It’s probably one of the most religion-hostile books I’ve read in a while. The need to explain the fundamentally inexplicable event drives the creation of at least two cults (or religions, depending on your perspective) and neither are portrayed very positively. (And both have superficial, perhaps coincidental, similarities to real-world religious organizations around which there is some controversy.

I found it hard to believe that Perrotta’s characters would make some of the choices that they make. The problematic choices, for me, don’t seem consistent with what the reader has learned of the character. Maybe that’s part of Perrotta’s larger point: exploring the boundary between the rational and the irrational, between faith and fanaticism.

I certainly found it thought-provoking, and it held my attention throughout.

needs more demons? In a literal sense, demons would be altogether too easy of course. But I’m really not sure.

It introduces a hefty dose of moral ambiguity into the story. In the original film, no one on the Death Star was portrayed as anything other than evil. But in Reaves and Perry’s revisionist take, the Death Star is home to conscripted doctors, conscience-stricken pilots, kindly prison guards, and other beings who are clearly not evil. Even the cold and cruel Governor Tarkin is humanized to the extent that he’s given a girlfriend.

Reaves and Perry do a good job of engaging the reader’s sympathies for the non-evil Death Star denizens without making them so well-rounded that they violate the general mood of the Star Wars uiverse. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension arises from the fact that the reader knows what happens to the Death Star, and the characters don’t. I found myself hoping that Reaves and Perry’s motley collection of misfits would somehow find a way to escape the Death Star’s fate.

I thought the first section was a little slow, but I read the second almost in a single sitting. I generally feel like it’s a mistake to try to science up Star Wars; even a Star Trek level of pseudoscience seems a bit jarring. There’s a little bit of that here, but not so much that I found it really obtrusive.

needs more demons? not so much

Drive strikes me as a perfectly designed business book. It’s a slim, fast read (it’s substantially padded by a section which essentially recapitulates the book’s content, with some putting-into-practice tips sprinkled in). It invents some new jargon — Motivation 2.0 and 3.0 (Motivation 1.0, if you’re curious, is subsistence-level gotta-survive type stuff) and Type I(ntrinsic) and Type X(trinsic) — in which to frame ideas that have been floating around for a while. Of course there’s a gotcha here as well: implementing many of these concepts requires people in positions of control to give up a lot of it, and they will be threatened by much of what this book proposes. (It does get a little hippy-dippy in places for a biz book, at one point Pink hints that management itself could become an outdated concept.)

Porter’s key concept is that you can examine any decision in cost/benefit terms, and you can almost always find a way to quantify the cost and benefit in monetary terms (whether it’s explicitly transactional or not). For instance, here’s how Porter analyzes why the 55-mph national speed limit didn’t work: A 70 mile trip takes 16 minutes more at 55mph than at 70mph. At $4.30/hr (the average wage of “production workers in 1974″), that represents $1.15. At the time gas cost $0.53/gal, so to break even, the average driver would have needed to save 2.17 gallons for every 70 mile trip — substantially more than the fuel efficiency of 1974 cars would provide.

Porter doesn’t suggest that most production workers worked out this equation and made a rational, informed decision to disobey the speed limit — I infer that he thinks people made gut-decisions perhaps based on a subconscious sense of time-value lost at lower speeds. But I would argue (albeit without stacks of research to back me up, whereas Porter’s book is meticulously footnoted) that the psychological dimension was significant outside of economics; the 55-mph limit was an assault on macho cowboy car culture. (Consider: if economics were that much of a factor in velocity determinations, you’d see a lot fewer jack-rabbit start and sudden stops with current fuel prices, especially in sub/urban commuting, where it avails the driver almost nothing.)

Porter’s framing of the problem also ignores that travel at 70mph for sustained periods of time is a comparative rarity for most drivers. (With long-haul trucking one notable exception, and, other than cowboy culture, one reason always advanced for the trucker/cop cb/radar conflicts of the mid-late seventies was that the truckers’ work schedules required violating posted speed limits.)

