Tag Archives: reviews

Sweating to Books on Tape*

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A few years ago when I was living alone in China, my job gave me a significant amount of free time. I taught either one or two classes per day (biology and pre-calculus), had no official office hours — I was able to make it to the gym most weekdays (morning or afternoon depending on my schedule) and had all my evenings free save Tuesday nights when I ran a sort of phys ed program until about 5:30 or 6:00.

What I didn’t have were friends. That may be part of the reason I started listening to audio podcasts. Craving the human voice (in English, rather). I listened to Escape Pod and enjoyed it quite a lot, though I stopped being able to keep up after a few months back in Canada, particularly once I was working a genuine full-time teaching job.

I do like audio fiction, and it’s particularly ideal for short stories, which I am also fond of. Not everybody is, even avid readers. Or at least, it doesn’t occur to a large segment of the reading population to pick up an anthology or collection. This is a shame, really.

Certainly there’s a place for novels and short works, both, but there are a number of advantages to short fiction, including the ability to read it in one sitting, the chance to get a number of neat and unique ideas in a single book instead of focusing on just one, the ability to see a basic narrative idea stripped bare and not buried in an overwritten novel (it’s harder to overwrite a short story and still get it published).

All of which is to tell you I was thinking of a short story I “read” some time ago (I realize I heard the audio version only), and tracked it down, and if you’re interested, perhaps you’ll give it a listen. It’s called “Usurpers”, it’s hosted on Escape Pod, and it’s about a stubborn runner in the future who refuses any sorts of bodily enhancements, but still dares to compete against modified humans. He’s kind of a jerk but the story makes an important (and legitimate) point about “grit”. It’s more important than you think. For anyone who strives for greatness, physically, intellectually, artistically. . . .

*The title is a reference to a Family Guy cut-away gag.

Book Review: Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5

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In 2002, the British government agency, Military Intelligence, Section 5, also known as the Security Service, or simply MI5, advertised for a part-time historian to write an official history of the Service, in time for its 100-year anniversary in 2009. The paperback edition, released December, 2010, included some small corrections and improved details, particularly on more recent terrorist activity, which previously, for security reasons, could not be published.

It’s a far cry from just a few decades ago where Service staff often could tell no one where exactly they worked, and even the appointment of the Director General was not publicly announced. In order to complete this monumental task, Christopher Andrew, a leading authority on the history of intelligence had access to tremendous amounts of declassified along with still confidential records. No doubt there were occasional clashes between the desire to detail a complete history and the need to avoid compromising national security.

The story of British intelligence dates to the first decade of the 20th century, precipitated by several years of increasing public hysteria and popular novels about “the Kaiser’s spies” operating in England. It all culminated in October, 1909 with an army captain named Vernon Kell and a navy commander named Mansfield Cumming running a two-man operation, trying to build an intelligence organization from the ground up. It wasn’t long before the two men parted ways to head their own organizations. Kell was first Director General MI5, whose province would be espionage and subversion within the Commonwealth, while Cumming was first Chief of MI6, responsible for collecting intelligence about foreign powers outside British soil.

This hefty history seems both thorough and objective. Broken into sections on “The German Threat”, “Between the Wars”, “The Second World War”, “The Early Cold War”, “The Later Cold War”, and “After the Cold War”, the individual chapters nevertheless cover much of the same period from different perspectives. For example, one chapter in the section of “The Early Cold War” covers some specific decrypted Soviet communications that would eventually lead to the uncovering of the famous “Cambridge Five”, enormously successful Soviet spies who had penetrated British intelligence.

Then another chapter is all about the lesser-known but simultaneous period in history of the early negotiations for the state of Israel. The major security threat of that unstable time was Zionist terrorism. (Andrew also tells us that the extremist Jewish Nationalist groups of this time were the very last in history to self-describe as terrorists for their cause.)

It’s interesting to see how priorities have changed throughout the history of the Security Service. Though originally conceived of as defending British Commonwealth from agents of foreign powers inside its borders — essentially spies, saboteurs, and a potential fifth column in case of war – MI5’s authority over all state enemies within the realm also put it front and centre in all instances of domestic terrorism as well.

