dfan says

I haven’t had much to write about books lately, for a couple of main reasons: I’m trying to get all the way through Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music in 2010, which is close to 4000 pages long, and I got sucked back into the game of Go (I’m using the Korean word, baduk, for the tag since that seems to be the standard search term – “Go” is pretty terrible for obvious reasons).

I got to my current level (AGA 4 kyu) largely by reading lots of instructional books, which is pretty much the main way I like to learn (which is also true of chess or math or science), as opposed to playing a lot or doing lots of exercises. But I’ve become convinced that the way to really improve is to actually do a lot of problems, and in both chess and Go that’s what I’ve been concentrating on lately.  So here are some of the Go problem books I’ve used in the past and present and what I think of them.

Graded Go Problems for Beginners (4 volumes). When I am forced to give only one recommendation for problem books, this is it. It’s a super collection of all sorts of problems, although by the later books it concentrates a bit overmuch on life and death, which gets a little tedious. Volume 1 starts at the very beginning (e.g., capturing stones in atari), so if you have any experience at all you probably want to start with Volume 2, which is still pretty basic but even I still spend an hour reviewing it every once in a while (like when I’m returning to the game after a break). Volume 4 is probably useful all the way to 1 dan level.

One Thousand and One Life-and-Death Problems. Exactly what it says. Starts out around 10k level, probably close to 1d level by the end (I’m only on problem 534 so far so who knows!). They can get a bit samey after a while but doing life and death problems is the single best way to improve your reading skill.

Get Strong at Tesuji. A good collection of tactical problems from ranging from very easy to 1d level. One nice thing is that a lot of them are mainly about making good shape rather than more obviously concrete goals like living or killing or separating or connecting. So you’ll learn how to place your stones effectively and flexibly in the first place, which will put you ahead of the game when the actual living and killing problems come up.

Lee Chang Ho’s Selected Life and Death Go Problems (李昌镐精讲围棋死活). Tons of people raved about this series of six Chinese books so I had to pick them up. The nice thing about problem books is that it doesn’t matter a lot if you don’t know the language (which I don’t); the diagrams have most of the information. Anyway, these problems are indeed great; they feel interesting in a way that some other collections don’t, and they build on each other nicely. Volume 1 is probably tractable at 10k, I pretty much hit a wall in Volume 4, and Volume 6 is probably suitable for dan players.

Lee Chang Ho’s Selected Tesuji Go Problems (李昌镐精讲围棋手筋). Naturally I had to pick up his tesuji series as well. This had gotten less stellar reviews, but I like it just as much. The problems are simpler, but that’s good; this is basically a giant practical compendium of all the standard techniques you should have in your fingers during the middle game, so it’s more for, say, reminding you that if you’re trying to connect two groups you should think about clamping the opponent stone sitting between them than it is for practicing intense reading. I’m only in Volume 3 so I don’t know how hard it gets, but I’d say you could get a lot out of this at 10k.

Cho Hun-Hyeon’s Lectures on Go Techniques and Lectures on the Opening. So far two out of three books have been translated in the former series and just one of the latter. These are really super. At least in Volume 1 of each series, the problems are very simple, but 1) even I only get them 90% right and it should really be 100%, and 2) he goes into detailed explanations about why alternative moves are bad, in a way that is incredibly useful when you’re learning and don’t have good shape intuition yet. Lectures on Go Techniques Volume 1 is about simple joseki (although it doesn’t really feel that way; it’s more about “applied fundamental principles”) while Volume 2 takes that knowledge a little further into the middlegame. Lectures on the Opening is more about opening principles, which you likely have picked up somewhere else but are always useful to review.

But again, if you want to start with just one book, I still would go for the relevant volume of Graded Go Problems for Beginners and take it from there.

After finishing Shriek: An Afterword, I dove right into VanderMeer’s third Ambergris book, Finch. This is in yet another style — it’s a hard-boiled detective novel set in a dystopian future a hundred years after the events of the last book. It’s pretty cool how willing he is to play around with many different styles in the same world.

