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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Quite possibly my all-time favourite book, I re-read it every few years and each time I get something more out of it. An investigation into the concepts of truth and quality, sprinkled with commentary on Western academia, it uses the metaphor of a motorcycle to explain logic and rational thought. Though the book uses the narrative framework of a cross-country trip, the motorcyle one is taught to maintain is not the piece of hardware on which the author rides: it is one’s own self. Here’s an odd book report.


“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman
Here’s a book report.


A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin
If you only ever read one book on the Space Race, this must be it, the book that was the basis for the award-winning HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. Chaikin explains the events and difficulties of the Apollo project with such detailed understanding that one might think he was himself one of the astronauts, except that no astronaut ever had such a gift for storytelling. Both the exhilirating highs and the disastrous lows will bring tears to your eyes.


A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Winner of a Pulitzer prize, published posthumously by the author’s mother. I won’t even try to summarise it. A masterpiece of pure genius. Here’s a book report, if it can be called that.


Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson
A guidebook for self-programming what John Lilly called the “human biocomputer.” Wilson uses his incomparable humour to explain the eight-circuit model of the brain and how each circuit is imprinted and conditioned. Mental games and exercises help the reader to understand the “programs” unintentionally imprinted on one’s brain during various stages of development, and enable one to rewrite detrimental programs and augment beneficial ones. You’ll find lots of quarters, too. Avoids the whacked-out zealotry of Timothy Leary, who pioneered the eight-circuit model.

The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams
When I was in high school my grandfather gave me an early printing of this book, and it has remained one of my most prized possessions ever since. It’s not so much because he died not long after, but because I’m still curious to know what prompted him to give me a book that tells the true story (and, of course, the bawdy rumour) about Catherine the Great and the horse, as well as the caloric content of human sperm. These are just two of the hundreds of questions unabashedly and caustically answered by Uncle Cecil in this book and its sequels. What are the original lyrics to “Louie, Louie?” Why is there no Channel One? How many Eskimo words for snow are there really? Hilarious and informative, truly a “Compendium of Human Knowledge.”

The I Ching, or Book of Changes translated by Wilhelm/Baynes
Both an oracle and a philosophy. I have read several different translations of this classic. Some are overly New Age. Some are so cryptically and tersely written that you’re probably better off learning Chinese and reading the original. This version is a bit academic and has a definite European cant, but it conveys some nice poetry and contains extensive commentaries on each of the 64 hexagrams.


VALIS by Philip K. Dick
This is (partly) a semi-autobiographical attempt to come to terms with an inexplicable mind-altering experience that PKD had in the early ’70s, which among other things allowed him to diagnose a life-threatening congenital defect in his young son that had gone undetected by physicians. Could it be that the “living word” of early Christianity was really an intelligent, symbiotic information packet which, when learned under the proper conditions, gave a person immortality? Could orbiting satellites be capable of firing pink laser beams of information directly into a person’s mind? These are but two of PKD’s many theories on the origin of his strange visions.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Even before the moment in 1933 when Leo Szilard stepped off a curb and had his epiphany of nuclear fission, the Atomic Age was inevitable. Rhodes’ Pulitzer prize-winner makes the difficult concepts of physics and chemistry understandable without oversimplification, and explains the background of each discovery as well. This could have made for a dull, tedious read, but Rhodes uses honest drama and solid characterizations to create a ripping good tale. No other book covers both the history and the morality of this subject better.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

For whatever reason, when I’m given books as gifts, I often don’t read them for a very long time afterward. They sit on the “pending” shelf in my library, gathering dust like all the rest, taunting me by tacitly saying, “me next!” But they only rarely make it to the head of the reading queue.

I suppose I could speculate on some reasons for this.  One is the basic assumption of friends that I’ll like to read what they like to read.  That’s not always the case.  Slightly more off-base is the assumption that I’ll like what they think I’ll like.  These are, of course, the normal pitfalls of gift books.  Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure that the majority of books I’ve given over the years have similarly languished on shelves.  I have no hard feelings about that fact, and so I suppose I should not feel all that guilty for doing the same.

To be honest, nearly every book I add to my collection tends to sit on the shelf for quite a while before I get around to reading it.  Such is the way of the avid book collector.

Moreover, though, there’s the simple fact of my tendencies when selecting new reading.  I like to think that the next book chosen is generally either a logical progression or wildly divergent from the last, but perhaps that’s not really true.  In a quick review of my reading selections of the past few years, I see that they hop between several of my favourite topics — in particular space and history, and their literary adjuncts sci-fi and historical fiction — with the occasional digression into what can only be termed research reading, mainly into the history of my alma mater, Michigan State University.  And then, mixed amongst those, there’s the odd book that doesn’t really fit into my usual routine but piques my curiosity due to interesting reviews, or coincidences with other media, etc., such as In Cold Blood (the movie Capote), The Dangerous Book For Boys (several rave reviews and sale-priced at Costco), The Barn House (excerpted in the Chicago Reader), and The French Connection (again, the movie), to name a few.

