The Importance of a Piece of Paper, Jimmy Santiago Baca

The Importance of a Piece of Paper by Jimmy Santiago Baca is a collection of short stories that my wife happened to see at a huge book sale and thought I might like.

Started: 9/22/2012

Completed: 9/25/2012

Recommendation: Please don't waste your time

Recommended By: My Wife

Review:

I read the first two stories.  Some of the images were beautiful.  The stories were both mournful and predictable.  I don't know enough about the author to comment more, but I simply couldn't read more of this book.

Helliconia Spring, Brian Aldiss

Helliconia Spring by Brian W. Aldiss is the author's attempt to make a real statement about humanity through a world that has a truly alien set of inhabitants and life cycle.  I really enjoyed  Greybeard which was a story that Aldiss wrote in the 1960's about a nuclear end-time.  The author is remarkably detailed and really took a lot of effort to understand the potential world of Helliconia, though he freely admits that he departed from physics when it suited the story to do so.  Here is a an audio discussion of this book by the author in an interview.

Started:  9/2/2012

Completed: 9/22/2012

Recommendation: Highly recommended

Recommended By: Nobody

Words I looked Up:

ancipital - Flattened and having two heads
apastron - That point in the orbit of a double star where the smaller star is farthest from its primary.
cataplexy - A medical condition in which strong emotion causes a person to suffer sudden physical collapse though remaining conscious.
cerise - A bright or deep red color
ecrythmous - out of tune
eddre - The English is serpent (the author seems to use this word to mean "spirit").  As Marco pointed out in the comments, this word does mean "spirit" in Olonets (it took me a while to find the reference, but it seems that Olonets is a Finnish language also known as Livvi-Karelian).  The language, Olonets, is mentioned in the book, but I simply thought it was a made-up language and did not realize it was a true, existing language.
imagos - The adult stage of an insect
mesentery - A fold of the peritoneum that attaches the stomach and other organs to the posterior wall of the abdomen
necrogene - This word does not exist, it is made up by the author to describe a class of animals that give birth through death.
noctiferous - Bringing night.
ostler - Someone employed in a stable to take care of the horses
pelage - the fur, hair, or wool of a mammal.
penumbral - The partial or imperfect shadow outside the complete shadow of an opaque body, as a planet, where the light from the source of illumination is only partly cut off.
prod - a poke with a finger, foot, or pointed object.  The author used it to refer to a penis.
pudendum - A person's external genitals, esp. a woman's
sang-de-boeuf - a deep red color
scumble - The application of a very thin coat of color over the surface of a picture.  The author used it to mean manure.
scut - A stubby erect tail, as that of a hare, rabbit, or deer.
spatch-cock - To interpolate (usually words) inappropriately.  The author used it with inappropriate color in a landscape.
sporran - A small waist pouch (like what is worn with a kilt)
sybaritic - Fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure; self-indulgent
queme - pleasant or attractive.  The author used it to refer to a vagina.
verdiagris-hued - The color of a bright bluish-green encrustation formed on copper or brass by atmospheric oxidation.
viscera - The internal organs of the body especially those of the abdomen.
zygomatic - The arch of bone beneath the eye that forms the prominence of the cheek.

Review:

Epic.  Bold.  A vision of another place that is, at least a bit, a reflection of our own, viewed by ourselves.  Pretty tough description, huh?  So this book is rather clearly an allegory for our own lives, but it is more than that...a multi-generational trip to places so alien that they become acceptable.  Suspension of disbelief is easy in this rich, consistent world.  The turn of phrase is often beautiful and the language, though esoteric, is comprehensible within context.  One might think that the author let loose with a thesaurus, but it seems that he must think with these words and have them ready at hand for just the right moment to unleash them on the page.  It would seem that there is an inexhaustible supply of new words for both new and old concepts that trip off the lips of the author and rush about the page looking for their perfect place.  Having established the setting over and over with colorful descriptions and populating it with complex characters, the race is on for the setting of the season that must come with Helliconia Fall.

Longitude, Dava Sobel

Longitude:  The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time by Dava Sobel is the story of John Harrison and his effort to solve the calculation of the longitude aboard ship.

