• Atlantic Retrospective on Politics: excerpts from articles in this magazine going back to 1862 (!). The oldest one is an article by no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson (quote: “We want a state of things in which crime shall not pay.”)
• Perplexing ad from Capella University: picture of a black woman setting a table, with a child in the background running towards the table. Text reads: “Knowledge is finding the place where mom and PhD can actually co-exist.” Punctuation gaffe aside, I can only assume that they mean the conflict between raising kids and finding time to study for a Ph.D., not that having a Ph.D. somehow precludes you from reproducing. I’m no raging feminist, but I would have preferred a version that replaced “mom” with “parent”.
• “The Drama of the Gifted Parent”: Sandra Tsing Loh is back with her usual scintillating wit as she reviews four books on the high-stress existence led by overachieving, gifted children. I really enjoy her particular sort of vaguely subtle sarcasm, at least partly because she is so willing to turn her own criticisms on herself and to acknowledge her own foibles.
• “Making Sinatra Sinatra”: an obituary for Bill Miller, Sinatra’s pianist. I find the Atlantic’s two-page obituaries unexpectedly compelling; they tend to be written in a lively fashion, and I come away with a real sense of a person whom I otherwise would never have known. (I have yet to read an obituary for someone whose name I recognized—but that makes them all the more interesting, like extended character sketches for a novel.)

This movie is by turns painful, funny, gripping, painful, horrifying, painful, and breathtaking. If you like self-referential, metaphor-laden, clever innovations in filmmaking, then you’ll love this movie. It starts out slow, pedestrian: yet another Nicholas Cage angsty existential crisis. But then it picks up speed. By the end it was roaring along and pushing the limits of my credulity in a completely gripping way. I’ve never been much of a Nicholas Cage fan—his roles tend to be too homogeneous, too flat, with too little to care about. But he impressed me with this one: there’s complexity, there’s discovery, and he’s interesting. An audience with more movie savvy than me might pick up on what the opening’s literal segue from Being John Malkovich is saying about the connection between this film and reality; it wasn’t until I picked up the DVD case after the movie was done that I realized that Charlie Kaufman, the main character in this movie, who is writing a book screenplay adaptation that is the movie, really is a real person. And so’s the book’s author, Susan Orlean. For that matter, the book is a real book, and this adaptation really is an adaptation, on several wonderful levels.

Ursula Le Guin never fails to disappoint. In this book, she offers several stories about growing up, exploration, love, loss, and learning. Given my recent interest in writing, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the structure of prose I read, its skeletons and underpinnings, the visible craft of the author. But with Le Guin, I just can’t seem to focus on the mechanics—her stories are woven so finely that I forget to watch for the framework and gears and am instead swept along into her fictional worlds. Like real life, the experience pushes aside immediate analysis. I’ll have to keep trying, though, because she is definitely one to emulate.

Who could read about Ben Franklin and not admire the man? If he had a CV, it would be about five miles long. His breadth of knowledge and interests, combined with his almost uncanny foresight and his diplomatic skill, result in a formidably successful man (although not as successful, perhaps, in his personal life).

This 45-page book is a quick read, successively covering Franklin’s life as a printer, scientist, politician, radical, diplomat, etc. What makes the book particularly fascinating is the inclusion of various reproductions of historical documents—letters, papers Franklin printed, newspapers announcing key events in his (and America’s) history, etc. The reproductions are separate sheets that you can slip out and examine independently of the book. I loved working my way through it, and this book has inspired me to put Franklin’s Autobiography on my to-read list.

I can’t believe I never got around to reading this book until now. Having grown up near Moab, Utah, I felt wave after wave of nostalgia and longing for the desert land roll over me as I turned the pages. If anyone can paint the printed page with glorious desert colors, it’s Ed Abbey. I disagree with some of his social and political views, but this didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the book—because what it’s really about is the land, the wilderness, the sheer stark gorgeous wonderful reality that’s out there, waiting for us to visit, explore, and recharge.

His description of floating down Glen Canyon just before it was doomed with a dam and became Lake Powell is poignant and lovely. I’m grateful that he captured this ride through the canyon, a trip that’s now (and probably forever) impossible.

I should also remark on Abbey’s surprisingly broad command of literature, classics, philosophers, and complex vocabulary. Very impressive!

This book has a great, humorous premise that, sadly, wears thin after a few sections. I persisted just past the halfway point before admitting that I just wasn’t motivated to read it—and with only so many reading hours in a day, I decided to devote that time to books I would enjoy more. It’s funny, the writing style is entertaining, but it would work better as a short opinion piece than as an entire book.

What an excellent, clever movie! The premise is great: a man, going about his daily life, starts hearing a narrator who describes his every move. It turns out that she is an author, and she is writing the story of his life. She’s under pressure from her publisher to finish the book, so she’s trying to work out a way to kill off her main character. He’s starting to get hints of where the book/his life is going, and tries to stop it so he can avoid his own death. Go see it. You’ll see what I mean.

