52 books in 52 weeks, 2007

I can’t do it. I can’t finish the book. The Mote in God’s Eye has defeated me.

The Mote in God’s Eye was written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the pair that wrote Lucifer’s Hammer. When I read Lucifer’s Hammer previously, I loved it. Later, I read Ringworld by Niven alone, and found it to be alright, but nothing spectacular. I tried following it up with Ringworld Engineers, but I ended up abandoning that one altogether. It just didn’t do much for me. I figured that I wouldn’t care much for further works by Niven alone, but might find collaborations enjoyable.

So, when I saw The Mote in God’s Eye at the library, written by both authors, I had my hopes up. I imagined a book written in the style of Lucifer’s Hammer, but set far in the future. And, to an extent, that’s what the book is. Plot-wise, the book is about humans in the distant future (3016) making first contact with an alien species. The species they encounter, which they call Moties, are quite different from humans, both physiologically and psychologically. The goal of the human expedition is to figure out as much as possible about the aliens. You can read the rest of the plot summary here if you’d like.

I ended up reading 400 of the 460 pages of the book before I gave up on it. Why? I’m not really sure, truth be told. I can’t pinpoint what it was about the book that turned me off. The writing was alright; the plot was an interesting one. Similar to Ringworld, there were too many instances of “science chatter” for my tastes (usually regarding how many Gs they were travelling at, spin in the ship, etc.), but they weren’t earth shattering. Whatever was wrong, I just couldn’t really stay interested in the book. It felt like it was going to take me the next 5 years to finish up the last 60 pages. The closer I got to the ending, the slower it dragged.

I read the plot summary at Wikipedia in full to know how the book ended, and I don’t think I missed much. Too bad I didn’t give up on it sooner and just read the plot summary, heh.

Next on my to read list: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell.

Oh, by the way: even though I didn’t quite finish the book, considering I read 400 out of 460 pages, I am counting it towards my 52 books in 52 weeks thing. I spent too much time on it to not count it.

Title: The Subtle Knife [amazon]
Author: Philip Pullman
Publisher: Scholastic (2005)
Pages: 368
Book Number: 19

I finished up The Subtle Knife today, the second book in the His Dark Materials series. After having read and enjoyed The Golden Compass, I was looking forward to see where the plot was taken in The Subtle Knife.

The things I complained about in The Golden Compass - namely, the main plot seeming to move a bit slowly, particularly information regarding Dust - have been “corrected” in the sequel. While I’m still not entirely clear on what Dust is, what’s going on overall is fleshed out a lot in The Subtle Knife. Specifically, a war is getting ready to be waged, between “rebels” - Lord Asriel, rebel angels, Will and others - against the Authority, or God. As one reviewer at amazon.com put it, there’s nothing subtle about this knife. Pullman obviously has an axe to grind in regards to the tyranny of the Church, its lies and deceptions. I’m not sure where Mrs. Coulter and Co. tie in with this war and the Church, but I’m sure that’ll be clarified in the last book of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. I must say - I’m anxious to see how the war against God goes. I think it’s an intriguing plot idea.

I was a bit bummed to find that armored bears weren’t in The Subtle Knife at all - not even Iorek Byrnison. His name popped up a few times, when Lyra and Will were talking, but besides that, he wasn’t in the book at all. Instead of lots of bears, in The Subtle Knife, there were lots of witches, specifically Serafina Pekkala and her group. I have to admit (and perhaps this is how Pullman pictures them) - from his description of the witches, I see them looking a bit like Sarah Sanderson (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) from Hocus Pocus. Sadly, I wasn’t able to find any decent pictures of that character online to share with you.

I’ve not looked into it, but I wonder if churches have raised hell (pun intended) about the His Dark Materials trilogy, similar to how they’ve raised hell over the Harry Potter series. I’ve seen news about a lot of different churches / religious groups banning the Harry Potter series, because it might teach kids “witchcraft” or “devil worshipping” or some other idiotic thing. I wonder what kind of uproar there’s going to be when the movies for Pullman’s books come out, and the main plot line turns out to be a war on God.

