Un Lun Dun

Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville, is a young adult fantasy novel. I've been meaning to read something by Miéville for a while, and saw this in bookshops a few times, and it grabbed my attention each time, so I eventually picked it up.

It's a great little urban fantasy piece, set in Unlondon, the counterpart of London, where all the broken, rejected things from London disappear to. It's one of many "abcities", cities that parallel cities in the real world. Two girls from London, Deeba and Zanna, are drawn across from London into Unlondon, in order to fulfill a prophecy and save the world (or at least Unlondon).

It's fast-paced and very imaginative. They encounter all kinds of strange people and creatures and things, and each suburb of Unlondon has it's own peculiar theme. Major landmarks in London have bizarre counterparts in Unlondon. The plot works well, and just as it is shaping up to be a bog-standard fulfill the prophecy story, it takes a turn and derails its own plot. This happens more than once.

It's an easy and entertaining read, and I'll certainly be encouraging the young adults (well, nearly-ten-year-olds) in my house to read it.

Surface Detail

As I've mentioned before, I can't not read a new Iain Banks novel, especially one set in the Culture. He's a writer was has an astonishing ability to flesh out a universe, to take a few powerful ideas and build a consistent and fascinating world from them. Surface Detail is set in the universe of The Culture, which a number of his other books are set in, so it's familiar to readers. In this novel he bolts on a whole separate set of concepts to this world - that of digital hells that various cultures set up to punish digitally uploaded personalities of beings within their society that deserve punishment for some reason. It's a bit out of place, as none of this was really mentioned in any of the other Culture novels, and it's something that would really be expected to have been mentioned. In that regard, it feels rather clumsily to the existing world, when it could have been set in a new world without the retconning that is necessary here to make it fit.

Other than that, it's a pretty good read, especially once the action gets going. The baddies are (as always in a Banks novel) extra bad, so much so that it's not a book you'd give to kids (I was looking for books for my sixteen year old nephew for Xmas, and considered Banks, but decided not to, what with all the genocide and torture and rape that are so often present in a Banks novel). The good guys are all kinds of shades of grey, textured and three dimensional characters. The Minds, the vastly superhuman intellects that are embodied in the starships of the Culture, are always delightfully entertaining.

It;s not the first Culture novel I'd suggest for a new reader of Banks - I'd still suggest starting with Consider Phlebas, which blew me away when I first read it. And it's probably not up to the standard of The Algebraist, but otherwise it's still pretty great, and worth a read.

Pride and Prejudice

Being the ever-neglectful husband that I am, it's taken me many years to finally get around to reading my wife's favourite tale, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I've seen the BBC production countless times, as well as the recent movie, and various related TV shows about it, so I'm very familiar with all the goings on, as I'm sure everyone reading this is. P&P is kind of like the Star Wars of chick flicks. So it was interesting to actually get around to reading it. I was travelling, and decided to attempt my first ever bookless trip, and happened to have downloaded the Project Gutenberg ebook onto my iPad, so I read it while working in Saudi Arabia and holidaying in Jordan.

With regard to reading an eBook, as compared to reading a dead tree book, it was actually better than I expected. For all the digitalness of my life, I've always been very fond of the old paper format book. This was the first ever full eBook I've read. It actually was fine. There's a feeling of inevitability to the transition to ebooks - I know that in ten years I'll almost certainly be reading everything digitally, but I've been a bit uncomfortable with the transition. One of the issues is DRM - as with all the other media that have gone digital in recent years, the book publishers have tried to lock ebooks down and cripple them to ensure that everyone who reads one has to pay for the privilege. No more second hand books, no more borrowing books from friends. This is why I'm yet to buy an mp3 or movie online - I still buy CDs and DVDs when I'm buying music or movies. Project Gutenberg puts out-of-copyright books online for free, however, so I wasn't worried about DRM intruding on my life. Having said all that, reading the book on the iPad was fine, and I can see myself quite happily transitioning to all-digital reading, particularly if the licensing issues ever get resolved.

Pride and Prejudice itself was, well, as I expected. The thing that struck me the most was how constrained the characters were by the rules of their society - this struck me more in the book than it did in the various TV adaptations, which I suspect played down this aspect a little as it didn't translate that well for modern audiences. There are a number of times when you just want to yell at the characters to just bloody talk to each other. This aspect struck particularly strongly because I was travelling in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, where there are much more rigid rules about the behaviour of men and women that we are used to in the West - the constraints on the behaviour of characters in the book were similar to the constraints on the behaviours of the men and women around me, and experiencing the book and the society at the same time made both make a little more sense. It shouldn't have felt like an unexpected and strange parallel, but it did.

Apart from that, it's quite a clever book, with amusing and occasionally subtle characterization, and the plot is certainly not spoiled by knowing the conclusion - if anything, the plot is enhanced by knowing the outcome, by the looming inevitability of a happy ending.

Wireless

Wireless combines two things I love - short story collections, and the works of Charles Stross. It has some fantastic stories in it, including the first Stross story I ever read, A Colder War. This is an absolutely brilliant short story, setting the awakening of Cthulhu against the backdrop of the cold war.

The great thing about a science fiction short story is that it's the ideal vehicle for letting an author's imagination run wild. They don't have to ensure character development, or a satisfactory conclusion, or enough plot to sustain hundreds of pages entertainingly, so they're able to freely throw ideas around that might be problematic in a longer format.

