An old year-end Review for 2007

While cleaning up my hard drive, I found files where I kept track of the books I read for a given year. Someone had given me the idea (back in the 90s, I believe) to open a text file, and add the name of the book I'd read. What follows below looks like an "end of the year" post made to a bulletin board somewhere. It's past my time on Usenet. Many of these may have appeared elsewhere in this blog, if not the entire post itself. I'll post these files one per month.

It looks like 2007 was the last year that I have a file for. But that point, I was using a small notebook. Plus, I started this blog in December 2008.

2007: The Year in Review

The History of the Pelopennean War, Thucydides -- Intro, Books 1 and 2. Gave up. I'll be back

Knights of Dark Renown, Dave Gemmell -- loved it.

Asimov's Sherlockian Limericks, Isaac Asimov (1978) -- more of a chapter book, really. One limerick per adventure of Sherlock Holmes. Quick read

The Life and Times of R. Crumb: Comments from Contemporaries, edited by Monte Beauchamp, intro by Matt Groening (1998) -- Fanboy praise from writers and artists about a guy I'd barely heard of who created comics that I never read.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling (2004) -- re-read prior to the movie and the new book.

The Enjoyment of Mathematics, Hans Rademacher and Otto Toeplitz (1957) -- sucked all the "joy" out of the subject. Tedious.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J. K. Rowling (2006) --

Mathematical Recreations, Maurice Kraitchik, (1953)

C is for Corpse, Sue Grafton (1986)

D is for Deadbeat, Sue Grafton (1987)

At this point, I was still catching up with the Harry Potter series --- it looks like I found another "reread" for my list. And decided to read the Alphabet mysteries at a rate of 2 per year, just because I didn't want to get bogged down with an entire series. (Plus, it gives you something to look forward to.) The math books may have come from the library, or they may have been tossed out from my high school's library (or by the Math Dept). The R. Crumb book, I wasn't familiar with although I had vague recollections of my older brothers reading some of his stuff when I was younger. I won that in a raffle and might've traded it away if someone had something worth trading for.

Note that in the past 14 years, I have NOT gotten back to Thucydides and it's highly unlikely that I ever will. I gave it that second chance, so many years after college, and now I've put it behind me. That said, if it turns out that the paperback is still in my closet and I one day find it, then who knows. But I wouldn't count on it when there are so many other things to read which aren't challeges and when there's little chance of me using the "History" as research for some writing project.

An old Year-end Review for 2006

While cleaning up my hard drive, I found files where I kept track of the books I read for a given year. Someone had given me the idea (back in the 90s, I believe) to open a text file, and add the name of the book I'd read. What follows below looks like an "end of the year" post made to a bulletin board somewhere. It's past my time on Usenet. Many of these may have appeared elsewhere in this blog, if not the entire post itself. I'll post these files one per month.

It looks like 2006 wasn't a big year, but I did get a lot of graphic novels out of the library.

2006: The Year in Review

Asimov's Galaxy, Isaac Asimov

The Earth Lords, Gordon Dickson

i sing the body electric!, Ray Bradbury

The Transparent Life: 30 Proven Ways to Live Your Best, Naomi Judd

The Funhouse, Dean Koontz

The Joy of Pi, David Blatner

A is for Alibi, Sue Grafton

B is for Burglar, Sue Grafton

The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton

The End, Lemony Snicket

I started at least two other anthologies that I put down and will eventually get back to.

I had to return C is for Corpse before I'd finished it.

And there was another Math book, but I forgot to enter it, and I can't find the title.

I ended the year reading the introduction The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides.

Summer reading included a host of graphic novels the library got in:

"Gotham Central: In the Line of Duty"

"Batman: As the Crow Flies"

"JSA: The Liberty Files"

"Trinity" (Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman)

"Outsiders: Looking for Trouble"

"Batman: War Games"

"The New Teen Titans: Judas Contract"

B is for Burglar was a reread. The End was the lackluster end of that series. The Outsiders was assigned for grad school, and I don't remember much about it -- maybe I should watch the movie (which I haven't seen). I'm curious what the anthologies were because I have many that I've started and never picked up again but I keep meaning to. Summer's coming, and they would make great pool books.

Fantastic Voyage (Asimov)

Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov (1966)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

Note: the book is a novelization of a science-fiction film directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby. The novel was printed first, but Asimov didn't create the story behind it. He just made some "smart writing" out of it.

As the pandemic was just gearing up and teachers were required to report to school, even as the children were not, I found myself in an Englsih/Language Arts classroom. The teacher had left some books "to be taken". Yes, they were meant for kids, but I left all the ones that kids would read. I don't believe that Fantastic Voyage would have been taken by anyone other than an adult of similar age to my own. A hardcover book, it still has the label from the school library shelves.

I've never seen the movie, though I remember parts of it on TV when I was younger -- my older brothers might've been watching it, and clips might've appeared on shows about movies and special effects. I remember picking up a copy of the paperback a long time ago as well. Probably in high school. I didn't get very far into it. Perhaps had I seen the movie, I might've done better.

