Short review of "The Throne of the Crescent Moon"

Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Saladin Ahmed has created a fantasy world where Middle Eastern themes and culture are neither disrespected with broad caricatures and offensive tropes nor idealized with the breathless admiration of the wannabe, which is a danger for this sub-genre and others like it. Because he follows this middle road between extremes, the author is able to tell an engaging story that draws on traditional literature like The Arabian Nights but can still comment credibly on humanity and society, especially the evils of the class system. The story is peopled with round main characters who drive the action, but even the imperfectly drawn characters have an arc and both good and bad qualities, enough to give the appearance of realism for fantasy purposes. I enjoyed reading it, and intend to find the sequels.

I have genuine criticisms of the novel, but since it has so much more that I like about it than otherwise I will just leave it at that. A very human author created art that I appreciate, and I look forward to seeing more.

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The book "What If?" and why you should totally buy it

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that doesn't have a clear genre. Physics humor? I dunno. Whatever--it's a lot of fun, and laugh-out-loud funny. (That's not just me talking. I could hear my son across the house when he read it.) The author is brilliant, able to mix great comedic writing with high-level science. It's like Mythbusters and Cracked and Big Bang Theory and a Michael Crichton novel all rolled up into a kind of demented physics lesson. If that appeals, then you're going to like this book.

A hypothetical like "What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% of the speed of light?" is answered with a serious essay--hard numbers, real science. (The short answer is that an expanding ball of plasma would destroy the batter, the backstop, the infield... and about a square mile around the diamond.) Though the questions are taken seriously--"How long could a nuclear submarine last in orbit?"--the answers are ironic. Still accurate, but funny. (Part of the answer: "Nuclear submarines use electricity to extract oxygen from water. In space, there's no water, [citation needed] so they wouldn't be able to manufacture more air...") When discussing things some animals are good at, he writes, "Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don't know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase 'shoot jets of blood from their eyes' in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down..." That's the kind of smart-ass writing that I really like. And it's probably not just me.

What would happen if the ocean drained away? How far would an arrow go with air but no gravity? What would happen if your DNA disappeared? His take on these absurd questions is as entertaining as it is instructive. Even his stick-figure drawings help tell the story. It's like having a crazy-brilliant NASA guy at your party answering the dumbest questions you can think of.

But, you know, drunk.

Highly recommended.

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1950s Bible epic--my review of "The Song of Ruth" by Frank Slaughter

The Song of Ruth by Frank G. Slaughter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(I read the Spanish translation--"La Canción de Ruth." Not a great translation, but very readable.)

I enjoyed reading this book, which is why I give it 3 stars. However, it wasn't a very good book, which is why I don't want to score it any higher.

Much of the novel was fun to read, like a romance/action adventure. The characters were pretty good, and although it is a story from the Bible it was not written in a devotional way, so that the bits of religion didn't feel too cloying. However, it had flaws that were impossible to ignore, even reading for fun.

Many of the plot points were not believable, and felt like blind spots in the author's research. It has the kind of flaw that drives me crazy in fiction, relating to errors in scale and size. Sometimes, two points are treated as close, as if they are just a short walk apart, and other times they are days between. Sometimes, the Israelites feel like a community of a couple hundred who all know each other, and then they are treated like a nation of tens of thousands. A related error is the way the author has the characters handling weapons, which he did not write about with much authority. I think he was guessing.

In other words--using a term that might or might not have been current in the 50s when it was written--the author has done a poor job of world-building. Too much was implausible. Honestly, it felt a lot like a 50s-era Hollywood set standing in for the Middle East. That impression is intensified by the fact that Ruth, a Semitic woman of 3000 years ago, has red hair, as if she is played by a European actress. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it better if I had imagined it like a sword and sandal epic, with Tony Curtis as Boaz and Sophia Loren as Ruth. Yeah, that's better.

Or better still, imagine it with William Shatner and some green lady on a red planet. Then I can forgive the cheap Paramount sets. :)

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Upon reading The Arabian Nights

The Arabian Nights by Richard Francis Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books you know about from cartoons and cultural osmosis, but generally don't read. Well, I'm glad I finally did. Not only is there a lot to enjoy, there's a lot to learn--about the literature of other peoples, historical customs, attitudes toward law and justice, and a thousand (and one) other important things. All taken with a grain of salt, of course, but instructive just the same...

