Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)

 

One of the things that I have pretty much not done in these reviews is rate something that I just read. This was partially due to convenience (who can read an entire book in a day and/or stagger their reading so that they can get one done daily?) but also due to the fact that I find that I actually have a better sense of the quality of a book a month or two after I’ve read it rather than right after I’m done. One book which I have not yet reviewed here, Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, suffered from this; I wrote a review on Amazon about an hour after I’d gotten done with it and, looking back, I think I rated it too low.*

It’s also entirely possible that I am basking too deeply in the afterglow of Cryptonomicon to give it the kind of objective rating that it deserves. I’m really thinking not, though. This book has pretty much all of the things that makes my inner 8 year old squeal:

• A winding, conspiratorial plot
• A sardonic authorial tone that keeps you from treating a book like this as a Serious Great Work, which for me anyway is something I have the habit of doing when the page count is up over 1000
• A historical setting which actually works in the historical sense (I mean, I want to like historical fiction but when you give Confederate troops AK-47s**
• Cool technology (which would seem to contradict the last point, except that a. there are parallel storylines and b. just read the book, OK?)
• GOLD (okay, maybe that’s not a real priority)

I realize, looking at that list, that my inner 8 year old is a damn nerd. I am surprised that I was not given atomic wedgies on a daily basis, to be perfectly honest.

The particular field of study that Stephenson tackles in this book is cryptography, which sounds dry, but trust me, is kind of awesome. Okay, it’s dry as heck. But Stephenson is a very competent sentence-to-sentence and scene-to-scene writer, and unlike some authors I know, either manages to avoid falling so in love with his own writing that he can’t drag himself out of it or else has a good editor who is able to point out to him where this happens. There is one scene in particular involving a small subset of the hacking style known as “phreaking” that is a lot of fun to read but which actually does not, for a change, violate Chekhov’s Rule of the Gun or whatever it’s called.*** I won’t give away spoilers this time around but trust me: stuff happens here which actually pays off later on.

Like you would kind of expect from a high-technology book written in the late 90s, some of the tropes used are a little dated. I guess hackers still love Unix, but even people who use C++ don’t treat the now-30-year-old system as a “newer” programming language. To be honest, though, I was a little surprised at how well a lot of stuff has held up. My job only very rarely and tangentially deals with security and encryption but I know that the 4096 bit encryption schemes the main characters used in the novel, which was supposed to be outlandishly heavy then, is still considered pretty strong (to the point that it slows things down unnecessarily for most peoples’ purposes) today, a decade and a half after the book came out. Most of all, what puts the book squarely in the 90s, aside from the occasional question about Windows 95, is the fact that several of the main guys are World War II veterans at the very end of long careers – if you set the book in 2013, all those guys would be dead or very, very old.

One of my readers (apparently I have more than one on this site; it’s called trolling forums, people, and it’s how you get hits) feels a lot differently about Infinite Jest than I do and has, in defense of that horrible, horrible book, posted some comments by David Foster Wallace about wanting to create something that doesn’t talk down to its audience. I actually completely agree with those statements and intend to respond to them with that book in mind in particular, but in my opinion this book right here is a great example of how a good author can make something which is smart and which challenges you to keep up with it mentally but which at the same time is actually, you know, readable and stuff. If that’s the kind of thing you’re into… okay, that was a passive aggressive statement. You should read and like this book and if you don’t you are a bad person with bad tastes.

*In other words, it is the Wilco of books.

**Yes, that’s a thing. Harry Turtledove did it in some book of his. I probably will not be reviewing it because I put it down after 50 pages and I generally like to finish books that I review. Call it an idiosyncrasy of mine.

***”If you show a gun in Act One, it has to be fired in Act Three.”****

****I don’t know why I enclosed that in quotations. I don’t remember the original actual quote at all and anyway it’s in Russian.

