dfan says

This is one of those books I appreciated a little more after finishing it and reading other people’s takes on it. Last year I read Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, which I thought was generally awesome; it aimed to turn the conventions of epic fantasy on their head, and actually did. I know some people who were disappointed by it, but their disappointment seemed to lie largely in the fact that Abercrombie actually carried through on all his narrative threats rather than just teasing us with them and resolving everything in a standard epic fantasy way at the end. I did have two political issues with it, though: 1) torture is presented as being wildly effective in producing information, 24-style, and 2) there’s an scary infidel pseudo-Arabic nation that is practically a caricature of political incorrectness. Of course Abercrombie has the right to put stuff like this in his novels, but the fact that people can read this and comfortably see their own prejudices verified, even fictionally, makes me sad.

Anyway, Best Served Cold is a standalone novel taking place in the same world, and sharing a few characters, although to be honest my memory is so bad that I wasn’t even always sure which ones had shown up before. It’s a revenge novel, like The Count of Monte Cristo, and there are seven distinct people who have wronged the protagonist and need to get their just deserts, so this is a long book (over 600 pages). I think the length works against it; although the author does a pretty good job of managing some longer arcs, the episodic structure of the book forced on it by the plot does tend to induce an “okay, three down, four to go” mindset on the part of the reader. I kept on wanting the novel to take a wild left turn and it never really did, although certainly interesting things happen.

But the writing is good and the character development, now that I look back on it in retrospect, is a little more interesting than I gave it credit for at at the time (since I was busy ticking off victims). Still, I think this would be a better book with a couple fewer villains and a couple fewer main characters.

P.S. I don’t know if this was done specifically as a contrast with the trilogy, or in response to others’ reception of the torture thing there, but here there is a wildly ineffective torture scene. So although I would actually prefer my novels with no torture scenes at all thanks, it was sort of nice to see this one as a counterbalance.

This was a weird one. Chip Kidd is a superb book designer; he might be a little overexposed by now, but there was a time when whenever I picked up a book and thought the design was awesome, half the time it was by him.

So this is his first novel, and it is, unsurprisingly, largely about graphic design. The protagonist is a college student who starts out thinking he’ll be an artist and then discovers the world of design. Although from page to page I enjoyed the novel a lot, when you step back and look at it from a distance it is sort of three books in succession, and the transitions were a bit jarring for me.

First comes your standard well-told comic tale of college life, stuffed to the gills with wry observations and dry wise-cracks. It comes off as a little glib, but Kidd does know how to write and it is genuinely entertaining.

Then it turns into a manifesto of design principles. A teacher shows up who is passionate about graphic design, and a lot of the middle of the book is devoted to him hectoring the class about various postulates and theorems. This was actually interesting too, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was all mostly here because Kidd himself is passionate about these ideas, wanted to pass on his excitement, and thought that the best way to do so was to stick them in a novel. It felt a little more like a novel from a hundred years ago in that respect.

Then, just when you are finally comfortable with the novel basically being a hip textbook in a thin fictional wrapper, the drama goes way up; it turns out that most of the characters are not just sort of messed up, but actually really messed up, everything sort of explodes, and you are left wondering where it all came from.

Now, clearly Kidd understood that he was making a book with an odd structure, and had his reasons, but I’m not honestly sure what those reasons were, and the book as a whole felt kind of weird to me. Again, any individual page was quite entertaining, and I learned a lot of interesting things about graphic design, and I certainly enjoyed the book. But somehow, once I put it down at the end, it felt like a little less than the sum of its parts. That said, I am still interested in the recent sequel, in which the protagonist apparently finds himself in the real world. Maybe that will feel a little more grounded.

If you know anyone who plays the board game Go, try asking them, “Hey, I learned the rules, I’ve played a bit, and I want to improve; can you recommend a good book?” I will lay even money that they will say, “Go this minute and read Graded Go Problems for Beginners.” GGP is a series of four books containing nothing but hundreds of problems (here’s a position, find the best move) and brief answers. Volume 1 starts with problems that basically just test if you know the rules, and by the time you eventually get through Volume 4 (I can’t, yet), you’re probably a dan player, or expert. You’re led through every basic tactical technique along the way; there’s no more efficient way to improve your game.