The significance of this became clear during the Troubles of Northern Ireland, starting in the late 1960s. Actions by the Irish Republican Army originally catalyzed the creation of Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police almost a century earlier (previous to the existence of any military intelligence service), but the Security Service took a leading role when violence re-erupted in the later 20th century. In more recent decades, Muslim terrorist groups have been a major concern to both intelligence officials and the general public in the West, and this, too, has fallen firmly within MI5’s operational scope.

By far the biggest focuses of the Service throughout its history are the enormously successful “Double-Cross System” used to mislead the Germans by false information in the Second World War, and the 40-plus years of espionage and counter-espionage against the Soviet Union, including the uncovering of the “Cambridge Five” and the famous “Atom Spies” who passed on the secret of the bomb. But as noted, it’s interesting to see that even while lesser-known threats are in the background as far as the public is concerned, the Service still has a smaller team quietly collecting information. During WWII, only a small amount of energy was devoted to Soviet intelligence (not enough, it later turned out), but analyzing what intelligence was collected became a priority during the Cold War. Similarly, glimmerings of Muslim terrorism are foreshadowed in the latter years of the Cold War, though they were not considered a priority at the time.

This is not a weekend read. Andrew could probably take some of the highlights and cut this 1000-page behemoth into something much more digestible, but if he did, it wouldn’t be a history anymore. Objective, fact-based (with an endnote for nearly every sentence to prove it), and detailed, Defend the Realm really packs it in. The density of information is high, the amount of filler is essentially nil, and the type is quite small.

Andrew also does not speculate as the writer of a general audience work might. He’s a professional historian and this is a professional piece of historical scholarship. I’ve been reading this book on and off for six months, and some casual readers might have given up before then. It’s not narrative and we know only what definitely happened; he does not tell us about the emotional states of the principal players or speculate on the dramatic tension at some of the events.

On the other hand, the material sometimes speaks for itself. This is the real-life story of war, foreign spies, secret political meetings, terrorists, and narrowly-evaded disasters of all kinds. For hard-core history/military/intelligence buffs, this is a goldmine of carefully collected and organized material. The shadowy realm of military intelligence is a rarely thought about but inescapable part of our modern world.

(Vintage Books, 2010)

Article first published as Book Review: Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew on Blogcritics.

Frankenstein and Other First Novels

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I look forward to a package of fresh books this week, all review copies I have requested from one publishing house or another. Meanwhile, I’ve been finishing up the last of the books I originally brought south with me, and expect to polish the last of them off next week.

I’ve just now finished Frankenstein, and yes, it is a first novel and sometimes clunky, as iconic as the story has become, but the (arguable) problems with it derive less from Shelley herself than the style of writing of the time. With respect to Austen, romantic aka pre-Victorian literature is not known for being tightly-plotted.

The 160-page novel, if you cut out all the exposition on the Swiss countryside, unnecessary back story of irrelevant minor characters, and long, melodramatic monologues by Victor Frankenstein (who, by all accounts, never was a doctor at all), you might have a decent 30-page short story (or a short graphic novel).

The 19th-century style, particularly for the pre-Victorians, is to drag out narrative, then pile it on when it comes to surprise, suspense, and terror, sometimes to the point where character behaviour makes little sense. Frankenstein brings his monster to life and as soon as it twitches, what does he do but literally run out of his own house and not return until the confused life form has stumbled off into oblivion.

He doesn’t see the monster again for a year, though we are told to believe he has maintained a frenzied sense of dread that entire time. The first few months are spent bedridden and near death, of course, since that brief glimpse of his awakened creation apparently shut down his immune system.

This is rather over the top. How frail were people in those days? Every time something unfortunate or simply unseemly happens, our poor Victor either has a nervous break-down or faints away into a coma. Either way he awakes in bed, prison, or a sanitarium to find three months (at a minimum) have gone by.

It’s certainly a lot easier to simply tell the reader a scene was horrific beyond imagination rather than actually developing dramatic tension and earning one’s emotional pay-offs. Maybe Shelley should have written teen dramas for television.

