My students sometimes ask me whether the mathematics in the television show Numb3rs is real. This question, among others, is explored in a fascinating book, The Numbers behind Numb3rs: Solving Crime with Mathematics, by mathematicians Keith Devlin and Gary Lorden. Most of the book consists of excursions into specific mathematical topics that arise in various episodes of the show; these excursions are really spinoffs, as they take an idea (that might be mentioned in passing or might be the entire basis of an episode) and discuss it in an accessible manner that goes far beyond anything on the show. If you’re interested in real-world applications of math, these chapters are well worth reading for their own sake, even if you’ve never watched Numb3rs.
But I specifically want to comment on my students’ question with regard to what’s in this book. Not surprisingly, the authors get asked the same question that I do. Here are some excerpts from their answer:
Is the math in Numb3rs real?
Both of us are asked this question a lot. The simplest answer is “yes.” The producers and writers go to considerable lengths to make sure that any math on the show is correct…
A more difficult question to answer is whether the mathematics shown could really be used to solve a crime in the way depicted. In some cases the answer is a definite “yes.” Some episodes are based on real cases where mathematics actually was used to solve crimes…. But even when an episode is not based ona real case, the use of mathematics depicted is generally, though not always, believable — it could happen… The skepticism critics express after viewing an episode is sometimes based on their lack of awareness of the power of mathematics and the extent to which it can be applied.
In many ways, the most accurate way to think of the series is to compare it to good science fiction: In many cases the depiction in Numb3rs of a particular use of mathematics to solve a crime is something that could, and maybe even may, happen someday in the future.
So there! Read the book for more details.
But the views of Devlin and Lorden may be out of date. A more recent and contrarian view comes from Mark Bridger, a mathematician at Northeastern University who maintains a blog about Numb3rs, from which these excerpts are taken:
January 3, 2009:
Last Friday’s Numb3rs was a repeat of the exciting episode “The Chinese Box” — aired December 14, 2007. This was yet another show where either the math consultants made a bunch of mistakes or the writers garbled the technicalities…
Since the Numb3rs folks eliminated independent script reviewers — mathematicians such as yours truly — the show’s math has gotten very sloppy, to put it politely. As far as I know, the math these days is injected exclusively by the Wolfram people. They seem prone to making mistakes, but Big companies such as CBS-Paramount like to deal with other Big companies such as Wolfram, not with individuals whom they have no control over. (And Wolfram gets to advertise its product Mathematica on the CBS website.) So what else is new?
December 15, 2007:
…Charlie whines that people are dissing him, and that he sees exactly what’s going on but can’t put it into words. This is an aspect of Charlie’s personality we have not seen before. The whole point of mathematics is to elucidate the structure of things. To say “I see things but can’t explain them” is pre-mathematical; Charlie can hardly expect people to recognize an expertise that he can’t communicate…
Now we come to some actual mathematical topics. Charlie describes a game called “Chomp” in which players take turns removing cookies from a grid… Exactly how this is relevant to the situation in the elevator is unclear, but at least there is mathematics here. Charlie identifies Sinclair with the “first player,” who makes his first move by getting into the elevator. Of course, we already know that it is not known what a winning first move is in Chomp, so I don’t see the analogy. Then Charlie throws in a real clinker: “Chaos Theory holds that outcome is sensitive to initial conditions. We must restore the decision making process to the man who started it.” This is a total non-sequitur. Yes, it’s true that a chaotic process is very sensitive to initial conditions: a small change in the beginning set-up can result in a tremendous change in the outcome. But how do we know that the Chomp game — or the elevator hostage situation — is chaotic? It would seem just the opposite: we simply don’t know what effect the first player’s first move will have: we just know that, as the game progresses, the first player can force a win. Furthermore, Sinclair stepping or not stepping into the elevator can hardly be described as a small change in initial conditions. On the other hand, Charlie’s conclusion turns out to be exactly correct: return the decision-making process to Sinclair. That’s exactly what the FBI doesn’t do, nearly resulting in Sinclair’s death (only his bullet-proof vest saves him).
All this reflects a disturbing trend in the show. Instead of using mathematics to solve the kind of physical or logical problems that are its natural setting, Charlie is trying to apply it to human behavior in complex situations. This is over-reaching, and the results simply do not ring true. In the early days of Numb3rs (season I, May 6, 2005) there was an episode called “Sacrifice” in which a young computer scientist kills his boss because the senior scientist is developing a program that uses mathematics to profile neighborhoods — this in order to determine where federal education money would be best spent. Charlie is admonished to look at the nature of his own research to see if he is not misusing mathematics to make social projections. It is interesting that he is, in recent shows, routinely using game theory, profiling, and data-mining to do just that: predict how humans will behave. We see once again, as in the “Chinese Room,” that the nature of human thought, behavior and language is very complicated and difficult to pin down. It can be very dangerous to exaggerate what we know and (think) we can predict.
Like some of the other novels I tend to read, People of the Book appeals to a particular type of audience rather than the general public. Australian author Geraldine Brooks’s fascinating historical novel spans many centuries while remaining firmly anchored in the present, with a focus on the Sarajevo Haggadah. The title, of course, is a play on words, as the story line interweaves themes about that actual book and themes about the Jewish people: the people of the Book. Although this medieval manuscript is very much real, many (most?) of the characters and events in People of the Book are invented by Brooks. If this is history, it’s fictionalized history. It is a novel, after all.
There are many technical details of book restoration in People of the Book. Probably some readers would find these details excessive and even boring, but for me they helped bring the story to life; I wish Brooks had included more of them. The historical accounts of Jewish history, especially the parts about the Jews in Spain and in Bosnia, were equally captivating and likely to attract a larger audience than book restoration would. The occasional romantic episodes, on the other hand, seem to be included solely in order to attract a larger audience, and to my mind they merely distracted from the story.
As a former resident and current habitué of Cambridge (Mass.), I can’t discuss People of the Book without mentioning the author’s right-on-target description of that city. You would swear that she was from Cambridge, not from Australia:
(I discovered later that Brooks had spent a significant amount of time at Harvard, so the accuracy is not so surprising after all.)
The descriptions and history of Sarajevo were (to me) the most moving parts of the novel. When Yugoslavia fell apart in the ’90s, the Sarajevo Haggadah needed to be hidden, as it had been in many earlier periods of conflict, especially the Nazi era. Having been to the multi-ethnic Sarajevo twice in the ’70s, I found it particularly poignant to read about it in this sad context.
If your experiences or interests match anything I’ve mentioned here — book restoration, history of books, Jewish History, Haggadahs, Spain, Yugoslavia, medievalism — read this novel!
Here is yet another genre-transcending novel that’s something of a gothic mystery but really is neither gothic nor mystery: The Stranger House, by Reginald Hill. It helps, of course, that the protagonist this time is a mathematician — even better than being a Latin teacher, as the protagonist of The Lake of Dead Languages is. But Samantha Flood is not quite who she seems to be, and the story focuses on her search for her own identity, which ends up being deeply intertwingled with the search for self of another character, Miguel Ramos Elkington Madero. But Madero is not the antagonist; that role falls to the town of Illthwaite, where most of the action takes place.