Apart from A Colder War, the other standout stories in this collection were Missile Gap, another cold war/sci-fi crossover, and Palimpsest, a time-travel novel that gleefully stomps all over the Grandfather Paradox.

In summary, as always, Stross is a great read.

Student's Experiences of E-Learning in Higher Education

Disclaimer: this one is written by people I work and study with.

This book seems to be written more to target people running e-learning at a university than the run-of-the-mill academic (or grad student). It takes the approach that the University should be treated as an ecology, where all the parts need to work in harmony together, rather than as a hierarchy. That the University as a whole should focus on Learning as its raison d'être, since all aspects of a university's core business are about learning - in the case of students, learning to become a member of a community of knowledge; in the case of researchers, learning by discovering new knowledge. It looks at how to try to improve the functioning of a University using this ecological approach.

What made if particularly interesting was that it was written very much from the point of view of the Uni I work at, and examples were drawn from research done at this Uni. The authors, Rob Ellis and Peter Goodyear, are respectively the Director of E-Learning at Sydney University, and my PhD supervisor. So it was quite fascinating seeing how they thought a university should be run, and comparing that to how our uni is run.

Overall I got a lot more from the high-level picture of how e-learning at a University runs than I got ideas about how students experience e-learning at a Uni, but that is probably because it covers a lot of the ground covered in the previous pile of textbooks I had read. The important idea that it contributes to my thinking about student learning is that e-learning should not be considered in isolation or in contrast against traditional teaching and learning methods; but that rather that it should be viewed holistically as part of a larger picture of how students are learning.

Perhaps I got distracted by the big picture Sydney Uni stuff which, from my point of view, came across almost as insider gossip, and was distracted from the main message a bit; but even then this was a useful viewpoint to digest, and will stop me thinking of e-learning as something that has to compete with traditional learning, and lead me more to see how to integrate e-learning with other modes of learning. Certainly, students aren't seeing it as an either/or proposition, but rather as complementary parts of a learning toolkit that they deploy strategically when figuring out how to learn effectively.

Tuck

This is the last in the King Raven trilogy by Stephen Lawhead. I talked about book two previously, and my impressions of the third part of the trilogy are much the same as the previous ones. They are nicely done, and written so that I'll enjoy them nearly as much as my nine-year-old son will.

This one is centered around Tuck, the anglo-saxon friar whose real name is Aethelfrith, but who gets given a nickname (appropriate to his stature) that is more palatable to the welsh tongue. Friar Tuck was important in the previous books, but is central to the plot of this third book. This third book has a wider scope than the previous ones, and Rhi Bran's band of outlaws become a rebellion and have to face battle with the full strength of English might.

It works well, and an afterword tells us (with quotes from Anglo-Saxon chronicles of the time) that several of the welsh kings involved in the story actually did fight the Ffreinc (Norman rulers of England), with some success - the author is defending his tale against readers who will doubt the likely possibility of the events in the trilogy. Tuck is a satisfying conclusion to the story, and is probably the best of the series.

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep packs quite a punch. It's supposed to be pretty much the definitive hard-boiled detective novel, and it certainly lives up to that description. Having read it, I now want to go and watch the film. It would be hard to pack as much story into a film as was in this rather slender (by today's standards) novel.

What I love about Chandler's work is the writing. You can't help but sit there in awe at the compact, urgent vitality of it. It is personified in the protagonist, Philip Marlowe, who is all that a hard-boiled detective ought to be - smart, wily, quick, honest (in general, not in specifics) and trustworthy. Marlowe is dragged into a morass of moral degradation and corruption, but comes through clean, and naturally with a clear idea of who the villains are and what they did. It's not a black and white outcome - characters in Chandler's world are all portrayed in various rather murky shades of grey, and villainy is a relative thing, not an absolute.

It was written in 1939, and bears the hallmarks of its era - there's no sign of war or world politics, and the west-coast USA is a dangerous place, full of thugs, petty criminals, and former bootleggers. The language is delightful - partly Chandler's turn of phrase, but partly the slang of the era (obscure enough that some of it could have used explanatory footnotes).

I'm not normally a fan of detective novels, but it's worth wading into the genre just to soak in the sparse, hard beauty of Chandler's words and characters.

Slaughterhouse-five

Slaughterhouse-five is another of the classics I probably should've read a long time ago. There seem to be a lot of them out there - given my penchant for thinking numerically, I'm starting to wonder if there are more books out there that I should've read than I could possibly have read in my entire lifetime, given my rate of reading. There probably are, and it's likely that I could sit down over a weekend and create a list of 738 books that I really ought to read, and have a lifetime reading list. It's all a bit daunting.

But back onto my topic for this post: Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut, is an odd book. It's written in a deceptively childish style, and bounces chronologically through the entire lifetime of its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, centering mainly around his experience in World War Two. Billy's travails in the war are not the glorious war stories you see elsewhere. Billy was at the front, but wasn't a soldier. He was captured, and was in Dresden during the firebombing that destroyed it. He is hurt, humiliated, and dragged around Germany until the war ended.

Alongside that, Billy is somewhat outside time. He doesn't experience it linearly, but jumps back and forth. He learned this from aliens who experience time differently to us, not as a sequence of events, but all at once. It's all rather odd.

It's fundamentally an anti-war book, and this is explicitly stated in the first chapter, which is a (possibly fictional) account of how he came to write the book. He has a character comment that he might as well write an anti-glacier book, since both are inevitable and unstoppable (a thought which travels somewhat unhappily across the years to our age of global warming - we're losing our glaciers, but there are still plenty of wars).

