Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) by Philip Pullman.

In brief: The first novel in the Sally Lockhart thriller series is an engaging caper, if a rickety one. The Victorian flavour is authentic and never descends into parody or kitsch. There’s a great story hidden beneath the tangled web of opium smugglers and London thugs, though the way it comes out into the open is at times haphazard; the plot depends too much on the cherry-picked concealment of information from the reader to cast a fluid line of discovery.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Ruby in the Smoke, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin.

In brief: A straight-up Cold War allegory constructed as an offshoot of an added twist—the arrival of a revolutionary theoretical physicist from an isolated anarcho-communist moon colony—makes for an outstanding novel of political philosophy that examines not only the relationship between the individual and the state, but also the effect of the state on the advancement of science. We often think of science fiction as an investigation of how science reshapes society; Le Guin’s opus begs us to consider the reverse.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Dispossessed, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Gravity Journal (2008) by Gail Sidonie Sobat.

In brief: This perspicacious young adult novel about a self-mutilating anorexic teenager would be nothing special were it nothing more than a conventional three-step gambit (bait troubled teens into identifying with a main character who is every bit on their side; hook them with a well-told story of gradual treatment and rediscovered self-esteem; save a life). Instead, it goes a step further to reach out to all readers, offering a ground-level window into what the statistical chatter about BMIs, calories, and negative media images amount to in the human currency of communal responsibilities and individual lives.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Gravity Journal, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells.

In brief: The weakest ingredient of Wells’ prototypical alien invasion story is the one that has left the greatest cultural legacy, the image of bloodsucking Martians in giant war machines obliterating the core of civilization and reducing it to an anarchic ruin while panicked citizens scramble for their lives. Far more intriguing are the periodic dip into social philosophy and the speculation based on Victorian science; the latter remains astonishingly relevant over a century later, now that ecology is emerging as one of the dominant issues of world politics.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The War of the Worlds, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (1997) by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

In brief: What begins as a comprehensive study of poetic translation evolves into a treatment of human empathy and intercultural understanding, a refutation of John Searle’s Chinese Room argument against artificial intelligence, and a solemn remembrance of the author’s deceased wife. With its exclusive focus on language, Le Ton beau is a substantially less technical and more streamlined tome beau than Gödel, Escher, Bach; the mathematically averse may find it a more accessible point of entry to Hofstadter’s thought, as there is no talk of recursion or formal incompleteness in sight. Those who prefer their poetry devoid of metre and rhyme will take issue with Hofstadter’s conservative aesthetics; those who prize pattern, structure, and wordplay will rejoice.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Le Ton beau de Marot, keep reading below.)

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