Balls Jr.: The Unreviewed Masses

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Pamela Britton - On the Edge
Anne Bronte - Agnes Grey
Clifford Chase - Winkie
David Cordingly - Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates
Richard P. Feynman - Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night
Barbara Garson - Money Makes the World Go Around
Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
Malcolm Gladwell - Blink
Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point
Linda Greenhouse - Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey
John Knowles - A Separate Peace
Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Edward Luce - In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
Molière - The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays
Frances Newman - The Hard-Boiled Virgin
Terry Pratchett - Wyrd Sisters
Philip Pullman - The Golden Compass
Gretchen Rubin - The Happiness Project
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Laura Wright - Front Page Engagement
Robert Wright - The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

Balls Jr. #26: Ubik - Philip Dick

FYI, I didn't put the "K." in his name on purpose. I like to upend people's expectations. Is your mind blown?

Similar to Asimov's Foundation series, Ubik occurs in a distant future in which regular people can travel to the moon, rich people can be cryogenically preserved after death in a sort of dreamy half-life, and people with psychic powers are so common that there are entire companies devoted to "anti-psyonic"services. Yes, the distant future of... 1992. Heh. Oh, sci-fi writers from the 60s. Adorable.

Ubik is a great, mind-twisty story about one of the above anti-psy organizations run by Glen Runciter and his half-wife Ella. Joe Chip works for Runciter as an anti-talent scout, and he's quickly introduced to Pat Conley, who has the ability to change events that happened in the past. She doesn't actually go back in time herself, she just thinks really hard about something, and then things that happened have now happened a different way. Conley is brought along with 11 other anti-psys to a top-secret factory on the moon to secure the place from psyonic activity for mega-rich dude Stanton Mick.

As soon as the group lands on the moon, Runciter and Joe Chip included since it's such a big job, a floating person-bomb explodes and kills Runciter. Everyone else drags him into their ship and takes him back to Earth, to the same facility that houses his wife Ella, so that he can be placed in half-life with her. That's when things start getting weird. Chip orders coffee and the cream comes out sour. Cigarettes bought in a store crumble and disintegrate. Modern elevators switch back and forth between their usual form and an old-school form, complete with elevator attendants. And Chip wakes up the next morning in a hotel room, with a disintegrated lady in his closet.

Runciter starts showing up everywhere - on coins, on bathroom stalls, on TV. There are also constant instructions to find and apply something called Ubik, which is apparently the only way to keep from dying. Runciter's trying to tell them something, but nobody can figure out what it all means. Did he have a psy predict the future for him, and he knew this was going to happen, so he planned all of the messages ahead of time?

Time keeps rolling backwards, with airplanes reverting to biplanes, and coin-operated doors reverting to knob-operated doors. (Some of these changes can be appreciated by the perpetually broke Chip.) People keep breaking apart from the group and disintegrating. Suspicion turns to Pat Conley, with her ability to change the past. Is she messing with everyone? If so, why?

Their world stops regressing in the 1930s, and Chip finally discovers that he's in half-life himself, as is everyone else. Runciter is the only person who survived the explosion on the moon, and he's been trying to reach the half-lifers as best as he can, which is why he kept showing up on TV, telling them that they are dead. There is a young boy in half-life, Jory Miller, who died in the 30s and steals people's remaining years. He's been trying to keep the group's mental environment consistent enough to keep their minds fresh for eatin', but it's hard for him to keep the last environment in which he lived from coming through.

Ella finds Chip and tells him all about Ubik, and how it will protect him from Jory. Out in the real world, Runciter's trying to have his wife and employees moved to a secure part of the facility so that Jory can't eat their brains. What a considerate employer. The book ends with Joe Chip appearing on some of his coins.

If I had to describe Ubik for its Match.com profile, I would say it has a good sense of humor, enjoys long walks on the beach because there's no technology available for reversion, but perhaps takes too much pleasure in mind games. Fun for a multiple-night stand, sure, but do not put a ring on that finger.

Balls Jr. #25: Silas Marner - George Eliot

The titular Marner is a lonely old weaver, spurning all of his neighbors in the town of Raveloe because he has never gotten over the betrayal of his best friend and fiancé when he was a young adult living in an ultra-religious community in England. It ended up with him being accused of stealing from the group's funds and kicked out. Now all he cares about is weaving and gathering that comforting yellow gold. His gold is stolen from him by Dunstan Cass, a prominent family's asshole kid who's in debt, for a change, and runs off with the money. The whole town rallies around Marner, who they feel empathetic towards for the first time since he came to town, but he is inconsolable. That money was literally the only thing he lived for, and when it was taken from him, it left a giant pit in his stomach.

Then, one day, he finds a kid in front of his fireplace. The baby has beautiful golden locks, and at first Marner, with his bad eyes, believes it to be his gold, returned to him. Yeah, it's not, it's a baby who wandered away from her drugged-out mom in the snow, but it's close enough for Marner! He keeps the child, since nobody's going to come to claim it. The mother, who died asleep in the snow, had the child by Dunstan's older, upstanding brother, Godfrey. Godfrey is trying to get into Nancy's pants, and he doesn't want to make it known to the Raveloe world that the kid is his, and that he was actually married to the kid's mother, Molly.

