Puttering in the Study

Casino Royale - Ian Fleming

I have been listening to an audiobook about Ian Fleming, and decided recently to reread the books, this time in order of publication.

First up is Casino Royale.  I have all the Bond books in the 1960's Signet edition paperbacks, and while they are amber with acid, they're still readable.  I am up to five in hardback, but after reading the Janeway book I know that those are Book Club editions, which are worth the $5-7 I paid for them.  First release hardbacks - to say nothing of first editions - are thousands of dollars each, so I'll be sticking with the paperbacks for now.

Knowing this is the first book changes the reading.  I also notice now - because of the movie - that this is really Bond's first adventure as a 00 agent.  Fleming's writing is just outstanding.  It's a pleasure to read, and especially to get a first hand view of life in the 1950s.  When I first read these books it was a surprise how different things were than the Roger Moore Bond films I was familiar with (remember that was the 1970's, before VCRs so Moore was the only Bond I had ever seen).

Anyway, a great book.  I'll save my comments on Fleming's dated view on women for the next book in the series, Live and Let Die, where they're accompanied by even more offensive views of minorities.

But I can't let the opportunity pass to note how great a film the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale - which I also watched last week - was.  It's a great film version of the book, and Craig is portraying the Bond in this week - younger and less experienced.  It is unsteady after the torture scene - the professions of love were actually more painful - but it was so good to see an actor that reflected Fleming's image of Bond as cold and cruel above all else.  Not that I don't think Pierce Brosnan did a great job doing exactly that.  It's just so much more raw with Craig, which I think makes for an even better Bond.

NASA Saturn V 1967-1973 (Apollo 4 to Apollo 17 & Skylab) NASA Apollo 11 (Owners' Workshop Manual)

I am such an Apollo fanboy that I have both the Saturn V and the Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual books.ormally N I wouldn't post on reference materials like this (I also have the ones on the Titanic and the starship Enterprise because of course), but the Saturn V book in particular just floored me when I read it cover to cover the other day.  Candidly I just got these for the pictures while I'm working on my Saturn V model, but I'm at the stage (no pun intended) that I needed to know how the rocket's stages interfaced with the support structures to model the access ports and openings, and decided to start reading the text as well.

The stories the Saturn V book in particularly tells are simply fascinating.  The engineering that went into every element of the spacecraft and booster is just amazing.  The books explains what the individual parts and systems did, how they were development, and how they had to adapt to the specific challenges they faced.  Just great, great stuff.

Booked to Die Paperback (Cliff Janeway novels) - John Dunning

I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that after I've had a couple of drinks I get on Amazon and look for books about books and libraries.  That is likely where this one came from. It is John Dunning's first Cliff Janeway novel. Janeway, a grizzled former Denver police officer with a soft spot for rare books, quits the force and opens up a rare book shop. Of course a new mystery ensues.

I have no complaints about this book - it taught me a lot about book collecting and the rare book business, the worthlessness of Book Club editions (which was sad) and was a fun read.  Although ... I do have to mention that I apparently stopped reading it several weeks ago and didn't notice.  I happened to run across it in my reading queue and when I opened it I realized I was at the book's climax.  So I finished it, having forgotten who every character was, and could not make any sense out of the denouement that was probably quite clever.  But that's on me.

The book did reinforce my belief that rare book collecting is not for me.  I respect and endorse the value of books, and am always looking to upgrade my copies of ones I like, but I enjoy them when I like them, and not for their inherent value. 

It's like wine. I unwrapped one of the bottles Jamie brought back from the Symphony Ball wine pull the other night and it was a red blend called Sexual Chocolate.  Ha ha, very funny, but I liked it - a lot.  Even though it's probably $3 a bottle, if I like it, I like it.

Update: holy sh%t did you know that Sexual Chocolate is $25 a bottle?  No wonder I liked it so much!

