14. Lamb

Book: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

Author: Christopher Moore

Number of pages: 444

What I’m watching: TV: How I Met Your Mother, Bones, Dexter, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Colbert Report, Red Dwarf, Friends, The Victor Borge Show

Movies: Night of the Living Dead, The Goonies, The Artist, Heart and Souls, Easy A, When Harry Met Sally, Tangled, The Notebook, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

What I’m playing: Terraria, Batman: Arkham Origins, Skyrim, Bioshock, Bioshock 2, Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Dead Rising 2, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Injustice: Gods Among Us

 

            Well, it’s the Christmas season, so why not a book about Christ? I remember one of my brothers reading Lamb a few years ago and claiming it was his favorite book. With that praise, I bought the book a bit later, but never read it. Now my fiancé just finished it, and she also really enjoyed it. Her second opinion pushed me to reading my copy of Lamb.

So the premise of the novel is that Jesus had a lifelong friend since childhood named Biff. An angel resurrects Biff in order for him to write a gospel chronicling Jesus’s life, filling in the 30 years between his birth and his ministry. Christopher Moore makes it abundantly clear that though he put real research into the novel, it should not be taken seriously. He has a blessing at the beginning, but I think his back cover photo and “About the Author” say enough: 

CHRISTOPHER MOORE is the author of seven novels, including this one. He began writing at the age of six and became the oldest known child prodigy when, in his early thirties, he published his first novel. His turn-ons are the ocean, playing the toad lotto, and talking animals on TV. His turn-offs are salmonella, traffic, and rude people. Chris enjoys cheese crackers, acid jazz, and otter scrubbing. He lives in an inaccessible island fortress in the Pacific.

And with that, I have no idea what to expect in this book.

            First off, Jesus is called Joshua throughout Lamb, because “Jesus is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, which is Joshua” (8). So the first part tells the story of Biff and Joshua growing up in Nazareth. They play out stories from the scripture, they do a little apprenticing with their dads, Biff hits on the Blessed Mary, Josh performs some minor miracles, and other 10-year-old stuff. They make a fast-growing friendship with the new kid in town, Maggie – Moore’s version of Mary Magdalene. There’s also the neighborhood bully, Jakan, who I totally predicted would become one of the high priests who’d have it in for Joshua when they grew up. One of Josh, Biff, and Maggie’s adventures involves attempting to circumcise a statue of Apollo:

Joshua took a quick swipe with the mallet and the chisel slipped, neatly severing Apollo’s unit, which fell to the dirt with a dull thud.

“Whoops,” said the Savior. (60)

The three of them also witness a murder. This first part of Lamb totally feels like a coming-of-age story, like Tom Sawyer, Bridge to Terabithia, Sandlot, IT, Simon Burch, and I’m sure a ton more.¹

            Moore infuses his humor into his writing style, which makes me really like the book. There are a lot of masturbation/sex jokes, which I’m fine with, but there are A LOT. Biff starts out as a young boy going through puberty, and he never seems to mature out of his horniness.

            Periodically, Moore shows what is going on to the resurrected Biff while he’s writing. For awhile I was more curious to see what happened to present-day resurrected Biff than 2000-years-ago Biff. That lessened as I read more, but they’re both interesting.

            Moore also incorporates the actual Bible stories of Jesus in when he can, although with his own spin. Of the episode with young Jesus at the Temple, Biff had to say “in retrospect, after having grown up, somewhat, and having lived, died, and been resurrected from the dust, I realize that there may be nothing more obnoxious than a teenager who knows everything” (98).

Before too long, Josh leaves Nazareth to find the three magi who found him in Bethlehem and learn about being the Messiah. Biff tags along, but Maggie has to stay behind. Pretty much all the unaccounted years of Josh’s life get spent with the magi. There are some mini-adventures in between and during. Each of the magi lives in the East, so Josh learns a lot of Eastern philosophy, religion, and meditation. Biff learns some of that too, but mainly has sex. They become Buddhist monks for a while and train in martial arts.² I actually really like how Joshua integrates so much Eastern wisdom into his ministry later on.

