What I Read in 2006

A few years ago, I used to get through around a book or so a fortnight. Most of my reading was done while on public transport or before bed. Last year I was working full-time at a job which I could only get to in a reasonable amount of time by car. (A 90 minute bus ride each way is not reasonable).

On top of that, for the first half of the year, all my time at home was spent finishing my thesis. There’s a lesson in there for all you book-loving PhD students: make sure your thesis is done before taking on full-time work.

As well as those excuses, I think the type of reading I do has also changed quite a lot. When I do have time for reading at home these days I spend much of it reading articles, papers, reference manuals and blogs on the web.

As a result, about the only time I set aside this year to chow through some books was while travelling through Greece, Cornwall and Dublin and when Julieanne and I escaped to the mountains for a weekend to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.

Fiction

I read José Saramago’s Seeing while in Greece and thoroughly enjoyed its satirical portrayal of a city’s non-violent, popular revolution against its paranoid government. Seemingly without any centralised organisation, the citizens of an imaginary Portuguese city strike fear into their overly bureaucratic government by casting blank ballots during an election. The tone of the book becomes dark, political and Kafka-esque when the government flees en-masse and tries to scare the populist into submission by declaring a state of siege and locking down the city.

J. M. Coetzee’s Youth was also quite sombre, following a young and aspiring artist and intellectual escape from his South African home to 1960’s London where he hopes to make his mark as a poet. Instead he finds himself working as a programmer and having unsatisfying affairs, telling himself the whole time that he can only become a “true artist” by first sinking to the depths of despair. For all its depressing content about the trials of growing up an outsider, Youth is beautifully written. I hadn’t read any Coetzee before so had no idea he could write so clearly, simply and insightfully. Highly recommended.

I started Michael Chabon’s Summerland: A Novel while in the Blue Mountains. It didn’t grab me nearly as much as his fabulous Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, maybe because it was a “young adults” novel and focused heavily on baseball and magic. I tried picking up a few more times when I was back at home but ended up giving up on it.

I also had trouble finishing Peter Carey’ Oscar and Lucinda which is surprising because what I read of it was great and I’d really enjoyed many of his earlier works of fiction. I stopped reading this around the same time I was nearing the end of my write up as I could only dip in and out of it. I’ll probably try again when I next have a chance to read for an extended period.

Will Self’s short story collection Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe was more suited to my sporadic reading at that time. I read this at the start of the year and was completely sucked in by it. The collection’s title story pits the psychiatrist Dr. Mukti against his charismatic, successful and manipulative nemesis. Most of the action takes place in Mukti’s increasingly paranoid and over-analytic mind. The story arcs like a train careering off a bridge in slow motion and makes for some of the best black humour I’ve read in a long time.

The rest of the fiction I read last year was of the scientific variety. I polished off Ian Banks’ The Algebraist in two days while holidaying in Crescent Head for the Christmas and New Year break. Like all of his Culture series of books it was a rollicking space opera and great fun but I have trouble distinguishing it from the rest of his work.

In contrast, Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon couldn’t have been more different to Fortress of Solitude, the only other book of his I have read. The latter was a gritty tale of modern day superheros set in 1970’s Brooklyn while Amnesia Moon presents a post-apocalyptic America as a surreal, nightmarish landscape that has fractured into tiny pockets of subculture. The protagonist is known by several names - Moon, Chaos, Everett - depending which town he is passing through during his search to find… something or someone.

Like most dreams, Amnesia Moon doesn’t resolve in any meaningful way, which left me slightly disappointed even though the rest of the ride was compelling. On reflection, however, I can’t see how Lethem might have tied it up without contriving something even less satisfying.

Non-Fiction

My favourite read of 2006 was, surprisingly, a textbook on probability theory. Yes, I realise my fate as a big nerd was sealed with that last sentence but I challenge anyone to find a more fascinating textbook on the subject than Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. In it E. T. Jaynes summarises the Bayesian approach to reasoning with uncertainty, a topic he spent most of his working life investigating. With almost equal parts theory, application, philosophy and opinion, it is eminently rigourous, relevant, rich and readable book. It took me a couple of months to finish which is yet another reason I didn’t get to read as many books as I would have liked.

To go into even half the material covered in this book fully would take several blog post (stay tuned). Briefly though, one of the things that really struck me about Jaynes was his incredibly pragmatic approach to the philosophy of mathematics. When reasoning about infinite series and the like he absolutely requires that the limiting process be clearly articulated in order to avoid many of the strange paradoxes that otherwise arise.

Coming from a computer scientist this made a lot of sense to me. After all, if things aren’t computable what are they? However, my undergrad degree was in pure mathematics so I still have a sweet spot for the reckless throwing about of the infinite that David Foster Wallace writes beautifully about in Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.

With a style all his own and a very large number of footnotes and digressions, Wallace manages to pull together a fascinating history of the infinite that pivots around Georg Cantor’s exposition of he countable and uncountable. Refreshingly, he is able to discuss the subject intelligently without being overly flowery or romantic. Given that he confesses to knowing little about university level mathematics when he started researching the book he does a remarkable job at clearly conveying many of the subtleties of the transfinite.

The other popular science account I read in 2006 was On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. It’s a strange book as it attempts to promote Hawkins’ new ideas while simultaneously popularising them. As Stephen Wolfram proved, this can be a very fraught endeavour. Fortunately, the former Palm CEO manages to discuss his “memory-prediction framework” for intelligence with due deference to other researchers in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The science was reasonably convincing but the book a little repetitive.

I was keen to read some accessible ethical philosophy last year and so was pointed in the direction of Peter Singer. I was a bit hesitant at first, wasn’t he the guy who wrote Animal Liberation in the 70’s which helped start the group PETA? Expecting polemics, I was surprised to find How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest a very balanced, warm and thoughtful book. Singer’s writing style is engaging and chatty so, after finishing his book, I was left with the sense of having had a friendly discussion about ethics with a wise and friendly scholar.

I received the elegantly designed and comprehensive Warp: Labels Unlimited by Adrian Shaughnessy and editor Rob Young for my birthday and finished it off in no time. If, like me, you like music of the electronic variety then you will have heard of Warp Records, home of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Autechre, Seefeel, Squarepusher, etc. If not, you should definitely grab a copy of this book and use it to get a better understanding of the history of electronic music coming out of the UK.

One book I was unable to finish was Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (no relation to E. T. Jaynes as far as I can tell). When I started reading it I was mesmerised by the depth and breadth of Jaynes’ scholarship as he put forward his theory that our consciousness is the vestiges of the gods that used to speak to our ancestors in a kind of schizophrenic mode. Once I had understood his thesis I found the mountains of evidence he provided from ancient literature a bit trying and some of the bows he drew a little too long for my liking.

While also not finished, I’m still working my way through Remembering the Kanji by James W. Heisig as part of my resolution to learn Japanese. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add it to my list of completed books next year. Or maybe the year after.

Credits: Book stack image courtesy of brokenarts on stock.xchng.