mmcirvin | Books

Total number of books owned: samantha2074 and I together have somewhere in the neighborhood of 400-500 books in here. About half of them started out as mine, so I'll say 200-250. There have been multiple purges in the past, some of which I regretted later. Note added later: Looking more closely at my bookshelves makes me suspect that this is a gross underestimate, and that there are actually more like 700 or 800 books in this house. Maybe I should do a more accurate count...
Last book bought: Heavy Planet, a collection of Hal Clement's Mesklinite stories, including the novels Mission of Gravity (reviewed here earlier) and Star Light. These days books are prime birthday-and-Christmas-list material so I don't technically buy the majority of them for myself.
Last book read: Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem. It's a well-written and amusing enough dystopian science-fiction Chandler pastiche, though it has a little bit of that Mainstream Author Slumming quality: I get the sense that the genre devices in it are supposed to seem more original than they do. I appreciated that it stays within the bounds of a traditional hardboiled-detective story; the hero doesn't save the world, but he does get his own kind of satisfaction.
Five books that mean a lot to me (I think I'm going for formative influence here):
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Even acknowledging its structural imperfections and somewhat rushed ending, I still think this is the best novel ever written by an American as well as one of the funniest and saddest, and (while explicitly denying it in the epigraph) it has at its heart a profound moral statement that I still treasure. I first read it in a greatly abridged kids' edition and laughed at the Duke and the Dauphin; I kept coming back to the complete novel later on and the thing just kept revealing more layers. Come to think of it, it's been too long.
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter goes on about artificial intelligence, mathematical logic, art, music and DNA with side trips into poetry and physics, and tries to hook it all together in some metaphoric sense. This weird, rambling, phone-book-sized opus, alternating between dense nonfiction chapters and playful Lewis Carrollesque dialogues (one of them actually is by Lewis Carroll), was probably the single greatest brainbomb I encountered in my early adolescence, and it has a lot to do with who I am today. I have a feeling that it wouldn't impress me quite as much today; I find many of the connections he was trying to make frustratingly vague. But it was just the thing for the time and age that I read it; the thread that really runs through the whole thing is a resounding permission to play with ideas.
- 5000 B.C. by Raymond Smullyan. This is the only book on this list that I actually have on my bookshelf today! A logician who is also a peculiar sort of semi-rationalist mystic talks about life, death and philosophy. As with Hofstadter, I have my quibbles with some of the things Smullyan says about metaphysics and ethics, and I have no idea whether his take on Taoism, Buddhism and such is at all accurate (I have a feeling that it's at least greatly simplified). But when I'm in one of my fits of crushing moral anxiety, for some reason I find this a profoundly soothing book to read, probably in the same way that some people take comfort in the religious scripture of their choice. I think it's something about the fundamental kindness of Smullyan's worldview. He emphatically rejects the idea that right and wrong are some kind of rigged game played by secret rules.
- Buy Jupiter and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov. This is one of the countless re-bundlings of some random subset of Asimov's short fiction with jaunty and egotistical introductions by the author, printed in the mid-Seventies. I include it not because it is at all remarkable among such volumes (the contemporaneous Nightfall and Other Stories, which I read later, probably had the better material), but because it's really the book that introduced me to post-Golden Age adult SF. I must have re-read it dozens of times, and in all the stuff I wrote for my friends in high school I was ripping off Asimov's style mostly on the basis of this one book. Finally, the last one I have to mention is a weird one:
- The Random House Encyclopedia. I spent a gigantic amount of time leafing through this fascinating monster of a book in my late childhood. It's a peculiar undertaking, a single doorstop-sized volume attempting to cover everything in the universe, with much of its page real estate devoted to pictures. There's a shorter alphabetical section in the back, with little squib articles cross-referenced to the colorful, subject-organized main section, which devotes a two-page spread to everything deemed a major subject of human knowledge or endeavor: brief synoptic article running along the top, giant, lavishly captioned color pictures filling the rest. Some of the pictures in the technology pages are a sort of apotheosis of the cutaway diagram, of a very British variety (I think much of it was of British origin). I remember being deeply embarrassed by the naked pictures in the human biology section. I suppose it would be nearly useless as a starting point for real research of any kind, but it felt more sophisticated than kiddie encyclopedias and was definitely a cut above those vapid Time-Life quasi-educational book series. It was a sort of teaser trailer for a lifetime of trying to understand things.
- Honorable mentions put here because I was limited to five (I do still have a few of these): Cosmos by Carl Sagan, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem, Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder, The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagels, The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman with Richard Leighton and Matthew Sands
Next victims (unless they've already done this, or don't feel like it): samantha2074, jwgh, secretive_bus, partiallyclips, sanspoof

I bought Gödel, Escher, Bach a few years ago; I think it was the 25th anniversary special edition. I didn't get very far, trying to read it from the start. Is this something I could skim? I could try just looking at the pictures first.