I don’t want to go into much more detail on plot or give every instance of why I think Lamb is funny, because that’s a lot (but I will mention it is a great scene when they run into Legion). I feel that Joshua’s character is a good portrayal of Jesus; he is a close representation of how Son of God is usually viewed, which I think is important to the story. I liked seeing how Moore characterized all the apostles. I liked Bartholomew right away at the beginning, but in the latter half of Lamb, he becomes pretty flat and one-tracky. They reunite with Maggie. A lot of the scenes from the actual Gospels like the Sermon on the Mount and the interrogations with Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas happen in the story, but not firsthand, probably because we already know what happens, though Moore did leave me guessing to the very end about Josh’s death on the cross. I recognized Joy’s – and subsequently Biff’s – phlebotinum vial pretty quickly, but wasn’t sure how it would play out. I’m remaining vague on this point to not spoil anything.

            Lamb is a funny, thrilling, clever, honest, absurd, and wholly entertaining take on the life of Jesus.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying.

 

Notes

1. Speaking of Jesus and coming-of-age stories, for your consideration, please observe the similarities between Jesus from Godspell and Sloth from The Goonies.

2. Looks like The Matrix got its Jesus/Neo parallel dead on.

Works Cited

Moore, Christopher. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.
            New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Print.

13. Spook

Book: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Author: Mary Roach

Number of pages: 311

What I’m watching: TV: Bones, Red Dwarf, The Critic, Angel, Once Upon a Time, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Movies: Batman: Year One, Justice League: Doom, The Langoliers, What About Bob?, Memento, Hocus Pocus, Nosferatu, Ghostbusters

What I’m playing: Pokemon Red, Pokemon Stadium, Magic 2013: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers, Dead Rising 2, Terraria, The Last of Us, Batman: Arkham Origins

 

            With only one book remaining of my six, I turned my eyes to Spook. Honestly, the order of the six ended up exactly the order I wanted. A big novel followed by a light read, two shorter analytical non-fiction, a quick return to a more narrative book, and finishing with a book that I’ve had for I don’t know how long that I’ve been meaning to get to but kept putting off. Now, I’ve finally picked it up, and what better timing for Halloween than a book called Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.¹ Mary Roach has another book that I own and love called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. In it, Roach is one part researcher of weird science history and one part hands-on anecdotes of weird science now. Right off the bat, I recommend Stiff; it is a humorous look at a strange scientific area. And right off the bat, I could tell by the title of Spook that the book’s scientific subject would be even stranger.

            Roach’s “Introduction” didn’t get off to a good start with me. She begins by stating how she’s skeptical of religion because there’s no proof. She says “science remains the most solid god I’ve got” (12-13). It bothers me when non-religious people say that. I won’t go into it, and there’s more than one reason, so to keep myself short and not ranting, it irks me when people make it seem like a choice: you have to either accept science or religion as true. And the assumption is that if you choose religion, you’re stupid. The two are not mutually exclusive! But Mary Roach is also skeptical of science, because it too sometimes fails to provide real proof behind its answers. I’m not bothered by her skepticism – it can be a good trait to have. I just find it demeaning of my religion when people misuse the term “god.” And again, to Roach’s credit, her skepticism never comes off as close-mindedness.

            So, Mary Roach’s approach in her book is to look into different scientific studies of what happens to a person’s soul after death, both historical research and contemporary research. What I love about her books is how she inserts herself into what she’s writing about. For her first section of Spook, which deals with the idea of reincarnation, she not only describes how cases of claimed reincarnations get studied, Roach follows along with an Indian scientist who investigates these claims. Roach has a very natural, flowing, and easy-to-read writing style, which helps greatly to make some of the subject matter more accessible. She transitions smoothly between her research and her personal experiences. So, she and Dr. Kirti Rawat meet a boy who claims to be the reincarnated soul of a young man who died recently a few villages away. They also talk with the boy’s family and the family of the deceased man about anything the boy knew, said, or did that made them believe he’s the real deal. I never gave any thought to the investigation of possible reincarnations, and it’s an interesting read. I guess it’s kind of like priests investigating the occurrence of possible miracles to see if they’re really miracles.

            Roach’s next chapter discusses the scientific history that studied the beginning of life – as in, where do babies come from?² Scientists had some strange answers, even after sperm and ova could be seen via microscope. Leeuwenhoek, the first person to find them, believed that sperm were pretty much mini-people and the woman’s egg was just something for the sperm-man to eat.

