But I’m learning to cope with it. Slowly I have learned to differentiate between the words on the page and the pages themselves. There are writers I love to read (Gene Wolfe, I’m looking at you) and books I love to hold (leather-bound Lord of the Rings) but at least I’ve now managed to convince myself that the sets are not identical. Gene Wolfe is still Gene Wolfe, even if the words are formed by excited particles on a screen instead of ink on paper. I still fear it must be illegal for anyone to write that addictively well.

But now I have another problem.

I’ve stopped buying technical books, for the most part. I use O’Reilly’s magnificent Safari book service, which lets me place books on a virtual shelf, to be referred to and read when I need them from my computer, where I usually need them. Ones I find I need to refer to often, I buy in actual ink-on-paper form, but now only after they prove their worth.

I can see taking the same route with much of my fiction. About 5% of the fiction books I own can be said to be in the “collectible” category, where the physical book has value beyond the text itself. The other 3-4K on my shelves are what’s fondly referred to in the trade as “reading copies.” The same goes for the 2K+ non-fiction volumes. Any format for them would serve the purpose.

Enter Amazon’s Kindle, posing as a solution. Given it and some off-line storage, I can have a few hundred square feet of floor space in my house back. Oh, there’s hangups like some authors I read (Charles L Harness and Gordon R Dickson, for two) don’t show up in Kindle format, nor do some individual books I re-read from other authors (Michaelmas, by Algis Budrys par example). But I could keep those books in hard copy without the need to reinforce my floors.

“But…” you say. You say you smell a but coming. And you’re right. I don’t get access to my Safari bookshelf from a Kindle, except through their lame web browser. And its support for other e-book formats isn’t the best. Sony’s book supports more of the e-book formats, but refuses to admit my computer exists, hence I can’t use it, and Sony doesn’t do the Safari thing, either.

Silos. Everybody’s building silos. They want to pen me up in their little world, and keep me from wandering away.

Silos are for grain, not for people. I voluntarily climbed in to O’Reilly’s silo because it gave me access to 75% of the books I wanted, and I could make do with other titles for the other 25%, in return for the easy, quick access it gave me. But that doesn’t mean I’m content to remain there. I’m getting out as soon as a better deal comes along.

I might be able to justify spending the money on a Kindle if it included technical books. But if I switched, then I lose the quick-reference and the book rental model Safari offers (and let’s face it, especially when it comes to computer tech, rental makes more sense than buying, because most tech books are almost worthless after a couple of years, given the speed of change) and instead would have to pay inflated prices (I’m sorry, but offering me 20% or so off the price of a book because you don’t pay paper, printing, storage, shipping, and inventory costs isn’t a fair deal, especially since there’s no resale value to factor into the equation, and you know it) for books that I may not actually find useful. Nope, that doesn’t work for me.

So I have to choose my silo, for the moment. And I choose Safari. But it chafes me, with the limited selection and the fact I can’t bring the book to bed with me, or to the beach with me. And the first one to offer me a larger silo gets me as a customer. I want a wider selection, and a rental option for expensive reference books. Are you listening, Amazon?

They were in the process of selling off all the old inventory of the former owner, soon to be replaced with “books we think will sell here,” and I got a sinking feeling in my heart. I suspect I know the kind of books the new owner is going to put there, so I took one last stroll around the place, to say good-bye. Oh, I’ll come back to check out the new inventory, but past history tells me that will be the last time I do.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before. The store was part of a local chain that used to be the only place I shopped for books. You see, the books I buy most often aren’t the usual fare, and the flagship store for this chain was the only place in town I could find a reasonable assortment of good chess books; as a reward, I shopped there for all of my books, not just the chess books. (You know, it used to carry newsstand copies for sale of the locally published chess magazine, even; I made sure to honor that practice by buying my copy there, rather than subscribing.)

