Wordfreak by Steven Fatsus is a wonderful and funny book about Scrabble and those who play it better than anyone else. Fatsus does a great job communicating their eccentricity and they humanity. Recommended.

I recently introduced myself to Justina Robson’s work via her Quantum Gravity series (I admit, I’m a sucker for cute cyborgs and long eared elves — in the same book(s) no less). I wasn’t immediately won over but by the end of Keeping it Real I decided the Robson had some interesting ideas and a nice way of expressing them so I went looking for more. It turns out that she’s been writing for a while and has a fairly stellar reputation (awards, etc.). Since my modus operetta is to find an author and then suck the marrow from all of their books that I can find, I went on a quest. The first book to be unearthed was Silver Screen which is, I believe, her second oeuvre (which is yiddish for ooooh, that’s exciting).

Silver Screen is a challenging spin through the worlds of AI, psychology, belief and identity. Since there is no way I can do justice to the plot, I won’t even attempt it other than to say that there are wheels within tires, tires trapped in round things, and a surprising number of interesting twists. Robson manages to limn the questions of AI that are central to the human condition: i.e., what the hell is the human condition and intelligently looks for answers by showing rather than saying the ineffable. What’s even better is that she is an excellent writer. A few phrases that caught my eye:

• On coming home: “Now I knew why I stayed away so much. In my memory I could revisit the past as if it were the present, but coming here was the present with the past half-lost inside it, visibly decaying and untouchable.”

• On human mistakes (from an AI’s perspective): “You can’t help it,” it said. “You can only make deductions from what you know, and what you know is hopelessly imperfect. Looking into every assuymption you make in depth would take too long. You work on a theory system. As long as the predictions remain reasonably accurate, you don’t check.

All in all, I’d highly recommend Silver Screen for the story, the ideas and the writing.

I’m a big fan of Paul McCauley’s writing: it’s smart, it’s entertaining, and it’s grounded in real knowledge of science and biology. the Invisible Country is a collection of older short stories (i.e., pre-1996) containing shards from Fairyland, Alternate History, and Confluence universes. Though some of the stories were duds, others opened up McCauley’s vision of science and future bio-engineering possibilities and his deeply humanistic take on what it means to be sentient in this vast never-ending roil. Here McCauley is summarizing (a version of) human history:

Saint Jack’s eyes were focused on infinity; his mouth lifted in an ecstatic smile that transfigured his hollow-cheeked, stubbly face. He said in his slow, gentle voice, “You know how it was, way back when in Africa? Tribes of man-apes ate these mushrooms that grew in the shit of antelopes and buffalo. They got smarter to deal with the visions, and they needed to share the visions, too , so they invented language. Language is the mind’s only reality, and so our reality is produced by language. But while the men hunted, the women grew things, and to do that they had to keep their heads straight, and they stopped eating the mushrooms. That was the first retreat from nature, the beginning of the Fall. Then the ice came, and drove the man-apes from Africa out into Asia, where the right kind of mushrooms couldn’t be found. Ever since, we’ve been truing to get back to the garden of the mind.”

What’s not to love about that?!

I’ll close with another quote from the same story (Children of the Revolution):

The trouble with the universal unearned wage is that most people can do what they want but can’t decide what to do. Wise up and think about what you want to do for the rest of your life. You’re old enough.

Which is good advice for just about everyone!

Highly recommended for science fiction fans and humans everywhere.

Even if it’s not all true, this is a wonderful jaunt through the professional chef’s view of the world. Bourdain has a great writer’s voice and a wonderfully slanted take on his place in the universe.

your body is not a temple, it’s an amusemnet park.

’nuff said.

Highly recommended.

From Dexter Filkins’s review of Thomas E Ricks’s The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008.

That an undertaking as momentous and as costly as America’s war in Iraq could vanish so quickly from the forefront of the national consciousness does not speak well of the United States in the early twenty-first century

I’d add that the war as a whole didn’t say much about America’s national consciousness but that’s another story.

Tender to the Bone is Ruth Reichl’s first memoir dedicated to food and love and family. It’s a very nice read. (A)

Life Sentences is a mixture of memoir (fictional), mystery, and race relations set in present day Baltimore. I listened to this on tape and really enjoyed it. (B+)

I finally read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball to be engaging, entertaining and fun. I also learned a lot about baseball. (A-)

On the other hand, I found Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August to be bombastic and far too full of sports cliches and tired sentences to be worth finishing. (C-)