Sleeping Murder

by Agatha Christie

Rather a well performed production here. It is a bit of a stretch, as so much Christie is, with coincidences here and there to make the plot flow the way she wanted/needed it to. Once you get past the major one of actually going back to the same house, which Christie does explain relatively satisfactorily, the rest fall into place. Miss Marple is, as usual, perceptive where others are blind; the villain is devious and obvious. Again, a classic production, evidently dating from the middle of her career, when she was at the peak of her form, though it is described as Miss Marple's last case; that description is deceptive, because it was marketed in the same way as Curtain, but they are not comparable; after all, Poirot dies in his last case.

Number Two

There's Treasure Everywhere

by

Bill Watterson

I love Calvin and Hobbes. They are so funny, so real. Calvin is the six-year-old little boy; Hobbes the stuffed tiger who is real in Calvin’s mind and, hence, the pictures and their adventures. I especially like that once in a great while Watterson drew Hobbes from the outsiders’ point of view, and we see the stuffed toy, not the living, walking, talking tiger. Too bad Watterson stopped drawing this comic strip.

Songs of Distant Earth

by Arthur C. Clarke

Once again, we discover that Clarke can write.

Again, as in others of his works, the heroes are not Earthmen ~ though descended from human genotypes, they are native Thalassians, and have been for generations. The Earthmen, the last in the universe, appear in the spaceship Magellan (no symbolism there, is there?), on their way to another star system, hundreds of years away, and it becomes doubtful ~ briefly ~ whether they will play the part of antagonists or behave themselves and fulfil their mission. The true antagonists, though, that will in generations to come challenge the Thalassians, are a previously unknown true native (not from Earth genotype) of the oceans of Thalassa.

Clarke’s imagination, knowledge, and ability to guess ~ accurately ~ where he does not know, is, as always, phenomenal. The picture of a colony of humans on a planet of water, struggling for survival in what could be a harsh environment, since it is not the original of their genotype, is brilliant. Though they struggle, they also live indolently, like the original South Sea Islanders, obviously the source of much of the picture. Yet there is something wonderful and scary in the idea of their founders ~ the Earth scientists who created their Mother Ship, loaded it, sent it ~ choosing for them the form of their culture, the portions of history, literature, Art, that they would have access to. The Thalassians are truly not Earthmen, for they do not have the history of Earth behind them. What we are shown is what a culture of humans would be like without Earth. Interesting idea.

1000 Reviews!

Right, it’s the first of January, and the last book i read (as the previous entry on this blog shows) was the one thousandth since i began the process of writing a review of each book read shortly after finishing it. That surely makes this the perfect moment to offer a small selection of those reviews here. So i’ll post one every two or three days over the next month, till maybe twenty or so are on-line ~ about two percent of the total. Why not?

I’ll be honest about the reviews; i will randomly select them, and i won’t change the selection to choose a better review. In fact, to ensure mine honesty, i have just run a random number generator, so the reviews will be of books numbered: 162, 487, 566, 207, 34, 625, 155, 627, 618, 131, 541, 732, 588, 174, 133, 47, 583, 698, 22, and 42. I haven’t looked yet, so i hope these are good reviews. I’ll post them, either way. The only change i’ll make is in the unlikely event that there isn’t a review at the indicated number (there are a few, probably a couple of dozen, books without reviews, for assorted reasons, mostly to do with software messing up records); if that happens, i’ll take the next in line.

I do reserve the right, however, to edit them before i post them, but that’s nothing new, they are always edited, lightly or otherwise, before being moved to their permanent location in the computer storage.

In the meantime, let’s take a brief look at the statistics (always a fascinating subject), of the books i’ve read and recorded since 1999.