Then the big box bookstores came to town, and the chain began retrenching. What do you suppose was one of the first things they did? They closed their flagship store, and moved most of the inventory to their other stores. I said “most.” That’s right, they stopped carrying the little local touches I appreciated so much.

It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make sense to me. You’d think I would be right smack in the center of their market. I have over 5000 books in my house, almost half in hardcover. My annual book expense was well into four figures, even in a bad year. In a good one it approached five.

And it wasn’t a matter of competition. Even had I been inclined to switch, the big box stores don’t carry the titles I want. They don’t carry much Arkham House, a local specialty publisher I’m a big fan of as well. The store that carried my faves got my allegiance for other titles, even if I could get them elsewhere, as an honorific for paying attention. But I couldn’t find AH books in the local chain anymore, either. It was like they decided to compete with the big box stores by simply becoming smaller versions of them, as if morphing into a mini-Borders was the only way to compete with the real one.

It’s not like the Big box stores care what I want to buy. When the local chain stopped carrying chess magazines, I went to the big box; they had one (New in Chess — I was also a big fan of Chess Monthly and BCM, but they’ve completely disappeared) so I started buying it there. They sold every copy they ever had on the newsstand, but still they discontinued it. And when Arkham House, a local specialty publisher I’m quite fond of, stopped appearing in the local shop, I couldn’t find it in the big boxes, either. It was as if the local stores decided to compete with the big box stores by simply becoming smaller versions of them, as if morphing into a mini-Borders was the only way to compete with the real one.

Slowly, the magazines I was interested disappeared from the shelves, so I started to subscribe. And it didn’t stop there. I solved the problem of tech books that no one would carry by subscribing to Safari. For chess books, I found I could special order from either store and wait a few weeks, or buy from Amazon and get them in two days, even next day, for the same cost (or less) and without costing me extra in time and gasoline.

I fully expect the new inventory for the local shop will be more of the same. Books I have no interest in. The same books I could find in the big box, just fewer of them. I hope I’m wrong.

What ever happened to “zig when the other guy zags?”

I used to be a big fan of the local bookstores. There’s a couple from Spring Green who would always talk about the “books with the strange titles” (“Wijk aan Zee”, for example) I used to order from their store. But the lack of support I get from the local stores these days has turned me into an Amazon customer. Not by choice, I didn’t get on the Amazon bandwagon until recently. By necessity.

So next time you hear complaints from your local bookstore about how their customers are leaving them for big boxes or online, think of me. I didn’t leave them. They left me.

Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman contains a test, intended to show you how optimistic or pessimistic you are. It gives you 48 questions, which you then score in 6 categories, and then use those category scores to calculate three other scores.

I took the test, and saw my scores fall all over the place, ranging from wildly optimistic to extremely pessimistic. I’m both average and very pessimistic in the permanence categories, while I am both very optimistic and very pessimistic in the pervasiveness categories, and have moderately high or average self-esteem, depending upon which score you accept there. I score as moderately hopeful yet on the subtotals I score as both moderately optimistic and extremely pessimistic (I’d have to more than double that subtotal to even get out of the “Great Pessimism” category). And the total score shows me as very pessimistic.

Does that mean I’m a complex person, filled with contradictions, or rather that the test is flawed?

As a whole, the book is good, but the question nags me: Do we really need 300+ pages just to say Vince Lombardi was right?

“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re probably right.”

Some will write about how good of an editor he was. And there will the obligatory homages to Rogue Moon and Who?, his classics in the genre. All of that will be covered by others who will do it much better than I, so I will leave them to it.

Instead I’ll talk about Michaelmas, a flawed book with a conventional alien invasion plot, but with a more personal meaning. It was the novel that brought me into the computer industry. Besides being a forerunner to (and better than 99% of) the cyberpunk subgenre in science fiction, it was the first novel to explore the potential of human/computer teams, without making either one the slave of the other. Oh, there was no doubt who was in charge (Michaelmas, the human). But he listened to and often accepted the advice of the computer (Domino) and in general treated Domino as he might a human member of his staff.

