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Wednesday reading
May. 4th, 2022 04:29 pmFinished:
Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer
Thriller in which a girl, moved frequently from town to town in the U.S. by her mother out of some mixture of paranoia and sensible fear of her violent stalker dad, discovers that one of the friends she’s stayed in touch with thanks to the social network CatNet is a friendly sentient AI. Something which could be useful, when circumstances threaten to let her stalker dad catch up with her.
I liked this - effectively tense, with the large stakes of 'will her dad find her?' and 'So what happens with this potentially world-transforming AI in the end?' and the smaller ones of whether the protagonist will be required to move again, having met someone IRL she’d really like to be friends with, all on the kindly background of a queer teenage social circle. And I loved the bit about hacking a classroom sex ed robot so as to make it provide actual sex ed. I did not like the way the ending leaned into the sequel, several things happened which felt deus ex machina, though the odds that they make everything more complicated in the sequel are high. (There are two climactic moments when the AI is able to intervene, the first one really landed for me and the second didn't). But I’ll definitely read the next one.
A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle
In audio, on the long car drive from Wellington to the Waikato. Steven Fry’s a good reader, though his introduction was low-content and somewhat interminable, it kept on telling us what the story following it was about to do. (I would mind this less if it could’ve been easily skipped).
I hadn’t realised I’d only ever read part one of this, in which Watson meets Sherlock and Sherlock does his first ever deducing. It is by far my favourite part. I was very surprised – though surely I must once have been told that this happened - when part two turned out to be an extended adventure story, absent both Watson and Holmes, in which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appear as a group of villains with near-supernatural powers of secret policing. All this goes along well enough, but as with the Steven Fry intro, I kept thinking, 'Gosh, there’s yet another section of this? When do we get to Sherlock?'
And Sherlock’s deductions are such nonsense, I am all in with Sam Vimes on this one, and the mystery is anything but satisfyingly elegant – most of the strange clues deflate into something which could’ve easily been much simpler – but fun still and all.
Partway through:
Feet in the Clouds, by Richard Askwith.
A book about the joys and consequences of racing over British mountains. I had never heard of fell-running before I heard of this book: it’s an obscure sport, which doesn’t publicise itself much, on the principle that those as can handle it will find their own way to it. Also, it’s hard to televise something which takes place across great lengths of mountain, often in terrible weather.
The book begins with a chapter in which the author is miserable, lost in the fog, and in moderately serious danger of death, and then steps back to try to answer the question, ‘Why would someone, having done this once, go back and do it again?’ The answer is of course complicated and different for different people. For the glory of being out in nature – for the joy of doing something with the support of friends who care about it as much as you do – to get away from modernity – to be a hard man who can master hard mountains – for money – for charity - because running downhill at high speed is incredible fun. I’m more in sympathy with some of those views than others, chapter one put enough emphasis on ‘be a hard man and master hard mountains’ to leave me thinking ‘I am not going to like this book very much’, and the general ‘weren’t things a bit better back in the day?’ vibes also leave me cold (except for when it’s ‘No, they literally were, foot-and-mouth disease devastated the economy here’). But gosh it’s fun to run down mountains. Askwith interviews the sport’s living heroes and narrates the legends of its dead ones, leavening that with his own more-representative failures to conquer the Bob Graham round – running forty-two peaks in twenty-four hours. (I’m still four chapters from the end, so I don’t know whether he manages it).
Not many of the sport’s heroes seem to have said ‘What I want is to be a great runner’ and gone out and done it; many of them simply went running one day and discovered that they happened to be extremely good at it. Some of them maintain full-time jobs herding sheep, besides.
There is clearly going to be a cost to a sporting culture which says ‘Get through by learning to ignore what your body is telling you as much as possible’. Plenty of stories here about athletes spending weeks not realising they have broken feet, grotesque descriptions of what happens to toenails after the twenty-second hour of running, and so on – as well as longer-term consequences, and deaths, and the expectation of reaching late life with an extremely good working knowledge of the ways legs can go wrong. Though the sport also treats knowing your absolute limits as important – giving up on a race when the weather’s too bad is almost as respectable as being the sole runner who bloody-mindedly gets through it anyway – I don't like to think of the unrecorded incidental damage, and I’d surely not have liked to be the child of one of the parents in this book who’s determined that all his children shall also be fell-runners. But as someone who sometimes struggles to be motivated at all, let alone obsessed, I find myself drawn to the upsides of the skill of pushing on through regardless: the chance of doing a measurably incredible thing, and the ability to say, as record-setter Billy Bland said, ‘I know that what I did was as good as I was.’
Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer
Thriller in which a girl, moved frequently from town to town in the U.S. by her mother out of some mixture of paranoia and sensible fear of her violent stalker dad, discovers that one of the friends she’s stayed in touch with thanks to the social network CatNet is a friendly sentient AI. Something which could be useful, when circumstances threaten to let her stalker dad catch up with her.
I liked this - effectively tense, with the large stakes of 'will her dad find her?' and 'So what happens with this potentially world-transforming AI in the end?' and the smaller ones of whether the protagonist will be required to move again, having met someone IRL she’d really like to be friends with, all on the kindly background of a queer teenage social circle. And I loved the bit about hacking a classroom sex ed robot so as to make it provide actual sex ed. I did not like the way the ending leaned into the sequel, several things happened which felt deus ex machina, though the odds that they make everything more complicated in the sequel are high. (There are two climactic moments when the AI is able to intervene, the first one really landed for me and the second didn't). But I’ll definitely read the next one.
A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle
In audio, on the long car drive from Wellington to the Waikato. Steven Fry’s a good reader, though his introduction was low-content and somewhat interminable, it kept on telling us what the story following it was about to do. (I would mind this less if it could’ve been easily skipped).
I hadn’t realised I’d only ever read part one of this, in which Watson meets Sherlock and Sherlock does his first ever deducing. It is by far my favourite part. I was very surprised – though surely I must once have been told that this happened - when part two turned out to be an extended adventure story, absent both Watson and Holmes, in which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appear as a group of villains with near-supernatural powers of secret policing. All this goes along well enough, but as with the Steven Fry intro, I kept thinking, 'Gosh, there’s yet another section of this? When do we get to Sherlock?'
And Sherlock’s deductions are such nonsense, I am all in with Sam Vimes on this one, and the mystery is anything but satisfyingly elegant – most of the strange clues deflate into something which could’ve easily been much simpler – but fun still and all.
Partway through:
Feet in the Clouds, by Richard Askwith.
A book about the joys and consequences of racing over British mountains. I had never heard of fell-running before I heard of this book: it’s an obscure sport, which doesn’t publicise itself much, on the principle that those as can handle it will find their own way to it. Also, it’s hard to televise something which takes place across great lengths of mountain, often in terrible weather.
The book begins with a chapter in which the author is miserable, lost in the fog, and in moderately serious danger of death, and then steps back to try to answer the question, ‘Why would someone, having done this once, go back and do it again?’ The answer is of course complicated and different for different people. For the glory of being out in nature – for the joy of doing something with the support of friends who care about it as much as you do – to get away from modernity – to be a hard man who can master hard mountains – for money – for charity - because running downhill at high speed is incredible fun. I’m more in sympathy with some of those views than others, chapter one put enough emphasis on ‘be a hard man and master hard mountains’ to leave me thinking ‘I am not going to like this book very much’, and the general ‘weren’t things a bit better back in the day?’ vibes also leave me cold (except for when it’s ‘No, they literally were, foot-and-mouth disease devastated the economy here’). But gosh it’s fun to run down mountains. Askwith interviews the sport’s living heroes and narrates the legends of its dead ones, leavening that with his own more-representative failures to conquer the Bob Graham round – running forty-two peaks in twenty-four hours. (I’m still four chapters from the end, so I don’t know whether he manages it).
Not many of the sport’s heroes seem to have said ‘What I want is to be a great runner’ and gone out and done it; many of them simply went running one day and discovered that they happened to be extremely good at it. Some of them maintain full-time jobs herding sheep, besides.
There is clearly going to be a cost to a sporting culture which says ‘Get through by learning to ignore what your body is telling you as much as possible’. Plenty of stories here about athletes spending weeks not realising they have broken feet, grotesque descriptions of what happens to toenails after the twenty-second hour of running, and so on – as well as longer-term consequences, and deaths, and the expectation of reaching late life with an extremely good working knowledge of the ways legs can go wrong. Though the sport also treats knowing your absolute limits as important – giving up on a race when the weather’s too bad is almost as respectable as being the sole runner who bloody-mindedly gets through it anyway – I don't like to think of the unrecorded incidental damage, and I’d surely not have liked to be the child of one of the parents in this book who’s determined that all his children shall also be fell-runners. But as someone who sometimes struggles to be motivated at all, let alone obsessed, I find myself drawn to the upsides of the skill of pushing on through regardless: the chance of doing a measurably incredible thing, and the ability to say, as record-setter Billy Bland said, ‘I know that what I did was as good as I was.’
