June bukes #2

[realthog]

My informal notes on the second half of June's reading are deftly concealed behind the cut.

Western Science in the Arab World: The Impact of Darwinism, 1860-1930 (1986) by Adel A. Ziadat

This very useful history/analysis serves to put to rest the canard that the Arab world as always been united in its rejection of evolutionary ideas, and that Islam in particular has been resistant to Darwinian reality. Ziadat divides his discussion into three parts: secularist Christians (i.e., people who, while from Christian communities, had either abandoned their faith or at least had discarded its dogmas), traditionalist religious thinkers (whether Muslim or Christian) and those Muslim thinkers who were prepared to be flexible in their interpretation of their faith -- i.e., who were believers but nonetheless also pro-science; in some of these latter instances, the "pro-science" part is a bit dodgy, depending on what the thinker thought science was. Obviously this isn't the kind of book you're likely to pick up from an airport bookstall, but there's a lot of fascinating stuff in it. My favorite among the writers Ziadat discusses has to be the Lebanese-born, Egyptian ex-Christian materialist Shibli Shumayyil, a wildly enthusiastic pro-evolutionist who wrote about the subject avidly and translated the work of the German evolutionist Ludwig Buchner into Arabic. The more one reads about Shumayyil the more he comes across as a thoroughly modern thinker, the kind of person whose views would be welcome at any rationalist soiree today . . . and then one discovers that, amongst all this, he had the conviction, based on his evolutionary thinking, that women were inferior creatures because their brains are on average smaller than men's. We all have our blind spots, I guess . . .


Lest Darkness Fall (1941) By L. Sprague de Camp

I read this in the SFBC edition of the undated (but obviously very much later) Ballantine reissue of de Camp's 1949 revision of the book -- the one whose cover I instantly recognized because it was done by my sadly deceased pal Ron Walotsky. Whatever, any page numbers I might cite are almost certain to differ from those in the copy of the book you have on your own shelves. Either Ballantine or the SFBC or both clearly thought it would be wastefully effete to bother proofreading this reissue, tra-la: aren't publishers such wags?

Being driven through bustling modern (well, 1930s) Rome by an Italian friend, Martin Padway is discussing the nature of time with that friend. On getting out of the car, he's struck by a bolt of lightning and transported back to Rome in the year AD535. Once there he adapts fairly quickly, using his rudimentary memories of schoolboy classical Latin (those were the educational days, eh?) to get around and his knowledge of as-yet-unelapsed near-future (to the Romans) history and much later technology to build a prosperous life for himself. It soon dawns on him that Italy is on the verge of the invasion that will snuff out the light of civilization for the long centuries of the Dark Ages, and he determines to avert this human disaster and change the course of history for the better, a task that involves his introducing bits of technology (like the printing press) long ahead of their time, politically manipulating the various factions of Italy's Gothic masters, and at one stage even become Italy's de facto king. In other words, he becomes a sort of Coyote figure using tricksterism with relish but toward, in this instance, a good end -- much like the protagonist of Eric Frank Russell's much later Wasp (1957), a novel of which I was constantly reminded while reading this one, even though de Camp lacked Russell's storytelling ability and wry wit.

I remember not liking this book much when I read it forty years ago or more, and I discovered I still didn't like it much. My mild sense of tedium became an active dislike when, on pp159-60, I came across a bit of plotting that de Camp obviously thought was hilarious and which is in fact disgustingly racist; I tried to justify it through the usual "product of his times" arguments, and couldn't. Worse still, it relies on a particular form of racism which, so far as my limited knowledge of history informs me, would have been regarded with blank incomprehension in 6th-century Rome. Most of the time, though, I found the text just a bit mediocre: I turned the pages because I wanted to get to the end of the book, not because of any avid need to find out what happened.

There was one really top-notch bit of plus ca change, though. Padway discovers that 6th-century Rome suffers from a bad infestation of religion. Here he is, early on (pp25-6), chatting with an Orthodox Christian he's met in a pub:

"You don't like the Goths?"

"No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!"

"Persecution?" Padway raised his eyebrows.

"Religious persecution. We won't stand for it forever."

"I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased."

"That's just it. We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn't persecution, I'd like to know what is!"

"You mean that you're persecuted because the heretics and such are not?"

"Certainly, isn't that obvious?"