As always happens in Hill’s novels, the reader learns a lot while being captivated and entertained. Looking to learn some new vocabulary? This novel doesn’t include quite as many words that require a dictionary as is usual in Hill’s works, but it still contains a few surprises — all used appropriately and not pretentiously, by the way. One Amazon reviewer cites recusancy, lucubration, scurfy, euphuistic, euhemeristically, and clart as unfamiliar words; I knew the first and fourth of these already, but I’m sure there were others in the book that I did not know, though it’s hard to keep a record of words while listening to an audiobook in the car. Also, quite a bit of the fascinating history of Catholicism in England and Spain works its way into the action, as does the appalling history of the British Child Migrants.
Another Amazon reviewer has this to say:
Hill makes ample use of flashbacks and foreshadowing to drop hints and clues, but the dizzying swirl of events begins to make sense only at the end of this lengthy novel. For the patient and careful reader who loves a literary challenge, The Stranger House provides rich rewards. It is a dryly humorous, suspenseful, engrossing, and ambitious tale of lust, greed, religious persecution, and murder.
Yes, indeed. All of that is true. Read it!
I recently listened to the audiobook version of The Lake of Dead Languages, a fascinating novel by Carol Goodman. Well, actually, I don’t know how fascinating it would be to the general reader, but it resonated for me in so many ways: the protagonist is a Latin teacher, it takes place in upstate New York, and almost every scene is set in a boarding school, which itself could be considered a character in the book.
One reviewer on Amazon wrote, “One might even call it a literate mystery,” but that sounds to me like damning with faint praise. The implied criticism is undeserved. The Lake of Dead Languages is indeed literate and is in some sense a mystery, but it doesn’t follow the conventions of the mystery genre. (Some reviewers say that it follows the conventions of the gothic genre, but I have no way of knowing whether they are correct.) The action, somewhat confusingly, includes a lot of flashbacks to the protagonist’s time as a student at the school where she now teaches. Perhaps those flashbacks would be clearer in the print version — maybe they’re marked in some visual way — but in the audiobook the listener is suddenly jarred to be transported back to the past without warning, especially when some of the characters appear in both settings, and Latin features prominently in both. Or maybe the confusion is intentional, since this is definitely one of many novels where the past is clearly prologue to the future.
The mystery aspect is clearly subservient to the character development and the setting. Nevertheless, the solution is startling and satisfactory; I, for one, didn’t see it coming.
I don’t want to say any more, for fear of providing inadvertent spoilers. But do read it if this description sounds intriguing. Don’t read it if a mystery is what you’re looking for.
Think about this:
The most important skill in the New World of work, learning, and citizenship today — the rigor that matters most — is the ability to ask the right questions. Old World rigor is still about having the right answers — and the more, the better.
…
In today’s world, it’s no longer how much you know that matters; it’s what you can do with what you know.
So says Tony Wagner in The Global Achievement Gap. The morning portion of yesterday’s Professsional Development Day at Weston consisted of a talk by Wagner, a discussion with him, and discussions of his ideas in small groups of K–12 teachers. On the whole I found him and his book to be apposite, exciting, and inspiring. The main messages that I took away from the morning, the big ideas that I’m thinking about, are that kids need to develop three important skills in order to be successful in today’s workplace and today’s colleges. One is the skill Wagner refers to in the quotation above: question-asking and its partners: critical thinking and problem solving. A second skill is the one he calls “collaboration across networks and leading by influence.” The third is “effective oral and written communication.”
It’s not that any of these are a surprise to me, not would anyone claim that I haven’t believed in them for decades. But it’s helpful to refocus my thinking on them, especially when business leaders in a variety of industries are supporting them. In the past decade the national focus of education has unfortunately been on testing, from MCAS to No Child Left Behind. I’ve written about this issue in many other posts, so I won’t repeat myself here. The testing mania is much more of an affliction in urban school districts, where some argue it’s more necessary, but it’s the high-quality suburban schools that Wagner talks about. His book is filled with good ideas, backed by lots of (unfortunately anecdotal) evidence. He actually cites seven “survival skills for teens toay,” but the three I mentioned in the previous paragraph are those that I found most striking. I think we actually do fairly well on all three at Weston, but there’s a long way to go. In particular, when we find that students are not good at asking questions, we tend to give in to this deficiency and ask the questions ourselves. This vicarious technique for teaching question-asking isn’t very effective; I would like to see a significant change in focus in this area. In a related matter, Wagner writes (and talks) about problem-solving in the context of solving unfamiliar problems. Clearly that’s a necessary skill; students are unlikely to ever see the very same problems that they came across in high school. And in our honors courses at Weston we do a pretty good job of confronting students with unfamiliar problems. But we rarely do so in college-prep courses, since the students object so vigorously. When confronted with mediocre results and whining students, the teacher’s natural response is to give him and write problems on a test that look almost exactly like the ones solved in class. We need to do better! We need to give a much wider range of problems in class and for homework, so that it become natural that the ones on the test are not already familiar to the students. And we need to put up with the complaints that will arise, by clearly and repeatedly explaining the importance of this new approach. It will be a big challenge, but the payoff will be worth it.
Incidentally, Wagner proposes abolishing AP courses, on the grounds that the College Board forces teachers to focus entirely on the tests rather than on learning. Somehow I can’t imagine that Weston parents would put up with that — although some of my colleagues point out that several outstanding private and public schools have succeeded in doing just that.
There were many other things that I liked about the book and the talk: Wagner’s emphasis on principal and teacher training, with a wide range of evaluations instead of the current stilted system; his insistence on rigor, not only in honorss and AP courses; his promotion of teamwork among both teachers and students; his disdain for rewarding self-esteem; his strong preference for leading by influence rather than by authority. In the interest of fairness and balance, however, I should point out that I did have three objections to Wagner’s book, and I didn’t much like his response to my one question after his talk. One of my objections centers on the book’s title, which I suspect was slapped on by Basic Books (the publisher) rather than Wagner. The Global Achievement Gap rarely discusses other countries, and the fewer places where it does so are unconvincing. For example, he cites both Singapore and China as highly successful countries that are emphasizing critical thinking and question-asking rather than rote learning and memorization, but my sources who have visited (and even studied in and taught in) schools in those countries say otherwise. The glaring inconsistency is that Wagner’s information about American schools comes from visiting a great many of them, as well as teaching in a few, but his information about Asia comes entirely from government spokesmen.
My second objection centers on Wagner’s attitude toward mathematics. As a former English teachers, he understandably tends to focus on English and history; I have no objection to that. But in several places he cites the multiplication table as the most necessary math skill, even though advanced high-school math can provide exactly the experience with critical thinking and problem solving that he is so strongly urging.
My third objection centers on the book’s single-minded emphasis on the school as the sole source of learning and the sole cause that’s responsible when students don’t learn. There’s too much else going on in students’ lives, especially in the family and the community, for us to fight this fight by ourselves. I didn’t have this same objection in the live talk, perhaps because the question-and-answer format led itself to a more nuanced approach than a book can provide.
