Now that March is more than halfway over, I suppose I should get around to
reporting on my February media consumption. I made several long trips in
February, which greatly increased my reading for the month. It also made me
very glad to have a Kindle, as several of the books I read were large fantasy
tomes that would have been otherwise inconvenient to lug across the country.

Books

• Neal Stephenson, Reamde

  Stephenson is one of my favorite authors, and I look forward to his new releases with great anticipation. Reamde is something of a departure from his previous work, in that it takes the form of a present day thriller and doesn’t introduce any substantially new technologies other than a particularly sophisticated MMO. Many people found this disappointing (Tyler Cowen called it “devoid of interest”), but I still thoroughly enjoyed the novel as a slightly nerdy action-packed page-turner.

  Stephenson is very good at writing characters that, for lack of a better term, are extremely competent. In Reamde, the characters, good and bad, collectively manage to track down a terrorist on the other side of the world, hack a major virtual currency, commandeer a rogue fishing vessel, steal and fly a plane into the Canadian wilderness, and perform numerous other feats of strength, endurance, and mental agility. This could easily seem ridiculous, but for whatever reason I find Stephenson’s characterizations compelling enough that they seem aspirational rather than annoying. You can almost believe that a slacker drug runner could invent a brilliant MMO, or than an obese writer could lose weight and make millions by working while walking on DIY omnidirectional treadmill, and somehow it makes you want to be more creative and ambitious in your own life. Or at least it does for me.

• Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

  I’m not sure how wise it was to start rereading a 14 volume, 4 million word series, but the final volume is coming out this year (written by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s untimely death), so I suppose it’s as good a time as any. I was also somewhat inspired by the Wheel of Time reread at Tor.com, which includes lots of description about the entire series.

  I was pleased with how well this book held up. Last year I reread the first Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, which is another fantasy series I enjoyed as a kid. While I still had fun with that, I was struck by how bad the writing was, which I guess means that my tastes have improved somewhat since middle school. I had no such problems with the Eye of the World, and I’m looking forward to continuing the series.

  I was reminded how similar this first book is to the Lord of the Rings. From the Ent-like Ogier to black riders who dislike water, Jordan clearly borrowed some of his ideas from Tolkien, but I’m inclined not to be too critical since he has another 10,000 pages to differentiate himself.

• Robert Jordan, The Great Hunt

  I reread this on my second cross-country flight this month, and I enjoyed it just as much as TEotW. Jordan hasn’t yet succumbed to the overwhelming number of subplots that characterize the his later books, but the series starts to move beyond the Tolkien-esque confines of the first book. I’m looking forward to book 3.

• Chris Martenson, The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our
  Economy, Energy, and the Environment

  In some ways this is a standard “we’re all doomed” book about the environment, but I thought it did a better than average job of linking the environment with the economy and discussing some of the economic challenges we will face due to resource scarcity. I appreciated that Martenson took the time to go over the math of exponential growth and work through things like the impact of inflation in some detail.

  I was less impressed with the solutions section of the book. Martenson’s suggestions — buy gold, move to a semi-rural community, etc. — sound a bit survivalist, and his self-promotion heavy website doesn’t help. This may just speak to the magnitude of the problem. There are many clear presentations of the challenges we face, but relatively few simple solutions that can be realistically implemented.

TV/Movies

• The Vampire Diaries, Season 1-2

  I’m a bit embarrassed to admit to this, but I found The Vampire Diaries to be extremely addictive. The easiest way to describe is really True Blood lite. Even though it is based on a different series of books, the similarities are striking. Both series feature young female protagonists in small southern towns that become involved in love triangles with two vampires, one of whom is brooding and reformed. They both have an African American “best friend” who gets involved in all sorts of supernatural drama. They both introduce werewolves and include at least one sympathetic werewolf struggling with his identity. They both feature a slightly irresponsible brother who is initially unaware of all of the supernatural happenings. And so on. In other words, you should not watch this for originality.

  Nevertheless, the characters have good chemistry and the plot moves fast, and while I don’t expect The Vampire Diaries to win many awards, it is enormously fun to watch.

Articles

• David Foster Wallace, The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and The Shrub, Rolling Stone, Apr. 2000

  This is a long, brilliant, and exhausting account of the 2000 Republican primary by the late novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace (DFW). As a political outsider, DFW travelled with the McCain campaign and reported on the exhausting and bizarre world of the campaign trail during the period in which McCain was making waves as the “maverick candidate”. DFW is hardly a traditional journalist, and this is hardly a traditional profile. It’s full of fun quirks — George W. Bush is referred to as “the Shrub” throughout, for instance — but it also provides an excellent behind-the-scenes look at the strategy and process of running a campaign. It is also a profound meditation on politics as advertisement and the challenge of determining when candidates are being honest and when they are being strategic. Finally it is a surprisingly human portrayal of McCain, who the otherwise progressive DFW seems to develop a healthy respect for. Highly recommended.

• Adam Gopnik, The Caging of America, The New Yorker, Jan. 2012

  The U.S. puts a larger fraction of its population in prison than any other country and this is a travesty just about any way you look at it. Gopnik surveys the problem and makes some interesting connections to the surprising drop in urban crime since the 80s.

• Matt Chaban, Terminal Condition: How New York’s Airports Crashed and
  Burned Can They Soar Again?, New York Observer, Jan. 2012

  New York is one of the most important cities in the world, but its airports are old, crowded, and inefficient. Much of this is due to the dramatic increase in air travel since they were built, but some is also due to the effects of 9/11 and increased security. For example, transit between terminals that requires you to exit security is now much less useful than it was in the decades prior to 2001, leading to the unpleasant necessity of inter-terminal shuttles. This was an nice followup to Aerotropolis, which I read last year, and should be of interest to anyone who has to travel to or through any of NYC’s airports.