By genre, first, always remembering that these genre choices are purely subjective and somewhat arbitrary (are Jeeves stories humour or short stories, for example):

1. Autobiography 22

2. Biography 56
3. Criticism 26
4. Drama 5
5. History 117
6. Humour 9
7. Language/Linguistics 11
8. Reference 3
9. Religion 26
10. Children’s fiction 25
11. Juvenile fiction 74
12. Historical fiction 27
13. Humorous fiction 24
14. Mystery 202
15. Science fiction 54
16. Short stories 33
17. Other fiction 177
18. Poetry 4
19. Assorted non-fiction 78

That doesn’t actually total 1000. Oh well; probably to do with my skills, or lack thereof, in manipulating formulae and spreadsheets. Still, it’s a large enough sample to get a picture of what i like to read.

Next, the view by year:

• 1999 29
• 2000 113
• 2001 127
• 2002 79
• 2003 85
• 2004/5 197 (computer error lost about ten months of dates)
• 2006 136
• 2007 93
• 2008 78
• 2009 63

Again, interesting: Some pretty productive years there, though i wonder if the “big” years tend to have shorter reviews. Last year, 2009, not such a good year for volume, but i read some quite large and detailed books, so that requires more time and devotion. Anyway, there it is.

An Early Review!

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941

Suzanne Barta Julin

This is the one thousandth book i have read and recorded since i started writing these reviews almost eleven years ago. In some ways that is quite an impressive milestone; in others, it really doesn't seem to mean much at all, in that it is less than a hundred books a year, and i would have guessed i read more than that, and the writing is of a patchy quality and quantity; of course, it is designed to please no one but myself, and originally planned just to provide an aide-memoire since i kept on forgetting if i had read something previously. That being said, what about this book, which i must write a review for, as it was a gift from the publisher under Librarything’s Early Reviewers programme, and one of the (very loose) conditions for that is that a review be written.

The book has a very limited scope, being focussed solely on the Black Hills area of South Dakota before the USA’s entrance into the Second World War; with such a narrow focus it is curious that there is a simple assumption that the reader knows about the area of interest, many of the personalities, the specialised knowledge that ought to be explained before beginning the history. To that end, a map of the Black Hills would have been useful, locating them within the United States; there is a small and not terribly good map showing the location within South Dakota and Wyoming, and placing some of the points of interest within the Hills, the eponymous hundred square mile, but i found it curiously unuseful as a reference, being little more than blobs of colour with a few circles and squiggles as towns and roads. One may argue, saying that any map could be described that way; i merely point to the difference between these two and any production of the Ordnance Survey.

Unfortunately, the quality of writing seems to be of a similar calibre, giving the information promised in the subtitle, but with little of the flair or style which a skilled historical author might have brought to it. (Disclosure: The book may be suffering by comparison, as i am also currently reading Frank Stenton’s volume of the Oxford History of England, Anglo-Saxon England, which is brilliant.) The truth is that Julin gives information, and quite a lot of it, but seems to find it difficult to put that information into any context, other than that she went on holiday in the Black Hills as a child and vowed to write about them one day. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book to me was the recounting of Calvin Coolidge’s holiday in South Dakota in 1927; but that oughtn’t have been the case.

Children's book

How the Loon Lost her Voice

Anne Cameron

Funny. Had i been asked, i would have said that i had read this book, until i picked it up to enter it on the list of books we own and realised i hadn't. So i did. Short, a retelling of what appears to be a First Nations (to be Canadian PC) legend retold for children, it is sweet and friendly. I liked it; i have always been pleased with stories that hook into reality cleverly, and this does by explaining why ravens like shiny stuff, why loons are almost silent, why stags' antlers fall off annually. The artwork is lovely; reminiscent of West Coast Indian artwork, but not copied from it at all, it adds a dimension to the story nicely. And this must stop, or be longer than the book.

Odds & Evens...and Five.

Following on, then, from thinking about treven, trod, and trud numbers, i have been thinking about odd and even ones. And realised something a bit, well, odd.

An even number, of course, is a whole number that is divisible by two exactly, with no remainder. Obviously, an odd one is one of the rest, leaving a remainder of one. It is easy to tell an odd number from an even one, as they always end in 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9; in addition, any number which ends with one of those digits is also odd, which is not quite saying the same thing. The reverse is, of course, also true: All even numbers end in 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8.