The response that I didn’t like was to a question I asked about the Parker School, which Wagner cited as an exemplary program (in contrast to most schools). I observed that when I came to Weston 12 years ago, I accepted Weston’s offer and rejected a similar one from Parker, even though I had enjoyed my two visits there, felt comfortable with the school, and was intrigued by their approach. Aside from the excessive commute, the reason I turned down Parker’s offer was that their wonderful interdisciplinary collaboration required endless meetings and I knew I would be burned out in three or four years. I could have done that when I was 25, but not when I was twice that age. So I asked Wagner to comment on this observation, and all he said was that the school was very knew when I had applied to teach there, so indeed they had to have far too many meetings, largely because they were inventing an entire curriculum. But now that they’ve written the curriculum, they don’t have to have so many meetings. That sounds reassuring, but I don’t believe it. On this day that celebrates change, I am reminded that any school that believes in change (as the Parker School does) can never have finished writing its curriculum. We do a lot of useful collaboration at Weston — among teachers, among students, and sometimes with groups containing both teachers and students — but even the meetings among Algebra II teachers alone take up lots of time. We don’t have time for interdisciplinary meetings, and I don’t know how anyone does, unless you’re looking for continual turnover with eternally young teachers.
Incidentally, Wagner included a simple activity in his presentation that’s all too rare in formal lectures. At one point he stopped talking and asked us all to discuss a couple of his points with those around us. Aside from being an excellent example of modeling good lecture behavior, of “leading by influence — this activity gave us a focus for subsequent questions and comments. Even though the talk was followed by (and overshadowed by) the historic inauguration, which I know I will remember forever, Wagner’s book and talk will provide a great deal of material for us to think about for years. I am confident that it will have a significant effect on what we do and how we do it. So, take The Global Achievement Gap out of the library and read it!
I enjoyed reading To Darkness and to Death, the fourth book in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s series of upstate New York mysteries featuring a female Episcopal priest. Not that I know much about Episcopalians or their priests, but that only makes these books all the more interesting. Eco-terrorism, real estate development, church politics, and town politics all play important roles. To Darkness and to Death is definitely not one of the best in the series, but give it a try if you want a pleasant diversion in a cold climate.
Although it’s not quite as enthralling as her first book, Tana French’s sequel is well worth reading. In The Likeness, French continues her lyrical writing and fascinating characterization. Cassie Maddox continues from the prior novel, In the Woods, but this time she’s the clear protagonist. The beautiful writing clearly takes center stage in this book, but I also couldn’t help being captured by the interactions among two sets of characters: the police on the one hand, a group of Irish graduate students on the other. Read it for the language, for the characterization, and even for the suspense, though the plot of The Likeness is not really its strong point.
I don’t usually like to quote from Amazon reviews, since they tend to be from random amateurs. As a random amateur myself, what do I need their observations for? But in this case I really have to quote from three, even though I risk sounding like a publisher looking for blurbs:
Tana French has created another sensuous, lyrical, haunting, suspenseful story… Tana French is no lightweight, but she makes the story accessible to anyone who enjoys reading. She has that gift to appeal to a variety of readers — even readers who look for largely escape mysteries. But this is not escape reading; it is the kind of reading that makes you ponder. It is philosophical and it echoes. It has shadows, swirls, hollows, heart,humanity, tension, suspense, whispers, hawthorn, hawthorn, hawthorn… [by switterbug "laughingwild"]
It was truly an exceptional and thrilling read. The way French fleshes out Cassie Maddox, Lexie Madison and the four housemates is truly astonishing. I have always been fond of character-driven plotlines and novels, and French truly impressed me with “The Likeness”. The amount of depth present in these characters — their motivations, relationships, and personalities — was both fascinating and engrossing. This was a book difficult to put down. [by Voracious Reader 326 “College student”]
I couldn’t write a single sentence as well as Tana French if I started now and lived to be a thousand. And she wrote a whole book, two books, of them. Flawlessly. Word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, until the book is as perfect as it could be. It boggles the mind, it really does… It’s a privilege to read Tana French, it really is. I feel only pity for the person who wrote of the unbelievable plot, I do. This book isn’t about a plot, just as Chandler wasn’t about plot, just as we don’t read Shakespeare for the plot. Anyone can do plot; but to give feeling and life, undoubted life, to characters on paper, that is to marvel at. [by Adam Shinbrot]
I recently read Joshua Kendall’s biography of Peter Mark Roget, entitled The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus. While this book is fascinating, it’s also deeply flawed — especially for those of us who love lists, not to mention those of us who love thesauri and other reference books.
On the plus side, Kendall teaches us a lot about Roget’s background as a scientist and physician. We learn about his compulsive list-making as a child, whether it be names of farm animals in Latin or lists of the bones in the human body. We learn about his organization of all the concepts of the English language in later life. And we learn a little — but not nearly enough — about Roget’s mental problems and how he coped with them. These problems were relevant, indeed central, to the decision to create the first thesaurus in 1852. Compiling lists of words apparently helped Roget cope with depression, anxiety, and probably Asperger’s, though Kendall only barely touches on the last of these.
On the minus side, the reader gains almost no sense (despite the subtitle) of the importance of the thesaurus to Roget’s life and to the world. It’s just one incident among many. I was looking for details — lots of details — about how the thesaurus was compiled. The lack of details is rather ironic, given the subject of the book. And it reminds me of my issues with The Professor and the Madman. The other flaw is the offhand consideration of the likelihood that Roget had Asperger’s, though of course neither the name nor the disorder was known in the 19th Century. These flaws were not enough to deter me from finishing The Man Who Made Lists, but they certainly reduced my enjoyment of the book and meant that I learned far less from it than I had hoped.
Those who know me will not be surprised that I still have an old copy of Roget’s International Thesaurus, a copy that my father gave me when I was eight years old. As I say, people won’t be surprised that I have this, though they might be surprised that I could lay my hands on it so readily. Anyway, when I was eight, this “new edition” of the thesaurus had been out for nine years, so it slightly predates my own birth. It’s instructive to contrast the arrangement and organization of this edition with the modern alphabetical lists of synonyms that still claim the name “thesaurus.” My copy, published by Crowell, contains the following remarks in the Publishers’ Preface [note the subtle placement of the apostrophe]:
The basic principle of Dr. Peter Roget’s original Thesaurus was the grouping of words according to their ideas rather than the listing of words, as dictionaries do, according to the alphabet. This principle — the secret of Roget’s success — has been scrupulously preserved in the various Crowell editions for over sixty years. [Italics as in original]
The difficulty with grouping words by ideas is that it can be very difficult to find a word, so this edition of the thesaurus contains an index that’s nearly as long as the body of the book. Be that as it may, Roget’s idiosyncratic organization of all possible concepts is a delight, as long as you don’t take it as a given truth. The schema is hierarchical and multi-level. For example, suppose you were thinking about prime numbers, but you couldn’t remember the terminology prime number. You would, of course, look under Class I (abstract relations), Section V (Number), Part 1 (Number in the Abstract), Category 84 (Number), Subcategory 2. You knew that, didn’t you?
