Out from the Silent Planet – C. S. Lewis

More than a decade before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis wrote the first book in what would become a science fiction trilogy.  That’s right, before sending kids to Narnia, C. S. Lewis sent a philology professor to Mars.

Professor Ransom, after wandering around England at night looking for a place to stay, comes across the home of an old classmate, whom he recalls as being a bit of a jackass.  When Ransom shows up, the old classmate and an accomplice are trying to force a local retarded boy into going on a trip in a space ship.  Ransom intervenes, rescues the boy, sends him back home to safety, and then decides to stay and have a nightcap.  Well, I don’t think we can sympathize too much when Dr. Ransom wakes up from being drugged and finds himself on a spaceship headed towards Mars.  I guess philology professors lack street smarts.  Sucks that they’re planning to sacrifice him to appease the local aliens.  Turns out, of course, that the aliens aren’t blood thirsty at all, and this portrayal is just due to white patriarchy’s need to depict other cultures as savage and brutish.  Oh you white devils!

In case it helps, here’s a good way to know you’ll be kidnapped at some point in your life: your name is Ransom.

The basic set up of C. S. Lewis’s universe is interesting though.  Each world is ruled by an angel-like being, similar to the ingelligences that are assigned to guide celestial bodies in Christian mythology.  Earth however, got stuck with an evil being (Lucifer) who has cut off Earth from communication with the other worlds, which is why we’re presently unaware of life on other planets.

The rest is basically what you’d expect from a B-rate daytime SciFi Channel space movie.  Strange creatures, a lot of “did you know we have different cultures?” and an overly preachy, obvious message.  Silent Planet is more description of the fantasy world than the telling of a story set in it.  But, it was the 1930s and the art of science fiction writing was still young and unrefined.  It may have been groundbreaking at the time, but more modern works, such as Dune or I, Robot, blow it away.

The trilogy continues in a trip to Venus in Perelandra and is finished in a showdown on Earth in That Hiddeous Strength.  Spoiler alert: the final battle involves a domesticated bear, an evil cult lead by a disembodied head, and Merlin.  All it’s missing is a talking rat and a donkey dressed up as a lion.

…Mothertrucking Merlin?  Is he kidding?  Throw in some on-the-cheap CGI and this really would be perfect for the SciFi Channel.

I can’t find much redeeming about this book, or the rest of the trilogy, except that you can wow people with useless literary trivia: “Did you know C. S. Lewis wrote a scifi trilogy?”  One star trivia, one star book:

P.S.: Tune in to this Wednesday’s Dumb Lit Facts to find out what other trilogy, by a different author, may share Lewis’s scifi setting.

Fooled by Randomness – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Before reading the review, consider the following two question:

1) If the average human life is 72 (let’s ignore gender, race, income, location, etc, just to keep the question simple), how many more years should you expect to live?

2) A test for some disease has a 5% rate of giving false positives (and a 0% chance at a false negative).  The disease occurs in 1 in ever 1000 people, and everyone is tested regardless of whether they show symptoms.  You are tested and the test comes back positive.  What are the odds you have the disease?

(Answers at the end.)  A shockingly high number of people get these questions wrong.  Not just ordinary people, but doctors, statisticians, and other people who really shouldn’t be messing this up.

Fooled by Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is not for the feignt of brain.  Taleb explores the role chance plays in our daily lives and in the daily lives of Wall Street traders.  Written in 2004, Fooled by Randomness isn’t just a response to the current financial crisis that looks back on the past with 20-20 vision.  Taleb also isn’t going to give you any advice on what stocks in invest in.

While I found the book extremely fascinating, I’m sure many people won’t.  It’s not just a book on randomness or a book about financial markets.  It’s part economics, part psychology, and part anecdotal story telling.  It’s also part asshole, as Taleb doesn’t come across as the nicest guy to be around, especially with how much he talks about how great he is at embarassing and intimidating people.  (People who brag about such skills typically are insecure about it and not really that good at whatever they claim.  A rich person doesn’t need to tell you he’s rich, a smart person that he’s smart, or a good looking person that he’s good looking.)

I found this book to be not quite as dense as Taleb’s The Black Swan, which deals with pretty much the exact same issues.  There are a lot of interesting stories and anecdotes to keep it moving, but at times it seems like Taleb would rather write drama than write about randomness, or that he just needed something to fill up the pages.  Taleb probably could have gotten all his points across in 50 pages, instead of 260 (not counting end notes and index).

In Fooled by Randomness you’ll learn about the errors in reasoning you make, but unfortunately probably won’t learn what to do about it.  In many examples Taleb shows how people who specialize in avoiding these mistakes professionally end up making them all the time in their personal lives, just like how a celebrity can fly in a personal jet on the way to giving a speech about reducing carbon footprints.

While I enjoyed Fooled by Randomness, it was a bit too scatterbrained and lacking in a conciseness that would make it easily consumed, and I think ease of consumption is a big factor in a book about how to avoid really common (and seriously costly) mistakes.  Three stars:

Answers:

1) Take 72 and substract your age.  You answer should be MORE than that number.  Why?  You’ve survived up to the age you are now, while some people have not.  If you are 50 years old, your odds of making it to 80 are more than someone who is 10 years old.  If you’re 80 your odds of getting to 72 are even better than the 50 year old’s.  Think about that the next time you make a decision regarding your retirement planning.

