By E. A. Vander Veer
First Edition January 2008
Pages: 268
Series: The Missing Manuals
ISBN 10: 0-596-51769-6

Note: This was a review copy I received for free

I’ve done a bit of writing and editing for O’Reilly on the programming side which means I’ve come to expect a certain dry, technical style. That’s rarely a bad thing, though, as any developer who has suffered through someone else’s cutesy variable names can attest.

But this is a manual for a web site — already an inherently ridiculous concept — and what’s more, it’s a manual on Facebook. Currently on my Facebook home page:

• J– is now a fan of Fall Out Boy
• T– received a “fluff gift”
• Oh and Southwest airlines is apparently having a fare sale

These are not likely to be the subjects of the next Knuth book.

So on the lighter topic of Facebook.com and Facebook apps, it’s appropriate to interject some personality and wit:

Facebook lets you join only one regional network at a time. If you try to add a second, Facebook simply replaces the first with the second. That’s kind of annoying if you’re a multiple home owner, but on the bright side, you own multiple homes.

Plus, I’ll admit it, I learned some things. Facebook has an annoying habit of renaming concepts that already have names, so for example I had no idea that Notes were actual blog entries, and could be imported from external blog sources (I use a third-party app for that). I was also inspired to finally figure out how to get added to the network of my college alma mater, and start a new network for my company. So hey, useful.

The book has sound advice throughout in terms of the fuzzier aspects of Facebook: how to maintain a modicum of privacy, how to use the system to promote yourself or your employer. (The author also recognizes that the first thing everyone does is look up their exes, and provides helpful tips for that too.)

I hadn’t seen any of the Missing Manual series before so the layout was new to me. For me, a tech book just needs some text and an animal woodcut but for a popular “technical” book it’s pretty nice — lots of useful callouts in soothing colors and no incomprehensible icons or annoying cartoons. I don’t know if I’d recommend this book to any of my friends who are clearly all-too-capable of using Facebook already, but I totally recommend it for your boss who wants to know what this “MyFace” thing is he keeps hearing about.

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov (trans. by Burgin & O’Conner)

I’m obsessed with being completely unspoiled about a book once I have made a commitment to reading it. This includes avoiding the back cover or inside flap until I am at least two-thirds of the way through. Since I knew I was going to read The Master and Margarita as part of this project I did no research whatsoever on it. I knew only that it was Russian, obviously, and I had a faint idea that it was written in the 1930’s. Otherwise I approached it as a completely blank slate.

I’ll extend the same courtesy to others and not describe the plot, even though I realize I’m an extremist in this regard. I will instead say this: The Master and Margarita is among the most moving, fantastical, dark and savagely funny novels I have ever read. I finished it before bed, thought about it for an hour, slept, woke up and re-read the haunting and beautiful conclusion the next morning.

I may not have felt this way if I hadn’t been “forced” to read it. The early chapters are disorienting and erratic, and if I had been reading casually I might have set it aside. That would have been a tragedy. This is a truly great work.

Death in Venice

Thomas Mann (trans. by Heim)

The Master and Margarita translation is in contemporary English, with crisp, conversational language. It was a real bummer to shift right into Death in Venice with its languid, overripe, high-falutin’ prose. Sure, I realize that it’s meant to evoke Italy and cholera and Greek tragedy and a gradual descent into idleness and debauchery. Maybe it was just the wrong time to read it (the book was listed for March). Luckily it’s short. I’m happy to move on.

Some of the rules are the same: no authors I’ve read previously, no books that I’ve seen adapted into film, a baker’s dozen. New rule: works in translation with a different language each month.

I’ve ordered them, somewhat nonsensically, based on climate.

January: Russian
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

February: Japanese
Mishima Yukio: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

March: German
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice

April: Dutch
Harry Mulisch: The Assault

May: Spanish
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

June: French
Michel Houllebecq: The Elementary Particles

July: Italian
Italo Svevo: Zeno’s Conscience

August: Arabic
Elias Khoury: Gates of the Sun

September: Anglo-Saxon
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)

October: Chinese
Mo Yan: The Republic of Wine

November: Yiddish
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Enemies

December: Norwegian
Knut Hamsun: Hunger

Bonus book:
Portuguese
Jorge Amado: Dona Flor and her Two Husbands

It felt odd to omit all of India but I couldn’t find anything I was interested in that wasn’t written originally in English. I bumped Portuguese in favor of Arabic — the list was too heavy on Romance languages. Within any given language, I went with contemporary over classic.

(I read some excerpts from Beowulf in high school but it was a different translation and I’ve wanted to read this one anyway, plus it’s my project and I can cheat if I want to.)

This Ask Metafilter thread was invaluable, although the project is somewhat different: Which books are most representative of each country?.