But then, if sperm were little animals which ate, then there also had to be little sperm poops. See? Science was pretty weird. Roach ties all this early biology into her book by discussing ensoulment – the moment the soul enters the forming prenatal life. Roach also tells the history of people searching for the soul’s location in the body.

            That leads into her next chapter, as she writes about experimental studies about the weight of a soul. Since some people believed that the soul had weight, a study was done in 1901 which weighed people as they died to see if they lost any weight the moment they died. It’s difficult for me to showcase Roach’s humor without quoting long passages setting up the context. Her humor is built into her writing and is often contextual or based off of an earlier statement, like a running gag. Her wit carries throughout the book. What I can showcase is the oddity that is the history of science.

            Mary Roach goes to Cambridge University to find the sample of an alleged ectoplasm from a 1939 séance. Ectoplasm, which I first learned about in Ghostbusters, is left-over ghost residue. It can also be found in the Elder Scrolls games.

But the ectoplasm that Roach examines comes from the medium Helen Duncan. Back when séances were a thing, I guess it was common for the medium to end up covered in ectoplasm after communing with the spirits. However, these ectoplasm samples appeared to be cloth or animal intestines. Not weird enough yet? In order to prove the authenticity of their ectoplasms, mediums underwent rectal and vaginal searches prior to séances to show they weren’t hiding these things up there and just whipping it out during the séance.

I think that is sufficiently weird.

            Roach’s section of psychic mediums culminates with her taking a 3-day course on being a medium. Props to her for really making herself a part of her research. This part reminds me of the South Park episode about John Edward. Mary Roach meets her roommate for the weekend, who is “propped on her bed, reading a romance novel. We make small talk for a minute, and then she says, ‘I foresaw that you’d be an American. Blond and chubby.’ I’m hardly blond or chubby, but I feel it’s too early in our relationship to mention this” (172). Ha!

            Next, Mary Roach investigates EVP: electronic voice phenomena. She visits the place of the infamous Donner Party with a group of people with tape recorders and tries to catch ghost voices on tape. She writes about the history and validity of people hearing words out of white noise. Also mentioned is the research of people trying to record the voices that schizophrenic individuals hear, in case they aren’t hallucinations but are really ghosts.

            She also experiences first-hand electromagnetic pulses and infrasound waves, which both may induce audio and visual hallucinations. The science behind it is fascinating, and it’s cool to see how these two scientific principles can be applied to explaining famously “haunted” places. Her final research deals with studies of near-death experiences in which people claim to have out-of-body experiences. So, the idea is that the soul can leave the body and does so after death. Roach doesn’t experience this first-hand, but she does witness a participant in one such study.

            All in all, Spook is informative, entertaining, clever, and definitely worth reading. There’s much more information and humor in Spook that I didn’t cover, and I recommend reading it. Want more weird science courtesy of Mary Roach’s research? Cambridge University performed one study which involved a man dressed in a white sheet running through a porno theater to see if anyone believed it was an actual ghost. Almost half the people didn’t even notice.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying.

 

Notes

1. Plus, it’s the 13^th book. Spooky, right?

2. Lebanon.

Works Cited

Roach, Mary. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. New York: W. W. Norton &

          Company, 2005. Print.

12. An Unquiet Mind

Book: An Unquiet Mind

Author: Kay Redfield Jamison

Number of pages: 224

What I’m watching: TV: Bones, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Red Dwarf

What I’m playing: Pokémon Red

 

 

 

 

            After Geekspeak and The American West on Film, I wanted something more narrative. I wanted to read a story, not essays. Luckily, I rolled a three!

An Unquiet Mind isn’t a fictional story; it’s a memoir by a psychologist who has manic-depressive illness, what is now called bipolar disorder. Dr. Jamison actually prefers the term manic-depressive illness and discusses why in the book. This book came out in the 90s, and I remember, even as a kid, being aware of how huge this book became – it was a national bestseller. However, I didn’t know what it was about until much later. Recently, one of my psychology professors at CSU strongly recommended it. So I thought, yeah, I might look into it. Before reading, I noticed on the back cover a blurb by another famous psychologist/writer, Oliver Sacks – an author whose work may soon be making an appearance on this blog. I took that as a good sign.

