The Best Books of 2012- The List of Lists

If you wait long enough on the Internet, someone else will write the blog you dream of writing.  Every year I think about gathering all the Best Books of the Year lists and putting them into a database.  That’s a lot of work.  So this year I configured a Google Alert to notify me whenever someone published anything on the Internet entitled Best Books of 2012.  I figured sooner or later someone else will have compiled my mega list.

I was right!  The folks over at the Williamsburg Regional Library compiled a spreadsheet with 12 categories of recommended books.  Each category ranks the books that were on the most Best Books of 2012 lists.  They asked that bloggers not link to the results, but to their blog that explains everything.  So click on All the Best Books Compilation (ABBC) 2012, First Edition.  Ah, and it even appears it will be updated, because this spreadsheet is called the first edition.   Williamsburg Regional Library used 175 different Best Books of 2012 lists.  See the 13th tab at the bottom of their spreadsheet called Sources.  Their spreadsheet even include hyperlinks to the original best of lists.  This will provide an orgy of reading about the best books of 2012.

Their General Fiction – Novels list, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain got on 27 different Best Books of 2012 lists, and that’s a book I don’t even remember hearing about, reading about or seeing at the bookstore.  However, the second book on the list, and on 19 best of lists, is Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.  I saw reviews of it everywhere, and I’ve already read it and can highly recommend it.  If I created a Best Books of 2012 list, it would be right at the top.  Book number 3, also on 19 lists, is The Round House by Louise Erdrich, who my friend Linda has been recommending.  Luckily, my wife bought it this weekend.

At the top of their Speculative Fiction list is The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker that I read when it came out and loved.  Third on the list is The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, which I also read and loved.  It’s always fun to discover great books when they come out.

At top of the YA List is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  I bought it, and my wife has read it, and I hope to get to it soon.

And I’ve read or bought several top non-fiction titles, however, I’ve been avoiding the most acclaimed non-fiction title, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, which is on 28 best of lists, ten more than Passage of Power by Robert Caro, which I’ve bought but haven’t read.  Being on 28 recommended lists makes me feel like I should overcome my prejudice and give Wild a try.

The fact that the new books I loved the most last year were the ones on the top of these lists say quite a lot about the value of this tabulation list.  Books on five or more best of the year lists are almost guaranteed to be great reads.  And I wonder if I’m cheating myself if I don’t read books that were on ten lists or more.  There were many books on just one list, or two.  And those books might be great too, but their success are probably determined a lot more by personal tastes than overall excellence.

I’ve always asked my friends, why read any book when you can read a great book?  The trick is finding the great books.

If you love books, visit the Williamsburg Regional Library link and download their spreadsheet.  You will need Excel or a clone to read it.  Also visit their site for lists from previous years, 2008-2011.

JWH – 3/2/13

How Many Books Would You Have to Buy to Manipulate Amazon’s Author Rank Page?

How many friends would a writer need to buy their books to get on Amazon Author Rank page?

Amazon says it’s Amazon Author Rank pages are based on hourly sales.  The New Times Best  Seller list seems based on weekly sales.  We don’t know if Amazon is basing their rankings on hourly total sales, or the weekly sales looked at hourly.  So I’m speculating here.  I sorely wished Amazon gave the actual number of books sold.  That would be fascinating.

Let’s say there are 730 hours in a month on average.  If a book sells a million copies in one month, it’s selling at 1370 books an hour.

There is 168 hours in a week, so if a book sells a million copies in one week, then it’s selling 5,952 copies an hour.

It would be very expensive to manipulate the Author Rank page if books are selling that fast.  However, few books sell in the millions.

Let’s drop down into the Science Fiction Author section for books, not Kindle sales, where we see many less famous authors, and book sales are less furious.  Would it be possible to affect the Author Rank at this level?

My favorite science fiction author is Robert. A. Heinlein.  He’s currently #34 on this list (#36 when I started writing).  How many books would we have to buy in one hour to bump him to the #25 spot?  Heinlein has been dead for a long time, so it’s surprising his continual sales are so high.

 

How successful is #34 on this list?  Amazon represents book sales for all of America.  So in any given hour how many people think, “Wow, I’m in the mood for a Heinlein book?”  What if that number is 25 books?  That’s a rate of 219,000 books a year.  If he sold 100 an hour that would be 876,000 books.  Remember, these rankings are based on sales of all books sold by the author.  My guess is Heinlein sells between 25-100 books an hour.  That’s just a hunch. 

And what if the #25 position author sold just 50 books to get to that position?  If I could talk 25 people into buying Heinlein books Saturday morning at 10am Eastern time, would his sales rank jump in the 11 o’clock hour to #25? 