One night when I was about eight, I decided that I would not conclude my bedtime prayer with “Amen.” I thought that praying was like making a phone call, with a ritualized beginning (”Our Father…”) and ending (”Amen”). Only between those two incantations could God hear me — like opening a channel to the away team. I decided that if I didn’t say “Amen” I could leave that channel on and thus make my whole life one unending paean to the Almighty.

Of course being eight years old I pretty much forgot about this the next time something profound happened, like getting a new Trapper Keeper. The next clear theological memory I have is from one afternoon in CCD when I asked how we knew that the Bible was true. The instructor, some poor girl a decade younger than I am now, answered that we didn’t know for sure but instead relied on our faith. At the time I found that unsatisfying. I was looking for some corroborating scientific evidence, having recently learned what science was. Of course, her answer was the only possible one.

Harris’s book is an attack on this and all other forms of faith. Although his examples of the damage caused by religion include obvious cases like the Inquisition and the Holocaust, he’s obviously not writing to convince 16th century Spaniards or Nazis. His targets are contemporary practitioners, especially well-meaning liberal Westerners who want to have it both ways: taking comfort in the history and tradition of Abrahamic religions but discarding the contradictory or flat-out unpleasant messages in its texts.

In my Catholic high school, someone once asked if Gandhi and Buddha were in heaven. “They are,” we were told, because their teachings were in the spirit of Jesus’s message. That same year we were subjected to a guest speaker on abstinence, and part of her routine included massive amounts of misinformation about birth control. I remember thinking then, as Harris does now: why do modern Catholics politely ignore prohibitions about belief in false gods but obsess over premarital sex (a topic which did not seem to especially interest Jesus anyway)? If Gandhi’s going to heaven anyway, why not be a Hindu? The food’s better.

The End of Faith can be a difficult read, even for an atheist. He explicitly rejects any “sensitivity” towards religious belief — in fact he considers this one of the West’s greatest internal threats — and it’s astonishing how transgressive this language can be. Dismissing religion as the ravings of primitive humans is just not how people talk (outside of the internet) even if some atheists do privately. Most of us, I think, try to be considerate of our friends and family. Harris is mad at us too.

Harris has been criticized by atheists, surprisingly, for not going far enough. He claims outright that paranormal phenomena have been shown to exist, and invokes Terence McKenna more times than a scientific rationalist should (i.e., ever). The book ends with a discussion on meditation, and while I get where he’s coming from (that rationalism does not equate to spiritual emptiness or the absence of wonder), it closes on an unpleasant New Age note.

There’s something seductive — and therefore, history tells us, dangerous — about thinking you’re on the correct side of a religious argument. It doesn’t matter from which end of the political spectrum you approach the book; Harris is neither right- nor left-wing. For him it’s equally true that Islam sanctions terrorism as Christianity promotes misogyny and persecution. (Actually it’s pretty much okay to equate every organized religion with misogyny.) His great fear is that these doctrines, codified when foul weather and disease were caused by God’s wrath, now influence people with access to nuclear weapons. In Harris’s worldview, only an unwavering support (I almost said belief) for strict rationalism will save us. And hey, guess what? I’m a strict rationalist. Now I feel great.

I’m not sure that’s right either, but I don’t have a better answer.

The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution is a history, in a way, of the expression of evolution. Told from the point of view of humans (who else?), it moves backward in evolutionary history visiting the major junction points where our species’ ancestors branched off from other groups. As the book progresses, the leaps (in form and function, as well as time) get progressively greater, ending with the origins of the first forms of life on Earth, estimated to be almost 4 billion years ago. The shtick of the book is that at each of these “rendezvous” between groups, a particular organism at that junction tells a “tale” which illustrates some principle of evolution.

I know a fair amount about hominid and primate evolution and pretty much nothing “before” that, so I found the later chapters more captivating than the first. It turns out I often didn’t know what our ancestors were.

I appreciated that Dawkins doesn’t shy away from the complexities in evolutionary history, but I wish the book’s structure were different. He reminds the reader repeatedly that the notion of progress as applied to evolution is pure nonsense — it’s nothing more than an expression of observer bias. To us, the notion of moving from sea to land, from four legs to two, seems obvious and natural. In reality, evolution moves in no particular direction at all, and even in our own history there are regressions and backtracking and the repeated “re-invention” of features.

Think about the evolutionary perspective of a bird. To them, mammals are an evolutionary dead-end: a minimally notable subplot in an unbroken chain from sea to land to air, from proto-reptile to dinosaur to bird. Humans managed to achieve flight only by over-engineering some unrelated organ (the brain) and constructing devices that surpass bird flight only in altitude and speed, but not even remotely in grace, agility or endurance. One imagines the pinnacle of evolution, from the point of view of a swift, of almost never having to set foot on land in an entire lifetime.

