What I Just Read

Readable fantasy/sci-fi hybrid, just like the other two volumes of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory trilogy.  [See my reviews of book 1, Children of Time , and book 2, Children of Ruin . ]   This is a layered, complicated and at times confusing story. It's not without promise, and in it an accommodating reader will find certain thought-provoking ponderings on sentience, on the nature of the self, and on the nature of the real. And if you enjoy magical realism and puzzle-like plots where the reader can't really figure what's going until the end, I'd recommend it. See for example,  Susanna Clarke's unusual novel  Piranesi , where the reader spends most of the novel in the dark . Ulimately, however, the book frustrates. When we learn  [spoiler incoming!]  "it was all a simulation," the lifeblood seems to rush out of all the promising mysterious and psychological elements of the novel, and the reader limps through the last pages, deflated.  If you...

Anyone into magic and card tricks likely already knows everything there is to know about John Scarne, since he's arguably history's most important card operator.  Until I'd read Ian Fleming's Moonraker  (see below), I had never even heard of this guy, and I don't care in the least about magic or cards. Yet I found this autobiography absolutely loaded with useful insights and great 20th century history. Scarne seems to rub elbows with nearly everybody: there are stories about gangsters including Al Capone and Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein (who allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series); stories about the vaudeville era, including Scarne's long friendship with Harry Houdini; all kinds of stories from the New York City Prohibition/speakeasy era, and fascinating stories from New Jersey history too, including some wonderful old-time boxing stories, as Scarne was a lifetime friend of heavyweight champion Jimmy Braddock. And there's a tremendous chapter on ...

In book two of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy ( I've reviewed book one here ), our once-competing spider and human civilizations have now teamed up to explore the universe together. We also meet a separate tiny outpost of humans attempting to establish new planetary colonies (readers should avoid emotional investment into any these human pseudoprotagonists however: the author kills them off). And we also meet an oddly interesting uberoctopus civilization, descended from experiments of one of the outpost humans. The octopus civilization offers a sort of neomalthusian lesson as it experiences massive overpopulation, mass violence, environmental collapse--even mass cannibalism.  Finally, there's a still weirder species, and the author struggles a bit in portraying it: a sort of cellular "goo collective" that starts out literally colonizing the minds and bodies of the humans and octopi. Later, by a rather sudden and implausible plot event, the goo befr...

A short ramble of a book. Thoreau's thoughts come and go, tangents form and disappear, just as your own thoughts amble and wander while walking. In fact,  Walking  makes you want to go for a walk, and during it good ideas will come to you if you let them.[*]  Thoreau struggled with modernity even back in 1860s-era Massachusetts. It's the same struggle. There's too much work/spend cycle, too much consumerism, too much development, not enough nature, not enough peace and quiet. But when Thoreau writes "I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant" you can't help but think mournfully about the sheer density, traffic, overdevelopment and all the other problems of modernity in Massachusetts ...

"My father made sure that I had every kind of proper musical training and technique, but no one was ever able to teach me when to shut up." If you've ever watched interviews of Stewart Copeland, the voluble, quotable drummer of the famous 80s band The Police, you see immediately he's a humble, earnest and often hilarious dude. He's an obvious and profound talent on an interesting artistic journey: he seeks variation, change, he dislikes safety. It's fascinating to watch the wide-ranging things he does over the course of his musical career, with little need for popularity and even less fear of failure. A genuinely free artist who never became a prisoner of his success. The book has ADHD in the same way Copeland seems to: it is  all over the place , bouncing from era to era and from scene to scene in short chapters that nevertheless keep the reader reading. And holy cow what an interesting life he has! His father was a CIA agent, Copeland grew up in Lebanon amon...