Neither the potato-lentil “creme” nor the pizza mentioned yesterday were made. Ms. S. returned home at the expected time and we got a little television in before bed. Schedules can be busy, packed, hectic, and disjointed. They skew; they do not always align. And so you make the most of it.
I think the pizza and potato-lentil concoction are for Friday, perhaps Saturday; Thursday is another day during which our meals do not exactly align.
Part the First: the Hoard
Today’s book #1 is Ian Stewart’s Professor Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures (New York: Basic Books, 2009). The “king” of recreational mathematics was always the wonderful Martin Gardner, and what was nice about Gardner’s work over all those decades was the puzzle-nature of so much of it. Math was not always being explained or described, but often done. That’s why, to me, Douglas Hofstadter’s run on Gardner’s long-running Scientific American column, which became the basis for Hofstadter’s book Metamagical Themas, was also so fascinating: pose a problem, consider it, get letters-to-the-editor in response, and continue with the problem-solving.
Stewart’s book is *not exactly* a recreational mathematics book in the style of Gardner or Hofstadter; it is, rather, more a compendium of curiosities and party puzzles. The first real segment, is “Calculator Curiosity 1,” which instructs the reader to try something out on a calculator. Mere paragraphs later we have “Luckless Lovelorn Litavati,” which is more a biographical segment, and just after that we get “Sixteen Matches,” a well-known puzzle/trick, in which your task is to move exactly X matches in a configuration to get from configuration A to configuration B.
In “Secrets of the Abacus,” Stewart directs his readers to WikiPedia for a history of the object (the Abacus); I’m torn about this sort of outsourcing of information. On the one hand, a well-written book ought to be self-contained in a sense. At the same time we use footnotes and parenthetical references; content footnotes not only point to our sources, they elaborate tangents that distract from the main narrative flow and they direct us to further reading. But we also know not to cite encyclopedias, as encyclopedias contain, in the general sense, “common knowledge.” On the one hand readers should already *know* about encyclopedias as ways to expand their general knowledge, and if they have to be told to go to one, that’s a failure in the reader; on the other, if you are directing your readers to an encyclopedia, what faults in your tale-telling are you masking? And I write this as someone who linked to WikiPedia only paragraphs above … after all, isn’t the use of hyperlinks what we do in webpages?
I am curious as to why “The Catalan Conjecture,” “The Origin of the Square Root Symbol,” and “Please Bear with Me” are located beside one another; the last is a bad math pun (or was that redundant?), whereas the first is an interesting mix of a real math proble with its history, and the middle piece is a wondeful anecdote, much of which is outsourced to a website.
My complaints about the ordering, or lack thereof, in this book are seemingly answered in that introduction (“Second Drawer Down …”), in which Stewart references his early work (Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities), describes the genesis of this work, and justifies this book as a “miscellany”:
A miscellany, I have said before and stoutly maintain, should be miscellaneous. It need not stick to any fixed logical order. In fact, it shouldn’t, if only because there isn’t one.
But then, I wonder, why is it a “book”? Only because he wanted to have it published and make money? His earlier book was called a “Cabinet” … and that obviously leads the reader to 18th-century (and before—Renaissance—and after) “cabinets of curiosities.” Cabinets of curiosities took natural items, and even artifacts, that did not have “natural relationships” between them, and organized them … it’s not that the objects fit a natural taxonomy, it’s that the point of the cabinet was the organizing itself, that meaning was created through organizing. Definitely the advanced but even the less mathematically-experienced reader will notice trends and themes in Stewart’s “Hoard” … historical expositions, jokes, parlor tricks, etc. Those are the “types” of entries. Then there are the mathematical themes explored, such as geometry and topology, mathematical notation, equations or functions with special (or no!) solutions, logic, numbers and/or numerals, our mathematical ‘tools’ (e.g. the abacus, calculators …).
Stewart’s “Cabinet” was described, he reports, as “the ideal toilet book,” and if “Hoard” is more of the same, I cannot exactly decry that. But that also means it’s not the kind of book you sit down and read through. You don’t take it on a trip. You wouldn’t give it to friends to help them learn more about math.
Stewart at least ends his introduction with one of my favorite quotes:
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”
—Paul Erdős
I can’t find fault there.
Part the Second: Recommended Reading
When shopping for Ms. S.’s birthday gifts a while back I stopped by a thrift store, not for a gift itself, but for parts that could be made into a gift. That’s what I was looking for in the books section, and the thought of tearing up some of those books in order to craft something else left a weird taste in my mouth and sensation in my gut. It was the idea that books had to be sacrificed, and I remember reading about the etymology of ‘sacrifice’ as ‘to make sacred,’ etc. That of course, is not the same as the meaning of the word (we all know that arguing by etymology is a fallacy, don’t we?), but it’s still an interesting notion, but I digress. No books were harmed in that shopping trip, and the idea of repurposing and ‘sacrificing’ books is of interest for later.
I picked up a couple volumes there that either I’ve been meaning to read or that I’ve read and wanted to have copies of or pass on to others. And the copies I found were in nearly-new condition.
- Hall, Steven, The Raw Shark Texts, (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007): Several years ago—can it really have been four or five?—Hall’s book was recommended to me by reader-writer-editor friends. It’s smart—occasionally close to being too clever for its own good—and in a few parts it comes across as Mark Danielewsky by way of cyberpunk. The central conceit fit with some things I had already been writing, and in terms of questions about the mind and identity, it would link to the previous section (Ian Stewart) by way of Douglas Hofstadter (“I am a Strange Loop,” “The Mind’s I” (with Daniel Dennett)).