            Dr. Jamison first explains in a prologue that she started studying mood disorders because of her own personal experience with manic-depressive illness. I understand; my own decision to pursue a psychology degree was based, in part, on my own experience with depression. After the prologue, she opens with an incredible story of a childhood experience one day on the playground. She grew up near an Air Force base, being a pilot’s daughter. One day, a plane almost crashed into her school. It missed the school because the pilot sacrificed himself to maneuver the plane away from the school rather than eject and risk the plane hitting the school. Holy shit, what an opening!

            I love Dr. Jamison’s writing style. Her words seem to me natural, conversational, brilliant, intellectual, clever, and really funny. I did not expect a book about manic-depression to be as funny as it is. On a childhood trip to the zoo, Jamison writes “If there is anything more boring that watching a sloth – other than watching cricket, perhaps, or the House Appropriations Committee meetings on C-SPAN – I have yet to come across it” (20). Jamison writes about her life growing up in a military environment, her family, and her first time dealing with manic-depression, which was in high school. I’m not doing justice to her richly detailed, eventful life, but I will say that it did not take long into reading An Unquiet Mind to be hooked by Jamison’s compelling memoir.

            Next are Kay Jamison’s college years. Sometimes, she goes into details about her illness. She talks about her unrestrained buying sprees during her manias. What sucks on top of that is “unfortunately, the pink overdraft notices from the bank always seemed to arrive when I was in the throes of the depressions that inevitably followed my weeks of exaltation” (43). During college, Jamison spent a year studying abroad in Scotland. There, she studied marine biology, a class which she found challenging but rewarding:

There were, however, definite advantages to studying invertebrate zoology. For starters, unlike in psychology, you could eat your subjects. The lobsters – fresh from the sea and delicious – were especially popular. We cooked them in beakers over Bunsen burners until one of our lecturers, remarking that “It has not gone unnoticed that some of your subjects seem to be letting themselves out of their tanks at night,” put a halt to our attempts to supplement college meals. (50-51)

I won’t reference every anecdote or quote from the book that I enjoyed, because that would simply be too much. I was fascinated throughout. However, it wasn’t all funny. She brings up a lot of the difficulties of both having manic-depressive illness and the negative side effects of the lithium treatment. For instance, the lithium affected Dr. Jamison’s vision and concentration, resulting in the inability to read books (much later she decides to decrease her lithium dosage and regains her ability to read).

            Her position as a successful psychologist allows for some pretty remarkable perspectives. First of all, she is surrounded by other intelligent psychologists who both help her and provide their own opinions, including her therapist. And as a psychologist, Dr. Jamison has the added lens of seeing patients who also suffer from mental illness. She is herself both a patient and psychotherapist. She’s professionally treated others with manic-depression and seen the deadly result of going off lithium, but personally fought with the decision to continue her own treatment.

            I mentioned in my last post that I spent a week in Canada. While there, my fiancé and I had a little lunch date/picnic along the river. We decided I would read aloud from An Unquiet Mind.

I gave her a brief recap of what I’d been reading and just picked up from where I left off. Dr. Jamison had just met David, a charming Englishmen who visited UCLA. They fell in love and she spent time with him in London and Washington. It was romantic and suited our date. However, David passed away from a heart attack. I read to Olivia David’s funeral and Jamison’s grief. At the end of that section, I had to pause and put the book down because we were crying. Very few books have ever brought me to tears. An Unquiet Mind created, for me, the rare mix of laughter and tears from a book.

            I’m glad to say that Dr. Jamison finds love again and marries Richard Wyatt. Within her book, she reflects how An Unquiet Mind primarily became about love and personal relationships, rather than solely about manic-depressive illness. I find that accurate. This book was largely about her family, friends, colleagues, and romantic relationships. And I’d say that’s a good thing. It is deeply personal, which makes the book so much more compelling and real.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying. This book was so much better than I expected, and I strongly recommend it to anyone, not just psychology nerds like me.

 

Works Cited

Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Print.

