It seems that many astrophysicists harbor secret interests in space flight. After several interesting discussions of it, my Kolleg Alexander leant me Digital Apollo, Human and Machine in Spaceflight, by David A. Mindell. This explores the development of the idea of automated flight, and the respective roles of the players, both technically and politically, focusing on the first primarily-automated flying machine, the Apollo spacecraft. It relates the Apollo story from a different view than presented by the astronauts, Besides the history, he goes into the stability of electronics guidance with a human “in the loop”, the development of “systems engineering”, and the purpose of humans in space flight. It’s a pretty amazing story—for those interested in space flight, an important read.
Long ago my friend Hilary recommended that I read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Now again I have been pressured in this Discworld direction, this time by Anne, to read his Mort.
Death gets himself an apprentice, and takes a vacation, leaving the poor guy in charge. I have to confess, it was a fun read. I even loosed a couple of guffaws.
The style is very reminiscent of (more than anybody) Douglas Adams (but less heady) and also of Tom Robbins (without the tweed).
My Kolleg Iliya handed me a copy of Dragon’s Egg, a bona-fide sci-fi novel by Robert Forward. It’s about little critters that live and evolve on a neutron star. The part about the critters is genuine sci-fi of high caliber, imaginings of a whole different physical world and how life might be like in it.
Everything involving humans is, however, dreary, dated and very skippable.
[In Progress] Isabelle cited Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as her favorite book, and I couldn’t remember having read it. I know I owned a copy, but no. Somehow familiar though.
At the insistence of my colleague Hakan, I read I,Q by John de Lancie (who played the “Q” character in several Star Trek series), co-written by Peter David. OK it’s got plenty of “Q” sounding lines, it has the character down pat. And the plot is all twisty, with just the right amount of emotiony stuff.
[In Progress] Leonie Swann’s Glennkill, subtitled ein Schafskrimi, again auf Deutsch.
Mikael Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Fun in convulsive fits! On the advice of my colleague Dasha. It’s a layered story, compounding a gentle parody of Soviet life with an alternative reading of the death of Jesus and a very peculiar view of the relation of good and evil.
Stanislaw Lem’s Tales of Pirx the Pilot. A nice collection of stories of the guy who isn’t sure if he should be surprised that he’s a space pilot. They are about life in space, and told with a human perspective and humor unusual for the genre.
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is going to run jumping into the leaves, then express in leaf-jumping horror the crawlies she finds there. This is a rush and jump and splash oh-no! Always panting, scanning for the next thing to pounce on, and then to wonder at the impossibility of framing the pounce in a human perspective. Not for everybody, but I loved it.
A friend of a good friend has great taste in books, to have left this laying on the table for me to see.
Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom (subtitled The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947), because I’ve been living next to Park Sanssouci for over four years. Several of these Fredericks and Frederick Williams were very interesting characters, and are set off all the more by some of the rather duller princes that went between.
Clark tells the story in the large, in terms of trends and relationships, periods of migration and wars. He delivers a convincing and sympathetic story of how the so-called “Prussia” came to be, how it came to have some of the qualities that are associated with it, and its relationship with four centuries of political events.
Besides a clarification of the relationships between these kings and with the development of Germany, one shouldn’t be surprised to see similarities with current politics.
[In Progress] Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, this time auf Deutsch. I first read this when I was 19 or so, as part of a literature class, I suppose. I remember thinking at the time, this language is very pretty, I wonder how it would sound in the original? I didn’t really think then that I would ever go so far as to find out. Well, I saw a nice copy in a bookstore, and bit the bullet. And it is rather hard for me—the vocabulary is very special. But I can report that I’m not disappointed by the language. To my limited discernment, the original is warm and rich and transporting.
Reading Siddhartha as a rather more mature person, I’m struck by how much my perception of it has changed. For example, at the beginning is a struggle between father and son. When I was 18, I just saw it as a righteous son overcoming an obstinate, foolish father. Now I see how Hesse has choreographed his characters—the father’s sleeplessness, as the star slowly moves across the window, and how he sculpted as an ideal this familiar unpleasant interaction.
One of the advantages of working in an academic outfit is that you can ask around, “What is the best book in your subject?” and get very good answers. For cosmologists, I found, the present-day bible is Binney and Tremaine’s Galactic Dynamics, a book whose proportions are almost biblical, too. I got a recent copy, and am glad I did.
