Title: 2312
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Rating: 4 out of 5
I've decided that my summaries have been getting too long, so I'm going to make future summaries shorter. This book was over 500 pages, but here we go.
Summary (with spoilers):
Swan lives on Terminator, a city on Mercury that glides along planet-wide tracks to avoid being caught in the sun. As Swan grieves at the death of her grandmother, Alex, she learns that Alex was involved in secret political dealings. Alex has left several letters that Swan must deliver, causing Swan to meet up with Wahram, Inspector Gennette, and Wang.
In addition to being overcome with grief, Swan is a rather unusual person. She had her qube, Pauline, installed in her head. She's also undergone various physical modifications.
Swan tries to figure out what Alex was working on, but no one will tell her directly what's going on, except that it has to do with Earth, and that they don't trust the qubes. Swan travels to Earth via terraria (hollowed-out asteroids turned into small worlds), to meet up with her former lover, Zasha. On Earth, some ruffians attempt to kidnap her, but she is saved by Kiran. In return, she gets him off-planet to Venus, where he becomes a double agent for two major political powers.
Swan meets up with Wahram on Mercury. After attending a conference, they decide to don some spacesuits and walk back to the city platform. En route, they witness an explosion the almost hits Terminator and destroys the tracks. They rush back to the city, but it's already been evacuated. Since the sun is rising, they need to get to safety. They decide to run sun-ward to the next platform, which has an underground system mirroring the tracks above ground. They make it to the platform, and while they are waiting for the elevator to arrive, Swan jumps in front of Wahram to protect him from a solar flare.
They hike along the underground tunnel for weeks, trying to reach safety, whistling Bach to pass the time. Swan gets increasingly ill from radiation poisoning. Eventually, they go to the surface to break the monotony, even though they are sun-side, and a vehicle passing by rescues them.
Swan spends time with Inspector Gennette, who thinks the attack on Mercury was caused by lots of small rocks thrown so that they would all land at the same time. He's also suspicious of the cubes. Swan and Wahram go to Earth to help with various development projects and then decide to repopulate Earth with all of the animals stored in the terraria. Thousands of animals are sent through the sky in gel balloons. On Earth, Swan and Warham realize they have feelings for each other.
Swan and Warham become passengers on a space craft, when Pauline informs Swan that a similar attack is planned on the Venus sun shield. They use the space ship to deflect the small projectiles, which means that everyone has to evacuate. Swan and Warham get into space suits and float in space, waiting to be rescued. However, their rescue ship is attacked before it can pick them up, and Warham's leg is injured. Eventually, they are rescued, but their time waiting in space is reminiscent of their time in the tunnel.
Meanwhile, these strange humanoid qubes have been wandering about causing trouble, so Inspector Gennette exiles them all in a star ship. The book ends with the marriage of Swan and Warham.
My Thoughts:
My summary doesn't do the book justice, as its strengths lie in world building, character development, and philosophical discussions. It was a book that would make me stop mid-page and think for 20 minutes about the concepts. I enjoyed the discussion of the pseudo-iterative routines of Warham, the question of qube-human relationships, and the descriptions of the various terraria.
My favorite part of the book was when they were wandering through the tunnel, and also the description of animals floating down to Earth. The chapters completely filled with terraforming descriptions were hard for me to get through, but most of them actually did have a relation to the plot. I believe the book could have been 100 pages shorter, but I enjoyed the complexity and depth of the world that Robinson built.
This book has won the Nebula and is up for the Hugo this year. I would have voted for it if I had signed up for a voting membership.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
The Mindy Project
The Mindy Project by Mindy Kaling
Summary (with spoilers):
Mindy tells the reader about her life, from childhood to comedy success, through humorous essays. She discusses her high school experience as a comedy nerd, college acting, moving to New York and writing the play Matt & Ben with her friend, various jobs, and how she became a writer for The Office.
My Thoughts:
Not a bad book, although Mindy is not nearly as funny in her essay writing as she is in script writing and acting. Some of the episodes were well done. I especially liked her description of her childhood. When describing high school, she says that it's okay not to be a star, because it's kind of sad if high school is the best time of your life. However, some of the chapters fell flat for me. The one where she describes pictures of herself on her cell phone is especially bad.
Overall, it was an amusing read, but I could have skipped it.