It's a thought-provoking book, but I'm not sure I enjoyed it. The rather offhand style sat unevenly with the deep meditations on war, predestination and free will.

Building Online Learning Communities

Building Online Learning Communities, By Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, is a well-regarded text on, well, building online learning communities. It's a book of advice to teachers who may not be familiar with e-learning, or have some experience but are looking to do better. It's a very readable book, without some of the hard jargon of some other textbooks in the field, and certainly designed for the wider academic public.

The advice in it is excellent, and clearly based on the authors' own practice; they frequently quote their students' comments about the process and how well it has helped them.

Their central argument is that to do effective learning online, the key is to turn the class of learners into a community of learners, who communicate through online forums in a deep and meaningful way. They explain how this is different from the traditional model of tertiary education, since the discussion between the students becomes as important, if not more so, than their interaction with the teacher. Of course, the teacher is still required to keep a strong hand on the wheel, ensuring that the community is heading in the right direction, and providing a model of the right kind of behaviour.

It's not exactly what I was looking for; I build e-learning software, whereas the authors take it as a given - that the institution will provide software, and you have to deal with its problems and vagaries. I was hoping it would delve more into questions of what sorts of features of an online system promote high-quality discussion, but all they really got into was that it had to be reliable - that if the system crashes all the time things get difficult.

The issue of the importance of a strong teaching presence was of interest to me. My intended direction of research is into how to build a system that will foster strong student to student learning collaboration without the need for the constant guiding hand of a teacher to intervene regularly, so I'll have to try to take this into account, and work out what might stand in its stead - whether there is a hole that needs patching in my model. The Communities of Inquiry model has the same requirement for Teaching Presence in an online community, so I might be fighting an uphill battle.

Anyway, this one is a good book, and one I've already recommended to an academic I was talking to about this.

The Strain

The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, is an interesting new take on the vampire mythos. It's the first part of a trilogy, and is definitely written that way. It's a great read, moving along quickly, with well developed background, a rather overly quirky cast of characters, and a generally well-developed plot. I was disappointed* to discover it was the first part of a trilogy, with the following two novels not yet released (the second part is apparently due this month).

Del Toro's cinematic background is clearly evident throughout; many of the scenes and characters are clearly written for a blockbuster movie presentation, and I'd say it's a fair bet that we'll see a movie of this in a couple of years' time. Stuff out there on the internet seems to indicate that it was originally written as a miniseries or TV show, and that shows.

The main thing that is missing is del Toro's unique visual style. Nobody does critters quite like him, and these vampires, while scary and monstrous, aren't painted is vividly as one might hope.

This isn't one of the Sexy Vampire novels** that are all the rage with the kids these days; in many ways it's closer to Zombie fiction than vampire fiction - these vampires are a plague, and frequently compared to rats and other vermin. There is a nice biological background to it all, and the main character is a doctor ranked reasonably highly in the CDC in New York. The biology isn't relentlessly implausible, and so doesn't turn me off like some stories that try to create a scientific theory of vampirism.

It's a good read, and I'd recommend it to fans of the genre. I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for the sequels in bookshops.

* I'm strongly of the opinion that novels that are part of a series need nice big writing on the front saying "Book 7 of the NoseBludgeon Cycle" or something to that effect, so you don't get tricked into thinking you'll get to read the whole story without buying a pile more books.
** I've got nothing against the Sexy Vampire genre in general, and am quite enjoying the new True Blood season.

The White Tiger

If you've been following this blog, you'll have seen that I've been hammering through quite a few books here this week. Partly this is a backlog which owes its existence to my laziness and earth-shattering powers of procrastination, but partly it's because I went on holiday a couple of weeks ago with the family. I've found that I go through a pile of books on holiday, especially in the tropics. There is something absolutely delightful about sitting back with a book on a veranda or on a couch, with warm sea breezes flowing past, and the smell of Ocean pervading everything.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, was a perfect book for the occasion. I started reading it down here in the icy wastes of Sydney, but the book works better in the warmth of the tropics.

It's a rather harsh book to read, and you're left feeling rather ambivalent about the characters. The protagonist, Balram Halwai, describes himself as an entrepreneur, and this book is his explanation of how he got to where he is now, the owner of a thriving small business, from his poor rural background. And how he murdered his master, Ashok.

It's written with the voice of a poorly education Indian man, and the feeling of the underside of India's democratic success comes through powerfully. You feel the omnipresent sweaty heat, the oppression and hopelessness of the poor, the corruption, the anger, the tawdriness, and the cheapness of life in a developing country. Elections are a mockery, and the poor don't really even consider that they have any say in this at all. Once in a while one of them stands up to his superiors, and is promptly beaten down. It shows you that a poor rural boy can become a success, but the cost of success is his integrity. And that in a society like this there really isn't any such thing as integrity, or at least it doesn't exist without being intertwined with corruption.

Each time I read one of these Man Booker prize winners, I'm left somewhat stunned by the experience. They know what they're talking about when they hand those things out.

The Last Legion

This one was a bit of a shocker. The Last Legion, by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, really trudged through what might have been an interesting story in other hands. It is translated from the Italian, so some of the clumsiness of dialogue and character might come from that, but certainly a lot of it derived from clichéd-filled story itself. It's clearly written for movie adaption, and the author even notes that in the foreword, so you've got scenes in the book that seem more like descriptions of a movie than something that belongs in a novel.