While there are tons of chess problem books, I’ve never been able to find a good GGP equivalent. The books are usually either aimed only at beginners, or only at experts, or mix up a bunch of problems of wildly different difficulty in order to keep you on your toes. But with Chess School I’ve finally found it: a graded problem book series that starts from square one, ends at square sixty-four, and covers every basic tactical technique. They were originally made for teaching Soviet children, and it’s hard to argue with those results.

There are four volumes, but Chess School 4 is an endgame collection; 1–3 are the real meat of it (to further confuse things, Volume 1 has been split up into 1a and 1b in this edition, and they’re sold separately). Volume 1 starts with mate-in-one problems and ends 1300 positions later with problems that I have to think about and sometimes get wrong (I’m rated 1800, for reference). Volume 2 is really the sweet spot for me. When I was taking chess lessons my teacher would give me homework problems from Volume 3, among other sources, and I’d rack my brains over them for a week; a master could still benefit from working through it.

If you want to improve your chess game and are rated below 2000 or so, there’s no better way than by studying tactics. And if you’re studying tactics, it’s hard for me to make a higher recommendation than these books. It’s not a complete chess course — you’ll need to learn about openings and endgames and strategy elsewhere — but it’s a great foundation.

(Unfortunately, these books can be kind of hard to find in the US. I’ve had good experiences with Chess Books From Europe.)

Mnemosyne is a spaced repetition program for aiding memorization; see my first post about it for the whole scoop. That was the one-month report, and it’s now time to post a three-month report.

The chess opening memorization is still going very well. I’m now up to 471 positions in my database and am reviewing about 20 a day. One thing that can be a little bit of an issue is that since my flashcards are just positions, they’re a bit contextless; often part of the work I have to do to recall the correct move in a position is to deduce what sequence of moves led to it, so I can consult the right part of my mental library. Of course this is not an issue in an actual game, so it makes the flashcard experience a little artificial. I could try adding the appropriate moves to the problem, but I’m not convinced that’s a good idea either. For one thing, some of the positions can be arrived at by multiple sequences of moves, and for another, the best move in a position shouldn’t depend on how you got there; I should be able to deduce (or remember) it without hints. But on the other hand, if I’ll have the hints during an actual game, why not use them here? I’ll keep thinking about it.

I’ve only played four tournament games since I started using Mnemosyne, but in none of them did I have any trouble recalling the moves in my repertoire. So that’s good so far.

Meanwhile, with Esperanto vocabulary I’m testing exactly the scenario I foresaw in the original post; my interest has waned a bit again, so I’m not reading regularly, but I am keeping up with the memorization. I am holding steady at 1926 cards, and the number I have to review every day has dwindled from a high of around 200 to somewhere in the 30s, which I can get through in a minute or two. I have a better than 90% recall rate, so I do seem to be retaining the information. So that’s perfect — I’m confident that if I picked up an Esperanto book today, I’d be able to read it with close to the same ability as two months ago. I’ll happily spend a minute or two (and dropping!) a day to retain that knowledge.

Another Vance novel — I guess I’ve read over twenty by now —and it pretty much goes according to formula, but hey, I love the formula. An adventurous young man has to achieve his destiny by overcoming a smattering of obstacles on various worlds spanning the galaxy, each of which has some charmingly odd culture and people who love to haggle.

Night Lamp was published in 1996, so it’s pretty late Vance, and it feels kind of loose (not that his novels are ever particularly tight), but everything does pretty much fit together in the end. Around a quarter of the way through, I was thinking, “Hey, this is really good, I wonder if this would be a good recommendation for newcomers to Vance.” But then things slow down a little as the focus shifts to the reminiscences of a second character, and I felt that the pace never quite recovered. In addition, a new plot element (which, to be fair, had been hinted at earlier) popped up literally 90% of the way through the book, mostly just made me feel uncomfortable for the characters involved, and was then resolved in a completely unsatisfying manner. That left a weird taste, and the book was already a bit overlong (close to 400 pages) anyway. So overall I’m not going to put this up there with his best. If you’re not a Vance fan there are better places to start, and if you are you’ll probably read it anyway, and still get some enjoyment out of it. And how many books have as a major plot point a quest to become a member of the exclusive social club the Clam Muffins?^*

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^*One.