Rob's Reads: October 2007a

Note: One thing I regret about the way I spend my free time is that I fail to adequately document it all. What good, I argue silently with myself, does it do to read a book unless I make some note of it as I do so? Sssooo... to try to rectify this situation, I'm going to try to give my sumuppance of what I've passed my eyes over in the first 2 weeks of October. If you're VERY unlucky, I'll remember to do it every 2 weeks or so forever.

The Worst Hard Time [Egan] - 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction [*****]
This book is easily the most entertaining bit of non-fiction I've read this year. Egan describes in very intimate detail the tribulations of those who lived through the dust bowl. In school, you breeze over this period of history in deference to World War II and only really talk about it at all as an addendum to the Great Depression. I had no clue just how bad circumstances were; one tends to think, "Oh, a little dust" but Egan preserves for us first-hand accounts of 9-foot dust drifts, animals electrocuted because of the static electricity produced by all that moving dust and countless victims of 'dust pneumonia.' This is a brilliant rendering of a much neglected period of U.S. history.

Glasshouse [Stross] - 2007 Hugo Nominee [****]
It has easily been 15 years since I last cracked open a 'modern' science fiction novel. From my point of view, the genre had completely cracked under the strain and gone utterly and completely commercial with Star Trek clones. I had to admit though that Stross' Glasshouse surprised me. While many of the concepts were hackneyed (instant transportation using wormholes, easy cloning of objects and people at the molecular scale, etc) Glasshouse did a good job of examining these technologies in a much more realistic light. What happens, for example, when someone introduces a worm into a transportation system that fundamentally alters people as they go from place to place and Jordi Laforge can't fix the problem in the span of a 1-hour episode? If this book is indicative of the genre then I'm ready to give it another serious look.

After This [McDermott] - 2007 Pulitzer Prize - Fiction Nominee [**]
In After This McDermott renders for the reader the story of a perfectly normal person with a perfectly normal life. She lives for a while then finds a husband. Then she has kids. The kids move away, go to war, fall in love, get pregnant and do utterly and completely unsurprising things. This is fiction for those with weak hearts who dare not risk their lives with real entertainment. The only aspect of this novel that saves it from getting only one star is the fact that I managed to finish without cheating.

Figures in a Landscape [England] - 1969 Booker Prize Short List [*****]
After After This, Figures in a Landscape was like an icy waterfall washing straight down my pant leg. England follows a pair of POWs as they escape from their concentration camp. For eleven days, they plod through the jungle, are nearly burned alive and are endlessly harassed by the faceless but ever-present helicopter pilot. This is true man's fiction. If you don't want to go for a long hike with a heavy pack after this book then you should probably check your pulse.