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle – 3.5 Stars

This is another book that I think most people know better, at least over here, by its movie adaptation than the original book itself (the adaptation has the Corrs in it! And Andrew Strong! Who, granted, never did anything after this movie but he is still awesome!). Nonetheless, the book is wonderful and funny and I think you’ll find that while the movie captured much of its whimsy, the book is quite a bit more comedic, I think. The movie seemed like it was pandering in some ways to foreign (read: non-Irish) audiences who might not otherwise realize without being shown just how down-and out Dublin is. The novel itself shows basically little to nothing of the slums, focusing instead on the banter between the bandmates.

This quote did make the movie but I think makes more sense in print:

Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.

The movie seems to put it in more of a “let’s pull ourselves up with our boostraps out from this horrible slummy area!” kind of way, whereas in the book I think the line is just funny and far-fetched, which is the original effect Doyle was, I think, going after.

Nothing against the movie, though: it’s one of my very favorite films that not a lot of people have heard of. It’s merely different, not worse, not better, than the book.

I can’t help but draw comparisons between Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh, who is Scottish not Irish but who likes to mix in lots and lots of dialect into his work. Trainspotting is pretty much entirely written in this manner and at points it’s roughly as easy to understand as Brad Pitt in the movie “Snatch”. I am normally not a really huge fan of dialect. It is really, really easy to do incorrectly*, and even when done right it interrupts the general flow of things.

I raise this because I find Welsh to be downright unreadable but I think Doyle, for some reason, is really straightforward and easy. Maybe it’s that the Irish accent is less impenetrable than the Scottish one. No, that’s not it. Welsh, I am almost positive, deliberately makes his narrative hard to read at times for, um, effect. Well, for effect I choose not to read his books.

Roddy Doyle is no stranger to more serious work (I also recommend The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, which I also might review later this year) but as an introduction to him, you could do a lot worse than The Commitments. Heck, even if you only have a weekend set aside for yourself, you can zip through the whole thing in one afternoon, watch the movie later that evening, and still have Sunday left over for, I don’t know, the Crusader Kings II video game (I bet if you made Ireland take over England, Dublin wouldn’t be the Detroit of the UK!).

*My “favorite” (read: least favorite) example is when American authors drop the g’s off of words that end in ing: “Ah was bringin’ up the rear, yanow?”. The fact is that in the US, most people in most parts of the country drop off the g’s unless they are in very highbrow company. The only information it passes to the reader in my opinion is that the author or at least the character relating the action, if the narrative is in first person, feels very proud of their own grammar. You may as well write people saying “button” as “bu’n” and call it dialect.

Loose Balls by Terry Pluto – 4 stars

What is with my fascination with sports books? I’m a big guy, about 6’2 and currently weighing around 230 pounds, and admittedly that meant that in school I was recruited into sports a bit. Unfortunately for me, I was also pretty fat back then so playing them were not always fun times. I guess I was best suited for football but my fat ass did play on our community center’s high school squad my freshman year. As you might expect, I was and am a really, really bad basketball player. We played full court, of course, so all that running… guh, it makes my shins hurt just thinking about it.

But reading about sports is another matter. There’s something about them that makes the next to impossible seem plausible. I think of Kirk Gibson’s homerun off of Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series. Gibson had a broken leg and may well have been thrown out at first base if he’d done anything but belt the ball out of the park… in game-winning fashion… against a powerhouse Oakland Athletics team which was expected to sweep the whole thing. If that can happen in real life, how is a book about a guy who does something similar so fake?

