A little gift from William Gibson on his blog which is, presumably, a snippet of text from his next novel.

My end of summer reading was a book I stumbled across in a used book stor called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. I’d read bits and pieces about the Rwandan genocide, but this book provides an in depth look at a situation that demonstrates how utterly completely the world ignores the African problem.

Of course, in North America the African problems doesn’t exist because we just ignore it.

Over 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi’s were slaughtered in 90 days by their Hutu neighbours. The world’s response wasn’t to do nothing, which is the popular view, but instead to send troops and pretend a genocide wasn’t happening.

Until it ended, and then what did we do? We set up refugee camps to shelter the Hutu’s who had killed the Tutsi’s, and then asked them all to live next to each other again.

In the aftermath of World War II, the nations of the west supported the creation of the state of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish population that had been methodically massacred.

In Europe, the vulnerable were given their own country. In Africa, the vulnerable were asked to live next door to the very people who’d killed them and just forget everything that happened. They were expected to just get along.

Sometimes, the world doesn’t make any sense at all.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is a wonderful book, written by physicist Janna Levin.

Though I’ve long been familiar with Alan Turing, and an admirer of his I had no idea that Turing had committed suicide (at least that’s the book’s thesis, and appears to be the most commonly shared opinion.) I also had no idea that he had been prosecuted for homosexuality.

It’s shocking to think of how different the world might have been if Turing had been allowed to continue his work.

Words cannot express how much of a loss this is. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous With Rama, Childhood’s End list could go on forever of influential works that Arthur C. Clarke was responsible for.

If you haven’t read his work, there will be no better time.

Arthur C. Clarke, 90, Science Fiction Writer, Dies
By GERALD JONAS
Published: March 19, 2008
Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

Rohan de Silva, an aide, confirmed the death and said Mr. Clarke had been experiencing breathing problems, The Associated Press reported. He had suffered from post-polio syndrome for the last two decades.

That’s not a trailer, it’s an Airstream. This isn’t Chiba City, it’s Vancouver’s Shaughnessy neighbourhood. The phalanx of Volkswagens has been replaced by an extension cord running out of the house.

Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass has been pulled from school shelves in some Ontario catholic schools.

School board pulls ‘anti-God’ book
RON BULL/TORONTO STAR
Philip Pullman’s works have often been criticized by the Catholic church.
Halton’s Catholic trustees and staff to review fantasy that is `apparently written by an atheist’
Nov 22, 2007 04:30 AM, Kristin Rushowy, Education Reporter

Halton’s Catholic board has pulled The Golden Compass fantasy book—soon to be a Hollywood blockbuster starring Nicole Kidman—off school library shelves because of a complaint.

A finalist for the Governor General’s Award when it was published, Riding with Rilke has a good place on any list of modern books about motorcycling. It’s well written and interesting to read.

This doesn’t meant that it’s not without it’s share of flaws.

Ted Bishop, the booke author, suffered a severe accident and I have a slight beef with the fact that in recounting the accident he seems to often gloss over the fact that he was passing a truck dangerously. Bishop blames his crash on the high speed wobble that the bike developed.

Most motorcycle accidents start with some form of rider error. Bishop’s is no exception.

The book also gets dragged down into minutae about writers of historic significance and their motorcycles. It would have benefited from a little more brevity on this topic.

A good read though.

John Irving’s Until I Found You is a long book that rambles through both North America and Europe before coming to its fairly predictable conclusion. Along the way it touches on his classic themes of older women, lost fathers, and wrestling.

At this point I’ve read just about everything Irving’s writen. A Prayer for Owen Meaney is without a doubt one of the best books I’ve had the pleasure of reading, but the rest of his work has been somewhat inconsistent. The Fourth Hand was horrible, Son of the Circus was pleasant but not great, and The Cider House Rules was good but I wouldn’t rave about it. I haven’t yet read The World According to Garp but I may yet.

If you’ve got time on your hands, Until I Found You might be a pleasant read, but I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way for it.

A good review at the New York Times of a book by Frank Rich called The Greatest Story Ever Sold

The central thesis of the book is that politics is more like the theatre every day. This should be obvious to anybody who’s paid close attention to modern political campaigns in North America — the Bush campaign isn’t so much ‘scripted’ as it is pre-recorded.