The years pass, and the kid, Eppie, brings Marner a long-lost sense of purpose and joy in life. Marner's making small-talk with the neighbors, making daisy chains with Eppie, and happily weaving the hours away. Godfrey is in a childless marriage to Nancy, and when Dunstan's skeleton is discovered with Marner's gold, he wises up and comes clean to her. They both go to Silas and ask to have Eppie back. Yeeahhh... It's been a long time. She's a teenager already. She gets to decide, and she stays with her "real" father, the one who raised her. Even when she gets married, she doesn't leave her father, but has her husband move into Silas's house.

Although Silas Marner was written in the 1860s, it was set in the beginning of that century, in the days when one weaver with a loom in his cottage produced enough goods for everyone in a town. It's a charming, compact little story that I've treated horribly in this review due to my tiredness and cramped hand making me not treat it as seriously as I should. There's also social commentary! Organized religion does not come out smelling like roses, for one thing.

Overall, I say it's deserving of its classic status. (It is a classic, right? I assumed it was, but that might've just been because of the author.)

Balls Jr. #24: Foundation's Edge - Isaac Asimov

Ennngh. Between eight reviews and countless games of FreeCell, my right hand is cramping up badly. This is not an unfamiliar feeling for me, but it usually results from more fun activities. I have a goal to write at least half of the reviews, though, which means two more after this. Ennnnnnngggggghhhh.

Anyways, Foundation's Edge is the fourth book in the Foundation Trilogy, and things start getting really crazy in this one. All of a sudden there's this guy, Janov Pelorat, who's obsessed with finding the ancient "Earth," and Golan Trevize, who's obsessed with finding the Second Foundation. That's right, not everybody was fooled by their epic game of "if they know that we know and we can make them think that they know that we don't know..." Galactic affairs have been running too smoothly, and adhering too closely to Seldon's plan, to make sense, unless there was still an outside power, like the Second Foundation, controlling events.

The Mayor of Terminus, Harla Branno, sticks Trevize and Pelorat together in a state-of-the-art ship, and while publicly announcing Trevize's exile for being a shit-stirrer, secretly instructs them to search for the Second Foundation. That's right, Branno's no fool, either. She knows that they know that they knew...

She's also no fool in another respect - she can't trust Trevize to follow her orders, or to report back to her if he does find the Second Foundation, so she sends his ex-friend and betrayer, Compor, to spy on him and Pelorat. Pelorat tells Trevize about his life-long search for Earth, how it was the first planet, the original whence came all of humanity, and Trevize realizes that, hey, maybe that's where the Second Foundation is! So off to locate Earth they go.

In the Second Foundation on Trantor, which we finally get a clear picture of, Stor Gendibal is a mentalic shit-stirrer. He's examined the equations comprising the Seldon Plan, and he's looked at how off-track they were during the years of the Mule, and he's seen how closely and faithfully the equations have matched the original Plan since after the Mule's death. Suspicious. Things are proceeding too well, even taking into account the Second Foundation's attempts to control events. There must be a-NOTHER agency, even more super-secret, and even more powerful, controlling galactic affairs with better results than the Second Foundation alone could muster. This isn't good for them, because they don't want another group to swoop in at the end of the thousand years and take credit and control of the budding Galactic Empire: Part Deux.

Nobody believes Gendibal until one of the Trantorian farm-ladies is shown to have had her mind tampered with with such delicacy that none of the Second Foundationers could have possibly done it. It had to be the work of a group much more advanced in mentalics. Off Gendibal and Novi, the farm-lady, go, to find this group of "Anti-Mules," and also to find Trevize and throw him off the scent of the real Second Foundation. A Foundationer's work is never done.

Trevize and Pelorat are brushing up on their local legends about a mysterious planet in the Sayshell region. The people there call it Gaia, which is an alternate name for Earth in many myths, but they try not to think about it, because first of all it's probably not real anyways, and second of all, Gaia keeps crushing every military force that comes near it. That won't deter our intrepid travelers, and Trevize and Pelorat head off to Gaia, with Branno and Foundation warships on their trail (because of Compor's spying), as well as Gendibal (also because of Compor's spying. Surprise! He's a Second Foundation scout.).

Gaia turns out to be a funky, inter-connected world full of people, plants, and inanimate objects that share a consciousness. They have the ability to control and read their own and other people's thoughts, and they act like hippies in a commune, with even the walls having feelings. Who knows if this is "Earth," but it's definitely something. Their tour guide, Bliss, tells Trevize that Gaia has been manipulating events for years, all so that he would end up on the planet and be able to decide something once and for all: the future of the universe. Trevize has always had a unique ability to "know" the right choice, and Gaia wants him to use it to choose who should run the galaxy, whether it's the First Foundation, with its military might, the Second Foundation, with its mental control, or Gaia, with its... hippie superconsciousness thing.

