The Moral Landscape

In this book Sam Harris presents a fascinating, interesting, and pretty appealing view of morality while managing to come off as pretty much unlikable.  He takes what is an appealing premise but he spends so much time arguing why he is better than other people and resolving imaginary arguments (in a condescending way) that his message gets lost under the frustration even people who agree with him feel.

The basic premise of the book is that morality is not under the purview of religion like it is often discussed.  He feels that morality can be decided by science.  There are various states of being that are empirically better than others and once we admit that, we can move towards those states.  He feels that there is a moral landscape with various hills and valleys and humanity's goal is to one day make it onto one of those peaks.

This is a fascinating argument.  I have always found it hard to believe that "Thou shalt not murder" is carved into every hydrogen atom in the universe however, if you look at morality from the perspective of human well being it allows for there to be moral truths without there being moral laws created by some higher power or universal constants.

However, this theory is intertwined with some incredibly acidic discourses on religion including what borders on a personal take down of the director of the National Institute of Health at the time the book was written. He then uses that segue into how hard it is for him and his "new atheist" friends. In the edition of the book that I read there is an afterword where he responds to a bunch of criticisms of the book.  This would be acceptable and perhaps even an educational look into his ideas if it weren't for a bunch of comments at the beginning where he basically complains about famous people giving his book bad reviews without reading it.
I think that the primary thing that I will take away from this book is his original idea and the long debate that it sparked about whether one can believe in objective morals in this sense without believing in objective aesthetics as well.

Overall, I would give this book an 81%.

Star Wars: Crucible

This book marks the end of an era.  This is almost certainly the furthest ahead in the timeline Star Wars publishing will go before Episode VII comes out.  As someone who is pretty invested in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the concept of Episode VII destroying all of the canon that I have come to love (warts and all) worries me.

Before Episode VII was announced, this book was intended to be a passing of the torch novel.  Luke, Han, and Leia (and Lando!) would fight one last big fight and then at least move a little into the background.  However, when Episode VII was announced Troy Denning actually rewrote the end of the novel so that it was less blatant who the characters were passing the torch to.

Denning obviously felt that he needed more than just the characters advanced age to retire them.  I won't spoil which, if any, of the characters survive the book but basically every single character takes a beating.  Jedi healing trances are pushed almost beyond belief and while there is not that high of a body count, there is a very high injury count.

The book is almost a direct sequel to the last Fate of the Jedi book and it starts in a galaxy that is sort of in a unique position in Star Wars.  There are many Sith throughout, the Jedi are not a part of the government at all, and there are multiple other independent states but still only one big government.  It is a shame that this political situation is (probably) about to get plowed under by the new movie.

There have been some complaints that the villains of this book do not make for a fitting last hurrah for the big three, and maybe that is true.  However, considering all that they have faced, it would be hard to do something so galaxy shatteringly intense that hasn't already been done.  However, these antagonists are different than the vast majority of previous antagonists and that makes them interesting.

Overall, I would give this book a 87%.

The Boat

This book is the original novel the famous movie Das Boot is based upon.  If you have not seen the movie, as I have not, it is the story of German U-boat crew and their adventures in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.  While that description makes it sound like a lighthearted romp, it is anything but.  The entire crew and the boat get pushed to their breaking points and beyond.

The author of the book actually served on a U-boat and he says that while the novel is fictional it is very closely based on real events. The author felt so strongly about this that he complained bitterly when the movie further dramatized the events to make it more exciting.

The book provides some interesting statistics as well.  Out of the 40,000 men who manned u-boats and terrorized the shipping lanes, 30,000 of them never returned.  That is a truly awful ratio.  Another troubling thing that most people do not think about  is how young everyone was.  The book implies that most people serving on submarines were under 20 years old.  However, after reading the book that is somewhat understandable because anyone suffering even the slightest bit from age would probably not be able to hold up under the constant pressure (literal and otherwise).

While I know a fair bit about World War II, most of my knowledge is confined to the land battles.  I did not know that U-boats were vastly different than modern submarines, which spend most of their time underwater.  U-boats spent most of their time on the surface, only going underwater to attack or to avoid being spotted.

I think the thing that I will remember most about this book is that it managed to portray German soldiers in World War II not as Nazis, not as men just following orders, but as tired boys just trying to do their jobs and make it home.   The sufferings of the crew, like not being able to sleep because they are battered by a massive storm for days on end, are really brought to life by the author and descriptions like the green rings around the Chief Engineer's eyes from sleep loss are enough to make one cringe.

Overall, I would give this book an 89%.

The Prince and the Pauper

I have never read any Mark Twain other than those mandated by my middle school curriculum until this one. This is another one of the many books I have inherited from my grandmother.  I decided to read it because this version has the subtitle "A Tale for Young People of All Ages" and I really liked that.

The story is sort of a classic tale of two people switching positions, in this case the aforementioned prince and pauper.  Interestingly, unlike a lot of these stories, the two main characters have no contact with each other for the majority of the story.  Also, considering the age of this tale, it probably inspired a lot of the more modern renditions of the switching story.

This book does portray a pretty grim picture of the differences between the upper and lower classes in England in those days.  Also, it shows some issues with medicine at the time and how willing people were to accept the "prince's" drastic change in behavior and knowledge levels.

What was the most interesting part of the book to me was that there were various endnotes that explained various historical implications of the events of the novel including how he felt the events of the young prince's childhood in this story affected his actual reign as king.  They also talk about various laws and historical facts that influenced his decisions about various plot points in the book.