Maybe the #25 position is selling 100-400 books an hour – too many to manipulate easily, but almost any news about Heinlein on TV, or in  magazines, or even on the Internet, could sell that many books.

Let’s imagine Heinlein is profiled on CBS Sunday Morning.  This won’t happen, but it might for a newer science fiction writer.  Such a lucky bit of press could send her to the top of the Science Fiction list for Authors, or even put her on the main Author Rank list.

The current author at the bottom of the Science Fiction Author Rank page is Mark Kalina with a single 99 cent ebook, Hegemony.  It shouldn’t even be on this list because I picked the Books list rather than the Kindle list, however, there he is with a single self published novel.

I’m thinking it doesn’t take too many book sales to get on this list, but it takes a lot of sales to get near the top.

I’m curious why Lois McMaster Bujold is at #63.  Bujold is a very popular writer with many award winning books in print.  Sales of all those books add to her Author Rank sales totals.  So why are many unknown writers selling Kindle books beating Bujold in the rankings?  My only guess is science fiction sells very few books per hour.  So an ebook author selling several $1.99 titles out sells a major author selling many physical books from $7.99 to $25.

I really can’t believe Heinlein is outselling Bujold.  I hear far more people talk about reading Bujold than Heinlein.

Either that, or Amazon Author Rank Beta isn’t working very well.

Selling ebooks cheap must be big business.  It might also imply that the science fiction book marketplace is very tiny.

Does this mean selling $1.99 ebooks leads to more fame and profit than selling physically printed books that sell for much more money per copy?

I really wished Amazon would put the total sales with the rank numbers.  Like:

Robert A. Heinlein #34 (127 books sold from 27 titles, for $13,750)

JWH – 10/15/12

The Implications of Amazon’s Author Rank Page

Amazon has a beta program for ranking book sales by author that is somewhat controversial, at least with some writers, according to the LA Times.

Amazon says the rankings are based on all books sold by an author updated hourly .  I assume it’s total sales for the previous hour, and not total cumulative sales.  This is a new, never before seen, way to look at book sales I think.

Before the Internet,  the premier best seller list for books was the New York Times Best Sellers list.  If a you got on it, you were made as a writer.  Now there are zillions of best seller lists, but probably the most important one is Amazon.com sales ranking for all books.  Amazon is such a powerhouse at selling books that their sales rankings are a national poll showing the reading interests of the American public.

Amazon is now taking the book buying pulse of Americans based on an author’s sales hourly.  That’s kind of cool.

However, Amazon isn’t the be-all-end-all of bookselling, as John Scalzi so carefully points out.

Among my online book club friends, they commonly complain that Amazon’s new Author Rank list doesn’t reflect 1) quality of writing, 2) their favorite writers or 3) the best authors according to whoever.   But was that ever the point of best seller lists?

I think we need to take the Amazon Author Rank pages with several grains of salt.  Let’s assume they don’t reflect true U.S. sales, writing quality or best of anything.  Let’s just assume it’s a Gallup Poll for what readers are buying every hour of the day, what do the various Author Rankings tell us?  In polling, the quality of the poll depends on the sample size, and Amazon’s sale figures are a huge sample size.

The fact the E. L. James is the #1 best selling author at Amazon (her books 4, 5, 6 on the current NY Times combined list), and Sylvia Day is #2 (#1 on NY Times) is very revealing.  It bugs me that people criticizes Amazon’s Author Ranking system as a huge failure because they hate E. L. James for whatever reason, but usually because they think she’s a bad writer.  Big fucking not the deal.  Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.  Americans are gobbling up James’ erotic novels like there’s no tomorrow, so what does that mean?

We’ve long heard the truism – sex sells – and boy is this proof.  I just finished a book Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace, about sexual repressed Victorian English society of 1858, but the success of E. J. James makes me wonder if we’re not just as repressed 154 years later?  I know I’m going to be shot down for being sexist, but are the huge sales of erotic and romance novels bought by women telling us something about women in general that’s not being reported in the news and literature.  In another 154 years will future writers explain all the clues were there in our times about some huge gender issue we’re not recognizing now?

Romance, mystery, fantasy writers dominate the main Amazon Author Ranking.  Men read these genres, but I think the general impression is these kinds of books mostly appeal to women.  I’m not saying writers on the list don’t appeal to men (how many women read Andrew Peterson) but one impression from studying the list over the past couple days is books women readers love dominate book sales.  I know this is unscientific, but study the list and tell me what you think.  And I think I’ve read more than once that women really do buy more books than men.