The same is true now: I would've gotten through it faster had I seen the movie and been more familiar with the story. As it was, the first few pages were a little tedious introducing the characters mostly through dialogue. After that, it sailed pretty well. The pun wasn't intended, but what they hell, I'll own it.

The story is set in a backdrop of the Cold War, but no enemy is mentioned. Just "them" or "the other side". A defecting scientist is attacked en route to a secret base and suffers a brain clot. It's inoperable and he's going to die if something drastic isn't done. The problem is that not only does no one know his secret, but they don't know if the "other side" knows it.

Pioneering research has been done in miniaturization, with a semi-reasonable explanation for where the extra mass goes. Now the limit is being pushed to shrink a team to the size of a bacteria, but it can only be sustained for an hour. After that, it will undo itself automatically. The team has that one hour to save Bendes' life and make their way to safety.

Actually, it's fairly routine, and the mission could be completed in under ten minutes without complications. But, of course, there are complications. Those complications could be accidents, or they could be the work of a saboteur working for the "other side".

The team consists of Capt. Owens who controls the sub; Dr. Michaels, who is mentioned as a pilot but is basically the navigator; Dr. Peter Duval, who is going to operate on the blood clot with a laser; Miss Cora Peterson, Duval's assistant; and agent Charles Grant, a soldier who is put in charge of the mission

Michaels scanned as much of the circulatory system as time allowed, and he navigates the sub through its journey. Miss Peterson -- I went back to double-check this -- is only a year out of graduate school with her Masters degree, so she isn't a "doctor" or anything, but she is Duval's assistant, and he won't procede without her.

Grant is put in charge to make final decisions after getting input from all concerned because any one of the crew -- even Grant himself, but he knows he's okay -- could be working for the "other side" to make the mission a failure, so that the patient dies. There are many times when the doctors think they fail have failed and should call to extracted, but Grant doesn't abort a mission until he sure that every avenue for sucess has been tried. Grant also serves as the non-scientist (like many of the readers) who has things explained to him.

At 180 pages, it was a quick read. It gave a brief tour of the circulatory system without being bogged down in technical terms. There was a sample chapter of Forward the Foundation which I didn't bother reading. (I listened to Prelude to Foundation and remember little of it.)

This was my "pool read", the book I took to read in the pool in the yard, not worried if it got wet.

Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy: 20 Dynamic Essays by the Field's Top Professionals

Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy: 20 Dynamic Essays by the Field's Top Professionals, the Editors of Analog and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (1993)

IMAGE COMING

Not really a review, just reminding myself about some of the details of what I read ...

If this entry seems rushed and uninspired, it's because I spent more than a half hour writing what I wanted to say, added tags and scheduled it to post the following day, and then hit the Publish button -- only for it to vanish into the ether. I just took a long lunch break and I'm trying again. I may hit the Pause button and come back tomorrow, at any time.

This book, from the editors of Analog and Asimov's science fiction magazines, was published in 1993, and it's been in my possession for nearly as long. I don't know where I got it from -- it doesn't appear to be a Book Club edition, or have a reduced price sticker from a book store. Maybe I bought it at a convention?

In any case, this was one of those books in a pile that I decided this past summer needed to be read and passed on.

The book is divided into sections on writing, science, and markets, with the last section being woefully out of date. The essays themselves are old, old even for 1993. Some were published in the magazines in the 80s, but a few stretch back into the 70s. There's even an entry on writing by Robert Heinlein from before I was born. Age doesn't adversely affect most of the book. Writing is writing, and the science is still true, except that we might know more now, and have better ways to express and calculate things. For example, one column, as an aside, explains what a spreadsheet is and how to make a simple one to handle the calculations of the article. Others might have benefited if spreadsheets had been available at the time.

The best of the Science articles is Poul Anderson's entry on how to build a planet, which covered different size stars (and why the largest ones would not have developed life yet) and the distance a planet would have to be away from these stars to have similar luminosity that Earth has. Once that's established, you can calculate the how long one revolution has to be. For the planet itself, the size will dictate the gravity (among other factors), and the axial tilt will give you seasons and habitable zones. You wouldn't have an ice planet, but you might have one where the ice portion was more habitable than the desert areas, for example. won't well for establishing colonies. And he does it will a couple of graphs, but spreadsheets would make the work so much easier.

Colonies, in my opinion, are the way to get around the "Star is too young to have developed life". And there's no reason why a colony couldn't be underground, or in an asteroid belt with a planet for a base or reference point.

A couple other notes: one essay was written by Jane Yolen, whose name only came to my attention maybe 5 or 6 years ago, but whose work I'd already been familiar with. I picket up a collection of fairy tales (some retellings, some continuations, others totally original), which included a story that seemed familiar. Going through some half-finished anthologies, I found a similar story that shared a theme. (It might even have been rewritten for one anthology or the other.) Strangely, I could almost swear that I'd heard another take of a similar tale (or the same one) on tape, but that would have had to have been in the late 90s, so I could be imagining it or mis-remembering.

