This Just Read: The Clockwork Universe: Issac Newton, the Royal Society & the Birth of the Modern World

I just finished Edward Dolnick's "The Clockwork Universe: Issac Newton, the Royal Society & the Birth of the Modern World." I got it for Christmas. In the past year I've re-read Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" and James Gleick's "Issac Newton," with cover the same period/subject (in the genre's of epic fiction and biography, respectively). I read it in actual book form. It's nice for restaurants and comfy chairs, but less nice for reading in bed (where my tablet literally shines).

The Clockwork Universe is a good treatment of the English Enlightenment covering, essentially, the second half of the seventeenth century. It focuses much of its attention on the work of Newton, but does a good job of putting that work in the context of his time and his peers. It's by no means a biography (g.v. Gleick), but is an excellent supplement.

The main "plot" element is Newton's discovery and publication of the universal laws of gravitation. To do this, Dolnick takes us on a tour of celestial theories, from the ancient Greeks, to Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, and Galileo. It also delves deeply into the invention of the calculus, and the dispute between Newton and Leibniz (q.v. Stephenson). Dolnick's careful explanation of what the calculus is doing is one of the best treatments I've encountered. It's not a math textbook by any means, but he gives a casual reader a good grasp of what's going on.

It was an enjoyable book to read at lunchtime. I't recommend it to anyone interested in the history of science, mathematics, Enlightenment thinking, etc...

Title Change!

This blog used to be called "The Shape of a Christian Life." I'd hoped to use it for thoughtful musings on my faith life as an United Methodist pastor in New York.

For a few years now, most of the posts have been about the books I'm reading, books I hope to read, etc. So I renamed the blog!

This Just Read: Cryptonomicon

So, over the winter I re-read Neal Stephenson's epic Baroque Cycle. This planted a seed in my brain to re-read Cryptonomicon, the book that inspired The Baroque Cycle. I've read Cryptonomicon many times--it hits many of my pleasure centers: World War II, cryptography, the invention of the digital computer, submarines, romance, new world economics, geek culture, post-modern paranoia, etc... The list just goes on and on.

I just finished it yesterday and was pleased with the re-read. I noticed something I hadn't before--probably as a result of just having read The Baroque Cycle. Rudy Hacklheber asked a favor of Hermann Goring when they meet. That chapter takes place in Goring's personal rail carriages, surrounded by stolen Nazi art. Rudy's request is left hanging at the end of the chapter--we never find out what it was or whether it was granted.

Later, Rudy flees Germany and hooks up with other characters in the book, ending up on a Nazi submarine around the Philippines. When Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe finds the sunken sub fifty years later, he discovers gold sheets with holes punched out of them.

At the same time, Lawrence Waterhouse--working for American intelligence--is using stacks of punchcards to hold cryptographic data. Presumably the Bristich and Germans are doing the same. It's easy to imaging (as I did on prior readings) that these gold sheets were somehow connected to that.

Reading The Baroque Cycle, however, we know that Daniel Waterhouse (predecessor of Lawrence and Randy Waterhouse) was compiling a Universal Language with Leibnitz for Peter the Great. He was, in fact, cataloging this language on gold sheets with holes punched out of them. Some or all of this work must have been held by Leibnitz, eventually ending up in Rudy's hands (for what purpose we cannot know).

Anyhoo, I've missed out on posting about books I've been reading this spring--there have been a few. I'll try to do a catch-up post. At the same time, I'm kicking off my Summer Reading List with Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. I hoe yo have my entire reading list up this week.

Good reading!

This Just Read: Lovecraftian Flashback

I've been diving into the short stories of H.P, Lovecraft this past week. It's transporting me back to 1983, when I first discovered them. Lovecraft's prose is the opposite of Hemingway's. Papa's credo was: "all you have to do is write one true sentence." Hemingway is spare and painfully honest. Lovecraft's work is opaque, overblown, even rococo. Both deal in indirection, but for different reasons. This week I've read:

• The Colour out of Space
• The Call of Cthulhu
• The Dunwich Horror
• The Whisperer in the Darkness
• Dreams in the Witch-House
• The Shadow over Innsmouth

I may move on to the longer stuff: At the Mountains of Madness or (my favorite) The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Anyway... it's good to be back.