My favorite genres writers are pretty much a no-show on the overall author rank list.  I love science and science fiction.  And please don’t point to all the fantasy books and say science fiction is well represented.  The Amazon Author Rankings change hourly, so it’s hard to generalize about what it reveals.  Philip K. Dick started out at #18 when the LA Times wrote it’s piece.  He was #50 yesterday and #84 this morning, and #93 right now as I write this.  Two days ago Amazon had a ebook sale on several PKD’s ebooks for $1.99 each.  I’m pretty sure that got him on the list.

See, the rankings aren’t about writing quality but so many other factors.  It’s very revealing about how to sell books.  Here are some other factors I see contributing from watching the Author Rankings.

• Movies sell books (Argo, Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Cloud Atlas authors are on this list because of them)
• Writing a popular book series that stay in print (many example)
• Being a very popular writer with many books in print (Stephen King and Nora Roberts)
• Writing a current bestseller (Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s Killing Kennedy)
• Writing something sexy (E. L. James, Sylvia Day, Gillian Flynn)
• Being a mega best selling writer with a new book (J. K. Rowling)
• Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature (Mo Yan)
• Having a TV series on HBO (George R. R. Martin, Charlaine Harris)
• Being a fictional writer on TV (Richard Castle)
• Writing about heaven (M. D. Eben Alexander III, Todd & Colton Burpo, Mary C. Neal)
• Amazon puts your books on sale (Philip K. Dick)
• You’re an innovative self-publisher (Hugh Howey)

But that doesn’t explain all.  How come Octavia Butler, who died several years ago, come in at #20 on the Author Rankings at this moment?  And she is #1 on the Science Fiction author rankings.  Butler was a ground breaking African-American science fiction writer whose reputation is still growing.  Are enough kids being assigned to read her books in school a possible consideration for her being on the list at the moment?  I don’t know, but I would like to know.

That’s the thing about studying the Author Rankings.  I want to know why these authors are popular at given given moment.  Some writers are just perennial best sellers with a huge backlist of books that are constantly selling.  I have never heard of Debbie Macomber (#28) in my life, but I’ve discovered from the Author Ranking list she’s sold more than a 100 million books and been on the New York Times Best Seller list 55 times.  I have to ask myself if I’m missing out by never having read one of her books.

I love the idea of sub-cultures, and I think every genre and sub-genre, appeal to different sub-cultures of American readers.  Reading the Amazon Author Rankings makes me want to try new authors and genres out just to see what I’m missing.

The main page for Amazon Author Rank Beta is for all books.  But you can drill down into Kindle and Books, and then pick a one of these sub-headings:

• Biographies & Memoirs
• Business & Investing
• Health, Fitness & Dieting
• History
• Literature & Fiction
• Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
• Religion & Spirituality
• Romance
• Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Self-Help
• Teens

Where’s Science, Math & Technology?  Or Non-fiction?  Some categories have sub-categories, like Science Fiction & Fantasy are broken into two separate categories.  But they aren’t accurate.  I don’t consider The Game of Thrones series by George R. R. Martin to be science fiction.  But the advantages of having sub-groups, and even sub-sub-groups is to reveal the popularity of more authors.  The Science Fiction category under Science Fiction & Fantasy shows the continual success of such classic SF writers as Asimov #23, Heinlein #29, Niven #41, Herbert #45, Clarke #83.  It’s great these old writers still appeal to new readers – but it also shows a long list of emerging new writers.  Because of playing with the author rankings, I bought The Complete Atopia Chronicles by Matthew Mather, a writer I’ve never heard of before.  And I shall return to try out more new writers when I finish reading it.

If I was a budding young author I’d be sorely tempted to start writing a genre series based on a continuing character, even though I strongly dislike reading such books.  If your goal is to make money, this technique seems to boost your chances for success.  It must also mean that bookworms love series and continuing characters.

I wish Amazon would expand the lists beyond 100 slots.  I’d love to see the Top 1,000 authors or titles in Amazon’s listings, but for most people that would be too many.  However, if they just expanded it to the Top 200 so many more writers would get noticed.  Adding 100 more slots would make a tremendous difference.

To see what I mean, look at Sci-Fi Lists Top Sci-Fi Books.  Then look at the Next 100 List.    If you are familiar with the classic books of science fiction, you’ll see why expanding the list to 200 entries is so important.

The more I play with Amazon’s Author Rank page, the more fun I have with it.  But then I’ve always been fond of lists.

