HSU IT Department

Why yes, I have been reading, thank you for asking. Knocked three off my to-read list just this week, go me!

Garden Spells: A good and pleasant read, but thin: I wanted more on all dimensions -- length, depth (ok, maybe not width). Claire and Sydney were a little too pat as characters: Sydney the free spirit who finds out that freedom is more than just the ability to leave whenever you want, Claire the stay-at-home who discovers that fear of others leaving doesn't excuse never letting them in. I would have liked the book to have started when Claire and Sydney were children, so we could have seen their relationship develop its fraught character naturally, rather than being told about it in flashbacks or conversations. And for sure I would have liked to see more of their grandmother, latest of this long line of Waverley women who know so much about herbs and flowers.

That said, and despite what I found to be a completely non-credible resolution of the problem of Sydney's ex, what is here is lovely and a pleasure to read. The apple tree that's part of the family, a bit like a big shaggy dog that lives in the garden, is an unusual and fun touch. Evanelle, the giver of immediately-useless-but-eventually-important gifts, is just a delight, as is Bay, the little girl who knows instinctively where things (and by "things" we include "people") belong. I'd love to see a sequel that covered her growing up.

The Hill Bachelors is a collection of short stories steeped in the Irish psyche and landscape. I first encountered William Trevor a few months back in the break room at work, via his short story "The Women" in The New Yorker. Like that one, these stories are intense, focused, acutely observant, and often with some sort of secret or unspoken event at their core. Excellent examples of subtlety and keenness, though more often melancholy than happy. Sort of an anti-Maeve Binchy.

Once again, the unquenchable Flashman is off on a mad, bad, and totally unintentional adventure. While en route home, Flashy is shanghaied by his old enemy John Charity Spring, the Mad Don of Oxford, with the willing (to put it mildly) assistance of Spring's extremely sexy daughter. He ends up in America, where not one, not two, but THREE different groups either pay, strongarm, or blackmail him into becoming the second-in-command to abolitionist John Brown. Brown is in the midst of planning for -- or, more accurately, waffling about -- his raid on Harper's Ferry, and Flashy, depending on which employer he decides to follow, is supposed to (a) ensure it succeeds, (b) ensure it takes place, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, or (c) delay and sabotage it so it never happens. Well, history takes its course and the raid of course does happen, but along the way Flashy manages to bed a number of women, escape by the skin of his teeth more than once, encounters more than one old enemy, and comes out smelling like a rose, as usual.

As always, the history is top-notch, the characters cleverly drawn, and the adventures harum-scarum. However, Flash is a bit more mellow in this one than in others, and seems to actually feel a bit fondness for "old J.B. and his crackbrained dreams," as he puts it. As a bonus, the story is bracketed by scenes of Flash with his grandchildren: Augustus ("young gallows...bursting with sin beneath the mud"), Jemima ("a true Flashman, as beautiful as she is obnoxious"), Alice ("another twig off the old tree, being both flirt and toady"), and John ("a serious infant, given to searching cross-examination"). Ha!

My first Iain M. Banks novel, and I'm sad to find that I have discovered him only, as it were, to say farewell, since he died last month of cancer. He's best known for a series called the Culture novels, a far-future sci-fi epic series, and also for his literary fiction which he published under his real name, Iain (no M.) Banks. I've got Crow Road on my list to try next, to see how it compares.

So, The Algebraist. This novel was:

a) amusing
b) bizarre
c) complicated
d) decadent
e) elaborate
f) freaky
...[insert g through v of your choice]
v) versatile
w) weird
x) xenophilic
y) yonder, out
z) zany

If you picked "All of the above," you'd be right. FTL travel and secret wormholes let the main character, Fassin Taak, hopscotch across the known universe in less time than it takes a villain to talk too much and get destroyed. The author takes full advantage of this to introduce Taak to everything from sentient brambles to a species that collects dead other species to Siamese-twin AIs that finish each other's sentences and possess some mad superpowers.

Others have complained about the Jeeves-and-Wooster ambience of the Dwellers, but I rather liked it: as with the English upper crust of a certain era, they seem to have unlimited resources and rather too much time on their hands. As a result, they've turned war into a sport, planetary defense into a club activity, and their own children into prey (surprisingly, this isn't as icky as it sounds).

Others have also complained about the exaggerated villain, the Archimandrite Luseferous, but again I rather enjoyed him. Like the Joker and the Penguin from the old Batman series with Adam West, he's in love with his own villainy and you can't help but admire his thoroughgoing EVILNESS. The fact that he's defeated almost indifferently by what amounts to Boodle's Nasqueron Defense Club also bothered some reviewers, but I found it entirely consistent with the overall point -- or perhaps a better word is punchline -- of the book: that everything, in the end, can be reduced to zero. All of Taaks' running and searching and hunting amounted to nothing. All of Luseferous' deep-dyed villainy was thwarted in the blink of an eye. And the mysterious wormholes were right there at the center of the planet all the time.

If Taak had ended by saying to the old Gardener, "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard; because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with," I would not have been at all surprised.

I was a little puzzled by the subplot involving Saluus Kehar and Kehar Heavy Industries -- he's like a 43d century Tony Stark, all wound up with the military-industrial complex, yet his story never really goes anywhere big. Instead it devolves into a personal, intimate story about cowardice, lust, friendship, revenge. Which I guess could be considered epic, since those emotions have helped power everything from The Iliad to Beowulf to the Bible.

There are some deeper themes threading through the novel (e.g., prejudice against artificial intelligence and the relativity of morality), but for me the fun was in the trip -- and what a long, strange trip it's been.

The hashtag #natesilverfacts has been trending on Twitter since Election Night. Here are some of the best:

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@weldonwk: Nate Silver wasn't born, the probability of his existence just increased #natesilverfacts

@edyong209: Immense RT @TrojanScientist: Before going on a date, Nate Silver calculates the prior probability of reaching third Bayes.

@petridishes: Han Solo lets Nate Silver tell him the odds. #natesilverfacts

@edwardbenson: Nate Silver escaped from a Prisoner of War camp by shrugging and making an independence assumption #natesilverfacts

@Smedette: Nate Silver can recite Pi. Backwards. #NateSilverFacts

@clarklab: Statistical margin of error will now be referred to as “Distance from Nate” #natesilverfacts

We also have the (fictitious, one hopes) #drunknatesilver ("Last night, I walked onto a maternity ward and pointed out the 53rd President of the United States. #DrunkNateSilver").

Then there's the hilariously over-the-top parody account @fivethirtynate, which has gems like this: "@fivethirtynate: Molten variables hiss and roar. On my mind-forge, I hammer them into the greatsword Epistemology. Many are my foes this night!"

Also, some people think he's a witch :)