Well, no, of course you didn’t; that’s why you needed the huge index. Anyhow, the subcategory in question reads as follows:
complement, subtrahend, multiplicand, multiplier, multiplicator, multiple, submultiple, coefficient, dividend, divisor, factor, quotient, fraction, mixed number, numerator, denominator, decimal, mixed decimal, circulating decimal, repetend, common measure, aliquot part, reciprocal, prime number, totient, quota, differential, integral, fluxion, fluent, power, root, radix, base, exponent, index, logarithm, antilogarithm, modulus.
Note that this is most definitely not a list of synonyms! It’s a list of words that are conceptually related in some way. Reading it, you spot the term you were looking for (“prime number”) and your mind is also captured by a great many other words that are closely or loosely connected. What a loss to use a modern so-called thesaurus, where you probably can’t even find “prime number” unless you already know the phrase, and then you’ll simply find that there are no synonyms.
You can browse through Roget’s Thesaurus and learn something new on any page. All you are likely to learn from a modern thesaurus is some pretentious near-synonyms that will make you a worse writer.
David Handler, best known for this Stewart Hoag series and other novels, has also written six books (so far) in his Berger and Mitry series:
- The Cold Blue Blood (2001)
- The Hot Pink Farmhouse (2002)
- The Bright Silver Star (2003)
- The Burnt Orange Sunrise (2004)
- The Sweet Golden Parachute (2006)
- The Sour Cherry Surprise (2008)
If you’re exceptionally observant, you’ll notice a certain pattern to those titles.
Anyway, I’ve recently read the first four novels in the list above, and I highly recommend them, both individually and as a series. Reading them in chronological order would make sense, as the characters develop satisfactorily from one book to the next.
The premise behind the series is a simple one. Handler delivers on it. In the small town of Dorset, Connecticut, two unlikely detectives have come together both professionally and romantically: Mitch Berger, a Jewish film critic who writes for the New York Times, and Desiree Mitry, an African-American cop who has become the “resident trooper” for Dorset (a thinly veiled version of Old Saybrook). That’s it. But out of this premise Handler weaves a series of truly entertaining mysteries with appealing characters, interesting plots, and a great sense of place. Do read them!
Obedience, by Will Lavender, is a fascinating but flawed novel. Not flawed like Strip Search, which I reviewed the other day; this novel is worth reading. But it’s flawed nevertheless. It shares with Strip Search the characteristic of a great premise that the author can’t quite deliver on.
Reviewers on Amazon and elsewhere have commented on the difficulty of suspending disbelief when faced with an implausible plot and implausible characters, but I didn’t have that particular problem. As an academic mystery with a title and plot based on Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, there was plenty to hold my interest, and I was actually able to buy into Lavender’s peculiar world. But here’s how a Massachusetts reviewer named Winter began his review that you should read:
Great idea. Mediocre book. That’s all you need to know.
Maybe that is all we need to know, but Winter goes on for eight more paragraphs anyway.
I will do likewise.
Well, maybe just four more.
The main characters are a group of college students in the fictional Winchester University. Although the students and their university are painted in fairly broad strokes, I found them plausible enough and wasn’t nearly as bothered by Lavender’s descriptions of them in “overwrought prose” as Winter was. I can’t comment on Winter’s analysis of the likely effect of reality TV on today’s college students, since I don’t know anything about the four shows he mentions. I do like Winter’s phrase that the three students are “less stable than Microsoft Windows,” but I don’t understand what’s wrong with that.
Most of the mainstream (professional) reviewers were positive about Obedience. Most of the Amazon (amateur) reviewers were quite negative. I’m not sure what to make of this split. My feeling is that the latter group wanted a real-life novel that could be believed on the face of it, whereas the professionals were willing to look for metaphor and even fantasy. If you can live with something less than realism in an apparently realistic story, give Obedience a try. But don’t say you weren’t warned.
Strip Search, by William Bernhardt, is an irritating novel.
Why do I say that? Well, it’s not just because Bernhardt portrays math teachers as weird and psychotic, though that’s certainly a major part of it. And it’s not just because the plot is so implausible, though that too is part of it. And it’s not just that the book is riddled with mathematical errors, though of course that definitely bothered me. And it’s not just that the amount of violence is excessive and unnecessarily explicit, though that would certainly put off many readers. No, the most irritating characteristic of Strip Search is that it reads like a “good idea” that someone had. My impression is that someone said to the author, “Here’s a proposal for a novel. Go write it.” Not surprisingly, a coherent novel was not the result.
You may wonder why I started reading this book. In the past I’ve found Bernhardt to be a competent and engaging writer, even if not a memorable one. And I had heard that Strip Search featured a combination of mathematics (equations left as clues at each crime scene) and a major character (Darcy) who’s an autistic savant. No math teacher could resist that enticing combination. Some readers (in customer reviews on Amazon, for instance) were annoyed by the characters and found none of them likeable. Personally I didn’t have that problem, although I can see why others might. But anyone who has taught students who have Asperger’s or autism will find Darcy likeable enough, to coin a phrase. And the detective is no more unlikeable than many a highly flawed protagonist.
You may also wonder why I bothered finishing Strip Search if I was so irritated by it; I’m not one of those people who feel compelled to finish a book once they’ve started it. But I kept irrationally hoping that things would get better, that there would be a good reason for all the flaws. Unfortunately I was wrong, so here is your warning. Don’t read this post any further if you’re intending to read Strip Search, as I can’t write what I need to write without introducing spoilers.
*** SPOILER ALERT*** SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT ***
OK, so we have a detective who’s actually a police psychologist (the protagonist) and fits into the genre stereotypes of being insubordinate and an alcoholic. Later she turns to pills. She is a psychologist without a doctorate, and she reaches most of her conclusions by intuition and guesswork. Since she’s also the first-person narrator, I’ve forgotten her name. Oh, that’s right, it’s Susan.
But don’t think that Bernhardt extends genre stereotypes to gender stereotypes. No, we also have Esther Goldstein, a female mathematician who not only teaches math but also has apparently solved the Riemann Hypothesis (misspelled “Reimann” throughout the book). For reasons that apparently stem in some undefined way from an unhappy childhood, she is also reviving the ancient Pythagorean religion, the Brethren of Purity. Unfortunately she also turns out to be a psychotic mass murderer. But then again she is a math teacher, so you can’t expect her to be normal, can you? “Math has been riddled with positively brilliant madmen,” as she explains at one point.
- The sympathetic characters, such as police lab technician Amelia, say things like, “I gave up on math after my second semester of algebra.”
- Susan, even though she presumably has at least a master’s degree in psychology, says, “I hadn’t taken a math class since junior high school.”
- The puzzle expert says, “I’m a word boy. Left brain. Math freaks are a whole different breed. And this doesn’t look like a real puzzle anyway. How can you solve an equation if you don’t have any of the numbers?