Porter also ignores other factors which might reasonably be considered part of the valuation: reduced loss of life, reduced emissions, reduced engine wear, et cetera. (Although I think it’s fair to assert that many drivers would likely ignore these factors as well.)

Although Porter’s analysis of what to do about greenhouse emissions ultimately concludes that given the uncertainty of the models, voters might as well follow their guts, his analysis of the issue omits a very important factor. (It’s also quite different from traditional risk valuations.) He suggests thinking of the problem as balancing lives positively impacted now and in the future, the economic cost of curbing emissions now and in the future, and the potential impact of climate change on the economy. (I infer that he doesn’t discount “there is no more economy” as an outcome, but thinks it fairly unlikely.) It’s easy to tweak the model to suggest taking only limited action in the short, in effect “investing” funds needed to address the problem in the future: spending money on policies that promote economic development so there are increased financial resources to address global warming later on. But he ignores the opportunity cost of not taking action now. I think of it as the “toothache problem” — the longer you put off the dentist visit, the bigger the bill is likely to be.

However, I should probably admit that phrases like, “the standard family deal, in which women exchanged the service of their uterus, child care, and household chores for their husband’s wage,” get me spoiling for an intellectual tussle with their author, irrespective of how historically accurate they might be and what the author’s personal attitudes are. And if I sometimes found the book infuriating, it certainly challenged some of my attitudes and preconceptions, and made me think.

Aside: Porter is kinda in the Chicken Little camp as far as the future of paying for intellectual content goes, and seems to think more/stronger DRM may be part of a solution. So maybe this is relevant, not just petty: A glowing review called The Price of Everything to my attention, and if it had been priced like other e-books I’ve bought recently, I probably would’ve bought it on the spot. These days my determination of whether and how to read a book includes among other factors, the cost of physical storage, the ease of library access, my estimate of re-read/reference value, and whether an electronic version is DRM-encumbered. Half-again the maximum price I typically pay for DRM-trapped content? Not a winning strategy for publishers who want revenue from me.

needs more demons? I might’ve found the content I disliked easier to swallow if I thought the extrapolation had been a bit more rigorous throughout.

Ry’s grandfather, Lloyd, took his first cup of coffee out onto the screened porch, sat down on a glider, and waited in the dark for the birds to start chirping. Between him and the sun, there was a thin bit of earth and a thick wall of trees, still black with night. As he sipped, the first rays of the sun found tiny gaps to poke through. Tomorrow he would pour the pot of coffee into a thermos to bring out onto the porch so he didn’t have to go back inside.

and

A stray moonbeam found the way through a window and fell in a faint square on the faded carpet, leaving the darkness around it blacker and more velvety.

or, a bit more representatively, the novel’s opening:

Wait a minute.
Was the — had the train just moved?
Ry turned his head to look at it straight on, but it sat on the tracks, as still as the lumpy brown hill he was climbing. As still as the grass that baked in gentle swells as far as he could see and the air in the empty blue sky.

I love the novel’s structure. It sets up expectations and then delivers something slightly different. (It made me think of the “There once was a farmer who took a young miss in back of the barn where he gave her a … lecture” song, although it’s nothing like as gimmicky or obvious.) I love that it repeatedly made me laugh out loud in delighted surprise, even if the delightful surprise was ratcheting the novel’s tension to an almost uncomfortable degree. I love that I had absolutely no idea, even in the last handful of chapters, if this book sided with the “everything turns out basically ok,” “okay with a dollop of tragedy,” or “dude, major bummer!” camp. I love the authorial voice, and especially how it assumes the reader is smart and paying attention, and often leaves conclusions for the reader to draw.

Things I’m less sure about: Perkins is pretty deliberately playing with the elasticity of the reader’s credibility, I think, and somewhere near the end I struggled to keep mine from snapping. And the more I think about it, the more I think the dénoument is tonally completely appropriate, that is, that it should be a little unsatisfying. But that unsatisfyingness is only satisfying in retrospect.

