Month: December 2009

Lords and Ladies is the 14th Discworld book by Terry Prattchett, which is a feat in and of itself, and it’s the 4th book to focus on the Lancre coven of witches. I had initially disliked Granny Weatherwax in her first couple of books, but along with her ever present friend Nanny Ogg she has become one of my favorite inhabitants of the Disc. Lords and Ladies deals with the pending marriage of Magrat Garlick, the third member of the coven, to the king of Lancre and a simultaneous outbreak of elves. Only Prattchett’s elves aren’t of the “Fa la la la” or toy-making kind. They’re more the “take over the world and torture people to death” kind.

What’s interesting about Lords and Ladies is that it shows how Prattchett has grown at this point into being able to tell a pretty good adventure story with genuine character arcs (or in Granny Weatherwax’s case, revealing what’s already there, since she’s too stubborn to change) and at the same time being really funny. And of course the author’s signature social satire is in palce, with his taking pot shots at everything from Shakesphere’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to the feudal system to psychology to superstitions about crop circles to the whole goth culture. It’s dizzying sometimes, but often very funny. Plus it features Cassanunda, world’s second greatest dwarf lover and repairer of step ladders. Some of my favorite quotes:

“Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare.”

“Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.”

“The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.”

“In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

“And the child had a permanently runny nose and ought to be provided with a handkerchief or, failing that, a cork.

But Magrat, like this, frightened him more than the elves. It was like being charged by a sheep.

NOTE: The author of this book posted a comment here that provides some interesting context to my review and some counterpoints. It’s definitely worth noting, so click on the “comments” link below.

In The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, author Mark Barrowcliffe presents his memoir of what it was like to grow up during the 70s in Coventry, England and being utterly obsessed with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. As someone who was himself once obsessed with D&D to the point of being able to recite entire blocks of text from the Monster Manual or tell you how many level 3 spells an 8th level Magic-User could cast, this was a good enough hook for me. I’d been there, albeit about a decade later and on the other side of the Atlantic, and I wanted to compare notes.

The problem is that I’m not sure who the audience for The Elfish Gene is supposed to be. Barrowfliffe certainly details his obsession with the game, and I think that any past or current D&D player would be hard pressed NOT to identify with something from the book. Maybe it would be the way the author would show up at schoolmates’ houses awkwardly hoping for a game, or maybe how he delighted in his discovery of the area where D&D and heavy metal overlapped in a Venn diagram. Or maybe how his parents would –as only a loving if confused parent can– feign interest in his nattering about hit dice, kobolds, and +5 vorpal swords.

Likewise, Barrofcliffe does have some genuine insights about how kids see social class, what drives teenage boys to be sardonic bastards, the nature of counter-cultures, hero worship among the self-loathing, and like. It’s all very introspective and again it’s interesting to compare experiences from my own adolescence.

There are also a few really funny bits to the book, as Barrowcliffe is not without the ability to occasionally turn an amusing phrase or describe a situation so absurd that it can only be a true tale born of childhood logic. There is, for example, the time he plans to ignite a balloon full of lighter fluid in order to recreate a fireball spell, but sets his friend’s bathroom on ablaze during a test run. Or the time that he decides to evaluate his ninja abilities by jumping, practically naked, from his bed into his dirty clothes hamper, only to miscalculate things and end up knocking himself out and leaving his befuddled parents to conclude that it must have been some bizarre masturbation ritual. Because, frankly, that’s more believable than the ninja thing.

On the other hand, Barrowcliffe isn’t describing all this in the context of nostalgia. Not even the wry, “can you believe what we used to think was cool” brand of nostalgia. From the opening pages, it’s clear that he thinks that getting into D&D was a huge mistake and that if he had only chosen a different path –one populated by girls and carburetors and maybe cricket– he’d have actually been happy, well adjusted, and better off in life. In fact, he’s downright disdainful of the game and those who play it, right up to the epilogue where he makes a half-hearted attempt to join a modern day game and ends up deriding the players and literally running away from them.

According to Barrowcliffe, everyone who plays role-playing games does so because he’s a socially inept, hopelessly nerdy git. This is mostly because Barrowcliffe is (well, was) himself a socially inept, hopelessly nerdy git and he doesn’t bother to see past his own experiences. While D&D certainly attracts its share of nerds, there are many positive things the author could have said about D&D if you weren’t so bent on blaming it for his own shortcomings. It encourages reading, it develops logical reasoning, it fires the imagination, and it’s an inherently social game, just to name a few.

But there’s none of that; the treatment of the game is entirely lopsided. A more complete book would have delved more into the history of the game and how it and the author evolved over time. There would have also been more examination of the gaming subculture on a wider scale, as well as its many offshoots into other forms of entertainment. Of course, you can say that this is a memoir, and since Barrofcliffe gave up D&D for life and developed other interests, he can’t very well talk about all that, can he? And that’s fair enough. But it remains that Barrowfcliffe doesn’t understand about role-playing games or the attendant culture. He understands about being a socially retarded teenager seeking escape from life. And yes, there’s a difference.

The humongous, full title of this book by Ronald Kessler is In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect. And as the title suggests, it aims to tell the secret story of the equally secret service, gleaned by meticulous research, high quality reporting, cross-referencing each story with multiple sources, and maintaining a tone of level headed objectivity without taking sides.