Bernhardt’s mathematical errors include confusing variables with unknowns and referring to expressions as equations. For example, on page 161, we have this excerpt:
It was another equation:
Bernhardt’s account of the Pythagoreans’ attitude toward the irrationality of the square root of 2 is also muddled. For instance, Esther, the professional mathematician who’s an expert on the Pythagoreans, says, “The square root of two was a problem with no solution.”
OK. That’s enough. Don’t bother reading the book.
If you can’t travel to Venice in the real world, the next best thing is to travel vicariously in the novels of Donna Leon. Formally speaking, these novels are squarely in the mystery genre, but Leon devotes as much attention to her locale (Venice, of course) and her characters (primarily Commissario Guido Brunetti and his family) as she does to the plot of the mystery. Some readers might find this balance disappointing, but the books are much the richer for it.
The Girl of His Dreams is the latest in Leon’s Brunetti series. The characters continue from Blood from a Stone and Death at La Fenice, both of which I read last year; the stories are independent. This time we have a lot about religion: the Roman Catholic church, Catholic priests, and a somewhat vague alternative but Christian religion that might be a cult or at least a scam. The teenagers are a little less stereotypical now, perhaps because they’re older. There is also a continuation of two themes from Blood from a Stone, ethnic prejudice and the presence of foreigners in Venice. This time the foreign group is Gypsies, who have fled from the former Yugoslavia during the conflicts there. Political issues infuse the novel, ranging from the treatment of Gypsies to the word itself to the Venetians’ attitude toward the Church. Leon’s pace is fairly slow and deliberate, but the book is never boring. Do read it.
A small linguistic note:
Leon is an American living in Venice, so she wrote the book in English, though Italian and Venetian are sprinkled lightly throughout to add an air of authenticity. The linguistic issue arises when two characters decide whether to call each other by the familiar or the polite second-person pronoun. I’m familiar with this issue in French and German, and I’ve asked Spanish-speakers about it in Spanish, but I don’t know much about it in Italian. Nevertheless, I understand that an Italian author could simply make a point by having a character say “tu” or “voi.” This distinction is nearly impossible to translate into English, thereby requiring some sort of circumlocation or paraphrase. But the English-speaking writer can simply have her characters say something like, “Shall we call each other tu?” or even “Shall we use the familiar form of the pronoun?” The latter, of course, would be unbearably pedantic and implausible, so we have to assume that the reader will understand “tu” from context or from familiarity with other Romance languages.
I have recently read two unconnected but closely related non-fiction books: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, by Ammon Shea, and The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester. Probably I should have read them in the reverse order, but it was Shea’s 2008 book that impelled me to go back and read Winchester’s, which was written ten years earlier.
As the subtitle to Shea’s book suggests, he successfully took on the self-assigned task of reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary in a year. You may wonder why anyone would do such a thing — one of my colleagues would uncharitably claim that Shea must have too muich time on his hands — but never mind, the book is well worth reading on several counts even without a compelling answer to that question. First of all, any reader has to be simply astounded that anyone could accomplish such a feat: it has a fascination similar to any story of the accomplishment of a long-lasting unlikely challenge. Second, the details surrounding the endeavor are of interest to any compulsive reader (not that I would know anyone in that category), ranging from Shea’s physical arrangements for the effort to the effects on his eyes, his body, and his relationships. Third, Reading the OED does not merely recount the story of what Shea did but also includes lots of notes on many interesting words that he encountered along the way. Definitely a niche book, I suppose, but go read it if you’re a lover of words and dictionaries. And if you didn’t grow up with a dictionary in every room, it’s never too late to start.
Winchester’s book is much more of a popularization. Basically it tells the tale of two men in Victorian England: James Murray, “the professor” and the principal editor of the OED for decades during the creation of its first edition; and Dr. William Chester Minor, “the madman” and the most prolific contributor of source material to the OED over the same decades. I wish this book had been around during my father’s life, not only because he was a lover of words and dictionaries but also because of one of the stories he used to tell as a psychiatrist. It concerned a visitor to the large mental hospital where my father was the director; the visitor stopped to ask for directions from the first person he saw, and the reply turned out to be detailed, complex, and accurate. It turned out that the person giving directions was a patient in the hospital. When the visitor expressed surprise, the reply was, “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
I’m sure you’ve heard that line before in other contexts, but this (probably apocryphal) story is the context for it that always sticks in my mind. It continued to resonate for me in The Professor and the Madman, where Minor is portrayed as a deeply paranoid schizophrenic who spent most of his adult life confined to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, as a sentence for shooting a man whom he had mistakenly believed to have broken into his apartment. Winchester tells the entwined stories of Murray and Minor, but mostly Minor’s, which is the more fascinating or the more sensationalistic one, depending on your view of such things. In any case, I did find it fascinating, but I wish there had been more details of the lexicographic procedures used for researching a writing a gigantic dictionary in pre-computer days. If you’re not a dictionary lover, read it for the story of Minor’s life and mind; if you are a dictionary lover, read it not only for that story but also for the account of how the OED was constructed. And, in either case, read it as intellectual history: Winchester’s portrait of the times provides more than just a glimpse of what was happening in Britain then.
After many hours of listening — and I do mean many — I have finally finished the audiobook version of Interred with Their Bones, by Jennifer Lee Carrell. At times I wasn’t sure whether it was worth slogging through to the end, but I like to listen to something when taking a walk, and Interred with Their Bones held my attention sufficiently.
As you can tell, I am mostly unenthusiastic about this mystery novel. I am told that it was inspired by the DaVinci Code, but I guess I’ll never know, since I steadfastly refuse to read any more Dan Brown after suffering through Digital Fortress. They say that Carrell is a better writer than Brown, but that’s not hard, as I’m not the first to observe. In any case, Carrell combines implausible but exciting action with long academic passages about Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio and the long-standing controversy about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. As something of an academic myself, I found these discussions reasonably interesting, though not very suitable to the audiobook format. The action scenes seemed more like a treatment for a subsequent movie. Shakespearean themes run throughout the novel, from the characters’ professions as actors, directors, and professors through the Shakespearean locales and staged events intended to mimic Shakespearean scenes to the characters’s names (Rosalind, Kate, Henry, Athenaide). Well, I don’t think that Athenaide is actually a Shakespearean name, but it could just as well be.
This novel belongs to the genre in which it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. No spoilers here, but suffice it to say that there are several plot twists that are not too severely telegraphed. Some reviewers found Interred with Their Bones to be fast-paced. I did not. I’ll admit that it’s breathless, and maybe that qualifies. Also, there’s far too much wanton killing. Read it if you’re interested in Shakespearean issues and academics, but don’t bother if you’re looking for thrills and actions.
It had to come to an end at some point. The experience of listening to the audiobook version of In the Woods, by Tana French, was a constant delight that enveloped me for 21 hours over a period of more than two weeks. Much of the credit has to go to narrator Steven Crossley, who brings the entire narrative to life, including an array of a dozen major characters who all sound distinct and true-to-life in Crossley’s reading. It’s a total pleasure to listen to him.
