Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

I was first exposed to the wonders of ancient Rome by Colleen McCullough's Master's of Rome series which is a novelized version of the key events in the Roman Republic in its twilight from 110 BC to 27 BC (after which it became the Roman Empire which endured for another ~5 centuries).  It is a great series and basically single handedly sparked my interest in ancient Rome.  Since then I have read a lot of different books (non-fiction and otherwise) about the Roman Republic and, subsequently, Empire.  Of these, my favorite is definitely Anthony Everitt's Augustus.  It a detailed journey through everything that has been unearthed about Augustus and his reign but it is written in such a way that it feels much more like a story than a textbook.

After reading Augustus, all of Anthony Everitt's books have been on my list of things to look for at a used book store especially Cicero because, due to Ms. McCullough's writing, the end of the republic is my favorite time in Roman history (though the parallelisms to Star Wars don't hurt).  I haven't found Cicero yet but I did find the "sequel" to Augustus in a stack off to the side in a used book store in Victoria.  Not wanting to pass up any Everitt book, I grabbed Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome.

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome follows Hadrian through his life while also explaining the shaping circumstances of his life.  This means that this book spends a lot of time talking about the previous two emperors, Nerva and Trajan who were the first two of the "Five Good Emperors" (making Hadrian the third) which created a great setup to Hadrian's eventual ascension and added some really interesting parts that would have been lacking from the book if the discussion had only covered Hadrian's time as emperor (next time I am in Rome, I am definitely paying more attention to Trajan's column).

Like Augustus, this book follows Hadrian from his birth to shortly after his death in more of a story style than a textbook.  Everitt is quick to admit what we do not know but he makes suppositions to fill in the blanks, always explaining why he thinks what he does.  Hadrian is not quite the key figure in Roman history that Augustus was, so this book was less interesting but it was still a fascinating read and a great window into the days of Rome.

Overall, I would give this book an 88%.

The Scar

One of my friends offered me the loan of The Scar whenever I wanted to borrow it.  When I started Gravity's Rainbow I decided that The Scar would be next.  When I finally made it to the end of Gravity's Rainbow I still wanted to read it (and I had hopes that it would be less stressful).  Right before I started I learned that The Scar is part of a shared world which currently comprises three books and The Scar is the second (!) chronologically of those three.  After some reassurances from my friend that the order did not matter significantly, I embarked on the journey that was The Scar.

China Miéville has crafted a full world that he calls Bas-Lag.  There are so many different species and cultures that it feels like this is a world that has been fleshed out a lot more than just three books.  For some authors, an attempt to do something like this would seem confusing at best and at worst like the author was being needlessly complex but China Miéville pulls it off.

I have to say, the end of the book felt a little contrived but after I started to get miffed about how contrived it was, the characters started talking about how they felt certain events were a little contrived.  That made me feel better and added an interesting dimension to some of the characters.

This book has some great plot twists.  Some characters aren't who they seem and some items are not what they seem.  Allegiances are murky and twisted. I will admit that I am not one of those people that has an easy time predicting plot twists, but there were a lot of surprises for me in this book.

The places within the world that the book goes are fantastical but at the same time plausible.  The battle scenes are very well done and make me wish that there were more of them. I am sure at some point in the near future I will be reading more by him.

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.

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%.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

When I started reading Across Realtime, I knew that I wanted to read the story that fell in between the two books contained within (see my review of Across Realtime for more info) so I grabbed this short story collection on my Kindle.  As I mentioned before, Vernor Vinge has some fantastic ideas and so I was a little worried that the short story format would not give him time to explore each idea to the fullest.  There were definitely some ideas that I felt could have held up whole novels, but it was definitely a good read, especially for fans of his other work.   As one would expect from a short story collection there were many good stories and a few bad ones.

Each of the stories had an introduction by him and some of them had a post script as well.  It made the collection have a much more personal feel than it otherwise would have.  I wish that other short story collections would do the same.  It also helped to explain the background of some of the stories that were part of his larger work collections.

This was a nice little collection.  My biggest problem with it is that, when you read all of his short stories, some of which are set in the same (or at least very similar) worlds as his novels, it becomes apparent that he does not place nearly as much value on a cohesive canon as I do.  Perhaps that is unfair.  What I mean to say is that some of the stories that take place in (supposedly) the same universe as some of his other stories are so different from the novel based stories in those universes as to necessitate serious explanation as to how the characters reached that point.

However, that is more of a personal problem than any one with the book.  Overall, I would give this book an 86%.

Across Realtime

Warning: Since Across Realtime is a collection of two books, The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, this review will have minor spoilers for The Peace War so that I can adequately discuss Marooned in Realtime

Vernor Vinge has always been a man of great ideas.  In every single one of his books that I have read, one of the central ideas in it has been unique or, at the very least, extremely interesting.  For example, in The Witling, he has a group of aliens that can teleport but, because he is a hard science fiction writer, he does it in such a way that it still takes into account momentum and everything else on a planetary scale.  This then shapes the way that they teleport and makes the story much more interesting than a normal teleportation story.  In another of his stories (A Fire Upon the Deep), there is an alien species that look like dogs.  However, alone they are only semi-sentient.  But they can commucate with each other to form packs which work together as one brain.  If the packs get too big, though, the number of competing desires and ideas becomes impossible to manage and they are no longer a functioning organism.  These are just two of his ideas that have convinced me that he is definitely worth reading.

As I mentioned in the warning, Across Realtime is two books.  They both take place in the same universe but one takes place long after the other.  There are very few repeated characters (and it could be argued that there are none) but the second book takes the science concepts introduced in the first book and takes them to their logical conclusion.  Since I have hyped his ideas up until this point, you are probably wondering what those science concepts are in this book.  Before the book starts a group of people called The Peace Authority has become the ultimate power in the world because they have developed a technology called bobbles.  These bobbles are spheres that nothing can penetrate, not light, heat, or anything else.  They have covered all of the military installations in the world with these bobbles and, because of this, most governments have broken down.  (THIS IS WHERE THE MINOR SPOILERS BEGIN)  Through the course of the book, the protagonists discover a key fact about the bobbles: time stops within them.  They also discover how to modulate the amount of time that a bobble is active for, allowing them to be used defensively or offensively.

The second book takes place "mega years" in the future, with a different protagonist.  This protagonist was introduced in the short story "The Ungoverned" which was collected in a short story collection (which I will review soon).  I read that story in between the two parts of Across Realtime.  Honestly, I am very glad that I did.  It doesn't contribute very much to the main story, but it fills in a lot of background for some of the characters which is nice in the beginning. 

Vernor Vinge avoids predicting what technological heights humanity will have reached millions of years in the future by having some people "miss" some event where all of the people except for those who were bobbled.  The story in the second part is kind of a mystery story trying to figure out how someone managed to get left outside a bobble for such a long period of time despite safety protocols.

(THIS IS WHERE THE MINOR SPOILERS END)  I really enjoyed this book, as I have every Vernor Vinge book I have read.  One of my only problems with it was that it did not include the aforementioned short story.  (Note: one edition of the book does contain this story but the one I read does not)  Overall, I would give this book a 92%.