Redwall

Redwall
© 1986 Brian Jacques
351 pages

At the edge of a great wood there stands a tall, red-brick abbey that offers peace, medicine, food, and sanctuary to call creatures in need. Its name is Redwall...and it is run by a quasi-religious order of mice.

Many years ago my home librarian brought this book to me and reccommended that I read it. I found it utterly captivating. I'd never read fantasy before, never developing a taste for magic and strange creatures -- but this was a different kind of fantasy, one in which real creatures simply took the place of human characters in a story that seemed positively epic to a younger reader such as myself. I'd only ever read books with simple plots before, but Redwall sported multiple stories: while the central conflict is one of good versus evil, with a great army of vermin (literal vermin -- rats, stoats, and weasels) arriving in hopes of conquering Mossflower,  the lead character Matthias is sent on a hero's quest, to find the lost sword of a legendary figure from Redwall's past so that he might destroy Cluny the Scourge.  His quest involves many dangers and distractions, comprising a series of perilous adventures, and Jacques tells that story while at the same time reporting on the siege of the abbey -- a siege fought with quasi-medieval weaponry, which should seem silly but works surprisingly well. It's as though this is set in the medieval-fantasy world of the Lord of the Rings, but using animal characters like moles who can dig tunnels in addition to wielding spears. Redwall inspired an entire series of novels set in this world and has a highly loyal fanbase who have taken to Jacques' characters with such gusto that they can have entire conversations in the dialects of his characters. I err, know from personal experience.

Redwall is an interesting literary experience, a mix of the mundane and fantastic, with lots of fun characters  and an easy-to-loathe villain. Although some of the magic has worn off since my childhood, I enjoyed my little return to Redwall Abby this Christmas season.

Related:  XKCD did a comic entitled "Notes on Rereading Redwall Books for the First Time Since Childhood" I rather like.

Related:
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NiMH, Robert C. O'Brien

Five Bookish Questions

Kelly of the Broke and the Bookish shared a quick book survey tonight, and I figured, why not?



1. The book I'm currently reading is Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain, by David Eagleman, which covers neurology and the subsconscious. It's probably one of the most fascinating books I've read this year, which is not surprising given my interest in the subject. The author and I definitely like reading the same guys: he's already quoted V.S. Ramachandran, whose "Phantoms in the Brain" absolutely astonished me, and Michael Shermer, who some may recognize as the author of Why People Believe Weird Things.

2.The last book I finished was...The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, by James Howard Kunstler, although perhaps I should mention Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne since I think I skipped a page or two of the Kunstler book. I was reading while being forced to listen to someone talk on the phone, and my attention wasn't quote focused.

3.The next book I want to read would be Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam. Before I lived in a university town, I'd never experienced how enriching living in an actual, healthy, human-sized community could be; I grew up living outside of town, and viewed it as a place we 'went to', not a place we lived in. After having graduated and moved back to my hometown for the time being, I found I missed the constant interaction with neighbors and fellow townspeople, so I've been actively  engaging myself in the local community and reflecting on how we've become isolated from one another in the last decades of the 20th century, despite the rise of connective technology like iphones and interstates.

4.The last book I bought would be Bowling Alone, though I purchased it and The City in Mind within a day of one another.

5.The last book I was given was 2000 Years of Prayer, edited by Michael Counsell, which contains a huge variety of Christian prayers, beginning with those mentioned in the Christian New Testament and including prayers from most every branch of Christianity. It's a fascinating resource for seeing the diversity and growth of Christianity through the centuries. The gift has strong sentimental value for me because the giver -- a new friend of mine who happens to be the associate rector at a local church -- was given a copy of this book by her parents when she attended seminary, so I know she's sharing something profoundly meaningful to her. She thought I would appreciate it given my interests in history, philosophy, and comparative religion, and she was right.

Santa and Pete

Santa and Pete: A Novel of Christmas Present and Past
© 1998 Christopher Moore and Pamela Johnson
176 pages

Seven year-old Terrence has no interest in spending his Saturdays keeping his elderly grandfather company while the older man runs his bus route.Who wants to be cooped up on a bus listening to an old man's stories when he could be outside playing? And the stories don't even make sense; they're about a place called New Amsterdam, a place grandpa seems to see when he looks out the window and sees New York. Instead of skyscrapers and apartment complexes, Terrence's grandfather acts as though he lives in a 17th century harbor town, where immigrants throughout Europe and Africa lived together and tried to make a world for themselves. Terrence can't help but notice the way passengers respond to the stories, though -- they lean forward, eyes bright, minds captivated by the way their driver can connect them with the past. And one snowy Christmas eve, when the bus breaks down in a blizzard, they are forced to wait -- but in the meantime, break out snacks from their shopping and hunker down while they're told the story of a man named St. Nicholas and his good friend Pete.