Into this fray leapt my friend David, who presented me with a hardcover copy of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips.  I’d read a positive and intriguing article about this book in the Reader, and so it was on my radar as something I might want to read some day.  Yet given that the article ran nearly three years ago, it’s clear that I would not have gotten to it any time soon — had David not pressed the issue by giving me a copy for my birthday, and later asking an innocent question about whether I’d started reading it yet.

Here’s the thing.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never read anything by James Tiptree Jr.

As a kid, I got into sci-fi in grade school and read a bunch of it over the years, mostly sticking to stuff by a few of the “heavies”: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein.  Around the time I graduated from college, I decided to expand my horizons and look beyond the familiar… but not knowing quite where to start, I decided to delve into the lists of Hugo and Nebula award winners.  I could not have made a better choice — it was like having my own personal sci-fi Virgil to guide me.  That’s how I discovered many of my very favourite authors, including Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Samuel Delany, Orson Scott Card, and David Brin.

(As an aside, I’m interested to note that four visits to my website this week have been the result of searches on “sci fi book recommendations” — it turns out Google has my page currently listed third.  Awesome.  Google still loves me.  As a result, I amended that page to suggest the Hugo and Nebula lists.)

Helping me considerably in my quest for quality sci-fi was Curious Book Shop in East Lansing.  Long before authors like Delany enjoyed a renewed interest and subsequent re-issuance, I could almost always count on Curious to have the out-of-print paperbacks.  (Sad to say, despite having borrowed its name from a classic Alfred Bester title, Chicago’s now-defunct shop The Stars Our Destination always came in a distant second to Curious in terms of both selection and price.)  For example, one of Bester’s works, The Computer Connection, didn’t make Vintage’s reprint cut a dozen years ago, but I didn’t mind because I’d already managed to find the Analog 1974/5 three-issue serialisation (with the unfortunate title The Indian Giver) in the basement at Curious.

But I never read Tiptree, and here’s why: he mainly wrote short stories.  Back when I was hitting Curious on a weekly basis, it was in the very early days of the web and it was not as easy as it is now to determine where these stories have been published.  On the rare occasion when I could figure out a source, it often involved some thick anthology, which felt unfrugal to purchase for the sake of a single entry.  So I stuck to the Best Novel lists.

To my detriment, it would seem — Tiptree’s stories sound fascinating.  And if I may offer one caveat regarding Phillips’ biography, having read fewer than a hundred pages into it, I fear that it might contain more than a few spoilers — it already has given away a couple of endings.  Perhaps it would be in my best interest to seek out some of Tiptree’s work in advance of finishing the biography.

Easily done, of course.  Her Smoke Rose Up Forever collects several of his best-regarded works, including the Nebula Award–winning “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death”, the Hugo Award–winning “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, and the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”  Nowadays, there’s something called the “Internet Speculative Fiction Database” that makes that kind of fact-finding simple; not to mention Amazon.com for a quick and easy shopping spree.  (Sorry, Curious… just can’t make a 200-mile road trip right now.)

Trouble is, The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon is awfully hard to put down.  I’m fascinated by Alice’s childhood experiences in the disparate but equally wild jungles of the Belgian Congo and Chicago’s upper-class society.  Julie Phillips employs clear understanding and deft phrasing to explain the origins of her “double life” in language that avoids stereotyping and value judgments.  When discussing written works she treats Sheldon and Tiptree as distinct, using both gender-specific pronouns depending on whether she (Sheldon) or he (Tiptree) was the writer, a conceit I have followed here.

All in all, I doubt I’ll be able to hold off on finishing this terrific biography before a box with the familiar smiley-swoosh arrives.  Thank you, David!

Following a recommendation from a colleague at work, and attracted by his piecemeal summaries as he progressed through the book himself, I recently read House of Leaves, by first-time novelist Mark Z. Danielewski.

The grab-line from the front flap is catchy: “A young family… moves into a small house… where they discover something terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.”

But that barely scratches the surface of what the book’s really about.  The story is told (with occasional interjections by an unnamed “Editor”) by a twentysomething slacker named Johnny Truant who discovers a shambolic manuscript by a dead man named Zampanò, about a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer named Navidson, head of the aforementioned “young family”, who films the experience of moving into the little house in the country and the subsequent expeditions into its strange spaces, and edits it into an alternately acclaimed and despised cult film.  Zampanò discusses and analyses the film with scholarly exactitude, yet his manuscript is a disheveled, incomplete mess;  Truant reprints and organises Zampanò’s manuscript, completing his references and finding translators for its foreign-language excerpts.  All the while, Truant’s footnotes frequently digress into rambling tales of his life and how working on the manuscript has invaded his mind and taken over his every moment.