It’s also a total pleasure to be captivated by the gorgeously poetic language of Tana French, whom I don’t otherwise know as an author. The heightened intensity of her words couldn’t possibly continue for 21 hours, and of course it doesn’t, but quite a number of passages read more like poetry than prose. All of this occurs in the context of a novel that looks like a police procedural but isn’t really. It’s actually a psychological novel about introspection, the effect of early experiences, and interactions among well-developed characters. Some reviews have missed the point and have criticized French for not following all the conventions of the mystery genre. But it’s unfair to criticize her for not writing a different book! In the Woods doesn’t follow the mystery genre because it’s not a genre novel. Like a number of other examples of serious literature, it adopts the framework of a police procedural but has an entirely different program. I don’t want to reveal any of the details other than to say that the narrative takes place within a homicide squad of a modern Irish police department. Definitely read it — but don’t expect everything to be nicely tied up at the end as you would anticipate in a conventional mystery!
Highly recommended: Death Comes for the Fat Man, by Reginald Hill. This latest installment of the literate Dalziel-Pascoe series continues the high standards of its predecessors, though Dalziel plays almost no role in it. I won’t tell you what the title really means, because it would of course be a spoiler. Does Dalziel die, or is the title just a teaser?
Anyway, you should probably have read some of the earlier books in the series before tackling this police procedural, but that’s OK: if you’ve never read any Dalziel-Pascoe, go to the library and read some of the earlier ones! Then you’ll be ready for Death Comes for the Fat Man. But be sure to have a dictionary at your side as you read them, so you won’t be caught short by words like sempiternal. Every Reginald Hill novel is good for learning a few new vocabulary words. Of course they’re also good for plot and characterization, which are the real reasons to read them.
On the whole I recommend Daddy’s Girl, by Lisa Scottoline. Formally it’s a mystery, but it’s mostly about families. Like many mysteries, it also carries a theme of law vs. justice, and Scottoline does an effective job of exploring this issue. Her protagonist’s relationships with her brother and her boyfriend are annoying, especially with the loud brother who talks in all caps — actually I listened to the audiobook version, so the caps were converted to shouting, as the author presumably intended, but I still kept wishing that Natalie would tell him to shut up. My other reservation was the implausible plot. But these deficiencies are outweighed by the convincing portrayal of the academic setting at Penn Law School and of Natalie’s large Italian family — perhaps similar to Scottoline’s? Who knows? Anyway, it’s certainly not the best mystery of the year, but it’s worth reading.
Just finished reading J.A. Jance’s Justice Denied, the 18th novel in the author’s J.P. Beaumont series of Seattle-based police procedurals. Though it’s not one of her best, Jance clearly hasn’t gotten tired and can still write a taut mystery with interesting characters. She explicitly deals with recurrent themes like “Can you trust this woman?” without making the reader feel that it’s merely a formula. Family relationships, especially those between parents and their adult children, add an extra touch, especially since the families involved vary in age, race, and social class. The author perfectly captures the internal monologue of a male protagonist who’s intellectually smart but can occasionally be socially clueless, not that I know anyone like that. Justice Denied is well-plotted but stronger on psychology than on action, so don’t read it if you’re looking for an action-packed mystery. But if you’re interested in story lines and characters, do read it, even if you aren’t familiar with any of the 17 previous novels in the series.
I have just finished reading Double Vision, by Randall Ingermanson. This science fiction thriller has a great concept, but the execution is disappointing. On the plus side, the novel speaks effectively to those of us who have worked in the computer industry, especially if we have any interest in computer science and physics. Knowing something about RSA and factoring certainly helps, but it isn’t necessary. Knowing something about quantum computing might also help — but since I know almost nothing about that field, how could I be sure? Anyway, the idea behind the book is fascinating, and the fact that the protagonist is a computer programmer with Asperger’s makes it fit into my accidental recent theme of Asperger’s Syndrome. However, there’s also the minus side: implausible characterization, poor writing (à la Dan Brown), unbelievable plot, and excessive Christianity. Worse yet, there’s a subsubplot concerning Jews for Jesus, and if anyone can explain to me how that organization is distinct from Christians, please let me know.
Take one part Raymond Chandler and two parts Philip K. Dick. Or maybe it’s two parts Dashiell Hammett and one part Aldous Huxley. Let’s try all four. Then add three parts of George Orwell. Mix them all together, and you get Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem, a noir science fiction thriller that successfully carries off this odd hybrid. I listened to the audiobook version, and I’m not sure whether it would have taken more time or less time to figure out what was going on if I had read it in print. Anyway, this odd tale of California in the very near future portrays a world of humanoid (“evolved”) animals, near-universal legal drug use, and a totalitarian government, all with a definite gloss of science fiction rather than fantasy. The noirish atmosphere is palpable and unsubtle. Characters are fairly interesting, the plot is intriguing, but basically the setting is all. Do read it (or listen to it), even if you don’t think it’s your cup of tea.
As I was reading Paul Graham’s essay, “Some Heroes,” it struck me that I’ve never liked being asked who my heroes are. In his second and fourth paragraphs, Graham reflects on the question itself:
I’m not claiming this is a list of the n most admirable people. Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to?
…
When I thought about what it meant to call someone a hero, it meant I’d decide what to do by asking what they’d do in the same situation. That’s a stricter standard than admiration.
I had never thought of that criterion before, but perhaps it would unstick me. Then I thought of the statement from one of my former students that Paul Erdős is her hero. [Brief aside: it’s tough to get the correct diacritic over that o. The natural tendency is to try for an unlaut — Erdös — especially since umlauts are relatively easy in HTML. But in Hungarian the diacritic looks like a double acute accent rather than an umlaut, producing a character with Unicode ID 0151. Thus you want “&#” followed by “x0151;” in HTML. End of aside.] So I wondered whether Erdős would fit the description in Graham’s next paragraph:
After I made the list, I looked to see if there was a pattern, and there was, a very clear one. Everyone on the list had two qualities: they cared almost excessively about their work, and they were absolutely honest. By honest I don’t mean trustworthy so much as that they never pander: they never say or do something because that’s what the audience wants. They are all fundamentally subversive for this reason, though they conceal it to varying degrees.
More on Erdős after I watch the movie about him. But note that Graham’s characterization is not a definition of “hero”; it’s simply a comment on two of their properties. Graham’s twelve heroes are Jack Lambert, Kenneth Clark, Larry Mihalko, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Morris, P.G. Wodehouse, Alexander Calder, Jane Austen, John McCarthy, the Spitfire, Steve Jobs, and Isaac Newton. Could I make a similar list (though surely not duplicating any of Graham’s)?
I don’t think so.
But it did make me think about the issue. Which people have influenced me to such an extent that I would consider them to be my heroes? Would I really “decide what to do by asking what they’d do in the same situation”? Would my list consist of people who “cared almost excessively about their work” and “were absolutely honest”?
