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.

Tolkien, in Nature, on Science

Nature recently published an editorial on the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, but it was the quote at the end by J.R.R. Tolkien that really got my attention. Then I noticed that the quote was about science, and I realized I had just read my favorite Nature editorial of all time. Tolkien gives some very good advice about writing, stories, and magic:

"Perhaps the most surprising critic of such technological fixes was the great hobbitmonger himself, J. R. R. Tolkien, as revealed in his unfinished story The Notion Club Papers (published posthumously in 1992 in Sauron Defeated, edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien). Much of the story is a discussion between academics and writers on the dishonesty of using scientific-sounding MacGuffins to get one from here to there. If one insists on doing such a thing, one might as well dream oneself to Mars or wave a wizardly wand. The story centres on criticism of H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), in which the protagonist, one Dr Cavor, invents a material, cavorite, that provides insulation against gravity. “Gravity can’t be treated like that,” complains one of Tolkien’s characters. “It’s fundamental. It’s a statement by the Universe of where you are in the Universe, and the Universe can’t be tricked by a surname with ite stuck on the end, nor by any such abracadabra.” Which suggests, perhaps surprisingly, that even if time travel and warp drives are impossible, the world’s best-selling fantasy author knew a thing or two about the general theory of relativity."

Book Review: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

With Cat's Cradle I expected a satire about science but I didn't expect religion to be an equal target, as well as island nation politics. I was pleasantly surprised. Vonnegut covers a lot of ground.

I found the science to be most entertaining and detailed of Vonnegut's targets. The idea of ice-nine is an excellent foundation for a book like this and Vonnegut's fast pace and occasional poetic interlude among the hilarious-depressing events that follow keep this book going. The visit to the American research lab set a high bar for the rest of the book, and I thought at that point that this might be one of my all-time favorites.

The more he got away from science the less I cared about the story, and the less biting his satire seemed to me. Maybe that's because there's so few writers that really stick it to scientists the way Vonnegut does, yet with a deep understanding of what science really is and (mostly) how it works. Lots of writers satirize voyages and prophets (ever since Jonah?). I have read/seen many island nation satires as well.

Now, I know in satire the characters are supposed to be a little ridiculous, but I found some of the science stereotypes (and the religion stereotypes, for that matter) to be too simplistic and the broadsides a little too broad to really illuminate the topic. I would take the real-life Oppenheimer (or Langmuir) over the fictional Hoenikker any day, and the real person is much more interesting than the caricature. For that matter, the fictional scientist Gale Boetticher in Breaking Bad is more interesting (and realistic) than Hoenikker -- he felt like someone I might meet in a lab, while Hoenikker did not.

The same for the way faith is dealt with. The people with faith that I know are more interesting than the characters in this, when I'd expect that the freedom satire provides could make them more interesting and ring more true, given the outlandish things that the author could contrive for them and their stories. From a classic beginning, the end fell a little flat for me.

The reader may start out thinking Cat's Cradle is about science, but at its heart, it's really about God. And on those grounds I do wish Vonnegut's critique had been just a touch more trenchant. The faith he's satirizing is not recognizable as faith to me, and the science, too, is close but ultimately does not resonate. Job provides a sharper critique than Vonnegut.

Both the science and religion in this book are too broadly drawn. More cutting details would have turned it from a very good book into a great book. But, again, I realize that satire is very much a matter of taste. I'm just surprised that this book wasn't more than the sum of its parts for me. Rather, it was less. Still, it's a classic, and a must-read. Just an "I liked it" rather than "I loved it" must-read.