Ha ha, no. Seriously. No. While it’s true that Kessler does aim to tell exciting and interesting stories about the Secret Service based on his extensive interviews with current and former Agents, what we end up with here doesn’t bear much resemblance to anything derived from sound journalism or rigorous research. Instead, the author seems most interested in taking quotes (often anonymous) from Agents (often disgruntled) that are assumed to be true without any kind of verification and usually without any kind of qualification. Think “tabloid.”

That’s bad enough but Kessler seems to be intent on wringing every bit of sensationalism he can out of the book, usually in the form of painting extreme pictures of the Presidents and other people protected by the Secret Service. So you get stories about how Jimmy Carter was aloof with the staff and disingenuous with the public, or how the Bushes sent the Agents steaks every year, and how Al Gore couldn’t stop eating cookies. Or how the appropriately named President Johnson would walk around the White House with his, um, namesake hanging out. Some of these are entertaining, but are tainted by their apocryphal nature, and Kessler’s judgmental tone.

Kessler also makes the frankly absurd mistake of thinking that I’m more interested in employee relations problems within the Secret Service than I am hearing about how they foiled assassination attempts or organize security measures. I sympathize, for example, that Agents have a hard time getting vacation time off or transfers or that their bosses are unsympathetic about all the overtime they’re working. But I really don’t want to read a whole book about it and I really don’t want you to try to convince me of how terrible this all is. The author goes to great lengths to rail against the Secret Service management about all this and more, and frankly it’s just not interesting and the bombastic tone of it all is pretty off putting.

The book does have some interesting bits, like an overview of the methods the Agents use to profile threats, the crazy hardware powering the Presidential motorcade, and a few good stories about catching would-be assassins. But those are buried under tedious discussions of stuff I don’t care about and an annoying, judgmental tone that relies on thin evidence and hearsay.

I picked up this “urban fantasy” novel by Neil Gaiman based on the fact that I had enjoyed the author’s The Graveyard Book earlier this year, as well as some of his other stuff. Turns out it’s the novelization of a BBC TV miniseries from the 1990s, which is kind of odd. Both the show and the book tell the story of Richard Mayhew, your typical sad sack archetype that is put upon by his hag of a fiance and run down by his demanding yet unfulfilling job. In a substantially darker inversion of the classic Cinderella story, Richard is yanked from that life when he stops to help a young girl and is taken away to “London Below,” a magical, shadowy world that exists in just the place its name suggests it would. Aside from Gaiman’s doing his thing with crazy world building and parading a mess of (supposedly) colorful characters across the pages, the rest of the book involves Richard’s growing a backbone and emerging from his ordeals as a much stronger and wiser version of the dope we met in the opening pages.

While I like the idea of urban fantasy that doesn’t center on vampires and I appreciate Gaiman’s substantial imagination, I was mostly “meh” throughout Neverwhere. I think the main problem is that the world of London Below lacks any kind of internal consistency that usually makes fantasy world building so interesting. Stuff just happens transparently because Gaiman needs it to happen to advance the plot, regardless of whether it makes sense. A prime example is the “Markets” which are migrating nightly bazaars at which our heroes can acquire various macuffins and plot devices. The Markets are in a different place each night and apparently require a dangerous trip to reach, yet the logistics of everyone’s knowing where the Markets are and how so many people brave and survive the trip is explicitly handwaived away by the characters. It all feels a bit lazy and obviously contrived, which pulls the reader out of the world. London Below just isn’t believable, even in the extremely generous context of a fantasy world.

Other than that, the book isn’t badly written for a piece of light fantasy that mostly eschews the typical tropes and cliches. And I enjoyed how Gaiman got playful with his language once in a while, as in describing how one character chose for his home the top of a tower that he found unbearably ugly, simply for the fact that at the top of the tower was the only place in London that you couldn’t see much of the tower itself. So it’s easy and occasionally fun reading, though I think Gaiman has definitely done better.

I enjoyed Levitt and Dubner’s 2005 book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything quite a bit, so I was excited to hear that the duo had collaborated on this sequel. You can draw a fairly straight line from economics to the field of behavioral economics, and from there it’s just a quick jaunt over to psychology in general, so what I like most about the books are that they use model building and data analysis techniques to answer questions that are at least put in different contexts and at most completely off the wall. Either way, it’s interesting.

Questions addressed in Superfreakonomics include why terrorists should buy life insurance (answer: it helps them circumvent computer software used in profiling), how hookers are like department store Santas (answer: both work more hours during holidays), what killed so many babies and mothers in Victorian hospitals (answer: doctors who didn’t wash up after going elbow deep in cadavers), whether it’s safer to drive drunk or walk drunk (answer: drive drunk), whether pimps or realtors are more valuable to their constituents (answer: pimps), how much car seats improve child passenger safety over regular seatbelts (answer: not much at all), and a lot more. There’s also some dubious stuff on global warming that’s been discussed elsewhere, as well as a hilarious anecdote about the invention of monkey prostitution.

Of course, it’s not just the answers that are interesting, but the process that the authors walk you through to get to them from their initial conjecture. The book is entertaining and well written, with a tone that does that magical trick of straddling the line between being informal and scientific. Levitt and Dubner use the tools of science in general and economics in specific to tackle these unconventional topics, and I enjoyed watching them go at it and do their best to surprise me with what they found. Occasionally they get a little too bombastic (comparing Al Gore to the high priest of a church full of climate change zealots comes to mind) but in general it’s really fun and it gives you no end of little factoids to throw out at your next cocktail party.