Gendibal makes his decision, and everyone leaves happy, except for Trevize, who suspects that his pure quick-thinking might have been influenced in some way. I think he's still going to go search for Earth in the fifth of the trilogy. I want to read it.

Balls Jr. #23: Second Foundation - Isaac Asimov

Whew. OK. The Mule went back to his empire, which includes the First Foundation on Terminus, but he stops expanding his reach. He's still wary of the Second Foundation, and he wants to find and crush them before making any more risky moves. He sends out expedition after expedition in search of it. All he has to go on are Seldon's words, saying that he was going to establish two foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy, so spaceships from Terminus keep going across the diameter of the circular galaxy. The search we care about has Han Pritcher at the helm, accompanied by Bail Channis, who the Mule thought might be a Second Foundationer, and thus might actually make the search successful. Han Pritcher was helping Bayta Darell and Hubby to fight the Mule in the last book, but after an assassination attempt, the Mule converted him to a loyal follower.

We see some brief snippets of a "First Speaker" of the Second Foundation, talking about how they're going to let the Mule find them, on their terms. It turns out that Bail Channis is indeed a Second Foundation man, and through an ever-escalating series of "but if he knows that we know that he knows that we know that he knows," the Second Foundation finally gets the upper-hand over the Mule, and alters his mind so that he doesn't want to find them anymore. All the Mule wants to do now is go home and play nice. He does that, and when he dies, the empire essentially dies with him, since he's sterile (hence "The Mule"), and the empire was one giant cult of personality that could not survive without the personality.

Years later, Bayta Darell's granddaughter, Arkady, gets herself all mixed up in things, and she plays a crucial role in helping the Foundation find and destroy its red-headed step-sister. She travels all over the galaxy, to Trantor and back, and while on Trantor, realizes that a circle has no end, and if you want to find the opposite end of a circle, you'll end up back where you started. In other words, the Second Foundation is on Terminus!

Foundation leaders root out and disable the group of Second Foundationers that were living on Terminus, and consider the case closed. The First Foundation is once again the only Foundation, and it is well on its way to ruling the galaxy.

Unluckily for them, the Foundation did not realize they were up against the champions and still undefeated masters of "but if they know that we know that they know." It was ALL a trick. Arkady's mind had been tampered with by the Second Foundation at her birth, and planetary events were delicately maneuvered for years to end up with her bringing the untruth to the Foundation and making them think that they had discovered the real hiding place of the Second Foundation.

Where is it REALLY?! On Trantor. Seldon had told the truth. Trantor was both the social opposite of Terminus (center of administration vs. uninhabited, ignored planet), and the physical opposite (in a spiral, the line ends in the middle of the circular rim). The Second Foundationers, with their myopic focus on keeping the Seldon Plan runnig properly, had needed to do something drastic to prevent destruction by the Mule, which brought them into the open. For the Plan to work, though, nobody could know that there were Plan Monitors, keeping everything on track. Nobody likes to think that they don't have free will. So they sacrificed dozens of their men to ensure that the First Foundationers would be convinced that they were free of the Second Foundation, once and for all.

Balls Jr. #22: Foundation and Empire - Isaac Asimov

We left our spunky little Foundation steadily gaining in regional power, but in the context of the larger galaxy, that power is confined to a few barbaric, outlying planets that nobody gives a whiff about anyways. The Galactic Empire is still technically in existence, although outer planets all over are declaring independence and slacking off on their taxes, and the empire's power is being eaten away at. Trantor is still technically in control of the galaxy's tax forms.

Now, when writing about a bunch of books in a row, I can't really discuss 2-4 without first talking about what happened in 1-3, so these reviews are not a good thing to read if you don't want to know what happens.

Part One: Yadda, Yadda, Yadda

Bel Riose, one of the emperor's generals, does not like the threat, small though it is now, that the Foundation poses to the empire, and he decides to go rogue and attack it. The emperor finds out and believes Riose to be a bigger threat to the empire than some backwaters planet, and has him executed. The people of Terminus grow steadily complacent, putting blind faith in the Seldon Plan, and thinking that their power will inevitably grow and grow according to plan. They forget that the early Seldon Crises were averted not because of destiny, but because key people noticed the upcoming threats and took decisive action to prevent ruination.

Part Two: The Mule!

100 years later. Trantor's been sacked, the Galactic Empire is like cosmic dust in the wind, the Foundation is largest Galactic power, all because of their economic reach (no invasions of planets for them!), and the Seldon Crisis that was foreseen (a bunch of rich trading planets revolt against the Foundation and try to secede) is ignored because of a much larger, unforeseen threat: THE MULE!

The Mule is highly secretive - nobody knows his real name, almost nobody has ever seen him, but the rumors abound. Rumors of his massive strength, and fire-eyes, and so on. The reality is that his strength comes from his mind: he can reach into people's minds and permanently adjust their emotions and loyalties so that they're more conducive to the Mule's tastes, which could entail loving him, fearing him, feeling helpless in the face of his attack, etc.