Despite my appreciation for it, it wasn’t totally successful for me, for reasons that are not really the author’s fault. For one thing, it’s a very grim book, and it turns out I wasn’t really in the mood for grim at the time I read it. Also, it resolves a bunch of mysteries from the first two books, but as you can guess from the word “dystopian” above, not in a very happy way. It made me sad that some of the open questions about Ambergris and the underground gray caps from City of Saints and Madmen that at the time were a neat mixture of charming and menacing turned out to be just menacing in retrospect. I’d almost rather imagine this book as one possible future history of Ambergris than as the one true author-approved one.

Anyway, as a book it was quite good despite my negative reactions above. The plot took a little while to get started and had just one or two too many components for my taste but was interesting and held together, and there were a few great “whoa” moments, as you would hope for in a fantastic (in genre) book. I’m not sure how much sense it would make if you hadn’t read the earlier books, but the first one (City of Saints and Madmen) is the one I would recommend for newcomers to Ambergris and VanderMeer anyway.

Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen is one of my favorite books, a collection of stories and other strange forms (one item is a fictional bibliography, another is a medical report, another is written entirely in code) all set in the fantastic fictional city of Ambergris, built over the caverns of mysterious underground-dwelling mushroom people known as the Gray Caps, and home to the dangerously bacchanalian Festival of the Freshwater Squid, world-famous composer Voss Bender, and a zillion other captivating creative inventions. “The Transformation of Martin Lake” in particular is one of the most arresting stories I’ve ever read.

So I was thrilled to hear, a few years ago, that VanderMeer was returning to Ambergris with the novel Shriek: An Afterword. I bought it as soon as it was released, tore into it… and stopped 2/3 of the way through and didn’t pick it up again. It just didn’t resonate with me the way his earlier work did, and I found myself dutifully chewing my way through it without really enjoying it.

Then VanderMeer recently released a third Ambergris book, Finch, and it got me thinking that I should really give Shriek another shot. So I did, and I enjoyed it a lot more this time. This is a similar relationship to the one I had with Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon; in each case I had anxiously awaited a book, which then turned out to be not quite what I expected, reducing my enjoyment to the extent that I put the book down without finishing it, but then enjoyed it quite a bit on a reread when I understood more what I was in for.

Shriek is quite different from City of Saints and Madmen. Most of the metafictional tricks are gone, replaced by a single one; the story, Janice Shriek’s biography of her brother Duncan, is regularly interspersed with comments from Duncan himself, supplementing and/or contradicting her assertions. This could be pretty cool but it was mostly irritating; rather than adding surprising or world-overturning information to Janice’s observations, Duncan resorts mostly to “Well, it’s more complicated than you give it credit for” excuses. And where I was hoping for more revelations about the nature of the Gray Caps (especially after some teasers early on), the book mostly is concerned with the much less interesting social rise and fall of the two siblings.

But taken on its own terms, as I did on my second read, the book is still pretty interesting, and it did turn out that some exciting stuff happened just after the point where I gave up the first time. So I did enjoy it the second time, and knowing what sort of book it was did help a lot. It still didn’t live up to City of Saints and Madmen, but at least this time I didn’t expect it to.

The idea is cool: the planet of the title orbits one star, which orbits another star in a very eccentric ellipse. So the planet, in addition to regular yearly seasons, has a thousands-of-years Long Season during which it goes from ice age to constant summer and back; and civilization never quite rises high enough during the summers to be able to make it through the ice ages intact. This is the first book of a trilogy, apparently set at widely separated points in that long cycle; in this one, the world is beginning to thaw and civilization is just starting to emerge again.

It was pretty neat overall, although I have a few gripes. The main one is that civilization pretty much springs into full bloom from nothing over the course of about one generation, domesticating “horses”, coming up with the idea of money, figuring out that the world goes around the sun (which goes around another one), etc. It turns out that previous go-rounds left a little help, but still. The characters are not so interesting that a lot would have been lost by spreading the advance of civilization over the course of several generations (and characters).

