The Darwin Intersection

I am waaaaay behind on my whole books-read thing. I really should be doing this on a more regular basis, like when I finish reading a book, or something, but that doesn't seem to be the way I work.

Since I keep much better track of the fiction, let me pause here to rap at ya about some of the non-fiction stuff I've been reading from the library...

Who Wrote The Bible Code? by Randy Ingermanson. I missed some of the original Bible Code furor, but I saw The Bible Code II on the remaindered shelves and flipped through it to get the idea. I toyed with the idea of taking some random book, or even some really bad novel, and seeing what kind of hidden messages I could find in it. When I was looking for one of the Bible Code books at the library, to see what kind of crap they were purveying, I found this one and read it instead. Ingermanson is a self-confessed Christian, and would be ecstatic to find messages in the Bible, but he's also a physicist and so wants to prove the existence or nonexistence of such messages scientifically. So he delves into probability theory, chi-square tests, and information theory, showing how meaningful arrangements of letters can be show to have different mathematical properties than random ones. After a lot of buildup, he comes to the shaking, nay surprisingly and unheralded, conclusion that there is no hidden message encoded in the Bible. Phew. But a good read. Pity it won't change anybody's mind, of course...

Also, imagine my surprise when, on his website, I found out that he's also a fiction writer, and creator of the Snowflake Process for writing a novel, which I'd previously run across on NaNoWriMo, and do mean to try sometime...

Gasping For Airtime by Jay Mohr. Wil Wheaton recommended this on his blog, so I checked it out. I've only watched Saturday Night Live about half a dozen times, so I mostly remember Jay Mohr from "Jerry Maguire" and "Pay It Forward". Still, it was an interesting look at the show. What was more interesting, I thought, was Mohr's accounts of his crippling panic attacks and the way he managed to overcome them, with medical and pharmaceutical help.

Genome by Matt Ridley. This was an "impulse borrow", grabbed from one of the racks near the circulation desk. I really lucked out here. Ridley, who seems to be a science journalist himself, not a scientist, presents the story of the human genome, one chapter per chromosome. I never got far in biology, preferring the harder sciences, but I have picked up a little bit about genetics over the years, particularly from The Birth of The Mind a few months ago. This book is incredible. While the association between the main topic of the chapter and the chromosome in question is often only dealt with in passing, the topics he covers are fascinating, and almost always contain some surprising insights into the relationship between us and our genomes. He explodes genetic determinism, shows how the X and Y chromosomes are more or less at war with each other, explores the genetic origin of cancer, and cautions us against thinking that "genes are there to cause diseases". Highly recommended to everyone who has the vaguest idea what DNA is.

I'm currently reading The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan. She makes a persuasive case for how many oddities of homo sapiens can be explained by postulating an aquatic phase in our transition from the forests of the Miocene into the savannahs of the Pliocene.

I have the feeling there's another one I'm forgetting...I still don't know why I don't keep track of these books somewhere, when I'm so obsessive about my fiction. Well, that's enough for now.

To Go Beyond

By the way, I've been spending most of my evenings working away furiously on my private MediaWiki version of my Wheel of Time concordance(and Song of Ice And Fire, and eventually Malazan Book of the Fallen, and Prince of Nothing, and whatever other books and series I happen across), which I'm calling, a trifle unimaginatively, Concord.

It's taking a long time just to go through one chapter, but maybe once I've gotten a few more of the basic articles in place it'll get easier. Of course, I'm also expanding the project, from being just a list of characters and chapter synopses to having articles on places and things mentioned in the series, and trying to do a personal "trajectory" for each character who appears in more than one chapter. So I've got my work cut out for me. I'll be lucky to be finished The Fires of Heaven by the time Knife of Dreams comes out this fall. At least I'm beginning to conceive of going back to the beginning of the series again, for the first time since I lost the first four books' worth of synopses in my hard disk woes.

According to the latest Locus, Robert Jordan received an eight-figure advance the first three books of his next series. The one he does after The Wheel of Time. (Knife of Dreams is the eleventh book, and I think the twelfth is supposed to be the last, but we'll see; there's also two more prequel novels planned, I think.) Must be nice. But then, he spent year writing Conan novels, so I guess he's paid his dues.

Still no sign of A Feast For Crows. But then, there's no sign of The Splendour And Misery of Bodies, of Cities, either, so I guess we can cut George R.R. Martin a little slack.