The Blind Watchmaker, Scott Pilgrim, The Porcelain Dove, To Say Nothing of the Dog
I went to Boston, and all I got were these lousy book reports. And a sunburn. And some cannolis. And so on.

In addition to the below-mentioned, ghira sent me The Shockwave Rider, which I read and was pretty good. Like a socialist Heinlein novel about computer hacking, maybe. Although I liked it, I am not sure it is exceptional in any way except the scale of its imagining and hitting cultural and technological trends despite having been written in 1975 -- one of those books you are required to use the phrase "eerily prescient" about.


The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins): This book feels a little unnecessary for most people who are likely to read it, but I don't know if that's because it's inherent in the setup or because it's twenty years old. Like, ok, there are basically four stances on evolution. The people who believe in it are probably statistically similar to people who believe in electricity -- most of them have a vague notion of how it works and what the theory is but believe in primarily because they read a textbook about it in high school and saw some exhibit about it at the science museum. The people who don't believe in it tend to be either the guys who put up angry websites about how scientists once carbon-dated a potato and said it was a million years old, or the guys who say "gosh, I don't know much about it, but it sounds too weird to be true to me."

Of these four types, only the last is going to get much out of this book. Like, the first one already knows most of the stuff here (although it's always fun to hear wacky animal stories about the subtle details that go into bat sonar or whatever). The second type might get something out of it but is unlikely to read the book -- the reason they don't know much about the details of evolution is because they actively don't care. The third type is not going to be convinced by anything. That leaves us with the fourth type -- people who think evolution sounds nuts but are willing to be open-minded and listen to an explanation. If that's you, great, you will probably really enjoy this book. If not, I dunno, I'd rather just read a 10-page article on Amazing Animal Facts or something.

Scott Pilgrim series (vols 1-3) (Brian Lee O'Malley): I would not normally pick up a graphic novel series myself, but nothings kindly gave me the set, so here we go. I realize the dates make this impossible, but my main take on this series is it feels like it's written by someone who thinks Questionable Content is awesome but doesn't have enough action. Both strips have the nebbishly author's-alter-ego male lead surrounded by a bevy of hot girls who are inexplicably interested in him -- it's like a male Mary Sue only the protagonist isn't super-competent. Both strips get a lot of their drive from the complex relationships the characters engage in (X dated Y, Y used to date Z, Z secretly has a crush on W), and both strips have a fantasy element which you could almost get away with using the term "magical realism" about, despite them not being South American. Like, in both strips, the fantasy elements are integrated into the real-world elements in a dream-logic kind of way -- it's clearly impossible to have a normal world that has this kind of thing in it, but it's also just as clear that this is intended to be our world and characters behave like it almost all the time except when the fantasy bits kick in. Somehow it all works.

Anyway, the irritating thing about reviewing this as a series is that the kicker of the premise only becomes clear near the end of book 1, or if you do something foolish like read the back cover of book 1. If you don't do that you get a nice zingy surprise, so far be it from me to spoil it any more than I have.

On the non-spoiler side, then, I can say that the writing is fun and funny and the plot is pretty zippy (the last being most unlike QC!). The art I am less thrilled about. It definitely doesn't help that these are in black & white, but I suspect that even if they weren't, I would still have to keep flipping back a few pages all the time to work out who a particular character is -- the dialogue is of little help here, since although it's fun to read, almost everyone talks the same way. But, yeah, by an obvious calculation there will be six or seven or eight books in this series, only three are yet published, and now I'm hooked. Curse you, nothings, curse you.

The Porcelain Dove (Delia Sherman): This is pretty awesome -- if I'd read this a couple years ago I would have got on the ball sooner with The Fall of the Kings. Basically, this is a story about the French Revolution told with equal weight given to history and fairy tales; alternately, it's a story about the long relationship of a lady's-maid with the lady and family she serves.

The style is admirable, and manages to perfectly merge three distinct pieces into a united whole. The result is that it really does sound like a fairy tale (not a doom-that-came-to-sarnath kind of voice, and not a myth kind of voice, but literally a fairy tale) that has been translated from the French and at the same time is a historical memoir.

There is not a lot of action for the majority of the book; at the end there is a bit where the author essentially says "Ok, stuff happens, but this isn't that kind of book, so I'm just going to tell you what happened instead of showing you". What you get in place of action is character and observation -- not exactly like real people, but deeper than an archetype. This is what the life of a young lady is like; this is her marriage. These are her kids, and how she interacts with them. This is the rise of revolution. This is magic. Part of the point of the story is, will she believe in either.

To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis): This is one I've read before but it's been on my to-buy-when-I-read-next list, and there it was. Connie Willis writes a couple kinds of stories. This is the kind that would be a screwball comedy if it were a movie starring Katharine Hepburn. Only, since this is Willis, it also involves a lot of time travel. And Complications. Like the title suggests, it's also in large part a fan letter to Three Men in a Boat, plus Gaudy Night, Alice in Wonderland, and various unidentified Wodehouse stories. This is the sort of book where the characters are also fans of these books, and realize that this is the sort of story they're in, but it's also the sort of book where that is not the entire story. If you like any of the aforementioned sources you will probably like this; if not, sheesh, what's wrong with you?


Next up: I've been told The Virtu ties up some loose ends from Mélusine, so here goes.