Booksbooksbooks 04/2023
In which i read five more books at the end of the year.
I just finnished Stephen King’s Holly as the last novel this year, totalling in 55 books i’ve read in 2023.
I’ll post a complete ranking from worst to best tomorrow, but before, here’s the last five short reviews of Benjamín Labatuts’ MANIAC (fantastic), Wilhelm Weischedels’ The Backstairs to Philosophy (good classic), Noam Zadoffs’ History of Israel (good, informative, mandatory), Arkady Martines’ A Memory Called Empire (near complete failure) and Stephen Kings’ Holly (great).
Happy New Year, everybody!
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Benjamín Labatut - MANIAC ★★★★★
John von Neumann is a prodigy, leaves his contemporary in the dust and fails brillantly at discovering the unifying axiomatics of mathematics undone by Gödels incompleteness theorem, only to invent Game Theory, builds the computer architecture for the titular MANIAC-Computer that still runs in all of our devices today and playing a crucial role in developing the atomic bomb in Oppenheimers Manhattan Project, and finally trying his hands at developing a new beast: Artificial Life that self replicates and lives inside the Digital. Then, 50 years later, DeepMinds AI-System AlphaGo beats korean Go-Champion Lee Sedol in a match for the ages.
If you want to understand AI, read this book. It's better than any paper or book i've read about Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence, and it surely is much more entertaining than those. Labatut masterfully retells the story of John von Neumann, his intellectual brillance and his unmatched contributions to scientific progress, but also his ruthlessness and darker moments in building the atomic bomb and, crucially, the optimization of it for maximal destruction in Hieroshima and Nagasaki. It does so in a documentary textbook style, a collage of biographical details interwoven with his emotional failing in private life, and building up to the moment where von Neuman basically stole the work of Nils Aall Barricelli for his posthumous paper Theory of Self Reproducing Automata and his book The Computer and the Brain.
Then, the book makes a jump in time to March 2016, where the new AI-System Alpha Go, a new algorithm from Googles DeepMind, beats Lee Sedol, which it tells like a minutiae thriller, giving us extensive details of behind the scenes goings, where experts run and gather information about what the hell this machine is doing and nobody, really, has any answers.
But it's not the narrative content that blew me away and making this a true page turner for me, it was the style in which Labatut tells this story: The documentarian style that mixes biography from different perspectives of von Neumanns contemporaries gets broken up by poetic, multipaged short interstitials, working to build up tension in this story that unfolds like a newschool historic thriller and which leads us to a non-conclusion, a hint at the fact, that the work started with von Neumann lead humanity to a new kind of beast, an entity that is so strange that humans can't understand it, and then it leaves the rest to the imagination of the reader.
I enjoyed this book like no other current book about AI, and it's maybe the best book i've read in 2023.
Wilhelm Weischedel - Die philosophische Hintertreppe (engl. The Backstairs to Philosophy) ★★★★☆
Weischedels book is a classic of Pop-Philosophy from the 60s, a fast paced (if you want to call it that) history of human thinkers from Thales, the early greek thinker who said 2500 year before Bruce Lee, that "Everything is water", to Wittgenstein, the "doom of philosophy". The extended edition being released in 1973, it does not contain any postmodern or newer thinkers, but it doesn't have to.
It's quite a wonderful read, albeit a bit outdated occasionally in tone and focus, and does exactly what it wants: To give you a good summary of philosophical theories ranging from metaphysics, existentialism to linguistic thought. Every thinker gets roughly 10 pages that sometimes more sometimes less covers his biography with a focus on the quirks and idiosyncrasies, and then goes on to explain the philosophical model those thinkers developed over their whole life and that often is directly connected to those biographies. It does so with a lovingly-cunning but never demeaning language, and i loved it.
Noam Zadoff - Geschichte Israels: Von der Staatsgründung bis zur Gegenwart (engl. History of Israel: From its foundations to the present) ★★★★☆
A good, short summary of the history of the state Israel, from the first zionist movements in the late 19th century until today, with a focus on the events after WWII, the wars in 1948 and 1967 and their consequences.
The Beck Wissen-series is an excellent edition of short 150page-booklets about a given subject, ranging from history to natural sciences, and i've read a few of them. This one stands out not only for being very accessible, but also for not just presenting the mere facts and dates and breaking down what happened, but interweaving that bare bones collection of events with notes about popular culture and art, which perfectly sums up how those events influenced public opinion and emotions of the people, culminating in the story of Shir LaShalom ("A Song for Peace"), an anthem of the Israeli peace movement from 1969, which Yitzhak Rabin sang during a peace rally on November 4, 1995, just minutes before he was shot by a radical israeli ultranationalist, with the blood stained lyrics on a sheet found in his pocket. Stories like these make this short, and, due to the limited number of pages necessarily, sparse breakdown of events into a relatable piece of writing in which history comes alive.