JWH – 10/14/12

Nora (1994-2011)

Back in 1994, Susan and I were eating at our favorite restaurant, Salsa, and talking to our favorite waitress, Wendy, who mentioned that her cat had recently had kittens on Halloween.  We told her we were looking for a couple of kittens and went to see them.  They were all brown-grey tabbies, and we picked out a boy and girl and named them Nick and Nora after the Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Today, September 17th, we had to put Nora to sleep – she was six weeks shy of her 17th birthday.  It was a hard decision to make this morning because Nick and Nora are my all-time favorite pets.  Susan and I have been married for 33 years, and for the first half we had Yin and Yang, two sister cats.  We loved Yin and Yang, but they weren’t very affectionate.  Before Yin died we got Nick and Nora.  So we’ve had cats most of our marriage.  We never had children – cats were our substitutes.

Nick and Nora loved us, slept with us, and if we were sitting down, slept on our laps.  Nora was more skittish than Nick, and would retreat to the bedroom when company came, but when it was just Susan and I, Nick and Nora always hung out with us.  They were like dogs.  The photo above is me, Nora and Nick in my reading chair.

Nora became mysteriously ill a few months ago when we noticed she had lost a lot of weight.  We never found out what was wrong with her, but we eventually noticed she wouldn’t use her tongue to lap water.  Nick and Nora loved to drink water from the faucet.  They would stand in the sink and turn their heads and lap water from the stream.  When Nora started losing weight we noticed that she didn’t do this, but stuck her head under the water and let it roll down the front of her face.

For her last months, Nora became very close to me and would often sleep on my chest at night, sometimes even wrapped around my neck. Because Nick had fought off an illness last year after shrinking down to nothing and returning to health and becoming a giant fat cat again, we kept hoping Nora would do the same thing.  We eventually realized it was more than weight loss, but pain. We think she might have had a tumor in her neck or throat, but we never knew. I’d wake up with her restlessly walking up and down on me. I’d get up and give her some pain medicine and she’d settle down for a couple hours. 

We kept hoping it was a temporary kind of pain, but today when they weighed her at the vet and she’d lost .8 pounds in a week, down from 5 pounds last week to 4.2, we knew it was something more.  She once weighed 12 pounds.  We have been spending a lot of time visiting Green Animal Hospital trying to figure out what was wrong with Nora.  Dr. Kahn tried so hard to save Nora, but it wasn’t meant to be.  Debra, Amy and Jo Beth were so nice to us that I feel bad that I won’t be seeing them again unless we can teach Nick to be a hypochondriac. 

Even though the people at the clinic are wonderful, our cats have always hated being at the vet, but today Nora just laid on the table not showing any signs of wanting to go home, so I took that as her way of saying it was time to say goodbye.  We had been trying all kinds of treatments for weeks.  I was giving her water with a syringe five times a day against her will.  But she was still eating, but not gaining weight.  It’s hard to decide when a creature should die, especially one you’ve been living with for seventeen years.  But I realized we were prolonging her life only to avoid making the decision, and it was obvious she wasn’t feeling good and never would again.

I wish I had more photos of Nora.  I have a lot, but they are mostly of her curled up asleep.  Here’s one of her reading my magazines.

What I really wish I had were videos of Nick and Nora playing fetch.  They both loved fetching paper balls.  We could get them to sit on a footstool, throw a paper ball over their heads, and Nick and Nora would leap up into the air to catch the balls and make wonderful backflips before they landed – and then bring us back the ball. 

They would even bring us paper balls when they wanted to play this game.  Susan and I would be watching television or reading and look down to see a cat and a bunch of paper balls they had stacked by our chairs.  Sadly, they quit playing this game when they got old.

I’ve decided that when Nick goes we won’t have any more pets.  I don’t know if I could outlive another pair of cats, and I definitely don’t want to outlive them.

JWH 9/17/11

Astronomy Rock Video

Be sure to turn up your speakers, set to 720p and click on the full screen button.

JWH – 5/30/11

 

JCPenney–Customer Service

The other day I saw a story on the news about how angry people get over customer service.  It was about how unhappy people are over what they feel is a major decline in customer service.  Now I understand that companies and their employees can make simple mistakes, so I’m not talking about how often we get bad service.  What I’m talking about is how companies go about fixing their mistakes once they make them.  How I rate a company’s customer service is by how they solve problems that they caused themselves.

I’m a guy that doesn’t like to shop, so I buy online.  Buying online is convenient unless you have to send something back, and I hate to send things back.  So I try to always order exactly what I want.  I’m not one of those people who order three different digital cameras and send the two back they don’t like.  I especially hate buying something and then discovering it’s a returned item.  When I pay for new I expect new.

If I do take a chance on ordering something sight unseen and I don’t like it, I’ll just give it to Goodwill rather than take it back.  With clothes I tend to find brands and styles that don’t change and order them time and again, expecting that what I buy online will be just like what I’ve bought before.