I learned a lot of new things about cosmology (that the modern view holds that galactic collision is one of the dominant processes in galactic formation rather than a rarity) and some new math as well (that an integral of motion of an orbit of a star in a mass distribution can be used to restrict geometrically the region of space through which the orbit passes.)
Another highly-recommended title in cosmology is Combes, Boissé, Mazure and Blanchard’s Galaxies and Cosmology. It’s not quite so imposing as Binney and Tremaine, but also very well written. They emphasize another odd new phenomenon: concentric shells about elliptical galaxies.
Following my old interest in typography, a respondant to a mailing list recommended Walter Tracy’s Letters of Credit. One might not expect to sit and read a book on type faces, but this guy writes with an easy elegance about his lifelong passion, and draws a reader in.
I tried to export Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Slapstick, and Breakfast of Champions to the German public. Reviews were mixed, but essentially negative. I think they get the pathos, but they don’t get the humor. Well, humor is very delicate and often doesn’t translate. I was disappointed nonetheless. So I read them all myself, and felt better. Then Mr. Vonnegut died. So it goes.
In preparation for a long plane flight, I picked up Tracy Chevalier’s The Girl with the Perl Earring. The blurbs will have you know that it is a masterwork. Were it not for those blurbs, I might be more forgiving.
I am unremarkable in that I’m transfixed, fascinated, transported by Vermeer’s little paintings. So I’m unremarkable in having bought this book, which features one of them on its cover, and which is meant to tell a story about its subject.
Ms. Chevalier deserves credit for an absolutely magnificent choice of topic. She also sat down, and bloody wrote herself a novel. But she holds a degree in creative writing, and she writes like someone with a degree in creative writing. What is worse, her 14 year-old maid protagonist narrates the story like someone with a degree in creative writing.
One lesson Ms. Chevalier missed in her courses was, not to irritate the reader with detail that adds nothing to the story. For example, the color of almost every eye mentioned in the book is dutifully reported.
Her style is so transparent that I could almost see her sitting at her desk, with art and history books of the times, thinking: “how will I get that bit into the story?”
Erwin Kreyszig’s 1959 text Differential Geometry. He has a beautiful writing style, which I fear has now died out. I couldn’t write like that.
The book covers the material using the simplest tools. There are no charts or atlases (by those names), no algebra of differential forms; topology is mentioned only lightly, tensors are objects that transform in a certain way.
This might be objectionable. Well, a lot has changed since 1959. A lot of the equipment and terminology one sees in modern literature post-dates this book. Also, I think the book is quite accessible to perhaps a third-year college student, who has just learned about partial derivatives, coordinate transformations, and multiple integrals, whereas all that modern machinery could amount to a barrier.
And he covers a great deal of geometry.
Now, I should have known all this material decades ago. But I’m hitting lots of beautiful little details that I never saw or don’t remember or never fully appreciated or saw but never connected with anything.
For example, the idea that the tangents to a curve (typically) generate a surface, and a family of involute and evolute curves. Somehow I found this a novel idea. Of course, it’s just a way of looking at developable surfaces.
I would love to understand the connection with geodesics with geometrical treatments of nonlinear P.D.E.’s.
Then there’s a formula for the torsion of a curve. How will I write it? The bars represent the determinant of a matrix whose columns are the three vectors written inside, the overdots are derivatives with respect to the parameter t of the curve x(t).
What the heck is that?! It’s gorgeous—such things don’t exist for nothing. Is there a corresponding formula in differential forms for this? I do not know. (I don’t remember any treatments of curves with differential forms—that material always rushes off to multi-dimensional surfaces.)
I paid too much in Seattle for a torn-up copy of a book about which I’d heard good things: Dana Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter. It’s a history of Galileo, with the perspective of copious letters from his cloistered daughter, Suor Marie Celeste. I paid too much due to the condition of the book, I mean. The text itself is an excellent story.
This is naturally a very personal treatment. I find that it balances well his scientific endeavors with his political, religious, and personal life.