Summary (with spoilers):
Mindy tells the reader about her life, from childhood to comedy success, through humorous essays. She discusses her high school experience as a comedy nerd, college acting, moving to New York and writing the play Matt & Ben with her friend, various jobs, and how she became a writer for The Office.
My Thoughts:
Not a bad book, although Mindy is not nearly as funny in her essay writing as she is in script writing and acting. Some of the episodes were well done. I especially liked her description of her childhood. When describing high school, she says that it's okay not to be a star, because it's kind of sad if high school is the best time of your life. However, some of the chapters fell flat for me. The one where she describes pictures of herself on her cell phone is especially bad.
Overall, it was an amusing read, but I could have skipped it.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Quiet
Quiet by Susan Cain
This is the first time I've done a review of a non-fiction book. I'll keep the summary short.
Summary (with spoilers):
Cain talks about the "extrovert ideal" in United States culture, which privileges extroverted personalities over introverted personalities. She uses the Harvard Business School as an example of an extreme extrovert culture.
Cain discusses the nature/nurture debate, bringing up physiological elements that influence introversion. She looks at introversion in terms of sensitivity, arguing that people who are more sensitive to outside stimuli are more likely to be introverts. There's an interesting experiment where researchers played recordings of balloons popping, etc. for babies, and were able to predict which would grow up to be introverts based on how the babies reacted. The highly reactive babies were more sensitive, and therefore more likely to exhibit introverted qualities when they got older.
Cain argues that we should pay more attention to the positive qualities of introversion and examines introverted leadership.
My Thoughts:
Although I had high hopes for this book, I wasn't impressed. I could sense the author's bitterness at having to grow up in an extroverted world. Although she repeatedly says that she hopes the book will cause introverts to be at peace with who they are, I don't think she spends enough time on the positive aspects of introversion. In fact, most of the time she's talking about extroverts (the extrovert ideal, comparing introverts to extroverts, etc.) I would have enjoyed the book if it had been more focused on what it means to be an introvert, not about how introverts can survive in an extroverted world. Perhaps the author would have sounded less resentful if she had written the book in a more introvert-focused way.
The most interesting bits of the book talked about the effect of physiology on introversion. Although introversion is influenced by environment, it's also highly hereditary. However, I had some friends note that some of the experiments/findings seemed flawed, like arguing that introverts might be more sensitive to coffee when it's probably a separate gene that influences caffeine sensitivity.
I wouldn't recommend this book. I have so much difficulty finding good non-fiction books. There's always a worry that the book won't be factually accurate (although Quiet contained a substantial amount of footnotes, which is a good sign).
This is the first time I've done a review of a non-fiction book. I'll keep the summary short.
Summary (with spoilers):
Cain talks about the "extrovert ideal" in United States culture, which privileges extroverted personalities over introverted personalities. She uses the Harvard Business School as an example of an extreme extrovert culture.
Cain discusses the nature/nurture debate, bringing up physiological elements that influence introversion. She looks at introversion in terms of sensitivity, arguing that people who are more sensitive to outside stimuli are more likely to be introverts. There's an interesting experiment where researchers played recordings of balloons popping, etc. for babies, and were able to predict which would grow up to be introverts based on how the babies reacted. The highly reactive babies were more sensitive, and therefore more likely to exhibit introverted qualities when they got older.
Cain argues that we should pay more attention to the positive qualities of introversion and examines introverted leadership.
My Thoughts:
Although I had high hopes for this book, I wasn't impressed. I could sense the author's bitterness at having to grow up in an extroverted world. Although she repeatedly says that she hopes the book will cause introverts to be at peace with who they are, I don't think she spends enough time on the positive aspects of introversion. In fact, most of the time she's talking about extroverts (the extrovert ideal, comparing introverts to extroverts, etc.) I would have enjoyed the book if it had been more focused on what it means to be an introvert, not about how introverts can survive in an extroverted world. Perhaps the author would have sounded less resentful if she had written the book in a more introvert-focused way.
The most interesting bits of the book talked about the effect of physiology on introversion. Although introversion is influenced by environment, it's also highly hereditary. However, I had some friends note that some of the experiments/findings seemed flawed, like arguing that introverts might be more sensitive to coffee when it's probably a separate gene that influences caffeine sensitivity.
I wouldn't recommend this book. I have so much difficulty finding good non-fiction books. There's always a worry that the book won't be factually accurate (although Quiet contained a substantial amount of footnotes, which is a good sign).
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