The plot revolves around the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the fate of its last emperor, Romulus Augustus. He is rescued from his imprisonment at the hands of the dastardly barbarians who have deposed him and killed his father by Aurelius and his trusty band of legionaries, who were from "the last legion", the Nova Invicta, which was created in secret by Romulus's father Orestes.

The writing is reminiscent of George Lucas's Star Wars prequel scripts, but you get used to it after a while, and the middle portion of the book (the rescue and flight) trundles along at a good pace, with some nice action scenes. Then it gets really silly, and [SPOILER warning - skip to the end of this paragraph if you're still considering reading this book after the above] it turns out Romulus Augustus's tutor is Merlin, and Romulus becomes King Arthur's father, Pendragon.

A quick web search has shown me that they actually made this into a movie. And it is mostly quite atrocious casting, apart from Colin Firth, who is of course always a good casting choice. Apparently it was quite bad.

Avoid this unless you've got a real thing for Roman historical fiction and you've read all the good ones.

Understanding Teaching and Learning

Understanding Teaching and Learning, by Michael Prosser and Keith Trigwell (who happens to be the fellow who recommended my supervisor to me when I was looking at starting my PhD, for which I am very grateful), is one of the pile of books I'm ploughing through to get up to speed on educational theory in higher education. It's well written, and really focuses on hammering home several key points - that a student's learning outcomes depend on:

a) their prior experiences of learning - whether they had previously had good experiences that lead to quality learning
b) the student's perception of the situation they find themselves in - whether they see the particular learning situation as affording a deep approach to learning, and from this and (a),
c) the particular approach the student takes to learning in this context.

It focuses on trying to work out how to get students to take a deep approach to learning, and tries to explain why they don't in certain circumstances.

I can't recall the last time I read a textbook that concentrates in such depth on hammering home a single set of principles like this; it was a very impressive exercise. In a lot of ways it helped me set into place a lot of what I read in Biggs and Laurillard, so much more of the theory has clicked into place for me, and I'm able to read research papers with a much clearer idea of what they are talking about.

One of the things I find most interesting about entering a new field of study is getting to grips with the jargon, and education is one of those fields where the terminology is multi-layered; words that are in common parlance have a deeper and subtler meaning in books on educational theory, and so coming to terms with the terminology properly lets you understand in a lot more depth things that you thought you understood fully before your started. After all the reading I've done on this journey, and find myself thinking back to previous discussions I'd had or things I had read and pondered, and realizing I hadn't fully grasped the situation. It's also a nifty though that in a year or two I'll be thinking back on my current state of thought and be amused by its naivety.

Back on topic, Prosser and Trigwell = Good and thorough.

A Stainless Steel Rat is Born

I need to get my hands on the original A Stainless Steel Rat - I've now read two of the sequels/prequels, but can't seem to find the original; my book catalog says I've got two of them somewhere, but they don't seem to be there now.

In any case, I've got plenty to fill in the time until I find it - I've got six Rat books sitting on the shelf behind me waiting to be read.

A Stainless Steel Rat is Born is pretty great too, but I wouldn't say it's got the zing that Revenge has. It's just a little less slick throughout; the younger Jim diGriz has decided to become a criminal, and decides that to become a proper master criminal he needs to find an expert to learn from. The story that follows, while fast and action-packed, just meanders along in no particular direction. What feels like the central plot of the book is resolved well before the half-way point, and then a lot of other stuff happens.

It's quick, fun, and full of adventure. Certainly not too taxing on the brain, but still entertaining enough to keep you going. I'll certainly read more of the Rat series.

Stories

Stories is a compilation of short stories edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. It's an interesting collection that is seems to be straddling the boundaries of literary fiction and fantasy/horror fiction. The back cover blurb describes it as "imaginative fiction", probably a subtle way of hinting to the genre fans what's inside without scaring off the general public.

Many of the stories in it were really quite good - the ones by Tim Powers, Elizabeth Hand, Gaiman, and Jeffrey Deaver all left very strong impressions; there were a few weaker ones, but overall the collection was very strong, and had a lot of innovative takes on familiar genres.

I'm a fan of compilations like this; they give a nice introduction to a range of authors that I might otherwise not get a chance to read, and in the past I've discovered some of my favourite author in this way.

Certainly worth a look.

The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge

It was more than 20 years ago that The Stainless Steel Rat was first recommended to me by a friend, and in the intervening years many other friends have expressed surprise and possibly a little disbelief that I had never read any of them. As a sci fi and fantasy fan, there are a number of these series that I'm yet to read that by all right I should have, from Asimov to Zelazny*. I've read one Harry Harrison, but I can't remember which one. It wasn't one of these.

Revenge was the second written of the series, but chronologically it was the fifth (I found this out when Jen, after expressing her shock and disbelief that I hadn't previously read any of the Stainless Steel Rat [henceforth SSR] novels, pointed out that I should've started with SSR is Born). In any case, it stands on its own quite well.

It starts with Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, on vacation** with his beloved Angelina, where they cause destruction and mayhem before turning themselves in to the Special Corps, who it turns out are their employer. He is then sent on a mission to infiltrate and stop the interstellar conquests by the inhabitants of the planet Cliaand.

It's a grand adventure, filled with old school sci-fi technologies. Maybe I've been reading too many tales of the Singularity, but it feels like a pleasant change to be in a universe of starships and warpdrive generators and non-nanotechnology personality surgery. Like a holiday in a country town where they don't have mobile phone signal, and small CRT TVs.