That should be interesting.

Title: The Golden Compass [amazon]
Author: Philip Pullman
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers; 1st ed edition (April 16, 1996)
Pages: 416
Book Number: 18

This is a book that had been on my shelf for years - literally. I received it as a Christmas gift when I was 16 or 17. At the time, I shelved it because it was a “young adult” book, and I was going through a peculiar phase in which I thought I was too “mature” for such things. The irony, of course, is that I was a young adult then, and now that I finally got around to reading it, I’m an adult - at least on paper, anyway.

So, how was it? It was a good book, and while I didn’t find it as great as many people have found it, I did enjoy reading it. There were two things in particular that I loved about it: the daemons that all of the humans had, and the panserbjørne, or armored bears. The idea of having my own daemon intrigued me - what would it be like to have part of my soul, essentially, represented by a creature I could talk to? A creature that could change shapes (at least until I grew older?) What shape would my daemon ultimately take, when it could no longer change?

The armored bears were… well, here, let me let an image speak for the panserbjørne:

Do I really need to explain that that’s cool? That image, by the way, is as far as I can gather, a concept image from the movie adaptation of the book, which is coming out in December of this year. Here’s the movie site.

I found it interesting how the book is suitable for children to read, but from an adult’s perspective, a lot of it can be seen as quite violent and morbid. Bolvangar, the “Experimental Station”, reminded me an awful lot of the “medical” facilities at places like Auschwitz. At Bolvangar, children had tests ran on them relating to Dust, but some children also had their daemons “severed” from them. After this operation, some of the children started losing their minds, because the daemons were a part of them, a part of their mind and soul; others died from the shock. The morbidness of the severing is lessened because there is no blood, no physical injury, etc. - the severing is a severing of the “link” between daemon and child. However, if you look at it a bit closer, it really is a disturbing idea.

The only problem I had with the book was that the main plot, regarding Dust - what it was, how it worked, etc. - just didn’t seem very fleshed out. Bits and pieces of information about the substance was sprinkled throughout the book, but by the time I finished the book, I still felt that I didn’t know much about it. Perhaps on a later reading I’ll pick up more on it. Someone I know who has read the whole series told me that the idea of Dust is fleshed out a lot more thoroughly in the second book of the series, The Subtle Knife, which I’m reading now.

One last note: I’ve seen quite a few reviews, both at amazon.com and in the front of the book, that say that The Golden Compass is on par with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. While I liked The Golden Compass, I’m going to have to flat out disagree with that. It’s a good book, but it’s not that good. Perhaps that’s just my long-standing biases popping out, though - I started reading The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings when I was 9 or 10, and haven’t stopped since. I obviously like it a little bit.

Title: Xenocide [amazon]
Author: Orson Scott Card
Publisher: Tor Books; Reprint edition (August 15, 1992)
Pages: 608
Book Number: 17

After having to let it sit on the back burner for a short while due to final exams, I was happy to be able to finish this book up last night.

When I wrote about Speaker for the Dead, I said that I enjoyed it even more than I had enjoyed Ender’s Game. I can say the same about Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead: I thought Xenocide was even better than Speaker for the Dead. This series just keeps getting better and better. I’m a bit bummed that I’m down to having only one book left to read, Children of the Mind.

I really like how Card tries to thoroughly examine morality and ethics through the lens of science fiction. The tensions between the humans on Lusitania, pequininos, and the buggers was fascinating, and it really made me think about the issues that were at hand. Card also tackles other themes in Xenocide, such as familial issues, religion (I loved the progressions of Han Fei-tzu and his daughter, Qing-jao), and the strange (to us) customs of alien races, such as the slaughtering of pequininos to take them into the “third life.”