It's like something you expect to hear from Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter, or read in one of those ghastly action alerts the American Family Association keep sending me . . .


A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (1999) by Peter Singer

The application of "Darwinian principles" to society, rather than to biological evolution, has generally been the province of the political right, with the crackpot ideas of Herbert Spencer and his followers -- the philosophical school later called Social Darwinism -- being used by the Robber Barons and their ilk as a good excuse to ignore the inordinate amount of sheer human misery their activities caused: all the poverty, starvation and suffering, all the destroyed lives, were worth it because that was the price that had to be paid for species advancement. My, you could almost look upon the Social Darwinists as saints and saviours. And, of course, we cannot forget the Objectivists, the disciples of the even more crackpot Ayn Rand.

What Singer attempts to do in the pages of this extremely slender volume is to lay out a few ground rules for what he doesn't call a Social Darwinism of the left, a political philosophy that relies less upon the "nature red in tooth and claw" aspects of Darwinism (that phrase anyway predated the announcement of the Darwin/Wallace theory) and more upon those aspects that recognize the value of characteristics like cooperation, aspects that the Spencerians simply ignored in their orgy of pseudoscientific cherrypicking. Since it had never struck me before that Singer's point was one that actually had to be made, that it wasn't wholly evident to anyone possessed of reason, I'm not sure I was actually the audience he was aiming at; at the same time, the book's very nattily written and sparkling with pertinent observations so I regret not one second of the time I spent reading it. Here's one item that had me punching the air in admiration:

[T]o leave a group of people so far outside the social commonwealth that they have nothing to contribute to it, is to alienate them from social practices and institutions in a manner that almost ensures that they will become adversaries who pose a danger to those institutions. [. . .] Social Darwinists saw the fact that those who are less fit will fall by the wayside as nature's way of weeding out the unfit, and an inevitable result of the struggle for existence. To try to overcome it or even ameliorate it was futile, if not positively harmful. A Darwinian left, understanding the prerequisites for mutual cooperation as well as its benefits, would strive to avoid economic conditions that create outcasts. [. . .] When the free operation of competitive market forces makes it hazardous to walk the streets at night, governments do well to interfere with those market forces to promote employment. (p53)

Singer was writing before the recent exponential increase in the gap between rich and poor in many of the developed nations. It is depressing how much more poignant his observation has become than it was a mere decade ago.


October the First is Too Late (1966) by Fred Hoyle

Richard, a moderately successful composer, and his old university pal John Sinclair, a physicist, go for a camping holiday in the Scottish Highlands during which John inexplicably vanishes for thirteen hours, returning both mystified and very subtly altered. He has to cut the vacation short because called back to London: a space experiment is returning anomalous results -- alarmingly anomalous, in fact. The two men fly out to California and thence to Hawaii; while they're in Hawaii, suddenly communications with the mainland go dead. As they and their American friends mount expeditions to explore what's going on in the rest of the world, it's Sinclair who first pulls everything together. Some entity, never identified (beyond a deduction on p198 that it's some form of higher consciousness, as ineffably far above us as we are above a nest of ants) and for reasons unknown, has made of the inner Solar System a sort of gigantic time machine, and the earth, passing through its temporal beam, has been differentially jolted into different eras of the past and future: while the UK and Hawaii (and presumably other regions) are still in 1966, Western Europe is still -- or once more -- being ravaged by the Great War and Greece is enjoying the glories and privations of 425BC. Most alarmingly, Russia and much of Asia are covered by a hard, impossibly smooth vitreous plain, which Sinclair deduces is an indication that they've been cast into the very far future, where the heat of a swollen sun has boiled away the atmosphere and melted and fused the earth's surface. (Here Hoyle's imagination runs into consistency problems: our heroes visit these regions and notice neither a redly bloated sun in the sky nor a lack of atmosphere. Perhaps the notion is that the air from elsewhere around the globe has rushed in to fill the vacuum, but this would lead us immediately to start considering other problematic "leakages" between the earth's different, coexisting temporal zones.)

Richard is much drawn to Periclean Greece, and joins a small expedition that ventures there to live among the Athenian people. The expedition is concerned not to inflict too severe a culture shock upon the Greeks, and thus introduce themselves there as "strangers from afar" and abjure most of the trappings of modern civilization -- although Richard does take with him his piano. Because of the situation the novel portrays, there aren't any of the considerations to be taken into account concerning the alteration of the past; the visitors thus strive to put an end to the Athenians' war with Sparta, a war which, they know, will if left unchecked bring both cities to their knees and leave the civilization of ancient Greece ripe for barbarian conquest. They succeed in this through help given from an unexpected source: the Delphic Oracle.