Regardless this gets 5 stars from me on Goodreads even if it blows my credibility to give anything 5 stars, and I strongly suspect I will purchase multiple copies of this novel in my lifetime because I’m going to want to lend it to people who will want to lend it to people, and so on. And I really won’t mind.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

Another hat-tip to Janet for the recommendation

If you have little patience for books that spend a lot of pages recapitulating introductions to characters and plot points of previous books, you’ll appreciate Peterfreund’s determinedly in medias res approach. It had been nearly a year since I read Rampant, and I had a little trouble getting back up to speed with Peterfreund’s cast of secondary characters.

One thing I’ve noticed about Peterfreund’s novels: they’re not plot-driven in a conventional external event sense. There are external conflicts for the characters to overcome, but the primary through plot arc is likely to be internal, and not necessarily obvious from the outset. Meanwhile, the most significant external plot drivers don’t necessarily manifest in the first few, or even several, chapters. Ascendant is no exception, and for a while I thought it was suffering a bit from middle-act-syndrome: there’s a strong sense of Things Are Not As They Seem hanging over many of the proceedings, and many plot elements with a span beyond beyond this novel. (Without getting too spoiler-y, the 64K$ question here is, “Can humanity and unicorns learn to just get along? And if so, how?”)

But the final third or so of this novel really kicks into high gear. I think I read it in a single sitting. And while at least one more novel is clearly in the offing, a) I don’t mind, and b) this one achieves a more satisfying degree of closure than I thought it was going to.

needs more demons? the distribution is a little lumpy, perhaps, but no.

I’ve read a lot of books that covered similar topics, but if you don’t read new ones (this one was published in 2008), things tend to change. For instance, we used to think that our sun was in the class of stars that could go nova, inexplicably increasing in brightness for a period of hours or days — possibly long enough to fry the Earth to a crisp. In the current understanding, stars like ours don’t go nova; only hydrogen-gorging white dwarfs do (whew!). On the other hand, I’m a little more scared of big meteors than I used to be; turns out blowing them up with nukes probably doesn’t work at all, and even deflecting them is likely to be much harder than I thought. So while Plait’s book covered a lot of ground familiar to me, there were usually new wrinkles; I learned plenty.

One reasonable quibble I have is that Plait is a little glib about scale. Only in the chapter on the death of the universe does he rely on exponential notation, and then only because the numbers are so unimaginably huge. Throughout most of the book he uses million and billion in adjoining sentences. Even these numbers are so beyond human scale that I think they’re difficult to keep hold of; I think our brains tend to render them as “really big” and “really big (but bigger)” — it’s hard (for me anyway) to keep in mind that a billion is a thousand million and that a trillion is a thousand thousand million. It’s geeky, but I kind of wish he’d used exponential notation throughout.

My unreasonable quibble with the book illustrates why I’d make a spectacularly lousy scientist, particularly in the chapter on “Deep Time” and the end of the universe. I can accept that we can make assertions about the age of the universe and what happened to bring us to the current point — if we look at an object that’s 6 billion light years away, we’re seeing it as it was 6 billion years ago unless pretty much everything we think we know about physics is wrong. So we can learn about state of the universe 6 billion years ago by direct observation, and extrapolate backward.

But foretelling the end of the universe involves quantities of time that literally, I think, beggar the imagination. As Plait acknowledges, you can’t use metaphors — you can’t say, for instance, that the 14-ish billion years age of the universe to date is an eyeblink compared to Deep Time, because an eyeblink is way, way, way, too long. It’s certainly scientifically reasonable to extrapolate from our observations of the universe now. But for us to presume we really know what’s going to happen on those scales strikes my unscientific, intuitive mind as enormous hubris. Suppose for a second that there’s some big change in the universe that happens once every 20 billion years. It hasn’t happened once yet, but in the Deep Time scale, it would happen billions upon billions upon billions of times. That’s not a scientific notion — I certainly can’t propose a mechanism for some fundamental shift in the universe, or draw up equations to describe whatever it might be.

