Gravity's Rainbow

I received Gravity's Rainbow as a Christmas gift.  The back cover made it sound a little strange, missiles hitting in exactly the same spots as a random soldier having sex?  Thus, it was with some trepidation that I embarked on the journey of reading the book.  However, remembering the fondness that I view Blackout/All Clear with, I was willing to give another abnormal story about World War II a chance. 

The time that it took me to read this book would normally allowed me to read several books, but I found that I had difficulties finding the time to read it.  Not that there wasn't time, but that I was allocating that time to other things.

I think that the key part of my issue with the book is that it didn't live it up to its potential.  This book had great promise of being a kind of strangely silly WWII story; a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but set on Earth in the 40's.  In the beginning, it gives you some hints that perhaps that is where it is going.  It is not going there, it is going some place far, far stranger and less enjoyable.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I read a New York Times review of the book before I started writing this.  Normally, I try to avoid reading reviews until after I write mine (a small part of the reasons for this blogs existence is that I rarely fully agree with a review).  However, this book was nominated for and won several awards and just narrowly missed getting a Pulitzer and I was worried that by disliking it I was missing some fundamental part.  The New York Times article's author obviously had a better time than I did but it was still rather critical of the book and I think that some of the points that he made are very valid.  (For the curious, here is the review: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html )

In short, the book tries to be an expansive in depth story, but it almost collapses under its own weight.  There are so many characters that don't make sense and seem pointless, so many plot threads that remain basically unresolved, so many resolutions that are at best strange and at worse unsatisfactory.  This book is more than 700 pages and I feel like it might have done better to be 200 pages longer and perhaps divided up into a few of books to better allow the characters a more coherent story.

A special note on one of the resolutions.  One mystery in particular, the 00000 rocket, is brought up again and again throughout the book and it resolution, when it finally arrives, is so strange and so anticlimactic that it does not do itself justice.

One other thing that I did not like was the sex.  I am by no means a prude but the sex in this book was, frankly, ridiculous.  It is not so much the quantity as the general types.  There are is the B, the D, the S, and the M from BDSM, urine, pedophilia, orgies, and the only sex scene I have ever read with feces. I have not had that much trouble reading any single scene since the scene in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho where the main character kills a hobo very graphically.

This book is not entirely bad.  The second of the four parts is quite an enjoyable read (though it does randomly drop a bunch of plots from the first part) and it really explores the levels of paranoia that, somewhat ridiculously, seem justified.  I am also generally glad to read award winning books because I like to see what kind of books win awards.  This book was a bit of a slog but I am glad that I read it.

Overall, I would give this book a 70%.

Some Remarks

Reading this blog, it becomes readily apparent that I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson.  I have read the majority of his books and am eagerly awaiting his next novel, whatever that may be.  I ordered his book, Some Remarks, because I thought it would make for interesting, light reading on my holiday travels.  Some Remarks, was billed as a collection of Neal Stephenson's shorter works that were generally not reprinted.  I was interested to read a series of works from him from across his career. 

The first thing that surprised me about the book was how small it was.  I am used to my Neal Stephenson books easily breaking the 500 page mark.  Coming in at just over 300 pages, this was noticably physically smaller than all of my other books by him.  However, it is a collection of short pieces and so I am not sure that he has another 200 pages of short work laying around.

Most of the pieces have been previous published in some medium or other with two exceptions. However, unless you devotedly snap up literally everything Stephenson writes, this will probably be mostly new material.  As someone who has read most of Stephenson's novels, I had a fun time seeing how he got ideas for parts of them in some of the articles.

The longest article in the book, by a wide margin, is called "Mother Earth, Mother Board".  At almost 120 pages, it takes up more than a third of the book.  This is a piece on laying an international cable from Europe to Asia and how the author went and visited various places that it went through or was in the process of going through.  This was clearly an inspiration for a lot of the modern day shenanigans in the modern part of Cryptonomicon.  However, it is really, really long for being about the subject that it is about.  Honestly, I think the book would have been improved if he had abridged it, and I am rarely for abridgement.

There are a number of other pieces in the book with topics ranging from treadmill desks to space travel.  There are also a few interviews where he discusses his opinions and also some of his works, depending on the times that the interviews took place.  Lastly, there are a couple of pieces of fiction which are interesting, one of which could be considered a connection between the end of Cryptonomicon and the beginning of Snow Crash which I enjoyed immensely because of my love of interconnected stories and cohesive canons.

While this is definitely Neal Stephenson's style, the short article or story format doesn't give him the time to set up that often makes his stories so worthwhile and good.  While the long cable laying article was interesting, undersea cable has never been one of my major interests and unfortunately that piece failed to inspire me to make it one.  That being said, the man is knowledgeable on a wide variety of topics, making this book an interesting read and, because he is such a good author, an enjoyable one as well.



Overall, I would give this book an 84%.

SuperFreakonomics

A while back I read Freakonomics (and reviewed it on here).  I really enjoyed the book, it offered an interesting perspective on several common issues.  Superfreakonomics continues in the same vein, exploring the hidden, economic side of the world.  In this book, to live up to its "super" title the authors expand the scope of the issues they talking about.  In the second book they deal with issues of more global significance like global warming and prostitution.  While these topics are certainly interesting, because they are more global in scope, they are more oft discussed, which means that the revelations that come from this book are much less fresh and exciting than those that come from this first book.

However, I am a big advocate of increasing public awareness of global warming and this books chapter on global warming gives a different take than the norm and is certainly more interesting for it.  This chapter provided some solutions that were alternatives to the ones that are often presented and I think they could make fixing the issue more palatable to many people (though perhaps less palatable to some).

In addition, there was some information about the Kitty Genovese case that is rarely discussed.  That was interesting because the case is discussed in basically every class that falls under jurisdiction of the Philosophy or Communication departments at most colleges and it does somewhat change the way that the case is looked at.  I wish that I had read that before some of the class discussions I have had.

This book, like many sequels, is not as good as the book before it.  Despite this, it was still a great read and I hope that Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt write a Super-Duper-Freakonomics or whatever they choose to call the sequel.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.