The trouble with the manuscript, as Truant comes to discover, is that neither Navidson, his former-model wife, nor the film ever existed.  And even if they had existed, Zampanò’s detailed descriptions of the cinematography would be suspect, considering that he was blind.

This nested concept, centered around a lengthy dissertation about a fictional film that seems to engross the mind of anyone who comes into contact with it, makes a very interesting premise, and the book starts off promisingly, with frightening hints even in Truant’s introduction that things have gone terribly wrong for him as a result of editing Zampanò’s manuscript.  After a while, though, despite a decent intertwining of love story and horror story, there’s something about the author’s arch conceits that becomes a distraction rather than an integration.

There are the little inscrutable typographical puzzles, like the fact that every instance of the word “house” throughout the book including the front cover, in any language, or even embedded within longer words, is printed in blue.  Much more obvious (if not facile) were the pages that are meant to illustrate the sense of confusion and space-shifting that happens to the occupants of the house, with print that appears upside-down, or sideways, or only at the very top or bottom of the page.

There are the rampant footnotes, which I ordinarily wouldn’t mind, until it became clear that a great many (if not all) of them were citations of fake journals, magazine articles, and books, and simply a part of Zampanò’s elaborate hoax.  I got to wondering if Danielewski got tired of making up fake article titles, because I certainly got tired of reading them all.

Then there’s the smugness of its self-reference.  In a chapter where the lost expedition taps out S.O.S. in Morse code, Zampanò describes how Navidson’s film echoes the pattern of ••• ––– ••• with its editing: three short takes, followed by three long takes, followed by three more short takes.  Meanwhile, the paragraphs describing these takes follow the same pattern.  This might have been an ingenious idea — if not for the fact that by the end of the chapter Truant has pointed the paragraph pattern out to us, just in case we have missed it.  I still haven’t decided whether Danielewski is being patronising or merely a spoiler by doing this; either way it’s annoying.

Annoying enough that when I got to the chapter about the labyrinth, with its mirror-image pages, and footnotes that tunnel down through page after page, or reverse back, or twist this way and that, with circular references and myriad dead-ends, it was all too easy as a reader to say, “Yes, I get it — the chapter about the labyrinth is itself a labyrinth. Can we move along now?”

I suppose mainly I just didn’t fathom House of Leaves.  I wanted to like it, and much of it was interesting and intriguing.  Yet its open-ended tendency to leave many of its notions unexplained might be best exemplified in the Ouroboros of self-reference that results when, in the final stages of deconstruction, Navidson burns the pages of the book he’s reading in order to provide the light he needs to read it — a book titled House of Leaves, presumably a copy of the very book we hold in our hands.

It’s only mentioned that one time, a throwaway comment that refuses to address its utter impossibility.  It left me feeling much like Navidson must have felt — that I needed to hurry up and finish reading the book.  Except that for him, the impetus was that he was swiftly running out of pages to burn before he caught up to the page he was reading; for me the impetus was tinged with the thought of getting it over with so that I could have closure and move on to something — anything — more enjoyable to read.

The purpose of this page is to vent my frustration at the modern state of the publishing industry. Nowadays, copy editing seems to be a nonexistent function of publishers. Simple typographical errors crop up in nearly every book, and oftentimes missing punctuation, transposed letters, and outright misspellings run rampant throughout the pages. It’s time book buyers took a stand. If I’m going to kill a few trees, dump dioxins in a river somewhere, and pay 25 bucks of my hard-earned cash, damn it, I think it’s only fair that I get my money’s worth. It doesn’t cost much to print a book, publishers, so hire someone to do a little quality control!

It’s called the “Shut List” to make a point, however subtle. This title will pass any spelling check, and give the reader the mistaken impression that one should “shut” these books, i.e. not read them. In fact, that “u” is a typo. It should be an “i” — because the copy editing in these books is for shit.

What follows are the most heinous offenders. Many are excellent books despite their typos, so stop by your local public library and give them a read. Just don’t give money to their publishers.

Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller by Neal Stephenson. Publisher: Bantam Spectra

Just how does a book make the Shut List? Hard to say. It’s not a “zero tolerance” policy, because every book ever published has had one or two minor flubs. For me, I guess the threshold is reached when the typos are just beginning to be annoying, but only in a subconscious way, and I have almost forgotten about them and am getting back into the book, and then find two on a single page. Apparently it’s not possible to print the word “chloracne” five times on a page without the last appearance becoming “chlorachne.” The clincher came when I had to stop for a few seconds and think to myself, “who the hell is this character Bone?” before realizing he meant “Boone.”