But what I can observe is that throughout recorded history, when we think we have things pretty much figured out, something upsets the apple cart and we discover it’s way more complicated than we thought. And, from the oldest historical records to just last week (with news story about experimental results failing to match the predictions of string theory), the strangification of the universe is happening faster and faster.

So while I don’t know when, how, or why (although pseudo-scientifically, dark matter still seems to be a bit of a wild card), I’d (intuitively, unscientifically) bet that long before the universe gets to the Deep Time that Plait describes, our understanding of it will significantly change. Probably before the sun swells to a red giant, or within my lifetime, or possibly even next week. And that’s what I love — the notion that despite our best efforts, the universe will always reveal complexities that transcend our understanding. We need something even weirder than string theory? Bring it on!

My irrationality aside, I liked Plait’s book a lot. Certainly found it thought-provoking.

Needs more demons? Nope.

Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

• When Pierson’s characters talk about bands, the made up names, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Sparrow, sound so believable I had to use Google to make sure they weren’t real.
• This book has the most realistic depiction ever of a high school friendship between two ubernerds. I say this as a “co-author” of a comic apocalyptic “novel” that shamelessly ripped off “Hitchhickers’ Guide” and Tolkein metal and whatever else my ubernerd pal and I were reading/listening to, and which was not utterly unlike Darren and Eric’s TimeBlaze project.
• Darren’s voice, holy crap. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To is the first book I read beginning to end on an e-reader device, and I set bookmarks on pages with passages that made me really want to read them aloud to anyone in range, and there were, like, a dozen. Here’s one:
  

  When I get up to my room I take my shirt off and look into the mirror for a while, not in a vain way, just to see what the fuck is going on with my torso, scrawny and fat at the same time, has to be the worst torso for miles. Then I might turn on MTV, again not because I like what’s going on there but simply to gape in wonder at what the fuck is wrong with everybody, and occasionally there’ll be some stupidly hot girl on, writhing around on the top of a car.

  and here’s another:

  Basically something I think I believed without ever having thought about it is that part of being smart is not being able to start a sentence with a subject and then end that sentence by saying that subject is a good thing and actually mean it.

  Darren usually opts for flat, uncomplicated language like this, but if it’s low on frills, it possesses a distinctive rhythm, and it feels so completely authentic that I sometimes feel as if Pierson must have rooted around in my own high school-era cranium.

• The title of this blog alludes to the fact that strictly naturalistic fiction, with no speculative or fantastic elements, sometimes leaves me feeling like there’s something missing. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To does have speculative/fantastic aspects, but it’s a measure of how resonant that I found it that I almost wished it hadn’t. I was so interested in what was going on between Darren, Eric (and other characters I won’t mention to avoid spoilers) that sometimes the fantasy elements felt almost intrusive. Coming from me this is high, if a bit left-handed, praise. (I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s textual evidence that Darren is delusional and that the novel’s fantastic events didn’t “really” happen, but it’s at least hinted at that fantasy worlds are one of Darren’s coping mechanisms for dealing with the messy emotional business of the real world and real people; once or twice I even had the sense that it might have been a distancing technique for Pierson — that maybe he didn’t think he could make the story compelling without the sci-fi twist. The irony here is that I think would have found it compelling, but I might never have thought to pick it up without that hook to draw me in.)

One thing I didn’t love quite so much — the ending works thematically, but it seemed a bit rushed. It leads into the prologue –but that prologue feels almost like it belongs to a different novel entirely. Maybe a sequel is in the offing. But whether Pierson revisits Darren, Eric, et al in future fiction or not, I eagerly await his next book, no matter what genre labels might apply to it.

needs more demons? Absolutely not.