The characters are eminently entertaining; it brings to mind some of the joy of reading The Flashman Papers; the protagonist is shady and self-centred but you can't help but like him and enjoy his adventures. The plot is pretty generic 60s/70s sci-fi, but that's largely not the point; the point is the entertainment of watching the anti-hero weasel his way out of an endless series of traps and tight situations.

So, definitely worth a read. Apparently you shouldn't start with this one like I did; start with SSR or SSR is Born. Though really, I can't see it hurting reading these in any random order at all. I'll certainly be reading more of them.

* OK, I'm exaggerating for the sake of alphabetical completeness - I finally read Zelazny's the Chronicles of Amber a couple of years ago. It was bizarro.

** technically it wasn't actually a proper vacation, but I'll leave the book to explain the details

738 books revisited

Not much to say but crikey! Google has done an estimate of how many books there are out there, and are 129,864,880 of the blighters. So once I get through my allotment of 738, there are still 129,864,142 I haven't read. I'll be able to get through 0.00057% or so of the books out there.

Rethinking University Teaching: a framework for the effective use of learning technologies

Rethinking University Teaching, by Diana Laurillard, was a hard slog, especially after reading Biggs and Tang. It's much more technical and jargon-driven, and the author uses words in a manner which just don't match up with dictionary definitions. Having said that, it's an impressive piece of work, looking at computer-supported learning, and how effective the various different forms of digital learning tools are. She sets up a theoretical framework describing how teaching and learning works (the "Conversational Framework"), and then looks at each type of teaching interface to determine how they match the framework.

My personal feeling was that the framework she established was created in a rather arbitrary manner - I come from a mathematics and physics background, where if you're going to set up explanatory theories or frameworks, you bloody well better have solid experimental evidence, otherwise you're just waffling and handwaving. It's taking me quite a while to get used to the world of Education, where the things they are studying are so complex and hard to measure, and the science it's based on (psychology and cognitive science) still so fast-moving and unsettled, that the kinds of hard experimental evidence and proof that I'm used to are a long way off.

However, the value of the framework is not in its explanatory powers regarding teaching and learning, but rather in the way that it highlights the shortcomings of each educational technology, and show what they are useful for. There is a lot of useful information in here about when and where to use video, interaction, discussion tools, and so on; and also in how to mix them.

This is far and away the hardest book I've hard to read, in terms of sheer density and complexity of prose, in quite a few years. And coming from a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, that's quite a strong statement. It reads like an academic paper, rather than a textbook. And since it's from 2002, in technology terms it's almost ancient history, and many of the descriptions are quite dated. On the other hand, pretty much all the technologies she talks about are still with us, and in similar forms. Many of the technical impediments she talks about are largely gone (provide videos on DVD? Pfft!), but the vast majority of the pedagogical issues remain.

Scarlet

Scarlet is the second in the King Raven trilogy by Stephen Lawhead. I read the first one, Hood, a few years ago, before I started listing the books I'm reading, so you'll have to look elsewhere for a description of it.

The premise of the trilogy is that Robin Hood wasn't actually from Nottingham, but rather a Welsh nobleman displaced by Norman invaders. His name is Bran, and Robin Hood becomes Rhi Bran y Hud (King Bran the enlightened). I found the premise interesting enough to grab the first book, and that one was a good enough read to encourage me to get the rest of the series. They're also very nice looking books, which always helps :)

As with most tellings of the Robin Hood tales, Robin is impeccably noble and good, and the bad guys are almost comically wicked. This second book is the tale of Will Scarlet (aka William Scatlocke), an English hunter displaced from his original home by the Normans. Like the first book of the trilogy, it's entertaining and fast paced, the baddies are sufficiently bad and the good guys are brave and noble. It's simple and clean, written in such a way that it will work as well for my 9-year-old son as it does for me, if not better.

In this episode of this trilogy, Will Scarlet joins Rhi Bran's band of outlaws, gets captured by the nasty Normans, and Rhi Bran and his band of outlaws gets mixed up in the near civil war between the King of England, William Rufus, and his brother, Duke Robert. It all ends up with the kind of conclusion you expect given that it's the second book of a trilogy.

It seems well researched (I don't know enough Welsh history to verify that, though), and it gives a good view of life shortly after the Norman conquest, and social changes brought about by very different attitudes at the top of the social hierarchy. If you're looking for good historical fiction that doesn't tax the brain too much, this is series is worthwhile. I'm planning on digging into the last book of the series, Tuck, in a few books' time.

Replay

I picked up this one not knowing what to expect. I'd never heard of Ken Grimwood, and it hadn't come with and recommendation other than being a part of the Fantasy Masterworks series.

In Replay, Jeff Winston is a 43 year old trapped in a series of dead-end jobs and a terrible marriage. He dies suddenly of a heart attack, and wakes up in his eighteen-year-old body, back in college. Armed with a knowledge of future events, he becomes wealthy, and lives an entirely different life, until his dies again at 43, and wakes up again in his eighteen year old body.

What stops this being just another repeat-a-day-until-you-get-it-right* or wake-up-in-a-younger-or-older-body story is the depth and richness of the characterization, the haunting beauty of Jeff Winston's loss and heartbreak and joy and love. The concept has been done elsewhere, but there's an amazing power in Grimwood's writing. Towards the end, I couldn't put the book down, and ended up reading the last six chapters in one sitting (my usual rule is one chapter per night). The ending is also far more subtle, more bittersweet than the thumpingly obvious ones that other tales with the same basic premise leave you with.