The story is set in a Christmas long ago, when Nicholas and his friend Peter traveled from the Netherlands to the New World, after hearing that the children there were in distress. They find the town  (New Amsterdam) enduring a poor harvest, a harsh winter, and on the verge of war with the natives. This being a Christmas story, Nicholas and Pete bring hope, peace, and friendship to the town and its perceived foes. Author Christopher Moore (not of Lamb fame) has produced a story that is a fascinating mix of fantasy, legend, and mythic history. I doubt many Americans are familar with the Dutch Christmas mythos, in which St. Nicholas arrives in town accompanied not by elves, but by a black man of Moorish descent named Piet -- or multiple black men. David Sedaris wrote about Christmas in Holland in the sketch, "Six to Eight Black Men". Although Sedaris revels in the absurdest aspects of the legend, here Moore presents the story of the two men in all seriousness. Their close friendship in a time of ethnic conflict should speak to American audiences, and despite playing fast and loose with both history and convention myth, the story itself is a charmer.

Teaser Tuesday (13 December)

Teaser Tuesday! 

You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you. 

Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain, David Eagleman. p. 33. This is a fascinating little about about neurology and the subconscious.

They say that Antarctica is the worst place on earth, but I believe that distinction belongs to Las Vegas, hands down. For one thing, Antarctica is more pleasing to look at.

The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, James Howard Kunstler. p.142

This Week at the Library (9 December)

This being the Christmas season, I'm currently in the middle of a Harry Potter re-read. This is not a tradition, though it may become one: in 2007 I re-read the entire series during Christmas break after I'd returned home from university, and for whatever reason the Christmas season strikes me as an appropriate time to revisit the series. Perhaps it is the magic of the season. In any case, my desktop wallpaper is also of Harry, Hermione, and Ron sitting in the Griffyndor common room, dressed for winter. At the moment I am halfway through Goblet of Fire, and Harry is stressing out over who to invite to the Yule Ball.

For serious reading, I'm halfway into The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. Like most books on physics and cosmology, it's a daunting mindscrew...but I'm staying with it and even learning from it. I've been using Galileo's Finger to help me, as it covers some of the same territory in a different perspective. (Galileo's Finger is a science book I've been chewing on for months. I could rush through it, but I like the author's approach enough to take things slow.)

Additionally, last night I began re-reading a book I read earlier in the year, but never reviewed. (It is on the cumulative reading list, though.) I'm in the mood for it, it's an excellent book, and I'd like to share it on here before year's end. The only other book I've failed to review is Erich Fromm's The Sane Society, and I will re-read it, too..eventually.

Oh! And I just realized today that there's a reason my library doesn't carry a novel called Sharpe's Skirmish. There's no such thing. That's a short story in another novel, Sharpe's Christmas. So, next week I'll be continuing in the Sharpe series. I'd been reading it chronologically, and wasn't sure what to do when I saw Skirmish is next in the series and my library didn't have it. Next up is Sharpe's Enemy, which is set around Christmas, so that's perfect.

Physics of the Future

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
© 2011 Michio Kaku
389 pages

We live in a remarkable time of human history. Since the industrial revolution, society has been radically altered by new innovations on a regular basis, and the rate of those world-changing transformations is ever-increasing, like a snowball growing in size and strength as it barrels down a hill. In Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku attempts to identify what changes may come in the 21st century, after interviewing hundreds of scientists from various fields. The result is extraordinarily interesting, covering projected developments in computers, artificial intelligence, medicine, nanotechnology, energy, and space travel as well as the future of wealth and humanity itself.

Although Kaku's field of theoretical physics doesn't lend itself well to lay understanding, here he writes expressly for a popular audience, inundating the text with references to pop culture. While he does engage in some scientific discussion from time to time to explain the basis of new technologies, the book emphasizes their effect on everyday lives, and his ultimate goal seems to be to wake the public up to the potential of science and the importance of appreciating it. When writing on technology,  that's easy to do -- there's no shortage of new toys that Kaku can tantalize readers with.  Imagine being able to take care of your entire morning routine -- cooking, errands, etc -- with a few orders given to your home computer via a headset while you sit in bed, for instance.