There’s also a totally incomprehensible element (that is, I can’t comprehend why the author put it in) of an orbiting space station from Earth which does nothing but observe the planet and the people on it (with apparently supernatural powers of observation, since it can observe individual conversations). Perhaps the point was to put in an omniscient narrator that somehow fits into the world; perhaps the reason for it becomes more clear in subsequent volumes. But here it just made me shake my head.

Good points: the world-building is very cool (I haven’t even talked about the native civilization, sort of ice-orcs who are obviously on their way out), and Aldiss has a way of narrating a primitive society that is interesting while not pretending that they’re modern people in animal skins.

I’m not sure if I would bother buying the other two books in the trilogy if I had this as a standalone, but I have an omnibus of all three volumes, so I may come back to it at some point, when and if I feel like reading something like this again. If that sounds lukewarm, I guess it is!

I read Tigana ten years ago, and mostly liked it a lot. It’s a one-volume novel set in sort of a fantasy (i.e., there’s magic) medieval Italy. The writing is good and the plot is interesting. That said, I liked it less this time around, and this reread pretty much did away with my enthusiasm for recommending it to my wife. Since this was a reread, I’m going to discard my usual attempt to be as spoiler free as possible and talk more openly about the contents of the book.

Spoilers follow!

The main problem I have with Tigana stems from the fact that the villain (Brandin) is too sympathetic. I understand that Kay was going for the whole shades-of-gray thing, but I think he tried to have it both ways and failed; the triumphant end is so undercut by the tragedy of Brandin and Dianora that it just rings false. The epilogue has a cheeriness to it that seemed so forced to me the first time I read the book that I thought it must have been intentional, but on a reread I think it’s just an authorial mistake.

The flip side of presenting a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of Brandin is showing the dark side of Alessan, the heroic prince who triumphs in the end. And he does a bunch of rather shady things, such as magically enslaving a wizard who was just minding his own business. Again, this could have been really interesting if the point was to show that maybe, if you look at it from a disinterested perspective, the “hero” isn’t necessarily any better than the “villain”. But Kay tries to have it both ways again: he gets all shades-of-gray by having Alessan enslave the wizard, but hey, Alessan feels bad about it! And broods about how hard it is to be an exiled prince who has to do what he has to do! And then eventually the wizard gets turned around to their cause, and Alessan lets him free, which shows how nice he really is! And then the wizard decides to stay with the good guys anyway! The whole plot feels like a total cop-out, like when a superhero is given the terrible ethical choice of which of two people to save — and then saves them both. What was the point of setting up a terrible decision if the person making it gets to have it both ways?

So on the one hand Kay is setting up a really interesting situation, and on the other hand he’s constantly authorially apologizing for it. Just to bring up one other example: the whole plot is about Alessan reclaiming what’s rightfully his; Brandin invaded the peninsula and now Alessan’s taking it (or at least his part of it) back. But, not to be too blunt about it, that’s just what war is: countries taking land from other countries. It’s not a battle of good vs evil, like in The Lord of the Rings, say; it’s a battle of Guy Who Got His Stuff Taken vs Guy Who Took His Stuff. It’s not so clear that Alessan has that much of a moral right to throw the entire peninsula into upheaval just to get his province back —although of course once he does, the whole peninsula wants to make him their king. Sigh.

So, overall, a lot of interesting moral ambiguity that the author didn’t seem to have the guts to fully follow through on. The first time I read it, I tried to give Kay the benefit of the doubt; this time, knowing what was coming, that was more difficult.

I picked this up probably a decade ago, because it was a novel about computer chess with some promising blurbs, but never got around to it until now. It was written in 1989, 8 years before Deep Blue beat Kasparov, and takes place in 1993, at which point the fictional best computer chess program in the world is pretty evenly matched with the fictional US junior champion.

All the chess stuff is fairly accurate, which is a nice thing to see in a literary novel, though naturally I have a few niggles (e.g., a strong player wouldn’t talk about “the twenty-seventh move” being a blunder (they’d refer to the move itself, like “knight f5″), nor would they refer to “advancing a bishop”). The portrayal of chess players and the way they think was pretty well done too.