If you read this book, expect to feel somewhat haunted when you finish it. Expect to wonder what you're doing with your life, whether you're on the right path, why you're on the path you're on, whether you have any control over the things that happen around you, and how you might even begin to make a rational choice in a world on unexpected consequences. I'm still being dragged through those tortuous, twisty paths of possibilities and improbabilities.

I think this will be one of the books that leaves me touched by its message for many years. There are a few of those over the years, books that have left a flavour in the mind long after the details of the plot and character are gone, that leave a few images and an atmosphere of wonder behind that comes back in flashes now and then; a feeling of having-felt-this-before when in a certain situation or reading a certain passage of prose.

I'd recommend reading this one. It's worthwhile.


*The novel pre-dates Groundhog Day, and the interwebs seem to think it influenced that movie

Saturn's Children

I'm sure I've said enough about Stross in my previous posts, and if you've read any you'll have a flavour of my fanboy-ish regard for his work.

Saturn's Children travels in a different direction from his other works. Rather than a singularity style universe of unlimited potential technological advancement, Saturn's Children is a world where humanity's robotic servants have been left in charge of the Solar System, after humanity rendered itself extinct. The robots, however, were built to serve humanity, so the society they build is warped and missing its core function.

The premise is that humans never worked out AI properly - they were only able to imprint human minds onto robot brains - which means the characters act and react in believably human ways to the events that unfold. It's a great story, and operates on two levels (like much of Stross's work); a story about believable people in believable situations, as well as a gigantic what-if question that looks at what might happen if we ever develop sufficiently intelligent robotic servants.

Overall, a good book, though perhaps not as mind-blowing as some of his other work, if simply because the scale is that much smaller.

Teaching for Quality at University

I pretty much now consider the main point of this blog is to track the books I've read, and how I felt about them. This book is the first of many I'll be reading for my PhD, so I'll talk a little about it.

Teaching for Quality at University, by John Biggs and Catherine Tang, is one of the definitive books about outcomes-based education. He talks about Constructive Alignment, which is a method for designing courses that aims to ensure that the the students are learning what you want them to learn - aligning teaching and assessment to the intended learning outcomes of the course. It's a very well written book, easy to understand and follow. Academic writing is often poor, focused on accuracy rather than readability, so this was a pleasant surprise.

I chose this as my first book to read (my PhD supervisor has given me a list), because the Medical Program that most of my day job is about recently redesigned its curriculum, building the curriculum around Learning Objectives (which is our way of saying "Intended Learning Outcomes"). It has really helped me understand with more clarity what we're doing (I'm employed mainly as software designer, not educational designer, so my former ignorance on the topic is not as outrageous as on might at first think).

Great book; I'll probably have to read it again sometime, when I've learnt more about everything else related to learning.

Conan the Champion

More Conan is always good for one's health. Conan the Champion, by John Maddox Roberts, it surprisingly good. I picked it up on the assumption that it was yet more mass-produced junk extruded from the vast Conan novel grinding machine they've got hidden away somewhere that takes raw beef and steel and turns them into a Authentic Barbarian-With-Rippling-Muscles Flavoured Product, but this was better than that. Certainly an improvement over Mercenary.

In this tale, Conan is shipwrecked at the start of winter in the northern reaches of the Vilayet Sea, and is stuck with nothing to do over winter, so he heads off to seek the employment of one of the local petty kings. Demons are encountered, battles fought, epic deeds done. The local northern tribes are nicely barbaric, done in the true style of a Robert E Howard barbarian tribe. There's a rather silly interlude in an alternate dimension that appears to be little more then filler, but other than that the story flows quite well. Apparently Roberts said in an interview that his publishers keep making him extend the length of his novels, and there are definitely a couple of parts that seem to have been thrown in to pad out the story and don't add much at all to the overall plot.

If I see more of Roberts' Conan novels, I will certainly pick them up - this was quite entertaining.

The Once and Future King

The Once and Future King is quite an epic book; the tale of the life of Arthur and those around him. But rather than a biographical style tale, it's the tale of Arthur's moral development, and his quest for the idea of a moral form of government.

The quote from the New York Times reviewer on the back cover is very apt - "A glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were but as they should have been". Mighty knights and quests and the holy grail and bravery and justice and love fill this bittersweet tragedy. In the beginning Arthur is a child, then a young man the small world of his guardian Sir Ector's castle and estate, and Merlin arrives to be Arthur's tutor. This warm and humourous start to the story becomes tinged with sadness and bitterness as the story progresses, and Arthur discovers his true purpose and tries to bring justice to the violent and thuggish world he was born into.

It's a powerful book, and a telling of the tale of Arthur that changes one's conception of the tale entirely.

There was something about the copy of the book that I read that added to the experience. It's the same edition as the one linked above, but it's very worn and beaten up; it is split in half, with several pages in the middle sitting loose, broken away from the spine. This gave the book a feeling of great antiquity; almost a sense that I was reading an artifact from the time of Arthur himself. To prevent further damage this book needed to be handled with an almost reverent care; this certainly added to the experience. As I move towards e-books and a more digital life, it makes me wonder if I'll be losing more than I thought I would by leaving paper behind. Having said that, while writing this review, I was able to pop open iBooks and download Le Mort d'Arthur by Malory, which is referenced often in The Once And Future King, occasionally quite amusingly.