11. The American West on Film

Book: The American West on Film: Myth and Reality

Author: Richard A. Maynard

Number of pages: 130

What I’m watching: TV: Garfield & Friends, Red Dwarf, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Seinfeld, Angel, Wonder Showzen, Friends, Bones Movies: Once, Philadelphia Story, Escape From L.A., Groundhog Day, Slither, Beastly, Escape From New York, Ghost, The Phantom of the Opera (Stage Recording)

What I’m playing: Ultimate Spiderman, Skyrim, Defense Grid: The Awakening, Dead Space 3, The Last of Us, Castlevania IV, Legend of Zelda, Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Pokemon Stadium, Pokemon Red, Secret of Mana

 

            Well then, I guess it’s September already…since my last post, I’ve watched five seasons of Buffy, a season of Angel, two and a half series of Red Dwarf, played all of R-1 of Pokémon Stadium and a ridiculous number of hours in Pokémon Red, finished Dead Space 3, traveled to Canada for a week for Stratford’s Theater Festival, and more.

But what really got in the way of my blog has been my job. Lately, it’s been wearing me down. As much as I want to keep at my bookshelves, at the end of the day it’s a lot easier to plop down on the couch and turn on Netflix.

            Anyway…The American West on Film!

I love Westerns: Once Upon a Time in the West, True Grit, The Magnificent Seven, 3:10 to Yuma, The Sons of Katie Elder, the list goes on. So, of course I was excited to read a critical analysis of them (and I mean that). However, within the first few pages, I get an “Editor’s Introduction,” explaining how “our national preoccupation with the cowboy legend reflects an American tradition of militant individualism, violence, White supremacy, and an often contradictory code of right and wrong” (vii). Dammit, I hope this book doesn’t make me end up hating Westerns.

            Looking at the table of contents, I notice there are four major sections of the book, and only the last two actually discuss Western films. The first part looks at actual writings from the Old West (“The West as Fact”). The second part deals with Western novels. So turns out I’ll have to read half the book before I get to any Western films, even though the book is called The American West on Film!

            So the basic idea of the book is to separate all the untruth from Western fiction, identify all the inaccuracies and legends, and show how different reality was from the glorified depictions of cowboys in movies and books. Maynard begins by showing how boring real cowboy life was back in the 1800s and how the biggest threat was surviving the elements. He includes diary excerpts and letters from settlers. Now sure, their lives aren’t heroic or exciting like movie characters, but I won’t say I wasn’t interested by them. The lives and hardships faced by early settlers, I find, are very compelling.

Maynard includes lyrics to “The Lane County Bachelor,” a sarcastic song from 1890 about living out west. One stanza includes “And the gay little centipede, void of all fear / Crawls over my pillow and into my ear” (13). That’s fucking nasty. Centipedes are gross enough on the ground, but, man, going into my ear? Yuck!

Following that are excerpts from essays and books about the racism in Western fiction. Writers touch on the misrepresentation or lack of representation of non-Whites. In Westerns, Native Americans are portrayed as violent and unintelligent savages, often barely human. Black people are pretty non-existent. I do love Westerns, but, yeah, I recognized an inherent racism in some I’ve watched. For example, El Dorado and The Shakiest Gun in the West are two films which have negative Chinese images and stereotypes. What’s kind of neat is that since the book is meant as a classroom text, each section ends with a few discussion questions. I guess I’m a nerd for thinking that’s neat, and using the word neat.

            Part Two (“The West as Fiction”) primarily explains the beginnings of how Western life became mythified. Maynard sums it up pretty well as Part Two opens:

Three Eastern gentlemen of wealth, education, and breeding helped legitimize the cowboy’s image and make him into America’s “knight in shining armor.” Theodore Roosevelt, Frederic Remington, and Owen Wister had many things in common. Fellow Easterners…and peers in age, wealth, and status (they were also quite close friends), the three men lived in the far West for only short periods of their early adulthood. Still, each came away fascinated with the freedom of Western life. Each interpreted this as a kind of natural alternative to the unexciting, industrialized society of the East. Members of a disillusioned upper-class establishment, they saw the great plains as a sanctuary…(29)

Roosevelt and Wister both were writers. Remington was an artist.

All three of them over-idealized their brief experiences and created a fantasy image of rugged individualism in the “Wild West.”