Anyway, in addition to heroism, sports stories are often pretty awesome because of the utter lack of heroism. Enter Terry Pluto’s excellent Loose Balls, which is more or less an expertly cobbled together set of interviews with former American Basketball Association players, owners, coaches, and front office types about the history of the league. If you’ll recall your basketball history, the ABA lasted from 1968 until 1976, when 4 of its teams merged with the existing NBA. Reading this book, you come to the conclusion that the craziest thing wasn’t that the league didn’t survive, it’s that it lasted for 9 freaking years in the first place. Without giving too much away, here are a couple of highlights:

• In the early years of the league, one team forgot to bring their uniforms to a road game and had to wear T-shirts with the player’s numbers written on the top with Magic Marker.
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was all set to join the league, everyone knew how much money he wanted and the league had pretty much planned his coming, but in the end he went to the NBA instead because the ABA commissioner at the time – no less than the first great center, George Mikan – decided that this would be a good time to lowball the future Hall of Famer.
• There was actually a team in this league called The Spirits of St. Louis. If that isn’t the most awesome name for a sports team ever, I don’t know what is.

Since it is, as stated, more a collection of interviews than a narrative in its own right, you might expect this book to be a bit on the dry side. But no. Thanks to Terry Pluto’s deft touch, the book feels like it’s undergoing a conversation with itself. A person makes a whopper of a remark and the very next line has some other guy saying “oh yeah, that’s totally true” or “no, Bob X is full of crap”. You get this sense that the entire league was run by crooks and con men, but not evil crooks, the good, funny crooks and con men like Bill Veeck* or Charlie Finley**. The players probably got the short end of the stick but at the same time I think a case could be made that the ABA was what brought American pro basketball out from the poorly lit arenas, chest passes, and granny free throw shooting*** era and into the spectacular dunks (the slam dunk contest got its start in the ABA) and star-driven marketing (see: Dr. J) that characterized the league from the 1980s onward.

All in all, this is a very funny book and a good way to pass the time. You may emerge from it wishing to watch a couple episodes of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, but there are worse things that can happen to you as a consequence of reading, I think.

*Oh yeah, TOTALLY going to be reviewing Veeck as in Wreck at some point. He was not actually an owner of an ABA team, though. I’m just putting him out there as the kind of character you expect to see in the league…

**On the other hand, Finley, his mule and all, actually owned a team called the Memphis Tams.

***Side note: Rick Barry, he of the granny free throw, played in the ABA.

Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding – 3 stars

THIS IS A GOOD BOOK SHUT UP. Seriously though I enjoyed it for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, it’s funny, and although it’s really, really light, the humor still shines through. The book is written as a sort-of epistolary (i.e. as a series of letters) in that it is, well, a diary. One of the things that the movie version loses, actually, is the daily weight and smoking record which kind of categorizes Bridget Jones’ general mood throughout the proceedings. The other main thing that it loses is the closing scene which involves Jones sending drunken emails to all of her friends. There was really no reason to put that into the movie but hey, it’s funny so I’ll allow it.

The other reason why the book ought to be read in its own right is that the very casting of Colin Firth as Mister Darcy is a callback to a pretty major meme in the book itself, which is Bridget Jones watching a particular scene from the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice over and over again in order to see Mr. Firth topless. The fact that he’s actually in the movie is enough to make your head hurt a little bit. The fact that the book itself is essentially a 1990s-era update of Pride (Firth’s character’s name is even Mark Darcy, a callback to Mister Darcy from the Jane Austen novel) is enough to make your head hurt a bit more.

I wish I could recommend Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason as much as I could this book but it gets just a bit more silly; the success of the novel, I guess, led Fielding to give Jones a level of success that isn’t really foretold in the first book, and on top of that there’s a sense that the original love triangle needed to be brought back. I wouldn’t *quite* say that Edge of Reason is to Diary what Hangover II was to The Hangover but it’s close enough that a parallel could be made.

But that’s nothing against this book. It’s not going to teach you new things about life. Bridget Jones is maybe a bit too silly to be a realistic character but she does in a sense represent a side of all of us which some of us attempt to sublimate but which nonetheless exists. Anyway, her constant fantasizing about “minibreaks” is pretty funny to this American; I have to admit that I had no idea what a “minibreak” was before I read this. I also didn’t know that if your name is Sharon and you are British your nickname is often “Shazzer”. That is awesome beyond words, I’m sorry. I want to move to England and find a woman named Sharon to befriend just to experience this. Actually, come to think of it I have an aunt named Sharon. She isn’t English though. I think I’d still have to move there and affect an accent to really pull that off.