2) Odds you have the disease are just under 2%.  If we test 1000 people, only 1 will have the disease (and will test positive).  But, with a 5% false positive rate, another 50 people will also test positive, for a total of 51 positive tests.  Odds you’re not a false positive are 1/51, or just under 2%.  Thank God we tend to only see the doctor when we have symptoms (which of course increases the odds that the test is correct and not just a false positive, because a disease is far more common in people with symptoms than the general population).

P.S.: Next time you meet a trader, ask them if they believe in the efficient market theory.  If so, ask them what the hell their job is.

The Dirty Secrets Club – Meg Gardiner

According to Stephen King, “If you read Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly, or Nelson DeMille, you’re going tothink Meg Gardiner is a gift from heaven.”

Well, I don’t read any of those authors.  But, that’s why there’s a difference between “if” and “only if.”  With a name like The Dirty Secrets Club, the book had better deliver, and it does.

San Francisco is plagued with a string of high profile, intensely bizarre suicides, such as a popular fashion designer killing his lover and setting himself on fire, or a U.S. attorney driving off a bridge, killing herself and a number of others.  So how does the SFPD respond?

Well, normally there wouldn’t be much of a response at all.  The perp is dead.  You can have serial murderers, but not serial murder-suiciders.  That’s sort of a one shot deal.

But, when all the deaths become linked to the mysterious Dirty Secrets Club, they do what any good police department would do, they call in a forensic psychologist!  Why not?  Enter Jo Beckett, a specialist in creating psychological profiles of the dead to answer just why they ended up that way.

How convenient for her that there’s suddenly a practical use for her job.  I bet it was getting tough to pay the bills.  But, it’s well worth accepting the fantasy element and suspending disbelief to get drawn into the fantastically original thrillride Gardiner has created.

Before writing, Gardiner was a lawyer in a small commercial litigation firm, and then taught legal writing at Stanford.  She has had a successful writing career in the UK, but only more recently got her break in the US.  The story goes like this: Stephen King was going on a trip and wanted a book to read on the plane, so Penguin sent him a box of some of their new releases, and he picked up one of Gardiner’s novels and was instantly hooked.  But why did he choose hers in the first place, out of so many other choices, any number of which were probably quite excellent?  To what does Meg Gardiner owe this lucky break?

The font was easier to read.

Yeup, that’s what got her the endorsement of one of the world’s most popular writers.

But, in any font, The Dirty Secrets Club is a winner.  I’m giving it four stars:

P.S.  I met Meg Gardiner at an event at the Tribeca Barnes and Noble.  She noticed that something about me seemed sad and lifeless.  I told her I was there taking a break from studying for the bar exam.  It’s almost as if she could sense it.

Lullaby – Chuck Palahniuk

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk is about what every book by Chuck Palahniuk is about: weird shit.  This one’s weird shit is a culling song, a poem taken from Africa that was used to lull the sick, elderly, or mortally wounded into a quick, peaceful death.  But, the poem has made its way into an anthology, and parents are accidentally reading it to their children.  Turns out it’ll kill anyone who hears it.  Oops.  Now reporter Carl Streator is on a quest to track down and destroy all copies of the book.

There’s some hippies, and witches and shit.  And of course, some really awkward sexing.

This isn’t Palahniuk’s best work.  Repetition is a common theme in his novels, such as repeating paragraphs used earlier in the book, or having a character go to support group meetings for conditions he doesn’t have in both Fight Club and Choke.  In Lullaby, Palahniuk has a line about how laugh tracks were all recorded so long ago that almost everyone you hear in them is probably dead now.  I know I’ve seen him use that before.

Get some new material, please.  Or a better editor who will catch this type of thing.

Lullaby has some very good moments, and the premise is solid.  Solid enough to have carried a much better book.  Instead of offering an ending that pulls everything together, this one just falls apart, and not in a meaningful way.  It really felt like Palahniuk was just getting lazy.

If you haven’t read Fight Club, skip Lullaby and start there.  If you’ve already read Fight Club, I’d suggest reading it again before picking up this one.

But, it could have been a lot worse.  Two stars:

P.S. The culling song, coming out of African tradition, would probably have been passed down orally.  I’ll let you figure out the problem there.

Free-Range Chickens – Simon Rich

“This is a joke book that I wrote.  Nothing in it is real.  It’s just some things that I made up.”

That pretty well sums up Free-Range Chickens, the latest book from Harvard Grad (and Lampoon editor), Simon Rich, who is currently a writer for Saturday Night Live.  Chickens is a collection of short jokes, mostly in the form of dialogue, that goes on a journey from early childhood through adult life, and ends with some thoughts on animals and God.

Chickens is light, quick, mostly clean, and funny in a way that will be pretty universally appealing.  Don’t plan on learning any good jokes to tell from it though.  Most would be awkward if spoken, and work far better on the page:

Terrifying childhood experience

–Got your nose!

–Please just kill me.  Better to die than to live the rest of my life as a monster.

If you liked that, you’ll like the rest.  If not, then you probably won’t like any of it.  And, you probably suck and should not interact with normal people.

However, at $17 it’s pretty pricey for just 129 pages, only a few of which are more than half-filled.  If you read as slow as I do, it’ll take about an hour.  You could go see all 96 minutes of Up in 3D for $15 instead.  Still, I’d recommend Free Range Chickens, with how short it is you can easily loan it out to your friends and be sure of a quick return.

Despite its short comings, I’m giving this one 4 stars:

P.S.  I picked up a signed copy from Barnes and Noble in Tribeca.  They may still have some there.