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Publisher: Avon Books

The text seems to have been fed directly from Neal’s laptop (or his BeBox) into the presses without even the benefit of a spellcheck. An error occurs an average of once every 10 pages throughout. (Note to Neal: we know you like the word abbatoir {sic} since you use it in both this book and your thought-provoking essay on the computer industry, but repeat after me: A-B-A-T-T-O-I-R. One b, two t’s. One b, two t’s.) Worse, both the standard-issue code example (“Attack Pearl Harbor…”) and the appendix describing the Pontifex Transform contained errata that affected the outcome of those systems.

Chariots for Apollo: The Untold Story behind the Race to the Moon by Charles R. Pellegrino & Joshua Stoff. Publisher: Avon Books

Wernher von Bran. Lenoid Brezhnev. The list goes on and on.

The Chicago River: An Illustrated History and Guide to the River and its Waterways by David M. Solzman. Publisher: Wild Onion Press (an imprint of Loyola University Press)

Here is a book report describing this book’s most glaring error. Of course, it also has its share of typos.

Rockets into Space by Frank H. Winter. Publisher: Harvard University Press

Well-written and informative, despite a 1990 publishing which leaves the “Future of Rocketry” chapter very dated, and info on the Soviet moon program almost nonexistent. The text is also full of numbers: dates, engine thrusts, etc. Unfortunately (at least in the 1990 paperback first printing) the numbers cannot be trusted. I have never seen a reference to a Delta 3916/PAM (in the Delta numbering scheme the 6 contradicts the PAM. It should be a 0). Much worse is the claim that Apollo 11 launched on 18 July 1969. If not for the rampant errata I could readily recommend this book.

Race to the Moon: America’s Duel with the Soviets by William B. Breuer

A decent and interesting book for the first two-thirds of its length, when it focusses on the Peenemünde rocketeers. Then it goes through the motions to complete the story of the moon landing, and fact checking goes out the window. Any book on the Space Race that gets the date of the Apollo 11 launch wrong, even by a day (as this one does), deserves nomination to the Shut List. This one also conflates the names of the Gemini XI crew, Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon, into “Lieutenant Charles ‘Pete’ Gordon, Jr. (who apparently flew solo to an altitude record of 850 miles). And finally (as the last error I’ll mention, not the last I noticed), it states: “the Peenemünde team… developed forerunners of the full range Pershing, Cruise, and SS-20 series of missiles, which formed the backbone of the NATO armory and deterred the Soviets…” [ellipses added, but guaranteed not to change the meaning of the sentence]. Sorry, but every source I can find confirms that the SS-20 was a Soviet missile — it deterred NATO.

The excellent 1971 film of The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, has been running quite frequently on the Fox Movie Channel of late. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s usually on late at night, so my focus is fuzzy, but there’s a major plot point in it that always had me confused.

The brown Lincoln Continental is brought into the country, loaded with concealed heroin, by the French connection. Then Sal Boca, the American connection, takes the car from a hotel parking ramp and parks it overnight on a seedy waterfront street, where it is nearly stripped by a roving chop shop gang. Popeye has the car impounded, the cops (finally, after hours of searching) discover the drug cache, then they close it back up good as new and return it to — the French connection, who later takes it to a desolate island in the East River for the deal to go down with Sal.

So here lies the confusion: why does Sal take possession of the car, full of drugs, before the deal — and then abandon it in a bad area? Why doesn’t he just off-load the drugs right then?

The answer lies in Robin Moore’s terrific non-fiction tale of, as he hyperbolically puts it, “the most crucial single victory to date in the ceaseless, frustrating war against the import of vicious narcotics into our country.” As Moore explains, the car (in reality a tan 1960 Buick Invicta) was left by the American connection on that waterfront street because at that point it was loaded, not with drugs, but with the cash payoff from a previous import. The car soon disappeared from the street, picked up by an unseen accomplice, and returned to Montréal (and ultimately France) to begin the next, even bigger, drug smuggling operation.

The stake-out scene in the movie is tense and dramatic, and it makes sense that it was included virtually unchanged from the book. But because the filmmakers have conflated two separate deals into one big deal, the chain of events ceases to make any sense at all. I find this ironic, considering that The French Connection is one of the films that is lauded for its gritty realism, a hallmark of American cinema in the 1970s. It’s a great movie — if for nothing else than the classic, nay, iconic chase scene between Popeye in a borrowed Pontiac Le Mans and his intended assassin in a commandeered elevated train — yet its five Academy Awards completely overshadow its excellent, worthy source material: Robin Moore’s 1969 book.