Except...except this is only true for as long as we use base ten. Let's switch for a second to base five, that is we can use only the first five digits (counting from zero) to represent numbers. We count this way in base five: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20 (that's zero to ten). In this system, while the same definition of odd and even apply (divisibility by two), the representation is different. The even numbers are 0, 2, 4, 11, 13, 20 (that's zero, two, four, six, eight, ten). Evidently, in base five, the sum of the digits can be used to tell if a number is odd or even. Or, to be more precise, because it's all i've really shown here, the sum of the last two digits of a base five number shows if the number is even.

What about treven numbers, then? Is there an easy way in base five representation to tell if a number is treven, trod or trud? Well, the three times table, base five, is 3, 11, 14, 22, 30, 33, 41, 44.... I may be mistaken, but i don't see an obvious method. Why not? What is it about base ten which makes it work for three, but not base five? What numbers might it work for, base five? And what about other bases? Oh, so many questions, and all of them beyond me.

Films

Hmm, well tried watching a film recently that i had to give up on. Really annoying, too, because it was an excellent book, Children of Men  by P.D. James. Chenowyth talked about the film when she visited, so we rented it to watch with her. Goodness, what a waste of time.

What is wrong with directors who make films ~ and are apparently proud of it ~ which don’t entertain? Why in the world do they keep having money thrown at them by studios? And, for goodness sake, what am i missing, why do audiences continue to watch their films?

This man, Alfonso Cuarón, can obviously make good films, because he made the third of the Harry Potter series, which was perhaps the best of the bunch so far. Certainly he had a different vision of Hogwarts and the world of wizardry than the preceding director. It was, however, an acceptable vision, reasonably close to the books, and at least as well received, as i recall, as those of the “family friendly” director of the first two, Chris Columbus. What, then, went wrong with Children of Men?

Well, let's see. Part of it is my great frustration with directors who hide facts, especially plot details, forcing the audience to work hard at understanding what is going on. Another part is the fallacy that they can fall into of thinking that their primary purpose is to make great art, and using special tricks and techniques is an essential point on the path to art. A third part, though lesser and subject to a different complaint, is the changing of perfectly good books' plots and/or characters to make a film.

First, then, the hiding of plot details. There are valid reasons, i suppose, to keep certain things hidden ~ in a detective mystery, for example, you don't want to know before the point of revelation who the murderer is. In the average film, however, the audience needs to be able to follow the plot in order to understand what is happening, let alone why it is happening. In Children of Men there were too many scenes, too early in the film, when it was not clear what was happening, nor why. I felt lost and confused, which are not good feelings, not what i would expect a director to be aiming to induce in me.

Second, changing plots and characters, sometimes (though not in the case of Children of Men, i admit) so greatly that there is nothing in common with the original book except the title. If they enjoyed the book in the first place enough to want to make a film, for heaven’s sake, why not make a film of what they enjoyed?

Third, though perhaps first in terms of cause and effect, is the desire to make “art” and the (perceived) necessity to therefore be complicated and difficult to understand. In my opinion, admittedly an uninformed one, but i hold to my right to hold it, is that art develops out of the real that a creator produces, and the real comes from his (or her, remember 'his' is an inclusive word) desire to communicate something with his audience, viewer, reader. A true creator, maker, poet from the Greek ποιητης, is one whose first concern is making, and a long way second is to be an Artist. The problem then arises when you have a film director or a painter whose first desire is to make “Art”, because they lose the focus on communication, and thus lose touch with their prospective audience. And i find very little tolerance in myself for such pretensions, so looking at a crucifix in urine, for example, i see no attempt to communicate but simply pretension by the maker, and i am gone. The same is true with a film that has forgotten that i need to be brought into it, to be communicated with, to be, almost, wooed until i am hooked. Push pretentiousness at me before i'm committed, and i have no desire to stay. And won’t; i still neither know nor care how Children of Men ends.