That was what excited me. It made real to me the possibilities of computers not as calculators, but as assistants in the real meaning of the term: as things to assist us in what we do best. It was the synergy between Domino and Michaelmas that excited me. I wanted to make that happen in real life.

I was happily on my way to becoming a chemist when I read that book. It was a life-altering experience. Call him cranky, curmudgeonly, call him whatever you want. Just remember it takes a whale of a writer to reach into someone’s life like that.

I never knew Budrys the man, but that doesn’t matter. My world is a little darker today for his absence. And for the umpteenth time, I’m going to re-read Michaelmas.

Bengta Wu was a bookseller. I never met the person, so I can’t tell you anything about him or her, but Bengta Wu was my own personal “84 Charring Cross Road.” We corresponded about books, and I bought most of my early library that way.

I was a kid who had just discovered that there were stores that sold used books that were real books, not worn-out paperbacks but with covers and maybe even dust jackets. And I had also just discovered John Dickson Carr, Marjorie Allingham, John Creasey and so many other authors that the local stores rarely stocked.

So my hard-earned paper route money went off through the mail to New Jersey, in response to mimeographed lists. Several times I was asked for something called a “want list”; I never responded with one for the main reason that I had no idea what I wanted, beyond “more books.” Every new list brought me more titles than I could afford, anyway, so what would have been the purpose? To find still more books than I could afford?

It’s funny the effect people can have on you. I still remember Bengta Wu fondly. Since it’s been 40 years or so since our last contact, I suspect the person is long dead, but the love of books he/she fanned within me still burns strong, and when I pick up one of the old volumes, I still remember.

Thank You, Bengta Wu.

Perhaps they were noticieable only to me, but there were sentences, even whole paragraphs, that when verbalized compelled me to rewrite.

The word “verbalized” means “put into words.” It’s impossible for sentences and paragraphs to exist without having first been put into words. And it wasn’t the process of putting them into words that caused the errors to become obvious. It was the process of speaking them aloud, something “verbalize” doesn’t necessitate.

Of course, I knew what he meant. What he meant was “vocalized,” not “verbalized.” But I ask you, what is more depressing than an magazine devoted to writing that cannot be bothered to use the right word?

The major difference between Witherington’s work and the rest is that he limits himself to pointing out just seven major errors, occupying less than the first third of his book. The rest of his book is spent in analysing the deeper errors, made by some more renowned scholars, which tend to feed into books like The DVC.

Witherington spends most of the book challenging the revisionists, those attempting to rewrite church history, exposing just how little they actually know about the subject and how biased their aproaches are. He points out that such revisions are possible only if one succumbs to “historical amnesia.”

Along with pointing out errors of history, Witherington spends a lot of time describing the major players and the questions confronting the church councils of the fourth and fifth century (along the way pointing out that the canon was pretty well established centuries before the council proclaimed it, with only a few books questioned and a few more proposed — BTW, none of them were gnostic, the favored son of the revisionists). He also suggests that we should by all means examine the gnostic texts, but in doing so we should be sure to subject them to the same rigors of criticism we subject the “orthodox” texts to (and when we do so, none of them survive the scrutiny).

One of the good things about this book is the amount of “positive knowledge” to be gained from it. Most books from this category are flooded with “negative knowledge,” that is to say, they give you a long laundry list of things Brown asserts that aren’t true. Here we are treated to a fairly well-done overview of what actually happened; the book spends more time teaching you what actually occurred than it spends on what didn’t occur.

He travels through the early history of Christianity, showing us how most of the cannon was settled in the second century, before any of the gnostic literature even appears on the scene. Even if you haven’t read DVC (or, like me, aren’t interested in debunking badly-written fiction) the book is a worthwhile read, as it’s one of the better overviews of early church history I’ve run across.