Lies Sleeping (Rivers of London) - Ben Aaronovitch

The Rivers of London series is similar to the Laundry novels in that it's about practitioners of magic within the London Police fighting supernatural forces, and I cannot keep any of the books straight.  On the plus side, the world's not coming to an end, and I remain absolutely enthralled with Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's narration.  I could listen to that guy read a cookbook, and be in tears when he describes what to do when it's time to use the ... oven.

Again, lots of great imagination and factual narration.  Wish the story made sense.  I had no idea what the characters were fighting against or why the entire book.  That may be because I wasn't paying attention at some point in the narration, but I don't usually miss knowing what the existential horror that threatens Britain is for the entire book.

Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant Paperback – Daniel Tammet

A friend that I'd had a discussion about Aspergers Syndrome with recently sent me this book, and I finished it last night as well.  It's a fascinating story of Daniel Tammet about what life is like as an autistic savant.  He explains clearly what challenges he faced growing up - and still faces - and how he overcomes them.  What's fascinating about the book is how well he can explain what he sees, most notably his synesthesia.  What this refers to is that he sees numbers and shapes, and visualizes lengthy sequences the same way.  He can even draw and sculpt what the shapes look like. For example, here's how he visualizes the first 20 digits of pi.

He tells a fascinating story about when he was presented with a section of hundreds of numbers from the 22,000 he memorized of pi (that's 3.14 for the rest of us) as part of the filming of a program for TV about him, Brainman.  The producers had randomly replaced the number "6" with the number "9" and Tammet realized right away something was wrong - because the shape of what he was seeing didn't like right.  He described the shape as looking like a familiar home that had been vandalized.

Great book if you're interested in the subject.  

Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 - James Donovan

This was not a book that needed to be written.  The story has been told many times, and better, but if you're an Apollo completist like me, you can't stand not knowing if there's something in there that I might not have read.  So I picked it up last week and finished it in two middle of the night bedtime readings (Jamie was annoyed, but sometimes I do that).

But this was a good book.  It told many things I had not read before, and two in particular.  First, we read all the time about the space race being about national "prestige" and how Sputnik and the first man in space or to spacewalk damaged American prestige.  I had never paid much attention to this, and Donovan - right from the beginning - explained what this really meant.

In the late 1950's, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were engaged in the Cold War - of course we knew that.  But what we had forgotten was that the competition was between two competing ideologies for the hearts and minds of the other nations, who had to decide whether Communism or liberal democracy represented the best path forward after the Second World War.  "Prestige" in this context was crucial because if one side appeared to be winning in a field that mattered - like science - it swayed these uncommitted third parties.  So it had enormous consequences when the USSR was successfully (it appeared) putting satellites and men in space and the supposedly more technologically advanced US could not.

Whoa.  I'd never thought of that.

It also meant that all the statements in all the books I'd been reading lately about how the astronauts viewed their job in patriotic terms - they were trying to beat the Russians to the moon - wasn't just an expression of trying to win a race for the sake of winning.  It always read like they were trying to win at a different version of the Olympics.  On the contrary, they were competing to win It to regain the lead in terms of appealing to countries to reject Communism and embrace the freedoms of the Western democracies.  

Nor was this the only thing I learned.  I may have known that Gus Grissom played a significant role in developing the Gemini spacecraft as a followup to Mercury.  What I did not know was that Grissom worked very hard in part because of the many jibes the Mercury astronauts endured about being "spam in a can" and about being mere passengers in their capsules, no different than the monkeys that preceded them because in no significant way were they "flying" their spacecraft.  He ensured that Gemini was a pilot's spacecraft.  It could be flown and navigated in any way an aircraft could because Grissom insisted that it be, and the astronauts that flew it loved it.  It was sometimes characterized as a sportscar, but the better analogy would be a fighter.  It was designed to be flown by and for fighter pilots.  The later Apollo spacecraft could do more, in the same way that a large transport aircraft can, but it wasn't the flying machine Gemini was.

The book also, as I like to be able to say, told a good story, and even though I already knew much of it, I was reading for new details and observations, and it had those as well.  I wouldn't say it was the first book I'd read about Apollo, but it was a useful addition to the corpus.

