Vacation Book Look
I'm sliding back into the swing of things after my vacation - much more smoothly than after my June vacation, when it seemed like things became unhappy chaos at work very shortly after returning. I made great progress on my projects for our deadline next Monday, even uncovering and fixing a nasty little bug along the way. Pretty nice.
It's been very cold out, with lows at night well below zero, and highs only as high as 10 degrees. It's so cold that the city can't even salt the roads, since the snow would probably just melt and re-freeze and make everything worse. But things aren't really so bad, driving-wise, that I can tell. Driving is slow, but there aren't many traffic jams.
Of course, I don't commute during rush hour, and I've mostly stayed off the highways the major arteries.
It's still fricking cold, though, especially when the wind starts up. Happily, my car seems to be handling it all remarkably well.
There are a host of illnesses going around the office lately, mostly colds, but one guy's family came down with an ugly intestinal flu over New Year's. Yick. Save me from that! There are few things in the world which are less fun than throwing up.
I've started taping the Homicide re-runs on Court TV, so tonight I watched the third and fourth episodes of the series (yes, I still haven't seen the first two). They're interesting in that they're a little more edgy than the later episodes (even the third season, which has some edgy moments): Main characters yell at each other, lie to each other, behave badly, and generally seem dysfunctional in one manner or another.
I got the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, on which the series was based, and look forward to reading it.
As I mentioned before, I read Octavia E. Butler's Patternist series (except for the out-of-print Survivor). Going chronologically, the first book, Wild Seed, is a pretty good book about an immortal man who is breeding humans to bring out their latent paranormal powers. It takes place between 1690 and 1840, and involves the man in question - Doro - and a shapeshifter named Anwanyu, and their relationships and tensions. The second book, Mind of my Mind, sees Doro's plans brought to fruition, and the reaction of the resulting Patternists to his plans and the outcomes. It's the best of the four, I think, and takes place in "the present day".
Clay's Ark takes place in the near future, when a mission to Alpha Centauri brings back a microbe which bonds to and biologically alters humans which it infects. This book focuses on the microbe gaining its toehold on Earth, is extremely grim, and ultimately not especially rewarding. At best, you could say it's a book about a highly virulent plague which encourages its carriers to spread it, and a look at how these carriers react.
The final book, Patternmaster, was the first written, and takes place hundreds of years in the future. It focuses on Patternist society, the tensions within it, and the ongoing war between the Patternists and the Clayarks. It's a pretty good straightforward adventure.
All for books have very strong overtones of slavery (which I believe is present in most - if not all - of Butler's work, from the synopses I've read). It gets to be pretty oppressive after a while, and a little repetitive as well. I think it's best handled in the Wild Seed/Mind of my Mind pair.
After reading Butler, I went for something lighter: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, which is a lighthearted treatment of the apocalypse: The Antichrist is placed with the wrong family, heaven and hell lose track of him, and the apocalypse arrives in thoroughly chaotic fashion, with an incompetent demon and his angelic opposite number at the center of it all. Basically, though, this is not a good book: The humor is extremely repetitive (often of the "If he'd only done thus-and-such he'd have ensured himself of a longer, fuller life - except, of course, that this was the last day in history" variety), and more than once I thought to myself that I'd seen these sorts of situations handled first and much better by Douglas Adams in at least three of his novels. There were two or three scenes that had my chuckling, but for a 360+ page book, that's not much. Skip this one.
Then I read Stephen Leigh's novel Alien Tongue, which involves a trio of humans heading through a wormhole a few decades in the future and engaging in humanity's first alien contact. It's a fairly good novel in its crafting of "Avian" society and its exploration of how they think. Actually, "Alien Thought" might have been a better title, since it's not a linguistically-based book. I don't think it's as good as Leigh's Dark Water's Embrace, but it was worth a read.
And now I'm reading Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, which is part fascinating photojournalism book on how buildings evolve and adapt in the decades after they're built, as they change ownerships and functions, and part diatribe on the state of architecture today (which Brand largely laments as focusing on aesthetics rather than functionality). I'm nearly half-done, and I'm finding it highly entertaining. Worth reading.
And on that note, I think I will call it a night... though perhaps I'll knock down a few more pages in that last book, first.
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