As far as the novel itself goes, it was fine. The characters aren’t particularly sympathetic but they’re well drawn, and the themes may not be stunningly novel but they’re used well and you aren’t hit over the head with them. What I don’t really understand was the need to surround the story with two metafictional shells; the story starts out in the first person before switching to third a few chapters in, and preceding that is an introduction by yet another fictional character. They both seem totally unnecessary unless I’m missing some subtle connection, plus both characters’ voices are pretty annoying (intentionally, I’m sure, but still). Once I got to page 40 without giving up, I enjoyed the rest of the novel, but it was a weird way to start the book and subtracted from the book rather than adding to it, for me. The back cover claims that “Hence is rife with puzzles and narrative jokes in the tradition of Borges and Nabokov”, which would have been great, but except for those two extra narrative layers that I didn’t like anyway, I didn’t catch any of the promised fun.

After reading Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, I was all excited to read about some more specific topics in evolutionary theory. His The Selfish Gene was the obvious next step. The fundamental idea is a great one, although of course less revolutionary now than I guess it was in the 1970s when it was published: rather than trying to explain the evolution of traits in terms of group selection, or kin selection, or individual selection, we should turn the problem inside out and look at the actual thing that not only gets replicated perfectly but also controls the trait itself: the gene. When you do this, a lot of paradoxes of the form “how can this behavior benefit the individual?” or “how can this behavior benefit the species?” make a lot more sense.

As I said, this book was originally published 30+ years ago and it hasn’t been updated much, but I didn’t find that that affected my reading much, besides some obviously completely obsolete analogies to contemporary computing power. I don’t know how much has changed since the time it was written, but the arguments seemed to hold up pretty well.

The book was quite interesting, although I was hoping for some more quantitative analysis of various scenarios. He does analyze some situations mathematically, but there was a bit too much of “This seems to contradict the theory, but we can explain it away with this clever hypothesis,” which is too unfalsifiable for my tastes.

It isn’t until the last couple of chapters that things really take off. The penultimate chapter is about how it is possible for altruism to evolve, and the final one goes even further than to say “let’s concentrate on the gene instead of the individual as far as evolution goes”; it asks why we really have individuals at all, which is a question that really blew my mind.

The individual organism is something whose existence most biologists take for granted, probably because its parts do pull together in such a united and integrated way. Questions about life are conventionally questions about organisms. Biologists ask why organisms do this, why organisms do that. They frequently ask why organisms group themselves into societies. They don’t ask — though they should — why living matter groups itself into organisms in the first place. Why isn’t the sea still a primordial battleground of free and independent replicators? Why did the ancient replicators club together to make, and reside in, lumbering robots, and why are those robots — individual bodies, you and me — so large and so complicated?

Awesome. He goes on to list some interesting advantages that genes get by building organisms around themselves, which I will not spoil here. Apparently this last chapter is basically a summary of yet another Dawkins book, The Extended Phenotype, so at some point I suppose I have to read that too. But for now I have probably read enough evolution books for a while.

Summary: a lot of cool ideas, and a few mind-bending ones, though my ideal version of this book would have cut out 50% of the material that didn’t fit into those categories. In any case, it is a total classic of modern popular science writing (and originated the concept of memes, though it has gotten kind of corrupted since then), and is worth reading for that reason alone.

I can’t handle scary movies at all, but for some reason scary books are generally fine. This is the third Stephen King novel I’ve read, after The Shining and The Stand, which seems to cover most people’s top two King novels in some permutation.

It is immense, at 1100 pages, although that works out to about 500 pages of horror novel and 600 pages of a slice-of-life portrait of what it was like to grow up in the late 1950s in a small Maine city. (You get one guess as to who else was 11 years old in a small Maine city in 1958.) The realistic stuff was actually pretty good, as King is a better writer than most people give him credit for, but he’s not such a good writer that you actively want to wallow in his depictions of life, as I do with, say, Tolstoy or Proust. Still, I was never really tempted to skip over anything.