I like undershirts with long tails, so I buy Stafford Vneck Tees that are X-Large Tall from JCPenney.  I like to get them in a six pack.  Recently I ordered another six pack but I received three tees in a plain plastic bag with a computer label slapped on it.  The three tees looked new, but I was grossed out by the idea that someone probably bought a bag of six and returned them and some flunky in shipping threw the three shirts in a plastic bag without counting and sealed it with a computer label which clearly says Pk6.  There wasn’t even a cardboard photo of a guy modeling a tee shirt like you’d expect with a new package.

You’d think they’d have a law against selling returned underwear?

But anyway, I believe it’s obvious that JCPenney made a mistake.  I called them up and my options are to send the shirts back at my expense or return them to a JCPenney store.  They offered to immediately send out new shirts, but to bill my credit card.  I would only get credit when the others were returned.  I believe that is horrible customer service!

At best I would have been impressed if they had said, sorry, we shouldn’t have sent you returned underwear, so throw those away, and we’ll send you an unopened new package right away.  Next best, because I understand they can’t trust customers not to cheat them, would be to send me shipping bag with automatic postage so I could just leave it for my mailman or UPS guy to pick up.

It’s their mistake, why should I pay for it?

I can understand telling customers to pay for return shipping for items the customer didn’t like.  That’s not JCPenney’s fault.  But when a company makes a mistake they should do everything to fix it at no cost to the customer.  That’s good customer service.  Evidently JCPenney feels that it’s more profitable to have a certain level of customer dissatisfaction over bad customer service than to spend the money for good customer service.

My final choices are:

• Throw the shirts away and never shop with JCPenney again and lose my money
• Assume the three shirts are okay and wear them and actually pay twice as much
• Take them back to a store and get credit and quit shopping at JCPenney

In none of the three options does JCPenney end up paying for its mistake.   I either let JCPenny rip me off, or spend the money and time driving out to the mall to take the shirts back, or wrap them up, drive to the post office and pay to send the shirts back.  I got 90 days, so the easiest thing to do that would get my money back would be to wait until I need to go to Best Buy and then run the shirts back to JCPenney.

JWH – 12/5/10

Don’t Fear the Future

Whenever our country goes into an economic downturn we have outbreaks of Chicken Littles crying the sky is falling.  In today’s New York Times there is an article “Imagining Life Without Oil” by John Leland.  Leland profiles new groups claiming the end is near because oil is running out.  Kevin Kelly gives all Chicken Littles a modern name,  Collapsitarians, which is a good enough word for me.  Science fiction has always loved Collapsitarian stories.  While some people like to plot a future where everything gets better, other people like to plot a downward slope for civilization. 

These end of oil is near folks will love The Windup Girl, which just won a Nebula and has a good chance of winning the Hugo in a few months.  But bleak stories of the future should only be lessons in teaching us what to avoid.

We have a weird national psychology, when things are booming on Wall Street everyone thinks they’re going be billionaires, but when stock prices head south, everyone thinks the USA will become a set for Mad Max chaos.  Few people see life as merely a bumpy road.

Our world has only depended on oil for a little over a hundred years.  Even if we’ve reach peak production like the Collapsitarians claim, it doesn’t mean all our tanks will go empty on the same day.  It will take decades to finish off the global supplies of petroleum.  We should have plenty of time to transition to new energy technologies.  Oil disasters like current Gulf Coast nightmare, and the evil Avatar like rape of the Amazon, only illustrates it’s time to give up the oil habit.

The problem is not oil, but people.  What the Collapsitarians fear is society going through withdrawal from it’s oil addiction and how painful that will be.  The Gulf Coast oil disaster only teaches us how painful living with oil is, like a heroin addict realizing their drug is destroying their body.  What we need to do is man up, admit our problem, go on a global 12 step treatment program, and change our lives.  That will certainly be less painful than what the doomsters are predicting.

Many Americans have embraced Big Oil like evangelicals embracing Jesus – they put all their faith in the word of Big Oil.  Whereas, the Big Oil companies should merely transition to thinking of themselves as Big Energy companies and embrace alternative forms of energy themselves, rather than trying to stomp out alternative energies as heretics of the faithful.

Just applying conservation techniques and energy efficiency should match the rate of oil production decline for a few decades.  The eight Bush years has nearly ruined our chances of becoming the world leaders in green technology, but we could still catch up if we stop running around crying the sky is falling.  We must fight the Drill Baby Drill desire with Build Baby Build competition of constructing massive green energy producing sites.  We have to transfer our faith in oil and coal to wind, solar, bio-fuels,  geothermal, nuclear and all the other emerging technologies.

