The Man in the High Castle

As with all of Philip K. Dick's work, the question has to do with the nature of reality, and our relation to reality. The reality here is an alternate history in which Giuseppe Zangara succeeded in assassinating FDR, leading to the Axis triumphing over the Allies in the Second World War.

How realistic is the alternate reality? I'm not sure I buy the Nazis on Mars (!) in 1962. The scope of their projects? Absolutely. Our setting is the Western United States, though, an area controlled by the conquering Japanese.

One device that I really like is the incorporation of the I Ching, which several of the characters use to guide their actions; "should I follow the suggested course?" or "what is going to happen next?"

A nod at the nature of reality is that there's a popular novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (paraphrased from a line in Ecclesiastes) in which Roosevelt survives the assassination (as he does in our reality) and through his strong leadership, the US is prepared for World War II, and the Allies win. As more of this novel-within-a-novel is revealed, it's clear that the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is not our own -- Roosevelt doesn't seek a third term, and there are other important points of divergence.

The climax of the novel is (perhaps) a Japanese diplomat slipping into another reality after contemplating a piece of jewelry made by American artisans. Left unsaid is if the reality is the one of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, of our reality, or another one entirely. (One would think the reality would be one of the above. A third reality, resembling both of those, would be needlessly complicated, right?)

Or perhaps the climax could be said to be the end, which implies (of course, this being Dick) that the world of the novel isn't the true reality, but a false one. As to whether true reality is the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (thus implying our world is false, as well), our world, or another one entirely is left unsaid.

I really enjoyed this -- I thought the characters moved the plot well and were better put together than some of Dick's other stories, and the interweaving of Japanese culture into American really worked for me. The questions as to the nature of reality and the prophecy of the Book of Changes were well incorporated, as well. Recommended.

Lolita

Lolita is a weird novel -- despite the subject matter, it's clearly not intended to (and does not) titillate, but the sexuality (even if not expressed explicitly) is impossible to separate from the content.

A friend of mine said the only way that Nabokov could have written this is if he was a pederast. I rejected that utterly without reading the novel, and after reading the novel, I just think that's a funny assertion.

I'm having trouble thinking of what I want to say about this -- it's the difference between enjoying the writing and approving of the subject matter. Our narrator (who gives himself the ludicrous moniker of  'Humbert Humbert') is not quite unrepentant, never tries to obfuscate what he has done (although he does avoid explicit description), and occasionally tries to justify himself. Nevertheless, he's certainly not reliable. (In fact, for many people, the textbook definition of "unreliable narrator" is "Humbert Humbert." I would argue that this probably isn't the best example, since he's not obviously contradicting himself two chapters later, but later parts of the book do have a more difficult-to-believe sheen.) If you're reading a novel looking for redemption, this is certainly not it. Humbert does realize that he's robbed Lolita of her childhood, but given how monstrous his actions are, that doesn't come close to making up for them.

As with other Nabokov, there's a lot of worldplay, some double entendres, plenty of other languages inserted (in the case of Humbert, this makes sense, as he's ostensibly European. In the case of Nabokov, moreso).

Yes, this is worth reading. Yes, this is more than a little unsettling. Yes, there are layers (as Nabokov himself notes in the afterward, he certainly wasn't trying to glorify Humbert Humbert.)

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.

McSweeney's 44

I like Jim Shepard's "The Ocean of Air", a fictionalization of the Montgolfier brothers. The rest of the stories didn't do much for me.