There was really only one section of the book that I didn’t care (isn’t there always something?), and that was near the end of it. The Inside, Outside space stuff, and “wishing” themselves to a distant planet, etc. just seemed dumb to me. The springing of the young Peter and Valentine out of essentially Ender’s mind was even sillier than the ship being “wished” back and forth through space. I suppose he gave a decent explanation of what was going on, but it still just came across as goofy.

For those interested (yep, all three of you), I’m now reading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. This book belongs to the group of books that I’ve owned for years, but haven’t gotten around to actually reading. It’s supposed to be a real gem, and thus far (I’m about 100 pages in), I’m inclined to agree with reviews I’ve read: it’s a great book.

Title: Auschwitz: A New History [amazon]
Author: Laurence Rees
Publisher: PublicAffairs; Export Ed edition (January 4, 2005)
Pages: 327
Book Number: 16

What’s this 52 Books in 52 Weeks thing about?

I finished this book up a few days ago. I’m hesitant to say I “enjoyed” it, because it’s obviously about a pretty depressing topic. My feelings on it, I suppose, are similar to my feelings about the movie Schindler’s List. “Enjoyable”? No, not really. But something I think most people should read, to have an idea of what went on at Auschwitz, how it happened, and (the most difficult question of all) why? Yes.

The book is based around over 100 different interviews the BBC did with former inmates, as well as former SS (Schutzstaffel) members who worked at Auschwitz or other similar death camps. The picture that ends up being painted is both revealing and bizarre. From the little I had read on the topic previously, I assumed that the vast majority of SS members used the old “I was following orders” card. While that holds true to a degree - many of them stated that they disagreed with what they were doing, but did it anyway because it was an order from above - many of them didn’t use this excuse. Many said up until their dying day (which was just in the past few years for a few of them) that what they had done was right, that they took part in the mass murder of Jews because they felt it was the right thing for Germany to do. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, was one of the men who felt that there wasn’t anything wrong with what they did. One of the major reasons for this was the success of Goebbel’s huge propaganda machine; many of the SS members who thought what they were doing was right saw all Jews not simply as “subhumans”, but as enemies of Germany. They saw the Jews as the cause of German defeat in World War I, and basically every other problem Germany experienced as well. To the warped minds of many of the SS members, what they were doing was not genocide, but an act of war - they were killing their enemies. In their eyes, what they were doing was no different from what other German soldiers were doing on the front when they shot enemies. I’m not really sure what is more scary - that the propaganda worked so well when it was first used, or that many SS members clung to the idea until their deaths, years later.

Overall, the book was well made. It did suffer from a few things, however:

• Poor editing in many places. Due to the nature of the book, there are many names which (to the English-speaking eye) have complicated spellings, particularly the Polish names of the inmates. I came across many instances where the name was spelled one way initially, and then a different way later on - sometimes even on the same page. This isn’t a huge deal, but it’s not something I really like to see in a history book.Another peculiarity: the full name of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, was misspelled in the entire book. The correct spelling begins with Sch; in the book, both in the body of it as well as in the index, it is spelled as Shutzstaffel. As far as I know, there are no words in German which begin with Sh. If the “sh” sound is at the beginning of a word, it’s spelled sch. There’s really no excuse for this blunder. Considering the topic at hand and how involved the SS were in the mass murder, one would think they’d get the spelling of the organization right.

  There were also quite a few grammatical mistakes where a verb was left out - something that Word or any other decent word processor would have marked as incorrect.

• When a quote from an inmate or guard / SS member was quoted, it received a superscripted number, which pointed the reader to the back of the book for the source of the quote. Unfortunately, this is practically useless in the case of the quotes from interviews. Why? Because they all refer simply to “BBC interview.” No interview number; no name of who was being interviewed. So essentially, the “source” list is ultimately a huge list of “BBC interview” repeated over and over. Not very helpful at all.

Despite those issues, however, it’s still a good book. While it could use some editing love, the content is generally educational and well done. If you’re interested in learning about the Holocaust, I can definitely recommend this book.