Actually, we have two major addictions, oil and coal, like heroin and cocaine, that we need to throw off.  The way to fight negative addictions, is with positive additions, like a alcoholic who goes on the wagon and takes up running.  Things might look bad now, and bad on numerous fronts, but there are lots of positive fronts too.  Too many people see the gloom in each scenario.  For example the health care crisis.  Yes, it’s costing us too much.  But on the other hand, modern medicine is working miracles.  Oil is running out, but technology is inventing numerous alternatives.  The sky is not falling.  It’s just a little cloudy.

The key is always us.  The future only looks dark when millions get scared.   When those same millions find hope, people start seeing the return of good times.  We need to be realistic Pollyannas, because when we get depressed we’re our own worst enemy.  Don’t listen to the Collapsitarians.   

JWH – 6/6/10

Flood by Stephen Baxter

Flood by Stephen Baxter has the feel of a typical mega-disaster novel, one where a cast of characters confronts a huge threat from all angles.  Flood, appears to be a warning about global warming, but it’s not, not really.  Baxter predicts yet another source of water flowing into the oceans to make their rise far more dramatic than the worst global warming predictions.  Flood can almost be called a prequel to the film Waterworld.

For the average reader, maybe even the average science fiction reader, Flood is a scary novel that people will equate to the effects of global warming.  That’s unfortunate.  Flood is more in the tradition of end-of-the-world disaster novel, especially when you consider it’s sequel due out soon.  Think of Flood as a special effects movie, like the recent film 2012, were movie goers go to watch the special effects of Earth being destroyed.  Readers of Flood get to observe one great city after the another destroyed by water – Katrina times 1,000,000.  Along the way mankind makes one valiant stand on high ground after another, each time hoping to gain a foothold to build a new world order, and time and again, each gallant effort is drowned by relentless rising waters.  Baxter gets to show a variety of political solutions to the problem, and that in itself is interesting.

It’s quite fascinating to compare a literary end-of-the world novel like The Road by Cormac McCarthy to a science fiction genre novel like Flood.  McCarthy’s story is 90% characterization and 10% details about the end of the world.  Baxter’s story is 90% description about the end of the world and 10% characterization.  The Road was 256 pages, and Flood is 490 – so we get a lot of details.  Writing a novel like Flood is mind boggling to contemplate because of the massive amount of information involved.  While reading Flood, I kept thinking about all the research Baxter had to do to create each page.  Depending on your mood and reading tastes, Flood could seem like one long info-dump, or it could be a thrilling vision painted in words.

Now here’s the funny thing, McCarthy’s book is far more realistic.  It’s far more likely to happen than Baxter’s story.  I could even call The Road ultra hard literary science fiction.  Flood, on the other hand, is something different.  It’s totally unlikely to happen.  It’s a made up scenario to make an epic science fictional fable.  Baxter goes for the Big Wow!  A superficial glance at the story would suggest it’s a warning about global warming – but again it’s not.  If Baxter had written a more realistic tale of 2016-2052, with as much characterization as Cormac McCarthy’s story, we might be hailing him for writing a literary prophetic novel of global warming, but he didn’t. 

Science fiction generally goes to for ridiculously big story, and in this case I’m torn between really enjoying the wild ride and being disappointed that Baxter failed to be serious and write a believable SF novel about humans altering the planet.  McCarthy proved that deadly serious catastrophe novels can be big best sellers.  I doubt Flood will receive any notice in the world of books at large, and only minor notice within the small world of science fiction readers.

Science fiction has always been about ideas, but not necessary realist ideas.  On every page of Flood, Baxter gives his reader something big to think about, but the novel doesn’t have a traditional fictional structure, it’s more like a documentary that takes thirty-six years to film.  For characterization, we get to watch a handful of reporters get old.  It’s the kind of story that would have appeared in Astounding Science Fiction or Thrilling Wonder Stories.

The book does have plenty of ideas to explore philosophically.  For example, at one point people in London are wondering if they should run for the hills, and then country folk blow up the roads and bridges letting them know they aren’t wanted.  Will that happen in the real world?  It’s a lot to think about.  Throughout the book we hear about one species after another going extinct, but the one I was most chilled at was my kind, “The global extinction event has claimed the coach potato.”  Flood does try to realistically portray collapsing urban environments, and it made me realize I wouldn’t have much of a chance.

Even with the weak characterization and monumental info-dumps Flood is a real page turner.  Before mother nature gets Biblical on humanity, the book can be read as an illustration of what global warming might do to some cities, but after a point you realize Baxter is a kid bent on blowing everything up for the sense of wonder thrill of it all.  And it is epic fun, in the same way When Worlds Collide thrilled me as at thirteen.  I’m looking forward to reading the sequel Ark, which is why this book isn’t realistic, but ultimately very science fictional.