This Just Read: Catching Up

I'm waaaay behind in posting about books I've read. I haven't posted since September. Ouch. Since then I've read:

Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood
I really enjoyed it. I follow her work online and really wanted to read one of her longer works. This one was great.

Lawrence Wright's Thirteen Days in September
Great plane reading. An account of the Camp David Accord. These are events that happened when I was a teen--too young to really know what was happening. A well-written, detailed account.

Finally finished Shane Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution
I love Shane's stuff and had been reading through this book in bits and pieces. I finally pushed through to the end. I highly recommend it!

John Jackson Miller's A New Dawn
Star Wars: Clone Wars was wrapped up and they were launching Star Wars: Rebels. This is the novel to get folks into that animated series, introducing you to the characters, etc,.. It wasn't great (last year's Kenobi was great), but it was good Star Wars fun.

Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle

For some reason I decided to re-read this 3,000-page, nine-book opus. I love Neal Stephenson's writing and in this work he comes closer than ever to the running monologue inside my head. Not quite a prequel to Cryptonomicon, it jumps back three hundred years to follow a vast array of characters through the birth of the Enlightenment. Yes, there's the Einstein-Leibnitz debate, King Solomon's gold, alchemy and natural philosophy, swashbuckling and antics in the court of the Sun King. It's really an indescribable work, so I'll stop now.

I may have forgotten one or two books in there...

This Just Read: The Paper Magician

I'm a new Amazon Prime member and one of the perks is you get a free book every month, chosen from a list of soon-to-be-released titles. In August, I chose The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg. It's the story of Cleony Twill, a young magician-to-be, leaving school and being assigned to the magician from whom she'll learn to become a Folder--a master of paper magic.

Magic, in this tale set in fin-de-siècle London, is carried out through man-made materials. Smelters deal in metals, others deal in rubber, glass, or other materials. Paper magic isn't very popular and our heroine is forced to apprentice herself to a Folder to build up their ranks. Once an apprentice "bonds" to his/her material, that will be their medium of magic forevermore. There's one type of forbidden magic: blood magic.

So, our story is about nineteen-year-old Ceony and Magician Emery Thane, as they begin their journey as master and apprentice. Ceony's not at all happy about becoming a Folder (she'd dreamed of being a Smelter). Early on in the book, it got into some details of how paper magic was done--through precise folding and enchanting--like magical origami. That part was pretty interesting.

Soon enough, however, Thane's ex-wife (and forbidden blood magician) tears out his heart and flees with it. Then our apprentice has to go rescue him, eventually going on a journey through the chambers of her master's heart.

So, what started interestingly enough soon became a rather dreary love story, as our heroine falls for her magician master as she fights to save him. Yawn. When I got to the end, it seemed like the whole things was little more than a vignette. In a Harry Potter book, for example, the scope of this story would be akin to the retrieval of the locket horcrux by Harry and Dumbledore. I got to the end of The Paper Magician and was expecting the rest of the novel to get moving--but it was over.

It's a series, apparently. I'd read others of they were free, but probably wouldn't spend money.

This Just Read: The Hot Zone

On a recent trip, I finished my thriller (The Odessa File) and moved on to some non-fiction, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston. Ebola is in the news and I'm interested in good medical writing. I remember back in the early 1990s, when the book was published. I was working at a bookstore and was responsible for ordering the New York Times best-sellers. The Hot Zone was on our shelves for some time.

It's a largely-narrative tale of the initial outbreaks of Ebola in the 1970s and early attempts at treatment and containment. The main thrust of the book is the incident in Reston, Viginia, in 1983, when a company that sold monkeys for research was hit with a new strain of the virus.

The story follows the USAMRIID and CDC vets and researchers as they dealt with that particular event. There were fears of a general outbreak in the human population of Northern Virginia, but they never materialized. Several workers at the facility became infected, but this string of Ebola was, apparently, harmless to humans.

The book was fast paced and well written, but it's not a great medical/scientific non-fiction book. It's mostly told in narrative style, with little scientific background to inform the reader (mind you, when it was written, we didn't know much about Ebola--and still don't). There are disease books that I've found more informative (and more interesting), especially the excellent The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry and The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (about influenza and cholera, respectively).

Still, The Hot Zone was a good read for my trip.