Book Review: Under the Dome by Stephen King

My run of luck with reading Stephen King appears to have run out. Under the Dome is perfectly readable and reasonably surprising, but it surprised me most in a bad way. As in, the author really hates all those characters that much? At its heart Under the Dome is about unexplained suffering, and it has a nice dichotomy in two churches that form at the center of two rival camps which develop after a mysterious dome seals off the town Chester's Mill from the whole world. But the role of the churches completely disappears halfway through the story. Worst of all, I knew how it would end because the ending is way too telegraphed -- there's none of the "what will happen" suspense that was present in 11-22-63, and that was a novel that you knew the end from HISTORY, after all -- and what does happen causes me to lose faith, not in God, but in King's ability to empathize with his own characters. In the author's note King says the book has been in the works for decades and was edited way down, and I can't help but wonder if some of the removed material would have made the characters and events a little more real to me, but I also don't know if it would have been worth sitting through. It didn't help that there's a meth lab involved here and I was reading this while watching Breaking Bad, so, well, there's just no comparison, Breaking Bad is much better than Under the Dome. Insights into suffering require what feel like real people doing the suffering, and near the end King lost me in believing that these people were real. Perhaps the rule is, the more normal or historical the premise, the better the novel for King? This is a very abnormal and modern premise, then. There's some promising moments but without a decent resolution they don't add up to much.

Green Tea, Dark Chocolate, and Zinc Actually Work

This infographic showing evidence for supposedly "healthy" supplements has been around since 2010, but it's the first time I've seen it. I must be a glass-half-full type because, rather than get depressed about the large number of "not worth it" substances, I'm pleasantly surprised to see dark chocolate (for blood pressure), green tea (for cholesterol, not necessarily cancer), and zinc (for colds) supported by actual evidence. This fits my impressions but I'm glad to see someone's worked harder at gathering more than just impressions. Now, I really need to take some vitamin D, especially considering Seattle's lack of sun.

Book Review: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo

This was an excellent read-aloud book, just taking a total of about two hours to get all the way through and telling the tale in vivid, elegant, simple language. The transformation of the characters in the story is also believable and hard-earned. The protagonist is a china rabbit doll who, unlike the toys in almost every other toy story, cannot move by himself. This is not just a good story but one that can change the reader as well, and I hope that it built some empathy and compassion in my boys as we read it together. I hope it did so for me too, come to think of it.

The Sun of Many Colors

This video combines the different colors we can see in the sun. One of them is yellow (surprise). Several of the others are colors that we can't see and sit beyond human eyesight, but reveal features like particular helium energy emissions and things like that. Each of these wavelengths was assigned a different color that we can see in the video. It's kind of mesmerizingly beautiful, like peeling layers off of the sun to see the dynamics inside.

For more information see this blog post at Discover.

The Middle Earth Weather Report

A few years back there was a writer from Eastern Europe or Russia who wrote a version of the Lord of the Rings from Sauron's perspective, I think it was. That "Wicked"-esque stunt didn't attract my attention as much as that writer's claim that the geography of Middle Earth doesn't fit with its climate at all. I think that last comment would have rankled Tolkien (although he almost certainly didn't actually have climate in mind when drawing the maps, so he'd be right to concede the point!). It did sort of rankle me, because if you're going to make such claims you should back it up.

Yet here is a real climatologist analyzing the climate of Middle Earth and coming up with detailed weather maps of it. Lo and behold, it all fits together with Tolkien's description. The Shire's like some parts of England, and Mordor's like the Sahara and/or Los Angeles. Yeah, that works.

What initally caught my eye are two things: high CO2 levels from Mount Doom (which fits nicely with Tolkien's anti-industrial and even anti-auto bent) and how the global map of the planet looks suspiciously like our planet, if drawn by someone with the accuracy and perspective of the sea voyagers of the 16th century. Tolkien always claimed that Middle Earth was supposed to be part of our history, and that global similarity just confirms it to me.

So there you have it. Not only did Sauron cause the enslavement of peoples and the pseudo-eugenic experimental abominations of the Uruk-Hai (along with Saruman, yes, yes), he also caused global warming in Middle Earth. I knew it.

Book Review: The Where, the Why, and the How

This idea behind this book is a simple one: for 75 questions that science has not answered (but possibly could), have a scientist write a few paragraphs on the left side of the page and have a graphic artist supply an illustration on the right side of the page. The result is a diverse book that probably bit off more than it can chew. Some of the illustrations are great (some, honestly, aren't) and a few, like the one asking how mind arises from brain, would be welcome all by themselves. But usually the promise isn't quite fulfilled and the art and the science don't quite meet. I think they got the right artists, but I'm not sure if they got the right scientists. I marked three pages (one illustration and two articles) as worth going back to in terms of ideas, but the rest was a nice exercise, signifying I'm not sure what. I wish this was better, but it too is less than the sum of its parts.

Book Review: War in Heaven by Charles Williams

I saw the grave of Charles Williams, in a little graveyard in the heart of Oxford, before I read his novels, but I always knew I would need to get around to reading them some day. So War in Heaven is the first I've read. I expected it to be rough around the edges, because it's his first novel. I'm not sure how much of the roughness is from first-book jitters, or from the general distance in reading novels 100 years old (not composed by masters of their craft), or from something unavoidable in his writing that explains why he may be the least popular of the Inklings (well, it's probably down to him and Barfield). Is it all three?

But as I got more used to Williams's idiosyncratic voice I found sentences, character traits, and whole scenes that shone with a light that speaks of very real things, things that are normally glimpsed through a mirror darkly. This particular story has to do with the Holy Grail and Prester John and dark rites. There's something very modern and Hollywood about the subject matter, and yet the way it develops is exactly the opposite of Hollywood tendencies (and I mean that as a sincere compliment). There are moments of disturbing darkness in this but also moments of clear, illuminating light. To call it a thriller would be to emphasize not the former moments, but the latter, and that's what I found most surprising about this story. The light is thrilling. That's a very special trait in a writer.

As for what this story seems like, it's most like CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength, although I must say that I liked War in Heaven more than Lewis's novel, which always felt over-the-top and unrealistically characterized to me. Williams writes "good" characters that are both more serene and more convincingly doubtful than Lewis's characters, and "bad" characters that seem both more evil but convincingly so to me. Granted, Lewis is clearly a better writer, I'll definitely give him that. But enough about Lewis. Williams's story is also strangely like a modern movie and even has elements of Alan Moore in its use of supernatural darkness and occultism.

My advice is to get past the rough parts and odd writing and to look for the lucid moments, which are worth it when they come. I'm looking forward to the rest of Williams's novels in the future, and he's definitely a worthy member of the Inkling crowd. In fact, for some kind of people (the type who read Alan Moore comic books, and I'm looking in the mirror when I say that), Williams offers a combination of themes and characters that I have not found anywhere else.