Asimov's entries about what worked for him are fun to read, even though you know that this would never work for anyone else, especially today.

Again: disjointed because I'm trying to remember the first time I wrote all of this.

The other happy surprise was seeing the name Ian Randal Strock in the Table of Contents. I had the pleasure of sitting next to Ian on a panel at Heliosphere NY this past April. (The topic was "Useless Superpowers".) Just before the panel started, we had been discussing the book he had in front of him, The Presidential Book of Lists: From Most to Least, Elected to Rejected, Worst to Cursed : Fascinating Facts about Our Chief Executives (I wrote that entire name out because I'm making a note to look for a copy of it). Aside: he hated the "worst to cursed" subtitle because everyone asks him, so which one was the worst, and they're all expecting one of two answers -- and both of those people served after the book was published. Note that it is NOT that kind of book. It (as the title says) is a book of lists. Interesting stuff, not demagoguery. Second aside: I was the last one to introduce myself, and I mentioned that I co-authored GURPS Autoduel, 2nd edition in the 90s, and that got an "Oh" from Ian. Nice to know I impressed someone.

Sadly, his entry in the book was just a list of science fiction markets, which while great at the time, is woefully out of date. Many of those magazines no longer exist (although some might have folded and been revived in the past two and a half decades) and the editors of the others had likely moved on. And, of course, most of these publications now accept submissions online instead of via surface mail.

The book closes out with the actual submission guidelines for both Analog and Asimov's, which are great as historical documents, but not much else.

Glad I finally read it. I'll be happy to pass this one on. And I made quite a few notes from Anderson's piece in case I ever try to place things in a hard sci-fi environment. Not likely, but who knows.

Realm of Measure (Asimov)

Realm of Measure From the yardstick to the Theory of Relativity, by Isaac Asimov, 1960 Removed from circulation from my school library and regulated to the trash pile before I spotted the circa-1960 photo of Isaac Asimov on the back cover (looking younger than I've ever seen him before, so I surprised myself by recognizing him), serendipity brought Realm of Measure: From the yardstick to the Theory of Relativity into my possession.

I'm happy that it did. Though billed as an exploration of mathematics, he veers off a bit into scientific measurements, but I'll still count this toward my goal of reading one interesting book on math each summer, and this one does it without spinning out of control with endless, overly-complicated and overly-ridiculous equations.

Asimov goes into the history of measurements and how certain units came about and how the different units relate to one another. Not only did lengths like palms and feet have to be standardized from person to person and town to town, but also in relation to each so that they could be divided more evenly among people without formal education but who could count and compute the basic operations.

Asimov pushes for the metric system often throughout the book, as it's used a lot in science (where he was quite at home), not to mention in most of the non-English-speaking world. (He doesn't actually mention the measure of the English-speaking world using British units.)

The biggest problem with his arguments is that he presented the beauty of American/British system in its origins. If you were a wordsmith, you might be interested in the etymology of words, where they came from and how they came to be. You wouldn't stand for simplified spellings that are attempted from time to time. (Benjamin Franklin had a serious plan to change the language and simplify spelling, for instance.) When you read the origin of who's foot we use and who's armlength, and why a furlong is 1/8 of a mile, there is a wonder to it that goes beyond, "You see, there's this stick, and it has these two marks in it...."

Further, the system of divisions make sense. Think of the times. Think of the people and how they lived. If they split things, they likely halved them. If they had to quarter something, they halved it again. How often did someone come along with nine of his friends and need things sorted out evenly among them. And for all those divisions, 10 isn't a great number to work with: you can only divide it by 2 and 5, but not 3 nor 4. Dividing 12 by 2, 3, 4 and 6 proved more convenient, if it you lose 5. Moreover, metric conversion is easy in that you can switch units simply by moving the decimal point, but first you had to invent the decimal point! And that didn't happen to, what, the sixteenth century?

Oddly enough, I can sit here and argue that the time for the metric system has passed. We're living in a computer age, ruled by binary and hexidecimal. The number 10 really doesn't fit well into that scheme. And once you get passed 11th year math, base 10 goes out the window in favor of natural logs and e.

Not that any of this took away from my enjoyment of his book, which I heartily recommend to all with the proviso, "Don't try to read it in bed when you're really tired."

And I'll close by considering how close NYC came to allowing 16-ounce soft drinks while banning 500 milliliters. Metric: not even once.

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Apparently, this is the first Asimov book I've reviewed, as his name was not one of the tags, which is odd because I have read some of his books since I started this blog, or at least since I kept track of the books in my paper journal. The most recent Asimov book I read which comes to mind was The Currents of Space. It's an Empire book and I remember wondering when the Robots would show up because I had Caves of Steel on my mind.