The Last Days of Night: A Novel Hardcover – Graham Moore

I listened to part of this and ended up reading the rest because it was going too slowly.  It's about the young lawyer who takes on representing George Westinghouse in his patent wars against Thomas Edison over the light bulb.  Those patent wars in the late 19th century dwarf the ones being fought now, I learned at a seminar a couple of years ago in Plano, and the speaker recommended this book to find out more about it.

The book was okay, and I really liked the love story that developed at the end.  It was a little annoying that all the legal action took place offstage ... but if it hadn't I'd have certainly not finished it!  The characters were a bit cartoonish, but not annoyingly so.  Not a bad read.

How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization - Mary Beard

I didn't really know when I bought this book that it was an accompaniment to “How Do We Look” and “The Eye of Faith,” a pair of Civilisations shows on PBS.  I just knew it was by classicist Mary Beard, whose book on Rome I'm listening to from time to time.  It looks at how we look at art, and is beautifully illustrated.  It reads like a series of essays on art, perhaps from a magazine, but now that I know where it comes from, that makes sense too.  I learned something from it, and that's what I got it for.

Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945 - Max Hastings

You really can never go wrong with Max Hastings on WW II topics.  I've read many of his books, and they're always interesting.  But this one was a bit of a dead end.

As he notes, there are a bazillion books on Churchill - why do we need another one? The idea here is that a book could be written that focused on Churchill as a war leader - what did he do, and are the many stories about the inadequacies of his war leadership true?

Again, the twin problems of reading a book on the Kindle, which renders it indistinguishable from many other books I'm reading or listening to at the same time, often on overlapping subjects, as well as trying to write a review months after I finished it makes it difficult to be specific about my impressions.  But I can say this.

The book does provide informed insight into what Churchill does.  Some was good, some was bad, but it's expert analysis from someone who's familiar with the subject matter and - important for an American reader - familiar with the British parliamentary system, so he can explain what's normal and what's not.  He also explains the threats Churchill faced to his political leadership of Britain as the country went years without a military victory - something the history books generally don't bother with because they didn't amount to anything until late in the war.  Churchill was never playing with a strong hand, and his greatness was that he bluffed shamelessly in defense of freedom when no one else would.

The problem with the book is its narrow subject.  Once the U.S. become the dominant partner in the war, there's not much to tell, and the book has the sound of a giant sucking straw.  Churchill was reduced to pleading with FDR to do this or that, and FDR was, while polite, largely immovable on matters of military strategy as developed by the combined chiefs, and more particularly by the U.S. chiefs of staff.  So Churchill was the leader of a nation which no longer controlled the strategy of the war.  That's a story, but an increasingly uninteresting one - except for the fact that when it's Winston Churchill it's never uninteresting!

The Labyrinth Index - Charles Stross

I love Charles Stross' Laundry novels - I really do.  But the absolute absence of any connection between the book titles and their content makes it very, very difficult to remember which book is about what. 

This book deals with the aftermath of the accession of some sort of extradimensional horror as Prime Minister, under whom Bob Howard's psycho former girlfriend - who's now both a PHANG (basically a living vampire) and a baroness works, while being connected with the police superhero who used to be Bob's wife's colleague.

See, I remember the players because of connections to the characters I care about (Bob and Mo) but I really can't remember what the plot or story of the book was.  And I don't want to remember, because essentially all hope is gone.  The world of the Laundry is destroyed, so is their nation, for different reasons, and possibly the world as well, for possibly related reasons, and all of this is before CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.   

This is approximately the equivalent of Walter Lord following up his Titanic books with a volume about a waiter on the Titanic who got in trouble because his supervisor discovered a discrepancy in the count of salad bowls in the second class dining room - but it wasn't his fault, and yet his career is still destroyed.  But that's not what the story's about - it's about the challenges he faces keeping the pantry organized on the afternoon of the sinking. It's well-written, but only barely enough to cover that it's a story I don't care about.  If the apocalypse is coming Tuesday and we lost everything last week anyway, then why do I care about what the people who live across the street are doing with their final hours?