In any case, this is a book certainly worth reading. If possible read it in larger doses than I did (one chapter per night - there are many chapters), so that you can a deeper sense of what is going on.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

My dear reading public, I'm sure that both of you are becoming rather concerned about the quality of my reading, so I thought I'd raise the tone a little bit by finally getting around to reading a classic that I've meant to read for years, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.

It's a story that's part of the fabric of our culture; I can't remember a time when I didn't know the basic premise of this book - that a vain young man has a portrait painted which takes on the consequences of his sin and depravity, so that he remains young and breathtakingly handsome, while the person in the picture ages and becomes hideous, and displays the evidence of all his sins.

Ten years ago Jen and I went to Egypt, and saw the Pyramids, among other things. Everyone knows what the pyramids look like, and probably can't remember the first time they saw them; they've just Always Known. But going there, I was absolutely blown away by their grandeur, by how simply colossal they were. The Picture of Dorian Gray is like that; it's far better than you'd imagine it to be.

For starters, it's frequently hilarious. Wilde is famous for his witty epigrams, but the sheer volume of them in this book is staggering. Several time I had to put the book down and just sit there, laughing. The writing is lyrical and delightful throughout. It shows that for a language slapped together by germanic peasants and invading French thugs, English can be breathtakingly beautiful.

As an aside, I just did a Google search for a page of quoted to link you off to, but the pages out there on the interwebs really don't do justice to the novel. There are some deliciously spiky barbs that are frequently quoted, but it's a book you can flip to any page and be lost in the language.

One thing I found is that I can't read it without hearing it in Stephen Fry's voice. It's not just that he played Wilde in the 1997 movie; Fry really is a modern reincarnation of Wilde. I don't know that it was a bad thing, since Stephen Fry's voice is probably the ideal way to hear Wilde's characters speak. He has in fact put out at least one audiobook of Wilde's short stories; I'm sure there are, or will be, more.

This is a book that is worth reading. Don't be put off by knowing the premise, or even the ending. There's much more to the book than the basic plot points and some witty quotes. Go, get it now. Heck, you can download it for free.

Conan the Mercenary

I promise I didn't read two trashy Conan books in a row. Honestly, I didn't. I've just been in the mode of reading several books in parallel, in different parts of the house, and it so happened that I completed this one before I finished the other one I started before I started this one. Really, I did.

In any case, Conan the Mercenary, by Andrew J Offutt, seems to be from an extended series of knockoff Conan books that may have stemmed from L Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's series - Buccaneer is listed in the "also in this series" list in the front of the book. In any case, if the Conan subgenre is literary junk food, then this one is fried pizza. It's not awful, but it certainly lacks a lot of the subtle power that makes Howard's or Robert Jordan's Conan tales shine. Relative to those, and even to the de Camp/Carter novel, this one is rather lacklustre.

It's actually two linked shorter stories; in the first Conan tries to steal from a sorcerer, and ends up with something of his own stolen; in the second one he comes into the employ of a noble lady in an eastern kingdom, in order to get back what he lost to the sorcerer. He defeats another bad guy who has been aided by a sorcerer.

Sorcerers in Conan stories seem to be always a little dull. They're two-dimensional bad guys with magic and an insatiable lust for power. I've always wanted a little more to them. The warriors are much more interesting - flawed but likable characters with some depth to them. I feel shortchanged after Conan goes up against a sorcerer - whether he wins of loses, it seems that there should have been more. More of what, I don't know. But more.

So this one I'd rate as only for the real Conan fans. Otherwise, skip it. The advantage you have with Conan over something like the Flashman Papers is the near limitless supply of reading material. I was immensely disappointed when I read the last Flashman novel and knew that there would be no more, but at least with Conan, there seems to be a good few shelf-metres of reading material to go through before I run out.

Conan the Buccaneer

To paraphrase Mel Brooks (and many, many others), Conan novels are like pizza. Even when they're bad they're still good.

There are a few other similarities too. They're cheesy and there's a lot of meat. And even though you know they're unhealthy you still enjoy them.

Conan the Buccaneer isn't one of Robert E. Howard's* original Conan works, but rather by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter**. Conan is the captain The Wastrel, plundering the coasts of Argos and other neighbouring kingdoms, and he runs into a spot or two of trouble and winds up tangled in the plot of a devious nobleman and some vile Stygian priests to overthrow the king. Along the way he gets caught up with a hideous god on a mysterious isle, a tribe of amazons capture him, many battles are fought, and monsters and evildoers slain. What more could you ask for?

de Camp and Carter were very deliberately tidying up and finishing off Howard's legacy with this series of novels, turning Howard's loose collection of stories into something like a narrative of the mighty Cimmerian's life. Buccaneer is a rollicking adventure, and does feel like a natural continuation of the originals; but it comes across as somewhat muted. There are the standard Conan fixtures of a buxom, beautiful, headstrong princess who ends up disrobed on a number of occasions; Conan defeats his foes, be they human, beast or supernatural. There are nods in the direction of H P Lovecraft in the way the supernatural, and religions in general, are treated. But it's missing some of the vibrancy that characterized Howard's work.

All the same, it's a great read. It's also quick (150ish pages), in the way fantasy and sci-fi novels could be before the last few decades when a 400 age minimum seems to have become de rigueur. I picked up a few other Conan books at the same time, by other authors, so expect more Conan reviews from me in the coming months.


* Holy crap! Just looked at that Wikipedia article for the first time. Robert E Howard looked like that?!?! I'd always thought of him, from the biographical snippets I've read, as a weedy pale little guy. He's totally gangsta!