In contrast to the conventional story of a far-seeing scientist persecuted by a backward Church, Sobel explains that Galileo’s political connections with the Church were deep and complex. Even the Pope himself, who was an acquaintance, was such an admirer that he had once written a poem for Galileo. Also, Galileo had gone to great lengths to have his Dialogs checked and altered by the authorities (including the Inquisition) for anything that might offend. Yet, something went wrong. Sobel does not completely answer the question, but she does suggest a possible, probably unintentional, personal offense as the deciding mistake.
We also get a very rich picture of 17th century monastic life through Marie Celeste. It’s another surprise, both horrifying and touching. Through her, life at that time is roundly represented. I came away with a deep impressions of the society, the difficulties they faced, and their little joys.
Sobel knows how to string a story together. I had a problem keeping the book on my night-table, not to read one more chapter.
From the wonderful German children’s series “Was ist Was”, Band 16: Planeten und Raumfahrt. For my language studies, you see.
In the 1980’s, I saw part of a single episode of the fascinating PBS series The Story of English. I didn’t have a TV at the time, and the people who owned the TV on which I saw the episode were disinterested to the point of turning it off. I always regretted this. So I finally ordered a copy of the book, and read it, with full enjoyment and without the disapproval of TV owners.
You could complain that the tone of the book is overly congratulatory to the language (which is certainly in no need of encouragement). But it is a great story, of people from several places risking everything to move, and other people being displaced and having their cultures crushed.
I was particularly impressed by how complex the mixing of languages was, which resulted in English. In most books, we have: Old English, then the Norse invaded, then the Normans invaded and it was Middle English, then there was Shakespeare. But most of these “invasions” happened over a span of centuries, and often didn’t involve conquest as such.
The authors plainly love the playfulness of the English language, and its surprises and pitfalls. Their own mastery of the language is apparent from the beginning. It’s beautifully written, and quite gripping.
The 1962 edition of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by Max Born. He does as much as one could hope without requiring knowledge of Calculus. It is also a sweeping history of the development of theories of electromagnetic phenomena in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This is a courageous attempt to bring the theory to the interested lay person, specifically those who don’t have the Calculus. I can’t say to what degree he succeeds. I’m sure all but the bravest high school students would be intimidated by the sheer amount of calculation he presents.
There is some point where it would be easier for everybody to just tell the reader to take a Calculus course. On the other hand, I wonder if his appeal to differential equations to distinguish action at a distance from contiguous action was really necessary. Also, I know of one or two places where he slips up, pulling a math formula out of a hat.
For me, I was in wonderment at his treatment of the history of the subject. He treats discredited theories with respect for their better features, and doesn’t shirk from pointing out inconsistencies in the reasoning of the greatest thinkers. And then, I was once again in wonderment that in the chapter on the concept of simultaneity he went on to make statements that are of the same nature as the ones he had earlier criticized.
For its flaws, this is the best book of its kind I have ever seen. I learned a lot about the development of science and relativity in particular, and he pointed out a number of subtle philosophic points I had never considered.
On the recommendations of both my Kolleginen Katarina and Diane, I read The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch. It’s certainly an entertaining read.
To be frank, I was left dissatisfied. But perhaps this was his intent, and perhaps this is the mark of true genius. I’m pretty sure that would be his explanation. (Oh. It was his explanation!)
It had to happen. On the advice of my Kolleg Thomas, I read the first two of JK Rowling’s series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. These are page turners; the lady knows how to work a hook. For me, it was a challenge to put myself in a pre-teen frame of mind, but once that was accomplished, the books were a simple thrill. And now I can’t get back to my adult frame of mind.
P. G. Drazin and R. S. Johnson’s text Solitons: an introduction. I only got through the first two chapters, and skimmed the rest, just because I got involved in other things.
The book is quite accessible to those with a general mathematics background, and the material is very engaging.
Solitons are an under-appreciated phenomenon of nonlinear waves. (That tsunami in Indonesia killed 100000, and it was a soliton!) Maybe there is some fundamental importance: in physics, we have a well-understood theory of linear waves that explains a lot—except how stuff comes to be localized, as in the case of matter. Then we have a notion of particles, which are a nice conceptualization of localization of stuff, but in practice, particles keep falling apart. In solitons is a theory of wavelike things that can be localized for long periods of time.