I suppose Isaac Asimov, Socrates, Charles Darwin, and Bertrand Russell would come to mind first. And maybe Johann Sebastian Bach. And probably Martin Gardner and Noam Chomsky. And it’s a cliché to put one’s mother and father on such a list, but it’s a cliché for a reason, so I will do that as well. And shouldn’t Shakespeare and Ibsen be on the list? And perhaps James Joyce? Well, that’s twelve, but I’m not convinced. This bears more thought…
Two and a half years ago I wrote a brief negative review of Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, by Ben Mezrich. I suggested that the account seemed to be fictional (even though it claims to be non-fiction) and that it “alternates between melodrama and tedium.”
Now they’ve gone and made a movie of it, 21. The plot outline on IMDb asserts that the movie is a “fact-based story,” But Drake Bennett’s article about it in the Boston Globe has this comment on the original book:
Bringing Down the House is not a work of “nonfiction” in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead of describing events as they happened, Mezrich appears to have worked more as a collage artist, drawing some facts from interviews, inventing certain others, and then recombining these into novel scenes that didn’t happen and characters who never lived. The result is a crowd-pleasing story, eagerly marketed by his publishers as true — but which several of the students who participated say is embellished beyond recognition.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the Globe article certainly makes me skeptical. Read the article, not the book.
On February 26, I wrote a mildly positive review of Nursery Crimes, by Ayelet Waldman. Because another novel in this series, The Big Nap, appeared to be more interesting, I decided (without great enthusiasm) to give it a read. I am pleased to report that this effort is distinctly more successful than Nursery Crimes, even though it has the same protagonist and the same basic formula: the Harvard-educated lawyer is still a stay-at-home mom, not the most promising premise for a story, even if she does turn out to be a (very) amateur detective as well, aided by her former prosecutorial experience.
Anyway, the most interesting aspect of The Big Nap is the interactions between the mainstream-Jewish protagonist and members of the Orthodox Jewish community in Los Angeles, especially the Hasidic subculture. As happens when reading many good works of fiction, I learned a lot from this novel (though I believe that the Verbover branch of Hasidism is an invention of Waldman and/or her husband, Michael Chabon, since I can find no references to it outside of their respective novels). While The Big Nap is still a light novel, it definitely has more heft than its predecessor and I found it worth reading. Maybe it would have meant still more to me if I had ever had the experience of being a mother, but (un)fortunately I haven’t. Nevertheless, I still recommend it to fellow non-mothers if you want an easy-to-read detective novel with a multicultural Jewish theme.
By the way, the significance of the title’s apparent allusion to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (or perhaps it’s to the movies made from the Chandler novel) escapes me. Maybe it would help if I read the book or saw the film…
In yesterday’s post, I recommended watching the movie of Mozart and the Whale before reading the book. And then I got to thinking about whether this was the natural order: after all, in most cases a movie is written after the book on which it is baed, so why shouldn’t it also be watched afterwards?
In standard mathematical fashion, let’s see whether we can abstract from the concrete example of one movie/book pairing to the more general case. What happens with other such pairs? Sometimes the order doesn’t matter. And often I read a book as soon as it comes out and then have to wait for the movie, so the order is imposed artificially. What are the consequences of reading the book first? On the plus side, you have the freedom to visualize characters and scenes as you wish, and you can learn the necessary background that might be omitted from the movie. On the minus side, the movie is usually a disappointment, precisely because it can’t possibly capture everything in the book. Furthermore, my own view is that surprises and plot twists in a movie are more effective when one hasn’t read the book first. There are surely exceptions, but on the whole I come down on the side of always reading a book after seeing the movie wherever possible.
On February 20 I reviewed Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger’s Love Story. After seeing and enjoying this fascinating movie, I decided to read the autobiography on which it was based. (Can I still call it an autobiography when it was “written” by two people, both Jerry Newport and Mary Newport? Not to mention Johnny Dodd, a writer for People who served as ghostwriter and who is duly credited?) I highly recommend reading this book — after you see the movie. Not surprisingly, the movie had to leave out lots and lots of material, and occasionally had to take artistic license, but it doesn’t actually contradict anything in the book, either in fact or in tone. The major difference is…well, I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, so let’s just say that the Newports’ relationship and Mary’s psyche turn out to be much more complicated than portrayed in the film. Again, no surprises there.
The only real problem with the book is that the first-person point of view changes without warning from section to section. Presumably Dodd interviewed the Newports extensively and fashioned the narrative out of their information with an attempt to capture their separate voices. But apparently he isn’t skilled enough to succeed at this endeavor, since it’s often impossible to tell who’s speaking except from external clues (like mentioning the spouse). Of course this makes me wonder whether he is actually capturing the voice of either Newport; probably what’s coming across is Dodd’s voice.
Another of the great ones is gone. Scientist, science fiction writer, and visionary Arthur C. Clarke died the day before yesterday at age 90. He is best known for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which the eternally rewatchable movie of the same name was based (though they were written simultaneously!). But he made so many more contributions than that. The Wikipedia article on him provides a fairly decent summary, including links to various obituaries. I particularly recommend the article about him by fellow writer David Brin, in the Daily Kos of all places. The NPR story on yesterday’s Morning Edition was an effective four-minute vignette.
I particularly remember Clarke’s observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” as well as his agreement with the late, lamented Isaac Asimov that each would refer to himself as “the world’s second best science fiction writer.” As Asimov wrote in his autobiography:
Arthur Charles Clarke was born toward the end of 1917 in Great Britain. He is another science fiction writer who has been thoroughly educated in science and he did extremely well in physics and mathematics.
He and I are now widely known as the Big Two of science fiction. Until early 1988, as I’ve said, people spoke of the Big Three, but then Arthur fashioned a little human figurine of wax and with a long pin.
At least, he has told me this. Perhaps he’s trying to warn me. I have made it quite plain to him, however, that if he were to find himself the Big One, he would be very lonely. At the thought of that, he was affected to the point of tears, so I think I’m safe.
I’m very fond of Arthur, and have been for forty years. We came to an agreement many years ago in a taxi which, at the time, was moving south on Park Avenue, so it is called the Treaty of Park Avenue. By it, I have agreed to maintain, on questioning, that Arthur is the best science fiction writer in the world, though I am also allowed to say, if questioned assiduously, that I am breathing down his neck as we run. In return, Arthur has agreed to insist, forever, that I am the best science writer in the world. He must say it, whether he believes it or not.
I don’t know if he gets credited for my stuff, but I am frequently blamed for his. People have a tendency to confuse us because we both write cerebral stories in which scientific ideas are more important than action.
Both Clarke and Asimov were science-based writers of science fiction; neither was a prose stylist, but both of them stuck to a transparent style that let the content of their writing shine through with great clarity.
I recently listened to the audiobook of Eye of the Beholder, by David Ellis. This work is a hybrid of two genres: the thriller and the police procedural. It’s definitely a page-turner — well, I can’t use that metaphor for the audiobook version, so let’s just say that it kept holding my attention and made me want to continue. But I’m not convinced that the hybrid genre has led to hybrid vigor. Perhaps that’s because of a continually jarring switch back-and-forth between a first-person POV and a third-person POV. The writing is clearly inspired by John Grisham and Jeffery Deaver, with an admixture of Ed McBain, but there are a lot of original aspects as well. In particular, the good guys aren’t completely good and some of the bad guys aren’t completely bad (except for one). In Deaver style, there are several plot twists whereby people aren’t who they seem to be. The major downside is that several scenes are extremely violent, enough so to turn off some readers completely. For those who can stand the violence, I recommend this study of lawyers, cops, criminals, and academe — quite a combination!