The horror part of it was pretty good too, although it never actually got scary enough to really frighten me. But one thing that disappointed me somewhat, as silly as it sounds, was the motivation of the Big Bad. There are a few archetypes for horror “villains”; one, for instance, is the Lovecraftian monster too horrible to even contemplate, to whom humanity is a meaningless triviality, while another is the psycho who loves to toy with the mental state of his victims. “It” is a weird amalgam of the two, and I never got a good sense of where it was really coming from. I know it’s odd to ask for psychological consistency in a monster in a horror novel, but there it is.

The good stuff: King really is a pretty good writer, and I did enjoy his depiction of the late 1950s, as well as the mid 1980s, which at this point are equally interestingly historical although of course he didn’t intend it that way at the time. I also enjoyed the structure of the book, which bounced between the two timelines in a compelling way, and the last 200 pages or so were a really well done action sequence, or actually two, since both timelines reached their climaxes in parallel. I often zone out a bit during the climactic action sequences of a book or movie, but I stayed pretty well gripped here.

So although I had some quibbles, overall I did enjoy it a lot, and never had the urge to put it down over the course of 1100 pages, which is a pretty good recommendation right there. Still, I have now probably had my fill of Stephen King for a while, especially since I seem to have already hit the high points of his career.

This is book three of the Long Price fantasy tetralogy (I reviewed the first two here), and as much as I liked the first two, this is the best one yet.  The stakes have risen even higher (as you might guess from the title) but the real interest lies not in the titular war but in the characters involved in it, in a Shakespearean way.  In fact, the one place where my interest flagged was in the third quarter, where most of the war occurs; the first half is fascinating as it sets up the situation, and the denouement is great, but in order to get from point A to point B Abraham needs to do a fair amount of letting the setup play out, which made me a bit impatient.  In general Abraham is pretty good at moving things along fairly swiftly, though, which is a regrettably rare thing to see in a fantasy novelist.

Although the book is pretty much standalone, the continuing character development really builds on what’s been set up in the earlier books in the series in a very compelling way.  It’s clear that he had the whole thing planned out well, so I’m looking forward to the finale very much.  Highly recommended, though if you’re considering starting it be aware that the last book is still only in hardcover for now.

Revolution in the Head is one of the most highly regarded critical books about the Beatles, and the Beatles have been in my mind a lot recently, having just written a game about them. My main interest regarding the Beatles is in their music itself, and in that respect the finest books that I have found are Walter Everett’s two volumes of The Beatles As Musicians, which do an amazing job of chronicling the Beatles’ musical journey from a technical perspective. Revolution in the Head occupies a middle ground between musical analysis and biography, chronologically treating each song in turn but looking at them more for their context in the Beatles’ history (and the cultural history of the 60s) than as straight musical analysis.

And it’s very interesting; despite a few caveats, I learned a lot, and MacDonald has many perceptive things to say. For one thing, partially because my knowledge of the Beatles’ history has largely been through relatively sanitized tellings such as The Beatles Anthology, it was not clear to me just how huge a role drugs played in the Beatles’ creative output. From speed to marijuana to LSD to heroin, the story of the Beatles’ music is largely (and somewhat depressingly) the story of the drugs they were taking. MacDonald also has a lot of thought-provoking things to say about the individual person-to-person relationships within the Beatles and the effect they had on their music.

Minuses: Well, MacDonald is a man of strong opinions, so you have to take care to mentally prepend “In my opinion” to many sentences, since he didn’t bother; if you don’t, you’re going to spend a lot of time rolling your eyes that could be put to better use. When this takes the form of dismissing certain Beatles songs that he doesn’t like, this isn’t so hard to do; when he dismisses all music written after 1970, it’s a little harder to take. But as long as you don’t take him overly seriously, his opinions are quite interesting.

There are probably more interesting biographies of the Beatles, since this book accomplishes its biographical functions mostly in passing; and for straight-up musical analysis, the Everett books have a lot more to say. But there’s a lot of good stuff here, and even if you don’t agree with all of it, it will at least make you reconsider a lot of your opinions, and whether you end up keeping them or changing them, thinking about them again can’t be a bad thing.