            I also learned about Buffalo Bill’s history. Originally William Cody, a hunter and soldier, he became a performing cowboy stuntman, using the stage name Buffalo Bill. His performance character became a literary figure. Okay, referencing this next part from my book is going to be a little messy because I am going to be quoting a book which is quoting a book which is quoting a book. I don’t even know how deep a quote-ception that is. So, Maynard the editor includes part of a book by Henry Nash Smith who quotes Buffalo Bill’s described appearance in the story Gold Plume, the Boy Bandit. Buffalo Bill wears “a red velvet jacket, white corduroy pants, stuck in handsome top boots, which were armed with heavy gold spurs, and…upon his head a gray sombrero, encircled by a gold cord and looped up on the left side with a pin representing a spur. He also wore an embroidered silk shirt, a black cravat, gauntlet gloves, and a sash of red silk, in which were stuck a pair of revolvers and a dirk-knife” (37). That over-the-top description reminds me of Marty in Back to the Future Part III, when Doc Brown dresses up Marty to send him back to 1885.

Though on some levels that movie plays upon the mythos of the Old West, it does in part acknowledge inaccuracies of the idealized West.

            I finally get to Part 3 and some movies, but I don’t know any of them. The book was published in 1974, but films mentioned are mostly from the 40s and 50s. Most of my favorite Westerns are from the 60s and 70s. I’d like to see a new edition of this book released, or a second volume, updating the contemporary perspectives of Western films. I do recognize some of the films, and there’s enough explanation for the films I don’t that it’s easy to follow. However, there was one tediously long section. It was boring, but I still cared about what I read. I learned that apparently lynching in movies became a film taboo except to show “the illegality and injustice of lynching itself” (Warshow 68). Is that still a thing?

            Maynard includes a number of interviews and movie reviews, which I thought were all cool. Also included is a promotional piece for Geronimo designed for classrooms suggesting boys build model canoe ashtrays and the girls design Indian blankets. All I will say is “Ugh…” But that is followed by a really cool comparison of a novel and a screenplay, addressing how the movie adaptation reworks layered characters into flatter, two-dimensional types.

            I didn’t like every excerpt Maynard included. Pauline Kael wrote on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, how she “dreaded an evening with James Stewart and John Wayne” (103). She referred to Western film actors as “stars who have aged in the business, who have survived and who go on dragging their world-famous, expensive carcasses through the same old motions” (103). What a dick! However, as shitty as I found Pauline Kael, almost all of the readings within the book are really cool; letters, diaries, screenplays, stage plays, novels, interviews, movie reviews, and essays all come together in one awesome read.

            At the end, Maynard compiles a nice filmography, recommending a lot of films within different sub-genres. A few of them I’ve seen, a few of them I’ve heard of, and a lot of them I’d like to find and watch. Maynard suggests simply renting a “D” grade film for a classroom setting. I’ve heard of B-movies. How low do you have to get for D-level films?

            So, I still love Westerns. Before the book, I hadn’t thought about their accuracy or distinguishing history from legend. Rather than making me hate the genre, the book gave me an added level of appreciating them.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying.

 

Works Cited

Maynard, Richard A. The American West on Film: Myth and Reality. Rochelle Park,

            New Jersey: Hayden, 1974. Print.



1-10 Recap

What I’m watching: Movies: Dead Snow

 

            Well, I’m off to a slow start. But that’s what I expected, being a slow reader after all. Now that I’ve done ten books (actually, eleven with two Ten Little Indians), I just wanted to do a little retrospective of my time during the past ten posts and write about some things happening outside of what books I read. I plan to make these little recaps after every ten books.

Part of the decision came from my realization that just writing down the name of a television show or videogame doesn’t indicate how much time I gave to it. Movie titles, on the other hand, are explanation enough. Each one stands alone and has a set amount of time for it. So, I figure I can use this as an opportunity to discuss any TV or gaming (or movies, too – it’s my blog!) that I gloss over in my regular posts. I also want to keep a total of how many books are staying versus going.

 

Wedding: Well, I got 15 more months until the big day. Since I started my blog, Olivia and I finished asking all 14 members of our wedding party to confirm that they want to stand up with us. All yeses. That makes me glad. We have a church we want, but we still need a reception venue. We’ve searched plenty of places, but they are either too small or too expensive. We still have a few ideas to check into. We got our engagement photos half-taken. Olivia and I had a weekend of seriously considering moving up the wedding by a year.