Baxter has created an amazing vision but I wished he had made the mixture at least 25% characterization and 75% details.  The characters occasionally moved me, but for the most part they were pawns in the plot.  Only when Grace does a runner did I feel any character acting on their own agenda and breaking free of Baxter’s strings.  That’s how you tell great characterization – when all the characters have their own agendas making any plot meaningless.  Characters are slave to plots in genre stories, and seldom get to break out.  Great characters take control of their strings and make puppets of their authors.  I wanted to rate Flood much lower because of the weak characterization, but the far out A+ science fiction overwhelms the story.

Final Grade:  B+

JWH – 12/30/9 

The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg

The First Three Minutes by Nobel Prize winning Steven Weinberg, is a short little book about how our universe began.  It is not new, first appearing in 1977, and updated in 1993, but still very readable and not quite out of date, a scientific classic.  While reading The First Three Minutes, I can’t help but compare it to The Book of Genesis.  Weinberg chronicles the science behind, “Let there be light.”

I would like to say this book is readable by any well educated person, but I don’t know if that’s true.  I do think any reader who has kept up with popular science should find it a thrilling quick read.  The first link I give at the top is to Google Books where you can read as much as you like online and decide if you want to buy a copy, but I will say Weinberg has done an excellent job of explaining an extreme mathematical subject with very little actual mathematics.

It is quite presumptuous of scientists to talk about the first three minutes of creation from 13.7 billion years ago, except that we have one direct existing clue, the cosmic background radiation discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965.  However, that’s like saying we should predict a cake recipe by taking the temperature of a slice of German chocolate before we pop it in our mouth.  What Weinberg is saying, by knowing the average temperature of the universe now, by measuring its rate of expansion, by studying all the sub-atomic particles we can, we can plot backwards to a point in time when the universe was infinitely tiny and very hot.

This is why we spend billions on high energy particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.  The more we know about all the sub-atomic tiny, the more we can say about the super big cosmos.  Once you get a taste for reading about this kind of science, the more you realize that speculating about the first three minutes after the big bang isn’t just idle chatter.  Our scientific view of reality is based on putting a puzzle together of logical pieces.  A student of popular science might begin with a 50 piece puzzle, to get a vague image of the universe, but eventually you’ll want to move on to 500 and 1,000 piece puzzles.  Every science book read helps create a finer mental model of how reality works.  The First Three Minutes by Weinberg provides many major puzzle pieces.

I like to think of our universe as rather hot, because of all the fiery stars, but in actuality, our universe is in a very cooled state.  The average temperature of the universe is just a few degree above absolute zero, whereas during it’s early stages it was millions upon millions of degrees hot, so hot that the particles and atoms we all know and love could not exist as we see them now.  Our visible universe, full of empty clear space, through which light from distant stars and galaxies shine, didn’t develop until the universe got relatively cool.  Before that the universe was opaque.

The First Three Minutes was written just a dozen years after Penzias and Wilson discoveries in New Jersey, and the updated edition was written after early results from the COBE satellite was put into orbit in 1989, giving more confirmation to ideas that were originally just speculation.  I highly recommend people read the CMB and COBE links at Wikipedia.  I wish Weinberg would write a totally new edition of The First Three Minutes, and expand it greatly to show what science has learned about the Big Bang since 1993.  For example, Weinberg had only known the Hubble Telescope during its early failure state, and not the mega success it would become.  He still thought Texas was going to have a super collider.  And there’s no telling what will go in the science books when research from the Planck spacecraft starts coming in.

Weinberg has continued to write science books, such as last year’s Cosmology, but it is expensive and more suited for graduate students, being The First Three Minutes with all the math left in.  It would be nice to have a complete rewrite of The First Three Minutes for us cosmological ground hogs.  I’m having a difficult time finding a current popular science book that covers the same territory as The First Three Minutes but catches up with all the latest scientific discoveries.  Even the 2004 Big Bang by Simon Singh is barely past the early COBE results.  I’d appreciate anyone posting recommendations to more current reading.

JWH – 7/5/9

Why I Blog

The NY Times recently ran a piece, “Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest” by Douglas Quenqua, which told how 95% of blogs are abandoned by their creators.  According to Technorati, the paper said, only 7.4 million blogs, out of the 133 million blogs that Technorati tracks, have been updated in the last 120 days.  Most people just don’t stick with blogging, especially when they find out there is no money in it.  I never thought I’d find riches in blogging, but I do find the hobby very rewarding.  It’s a shame Mr. Quenqua only focused on people who quit blogging.