Richard accepts a challenge from a beautiful priestess of Apollo: a musical contest between himself and her god. A huge audience gathers to watch Richard perform on his piano; the god, discreetly, performs out of sight. As they trade party pieces, it becomes evident to Richard that Apollo -- or whoever is invisibly playing -- has created music quite unlike anything he's heard before, and certainly far more sophisticated than the offerings he's encountered so far during his Greek sojourn. At the end of the contest, he and the priestess agree that the only fair outcome is to declare the contest a draw. They celebrate this judgment in a manner not usually associated with the Supreme Court (at least, we assume not) and then Richard falls into a deep and dreamless sleep . . .

. . . to awaken in the distant future. Sinclair has been brought here, too, and explains that, as he'd expected, at least one of the far-future societies brought by the "time machine" into coexistence with 1966 Britain has been concealing its presence from the rest of the mixed-era planet. Richard's "priestess", Melea, was in fact an explorer from the future who'd come to investigate his anachronistic presence in 425BC Greece; her pal Neria was meanwhile subverting the Delphic Oracle into a fit of pacifism. Melea introduces Richard to various far-future technological wonders, such as CDs that are conveniently only the size of dustbin lids. More somberly, the 20th-century visitors are shown a sort of movie of the history of the human species between their own time and the sparsely populated distant future of Melea and Neria. They learn that, not once but countless times over the past millions of years, humanity has allowed itself to expand uncontrollably until a moment of precipitate and horrific collapse, with inordinate suffering; in the wake of each catastrophe the small surviving relic has promised itself that this time they will learn from the past and it will be different, and yet of course . . . The question Melea and her society want the two Englishmen to answer is, in effect: Is it worth it? Of course, there isn't a real answer to that.

The tale is told in the same sort of Buchanesque mode that Hoyle adopted for Ossian's Ride; the contrast between the bluffness of style and Richard's supposed sensitivity as a musician works surprisingly well, and it adapts well too to the occasional didactic passage. These latter are always welcome components of Hoyle's novels; here he gives us a few pages (pp75-7) of happy speculations about the nature of time and consciousness. One oddity is that the events of the first few pages seemed to me wildly reminiscent, albeit it in a different order, of parts of Ian McEwan's 1998 novel Amsterdam; I wonder if McEwan read October the First is Too Late decades ago (as I did) and forgot most of the incidental content (as I did), only for it to come bubbling up from his subconscious when he was writing Amsterdam? There's quite obviously no question of plagiarism, deliberate or unconscious; it's just an oddly similar pair of juxtapositions of events. It's certainly pleasing to think that something of Sir Fred's hobby might still be swimming in literature's river.


Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) by Douglas Adams

While I've liked Douglas Adams's scripts ever since I picked up the very first run, on BBC Radio 4, of his The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I've never been entirely convinced by his printed fiction: tricks of his that work well on screen and exceptionally so in audio can too often just seem twee and self-indulgent on the printed page . . . or, at least, they seem so for me. Still, it had been a long time since I'd read any Adams, and Dirk Gently is billed as a time-travel novel, so I pitched in with the hope of making a refreshing discovery.

For much of the book I found myself merely annoyed. There were some good things -- though it's about three times as long as it should be, an account of a dinner in a Cambridge college has some excellent observation and made me grin several times -- but for the most part I was rolling my eyes as one piece after another of humour fell flat; it somehow increased the frustration levels that I could see how several of the scenes concerned would be hilarious if part of a movie or TV sitcom. There's quite a lot of unforgivable sloppiness: on page 53 we're told,. midway down the page, that something happened a few years ago (because otherwise a lame joke wouldn't work); at the bottom of the page, to make the plot's chronology work properly, the incident now happened just three weeks ago.

About halfway through, Dirk Gently himself came to centre stage for the first time, and things picked up a bit thereafter -- in general, anyway.

Of course, I was still waiting for the time-travel element to emerge, and beginning to suspect that some anonymous 1980s blurb-writer might have misled me into wasting my research time. And then, not much more than fifty pages from the end, finally it became evident that, yes, Dirk Gently can reasonably be described as a time-travel novel. Phew!