Considering the range of chapters, there seems to be something for everyone here. Being keen on human space flight, for instance, I looked forward to reading about the various ways in which we might further explore the deep black. While I try to stay well-read on that subject, Kaku touched on approaches I'd never heard of --like launching swarms of "nanoships".  Our medical prospects seem exciting and wondrous.  His predictions on the future of computers frankly horrified me, as he envisions increasing immersion inside virtual environments, or rather a day in which there's no real distinction between virtual and 'real' environments. We're already seeing this today, with applications for our gadgets that read the environment and give restaurant reviews for the dining establishments on a given street, but in the future this interaction will rely on contact lenses that project the Internet onto our eyeballs.

Kaku's work is triumphantly optimistic about the way technology will continue to dominate human lives,  which I appreciated given the cynical spirit of our times. However, more thoughtful consideration to the possible consequences of these technologies on our lives might have been in order. His projections point toward a world in which humans are increasingly spectators in their own lives, the subjects of Matrix-like domination by technology.  Considering the health problems our current use on automation has given us, do we really want a future in which that is increased?  There are seven billion people alive today, most of us doing jobs that Kaku sees machines doing in a hundred years. The kind of social disruption  that widespread job losses would cause is unimaginable.  He also takes a curiously light attitude toward energy. It would seem to me that in a world as technologically dominated as his in 2100, the section on energy would be fundamentally important -- the foundation on which every other section is based. Instead, it is treated as lightly as a commercial advertising toys mentions the need for batteries.

Even with these limitations, Physics of the Future recommends itself. It's open to anyone remotely literate and should have surprises in store even for those who consider themselves tolerably well-read in matters of science and technology. I imagine the sharpest criticism would come from those interested in social sciences like myself.

In Defense of Food

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
© 2009 Michael Pollan
256 pages

Michael Pollan's seminal work, The Omnivore's Dilemma, established that there's no such thing as a free, or even a cheap, lunch.  The low-cost processed foods that the American diet takes for granted exact their price in other ways. The abundance of food in the developed world has coincided, not accidentally, with a decline in its quality - - and so, curiously, while most of us can take the availability of food for granted, we can no longer take for granted that it is in fact food. Food has lost its meaning in the American mind, Pollan asserts here, and science and technology are to blame.

Pollan sees food as having fallen to the twofold assault of industrial agricultural and and ideological which he calls "nutritionism", which reduces food to nothing more than a carrier of nutrients. In his view, this misses the forest for a few twigs on a tree and ignores relationships between different food in traditional diets and the interplay of nutrients and body chemistry. Further, he believes that industrial agriculture  creates not food, but products resembling food -- and that nutritionism aids and abets this, creating a situation in which people are "overfed and undernourished".

In Defense of Food presents a problem for me. On the one hand, there are significant ideas worthy of consideration in here -- people do overly fixate on the value of one nutrient or another, industrial agriculture does sacrifice quality for quantity, and yes, the constant pattern of nutritional fixation does dovetail perfectly with relentless advertising-driven consumerism. Pollan's "food rules" make sense, like "Don't eat anything that doesn't look like food".  That is, if you want cheese, eat cheese -- not puffs of god-knows-what covered in orange powder.

The great problem for me is the anti-scientific attitude that develops from his attack on "nutritionism", an ideology which Pollan sees as being the spawn of scientists, journalists, and advertisers.  While scientists are just as human and potentially self-serving as anyone else, they attract the bulk of Pollan's ire. He mocks the fact that a half-century of nutritional advice has seen Americans grow not healthier, but fatter -- as if obesity and nutritional disorders were caused not by the popularity of fast food or a society dominated by cars, but by the fact that people followed the advice of a government study and got themselves fat by trying to stick to low-fat diets. A spirit of petty resentment pervades the book, as if Pollan is insulted that scientists would dare get their grubby lab gloves over his food. Those of us who are interested in science know all too well that the media does a horrible job at attempting scientific journalism, being irresponsible and ignorant of the subject --  leaving no room for nuance and pitching stories in such a way as to grab headlines. (PhD Comics did a GREAT comic on this.)  Pollan mentions the hype over resveratol, for instance, a compound found in many foods of the French diet which has been linked to health and longevity. While Pollan uses this as an example of nutritional fixation, I recently read an interview with the scientist whose work prompted the media frenzy (in Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Future), and he was dismayed by the way the media failed to understand that the variable he was studying was only one factor of many.  Here it is Pollan, not the scientist, who is overemphasizing the work.

In Defense of Food may be worth considering if you are just starting to become conscious or mindful about the foods you eat, but given Pollan's bias I can't earnestly recommend it to you. Given the importance of food, I'm sure there are superior books out there on the subject.