Blogging for me is therapeutic.  Since I’ve grown into my 50s, I’ve been forgetting more and more words.  The more I write, the better I remember.  Recently when I had an eye problem and couldn’t write on my blog for weeks, my memory went into a decline.  Picking a topic and focusing on it for several hours is good exercise for my mind.  Writing about the past has psychoanalytical benefits too.  I’m constantly examining where I got an idea, and why I believe something.  I’ve spent a lot of blog time examining the science fiction I read in my teens, trying to figure out how those fantastic stories shaped the thoughts of my life.  It’s been amazingly revealing to me.  That’s just one of many blogging projects I pursue.

Blogging is like practicing the piano in public though, because writing fast often produces sentences with many sour notes.  I try hard to revise my essays before hitting the publish button, but all too often I find bumpy passages and mistakes the next day.  This is actually good for me, because it pushes me to try harder, although I think I’m currently on a plateau.  Seeing how I’m not improving as fast as I was a year ago, makes me want to try something new, like reading books on writing essays, or studying fine prose in magazines to improve my sentence structure.  Lately, I’ve even thought of studying poetry, something I hated in school.

WordPress provides statistics about my blog pages, that I use to examine which ideas I write about are popular  This is probably a false assumption, but I assume if a piece gets a lot of hits it means it’s interesting.  That doesn’t mean my writing is better in that piece, but at least I found something that people want to read about.  My most successful essay has been “The Greatest Science Fiction Novels of the 20th Century.”  My stats tell me that 8,505 people have loaded that essay into their browser for whatever reason.  My ego would like to believe people actually read the essay, but all it really means is 8,505 folks have stumbled upon that page, whether or not they have read it is another story.  The act of writing it is what’s important.

My least popular essay is, “Super Men and Mighty Mice,” with 3 hits, but I think it’s one of my better efforts.  Hits don’t mean a thing.  Actually, both essays are very informative to me, and help me remember things I noticed about the world.  That’s why my blog is called, “Auxiliary Memory – Things I Want to Remember.”  I think Douglas Quenqua missed a great story by not researching why 7.4 million people do keep blogging.

Not only am I getting to know myself better, but I’m also meeting so many fascinating people online.  If you read blogs, you get to know people in a way you seldom do by just talking with acquaintances at work or parties.  I wished all my friends wrote blogs.  If my wife published her thoughts in little essays I expect I’d discover a whole new woman that I never got to know during the 31 years we’ve been married.  I’m constantly discovering things about myself that I didn’t know.  Writing is revealing.

Every evening after work I have about three hours of freedom where I can do absolutely anything I want.  All too often, I pick watching television.  I love television, it’s quite stimulating, but it’s basically parking my brain – unless I respond in some way.  If I watch a show, whether fiction or non-fiction, and then write about it in a blog, I will see that show far differently.  It becomes a real experience.

In my hours of freedom I could choose to read, listen to music, work at a hobby, play on the Wii, cruise the net, clean house, listen to an audio book, call friends on the phone, cook a better than average dinner, study a Great Course on DVD – the list goes on and on.  Writing on a blog post pushes my mind more than anything else.  Struggling to find the right words to capture a fleeting concept that came to me as a mini-epiphany during the day takes a great deal of concentration.  More concentration than I put into anything else I do. 

I wished I could have blogged when I was seven and first learned to string words together into sentences like they taught us in grade school.  I think it would have transformed my life and greatly improved my K-12 experience.  If I had had to write an essay about every lesson I studied, from math to PE, I think I would have learned so much more during my educational years.

Pedagogy puts a tremendous focus on reading.  At the College of Education where I work, students can get a master’s degree or doctorate in Reading, but we don’t offer any educational degrees that focus on writing.  Inputting words is important, but I think outputting words is more important for a good education.  It’s a shame that blogging is not catching on.  It’s a shame that it’s seen as a scheme to get rich quick on the net.  It has so much more potential.

We should encourage children to blog, and we should also support the permanent archiving of blogs, so kids growing up can look back over their own development.  We should develop a curriculum that asks children to explain what they studied each day by writing essays that explain their subjects in words, drawings, diagrams, videos, photos and so on, and not in checking multiple variations of A) … B) …  C) …  D) … at the end of the week in a quiz.

So Douglas Quenqua, write another article for your Fashion & Style section, and explore the positive aspects of blogging that those hundred million plus are missing by giving up on blogging.  I think if you examine a 100 different good blogs you’d find a 100 different reasons why blogging is too valuable to just dismiss as a passing fad.  Here’s just one creative example, Golden Age Comic Book Stories, that I discovered the same day as your article.  I don’t even like comic books, but I could spend endless hours exploring Mr. Door Tree’s passion for illustrations.  There’s real history in his pages.

Everyone should scrapbook their life in a blog.

JWH – 6/8/9