mention that I did like the book overall even if I am a little harsh about some of the points. It works and it is likely that the things that I didn’t like would be helpful to others.
Atmosphaera Incognita by Neal Stephenson
This story popped up last year and I just got the chance to read it. I don’t know if this classifies as a short story or a novella, or what. My kindle app puts it over 50 pages, so I am going to treat it more like a novella. The narrative is a little difficult to follow because there is not a lot of story here. Rather, this is more of a mediation on the idea of the complexities involved in building a 20km tall structure. The main character has been involved in the planning and logistics of building the structure and she ends up participating in a rescue mission during an extreme weather disaster that rocks the structure. The disasters acts as a venue to answer more questions about what it would be like to build a 21st century tower of Babel.
This was fun to read and it seems to be an update to the “space elevator” technology used in other sf stories. The story shares in the hopeful, technologically advanced hard-sf tradition that explores the capabilities of human ingenuity. Though I am not sure what to make of the capitalist-industrialist Carl who conceives and funds the whole project. His role in the project seems a little out of keeping with other Stephenson that I have read. I need to think about this aspect more.
Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos
Innumeracy is one of those rare non-fiction books that I read because it catches my interest. I try to read non-fiction as much as I can and in areas that that are outside of my norm. In this case, this book is about mathematical literacy. Two words about this before I continue. First, I had first heard about this book from a math teacher in high school. For whatever reason, this idea stuck with me and I am reading this more than 20 years later. Second, I like math. There was a time when I considered becoming a math major but I did not. I think that I have a better-than-average layman’s understanding of mathematics. I did dedicate a sizable portion of my doctoral dissertation to a literary rendering of Godel’s incompleteness theorem. However, I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination and never followed up on that idea aside from a little bit of research and reading occasional books.
So, to the book itself. It isn’t bad. The book mainly wants people to understand probability and simple statistics better. This isn’t a book arguing the importance of higher mathematical concepts in daily life. It just wants folks to understand when and why stats they encounter can be misleading or totally bogus.
There are two major drawbacks in the book. The first has to do with the writing and style, and the second has to do with my perception of the book’s goals.
To take the first first, Paulos writes at one point that his prose is guided by a desire to skip needless exposition (my gloss). But he ends up being guilty of what he charges other math writers, namely, glossing over important explanations. Paulos likes to stack up examples without explaining the significance of them. This is self-defeating. His purpose is to explain the importance of math to folks who do not see the importance. But without providing adequate layman’s explanations, the book just doesn’t answer the call. Second, and probably more damning, is that this book doesn’t provide adequate explanation for its own goals at key points. One example that irked me was a section that attempted to apply statistical probability to choosing a mate. Paulos gives his standard equations and explanations, but with one big hole. Why the fuck is the selection of a mate something that is probabilistic? Sure, maybe it is best to choose one mate from among the first third of suitors, but how is one to know how many potential mates one is to have in a lifetime? A bigger question might be why one would think that something emotional and personal should be left to stats. Paulos provides some equations and probabilities but doesn’t give any sense of why it would be appropriate to apply them.
Otherwise, there is some good stuff in this book. He just runs off the rails from time to time and can give some dumb answers, or at least, incompletely explained ones.