You'd get a lot just out of reading the Dialogues, actually. They're fun.

The conceptual heart of the book is all those typographically peculiar chapters about formal systems, which gradually build up to a description of the proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. But those parts might actually be more comprehensible if you jump and skip through the other stuff first, working from the outside in as it were. I don't remember whether I actually read the book in order from the beginning to the end.

Someday I'll understand the parts about Bach...

I don't think it suffers much if read completely out of order, so in general if you find that a particular chapter doesn't interest you I would feel free to skip it and come back to it later if you feel like it.

I had read all of the dialogues many times before I read more than a couple of the other chapters.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I haven't heard of that one in years. It brings back memories of high school; it was the "in" book for nerdlings. I never did read it.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Email me your snail mail address; I have something for you. It's to thank you for not making me tell people how few books I have in my home.

I haven't a clue how many books I own, and really wouldn't know how to go about completing one of these! I'm afraid I'm on better ground with films, because I'm an uneducated berk. Or something. :-)

That's fine—I'm always a little nervous about the "tag five friends" parts of these things...

I will say that "Dudley Moore: An Intimate Portrayal" by Rene Fruchter (I think that's how it's spelt) is a wonderful book. :-)

The book meme was actually modified from an earlier one about music (to which I wouldn't dare respond without seeming like an unmusical berk), so turning it into one about film would probably work as well.

Well as for music I'm a classical man myself - Puccini and Holst are generally my favourite composers, though Barber's Adagio for Strings and Ravel's Bolero are two of my favourite works. I also like a bit of light, comical jazz from Henry Mancini or Burt Bacharach. And m' favourite singer, in fact the only one whom I've collected some albums for, is Chris de Burgh. That last fact is one that I don't often tell people, for obvious reasons.

;-)

The thing that would mostly come out is how freakishly They Might Be Giants-centric my music collection is, even though I've probably got less They Might Be Giants than many other people whose collections are much larger and more eclectic.

Somebody else likes Bolero! The only people I hear talk of it are skating fans who find it either inappropriate for skating (unless you're Torvill and Dean) or incredibly boring and repetitious or both. The Barber is nice, if at times a bit overplayed. Holst is big in the band world as he's written some of the warhorses of the repertoire, especially his First and Second Suites for Military Band. I've played both, as well as his Moorside Suite. The other band piece that I'm aware of him writing is the Hammersmith Prelude and Scherzo, which I have a recording of. It's a lot more dissonant and dirge-like than the others.

Read GEB just a few years ago. Kind of wished I'd read it fifteen to twenty years earlier, but it was still a pretty impressive read. Made visiting the al-Hambra more fun (though I don't remember if I learned from GEB or elsewhere that Escher was inspired by the al-H).

I need to reread huck finn, if I can find a copy.

More honorable mentions: The Mind's I edited by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Chosen by Chaim Potok; The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction; Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker; White Light by Rudy Rucker.

And the third annual Gardner Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction anthology, published in 1986. This was probably the best volume (http://www.bestsf.net/reviews/dozois3.html) of Year's Best Science Fiction of all time, filled with stories still remembered as major classics, and it was the one that introduced me to the series and to serious post-New Wave 1980s SF.

I get the sense that the genre devices in it are supposed to seem more original than they do.

Ding! See also: Doris Lessing.

I actually give Lethem more credit than I do most mainstream authors who dip into SF, both because his work on the whole is really more fantastic fiction than not, and because he seems to be knowledgeable enough that he knows he's writing satirical science fiction rather than something that is Not Really SF And Therefore Better. But the ways in which his writing excels are more on the lapidary word-and-sentence level than in fantastical imagination.

What bugged me more than the novel itself was the cover blurbs; they all mention Philip K. Dick not because Lethem's work is particularly Dick-like but because that's the only weird-ass, darkly funny SF author they've heard of.

Books

GEB

Re: GEB

Re: GEB

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

GEB

no subject

no subject

no subject