He uses this unique, freak ability to quickly climb to power in planets near Terminus, and plans to face off against the Foundation. The men in charge assume that this is yet another Seldon Crisis (yaaawn) and that one of Seldon's patented videotapes/holograms will appear and tell them exactly what to do to beat the Mule. Instead, Seldon pops up and warns them about the secessionary trading planets. Oh shit.

Meanwhile, on those trading planets, Toran and Bayta Darell sneak over to Kalgan, where the Mule has set himself up real nice, and do some spying. With the help of Han Pritcher, an insubordinate Foundation captain, they leave the planet in haste, and harboring a fugitive: the Mule's jester, Magnifico Gigantico. He hasn't done anything wrong, really, he just wanted to escape the Mule's vicious grasp. They pick up another guy on the way, Ebling Mis, who's a psychologist with the Foundation, and they all go off searching for the Second Foundation.

Hari Seldon had talked about two foundations back in the days when he was alive, the second being formed "at star's end," but hundreds of years of searching had proved futile, and everybody assumed Seldon was talking crazy, or trying to mislead certain people, or something else deviously clever. These guys figure that if they have a shot at finding the answer to the Second Foundation riddle, they should go to the giant library on Trantor, which was the only part of the planet that was left untouched in the sack by barbarian hordes (students at the university protected it), and is still the largest storehouse of galactic knowledge. The Second Foundation might be further along in their development of physical weapons, or they might have other weapons that could be used against the Mule's unique mental powers. Last hope for the universe, and all that.

Mis puts his nose to the grindstone when they get to the library, becoming completely focused on trying to figure out what Seldon could have meant, and where the Second Foundation could be located. He loses hair, he loses weight, and finally, finally, he figures it out. He's literally on his deathbed when he calls in the Darells (Magnifico was already with him, having been his helper) and tells them the good news. He opens his mouth to announce the location and BAM! Bayta shoots his fucking head off.

She has her reasons. She realized that Magnifico, the sad clown, was actually the Mule, who was using them both to gain access to broad swaths of people to be influenced and to find out where the Second Foundation was so he could destroy it. When Bayta figured this out, she knew that at all costs, the Mule could not find out what Mis had discovered. So she killed him dead. (He was dying anyways, because the Mule has placed so much mental pressure on him.) The Mule goes back to his empire in which all of his subjects have been made to believe that they love him, and Bayta and whatshisface go... do something.

The upshot is that they, and we, the readers, know that Second Foundation does exist, and instead of building political, scientific, and economic power, it was staffed with psychohistorians and tasked with studying "mentalics," i.e., what the Mule has innate control over.

Balls Jr. #21: Foundation - Isaac Asimov

I was halfway through Foundation, the first in a seminal sci-fi trilogy/series, when I told my boyfriend, from whom I'd borrowed the book, that I wasn't getting into it. It wasn't bad, I just wasn't invested. He advised me to keep going until the end, because a lot of people have had the same complaint and end up flying through the rest of the books. I trusted him and kept going (not that I had a choice anyways, in this contest), and wouldn't you know it, he was right! I finished this one quickly and went right on to the second, third, and fourth entries in the Foundation Trilogy.

Hari Seldon is A Man with A Plan. Seldon is the pioneer of the field of psychohistory, which applies math to large-scale social events, allowing him to predict the future of human society with gigantic probabilistic equations. He is living far in the future, after humans have colonized millions of planets across the Milky Way Galaxy, space travel is common via hyperspace, Earth is considered a myth if considered at all, and the planet Trantor is the administrative seat of the Galactic Empire. Seldon predicts the downfall of the Empire, and the approximately 30,000 years of chaos, internecine war, intellectual darkness, and suffering that will ensue if drastic steps aren't taken to shorten the time before a new empire will unite the squabbling planets.

To bring about a new empire after only 1,000 years, Seldon sets up what is ostensibly a research center ("The Foundation") with the task of writing the Encyclopedia Galactica on the isolated planet Terminus, but his real reason is to have Terminus become the densest concentration of scientific knowledge in the universe after the deterioration of Trantor. With the heads of The Foundation firmly tasked with the singular goal of completing the Encyclopedia, and their collective scientific heads buried in that quest, Terminus has no way to get out invasion by one or other of the nearby planets who want to take it over.

No way, that is, until the mayor of the capital city, Salvor Hardin, screws science and does some realpolitik, maneuvering a peaceful solution to the crisis. The Seldon Crisis, as it turns out, was predicted by Seldon, and the age of Mayors begins, ending the sham rule of the Encyclopedists. A Seldon Crisis is a point in time, predicted by Hari, in which his plan could go off the rails. If a successful solution isn't found to any of the Crises, the thousand-year plan might fail, and the tens of thousands of years of barbarism might come to pass.

Terminus's superior knowledge of things like nuclear power, and free sharing of that knowledge to neighboring planets, allows them to slowly but surely gain power and influence by making themselves economically invaluable. In time, more Seldon Crises pop up, and each one is averted and results in a new ruling class (Traders, and then Merchant Princes). The first book covers fewer than 200 years after the Foundation is established, though, and Seldon knew that there was a small chance that something would go wrong that early in the game. But the chances increase the further in the future we go. Dun dun DUNNNNN!