(For an example of pre-Victorian done well, although it’s faux-pre-Victorian, Susanna Clarke’s 2004 debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, is pretty good once it gets going. At nearly 800 pages, though, its even less concise and to the point than the works it is inspired by.)

The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Much Ado About Corn

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I’m reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma after literally having it on my reading list for three years (and in my physical book-pile for one). Another excellent example of scientifically-literate long-form journalism. I do recommend it, even if it also takes you three years to get around to reading it. (Those who want to delve deeper into topics like these sometimes look into classes from accredited online colleges.)

The first few chapters are all about corn, and how it’s behind everything we eat. Some Nixon-era agricultural reforms, WWI-era innovations in industrial chemistry (i.e., the Haber-Bosch process for making synthetic nitrates), and some clever Depression-era cross-breeding combined to create the perfect storm for the agricultural industry.

Long story short, the United States produces way more corn than it needs, therefore it gets used for everything, and the flooded market drives the price of corn down to maybe 60% of what it costs to produce. The government subsidizes the farmers to keep them afloat, but it’s still not a very profitable business for farmers.

Rather, it’s the secondary industries that get filthy rich from the massive availability of artificially cheap corn. The beef industry feeds their cows on corn rather than grass (which is free) because they can keep their pre-slaughtered meat in stalls rather than investing in grazing land. Recent studies suggest that the heart issues associated with red meat may be more due to the corn-fed diet of our red meat, rather than the red meat itself.

Meanwhile Coca-Cola and similar companies turn something that’s nutritious enough in its natural form to be a staple crop for some cultures, into diabetes in a can for North Americans who don’t need the extra calories (perhaps you thought it was sugar in your carbonated beverages, but in North America it’s not, it’s high-fructose corn syrup).

If you go further back, it’s not even corn at the base of our food chain, it’s oil. The Bosch-Haber process we depend on for our artificial fertilizers is energy intensive and requires more energy from fossil fuels put into it than the food energy we get out of it. But without artificial fertilizers, the ridiculous yields that cause corn to be practically worthless would not be possible. So we’re burning all the oil we can to create more corn than we need, which we then dispose of in any way possible, usually at the detriment of our own health.

It’s a great deal for certain industries and terrible for almost everyone else. But it’s an interesting example of how very different issues can be related: human health, environmental issues, industry, economics, government policy, consumer behaviour.

Book Review: Future Science: Essays from the Cutting Edge

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Future Science: Essays from the Cutting Edge is the second non-fiction compilation from editor Max Brockman, following up the earlier essay collection, What’s Next? The topics are as varied as the authors: working scientists from fields as diverse as astrophysics, immunology, computer science, even a new discipline called “experimental philosophy”, which would probably fall under the heading of neuroscience or behavioural psychology (there are several more of those, as well).

Essentially, what Brockman did was get a lot of young, actively working scientists to talk about what’s exciting right now in their field. There’s a balance between the highly topical “look at this cool thing we’ve just discovered” and some of the broader implications of their work. It seems the contributors were given free rein, perhaps actively encouraged, to speculate a bit about what it all means.

I appreciated this larger context. Even though most everything in the book is, as the sub-title suggests, cutting-edge to varying degrees, references to the big picture provide something extra. There’s a sense in this book of being invited to look ahead and ask, well, what’s next? This provides a unifying theme which might be absent in, say, a best of year collection of science journalism. The result is both topical and an historical benchmark: this is us; this is the world — right now.

Kevin P. Hand, a planetary scientist, wants to talk about the next stage of deep ocean exploration — in Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Laurie Santos discusses everything from primate studies to game theory to the economics of consumer behaviour, in order to understand the leaps of illogic that lead to some of our terrible financial decisions. Kirsten Bomblies surveys what’s currently known about plant responses to stress — and what’s still to be determined, if we hope to help both crops and natural ecosystems survive the next century of climate change.

If there’s a weakness to this book, it’s an unevenness in its authors’ abilities to communicate their subjects to a popular audience. Some of the writers are naturals, they get to the essence of their work with a minimum of jargon and a maximum of depth. Others are clearly more used to submitting to academic journals, and their style is similarly technical. The subject matter is undoubtedly interesting, but some readers may find it a struggle to get through some of the more scholarly essays.