Threes

So, i'd like to offer three new words ~ new to me, at any rate; probably someone has previously used and defined them ~ which the language seems to lack. They are formed along the lines of odd and even, as you'll see: They are treven (pronounced 'tree-vən), trod, and trud. I define them like this: A number which is perfectly divided by three (i.e., with no remainder) is treven; a number which, when divided by three leaves a remainder of one is trod; obviously, a number which divided by three gives a remainder of two is trud. (As a mnemonic, a trod number is one over a treven number, a trud number is one under.) As i say, these, or others with similar meanings, may well have been created and used for years, by mathematicians if no one else, but i have not come across them, and found the need for them in thinking about some ideas today.

Everyone knows that a number divisible by three has digits that add to three or to another number divisible by three. For example, 345 is evenly divisible by three because 3+4+5=12 and 12 is divisible by three because 1+2=3. Thus it is clear that a number is treven if its digits add to 3 or 6 or 9 or any other treven number.

So i wondered, is there a way to tell, if a number is not treven, is it trod or trud? Well, let's look at a few examples. 749÷3=249 remainder 2; it is trud, and 7+4+9=20, which is a trud number, and 2+0=2, which is also trud. 157942=52647 remainder 1; it is trod, and 1+5+7+9+4+2=28, a trod number, and 2+8=10, also a trod number. 6847004 is trud; 6+8+4+7+4=29, which is also trud; 2+9=11, trud again, and 1+1=2, also trud.

There are seven example numbers (749, 20, 157942, 28, 6847004, 29, 11) seeming to follow a pattern which suggests itself: Just as a treven number's digits add to a treven number, a trod number's digits will add to a trod number, and those of a trud number to a trud number. A lovely, clear pattern, something i love to find in numbers. But, along the lines of single swallows and summer, four numbers do not a law make. Therefore, i need someone clever to tell me, is this a known law? And, more importantly, why does it work?

'Nother Early Review

Blest Atheist
by
Elizabeth Mahlou

Difficult review to start writing. I wanted to like this book, for a couple of reasons: One, it was a freebie, an Early Reviewers copy through Librarything, and when i'm given something my tendency & desire is to like it; two, i like the theme, an atheist who ends up forced to accept God's existence and presence in the world. Trouble is, i found it hard to like it, though it has very definitely got good points.

One of my problems, to be perfectly fair, was of my own making. It has taken me several months ~ at least four ~ to finish the book, and that is because i lost it twice: “Tidied” and put away, i had no idea where to find it, and nor did anyone else apparently. That makes it a bit more difficult to keep focussed on a book, its characters, its themes. I am fairly confident, however, in mine ability to hold books in my mind for lengths of time exceeding that which i took here; Crime and Punishment, for example, i held as a whole, though it is much bigger and more complex, for the stretch it took me to complete it.

A second problem i found was a lack of focus in Mahlou: She uses one story in the first part, that of a Siberian boy she takes under her wing to bring to America for healing, as a framework for the whole of her life up until she left atheism, but it is, in some ways, an unfortunate choice, as too much has to be told outside the frame, and the effort to reënter it is rather more than i could easily manage. I felt as though i was being pulled and pushed to fit her narrative desire, and being bullied is almost never a good position to be a reader in. It was almost as though, once she had decided to use Shura's story, she was unwilling to let it go, even when it was not helping the narrative, hindered it, even. Admittedly, it was a good story for her purposes, in that is consists of a whole lot of coincidences, which Mahlou uses to imply the existence of God ~ often through a sly sarcasm which i found a little jarring. I have to confess, until the end of the first part, which is easily the majority of the book, i was completely unconvinced about Mahlou's conviction that God exists, as her proofs really seemed to be just the series of coincidences i already mentioned.

The second part is much more convincing and, to be completely honest, far more interesting; it's hard to see, really, why she gave it comparatively so little space in the book. In this section, Mahlou has a total, ongoing, and intimate experience of the presence of a personal God. This is the heart of the book; this is what is compelling about her story; this is what ought to have been the majority of the book, perhaps with her previous lifestory abbreviated to set the scene. All in all, then, i'm afraid that i found this an unsatisfying book.