Balls Jr. #20: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - Douglas Adams

Dirk Gently (of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) becomes embroiled in a big imbroglio after arriving holistically late for a detective appointment with a record industry man who wanted protection from an alleged monster with a scythe that was allegedly stalking him because of a blood contract. Or something. Dirk took his claim lightly and wasn't listening too hard, which backfires when he stumbles upon a crime scene centered around the decapitated record industry man. He was found in a sealed room, head spinning on a turntable, and nobody can figure out how the hell he died without the killer remaining in the room with him. The resulting guilty conscience gives Dirk just the push he needs to take his job seriously, and he sets out to detective his way into a goddamn answer!

Airport counters explode, train stations turn into godly meeting places, calculators give wildly unhelpful answers ("a suffusion of yellow"), Thor, Norse god of thunder and my college-era wooden penis, throws temper tantrums, a professional couple makes contracts on Odin's behalf, an eagle that is not really an eagle throws a temper tantrum in Dirk's apartment, and a filthy, filthy fridge saves the day.

Similar to Gaiman's American Gods, gods have been created because of people's belief in them, but when people stop believing, they don't vanish, they just sort of hang out, and mostly get poor. No resume and no easily described skills* = no job prospects. Gods were not designed for the modern world, alas.

If you loved Adams' Hitchhiker's, you will probably like this book. If you only liked the superior series, you're not missing much by skipping this one. I haven't read any other Dirk Gently novels, but I also don't have much desire to do so. It was funnier in concept than in execution.

*I fly on a hammer!

Balls Jr. #19: On Human Nature - E. O. Wilson

On Human Nature won a Pulitzer, and the author teaches biology at Harvard, so you know this has gotta be good. It discusses and elaborates aspects of sociobiology, which is the application of Darwinian evolutionary theory to social behavior in humans and other animals, although humans are obviously the focus in this book. Wilson is generally considered the main popularizer of sociobiology (he literally wrote the book), but the field became extremely controversial when it was co-opted by Social Darwinists and tainted by accusations of eugenics-type goals. The main idea behind sociobiology is that social behaviors have been acted upon by evolution, not just physical traits. It doesn't sound so controversial, but this requires the following assumptions: that some behavioral traits are affected by genetics and are inheritable, and that these traits conferred some adaptive advantage to the people who expressed them in the environment in which humans evolved.

GENETIC DETERMINISM, Y'ALL, OMG. Are people slaves to their genes? Does that mean that people with certain genetic combinations are either doomed to a life of crime or blessed with a life of high-achievement? Does that mean we can't punish criminals? Is there no free will? What role does the environment play? What if people start designing their babies and we end up in a real-life version of Gattaca? I'm going to ignore the controversy, partly because I'm on a time crunch, and partly because I don't think determinism (genetic and environmental) is necessarily a "bad" thing, or necessarily untrue. It's a fascinating debate, though, and a book I finished a few days ago, The Moral Animal, goes into these issues near the end. If anyone's interested, have at it.

In On Human Nature, Wilson focuses on certain universal human traits that might have been "selected" by evolution, like altruism, the use of sex for pleasure, aggression, and belief in religion, and discusses how they might have first emerged and then served some kind of advantage. It's easy to imagine how aggression could have helped early humans, but what about altruism? How is doing something good for someone else going to help you, and why would that trait even pop up in the first place? One answer is the theory of kin selection. If you look at evolution from the point of genes, not organisms, then it's clearer to see that genes predisposing organisms to help close family members would easily flourish.

There is also discussion of larger scientific issues, like the concept of disciplines and anti-disciplines. An example would be the discipline of chemistry and it's anti-discipline, physics. Physics provides its own governing rules for how matter acts, but once you get up to the level of chemistry and start studying chemical reactions and such, you cannot rely on the rules of physics alone. Chemistry needs to create its own rules (and it has). Go one level above chemistry, and you get biology. Biology and its anti-discipline, chemistry, have been merged into a distinct field of study, biochemistry, that looks at the effects of chemical interactions on organisms. Wilson believes that biology should, and will, serve as the anti-discipline for the social sciences, with a merging of the fields to create distinct new fields like biochemistry. This merging would create a more solid foundation for social theories that can use biology as a springboard. He makes clear, though, that this would not "reduce" social science to "mere" biology, the same way that biochemistry does not "reduce" biology to "mere" chemistry.

I am a sucker for popular science books, and I have a discipline crush on evolution, so this book was right up my alley. Well-written, influential, controversial - who could ask for more? (If you do ask for more, though, I won't blame you, since that's just your genes talking.)

Balls Jr. #18: The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse

One of the earlier Jeeves and Wooster novels, The Code of the Woosters involves 1) Bertie's Aunt Dahlia wanting him to sneer at a cow-creamer that's for sale so her husband can haggle the price down, 2) Sit Watkyn, a retired magistrate who once had Bertie hauled in front of him for a mistaken case of purse-snatching, and who gets to the cow-creamer first, 3) Bertie accidentally stealing Sir Watkyn's umbrella, 4) a broken engagement between Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Bassett, the latter to whom Bertie was once accidentally engaged, 5) Stiffy Byng, Sir Watkyn's niece who wants Bertie to help her marry his old friend Stinker Pinker, 6) a Very Dangerous Notebook that mustn't ever leave Gussie's side, 7) Anatole, a gastronomical wonder, and 8) Roderick Spode, a "big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces."