To say i "enjoyed" this book would be wrong, considering the tragic and incredibly complex standoff all sides are entangled in here, but it surely made me understand history a bit more and it did so by moving not just my braincells. That's anything a short book like this can wish for.
Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1) (dt. Im Herzen des Imperiums) ★☆☆☆☆
This novel won the Nebula Awards 2020 and if that says something about the literary standards in the genre, they stink, because this is a bad, bad novel, and it's only in part the fault of the author. I'm happy that i finnished it besides really wanting to give up after the first half, because it's also a masterclass in what errors to avoid when writing a story.
First, the book is marketed as a space opera in the vein of Dune. It's absolutely not that, and the comparison to Frank Herberts masterpiece is an affront against anyone actually loving the genre. It's a boring political thriller playing pretty much entirely within one city, "the heart of the empire". And because it's boring, we get meaningless intrigues and gossip, dialogue after dialogue and inconsistent descriptions of a society that wants to sound weird, but only comes around as a very boring version of earth.
In the appendix, the author gives us a rather detailed explanation of the alien language and some of the glyphs -- and then does nothing with it. Sure, she describes how weird and different that language is, but she never shows it. That's one of the biggest flaws of the book: It's one giant "Tell never show", in which nothing ever happens but talk.
The best part of the book, the Lsel-technology which transplants recordings of consciousnesses into another human and fusing those two personalities and their memories, which leads into a long chain of consciousnesses, where intergenerational memory is communicated via consciousness fusion. This is a mighty good concept and it would be absolutely worth exploring, how this technology would transform collective memory formation, scripture and historic writings. In this book, the technology is reduced to a McGuffin, and if that wasn't bad enough, after mentioning the tech in the first pages, it breaks, her "imago" gets lost, and is only randomly mentioned again until the last act on the last 200 pages. Wow.
The characters are lame and clichéd and the main character is coming around like a hipster accountant from a New York ad agency, who gets a sidekick which is just a younger version of herself, and both are tumbling around in a supposedly-weird but actually-not-weird-at-all society , worrying about diplomatic phrasing, and not much else. On top of that, the characters come off as unstable, switching from one emotion on a whim. In one moment, she's tired and exhausted and bursts in tears, in the next she's a fierce, sharp diplomat.
And even the names don't work: The author invents a naming system, in which every character of that "space aztec"-empire is named by a number-thing-pattern, like "Thirteen Pinetree", "Eight Lemon" or "Twentytwo Calliflower". After you meet three characters, all of these sound the same and you'll have a hard time differentiating them by name alone, except maybe for the few main characters.
Also, the mystery and crime the book has to offer stays shallow, off the shelf thriller stuff that is done more interestingly in cheap pulp novels for a buck. And all of this isn't even the worst part, which would be the editing. You see, an editor of a story usually not only looks for spelling errors, but also contradictions and logical errors, unnecessary repetitions, weird wording and simply stuff that doesn't feel right. The book has plenty of crappy wording, contradictions within the same paragraph and logical errors. If i were editor and this was a first draft, Martine would have some work to do.
For instance, in a crucial moment which leads to the third act, a general on TV explains why he initiated riots and acts against the empire. He speaks on TV about the very Space Station, the home of the main character is coming from when... one of the caracters turns off the TV? Why on earth or any other planet would anyone turn off the TV in such a moment? And then they just go on with talking about intrigues with said riots being not a biggie.
Or this: The space aztecs love poetry and talk in symbolic poetic language, or so the novel is trying to say, while actually they just talk like normal people, except sometimes. So she goes on and explains something to a councelor of the emperor in pretty down to earth, normal language that could've been written by a tactical military advisor, in a very bared tone, absolutely non-ornamental, un-poetic and just strategic. Then, ofcours, the main character says to herself that "she told them in the language of the empire". I thought they dig poetry? The book is full of these contradictions, on pretty much every page you will find those blunders, and an editor not catching these simply sucks at his job.
Some of the more unique stylisms of the author don't help here, when she repeatedly and annoyingly can't decide how to describe a thing and then simply offers two comparisons. The thingy looked like a garden gnome, or a flower. The X looked like Y, or like Z. Taken together with the overall sloppyness of the novel, this creates a whibbly whobbly feeling about this world. When even the author can't decide how her world looks like, how can i?
