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.