Computer programmer Richard MacDuff visits one of his old college tutors, Professor Urban "Reg" Chronotis, at St Cedd's College, Cambridge -- the college which (according to the novel: not in real life) the poet Coleridge attended. So, we discover, did Dirk Gently, who made money out of pretending psychic abilities that may not have been so pretended as Dirk thought. During the course of the aforementioned dinner, there is much quoting done from Coleridge and Reg performs, primarily to entertain an otherwise bored small girl dragged along by her father, a series of conjuring tricks -- one of which seems actually impossible. At the end of the evening, Richard and Reg discover a horse jammed into Reg's college bathroom and Richard realizes he forgot that he'd been intending to bring girlfriend Susan along for the evening. Soon after, Gordon Way -- who is Susan's brother and Richard's highly successful software entrepreneur boss -- is murdered, though he continues to exist as a ghost. Richard, believing himself a suspect, calls on the services of his old university acquaintance Dirk, now running the Holistic Detective Agency of the book's title; its main speciality seems to be not finding lost cats. After much gadding about, it emerges (a) that Gordon is not the only ghost playing a role, the other being that of an extraterrestrial, the last survivor of its kind after its refugee spaceship crashed on the primordial earth billions of years ago, and who once told his story to Coleridge, (b) that Reg's college rooms are, for reasons not entirely certain, a functioning time machine which he has been using for such unworldshattering purposes as to go back a few hundred years in order to set up a completely impossible conjuring trick to entertain a bored little girl, and (c) that the ghost alien is attempting to influence various other cast members to use Reg's time machine to take it back to its crashed spaceship.

Here's how the most important time-travel paradoxes are avoided, according to Reg:

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make. (p228)

All of this and more besides could have made a wonderful comic time-travel novel, and during those latter pages there were several times when I could almost have clapped my hands at the cleverness of it all; yet I'd had to wade through quite a lot of ponderous jollity and other dull stuff to get there. I suppose it was expected of Adams that, rather than tell the tale in any conventional or pseudo-conventional manner, he had to be as quirky as possible. I'm all for quirkiness as a general habit (I keep stressing to Pam that I'm deliberately quirky rather than, as objective observers might deduce, an idiot), but in this instance it seems like a sort of blizzard of cotton wool getting in the way of the story (if that image makes any sense).

While I was reading this novel, my copy of it (a first printing of the first US edition, I've just noticed) started falling apart: that's crappy 1980s perfect binding for you. Or is it something more . . . meaningful?


Letters from Atlantis (1990) by Robert Silverberg

Time travellers based in our not-too-distant future are researching the past, and two of them, Roy and Lora, are sent to separate parts of the earth in the year 18,862BC, Lora to what will one day be Siberia to live among the mammoth-hunters and Roy, who is our narrator and central character, to Atlantis -- or Athilanta, which is what its natives call it. (Lora never appears in the novel: she is simply the addressee of the series of letters Roy writes that form the text of the novel.)

I've implied that Roy and Lora are time travellers in the ordinary sense. Not so. It's the premise of the book that physical time travel is impossible; instead, folk are sent back in the form of electrical patterns -- clusters of data, if you like -- that lodge undetected in the brain/mind of an inhabitant of the destination era. It is possible for the visiting entity to control the host human being, but not without alerting the host to the traveller's presence, something that's normally to be avoided; Roy gets round this prohibition in order to write his letters to Lora by waiting until his host is asleep, then keeping him in a trance while he does the writing.