 

TV: I watched the entire series of Cadfael. I love that show! There are only 13 episodes, but each one is 75 minutes long. My favorite character, apart from Cadfael, got replaced after the first season, which sucked, and then the replacement got replaced for the last season. Olivia and I barreled through the first two seasons of Downton Abbey. Another amazing British show. Mr. Bates and Anna were immediately my favorite characters. I’ll admit, I really liked Lavinia and part of me preferred her to Mary. Mary lost some major points with me after turning down Matthew while the entail was being questioned. Off and on I would join Olivia as she marathoned all of the Office. I watched all of Twin Peaks season 2. I was disappointed with the show’s end. I’ve heard the movie sucks ass, but I was still going to watch it until I heard that it’s a prequel. Dammit, I just want some closure! I watched the first two seasons of Once Upon a Time. That show’s pretty cool. I don’t really like the actor playing Emma Swan. She always has a grimacey frown on her face, no matter what’s happening.

I hope I made my point. Olivia and I watched the first two series (that means seasons in British) of Misfits. The first series is amazing and was hard to put down. It’s very funny and very thrilling. Series two was really awesome as well. However, we started watching the beginning of series three, but there were so many changes (worst of all, our favorite character left the show) that we weren’t enjoying it at all. So we stopped and haven’t gone back.

 

Movies: I never got around to that Tarantino marathon. Damn. I still mean to do that.

 

Videogames: I started and beat the Uncharted trilogy, God of War 3, Far Cry 3, Bioshock: Infinite, and the Injustice: Gods Among Us story mode during my blog. Uncharted was amazing, and the third game was epic all the way through. So many awesome set pieces, such as the sinking ship, the plane falling apart in the sky, the train convoy from 2…all three games were super fun. The first Bioshock is still my favorite story, and I think Bioshock 2 is my favorite gameplay, what with the dual-wielding plasmid and weapon. And the drill. There was not enough Songbird in Infinite. It was still a good game. I tried picking it up later to try 1999 mode, but I got my ass handed to me pretty much as soon as the fighting started. I started Dead Space 3, but I hit a wall of being scared once the necromorphs jumped up in difficulty. After finishing Twin Peaks, I picked up where I left off in Deadly Premonition (because I guess that’s the next best thing to a sequel I’m going to see). I created new characters in both Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Olivia and I started a band in Rock Band, The Mistake. We collected all the Star Coins in Mario.

 

Running Total: 3 Staying, 8 Going.

10. Geekspeak

Book: Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness

Author: Dr. Graham Tattersall

Number of pages: 239

What I’m watching: TV: The Office, The Mindy Project, Downton Abbey, Black Adder, Cadfael Movies: The King’s Speech, Much Ado About Nothing (2013), Back to the Future, Robots, Tomb Raider, How to Train Your Dragon, Wayne’s World, The Wrong Trousers

What I’m playing: The New Super Bros, Far Cry 3, Rock Band, Skyrim, Crysis

 

            For whatever reason, I just kept putting off this post. Maybe I wasn’t sure how I felt after reading my next book, Geekspeak.

Well, first off, I picked this book up and a sale of donated books. Turns out this copy is an “UNCORRECTED PROOF: NOT FOR SALE” (front cover). Too late, I already paid for it. What’s more: “Reviewers are reminded that changes may be made in this proof copy before books are printed. If any material from the book is to be quoted in a review, the quotation should be checked against the final bound book” (back cover).¹ Fuck that, this blog is about reading the books I have on my bookshelves. I’m not going out and buying a second copy to add to my shelf. The idea of my blog is to subtract from my shelves. The back cover claims that “Geekspeak does for problem-solving what Freakonomics did for economics.” I remember thinking Freakonomics was awesome, so I had strong hopes for liking this book.

            It starts off pretty good. Dr. Tattersall talks about how big people’s vocabularies are. He suggests using random sampling of dictionary pages to figure out about how many words you know. He mentions a study done in Britain (he’s British) analyzing recorded conversations which revealed that the top three words spoken by women were “she, her, [and] said” and the most frequent words said by men were “fucking, er, [and] the” (6; 7).

That feeds into some certain assumptions about the genders. Gossipy women and stupid men. Hell, “er” isn’t even a fucking word!² I feel like “er” is a more British filler syllable. I remember Harry Potter saying it in Book 4, but I feel like Americans are more apt to say “uh” or something close to the schwa sound(of course, I’m pulling this er vs. uh stuff out of my ass). Still, I find that study intriguing.