There’s much more than this wrong though.

That television — that cyclopean seductress of the thirty second attention span — has become addicted to the soundbite and sells political campaigns in the same manner as it sells pizza pops should come as no surprise. TV has long since stopped being good at communicating real information, at least in the current expensive production supported by advertising model.

What’s truly disturbing is alluded too by this comment:

Yet — and this is where Rich is particularly acute — most serious papers published the White House claims on their front pages, and buried any doubts in small news items at the back

The propensity for virtually all mainstream media to simply reprint what the White House calls news is a problem.

This is not limited simply to political news — open the business section of any newspaper, and check the content against press releases distributed directly by the company through Canada Newswire or PR Newswire. You’re likely to be shocked.

The days of Woodward and Bernstein have long since been left behind, and the news media these days is not much more than a machine for reprinting content.

Ask questions — it’s your duty always, but especially in the absence of effective news organizations.

John Irving is one of the great authors of his generation, having produced novels which are simultaneously popular and literate. This is no mean feat. A Prayer for Owen Meaney is one of my favourite novels of all time.

The Fourth Hand is an entertaining read that demonstrates Irving’s unique way of looking at the world — slightly askew, but not so much that you won’t recognize it. The story of a television reporter who loses his hand and slowly gains a soul is deftly interwoven with actual historical events.

Coming on the heels of reading Joshua Then and Now — another darkly comic novel — I have to say that The Fourth Hand is the more enjoyable of the two books. It’s an aproachable novel, with characters that are easy to relate to.

This week has seen the departure of two of North America’s distinguised thinkers: Jane Jacobs and John Kenneth Galbraith. Both were erstwhile Canadians.

Jane Jacobs Death and Life of Great American Cities is a classic text to anyone interested in urban planning. It went against conventional wisdom of the time and, to this day, remains an insightful thoughtful viewpoint.

Jacobs called both Toronto and Vancouver home for extended periods of time, and was proud to have been associated with both communities.

John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the most influential liberal economists of our times. Born near London, Ontario Galbraith was a Harvard professor and trusted advisor to a number of democratic presidents. His influence over American monetary policy was significant, and serves as evidence that the decline of liberalism in modern American economic thinking may, in fact, be linked to the general decline of America’s economy and its political relevance in the world.

Galbraith’s The Affluent Society was republished to celebrate an anniversary, and I read it years after I’d left school. It’s worthy reading for anybody with an interest in modern economics, despite the fact that it was written many years ago.

I have just finished reading Tom Wolfe’s most recent novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. It’s the first Tom Wolfe I’ve ever read. I probably won’t read another.

I Am Charlotte Simmons chronicles a young, small town girl’s attendance at a fictional Ivy League university in the United States. Charlotte is cast as a fish out of water in many ways: the small town girl from North Carolina with an accent; the academic paired with a roommate who likes to party; the young virgin surrounded by the feelings of lust that are pervasive amongst post-high school kids.

Wolfe — a 75 year old man with a fondness for white suits — has a fertile imagination and a pen that can certainly spin a story. This is a story with three fundamental threads that run throughout (two of which are, essentially, variations on the fish out of water theme…one social, one academic) and all come to a rapid conclusion towards the end of this 600+ page novel. It’s sort of the opposite problem of The Da Vinci Code which plods along such a predictable path that one can’t help but see the end; I Am Charlotte Simmons simply unfolds, and when the ending comes it seems to have little relationship to the rest of the novel.

If the book has a message, I think it’s that for those who remain true to themselves, things always work out in the end. A young girl discovers that just because she lives in the big city doesn’t mean she’s changed; an athlete learns that there’s more to himself than just basketball and a campus journalist and smart guy learns that honesty can be the best policy, even if it doesn’t always seem like it at first.

Five out of ten. Not remarkable, but I don’t get what’s particularly special about the book.

Fast Company has chosen Malcolm Gladwell as one of the year’s most creative thinkers in business.

This is a sure sign that they haven’t read his book, The Tipping Point

If you haven’t yet, the first chapter is worth a read. Not much else. It’s a fairly simplistic look at trend analysis and how business can create a vocabulary around it. Not much else.

