Woods

Not a full review but Tana French’s In The Woods was good despite the fact that I knew who was behind it all from the very moment the character was introduced.

Not because I’m so smart, but because I’ve met too many people just like that one. However, I think most people would not pick up on it. And in fact, it marks French’s skill as a writer that people who have encountered that type will likely see the signs right away.

That’s my first Tana French; she’s a bit Bradbury-esque. I’ll read another of hers soon.

Crafting Airs

Smart book I’ve just started: Systems Engineering for Commercial Aircraft: A Domain-Specific Adaptation by Scott Jackson.

Among others, I’m also reading Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky actively but it’s much inferior to the first installment and I am not sure I will continue. It’s almost a recap of the first book with far less punch and point. Which is too bad, as I quite liked the inaugural entry, despite some glaring tonal flaws.

Short Work Of

Seems I’m going back to my old ways. No, not of getting in constant fights and near-stabbings and such.

I mean, today I read two different books in one day. Short ones, but not YA, both fiction. Mainly this happened because I was traveling. Doubt I will plow through seven books in a single day again, though. That requires reading about twenty hours at a stretch and I just don’t have that in me anymore.

Bad Books

Fun question from @Sam__Enright: What’s the “anti-reading list” in your field of expertise?

I have many fields of expertise.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is an atrocious book that teaches you nothing, or if it manages more than that is completely wrong. A book designed to make stupid people feel smart. Read specialist books or textbooks in this and related fields instead. Do not fall prey to this utter piece of shit or you will become much dumber than you were before.

Helogland by Carlo Rovelli. Full of wrong information. I don’t mean that it’s my opinion that it’s wrong. A lot of the most important parts of the book are directly contradicted by actual experiments conducted in the real world, including some Nobel-prize-winning ones.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future. Just a clueless work that marshals poor evidence in service of murky points. Avoid.

There are other books in the thread, but these are ones I did not see mentioned that are also atrocious and cause you to know less than you did than when you started. And all are in fields I know enough about to say that yes, they are 100% full of bullcrap.

Moore Less

I read Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods recently.

This won’t be a complete review, but will try to offer enough of an appraisal to know if you, dear reader, would like to devote your time to this fairly long book.

My main thought is that I wish it had been better. The work starts off so well and had so much potential, which is why I kept reading it. The characters are interesting, the beginning is a banger, and the mystery is compelling. But it begins to suffer as it spends more and more time with viewpoint characters who offer little to the story. Too much of the action happens off the page — it’s like Moore has no idea what to do with anything more than people talking, so God of the Woods has no substantive propulsive action scenes at all even when they are core components of her own story. Nearly everything important occurs outside of the reader’s observation. While this can work — see No Country For Old Men for an example — you have to be Cormac McCarthy or the Coen Brothers to pull something like that off.

And Moore is neither of those things.

As the book becomes increasingly meandering and the characters do little to advance the story, I began to hope the ending would be the banger that the first 30-40 pages were. No such luck. The denouement is unbelievable, unsatisfying and borderline insulting to the reader.

There was a good novel in there somewhere. A decent editor probably could’ve located it for Moore, who clearly has some writing talent. But like many of the characters in the story, that editor was nowhere to be found.

I don’t have a Goodreads account, but if I did I’d rate The God of the Woods 2 out of 5 stars. However, I’d rate the first 100 pages a 4.5/5 and the last 100 a 1/5. By the by, Yun’s review is better than mine and more thorough — and is essentially what I think, but she is more charitable to the book than I am.

QNTM

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed that book. But it didn’t seem all that weird to me. I guess that’s because my brain works like that 24/7. When you’re constantly thinking about how you know what you know, what it’d be like to experience another consciousness, what a self-censoring idea would look and feel like, and the limits of knowability, computability and intelligibility, a book about similar things just seems like another day.

Recommended, though.