** Linwood Vrooman Carter? Lyon Sprague de Camp?!? Where the hell are these people getting their names***? I used to chuckle quietly when reading fantasy novels at the outlandish names, but to these people Ator, Conan, and Thongor must be like John, Paul, and Steven to us normals.

*** Yes, I know what my kids' names are. Silence, you!

Kingdom Come

I found this one a little odd. Kingdom Come, by J. G. Ballard, is on one hand a nicely written novel with interesting characters, but on the other hand a somewhat hamfisted parable about fascism being the natural consequence of excessive consumerism. I've not read any other Ballard, but I've heard a lot good said about him, so it leaves me wondering if this is one of his lesser novels.

It's the story of an advertising exec, Richard Pearson, who heads out to the burbs when his father is shot in a shopping mall. He proceeds to investigate, and is drawn into the weird politics that is evolving in the suburbs surrounding the Metro Centre where is father was shot.

The story is really a vehicle for Ballard's obvious distrust of consumerism and sport, and he seems to believe that they naturally segue into racism and violence. As someone who would be very much considered a product of a consumer society, I find it all a bit hard to swallow. I found Dawn of the Dead made a more pertinent commentary about the failings of consumerism than Kingdom Come.

In any case, it's an interesting tale, and certainly hasn't turned me off this author. Kingdom Come is his last novel (he passed away last year), and I've get his second (from 42 years earlier) sitting on my shelves waiting to be read.

Halting State

(Disclaimer: I finished this a couple of months ago, so its not so fresh in my mind).

Again I delve into the worlds of Charles Stross. I will get through them all eventually, and then only be reading the one or two per year he writes, but until then, expect more Stross fan-blather from me.

Halting State is set in near-future (2017, according to the chapter that is the CIA World Factbook entry for Scotland in that year) Scotland, where everyone has access to virtual world overlays of the real world, and can be actively involved in MMORPGs all the time. Even the police have an virtual world called CopSpace that gives them all kinds of additional information about everything they look at - maps, suspect databases, current activity, etc. All the kinds of things that we'll get once they get VR headset drivers for iPhones and Android phones.

It's an investigation style novel - detective novel, if you will, about a cybercrime that blows out of proportion. Published in 2007, which means he was writing it in 2005 or 2006. Back then it was sci-fi; but now it's just a straightforward What's Happening Soon. If you're reading the right blogs, the reaction to certain news items is "well, Halting State is no longer fiction".

As always, good story, well written. Characters that any nerd can identify with and enjoy. It's nice to read stories from the nerd viewpoint; stories unafraid to talk about TCP routing and MMORPGs and facial recognition software, but that still deliver an exciting story with believable people in them.

All in all, a very cool book. I don't think it was quite as awesome as some of his other books, but still worth reading. It leaves you with a definite sense of how the near future will look, with what feels like a lot more accuracy than many other visions. And the way the world has developed since the book's release has made it look more prescient than it may have looked three or four years ago.

Dr Dan?

Well, there it goes, off into the ether, winging its way across copper and fibre, onto a pile of disks in a darkened shelf somewhere in Ultimo. I've just sent off my CV to see if they're interested in letting me do a PhD. It took me over a week to respond to their email asking for it. Had they thought I'd forgotten or changed my mind?

This whole thing is rather intimidating. My Honours years (now seemingly an aeon ago) weren't exactly the masterpieces they could've been (though I tend to cite various extraneous factors as excuses). With a full-time job and a wife and three small kids, is taking on a PhD a smart idea? Have I got what it takes to do this? It'll take smarts (which I can usually successfully fool people into thinking I have), and hard work (most people aren't aware, but I have been known to do it on rare occasions), and a whole lot of energy (rarely my strong point, despite the medically inadvisable amount of energy drinks I consume).

It's still not final, and I'm still a fair way off being actually enrolled in anything, but each step closer fills my gut with a roiling brew of dread, excitement and worry.

738 Books

738 Books. That's how many I've got left. To read, ever.

Part of the reason I've been noting the books I've read here in this blog is to get an idea of how quickly I actually read them, and thus how many I've got left to read before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I've read 18 books in the last year, and given average life expectancies and my current age, it means I'll get to read another 738 books (if I knew a bit more stats, I'd produce a nice graph that would show the likelihoods of me reading each particular number of books between 1 and 1500).

The good thing is, this is more than I was expecting. I didn't know of the number would be 200 or 2000; I was expecting something closer to the 400 mark. But it does show I need to think a little more about the quality of book that I read. Each book I read can now be considered 0.14% of all the books I'll ever get to read in my life, and each crappy book is a good one I don't get to read. If I should decide to read the entire oeuvre of a writer who has produced 8 novels, that's 1% of my life's reading.

This doesn't mean only reading the highest literature and non-fiction to be found; it means the books that will affect me the most, and bring me the most enjoyment. A lot of the books I've read over the last year have been of that sort, and I find a Singularity Sky to be as relevant, or even more so than a Vernon God Little. I will, however, avoid wasting 0.27% of my remaining lifetime literary intake on the sequels to Byzantium's Crown.

Of course, I still have the option to expand my intake by spending more time reading. And getting serious about it once I retire. Danny seems to get through about four times as many books as I do, so it's certainly possible.

I intend to keep writing here about the books I read. I've enjoyed it so far, so I'll keep doing it until someone tells me to shut up :)