Science writing is a balancing act between maintaining interest, clarity, and accuracy. It’s possible to lose your audience in detail whether you’re talking about genetics, string theory, or behavioural psychology. I struggled with an article on cosmology, despite coming from a physics background myself.

But on the whole, Future Science delivers what it promises. It takes us to science’s many frontiers, and gives us a sneak peek behind the curtain. I can’t imagine another single book (well, other than its own predecessor) capable of giving such a broad view of scientific discovery on the cusp, as it stands right now. Not every major open question in the whole of science is covered — that would be unrealistic. But there’s plenty of food for thought here.

(Vintage Books, 2011)

Article first published as Book Review: Future Science: Essays from the Cutting Edge by Max Brockman (editor) on Blogcritics.

Book Review: The Magician King

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The follow-up to his 2009 bestseller, The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s newest novel serves as a self-aware take on the hero’s quest. The Magician King picks up more or less where the previous book left off. Quentin Coldwater and his friends are living in the magical world of Fillory, of which they’ve been crowned kings and queens. And Quentin, being Quentin, is feeling a little restless. Because the thing about happy endings, or, for that matter, even bittersweet endings, is that life isn’t like that. Happily ever after or otherwise, life, so long as you’re in it, keeps on going.

So when a mysterious portal opens up, and dark portents make themselves known, Quentin, at least, is a little bit excited. This is the part where he gets to have an adventure. This is the part where he gets to be a hero. He’ll find out, though, that being a hero is not about winning. Being a hero, Quentin is warned, means being willing to lose. Perhaps losing everything.

The magical college of Brakebills is a distant memory in this novel. However, a secondary storyline parallels the events of the first book, telling us what happened to Quentin’s pre-magic crush, Julia, after she was invited to take the Brakebills entrance exam and failed where he succeeded. We know from the previous book what happened to him: he became a magician; he went on an adventure; he barely gave her a backward glance when she was expelled from Oz. But for whatever reason, the standard memory wipe didn’t work on her. Though she was rejected – along with countless other also-rans – from the world of institutional magic, she didn’t forget her peek behind the veil like they did. And that meant she knew what was taken from her.

Frequently I find myself bored with secondary stories that only serve to enhance or shore up some aspect of the main plot, but The Magician King pulls off the dual narratives where others have fallen flat by the simple expedient of telling two individually excellent tales. The real brilliance, however, is in the way Grossman weaves everything together, linking up with loose threads from the first book and giving us a perspective on both present and past events that we didn’t have before.

As the book progresses, we no longer lose our momentum when we switch perspectives; instead it is as if we are bouncing more and more frenetically between the converging narratives, the tension building to a fever pitch as they meet in the middle. Scenes in this book actually physically quickened my pulse – a rare feat, I assure you.

Like the first book, Grossman’s sophomore effort tackles its subject matter and their implications thoughtfully. Once the wish-fulfillment aspect of a world of magic is satisfied, there are many questions left over. What do information theory and economics tell us about the plausibility of keeping magical information both exclusive and regulated? What does the existence of magic imply about the most fundamental physics: the structure of reality and the birth of universes? Turning the question around, what new spellcasting possibilites might exotic phases of matter hold – plasmas and Bose-Einstein Condensates, say? And if things like dragons and dryads exist, what else might be out there?

Grossman’s smart writing acknowledges questions like these where other fantasies sweep them under the rug. When he describes a spell for the reversal of entropy you get that he knows the significance of the physical law being violated. He approaches comparative religion like an experienced exo-biologist.

It’s hard to believe The Magician King managed to live up to the high standards set by its predecessor. Second books in a series so often underwhelm, perhaps because authors strive to give readers more of the same things they loved in the original. But Grossman has managed to strike a balance, staying true to his story while entering brave new territory. Many of the questions, characters, and perspectives in this book are wholly new, but they still feel like organic outgrowths of those in the previous book. It’s as if all of these new revelations and adventures were present in Grossman’s universe already, just under a bush or around a bend we hadn’t gotten to yet. I’d like to see if this author can manage to keep things as interesting a third time. Certainly I plan to find out.