This is definitely a book for the lighter half of your reading load, something to read to let your brain cool off after A Brief History of Time or The Ancestor’s Tale. I found myself enjoying this book in much the same way that I enjoyed High Fidelity; although it’s not really in the same league as that tome, it’s fun enough to warrant the price of the paper. And it’s a quick enough read that you might find yourself flipping through it again in a year or two.

Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett – 3 stars

The above is how the cover looked of the version I originally bought back in the 90s. I just now noticed that there is a recommendation of it by Piers Anthony right smack in the middle of the thing. Guh. Just guh. Piers Anthony recommending Terry Pratchett is like David Cameron recommending you go and watch some Stanley Kubrick. I mean, I love Pratchett, but if I were brand new to his work and I saw this on the cover, I have to admit that it might very well make me look for something else by another, less Anthony-endorsed author.

In one way, actually, I’m kind of glad that Anthony appears up there because it gives me the excuse to talk about humor. I am the world’s renowned expert on humor. Okay, not really. I do know what I like and what I don’t like, and although to outsiders they both write in the same general genre – humorous sword and sorcery style fantasy – Terry Pratchett and Piers Anthony are as different as night and day. I’m not just saying this as a guy who flipped through 50 pages of one of Anthony’s books at the bookstore and set it down. Actually, I read the first 10 or 12 Xanth novels and all of the Incarnations of Immortality books when I was younger. So yeah, I feel like I can inform others of Piers. Come to think of it, the fact that I find myself morbidly offended by stupid puns the way others are morbidly offended by Holocaust jokes* is probably due in large part to getting absolutely sick of the work of Piers Anthony.

Terry Pratchett doesn’t have lots and lots of puns, fortunately, surrounding the Evil Com-Pew-Ter or Stap-Ler or whichever other office appliance is nearest to him at the time. Pratchett’s thing is that he takes fantasy memes, thinks about what they could really mean if you strip away Tolkien, C.S. Lewis. In the particular case of Lords and Ladies, Pratchett looks at elves. Consider the following passage from this book:

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

If you’ve read the Lord of the Rings series or played Dungeons and Dragons, what you remember about elves is that they’re this kind of noble, fairy race that loves nature and so on. If you’re more in tune with folklore than nerd-dom, you might know them as mischievous little creatures that thwart humanity in silly little ways. Or else you might know them as creators of fine cookies, which they apparently do in a cookie-tree. As you can see above, Pratchett takes much of that elven lore and, without changing the words used, turns the whole thing on its head.

Instead of puns you get social satire. He also does this in brief asides; the one I remember from this book is a play on Schroedinger’s Cat, wherein the cat in the box has three possible states rather than two: alive, dead, or very angry at being cooped up in a box.** Come to think of it, he loves the footnote almost as much as David Foster Wallace did***. These rarely take more than a few seconds to read, though, and they do, at least, keep you in the general feel of his writing.

The Discworld series of novels revolve around a growing group of characters. Some of these have their own subseries. This book is actually part of the Three Witches group of books, which is one of my favorites (I’d have to say that the City Guard are my #1 but these are a close 2nd). Terry Pratchett has been a very prolific writer, and although none of this stuff quite qualifies for High Literature or Inclusion Into The Canon, just about every book in the series is worth reading for the humor content alone.

*To think nothing of Holocaust puns!****

**Followers of Maru on YouTube might object to the notion that a cat is necessarily angry at getting cooped up in a small box; in fact, maybe it went in there on its own. Those of you who believe this are perfectly well entitled to make your own fantasy novels about elves.

***Crap. Now I really am going to have to write a review of Infinite Jest now, aren’t I. I hate myself.

****No, I am not going to provide any examples.