One misconception the book tackles right off is that solitons are rare in nature. It happens that (in some sense) most non-linear time-evolution equations exhibit soliton-like phenomena. Perhaps the real reason for this misconception is that there is so little literature on the subject.
My only literature was The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, circa 450 BC. This is a beautifully written account for any time; the presentation is remarkably balanced and seemingly modern. Or is it more that our modern prose sensibilities took form 25 centuries ago?
The tone is that of a report of the minutiae of a huge disaster. While this is interesting in itself, the window really opens on the occasions when he breaks out of his narrative to express his horror and disgust and despair over the events.
I would recommend this book to anyone with any interest in politics. The issues and arguments are amazingly familiar.
People have been pushing me to read more Salinger ever since I read Franny and Zooey. So when I was in Portland last year I visited Powell’s books, and thought enough to buy a copy of Seymour, an Introduction and Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters. Seymour’s Introduction is a bewilderingly silly, self-absorbed literary roller-coaster. I’m amazed at how he manages to integrate the point he’s making with the tone of the book. It’s a lesson in Zen archery. Since then I’ve also read The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, which, I think, is all of Salinger. Here’s my big observation: Buddy always sweats profusely when he’s just had a Seymour-related epiphany.
Perhaps in honor of his passing, I read almost all of Stephen Jay Gould’s popular books, including Dinosaur in a Haystack, Bully for Brontosaurus, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Ever Since Darwin, and Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms. I wish I had another one by my bed. I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but now it seems they will eventually run out.
I just finished a fuzzy little thing, Vinyl Cafe—unplugged by Stuart McLean, a gift from my bud, Lin Patfield. After the last book, it’s a relief, let me tell you.
Now there are two books in my life. One is yet another Emma Tennant, Queen of Stones. Another sad non-chronological tale told through the eyes of children.
The other is a recommendation of a writer named Rachel whom I met while she served time as a waitress: Vurt by Jeff Noon. Well, I must say it’s different, and very energetic.
Hilary recommended a “young adult” sci-fi, Gillian Rubinstein’s Galax-Arena. I’ll give it this: I couldn’t predict the outcome. As these things go, it’s not a happy book, and that pleased me.
I read an odd little whodunit, Kinky Friedman’s Greenwich Killing Time, that Julian sent me. Seems this guy also had some sort of band, so now I’ll have to find out what he sounds like, too.
Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi kept me company in a stinky bar. I now have little sympathy for river-dwellers whose expensive homes are swept away in a flood.
I played for a while with Catastrophe Theory by V. I. Arnol’d. I’ve spent some time with a couple of his other books, and I’ve always loved his style, from that Russian math-puzzle tradition. If you’re at all interested in geometry, give this book a whirl.
Mr. Vonnegut, who seems to be ironically still alive, has written several novels since we last met. The one I just read was Timequake. Probably not his best, but then I’ll read anything he writes. I got a few laughs out of this one, so who can complain?
I plowed through a collection of short fictions of Jorge Luis Borjes. It went at a rate of one story per bar visit. Took months. It had its moments, but I think I’m finished with Borjes.
Last year’s big novel was Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera. Took me months, but then, it’s a very broad book.
Also read J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. The characters’ dialog is beautifully quaint; there’s more going on here than you might at first expect.
Milan Kundera’s Slowness. More of the same. A simple observation is woven into a dual fantasy. I think this is also the year I read The Joke.
Over the past two years, I read almost all of Stephen Jay Gould’s popular books, including Wonderful Life, Eight Little Piggies, The Panda’s Thumb, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, and The Flamingo’s Smile. Also read rather more serious books by Gould: The Mismeasure of Man and Ontogeny and Phylogeny.
On Tali’s recommendation, I picked up The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. This is just up my aesthetic alley.
At John Kerkhoven’s insistence, I read A. R. Luria’s seminal The Man with a Shattered World, to contrast with Oliver Sacks. I however found it to be another wonderful island in a world Sacks had first shown me.
Joy shoved at me a copy of Oliver Sacks’ The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. I was thrilled, and so read An Anthropologist from Mars, A Leg to Stand On, and The Island of the Colorblind. Seems people have one of two reactions to Sacks: either wonder or horror. I’m in the first category.
Very much enjoyed Milan Kundera’s Immortality, despite some not-terribly-original literary indulgences. He’s very good at weaving a simple observation into a story.