But I’ve saved the best for last. Witherington doesn’t just drop these things on us and say “trust me, I’m a scholar” as all too many do. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

This book has in some respects been hard-hitting, but I don’t want it to impede the search for truth about Jesus and early Christianity. All leads should be followed and all evidence evaluated (and not ignored, much less destroyed) — the same critical scrutiny that is applied to sources like the Gnostic Gospels should be applied to the canonical material as well. Fair is fair. But when we examine all of the evidence and clues, we find that our oldest sources are still the best sources on Jesus and the history of early Christianity.

It’s rooted in a principle I’ve always held dear: the Truth is never afraid of questions. In any fair comparison, the Truth will emerge victorious.

The Gospel Code. Highly recommended. And I’ve added another author to my “watch for” list.

Not even close. Had I the time and space I’d list the beter ones, but I’ll content myself with simply observing I’ve never read worse, at least that I can recall (and since this one was so spectacularly bad, I doubt I’d forget coming across a worse one).

The characters were completely unbelieveable, the “mysteries” (I use the term loosely) were simple enough, even considering the author couldn’t be bothered with leaving anything like clues (the stories are attempts to write suspense, rather than puzzles, you see). At least that’s what I’m assuming, because I don’t know how else to describe it. For example, when the Culprit in one story is first introduced the author goes to great lengths to point out the person has a key (stopping only just short of having the wife exclaim “Oh look, dear, they have their own key to the crime scene”). It was almost embarassing, like watching a magician drop the deck of cards he was shuffling.

It was really hard to care about characters when they didn’t even remotely resemble real people, and the task was made even harder when the author tossed in other impossibilities (husband is an ex-president — handsome, wealthy and popular beyond your wildest dreams, of course — while wife is a sitting Congresswoman, yet we’re expected to believe the Secret Service would just take some time off and not be around for hours?) that a T. Rex would have trouble swallowing.

If this is a fair sample of her work, I confess I’m mystified by her apparent popularity. I kept hoping to run across a story I could read without cringing, but it didn’t happen. It wasn’t hard to stay at least ten pages ahead of these “sleuths” (cover blurb, certainly not a characterization I’d make of them).

I can’t honestly think of any class of reader who might like this book. It’s not offensive, so if you really don’t have anything at all to do, it’ll help pass the time, but, frankly, recounting the change in your pocket will be more engrossing.

You know how it is, the story is going along nicely, you’re getting in to the characters when suddently the author slips, and destroys the illusion that he’s been building up and that you’ve been enjoying. You want to scream, but settle instead for throwing the book across the room.

Well, that’s what happened here. No, it wasn’t the sneers he throws at religion; I’m getting used to that by now. That seems to be the current trend. When an author today wants to hang the “intelligent” label on one of the characters, the character disses religion. After all, it’s not possible to believe and be intelligent at the same time, is it?

But, as I said, that’s not why the book went airborne. The premise of the book involves the crossing over between parallel universes of a scientist. The twist is the scientist is a neanderthal, coming from a universe where the spark of consciousness lit up the minds of the neanders, not the cro-mags. He’s been learing english through conversation, aided by a computer, which beeps whenever it hears a word it cannot translate.

The situation is handled really well, until at one point the computer translates (into english) the exclamation “That’s so oxymoronic!” As if I’m supposed to believe that word has come up in conversation, when words like “endanger” haven’t. It blew the whole mood, destroyed the credibility of the process. After I picked up the book and read a few more paragraphs I realized that the reason for this was that the author needed to gather some momentum for the obligatory No Thinking Person Can Believe scene (since the author had been silent on religion up to this point, I confess I didn’t see it coming until it got here) and so had to suspend the limititations he’d imposed on his scientist to this point.

Still, the “first contact” scenes are handled well enough. The plot is too flimsy to carry the novel, but that’s more because the book isn’t plot-driven. Nor for that matter could you call it character-driven. It’s more driven by the examination of the concept of quantum states and many worlds, and by the chance to view of Neaderthal scociety.

