a hundred degrees

Passing Sentences

  I finished a couple books this weekend. I traditionally read Terry Pratchett's Discworld books aloud to Lexie. We've had Guards! Guards! in the car for some time. We had just quit the reading aloud thing for a while. Not too long ago I started back into it. Anyway, we finished up just this side of Marble Falls on the way home today.
  Kevin mostly talked or sang to himself or drew on his Magnadoodle while I read. He was generally very good. Occasionally he wanted some questions answered about things he saw on the road or on his Magnadoodle and he would interrupt.

  I really don't understand why kids ask the same question again after they've received an answer. It's particularly perplexing when you repeat their question to them and they repeat the answer you've already given back. They know the answer. So, why won't they shut up?
  Perhaps it is our capitalist society. Everything is a transaction. We want to close the deal. We want give and take and an ending. More likely I'm just impatient.
  Best guess: he just longs for interaction and has no other conversational ploys handy. Okay, give me the poor father label and let me get back to what I was doing.
  I also finished Woad to Wuin. This is the sequel to Sir Apropos of Nothing. The first book was actually pretty entertaining. It plays around with the tension of destiny and free will. Consider the title. We use the term "apropos" to indicate that something is as it should be. But our knight's name gives us to understand that nothing is as it should be. Apropos is the antihero who scrapes and scams his way along occasionally appropriating the destinies of "true heroes" and then being disabused of them. Still while he is busy busting up Fate's work among his moral betters you are given to understand that he has not changed his own destiny by a hair.
  Woad to Wuin, however, feels like a one trick pony. Peter David writes a lot of Star Trek and other tie-in novels. Where Apropos felt free and breezy like his own show, Woad feels like an episode. I'm not likely to continue to the third book: Tong Lashing.
  I'm two and a half (out of ten) cassettes away from finishing Smiley's People. For the first two-thirds of the book or so, it's almost a straight murder mystery. I'm sure the bad guys will lose but we won't feel good about it.
  I started Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. This is the first of a trilogy which itself is a prequel to Cryptonomicon. I think Neal likes to be difficult. He really wants to exercise those rusty sections of my vocabulary. It isn't enough that the book is over 900 pages long, he wants me to slow down when I read it. Witness the third sentence of this brief quotation:

  The ferryman's hefty Africans pace short reciprocating arcs on the deck, sweeping and shoveling the black water of the Charles Basin with long stanchion-mounted oars, minting systems of vortices that fall to aft, flailing about one another, tracing out fading and flattening conic sections that Sir Isaac could probably work out in his head. The Hypothesis of Vortices is pressed with many difficulties. The sky's a matted reticule of taut jute and spokeshaved tree-trunks.

  It's not quite Eco, but we're not far off. Snow Crash was lots of fun, but Cryptonomicon was a lot of work, and I think this one's going to be the same way. Still the furniture distribution method in the latter book is just nearly worth the cost of getting there.

Posted to Books at February 1, 2004 8:55 PM