And Roy's host is not just any Atlantean: he is Prince Ram (the "Ram" is the generally used short form of an infernally long full name), heir to the throne and already a powerful ruler in his own right. Through Ram's eyes Roy observes the wonders of Atlantean civilization -- and these genuinely are wonders because, contrary to expectations of finding something along the lines of ancient Egypt, Roy discovers a technology roughly at the same level as that of the Victorian era: steamships, electric lighting, etc. In fact, the text irritatingly doesn't give us too many details of the technology beyond what I've just stated, or even much of a description of Atlantean society at all beyond the fact that it has slaves but that these are well treated, and that it has a strong streak of racism toward the primitives of the mainland(s), who are called "dirt people"; instead, the focus is much more on Ram's beliefs and the rituals he must undergo with his father, the king, as he prepares himself to be the fully readied heir to the throne. One of these rituals concerns a star known to the Atlanteans (in translation) as the Romany Star, which presumably means that the concept of gypsyhood was understand long before the emergence of actual gypsies. Hm. Anyway, Roy soon manages to dig out of Ram's mind that the Atlanteans are not in fact humans: they are descendants of the survivors of a startlingly humanoid species whose star swelled up and the usual, who sent off a pitifully few colonists in quest of a new home amid the myriad stars of the Galaxy, etc., etc. Clearly the Atlanteans have not been able to build up their technology to anything like the levels they once enjoyed, but they've done the best they can with the limited resources available to them here on earth. Their racism is still pretty repulsive, but more understandable (according to the text) once we realize that humans are actually a different and less developed species.

Eventually Ram detects Roy's presence, regarding him as a possessing demon. Even when Roy, recognizing the inevitable, breaks every rule in the chronic argonaut's rulebook and "introduces himself" -- explains he is a historian from the far future and ya-de-yada -- Ram still regards him as some kind of wizard. And here, I think, the machinery of the book creaks down. If the Atlanteans are indeed the relics of hi-tech spacefarers, how come their minds are still polluted with all these stupid superstitions? It's not just the belief in demonic possession and wizards (and, for that matter, in the moral acceptability of slavery): the Atlanteans also worship a whole pantheon of gods who seem to have attributes akin to those of Olympus. Surely we might expect an advanced culture, even if it had perforce regressed technologically, to have grown out of this sort of stuff? I'm not making an anti-religious point here (for once); what I'm saying, rather, is that we're being expected to believe in a culture that's composed of cultural elements that simply don't go together -- that are chalk and cheese.

Letters from Atlantis is nicely enough told, but it's a slight work (I think it was intended as a YA novel, which is no excuse; I've read it as part of Silverberg's three-novel Cronos omnibus, hence the uncertainty) and, as I say, doesn't seem really to hold together.


Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case (1996) by Marcia Angell

Whatever the pablum peddled by politicians and the media, the public attention span and memory are both short, so it's easy to forget the flap there was in the 1990s about the supposed dangers of silicone breast implants, especially in the wake of the 1992 FDA decision to call a moratorium on the sale and implantation of the devices until their safety could be properly, scientifically established: at first the rumour was that they could cause cancer, but after this nonsense had been laid to rest -- which didn't take long -- the next piece of pseudomedical quackery came along, which was the widespread conviction that they were responsible for the very unpleasant condition called mixed connective tissue disease, a malfunction of the immune system. And this time the rumour must be true, because after all wasn't it being demonstrated time after time in the nation's courts that the lives of poor, defenseless women were being destroyed by these infernal devices . . . with the massive damages awards being levied on the dastardly manufacturers serving as emphasis to the truth of it all?

Well, no. There never was any evidence at all that silicone breast implants represented the slightest health hazard. The "science" produced in court was the kind of stuff Snopes.com was invented to expose. Juries (and judges) were whipped up into hysteria by tort lawyers who realized they could earn themselves enormous fees by playing on people's fears of disease and detestation of ruthless corporations and abjuring any connection with such trivia as facts and reality. As a measure of the virulence of these people, when the first scientific reports came in, from 1994, demonstrating the near certainty that the implants were harmless, not only did the lawsuits continue but also legal attempts were made to silence the scientists who'd done the research! Not only had the inmates taken over the institution, they were being paid handsomely for doing so.

Marcia Angell, who was then Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, is an excellent teller of this tale of confusion, ignorance, panic and, I'd suggest, criminal abuse of the law. She spells out early on that her own general pre-existing prejudices on approaching the task were those of a liberal feminist, and that some of her preconceptions about the rights and wrongs of the episode were very far from validated: in particular, she reveals that for once the corporations -- companies like Dow Corning, driven into bankruptcy by the fracas -- were the victims. She's right in this, obviously, although it's hard to feel undiluted sympathy for them because they were in good measure responsible for bringing this catastrophe upon themselves: Having grown accustomed, during the years of Genial Uncle Ronnie when human welfare was a distant second to the profits of big business and the greed of the wealthy, to an FDA that was sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything, when David Kessler, appointed by Bush Senior as the FDA's new boss, demanded from the implant manufacturers supportive scientific research to show their products were safe, they essentially didn't bother doing anything -- presumably assuming the silly little man would go away and stop bothering them. In the end, clearly frustrated beyond all bounds of patience and genuinely concerned there might be safety issues lurking behind the manufacturers' inaction, Kessler introduced the moratorium. It was the FDA ban that really opened the floodgates to all the claims of implant-caused illness, because after all the FDA wouldn't have banned them if they weren't really dangerous, would it?