(And for you nanovelists out there, how much more well timed could it be, coming out in November? Can you imagine coming face-to-face with your own main character?)

I first read this book several years ago, in college. I came across it again the other day, remembered liking it, and decided to read it again. It’s a phenomenal little book! The story is set in the distant future, where individualism has been eradicated and everyone exists for the collective. Language itself has been shaped; the narrator refers to himself as “we” because the singular pronouns no longer exist. The plot arc follows the narrator as he is irresistibly drawn to push the limits, break the rules, and discover what has been lost. The story culminates, like Atlas Shrugged, in a speech-essay in which the main character becomes the direct mouthpiece for the author—but four pages are far more tolerable than 40. Don’t get me wrong; I liked Atlas Shrugged, too, and one thing you will definitely miss with this briefer offering is the fabulous character of Dagny Taggart. But I would still recommend this book as an enjoyable, thought-provoking read, well worth the time investment.

I love this book! It’s formatted somewhat like a textbook, but it’s very readable. The first chapter describes how galaxies and stars form and how the universe went from purely hydrogen and helium to its current heterogeneous mix of elements. The second chapter looks at how planets form, out of the accretion disk that surrounds a star, and why we get “terrestrial” (rocky) planets closer in and the gas giants further out. It also covers other inhabitants of stellar systems, such as asteroids and comets. Much of this covers ground I was passingly familiar with already, but the book provides enough additional detail to keep me eagerly reading.

The third chapter, which I’m currently in the middle of, focuses on the history of the Earth (our most familiar planet). The current theory of how we got our Moon (what’s left of a Mars-sized impactor that smashed into the Earth) continues to astonish me—it’s so hard to even imagine such a catastrophic event. The chapter is now moving into a whirlwind blast through all of the geology classes I’ve taken so far: Mineralogy, Petrology, Stratigraphy, Structural Geology, Plate Tectonics. It’s fun to see all of the terminology and facts I’d previous studied make a comeback.

And lo and behold, a gem of a factoid, buried in Chapter 3! The book notes that rocks may be considered felsic if they contain feldspar and silica, in contrast to mafic rocks that contain magnesium and ferrum (iron). !!! When I first encountered “felsic” and “mafic”, the only definition I could extract from my textbook or my TA was that “felsic means light-colored, and mafic means dark-colored.” I was never satisfied with this, but such was their combined authority that I figured that must be the end of it. But no! It does mean something! (Note that feldspar/silica are lighter than magnesium/iron; the light/dark distinction isn’t wrong, but it’s more of a side effect than the compositional description the terms are used for.)

For me, there are two kinds of Heinlein stories: the entertaining science-fiction-y adventures driven by intriguing plots, and the obnoxious, self-indulgent, slightly off-color “stories” that I find repellent. Happily, this book falls into the former category. The characterization isn’t great (I can’t say that I came to care for any of the characters with more than passing interest—and this goes double for any female characters), but that’s not Heinlein’s strength. Instead, this story is intriguing for its premise (lunar penal colony rebels against Terran overlords) and its deus ex machina (a massive computer that achieves sentience and aids the lunar rebels in their cause). In fact, it’s this computer (“Mike”) who exhibits the most personality of any character in the story.

The future envisioned by Heinlein, in which Terra ships its convicts to the moon to do manual labor and, critically, grow crops to feed the billions left on Earth, is both prescient and naive. There are reasons from basic chemistry why growing grain on the moon would be difficult or impossible (mainly, lack of fertilizer), and shipping it to Earth would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive, but this is a necessary component of the plot. However, Heinlein is very careful in his science about the moon itself, from descriptions of how new arrivals cope with the reduced gravity to the radiation perils of being on the surface when the sun is up. With respect to technology, the computer he imagines is spot-on in terms of today’s computer evolution (and he wrote this way back in 1966!). On the other hand, the computer’s leap to sentience is never really explained, and the rate at which it knocks down all of the Artificial Intelligence hurdles, from language skills to conversational context to humor to inference to simulating a video portrayal of its “self”, is pretty unbelievable. Still, with a healthy suspension of disbelief, it’s very enjoyable to watch. The only odd thing about this future techno-world, for today’s reader, is Heinlein’s failure to anticipate the Internet. Despite having regular space travel between Luna and Terra, and a sentient computer, the only way anyone has to communicate is via phone (voice, not data). All of the networking is done with phone lines and realtime conversations between people. No email, no net, no web. It feels a little strange (but Heinlein, of course, can be forgiven for not anticipating everything!).

The book also contains a good dose of political arguments about the best form of government, and a typical Heinlein exploration of alternative marriage forms. Good fodder for thought.

One style nit-pick: I’ve repeatedly encountered writing advice that warns against the use of dialect in stories. I can now see exactly why. The dialect used by the narrator was grating at first and remained annoying throughout the entire book, making me grateful whenever he was reporting anything anyone else said, just for the relief from his bizarre dialect. It was entirely unnecessary, too. The other language touches Heinlein added, like the hints of Russian influence in how people address each other, are nicely done.