Do the 2008 TBR challenge

Postsingular by Rudy Rucker

Ah, what a perfect ending to the books I’ve been reading all year. This was a spur of the moment read, but I’ve had the book for well over a year. An utterly enjoyable romp through an ingenious transreal ficton. Rucker conjures up characters and events so bizarre, and yet so tied into his explanations of infinite math and the gnarl of chaotic processes as well as discussions of what constitute human consciousness and human beingness. Wow!!! It was quite literally a psychedelic experience (driven only by my own neurotransmitters drifting to new places by the new connections being formed by the text).

Synchronistically enough, this book tied together multiple ideas from about half the other TBR books I’ve read this year. Certainly the most important ones. Now it’s time to get home and make up my list for 2009.

Fight Club: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk

The first rule of FIGHT CLUB is “Nobody talks about FIGHT CLUB.”

The second rule of FIGHT CLUB is “Nobody talks about FIGHT CLUB.”

(Let’s just say that while the movie and the book share a certain amount of common material, simply enjoying the movie is an insufficient reason for reading this book. If you’re a Palahniuk junkie then why haven’t you read this one yet? An excellent experience, but it required a long karmic shower.)

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

This is the third time I’ve attempted this book. This time I couldn’t put it down. The other times I couldn’t dig my way into it.

I’m not a real William Gibson fan. I don’t really enjoy his cyberpunk. But this book worked well for me. I didn’t want it to be over. It’s also probably the next to last book I’ll read this year. I’m digging into another book from last year’s list, Fight Club. It’s enjoyable enough that I wish I hadn’t already seen the movie several times.

Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show by Geoffrey Nunberg

This book seems to have been read by the Obama campaign. Nunberg dissects the language games of the right and the counter games of the Democrats and finds that semantics cannot save the Democratic Party. Nunberg only briefly suggests that authoring a New Story about what it means to be American. Barack Obama won the election largely by telling an American Tale that most voters could identify with.

Mathematicians in Love, by Rudy Rucker

This was a wonderful and refreshing read. A psychedelic, gnarly interdimensional excursion through determinate, non-predictable math into parallel universes, politics, music, anarchy and just plain fun. But it’s well frosted with love, lust, loss, and union. In the end, it’s a life affirming adventure through mindspace we rarely traverse.

If you’ve read Rucker’s The Seashell, the Lifebox, and the Soul, many themes from that are played out in this story. If not, don’t worry. This book is a mind expanding adventure through love and chaos. Definitely sad to finish it.

The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy, by J. D. Williams

I finally finished this book. Not that anybody else here is likely to read it by accident – but DON’T!!! The author tries to make the technical material cute and that’s very annoying. Worse than that, however, he avoids the mathematical heart of the matter and only teaches some select tricks (the cute and the tricks would be forgivable if he then taught the math as well, or at least explained what to look up for more info).

The final insult, however, is that most of the tricks are to avoid doing a lot of computation. If the author described what he was really doing, he could discard 80% of the book and provide some Excel templates. But if he could have done that back in 1954, he’d have been truly amazing.

I should have checked the copyright date on the book before ordering a few years back. I should have checked it before reading it.

Oh, well, it’s done now, and I’ve got no excuse to put off Rules, Games, and Common Pool Resources any further.

Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction, by Morton Davis.

Ahh! This turns out to be the book I needed before I dive back into the more technical book Rules, Games, and Common Pool Resources. It covers some material I’d already studied in detail (Prisoners’ Dilemma) but added plenty of new material … although not technical enough that I could really solve too many problems.

It’s very interesting looking at the various ways of bargaining and how they can be mathematically represented. Sometimes a seemingly “powerless” position can dominate. For example, two evenly matched political parties without enough to get a majority and a third party who can bring either party into power. That minor third party has equal power with the major parties so long as they oppose each other.

Interesting stuff. The other book I’m still reading has me bogged down solving problems. I haven’t done that for quite some time. Interesting.

Meanwhile, I’m sidetracked reading (not a TBR book) Variable Star, a novel outlined by Robert Heinlein in 1956. Heinlein did not write the novel, but his estate asked Spider Robinson to author it. I’m 80% of the way through and thrilled with the experience of reading a “new” Heinlein book – Spider Robinson stays true to Heinlein’s approach and story lines from other novels, but also explores territory that Heinlein avoided.

Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief, by Huston Smith. (completed on 7/8/08)

Huston Smith is a skilled writer and well-informed about world religions, science, philosophy, and modern culture. This book, although containing a number of factual errors, is on the whole an excellent book.

Smith’s purpose is to guide the reader away from an unconsciously accepted world view and to replace it with a more generous and accurate one. Smith makes a point that while he has done extensive reading in the sciences, scientists rarely ever take the time to similarly understand religion (as in book #23).

This book gives excellent treatment to the subject matter. It is well worth the time and energy to read.

God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, by Victor Stenger (completed 7/2/08)

While Victor Stenger has written an interesting book, the title boasts more than the text accomplishes. Stenger displays a horrid ignorance about religion, religious phenomenon, and religious history.

Stenger does a decent job of smacking down the would-be-scientific intelligent design points of view. But ID carries severe theological baggage all on its own. Whenever the argument that “we can’t possibly understand this, so God did it” is voiced, further discoveries shrink the “God of the Gaps.” Stenger does believers a favor by slicing and dicing the a God of the Gaps approach.

But Stenger is arrogant and sloppy. He paints with a broad brush when it suits him or he zeros in on special cases when they suit him. Throughout the work it is clear that this author does not have a strong enough background in religion, philosophy of religion, or history of religion (much less anthropology of, psychology of, etc) to pull off a book like this.

Although Stenger decries “philosophical arguments,” he presents many that “prove” God cannot exist. These are of the “Can God make a rock too heavy for him to lift?” variety – mere verbal jousting and not actual argumentation.

This hubris knocks my rating of the book down to about three stars.

I’ve been lagging with my posting. Here’s my progress is tracked in the list I wrote at the begining. I’m reading book # 32 for the year (most, but not all of them are TBR). I’ve now read every book off of last year’s TBR challenge list.

I do hope to sit down and write some posts on the books I’ve been reading. They’ve been really terrific.

I’m reading one of two recently added books – I’ve had them on the shelves for a couple years. I started on Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources, but found I could stand a bit more background, so I dug a few oldies off the shelf.

The current read attempts to make the math less intimidating by using humor. I think it succeeds, but I’d rather just plow through something more concentrated. So this is probably good, it’s forcing me to smell more roses on this journey of words, ideas, and an expanding universe.