Finally, another missed chance of this book is how it handles migration politics. It hints at themes of assimilation into society, but it does not really go there and discuss questions like if we want it at all, if we want to preserve and protect other cultures in a society and how far integration and assimilation should or can go. Quite the opposite is happening here: The main character stems from a space station who always dreams about living in that city -- and those dreams are simply confirmed. The empire is good, even wonderful, and the slight hints that colonialism has "some" dark aspects like, say, military expansion and conquest, war and death, are mentioned and then simply forgotten. That's astounding for an author with a background in academical history writing.
The sad things about these flaws is that many of them could've been avoided by rigorous editing. One or two rounds of rewrites may have done the trick to make this mess into a good scifi polit thriller. It still would not be the space opera it sells itself, and the characters still would be flat NYC-hipsters, and it would still be mostly people talking about boring intrigues, but at least you wouldn't scratch your head on nearly every damn page.
Polish scifi-master Stanislav Lem famously despised the science fiction genre and said it's full of crap. With this boring, clichéd, unintentionally fuzzy book full of sloppy writing and missed chances winning one of the most important awards in scifi lit, and the overall praise this book gets, he absolutely has a point. Don't waste your time, unless you want to learn how to not write a novel.
Stephen King - Holly ★★★★☆
Kings latest is a great pulpy trip, part classic thriller detective story, part 70s grindhouse movie, part literature meta-narrative. I haven't read all Holly Gibbney-books and only the first of the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, but i did however read The Outsider and If it bleeds, and while you don't have to read those books to enjoy this novel, it surely helps, as you'll meet many recuring characters.
The book is no whodunnit, from early on we know exactly who kills the missing people and why, and from the very start King describes his villains as completely batshit crazy, except that they don't come in the vain of classic serial killer villain stuff, but an academic elderly couple both more than 80 years old, who are also Covid-deniers, racist af and homophobic too.
The story playing mostly in 2020/21, Covid is the thread weaving itself through the whole book, and it's safe to say that Holly is something like Kings indictive description of an America that lost it's mind, having witnessed not only the Trump years but also the, well, batshit crazy stuff that followed, only to be toppled by the insanity unfolding in a global pandemic. No wonder there are "critics" who did not enjoy this book, because largely, it is about them, and assholes don't like to be exposed as such. Funny enough, as longtime King readers surely know, he never minced words about certain types of people and never shied away from going into politics, and if some of them loose their cool finding themselves as the asshole in a King novel and don't like that feel, everybody wins, including themselves. Let's not waste another word on those.
Let's talk poetry instead.
I love that this book not only is a super pulpy cannibal thriller that really takes some more disgusting turns, even for a Stephen King story, i loved that this is contrasted with meta-narrative on writing, taking some few elements of his own brillant textbook On Writing.
King is not new in meta-narrative land, some of his strongest works (Misery ofcourse, but also Shining, Stark and The Body) play with narratives about writing itself, serving as metaphors for Kings own life. While the metaphors in Misery (King writing about stalking fans) and Stark/Shining (Kings cocaine/alcohol addiction) are clear, here they seem to work first and foremost as a stylistic counterpoint to the devoured innards, and very possibly as a symbol for both Kings own prevailing bustling activity, putting out huge novels every year and writing shortstories inbetween, and the going on literary success of his son Joe Hill. In Holly, the writing character is "just" one of the sidekicks, but we follow her just starting writing carreer closely, get a lot of tips on writing poetry from an elderly mentor, and watch her writing take off to a very promising start, all of which makes Holly a novel of hope. As if he's trying to say: The world may be batshit crazy, and people eat each others guts, but there is good in the world, which only is confirmed by the very last line in which Holly, without spoiling too much, refuses to skip work and get's back to business.
I loved this blend of pulp, reminding me so much of those old 70s horror house movies in which elderly couples hide a dark secret and a very bloody axe, and this meta-talk about poetry, and the hardboiled crime detective story, and if King would've made the meta-narrative stuff a bit more clever with some more implicit symbolism like in, say, It, this could've been a late masterpiece.
As it is, Holly is "just" a damn good King, and you gonna have a bloody good time reading it. For me, as the last book i read this year, this is also the most delicious dish to finnish up an already pretty good year in reading. Thanks for that, Mr. King.
loved the detailed disrciption of the empire:D , adding Maniac to my list*