Those of a delicate disposition -- me, for example -- might want to avoid Angell's Chapter Two, which describes the surgical procedures involved in various forms of breast augmentation and then all the many things that can go ruinously wrong with said procedures. I was reading this chapter in a pub in Toronto and was mighty glad I was positioned within easy reach of plenty of stomach-settling beer. (The rest of the pub was watching a World Cup match on t'telly, so assumed my occasional moans and retches were commentary on the state of play.) My only real complaint about the book was that the copy I had was defective, containing at the back a repeat of the first 32pp signature rather than the 32pp that should have been there, containing most of the notes/references, the biblio and, most devastatingly of all, the index. Grr!

Anyway, this is a very good book, and wonderfully readable. Don't be tempted to think its subject is ancient history: although the specifics may have changed a bit, its subject is highly topical in that, at the moment, he have a similar hysterical flap going on over the nonsensical belief that vaccination causes autism . . . to mention just one.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

". and then one discovers that, amongst all this, he had the conviction, based on his evolutionary thinking, that women were inferior creatures because their brains are on average smaller than men's. We all have our blind spots, I guess . . ."

That's not a blind spot, that's a case of raging misogyny.

I enjoyed Lest Darkness Fall but the pre-War racism is pretty jarring (and also not in keeping with 6th century attitudes as you note).

I read October the First Is Too Late a long time ago, and recall enjoying it as a decently told story. Better, I think, than The Black Cloud.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

That's not a blind spot, that's a case of raging misogyny.

As you say.

Better, I think, than The Black Cloud.

That would be my guess, too. I read The Black Cloud first when I was in my pre-teens, and found the science parts of it a struggle. When I read it again later, perhaps in my mid-20s, the science seemed pretty humdrum and the writing, as you imply, pretty clunky. I know that Sir Fred's son Geoffrey co-wrote some of the novels even before he started getting joint credit, so it's quite feasible he worked on October. On the other hand, the first book where Geoffrey got that credit, Fifth Planet, was (according to my hazy memory) a complete stinker. So . . .

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I read The Black Cloud at 12, and thought it tolerable then. I suspect I might not now. I find that a lot of the books that I enjoyed in my childhood and early teens I find completely unbearable four decades later.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I find that a lot of the books that I enjoyed in my childhood and early teens I find completely unbearable four decades later.

Ditto! But then there's great delight when it happens the other way round, as with The Big Time for me this month, or even on those occasions when a fondly remembered book proves, surprisingly, to be every bit as good as one's youthful judgment said it was.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Ah. I read The Big Time, if I recall, about 25-30 years ago, so my taste was more fully formed.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

In your pre-teens, you mean?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

My older son turns 25 this year, young feller-me-lad.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

That still means you're a whippersnapper.

[nick-kaufmann.livejournal.com]

I wish I could read as quickly as you!

[realthog.livejournal.com]

*blushes*

I've also read relevant bits of several other books during the month, plus several stories. What you must remember is that quite a lot of the reading (essentially, the nonfiction) has been done during working hours for research purposes.

[nick-kaufmann.livejournal.com]

I usually only average 2 books a month myself. I'm such a slacker!

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Golly! Just two? You should cut down on that wild social whirl.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

One of the themes running through Naguib Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy (best thing I read all last year, hands down) is the effect of Darwin's ideas within a family, some devout, some socialistmin the period between the two world wars. Highly recommended, if you haven't read it.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Sounds great fun, and I've made a note . . . although I think it'll be at least the end of the year before I can do any reading just for fun.

[bondo-ba.livejournal.com]

Thanks for these. As always, your mix of fiction and nonfiction is interesting and I love to see non-fiction reviews aimed at intelligent readers instead of ones that pander to the sheeple.

You are, of course, completely wrong about Dirk Gently, but then, no one's perfect!

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Me? Wrong about anything? Pshaw! Surely not!