(Viking, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2011) The Green Man Review

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Electricity

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This is a story about how Rereko, a fairly ordinary high school student from the advanced world of Electopia, gets sent to Earth for remedial courses in the science of electricity. Her society expects absolutely everyone to know a little something about how electricity behaves, and its more important applications. Since she’s a little bit slow in this subject, a tutour from our own, more primitive planet, may be just her speed. A Tokyo graduate student in electrical engineering, Hikaru, seems like the perfect fit.

Like the other books in this series, The Manga Guide to Electricity aims to break down potentially difficult subject matter into bite-sized, comic book chunks, all wrapped up in an engaging story. While the target audience is individuals interested in the subject matter rather than manga fans only after a fun read, the story provides a natural vehicle for the book to give lots of real-life examples of the subject in question, an endless litany of answers to the unasked question: why does this stuff matter, anyway? As usual, the book features a tutour and a (sometimes reluctant) student.

The dialogue-based format is not only an effective way of unpacking concepts, but also makes it easy to build up a book-length political argument simultaneously: that this information is important and worthwhile even for an average citizen. Plato made Socratic dialogue famous in his philosophical treatises, Galileo appropriated it for the use of scientific education, and Ohmsha and No Starch Press did both of them one better by adding pretty pictures. You almost can’t go wrong.

The focus of this book is on applications. It’s at least as much about basic electrical engineering as it is about electrostatics and electrodynamics. The abstract concepts of electric forces and fields are not really touched on. Point charges don’t come into it. Instead, we jump directly into circuits, explicitly using the analogy of electricity as flowing water: voltage is pressure; current is rate of flow. This is a very useful picture, although there are times it could have been used to greater effect.

The only weakness in this book, from my perspective, is failing to take a little more time to fully flesh out some of the basics. Voltage, current, and resistance are all explained very well. The reader is not simply given a definition, but aided in visualizing the real physical meaning of the concepts. However, the relationship between them is not as well explained. The current is equal to the voltage over the resistance. Why does a higher voltage result in a higher currrent? It’s analogous to increasing the water pressure, forcing it through even faster. Why does an increased resistance lower the current? It’s analogous to constraining or restricting the path, slowing each individual drop of water down.

This and a few other concepts were not sufficiently spelled out, though the formula was introduced. On the other hand, a tremendous number of applications were discussed, although many of them were only roughly sketched out: transformers, generators, semiconductors, diodes, and transistors of many kinds. These thumbnail sketches were appropriately short, and a writer with less of an engineering background may even have left some of them out, but a writer with a pure physics background probably would have spent a little more time on some of the basic concepts, and this is my own background, so I admit my bias.

Still, a solid overview of the topic. I really like the practical, real-life examples that are a hallmark of this series. The very first chapter started by looking at the labels on kitchen appliances, and this was a brilliant way of introducing the topic. And I was quite surprised, I didn’t expect to learn something new in this book, but actually a good chunk of the material was unfamiliar territory for me. I didn’t know that much about the basic physical operations of diodes, transistors, or some of the other types of electrical technologies discussed. It makes me want to learn more about electrical engineering. After all, who isn’t crazy about all the electronic gadgets that make our modern world go round?

(No Starch Press, 2009)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2011) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Physics

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Having read and enjoyed nearly all of the entries in the Manga Guide series by Ohmsha/No Starch Press, I’ve been going back to read those ones I missed the first time around. The Manga Guide to Physics is pretty much what it sounds like, covering what most people think of when they hear the word physics: mechanics, which is the physics of motion, force, and energy. Other areas of physics, like electricity, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, are left to future titles.

The book covers its material in four chapters: Law of Action and Reaction, Force and Motion, Momentum, and Energy. The subject matter is explained via a series of private tutoring sessions between the two main characters, high school students Megumi and Ryota. In the prologue, Megumi, an all-star athlete, has a bad day, losing a tennis match to her arch-rival while she is distracted by thoughts of her poor test performance in physics class. She enlists Ryota, the star science student of the school, to get her back on track academically. It may even turn out that a better understanding of physics could improve her game.