It was a bestseller; then, for the last several years, I’ve seen remaindered copies at B&N on almost every trip. But it’s still quite worthwhile. - Griffith, Nicola, Slow River, (New York: Del Rey, 1995): I’ve not read it, and yet I have two copies. I found a trade paperback years ago at another thrift store, that book rested on a bookshelf in an apartment for a year or so, and when I moved across the country I either gave the book back to the thrift store or I boxed it and sent it the other way across the country for storage in my father’s garage. The dust jacket on this one is slightly worse for wear, as if a cat or dog considered making it a chew toy, and then thought better of it.
My history is not with this book but with the author. Her science fiction novel “Ammonite” is a briliant read, but I came to her by way of The Blue Place, a sort of lesbian hard-boiled detective story that made its way from, in-story, from the US to Scandinavia, almost as if it were planting the seeds of and for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and so many other works.
Books multiply and collect. Somehow they reproduce, but not sexually, and it’s possible that they are parasites upon us. But over time they take up all the available space. Repurposing through sacrifice is one solution; other is through husbandry (for lack of a better term): prune and gift.
Some books maintain a special place in our hearts and so we must keep them, but not every book can be that book. Others are practical or such: we continually reference it, we go back to it, it’s of use. Some cookbooks are the former, some the latter, and some both. If a book is neither, why keep it? Some I keep, waiting for that “it will be useful someday” moment, or because “someday I’ll read it again.” But I should not delude myself. Some I maintain for professional reasons, but that’s a subcategory of “practical,” which is also where books that are kept because the have monetary value are placed. But you read a book and you like it, but you’re not likely to reread it; what should you do? (A) Give it to a friend, pass it on. Or (B) hold on to it until you can pass it on to a friend. And if it’s not good enough to give to a friend … give it to a thrift store or sell it.
This does not explain my acquisition of Griffith and Hall, not exactly. Unless one continues with the thought: the Griffith is a book I should get around to reading and, if it is good, pass on to a friend. The Hall is a book I may reread, may keep but lend out from time to time, or a book I’m keeping for the right person. I in fact did that with The Blue Place years ago: I found a copy at a thrift store, bought it, and promptly sent it as a birthday gift to a friend.
Part the Third: Miscellany
During one of those same recent thrift store forays I came across several books that I felt like acquiring but which (1) do not need to be pased on to friends, (2) will not maintain a lasting place on my shelf, and (3) aren’t of spectacular quality.
- Estes, Rose, The Demon Hand. Greyhawk, Vol. 6 (Lake Geneva, TSR, 1988)
- Estes, Rose and Thom Wham, The Stone of Time. RuneSword, Vol. 6. (New York: Ace, 1992)
- Pullman, Philip, The Shadow in the North. Sally Lockhart, Vol. 2 (New York: Dell Laurel-Leaf, 1986)
I remember childhood trips to independent book stores in the 80s; my mother would be shopping that Saturday at the ‘Emporium’ or similar, and I’d get an hour alone with books. I often roamed the fantasy aisles, and while I never bought any of TSR’s “Greyhawk” books (at that time, though, I was, I must admit, reading some “Dragonlance” and “Forgotten Realms” novels), I was somehow intrigued by them. Their cover art was, like that of other TSR books, produced by the likes of Clyde Caldwell and Larry Elmore, among others. There was a house style there, but at the same time the book’s design was a bit more “old school,” more like a relic; even if the books came out the same time as those from the other series, they seemed more like reprints from the 70s or early 80s. They also resembled the covers for the gamebooks Estes had also designed. And so I never bought or read any of them.
I did, however, have several of the RuneSword books, books one through three, actually. In McCall there was a small book store, and along the way I branched out in my reading of crappy serial fantasy: I bought other books by authors who had published with TSR, in particular Richard Knaak (this Dragonrealms novels). And then there was RuneSword, a cheap, pre-packaged deal, different books written by different authors, sometimes in teams, with little thought to real continuity, etc. But they had cover art by Larry Elmore. I stopped reading them before the final three volumes were published, but they came back to mind a few years ago, and I wondered: have they appeared as ebooks?
The answer is no.
And so I thought, if I find them in a thrift store, I should get them, “just because.” Neither work by Estes is particularly good, and with each I’m missing previous entries in the series, but perhaps I’ll “collect the whole set.” Just because.
That partially explains my purchase of the the Pullman. Unlike the two crappy fantasy novels above, his, an exercise in Victorian penny-dreadful pastiche writing, is still more or less in print, and pretty good to boot. Pullman hit the scene big time about a decade ago (sort of riding the Harry Potter craze) with “His Dark Materials,” a wonderful anti-Narnia kind of trilogy, but Pullman had been writing for years before that, and the Sally Lockhart novels are among those early works. For a while I collected his books whenever I found them on sale, though most were more for children than for (young) adults. I gave some as gifts. I had the first Sally Lockhart, which I found at a thrift store. I may or may not have found the other two on sale before I moved and put a lot of my books into storage. In any case, unlike “His Dark Materials,” the Sally Lockhart books are not available as ebooks; if you want them, you need physical copies.
They’re smart, they’re witty, and they’re worth reading.
Part the Last: a Bookend
We recently finished season 3 of Oz, and soon we’ll begin season 4; we have a “rotation,” which consists mainly of whichever science fiction show we’re watching, a 20-minute network comedy, and something “serious,” like Oz. These are all episodes or shows that have aired, so we can watch en episode every day or every other day.
And then there are more-or-less currently-airing shows, like our weekly dose of Top Chef Masters (season 4 finale to consume today, perhaps!) or Doctor Who (we usually watch it Sunday). The former might give me some ideas as to what to cook.
But now autumn is upon us, and with it the fall television schedule. Plenty of bad, which we’ll avoid, some good, and a couple “what the *&@)?!” moments that will intrigue us. Autumn. Not every pumpkin becomes a carriage; not every carriage gets squashed.