Bertie is tasked with fixing everybody's problems, which in turn means Jeeves is tasked with fixing everybody's problems, which is no easy feat, since every person at Totleigh Towers has multiple conflicting opinions of who should marry whom, and and who should own which cow creamer, and so on and so forth. The Very Dangerous Notebook gets used as a bargaining chip by almost everybody after it inevitably leaves Gussie's side. Everything goes wrong, as everything must, before everything gets sorted out, and Jeeves even gets to go on a cruise around the world by the end. Classic, funny Jeeves and Wooster story.

Balls Jr. #17: Mort - Terry Pratchett

Yes, another Pratchett. And I still have one more to review after this. The titular (hee) Mort goes to market on Apprentice Day to be picked for an apprenticeship in meat-pie-selling or cobbling or assasinning or another of Ankh-Morpork's varied professions. Instead, the awkward and gangly young man is completely ignored and is about to give up hope and go home when Death Comes For Him. To be his apprentice. Mort is not overjoyed about this, but Death can be quite persuasive, and so Mort is off to Death's home in another dimension. He meets Death's adopted daughter, Ysabell, and right-hand man, Albert, and starts learning about Death's profession.

At first Mort is doing menial and manual labor, like shoveling poop, but Death gradually piles on more responsibilities as he starts enjoying time off for the first time in his non-life. He visits the living world more and more often, becoming more human and less Death-y in the process, while Mort slowly grows into the role and personality of Death, including the ability to walk through walls, which is more creepy than fun. When it comes time for a princess to die, though, Mort ignores the cardinal rule of reaping ("Don't save anyone's life or you will cause reality itself to break apart and need to repair itself. Foolio.") and saves her life.

This causes quite a stir with reality, as it inevitably breaks apart, and all sorts of shenanigans ensue. In the end, though, reality sorts itself out (it wasn't born yesterday, after all, and has done this before), and everyone ends up in their more-or-less rightful places. Very funny, and I always love getting a chance to spend more time with Pratchett's Death. He's just so wonderfully non-human and human at the same time, obviously separate from life and humanity, but fascinated by humans. He reminds me a little bit of the Doctor in that respect.

Mort is still no Small Gods, but it's definitely one of the better Discworld stories I've read.

Balls Jr. #16: Programming the Universe - Seth Lloyd

Seth Lloyd is a Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering at MIT, as well as the first creator of a technologically feasible design for a working quantum computer. In Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos, he explains how he came to believe the premise of this book - namely, that the universe is one gigantic quantum computer. The universe is made of bits, the smallest possible unit of information, and everything in the universe registers information, whether it's a molecule, an atom, a quark, etc. Every time something in the universe interacts with something else, those bits are altered, and the universe processes that information. The universe computes, in other words. Since the bits are governed by the laws of quantum-mechanics, the universe is a quantum computer. Computing itself.

Lloyd talks about his idea of how the universe could have been created out of "nothing." In the beginning, there was a stable plain of non-information, and then one of the bits got thrown out of whack, and registered the first piece of information in the universe. This "knowledge" spread to other bits, and the universe began computing. He believes that information is the only thing in existence that doesn't conform to the law of "something can not be created out of nothing." As information spreads, new information existed that did not exist before.

At first the universe's computations created simple things, like elementary particles and the basic laws of physics. As he describes it, these are governed by the equivalent of computer code. Small pieces of code, after all, by virtue of imbuing bits with instructions to follow in varying circumstances, can create hugely complex patterns. As the universe expanded with more and more information and computations, it created stars, and planets, and Taco Bell. Seriously. Society would not exist if matter and energy did not have an ability to process bits. The creation of information explains how complex systems like humans can rise from the fundamentally simple laws of physics.

We are all computer programs. Actually, we are computers, and parts of the universal computer, and computer programs, and the results of computer programs, all at the same time. Sort of like being inside of the Matrix, except that we are the Matrix, too. Since it's a quantum-mechanical Matrix, there is no way to predict the future, because to do that, we would need a quantum computer with enough processing power to take into account every bit of information in the universe. Which is what the universe is. The universe is predicting the future of itself. So the only way to know the future is to wait and see what the universe ends up computing it to be.

It's hard to completely explain the contents of this book in a review, but if you have a bent for either the physical or computer sciences, I would highly recommend reading it for yourself. It's thought-provoking, and not dryly written, and could perhaps make the origin of the universe better understood. Not bad.

Balls Jr. #15: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson

"If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore."