The storyline is simple but good, and the tennis angle provides a good vehicle for illustrating and applying physical concepts. Many people think physics is just a series of formulae, but a mathematical formula is just one way of expressing the behaviour of, and relationships between, objects in the physical world. Visual and graphical representations are also very effective ways of conveying concepts in physics, and The Manga Guide to Physics expertly applies these approaches.

Although the author, Professor Nitta of Tokyo Gakugei University, does not shy away from the relevant equations, even including some (completely optional) calculus-based sections, this book’s focus is firmly centred on conceptual understanding rather than calculation. Typical of this series, the main ideas are introduced via the story, which is illustrated in graphic novel form, while deeper explanations are left to a few pages of text at the end of each chapter. However, while some of the other books in the series include end of chapter practice questions (Manga Guides to Calculus, Molecular Biology, and Statistics, for example), the text-heavy pages in Physics are reserved for derivations and more complicated calculations.

This book does an excellent job of explaining these concepts, however, and showing where the equations come from, even if it doesn’t provide the reader with practice using those equations. Unusually, Nitta starts out with forces, specifically, Newton’s Third Law, discussing details of motion (velocity, acceleration, displacement) later. This approach works well, because it allows the first chapter to be qualitative, rather than jumping straight into the math.

He only touches briefly on force diagrams, but gets the main idea of action-reaction pairs across via thought experiments and Socratic questioning. The use of both equations and different types of motion graphs in the next chapter are explained well through examples in the main body, and would be well-paired with a more traditional textbook’s practice questions. Momentum and energy are also well done, explained first qualitatively, then with numbers.

The Manga Guide to Physics has the potential to be a great resource for the independently-minded student, and its non-traditional topic sequence is an effective alternative to the usual way of doing things. The series’ book on calculus also takes an uncommon, but much superior approach to its topic that I found most helpful in refreshing my memory, and this alternative approach to the physics may also be just the ticket for some students. Sound pedagogy, a fun story, and the natural pairing of a visual medium with a visual topic make for another home run from this consistently strong series.

(No Starch Press, 2009)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2011) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Book Review: Feynman

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And now for something completely different. I was intrigued and delighted when I stumbled across this rather quirky project from First Second Books the other day. It’s a fresh new biography of the famous Feynman: bongo-playing, girl-chasing, and Nobel-winning; physics god of generations of undergrads, as much for his barroom stories as for the ubiquitous diagrams that bear his name.

This isn’t the first Feynman bio, and it likely won’t be the last. James Gleick’s Genius set the gold standard, cutting through legend upon legend – Feynman picking locks in Los Alamos; Feynman spending a summer sabbatical learning molecular biology and immediately making a discovery about DNA; Feynman the Nobelist rubbing elbows with royalty and flubbing the etiquette – and getting at the real character-forming events in-between.

More recently, physicist and author Lawrence Kraus, feeling there was too little said about Richard Feynman’s significant work in fundamental physics, focused on tracing the development of the scientist’s major professional work in The Quantum Man. Before his death, the enormously popular Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? collected many of Feynman’s essays, lectures, and well-practiced anecdotes (as told to his friend Ralph Leighton); a few of these greatest hits plus many new ones were later published post-humously in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. And there are many, many more.

As far as I know, however, Ottaviani and Myrick’s simply-titled new book is the very first one to chronicle the man’s life graphically. And it’s gorgeous. Just look at the brilliant cover.

The clean illustrative style seems a perfect fit for Feynman’s light-hearted approach to life, while still being detailed enough to convey subtle facial expressions and body language. Throughout, the man on the page is recognizably, uniquely Feynman, the graphical and textual elements complement each other so beautifully it is like watching the man on video.

But credit also must be given to Ottaviani for weaving scores of otherwise unrelated stories into a portrait of a truly original life. The major source materials for this book are the famous Surely You’re Joking and its follow-up, but these are self-contained recollections, lectures, and musings. Drawing out and tying together the biographical bits and pieces of these much longer stories, and capturing the flavour of each one while quoting only a tiny bit of it requires an inspired touch. Making full use of the visual medium, Ottaviani and Myrick manage to give us all the punchlines in a fraction of the space, meanwhile creating a sense of continuity that is absent in the original, non-chronological story collections on which they draw.

