Reading Freely

Books this Update:

• In the Presence of Mine Enemies, Harry Turtledove
• Only Begotten Daughter, James Morrow
• Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman

I began with a return to Turtledove. While I do plan to return to his Colonization series, I read instead this week a standalone book set in the near future, but one shaped by a past different from ours: a past in which the United States remained neutral during the Second World War. Its lack of economic and military aid to Britain and the Soviet Union led to their respective collapses and the domination of the eastern hemisphere by Nazi German, the Italian Empire, and the Imperial Japan. (Want to guess why they own so much sand? There’s black stuff under it.) The United States was attacked a “generation” later with nuclear missiles and essentially knocked out, although we’re given the impression that it was attacked out of fear of its economic potential, not because its leaders were starry-eyed idealists who wanted to rid the world of tyranny and oppression and so forth.

Turtledove likes to lift stories from the history books and retell them in different contexts. In his “Southern Victory” timeline, for instance, we see military campaigns that were in reality executed in 1864 being perpetuated in 1944. Instead of the Holocaust happening in Europe, it happened in the deep south. Turtledove does this again in In the Presence of Mine Enemies, telling the story of the dramatic political change of the late 1980s in the Soviet Union, changing the years and making the evolving political entity the Greater German Reich instead of the SSSR. Within that context, Turtledove uses his traditional viewpoint method to tell the story of various people as they react to these changes. What is particular about these people is that they are all Jews, their genealogies having been forged. It’s an interesting book and has become one of my favorite Turtledove works.

Next I read a work of fantasy in Only Begotten Daughter. This book begins with the idea that a being resembling the Judeo-Christian god magicked up a kid in 1974. Julie Katz, who refers to herself as Jesus’ half-sister, struggles with her nature, the nature of God, and the question of evil while being pursued by Satan and attacked by Christian fundamentalists as the Antichrist. Along the way, she accidentally creates a religion around empiricism and visits Jesus in Hell, where he is occupied in soothing the pains of the damned. The conversation between he and Julie about his life on Earth and the consequences thereof is one of the most interesting parts of the book. The plot is intriguing and the characterization good, but the book was far too dark for my tastes.

Lastly, I read Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. In the book, the authors assert that human beings — while pretending to be rational — are really not rational at all, and in fact fall into irrational traps with disturbing ease. They use accounts of seemingly rational people behaving in irrational (and all-too familiar) ways to point out irrational traps. These aren’t obvious things like not questioning beliefs or willfully believing in things with no regard to the evidence, but are rather subtle misdirections, like taking a wrong turn in the house of mirrors. The book is very informal, very readable, and begs me to recommend it — so I do.

Next Update:

• Dark Rendezvous, Sean Stewart
  
• Demon in my View, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
• Stoic Warriors, Nancy Sherman
  
• The Titan’s Curse, Rick Riordian

Books this Week:

• Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordian
• Darth Bane: Rule of Two, Drew Karpyshyn
• Atom, Isaac Asimov

My reading this week was fairly light, as I began preparations to return to school — and did, on Friday. I began by continuing in Rick Riordian’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series with The Sea of Monsters. In the last book, we were introduced to Percy Jackson, a Hero in the Greek sense: the offspring of a Greek god (in his case, Poseidon) and a mortal. Percy, becoming aware of his status as a hero after repeatedly being attacked by monsters and rescued by a centaur and a satyr, comes to Camp Half-Blood, a sanctuary for demigods like himself. Owing to who his father was, young Percy was caught up in divine politics between the various gods of the Pantheon, giving us our story last time: the thunder of Zeus was stolen, and He blamed it on Poseidon, while both suspect that Hades was orchestrating a frame-up job. In the last book, Percy discovered that the current cause of conflict between the Big Three was really caused by the Titans stirring. The Titans, for those who know little of Greek mythology, were once in charge. Zeus felt his father Kronos was doing a poor job of things, though, so He threw Kronos and all of his siblings into various pits. Well, after a few thousand years of that, Kronos is bored and wants to rise to resume control over the Cosmos (well, Earth) and destroy western civilization, which in his opinion is overrated. In The Sea of Monsters, Kronos‘ attempt to rise is on-going, and again impacting Greek politics. Percy, Annabeth, and the daughter of Ares are tasked with reclaiming the Golden Fleece in hopes of protecting Camp Halfblood while at the same time rescuing Percy’s satyr friend Grover from…getting married? The story is light and fun. This isn’t as good as the first book: there’s less wry commentary on humanity, for instance. It’s still fun, though.

Continuing with the idea of evil rising, I read Darth Bane: Rule of Two — the second in an unfinished Darth Bane trilogy. Last time we were introduced to Darth Bane, a miner turned Sith soldier who attracts the attention of Sith lords and is trained in the Dark Side by the Brotherhood of Darkness. He was repulsed by what he saw as the Brotherhood’s betrayal of Sith ideals and sought his own path. His path happened to involve finding a way to destroy all of heretical Sith and restore the old ways. His quest to realie the fullness of the Dark Side took him to various places, ending on a planet where an army of Jedi and an army of Sith were struggling against one another. The first book ended shortly after he completed his first mission and after he began to rebuild the Sith Order. Rule of Two continues from there, and documents his growth as a Sith Master, his apprentice’s growth in the Dark Side, and Jedi/Republic politics. This book was quite good. It was written in only a few months, but I couldn’t tell. It was a riveting story and I recommend it — to Star Wars fans at the very least.

Lastly, I read Isaac Asimov’s Atom. I wanted to read a little science, and my eyes fell upon — as luck would have it — Atom by Isaac Asimov. The book is an informal introduction to the world of subatomic physics, but written with a historical perspective. Asimov does not simply introduce the reader to electrons and quarks and muons and so on: he tells the history of scientific research dealing with subatomic physics and links it to studies in other fields (electromagnetism and planetary science, for instance). Even though he introduces a historical narrative into it, he is still able to explain the significance of various concepts. It is both informal and detailed. Although Asimov’s style is clear and he does a good job of explaining matters, my concentration kept leaping to my impending return to university life, and so I did not give this book the attention it deserved. I will return to it, I think.

Next Week:

• In the Presence of Mine Enemies Harry Turtledove
• Only Begotten Daughter, James Morrow
• Sway: the Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, Ori Brafman