2000 Reading List |
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When I was in London last month I read an article on Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series. The thing that caught my attention was the fact that these fantasy novels were marketed to kids in the UK, but to adults in North America. Sure enought, back in Toronto I found it in the SF/Fantasy section of a downtown bookstore. It's a good yarn, but let there be no doubt about it: this is a kid's book. It's a complex child's book, and it deals with some potentially traumatic topics (child abduction for scientific experiments), but the story unfolds in a pedestrian manner and the outcome is never really in doubt. The good guys triumph. Even though The Golden Compass moves at a good clip, it left me unsatisfied and I won't be heading out to buy the other two books in the series. I think I'll hang on to it though. Andrew should be ready to tackle it in a coupel of years. 5 November 2000 |
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Read the book...its great. Skip the movie...it isn't. Hornby has reached into the normal male psyche and condensed all the insecurities he found into this novel. It's a treat. It is also a little piece of the truth. 31 October 2000 |
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Singh does it again. First he turned the quest for a solution to Fermat's Enigma into a gripping mystery. Now he traces the history of cryptography and makes it eminently readable and surprisingly engaging. I read this book, mostly, on a flight to England and found that I would rather follow Singh's description of how British intelligence officers cracked the German Enigma code during WW II, than watch the movie (which, by strange coincidence, was about US naval officers stealing the Enigma machine from a disabled Nazi submarine). In fact I also found Singh's description of how Egyptologists used the Rosetta Stone to decode heiroglyphics to be much more interesting than going to see the Stone at the British Museum. 31 October 2000 |
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Lowenstein is a man with a mission, or missions. Most importantly he wants to tell us the story of a small cadre of super-intelligent, super-ambitious, super-greedy money managers, who bullied their way to the top of their field. He wants to tell us the story of their come-uppance, how they lost nearly US$5Bn (much of it their own money) in a few weeks and possibly brought the US financial system to the brink of collapse. This he does exceedingly well. Its a taut story, with much insight into the minds of these people. Lowenstein also wants to tell us a story of the limitations of financial theory, of the insidious dangers of derivatives, and of the inappropriate role of the US Federal Reserve in avoiding financial chaos. These stories aren't nearly so compelling. Rather than illustrating the limitations of financial theory, Long Term Capital Mangement mostly showed what a powerfool tool it is. Unless, that is, you believe that its managers were just lucky for 4 straight years. Their failure came from excessive leverage (hardly a new concept) and attempting to perpetuate an investment strategy after the opportunities that made it successful in the first place had disappeared. LTCM knew that the opportunities to repeat their previous successes were few and far between, and yet they failed to change their risk management strategy when the nature of their trades shifted from arbitraging market inefficiencies to outright speculation. It is hard to understand what the Fed did wrong in orchestrating, but not bankrolling, LTCM's bailout. Rather than placing public money at risk in the bailout, Lowenstein describes their role as that of a facilitator. They brought together the people with the most to lose from LTCM's failure (the banks which traded with it) and suggested that it was in their best interests to keep LTCM alive. If the bailout failed, then it would have been Goldman, Morgan, Chase and the rest who took the hit...not the US public. I don't see anything wrong with that. 4 October 2000 |
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I don't want to sound obsessed with the length of novels, but this one is perfect. In 220 pages, (220 pages!) Coetzee manages to develop rich characters, bitter conflicts and insoluble moral dilemmas; proving himself to be a great writer in the process. It's about South Africa, and racial conflict, and sexual conflict, and its about living with evil. It's crisp and utterly fascinating. 4 October 2000 |
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You gotta hand it to Gowdy, she sure does dream up some offbeat perspectives for her writing. I enjoyed "We So Seldom Look on Love" a few years ago and thought that "The White Bone" was worth a try. It's not without merit, but to be honest, its just too damn hard to try to care about the trials and tribulations of a bunch of elephants wandering around the plains trying to make sense out of their existence. In he end, their lives make about as much sense as our human experience, which isn't much. Like us, they look for meaning and significance in everyday occurences, when there usually is none. Writing a novel from an animal's perspective is a brave thing to do. But as skilled a writer as she is, i couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading a very land-bound rewrite of "Johnathan Livingston Seagull". And that is no recommendation. 27 August 2000 |
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This is a book that needed to be written. A clear-headed first-hand accounting of the goings -n in Silicon Valley during the late 1990's. It was a heady time, and for some reason Bronson seems content to tell the stories even though the temptation to participate must have been nearly overwhelming. For us, this is a good thing. We get to tag along with software salesmen on their calls, we get to sit in on an IPO, and we watch a software entrepreneur try to corral a group of freelance programmers. These are fascinating vignettes. The stories in the book aren't really connected to each other, but ever now and then things begin to overlap. The problem is that Bronson never acknowledges this. So early in the book we are introduced to a woman who is tele-marketing for an online community guide called Cityscape. When the same company pops up later in the book, Bronson makes no connection to the earlier story, but describes the company all over again. This is probably because these stories were first published independently in "Wired", and the editor didn't sit down and read the whole thing from a fresh perspective to make sure the material flows properly. This is an unecessary irritation to a collection of very interesting material. 2 July 2000 |