But what I liked learning about most was the place of the servant, and the slave, and the con artist, and the liar, and the murderer, and the swindler, and all the people of that sort. That, to me, was the most interesting part of these stories. They were filled with kings and viziers, true, but they also dealt with people at the bottom of the social ladder, those just getting by, the unfortunates, telling how they lived, how they avoided being crushed by the powerful, what they believed, what they valued. One example of this is seeing how readily sympathetic characters would lie, and how often they would be completely forgiven even when found out. I did not expect that. There was a reverence for the clever con-artist, who was often rewarded, or at least forgiven, because again and again they were respected for their brilliance, even if it was criminal. Some of this parallels western stories and fairy tales, but much of it felt quite different. I liked that.

I wish I had enjoyed the poetry in the Richard Burton translation. I tried to. There is a lot of verse throughout, and the translator worked really hard, it seems, to make the couplets resemble the original, and rhyme in English. The lines are so tortured I can hardly understand their meaning most of the time, even when trying to puzzle it out, which is made worse by Burton, in the late 1800s, using language that I have never seen anywhere else--not in Shakespeare, or Austen, or Tolkien, or Blake, or Spenser. (Where'd he get "fou" and "gar" and "cark" and "undight"? Okay, undight looks like something Spenser would have used...) I would like to have the text rendered in plain prose. I might have enjoyed that more. Would have.

But that's minor. Overall, this volume is a great pleasure. Much more profane than I expected, in a good way--earthier, and more accessible--it is filled with memorable characters and fantastic (in the original sense) stories, offering a fairy-tale glimpse into the kind of lives people enjoyed across the Muslim world centuries ago. Well worth, in my opinion, the time it takes it to read through its pages.

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The 12th Jane Austen mystery--my review

Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas by Stephanie Barron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book, like the entire series, is such a pleasure to read. It isn't just that Stephanie Barron gets the language of Jane Austen and the time right, which she really does, or that she gets the details so right, with the appropriate and measured inclusion of all of her meticulous research into Jane Austen's personal story. That's part of it, but not all. As a mystery writer, she has such a deft touch with clues and characters that readers like myself can master the details without growing confused, and can enjoy the story without constantly searching for missed connections or buried clues. As an observer of human nature, Stephanie Barron always impresses, creating a wide range of characters and behavior while always making them feel familiar and real, their concerns genuine and their motivations human. And as a historian, she grounds the novel in the very real history of England after the loss of the colonies, during Napoleon's rise and fall and subsequent rise. Sometimes, I appreciate Jane Austen novels for being set almost outside of time, in a bubble made up of the well-dressed and well-mannered, where members of that polite society mingle in balls and drawing rooms, engaging in witty and bright conversation, safe from the darkness of the outside world--our world. But I appreciate this novel, and whole series, for the opposite reason. The author vividly creates the time and place, establishing the characters in that timeline, so that it is real as our own world, so that it IS our world--no bubble--a place where war and invasion is the frequent topic of conversation and constant concern, where the poor and the unfortunate also have their roles and their lives, and where well-mannered ladies might sew tiny dresses for a niece's new doll or drink tea with the neighbors, but might also investigate a murder or regret the passage of time or feel the pain of grief and lost love. The author has done well to create such a real place, and people it with such engaging characters, and craft so satisfying a story. I enjoyed this book, and I recommend it.

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Drift--by Rachel Maddow

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book well worth reading. I have enormous respect for Rachel Maddow, and even more after reading this book, which is basically a long-form essay. Military policy is in no way my favorite topic, and not even particularly interesting to me, but this is written with such a clear voice (just how she sounds in interviews and on the news) with so many real-life examples that I found it as compelling and entertaining as it was informative. Rachel has a quirky manner (which I rather like) which includes bouncing from hard facts to folksy commentary, and from biting satire to disarming concern and empathy. She does not make this topic about herself, but she makes it a personal communication, from her to you, from her store of knowledge to your new information.

The title comes from a quote by Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Obama, who said, "If the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can't tolerate." Her thesis is that this is exactly what has happened. It's not just about the ballooning cost of defense, and what that means to other priorities, but the social and political ramifications of these changes.

Because she is scrupulously fact-based--working from news data, biographies, interviews, transcripts, and other verifiable sources, which are clearly described in the back--and conscientiously fair when making her case--avoiding hyperbole or personal animus--it is difficult not to follow her to her conclusion: we've allowed our society to become dissociated from the pain and sacrifice of war which now falls on military families only; we've allowed others--CIA, Blackwater/Xe and other mercenaries, SEAL teams and rangers, etc.--to prosecute war without our knowledge or consent; and we've made it easy for the executive to wage war instead keeping it as a prerogative of Congress, where the Constitution put it. She argues that these and other points need to be pushed back on, and ends with a series of recommendations that (IMO) should probably be in the democratic platform--if not the republican.

Good stuff, on a dry topic. And I couldn't help but think as I read it that John Oliver could make several really good episodes of Last Week Tonight out of this information.

And now, this...

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