He also graphed out the frequencies of different word-lengths of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a way to identify her unique vocabulary. This is the kind of random crap I like. I had the idea of counting up the spoken words per minute of Gilmore Girls and comparing it to other TV shows, because the joke is that they talk so much faster on that show than real life or other shows.

I wanted to do a statistical analysis to see if there’s any significant difference. I guess that means I speak Geek.

            Then he does stuff like explaining horsepower, estimating how heavy a house is, and using math to explain “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (except since he’s British, he uses the Queen, not Ren McCormack). Sometimes I like what he’s writing about, but as I’m reading, I’m growing more and more bored with Geekspeak. I don’t really care how much a house weighs.

            So, the book’s basic structure is Dr. Tattersall puts forward a question, a little anecdote or pop culture reference to lead into the answer, and then he answers the question using a mathematic formula and plugging in estimated numbers. He’ll mention Captain Kirk or Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (my second favorite book I’ve ever read), but leaves it behind to talk about math that sometimes doesn’t really connect back to it.

A chapter will start off cool, but end up as a rough guess to a useless fact.

            Instead of quoting an entire chapter, this is me imitating a chapter:

            How busy is rush hour?

            According to Doc Brown, in 2015, “we don’t need roads.” But for now, I have to stick to my highway commute to and from work. When I’m stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, how many people am I looking at driving opposite me on the other side? To figure this out, I need to know how many cars I see and how many people are in each car. We can use the formula

People = Length of lane X lanes X cars per lane X people per car

On a straight, flat stretch of road, I’d say I can see about a quarter-mile clearly. One mile is 5,280 ft. Divide that by four to get how much I can see. Let’s just make it 1,000 ft. A car is about 12 ft long. To account for the space in between each car, I’ll just round up to one car per 20 ft of road. So, I’m seeing 50 cars down one lane. But where my car is sitting I-94 has three lanes. That makes it 150 cars. How many people are in each car? I don’t need to run around each vehicle and do a census Frogger-style. I can just get a look at a sample of 10 cars and apply those results to the whole population of rush hour traffic. My result turned out as 9 cars with only one person. One car had a driver and a passenger. That makes an average of 1.1 people per car. Multiply that by the number of cars and I now can reasonably guess that I am looking at 165 people across the cement divider.

 

           The worst part is that so many of the numbers end up being arbitrary. Discussing clouds, Dr. Tattersall writes “a true Geek will have a go at working it out, but will also recognize that the estimate could easily be ten times too big or ten times too small. Cloud thickness ranges from hundreds to thousands of feet; for simplicity, let’s go for a 1,000-foot (1/5 mile) thick, 1 mile long and 1 mile wide cumulus cloud” (226). The same thing goes for pretty much all of his facts. He’ll give a range, sometimes differing by millions, and pick a simple number in the middle. It leaves me wondering, how factual are his facts?

            But then again, I’ve found myself bringing up some of these random and useless facts in conversations.³ Sometimes I really enjoy Dr. Tattersall’s topic, like which  personality descriptors are used most in personal ads. On the other hand, I don’t give a shit about how much a bus weighs.

At one point, he’s pondering how large an angel’s wings would need to be to work (one of the interesting ones), and he writes “estimating the weight of a soul is beyond the scope of this book” (149). Lucky for me, soon I’ll be reading Spook for my blog, which I’m pretty sure works at answering that very question!

He figures out whether or not there are more people alive than the total of all people who have ever lived. What?! How is that even a question? Apparently, all lot of people have been saying that. How could there be more people alive today than the total number of past lives of humanity spanning the entire history of the world? That idea sounds unbelievably ridiculous to me. And yet, the doctor describes an enormous population explosion over the past few centuries and how technological advances allow more food production than ever before. In the end, he estimates the number of all the past dead to be four times the number of all the current living. That still seems to be too small a difference to me.

After finishing reading, the problem with deciding the fate of Geekspeak is that the book switches every chapter between being cool as ice and boring as shit. Since the book is about math, I tallied up all the ones I liked. I liked 42.3% of the topics.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Going. Was it worth a read-through? Yes. Do I plan on ever reading it again? No.

 

Notes

1. Did I just break that rule by using that quote?

2. Damn, how many times have I said “fuck” so far? Or “the,” for that matter?

3. Such as 20 mph farts.

 

Works Cited

Tattersall, Graham. Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness [uncorrected

          proof]. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print.