The Martian

I was a little surprised to get a hard copy (well, soft cover, but close enough) of this, given how this is one of the works that heralds of the e-book revolution point to.

Anyway, this is a straightforward adventure-type novel. My copy has a short interview with the author afterwards, where he mentions admiring Heinlein. I don't really see any Heinlein here, but that era of SF shows through here.

This was apparently first released in serial form, and it kind of shows. There are a few more crises than you'd typically expect if it had been not serialized, some of them more telegraphed than others.

With a book like this, the criteria you're looking for is did it keep you turning pages? If yes, then it did its job. This was diverting, if nothing else.

At the Mountains of Madness

The cover illustration depicted here has little or nothing to do with this book -- at no point are human characters revealed to be some sort of undead skeleton. However, the image is appropriate -- it shows the horror that can lurk behind the ordinary, the banal, how normalcy can be pulled aside for a terrible revelation.

The story is told in a typical conceit -- as the sole survivor of an Antarctic expedition, the narrator is attempting to warn future explorers against disturbing what he and his companions had.

What Lovecraft is good at is building tension -- things start slowly for the expedition, with exploration and sample taking, until an isolated group makes a discovery "that will do for biology what the work of Einstein did for physics." This, of course, puts the expedition on the path to disaster. The isolated group goes incommunicado, and when a relief expedition arrives, they find the camp in disarray, the men and the dogs wildly slaughtered, and some specimens missing. It's implied, rather than outright stated, that these specimens had lain dormant, rather than dead, and had revived and perpetrated this.

What Lovecraft isn't great at is prose. There's a lot of repetition in terms of "we withheld these details from our reports, but now I must steel myself and reveal the truth," and "ill-prepared we were for dealing with things beyond our ken". It's effective, though, as repetition is a device of madmen, and Lovecraft's protagonists are having the limits of their sanity stretched.

The setting is almost a character in itself, in that Lovecraft spends an enormous amount of time describing the awful city of the creatures, and letting our protagonist read their murals and learn their history. It's very creepy, if a little convenient that a professor of geology is intimately familiar with the Necronomicon and other tropes of Lovecraft's universe.

I would recommend this -- it's not quite what I had expected, and reading works that Lovecraft has influenced makes this lose some of it's power, but it retains enough to remain fresh.

Traffic

The first thing I thought when finishing this book was "Well, that was interesting." Whether that says more about the book's subject matter or my lack of intellectual creativity is a matter of debate, I suppose, but this is an interesting book. Although I did find it interesting, I think its reach exceeds its grasp somewhat.

There's a lot here -- the prologue is about how we merge when construction closes a lane on the highway (spoiler: the author advocates merging towards the end of the lane, in a zipper merge, but notes that we have issues because not everyone thinks that way). We then go through how anonymity vs. awareness of others influences how we act on the road, how we fail to receive feedback on our driving (with a sidebar on self-driving cars), how our eyes perceive objects while we're moving, traffic flow and human nature, congestion, traffic engineering, traffic around the world, and risk. Quite a bit to digest, even if it is presented clearly and sequentially. (There's even a few notes "this subject will be covered in detail in a later chapter")

This is all very readable and interesting, but my issue is that for a work that details some of the issues we face on the roads, there's not too much time spent on solutions. (The author notes that we are conditioned to reporting our commute in terms of time, as opposed to distance, as well). Any solutions presented are typically within small lines, or must be inferred (such as setting sidewalks farther back from the road can increase pedestrian deaths). Worth reading, and plenty to think about, but I can't help but feel that this could have been more than it is.

Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare

What an enormous disappointment. I had been expecting an examination of large predators, their habits, their needs, and why they are relatively rare (because large animals have large energy needs, and predation isn't terrible efficient). Instead, there's one chapter on that (sharing the book's title), and a general overview of ecology, from the effects of the Sun, to the soil, to "The Social Lives of Plants," the differences in habitat of the land v. the ocean (other than one being wet). It's informative, if dry.

I wouldn't recommend this, unless you're looking for a "basics of ecology" book.