I seem to be inadvertently continuing my Asperger’s theme here. As Dog is My Witness, by Jeffrey Cohen, is a mystery that features a couple of boys with Asperger’s; one is the innocent suspect, the other the informal detective. You may recall that I reviewed another book by Cohen on December 19. The two books are almost entirely different in everything except for a minor theme about scriptwriting and a major role for the locale, since both so clearly take place in New Jersey with a lot of Jewish characters. An aside:
Why is New Jersey called the Garden State?
Because there’s a Rosenbloom around every corner.
(Say it aloud to get the full effect.)
Anyway, the author is the parent of a boy with Asperger’s, so it’s no wonder that he can write about the subject with authority and confidence. More surprising is that he writes with a great sense of humor. The humor extends not only to Asperger’s — which Cohen carries out with aplomb and not a trace of making fun — but also to family relations. I particularly liked a subplot about the mother of a minor character (no, not a minor in that sense; he’s an adult), as well as a long subplot about the protagonist’s obnoxious inlaws. By all means read this book!
The Second Mouse is a wonderful addition to Archer Mayor’s series of Vermont mysteries, which are always a pleasure to read because Mayor is so skilled at drawing verbal pictures of both the characters and the locales. As a reader, you always know where you are — usually a part of Vermont that’s not visited by tourists. The sense of place is overwhelmingly accurate. Characters develop convincingly from book to book. The good guys aren’t flawless, and the bad guys aren’t entirely bad. I’m not going to write anything more about The Second Mouse, the 17th in the series, except to say that you should definitely read it. And it wouldn’t hurt to read all 17 in sequence!
That’s 10, not ten — because there are twelve, which is still 10. Confused? Just pick the right base, of course. So I guess they’re still my 10 favorite books.
Anyway, if you look at my profile (the link is near the upper-right corner of this blog), you will see the current list of my favorite books, in no particular order:
- A Pattern Language
- Getting Things Done
- Foundation
- A Clockwork Orange
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
- Gödel, Escher, Bach
- How Children Fail
- The Odyssey
- The Nine Tailors
- The Lord of the Rings
- Excursions in Calculus
The list may change tomorrow, but here are a few words about my selections. Again remember that the order is mysteriously random:
- The 1216-page A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, by Christopher Alexander, is indeed about towns, buildings, and construction, as the subtitle claims, but it’s not just an architecture book or a city-planning book. This 1977 tome is all about the ways for us to design and think about the spaces we live in, written with a bit of a linguistic flavor as the title suggests. It truly helped me see the world differently, at least in terms of human interaction with our environment. Read it!
- I’ve already written twice before — in both 2006 and 2007 — about Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen (2001). See those links for more info concerning my thoughts on this valuable book.
- The classic Foundation series by Isaac Asimov is, well, a classic. But it’s so much more than that. It has had a major influence on science fiction fans, especially those (like me) who value historical points of view as well. Originally a trilogy formed out of eight short stories written from 1942 to 1950, it developed into a cluster of short stories and novels that altogether painted a sweeping view of future history. Though the series is not an example of elegantly written literature, its serviceably transparent style makes it worth reading multiple times, as I have done. The interaction between Asimov’s invented science of psychohistory and the discovery of chaos theory (which came after Asimov wrote the initial theory) is particularly intriguing for those who are interested in math. Try reading the series in the order suggested by the author.
- A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, was a tour-de-force when published as a book in 1962 and subsequently as a movie released in 1971. It’s essential reading for two very different reasons: primarily because it is not written in English but in Nadsat, an invented teenage creole that combines Russian words with Cockney English; secondarily because it raises so many interesting questions about personal responsibility and decision-making.
- Mathematician Charles Dodgson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), written (as everyone knows) under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, are not merely children’s novels but are masterpieces of language, logic, and a smidgen of mathematics. These two books are, of course, deeply embedded in our culture in so many ways, and are special favorites for those of us who love words and numbers. I especially recommend Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice.
- The most recent book on this list is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel by Mark Haddon published in 2003. While the reader is initially attracted by the fact that the chapters are numbered 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13 — and by the fact that the protagonist is a budding mathematician, the real interest in this novel is the author’s success in creating a first-person narrator with Asperger’s Syndrome.
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is my #1 favorite book, so why is it listed seventh? This 1979 masterpiece by Douglas Hofstadter weaves together mathematics, computer science, art, and music around a central theme of recursion and self-reference. I’ve read it and reread it often, and have taught from it six or seven times. Gödel, Escher, Bach is an amazing book that has changed the way I think about so many things!
- In 1964, when I was halfway through high school and only beginning to think that I might become a teacher, I read John Holt’s newly written work, How Children Fail. Although the title sounds negative, it presages today’s emphasis on error analysis and differentiated instruction. I have read it several times, not only in high school and college but also after I began teaching, and I always recommend it to beginning teachers.
- By far the oldest book on this list is Homer’s Odyssey, definitely one of my top 10 — preferably in the original Greek but otherwise in the Robert Fitzgerald translation. I had the joy of reading much of this epic poem in Greek in eleventh grade and all of it in English in twelfth grade. I know, some people prefer the Iliad, but I’m definitely in the Odyssey camp.
- The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers, may or may not be my favorite mystery, but I guess it must be since it’s the only mystery on this list. Sayers’s elegant writing leads most people to place this 1934 novel in the literature category rather than the mystery category, and the lovely mathematics behind bell-ringing adds an extra charm for certain readers.
- I couldn’t leave out Tolkien’s famous 1937–1949 trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, which I’ve probably read eight or nine times. Everyone knows it, so there’s not much for me to say here other than that it’s the epitome of creating an imaginary garden with real toads in it. And I also surprised myself by loving the movie versions as well.
- Finally, last but certainly not least, comes the best math book in the world. Despite its title, Excursions in Calculus: An Interplay of the Continuous and the Discrete by Robert M. Young (1992), is not about calculus — at least most of it isn’t. The subtitle is more informative. This elegantly written work explores a wide variety of math problems in areas such as iteration, number theory, combinatorics, and algebra. Although there is plenty of exposition of the text, the real meat of the book comes in the hundreds of carefully chosen problems, many of which lead the reader to explore fresh topics in some depth. The catch? The “solutions” in the back of the book don’t actually provide any solutions; they merely tell the reader where to find the solutions. You will need an exceptionally well-equipped library in order to follow the links. Since I rarely am in such a library when I work through the problems, I have to cope with them on my own. I’ve twice used parts of Excursions in Calculus as a text for independent study by advanced high-school students; it works well for that purpose, but it also richly repays study by any math enthusiast at or above the first-year calculus level.
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