I think that the thing I will remember about this book is the harshness of the laws presented here.  It is easy to think of things like the Salem Witch Trials as a isolated historical incident but it was really just a harsher and more extreme version of the norm at that time.  The fact that people were actually routinely flogged and burned at the stake, even for relatively minor issues, is a troubling part of our world's history.

This copy was originally published in 1944 (I think, check out this website for the interesting history of this particular printing run http://www.twainquotes.com/UniformEds/UniformEdsCh35.html).  Another interesting thing about this version, is that, because it was published during WWII, it has a small picture in the bottom inside of the back of the dust jacket.  I thought that this was pretty interesting as I had never seen anything like it before.

Overall, I would give this book a 86%.

Doomsday Book

It feels a little unfair to compare this to Blackout/All Clear because this was written years earlier and Ms. Willis has obviously improved as a writer in the intervening timespan.  However, with their both being part of her "Oxford Time Travel" series, it is hard not to.  Don't get me wrong, Doomsday Book is quite the good book, it is just not as good as Blackout/All Clear.

Instead of World War II, this story takes the time travelling protagonist to England in the Middle Ages.  Also, in this book it continues to follow the characters in the "present" as well as in the past which makes for some interesting parallel dramatic tension (though if you don't understand the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendar, the timeline can be a mite bit confusing).

The beginning and the ending of this are both very strong,  but I felt that it slacked off a little in the middle.  Some important things happen, for sure, but I feel that it could have been compressed.  However, the final act is wrought with emotion and a pretty moving expression of what life what probably like in that time period for some people.

Despite the slowness in the middle, I would say that the biggest problem that I had with this book was, since it was written shortly after I was born, the future that the time travelers come from no longer feels very futuristic.  There is surprisingly large number of pages devoted to one of the characters trying to find someone to stay by his phone while he goes out, which kinda broke my suspension of disbelief because he really should have a cell phone.

Like Blackout/All Clear, the strongest part of the book is the characters, heroes and "villains," they are all very well done and you really feel for them.  It would be hard to imagine a time travel story that tried so hard to emphasize the lives of everyday people that wasn't by an author of Connie Willis' caliber.  She is the only author that can consistently bring me to (at least) the verge of tears whenever she tries to.   I think that these characters will live on in my head for a long time.  (Also, there are two little girls in this book who remind me a great deal of an Arya and Sansa Stark if they lived in the actual middle ages rather than Westeros.)

That being said, the time traveler in this book seemed a little less competent at her job then those in Blackout/All Clear (last comparison, I promise), she is much freer with information that she is from the future than the other books' protagonists.  She is also a lot quicker to give up hope than the others.  To be fair, she is less experienced than at least some of the characters in the other books so she has that rationalization going for her.

Overall, I would give this book a 93%.

Out of this World: An Anthology of Fantasy

I recently inherited all of my late grandmother's books.  After finishing The Thorn Birds, I chose a book at random from a box that came from her collection.  The one that I pulled was this one.  Generally speaking, I like fantasy and so the title sounded interesting.  Plus, this collection has some surprisingly famous authors in its pages.  The most surprising was probably Jack London, who I know from his books like White Fang and The Call of the Wild, both of which I read as a child.  In this collection, his contribution is dark, post-apocalyptic story, which is very different from the brand of wilderness adventure that I am used to seeing from him.

This is my copy, the lines are some sort of plastic cover that has developed linear bubbles.

This is not really fantasy in the modern sense. There isn't any unicorns or centaurs or really magic. This is an older definition of fantasy. In addition to the story about the world trying to recover from an apocalyptic plague, there is, for example, a story about people who live in department stores and their feud with the night watchman. All of the stories could be described as “fantastical” if someone tried to convince you that they actually happened, but would not be what you would expect from the fantasy section of your local book store.

Some other famous contributors were H.G. Welles with his vision of the last judgment and Oscar Wilde and his story about a British ghost that becomes exasperated with Americans. H.G. Welles’s story has his same biting style of cynical commentary as many of his other works but it is much more humorous than some of his other stories and Oscar Wilde's story shows how America (and really the world) has moved beyond tradition ghosts in horror.

The story behind this book was that it was compiled by a Sergeant named Julius Fast during World War II of the soldiers favorite short stories read. It is sort of interesting to imagine a different generation reading these stories in their makeshift quarters somewhere in Europe or the Pacific while I am sitting reading these over a hot meal in my comfortable apartment.

I think the thing about this book that I will talk about the most later on is Robert Arthur's "The Devil and Sam Shay" which is about a man winning a bet with devil, and the devil, furious, curses him with never being able to win another bet again and the story explores the aftermath. The character behaves rationally and does exactly what I would have done in the situation. It is great example of making the best of a bad situation.

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.

The Thorn Birds

I was introduced to Colleen McCullough by her Masters of Rome series which basically singlehandedly sparked my interested in Roman history.  However, this is the book she is the most famous for, so, when I saw it on sale, I thought I would give it a read.  The book is very well written, if not exactly my normal genre. While this book is long, it uses that length to make a generational epic that pulls no emotional punches.

While the cover makes it look like a romance novel, it is really not.  There is certainly romance involved but that is not the primary focus of the story.  In the beginning of the book there is a quote about how some birds impale themselves on thorns and sing their most beautiful songs, even as they are dying.  That theme, so blatantly laid out, pervades this book, showing how loss can be empowering.

The book covers a 50 year period, allowing it to show the growth and change of the Cleary family as they suffer their personal victories and defeats.  The writing really gets across the expanses of Australia and both its beauty and harshness.  It also allows the characters to really come alive and to let the reader emphasize with them with ease.

Overall, I would give this book an 89%.