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I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! 500 pages is just too long for a novel. I really enjoyed Nicholas Christopher's last novel, Veronica, and so I decided to tackle this one. Many of the elements that worked so well in Veronica are also present in "A Trip to the Stars": abudant symbolism, strangely magical happenings, and Christopher's direct but highly descriptive writing style. Unfortunately, the result isn't nearly so satisfying. For starters, there is the small matter of the plot....there isn't enough to sustain this book through 500 pages. We follow the lives of the two main characters from the time that one is abducted from the other at the age of 10 until they are reunited 15 years later. In the interim they both live curious and improbable lives, but I just kept asking myself whether I really cared about them. In the end, I decided that I didn't. 28 May 2000 |
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Macfarlane writes a weekly column in the Globe and Mail, ostensibly about the arts, but very often its about trying to maintain a semblance of independence and integrity in a world which seems to be rushing ever quicker towards the lowest common denominator. Occasionally his writing resonates, occasionally it misses the mark, but he never talks down to the reader. He constantly expects us to operate at an intellectual level that he defines. Summer Gone, Macfarlane's first novel, is pitched in exactly the same way. It is a challenging read, but one that is beautifully crafted. The story meanders through the life of Bay Newling, and it is this meandering that I found most disconcerting. Novels where the point of view shifts from person to person, or from one time to another add a layer of complexity to the narrative, and the reader must make a concerted effort to disentangle the strands of plot as they are revealed. The problem I had with Summer Gone is that, even after finishing the book, I couldn't figure out how the timeline fits together. There are only a few key dates revealed to us, and one of them is 1964, when 12-year-old Bay is sent for a single summer to a camp in Northern Ontario. He returns to the same area twice as an adult, once for a family vacation, and then 6 years after that for a canoe trip with his son, Caz. Problem is, Bay seems very old on the canoe trip, and yet working backwards I think he must have been in his late 30's. It doesn't work. After finishing the novel I stewed about the timeline to an unreasonable degree. And that's unfortunate, because there is much in the novel to commend it. Macfarlane has a gift for narrative, he takes episodes from the lives of his characters and breathes life into them, no he polishes them and makes them shine. Despite my inability to get my head around the dates, this is a fine book. 24 April 2000
8 May 2000 |
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OK, I have to admit I felt like kind of a creep when I paid for Lolita at the bookstore counter. I mean, what sort of a 40-something man buys a book about another 40-something man who seduces a 12 year old girl? It is hard to imagine this despicable topic being treated with more sheer intelligence than Nabokov manages in Lolita. The narrator, one "Humbert Humbert", is a monster. He knows it, and it is clear that most of the other characters know it too. But they aren't so sure of it that they do anything to stop him. So in the midst of this quiet acquiescence, Humbert goes about pursuing his "nymphet", and in the process completely destroys her. Nabokov allows us to see the world only from Humbert's perspective who, even though he knows his urges are sub-normal, manages to rationalize his every move. While this allows us to understand Humbert's motivations, it doesn't lead to sympathy. His world is quite clearly a cruel and paranoid place. The book is remarkably fresh, despite being written half a century ago. The narrative tends on occasion to provide more description of Humbert's obsessions in rather more detail than is necessary, he can run on for several pages describing the most trivial occurrences. But that is a small quibble with an otherwise truly impressive work. 10 April 2000 |
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Many years ago, Mark Helprin wrote a book called "Winter's Tale" which was a kind of magical tale set in a perpetual winter in New York about a hundred years ago. It was a book that left a deep impression. Now Nicholas Christopher has written a magical tale set in a perpetual winter in modern New York. It also leaves a deep impression. Like Helprin's book, the prose in Veronica is dreamlike and wonderfully transporting. Veronica is a combination detective story, a fantasy which riffs off sources from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to the execution of Sir Walter Ralegh, and it is a love story too. Behind everything is the familiar geography of Manhattan. This highly visual book will stay with me for a long time to come. I recommend it without hesitation. 13 March 2000 |
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There is one sentence in this book that is deeply and fundamentally dishonest. This is it: Now this is a detective story, so it isn't fair for me to explain just how flawed that statement is because it would give away a good bit of the second half of the book. But despite the books many strengths, that one lie stayed with me, like a bitter aftertaste. 13 March 2000 |
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This is one outstanding book. It is the story of Andrew Wyle's quest to solve a mathematical problem which stems all the way back to Pythagoras. Along the way, author Singh takes us on a variety of mathematical side streets in search of pieces to the puzzle. It is almost embarrassing, but I actually felt a shiver go down my spine when reading Singh's description of Wyles' final lecture when he revealed his "proof". There is enough math in this book to make it interesting, but not so much that it would put anyone off. February 2000 |
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This is one disappointing book. It is the story of John Harrison's quest to build a clock which would keep perfect time over long sea voyages, allowing navigators to determine their precise position. It is almost embarrassing, but even though this book is about building a better clock, I learned almost nothing about how a clock works, or how Harrison solved the technical challenges. There isn't enough technical detail in this book to keep the intelligent reader interested. February 2000 |