There are weirder trees to imagine: what would a fish think of the evolution of a whale? (”What a pointless digression were lungs and legs”, probably.) And the eusocial insects would be amazed that primitive forms of relatedness were still hanging around.

Dawkins can’t help but grumble about creationists throughout, but it’s mostly constructive: he cites the number of times the eye has independently evolved (nine) and there’s a good amount of space devoted to homeobox genes and their role in macroevolution. But I got the impression that he was holding back, if only because he knew he had The God Delusion in the pipeline.

Overall, it’s a good book, especially for people who enjoyed biology in school but haven’t kept up with the extraordinary discoveries enabled by molecular DNA analysis (dogs and the most recent common human ancestor are both from Asia, who knew?) Next up: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Dawkins buddy Sam Harris.

Every year I buy a bunch of romance novels for our vacation. I feel compelled to mention that the guys read them too.

This year I asked Amazon for high-rated romance novels set in the Jane Austen era:

1. A Wicked Gentleman by Jane Feather
2. Sinful Between the Sheets by Barbara Pierce
3. Bedding the Heiress by Cathy Maxwell
4. The Naked Earl by Sally MacKenzie
5. The Geology of Fluvial Deposits: Sedimentary Facies, Basin Analysis, and Petroleum Geology by Andrew D. Miall

Technically, the last doesn’t count: it received only 3 stars.

The introduction for the 2005 edition, rushed back into print to capitalize on the novel’s prescience, praises Sinclair Lewis’s achievement (of course) but only in spite of the book’s “loose melodramatic pot, flat and even corny characters, weak cliched dialogue, padded political discourse, awkward sentimentality, and heavy-handed satire.” All of these criticisms are true. I loved it.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Robert Louis Stevenson novella is told largely from the point of view of Jekyll’s friend and colleague Utterson, who slowly and painstakingly uncovers the twist that every modern reader already knows. So with the plot pre-spoiled, most of what the story has to offer is moody Victorian atmosphere. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s only about a hundred pages of it. Many of the adaptations expand the original story or tell it from Jekyll’s perspective instead. It’s a good candidate for that sort of treatment because much of the exciting stuff is discreetly glossed-over or told in letters rather than “real time.”

This only took me a few T trips to read, which is good because I’m scrambling to finish the last three books before the end of the year. I liked the pseudo-Freudianism and the addiction metaphors and the author’s prissy reluctance to describe Hyde’s actual deviant behavior, but that’s about all that’s to be had here. Oh, and the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting.

It’s harder to write about the books that I loved. I started reading this, years ago, and stopped, losing interest almost immediately. The initial idea behind this book-reading project was going to be “supposedly-great novels I never got around to finishing,” and Mrs Dalloway would have been first on that list (One Hundred Years of Solitude is another one). Instead I put it off until this year, and now I will count it as of my favorite books of all time.

I read the same copy I’ve had lying around for years, and when I reached to dog-ear a passage I particularly loved, I saw that I had already done so once before. I can’t imagine, then, why I put the book down — I find this so beautifully Modernist.

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turn at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory — away the aeroplane shot.

When I started this book-reading project, Moby Dick was the white whale in the room. I hadn’t read the book, I didn’t want to read the book, and when I chose my list for the first year, I deliberately ignored it. When I came up with the second year’s list, I knew I couldn’t put it off forever: it was the one novel almost everyone asked me about.

In fact I had no actual reason to avoid it because I knew nothing about it besides the usual cultural touchstones. If someone had told me, “Hey you should read this highly metaphorical Romantic novel criticizing man’s hubris in his quest to defeat nature, featuring wild style shifts and random asides about marine biology,” I’d say hey sign me up. Plus the opening narrative is pretty engaging so I thought this was going to be a breeze.

…they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

I always enjoyed high school literature class but I was often skeptical that the metaphors we uncovered were the product of authorial intent. Put in the context of this project, I can see that probably many of them were, but that was largely a consequence of reading so much 19th century American fiction. I’m happier decoding the repressed passion expressed in English aristocratic pleasantries than worrying about the symbology of Ahab’s, uh, pipe (if you know what I mean). It’s probably litcrit blasphemy but for the most part I gave the allegorical stuff a miss and just kept reading.

The biology digressions are probably interesting to history-of-science types but mostly I found them tiresome because I know it’s all wrong. Also I realize this is lame of me but I could not stop being annoyed by Ishmael calling the whales fish.

I did get a kick out of the Gothic Romanticism of it all: the more heavy-handed, the better. For example, I loved this:

For all [the whale’s] old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

I give Melville props for rolling this all into one sentence: compassion for animals, criticism of organized religion, and “gay bridals.” In fact I loved the style of the prose throughout, but it just wasn’t enough to carry my enthusiasm: less ambergris, more action.

I didn’t watch any adaptations but apparently there’s a 1998 TV movie version starring Patrick Stewart. One of the few user comments on IMDB is, “She blows.”