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is the coming of age/coming out story of Jeanette, a girl adopted by evangelical Pentecostal parents in 1960s Britain. It reminded me of both Running With Scissors, for the insanity and neglectful parenting that was inflicted on her, and Elmer Gantry, for the religious fervor. In Gantry, though, everybody was a hypocrite, pretending to believe in God. Here, people believe. Oh, do they believe. Jeanette's mother wanted a child, one not born of her loins, specifically to train to serve The Lord, so Jeanette grows up wanting to be a missionary and believing that she has been chosen by God. When she's young, she loses her hearing, and everyone in her congregation stops talking to her because they think she's just having an extra-spiritual experience. When the government forces her mother to send her to school, Jeanette's outspoken beliefs quickly make her an outcast, despite a truly impressive-sounding eggshell Jesus diorama.

Exorcisms are performed on Jeanette after her romance with a female convert, Melanie, is found out. She's also locked in her room for days without food until she agrees to repent. She eventually leaves home/is kicked out and stays for a time with a sympathetic teacher at her school, before leaving for a job at a mental institution.

Years later, Jeanette runs into Melanie, who had immediately acquiesced to the demands for repentance for her lesbian sins. Melanie is pushing a stroller, and vacantly talks about her husband

Allegorical fairy tales are mixed into the story, about Perceval, one of King Arthur's knights, and a girl named Winnet Stonejar who meets a sorcerer in a forest. These additions keep the novel from being an autobiography, even though most of the main plot elements happened to Winterson .

The chapters are each named for a different book of the Bible. If I had any knowledge of the Bible, I might be able to discern some deeper meanings to the events in each section, but, alas, I got nothin'. Except for the first chapter, "Genesis." I get that.

Balls Jr. #14: Bonk - Mary Roach

If you're in the mood for some good, clean, science-y fun, you can't go wrong with Mary Roach. Unless, that is, you consider sex, decaying corpses, and the afterlife either unclean or un-science-y.

Stiff was my first Roach book, Spook the second, and Bonk, about the history of the scientific study of sex, ranks firmly in between the lesser Spook and the better Stiff. As is typical with Roach, she doesn't take herself seriously, volunteering herself and her husband for some of the sex studies, and she explains all of the different topics in amusing, non-technical language. Also typical, there are a lot of topics. If you become interested in one particular study or area of scrutiny, you'll have to continue your research elsewhere, because there isn't enough space to get too in-depth.

I found a draft of an email where I had taken notes, and since, like all of these reviews, I neither have the books with me, not remember many details, I'm just going to dump them here to finish:

p114: "Copulation," Leonardo [da Vinci] wrote, "is awkward and disgusting." He is said to have never bedded a woman.
p116: SUNY downstate archives w/ pictures of Dickinson vulvas. In Brooklyn.
p135: "nasal boner"
p138: ""Please give all the penises to me."
p141: she mentions The Rise of Viagra, by Meika Loe, which I read for Medical Inventions, etc.
p144: "slim, pernicious work of hyperbolic quackery" - great insult
150: Penis on Trial!
p170: Priapus, god of garden produce and anal rape

Band name: "Womb Fury" (In olden times, what "hysterical" women were diagnosed with. It had something to do with their wombs being angry that they hadn't produced children, or weren't getting enough attention. Treatment of symptoms included manual stimulation of the affected area.)

Balls Jr. #13: Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

Oh, Catherine. Childhood-era Catherine was actually one of my favorite Austen characters, in terms of one that I would want to spend time with: an unpretentious tomboy. She grew out of the tomboyishness and into dresses, but she remained unpretentious and obsessed with books, in particular one gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho. This obsession brings about fun satires of the gothic genre, with Catherine thinking that her trip to stay with her friend Eleanor Tilney at "a real abbey" will be full of cobwebs and intrigue and indescribable horrors, just like in the books. She's introduced as "our heroine," with apologies being made throughout the novel that our heroine is not devastatingly beautiful or prone to fainting.

Romance as well as broken engagements abound, the former between Catherine and Eleanor's older brother Henry, and the latter between Catherine's older brother James and her frenemy Isabella Thorpe. Isabella is dumped after her incessant flirting with Henry's older brother Frederick. There is intrigue, as Catherine manufactures a murder-mystery out of the years-ago death of Eleanor and Henry's mother. Their father, General Tilney, seems impossibly rigid and stern, and the mother's old rooms are off-limits, so Catherine naturally assumes that life is like a gothic novel and General Tilney hated and murdered his wife.

Eventually Catherine comes to realize that real life is, well, real life, and not a novel, that some things simply do not hold any greater mystery, and that some friends are toxic and do not mean everything they say. Everybody's love lives get sorted out satisfactorily, since this is Jane Austen, and we all go go home smiling.

This was a lighter Austen than Emma, which I read in the break between Balls. So many good lines. It also contains Austen's famous "defense of the novel," which is great.

Fun fact for male readers afraid of Austen (there was a small comment-discussion on this the other day*): Yesterday one of my coworkers saw me reading Northanger, and said he had been forced to read Pride and Prejudice in college, and had surprisingly liked it, because "it wasn't about romance, it was about social commentary. But I didn't want to read anything else by her, because I figured they would be romance." I set him straight, with an assist from another coworker, and he decided to give her another shot!