I really like this book. It fills a gap in the Feynman corpus that I didn’t realize was there. It’s not that we need a briefer or more readable version of Feynman and Leighton’s eminently successful books. With Feynman we have something wholly new, a different perspective and focus make this a worthwhile read even for those of us who’ve heard these stories before. Librarians with librarian degrees may want to look into adding this title to their collections. That the first edition of what is essentially a graphic novel is in a beautiful hard cover form was another unexpected bonus to me, as this item has a place of honour on my shelf.

(First Second, 2011)

Article first published as Graphic Novel Review: Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick on Blogcritics.

Book Review: One of Our Thursdays is Missing

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This is the sixth installment in Fforde’s Thursday Next series, and if, like me, you haven’t read any of the previous books, you’ll probably be hella confused. The series’ titular heroine (wait, can I write that?) is a no-nonsense detective in a world of nonsense. Using the fantastic technology of Fforde’s parallel universe, she travels into the Bookworld, a sort of distillation of the collective consciousness, where plots both new and classical are acted out for the sake of anyone currently reading the book in question.

Since Next travels and works within the worlds of famous literary works, you can imagine there is plenty of opportunity for parody, punning, and tongue-in-cheek references of all kinds.

This much I knew going in. What I didn’t realize is that the “real world” of Thursday Next, outside of the Bookworld where she works alongside the Jurisfiction policing service, is also an elaborately imagined parallel universe from our own, sharing much of our literary canon (with occasional tweaks), but with a very different history and modern political organization. Randomly enough, the Crimean War continues into the 1980s, Wales is an independent republic (and the UK as a political entity does not exist), and both neanderthals and humanoid robots are commonplace sights. Quite apart from her adventures in the Bookworld, Thursday lives in interesting times.

What I also was surprised to find is that this latest book doesn’t feature Thursday Next, it features the “written” Thursday Next. I.e., a fictional version of the Next of the previous books, who popped into existence in the Bookworld when the real Thursday Next’s adventures were ghostwritten into a marginally popular book series of its own. This seemed rather meta to me, and took me awhile to figure out. Especially because I didn’t realize at first that the original Thursday Next wasn’t also fictional in the context of Fforde’s universe, and that the books haven’t been self-referential since the beginning of the series, i.e., the world of Fforde’s novels including the existence of his very own novels, in an infinite regress.

All this is a point in favour of not choosing this novel as your introduction to the series. But if you have read the previous books, you may wonder, how does this one stand up? Even though I can’t speak to that directly, I’ve read both of Fforde’s Nursery Crime novels (a third is upcoming), which are a spin-off from the Thursday Next series, and I devoured each in a day or two. Both proved satisfying crime stories with a streak of wicked humour. A world that includes serial killer gingerbread men and an alcoholic Humpty Dumpty does require a suspension of disbelief, but the absurdity never overpowered the whodunit narrative.

In One of Our Thursdays is Missing, however, I had some difficulty keeping track of what was going on, and as a result never really got hooked the way I was with these previous novels. The clever literary references are still there, of course. Thursday finds herself on the trail of a missing cabbie named Gatsby. “I didn’t know the Great Gatsby drove a cab,” she says. “No, not him, his brother. The mediocre Gatsby.” But the convolutions of the Bookworld, not to mention Fforde’s very weird “real world”, gave me too much to keep track of to be able to follow the mystery at the same time.

It seemed like the world-building took over and the plot took a backseat. Since everything was equally unusual/suspicious, I couldn’t follow the logic of what Thursday was thinking or doing, or the trail she was following, and as a result it felt less like figuring out the solution of a puzzle along with the hero than simply being told in narrative that the puzzle had been solved. And really, it’s a bit of a disappointment to read a Thursday Next book that turns out not to star Thursday Next. Though the written Thursday Next is sympathetic enough, she’s a bit too passive for a starring role.

I still love the concept of this series, but I’m sorry that this particular book wasn’t a little easier for me to get into. It’s not bad, by any means; it certainly wasn’t a slog to finish, it just wasn’t a stand-out for me.

(Viking, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2011) The Sleeping Hedgehog