Started: 8/18/2012

Completed: 8/27/2012

Recommendation: Strongly recommended

Recommended By:  Nobody

Review:

I had no idea that calculating Longitude was largely a matter of carrying time around.  While other methods were developed over the 50+ years of John Harrison's pursuit of the longitude prize, having an accurate clock was the easiest and best.  With GPS we all take for granted that it is easily within anyone's grasp to know their exact location, but in the 18th century navigation on the high seas was truly a guessing game with outrageous methods competing with methods that had some merit.  Galileo was the first to come up with a reliable means of finding longitude (using the Jovian moons), but it wasn't until John Harrison that longitude could be reliably calculated on the sea.  Keeping a telescope focused on Jupiter was more than anyone could do on a ship on all but the calmest of nights and then the calculations to determine longitude were non-trivial and required substantial tables of predicted locations of the moons.  Most clocks of the time were pendulum clocks which were horribly effected by the rolling of the deck.  John Harrison invented a clock that was not effected by changes in heat, humidity, and rolling of the ship and that, eventually, won him the longitude prize (literally a king's ransom).  What a great book!

Dava Sobel, as always, is evocative and careful with her prose.  At points, her sentences even take on a tick-tock sing-song picked up by the actor who read the book.  It is a joy to hear this book, but I'm certain that reading it would be excellent as well.

Sword Song, Bernard Cornwell

Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell is the fourth book in the Saxon Stories.

Started: 6/20/2012

Completed: 7/27/2012

Recommendation: Oh, yeah, still enjoying this series!

Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

The story of Uhtred continues with a foray into London.  During this book it is easy to see the skills of leadership being developed (through both success and failure).  Despite the title, it seems to me that in this book Uhtred starts to find that war is not all its cracked up to be and though he still participates with relish, it seems that the character is slowly growing tired of the mayhem.  He is, however, a fierce Lord who seems to relish in the argument that, "a man is hard to kill."

The Lords of the North, Bernard Cornwell

The Lords of the North by Bernard Cornwell is the third novel in the Saxon Stories.  This story follows Uhtred's trip to the North as Uhtred, having served Alfred well, looks for an opportunity to return home.

Started: 5/20/2012

Completed: 6/16/2012

Recommendation:  Still hooked by this series

Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

In this book, we get some of the "action tension" that a romantic comedy uses as "romantic tension."  There is action and it seems to be constant.  It is clear by this book that Uhtred is going to get in a scrape and come out victorious.  This is the first book, however, in which Uhtred really takes a hard loss from his action and it is a harbinger of things to come.  This book mostly seems to set the stage for some future work where the events of this book were critical to some future plot twist.  With little surprise, the plot in this book moves as expected with one surprising (though constantly foretold) event.  I don't want to give away the plot, but it did throw me.

I did not realize that there were several audio version of this book and leaving Jamie Glover (I think to listen to Richard Armitage) hurt the book in my ears.  The phrase "Uhtred of Bebbinburg" no longer had the ring of longing associated with it.  The names of characters and places were pronounced differently and it took a little bit of a recovery to once more suspend my disbelief.

The Pale Horseman, Bernard Cornwell

The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell is the second in the Saxon Stories and picks up after the last kingdom.  I couldn't wait to hear more about Uhtred.

Started: 4/26/2012

Completed: 5/11/2012

Recommendation:  Loved it!

Recommended By:  Nobody

Review:

The story of Uhtred continues in this gripping saga of England under Danish control.  Uhtred becomes more human and parts of his character are fleshed out in this book.  To show that Uhtred is not a one shot wonder, he goes on to take a prominent role in helping Alfred restore the kingdom of Wessex from under Danish control and lays the foundation for the concept that Uhtred could actually be a leader himself one day.  The battles continue and this story will not disappoint anyone looking for action scenes.  While it seems that time spent in a swamp simply can't have much action beyond a lost boot, Bernard Cornwell handles it well. 

Wired Love, Ella Cheever Thayer

Wired Love:  A Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer was a Project Gutenberg book that caught my eye.

Started: 10/19/2011
Completed:  5/10/2012
Recommendation:  Not recommended
Recommended By:  I read a magazine article about love via email while doing some research on one of my son's efforts to find a Russian bride.  It mentioned this book as the first description of remote romance, so I thought I'd give it a try.

Words I looked up:

inamorata - A person's female lover

Review:

This is a book that is typical of pulp fiction at the time.  It isn't quite as dramatic as there are only one or two fainting scenes and there aren't any conversions to God.  It has the mild air of a comedy (mistaken identities and such) but one poorly drawn as I never found myself laughing out lout and the mistaken identities seemed to be generally painful to the characters.  The romance via Morse Code is definitely over played though it seems to have been semi-auto biographical.  The constant "restraint" exercised by the characters literally overshadows their ability to interact in almost any way and the book dissolves to some kind of constant cat and mouse played by characters who seem to always do the wrong thing for questionable reasons.