*This review was started months and months ago.

Balls Jr. #12: Do Butlers Burgle Banks - P.G. Wodehouse

Do Butlers Burgle Banks involves a small team of crooks who prowl the English countryside, burgling wealthy estates by getting the leader of the team, Horace, installed as the trustworthy butler. Mike Bond becomes their newest target, not for the jewelry kept in glass cases, but for the mounds of cash kept in Bond's Bank. This might be just the lucky break Mr. Bond needs, because his bank is going bankrupt. Throw in some ladies handy with an umbrella, safe-crackers getting lured in by evangelism, romantic entanglements galore, and as you can imagine, hilarity ensues.

For anybody who's a Wodehouse fan, but is only familiar with Jeeves and Wooster or the Lord Emsworth/Blandings crew, Do Butlers Burgle Banks is a light, fun addition to the collection. For readers new to Wodehouse, though, I would recommend holding off on this one until you know you like Wodehouse.

Balls Jr. #11: Sting Like a Bee - Jose Torres

Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story recounts the rise and fall of Cassius Clay's boxing career, as seen through the eyes of a former champ who was friendly with Ali. I am most definitely not the target audience for this book, as I have no interest in and almost zero knowledge of boxing. As so often happens, I found myself book-less somewhere, in this case, my boyfriend's apartment, and had to grab something, anything. This ended up making it more engrossing for me in some ways, since the culminating Fight of the Century between Ali and Frazier held tension for me in a way that it wouldn't for people who already knew the outcome. It was interesting to learn about Ali's childhood and family (father once left Ali and jumped off a bus to meet a hot girl), and to see him as a person behind the famous quotes and taunts.

I'm not sure how much I need to write about this one, because most people know this stuff, right? I feel like I'm the only person who didn't know anything about Ali aside from 1) the "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" quote, 2) he was a black boxer, 3) something about Islam... and 4) Will Smith played him in a movie that I never considered seeing. Hey, did you know Muhammad Ali liked to predict in which round his opponent would fall? Or that he protested having to fight in the Vietnam War? I didn't.

A piece of artful writing this is not, but this kind of book is about the story, not the perfectly crafted sentences, and Torres is effective at both narrating fights so that even know-nothings like me can understand the action and be drawn in as well as throwing in apparently previously untold stories and anecdotes about Ali.

Balls Jr. #10: Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett

I'm baaaack! Just in time for the tail-end of Cannonball Read, Jr. Believe it or not, I've kept Balls Jr. in my heart, although I became thrown off the review-posting course by 1) "training for" and "running" a half-marathon, 2) my first real relationship (to nobody's surprise, he's almost 20 years older than I am), and 3) long work hours. Nothing could ever keep me from reading, though, and I finished my 51st book earlier today. There's no credit in this round without reviews, so I'm going to try to get to at least a few more before time runs out on Halloween. I'm halfway through my first real vacation since I started my job, so I'm considering this a giant sacrifice that everybody should appreciate, even though I picked a Discworld novel because they're easy.

Guards! Guards! begins with a group of dim, disenfranchised Discworld residents with petty grudges against the world at large, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork in medium, and dishonest meat-sellers in particular who have formed a magicky group under the manipulation of an unknown hooded figure. The goal? Bring dragons back. Not the small, unimpressive swamp dragons that are bred by the eccentric Lady Sybil Ramkin, but real, noble dragons that used to live back in the good old days. The dragon will then, in theory, replace the Patrician and get revenge on those meat-sellers and nagging wives and such that so plague the conjurers. Then an heir to the throne will come forward, slay the dragon, replace it as ruler, and be a benevolent dictator.

Gigantic, fire-breathing, magic-eating dragons, you might be shocked to learn, are not easily told what to do. When the group does manage to drag one back in existence, it proceeds to effectively wreak havoc and, after installing itself as the new ruler, requires donations of gold and virgins.

In come the policemen of the Night Watch, led uninspiringly by Captain Vimes, and grudgingly inspired by the new guy - naive, law-worshipping Carrot Ironfoundersson. Carrot turns the Watch around, forcing them to try to stop crime for the first time, and by crime, he means dragons. They muster up the best that their ragtag group can do, bring in the orangutan Librarian and Sybil Ramkin and her most pathetic swamp dragon to help out, and eventually they defeat the draco nobilis, with a game-saving assist from Errol, and unmask the anonymous hooded figure, with an assist from the Librarian.

I never knew Captain Vimes started out the series as an incompetent drunk, since my first experience with him was in Night Watch, and there he was a dogged pursuer of truth, justice, and the decidedly non-Ankh-Morporkian way. In that book, also, Vimes's wife Sybil was only alluded to, not shown, and seeing Sybil as a character and how she and Vimes met was hilarious. Sybil and Carrot are both great characters.

Overall a funny Discworld entry, but I'm going to have to repeat myself and say that nothing has remotely compared to the greatness of Small Gods.

****I read this book months ago and don't have it with me, so there is a vanishingly small chance that I got every detail correct. The overall gist is correct, though.****