Reading The Da Vinci Code is interesting - this was, I gather, a pretty popular little book a while ago. I got to it slowly.

I’ve been accused of being an elitist reader, and a snob. Both of these things are true, and I’ll take them as complements in a world where Time Magazine is increasingly considered literature and the 30 second attention span is considered long. Reading is the best way I know to stretch your mind, and most people don’t do it.

I don’t read a lot of “popular” fiction. I read a lot of fiction, but it tends to be of the literary popular variety. I’ll read John Irving but not Stephen King.

So what does all this have to do with The Da Vinci Code?

This book is 449 pages in length, as published in the original hard cover, and it contains 105 chapters. That’s right - 105. That’s more chapters than appeared in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.

This bugs me, because it’s written for a TV generation. At 4.27 pages per chapter on average (and the pages are not densely packed with a small font, by the way) the action, activity or character development all happens in bullet time. The book’s plot is outlined in explicit detail on every page, with not much left to the imagination as you jump from scene to scene.

The Harry Potter books felt the same to me - the authors of these books don’t want you to think, they just to lay their story out in front of you. It’s just plain bad writing, that fails to recognize the most powerful aspect of the written word - the human brain.

All of this is not meant to imply that I’m not enjoying the book, but I’d have a hard time recommending it to many of my friends.

And if Time is your idea of literature, try reading either The Walrus or The Atlantic Monthly for a change. You might enjoy it.

My last visit to Seattle inluded a road trip to Portland, with two main goals. The first was to visit Mt. St. Helens, which was about to blow the last time I passed by; the second was to hit Powell’s bookstore, long my favourite online bookstore and the world’s best used store by far.

A funky new Lomo Fisheye camera got trotted out for this trip too - the results are below.

Mt. St. Helens
The road to Mt. St. Helens is a twisting, sprawling road to nowhere and one that positively begs to be ridden on two wheels. These girls chose my favourite mode.

Entering Oregon
Every time I cross the bridge over the Columbia River - something I’ve done 4 or 5 times - I love it. The Columbia is one of the world’s greatest waterways, and was planned, by the Hudson’s Bay Company, as the border of Canada. This bridge, even if it’s fairly new, is a piece of history simply as a result of its geography.

Powells
Powell’s has long been my favourite online bookstore but I’ve never been to the store itself. Wall to wall books with book cases that go from floor to ceiling. So easy too get lost. So much fun.

Portland is a great city - a cyclists paradise that doesn’t suffer from the urban sprawl that characterizes so many large cities. I love this place.

Gas Works Park, Seattle
Back in Seattle the next day, a visit to Gas Works Park was in order. From Gas Works, you can watch the water based buzz of seattle happening. In this picture, you can just see a sea plane landing in the upper portion of the picture. The structures at Gas Works are remnants of a more industrial era - a time when cities were lit by gaslight with all of the attendant smells and murkiness that this implies.

Some things are best left as memories.

I couldn’t sleep last night - I was trying to sleep on my couch, which will serve as my bed for the next few days, and I tossed and turned all night.

Consequently, I spent most of the night listening to news from London where something like four bombs have been set off in the Tube and at least 45 people appear to be dead.

I can’t imagine being there, and I can’t imagine the sense of normalcy with which many Londoners seem to be treating this event. In a city that has dealt with the threat of IRA bombings for years (and no one seems to think this is an IRA bombing) everyday citizens in London seem to be taking this very much in stride.

Astounding.

I’m pretty happy today to be living in sleepy little Vancouver, where nothing ever seems to happen.

Laurie Anderson, on her Ugly One With The Jewels album, quotes Don De Lillo’s book Mao II saying that the terrorists are the only true artists because they’re the only ones who can surprise us anymore.

So much for liking surprises.

Pierre Berton has passed away, just days after the CBC selected their “Greatest Canadian” - a contest that might not have been possible without Pierre.

Canada is a young country, and Pierre was a big part of establishing our national identity. His books brought history to life for many (and put many others to sleep) and defined out history for a generation. Along with Peter C. Newman, Berton was one of our great storytellers.

I guess I’m going to have to read the National Dream next; it’s on a shelf here somewhere.

Tag Cloud