If you’re looking for a strong plot, or compelling characters, pass this book by. If you enjoy travelogs to unfamiliar societies, however, you’ll enjoy this one a lot.

It’s a well-written thriller, in general, but the historical research is amazingly shoddy. As fiction, I’d give it a B, but if he submitted the “research” behind it as a term paper, it’d get an “F” at most, and we might even have to invent a lower grade for it. He begins with a page stating “facts”, virtually none of which is actually true in the strictest sense, though a few items you could “spin” into being acceptably true, in the sense that claims made in TV commercials are “true.”

You see, I’ve been down this “historical” road a few decades ago, when I read “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, but it seems Dan Brown lacks the critical skills required to be a researcher or historian. He seems to believe everything he reads (‘it’s in a book, therefore it must be true”) which is a fatal flaw when doing research, though quite essential, if only in a temporary sense, when reading fiction.

First off, let me say I don’t have a problem with the theological ramifications of much of the “data.” Though he’s clearly way off base, when you examine the historical record and the dating of old manuscripts, with the assertion that Jesus wasn’t considered divine until Constantine, the rest of the assertions aren’t really troubling. Jesus being married or having children, for example, doesn’t change anything, though it certainly doesn’t square with anything written in any of the historical documents.

My major problem with him is that he doesn’t play fair. When an author paints a historical backdrop for his fiction, he should take pains to get the history right. When he doesn’t, the cognitive dissonance he causes me forces me to drop out of my “suspension of disbelief” and moves me awya from the story. Brown’s use of easily recognized historical fallacies and proven hoaxes means that instead of writing about history, he’s writing an “alternative history” novel, Harry Turtledove’s specialty (to name one popular writer in the genre). Yet whether out of a desire to avoid that “ghetto” or just good marketing sense, he denies that’s what he’s doing.

His major source seems to be “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” (this doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, as that’s the prime source for everything written in this vein) yet he interestingly seems unaware that one of the authors, in an interview given after the book was published, admitted that he didn’t believe the book’s contention was factual. He simply thought it an intriguing possibility. Brown claims to be unaware that the Priory of Sion (claimed as “fact” by Brown in his book) was a hoax perpetrated by a man wanting to prove himself descended from the Merovingian Kings. (Notably, after the publication of HBHG this man quickly retreated from his claim; he wasn’t comfortable claiming Jesus as an ancestor, apparently.) Far from going back to the 11th century, it was invented in the 1950′s.

Many of Brown’s mistakes can be easily detected by using a mere smidgeon of common sense. If that’s Mary in DaVinci’s picture, then where’s John? (There are only thriteen at the table, and one is clearly Judas, so there’s a disciple missing.) If Constantine invented the idea of Jesus’ divinity, then why are there important manuscripts dating before that point making the same claim? If, as Brown says, the vote was close, why do the records of the conference show the vote to be hugely one-sided? (That’s the beauty of conspiracies, though. If the evidence is lacking, then obviously it’s because “they” have erased or changed it all. But when faced with that proposition the only proper response is, “then how did you find out about it?”) And why would anyone hide secret documents on the shelves of a research library? And if they would do such a bizarre thing, why would they ever choose to clearly label them as secret documents (“Les Dossiers Secret” in french)?

See what I mean? It beggars the mind that someone would not ask such common-sense questions. Other questions that should be asked require a bit of knowledge. One that immediately springs to my mind is that if Constantine selected the four Gospels in the New Testament, then why were they the only four on most lists of scripture we’ve found that were circulating as much as a century before him, and why were they the only ones selected when the Bible was officially compiled, long after Constantine’s death? (Oh, you thought Constantine was at that council, too? You must be reading too much Dan Brown.) Constantine’s role was clearly the same as King James’ would be later: he locked warring factions in a room and told them don’t come out until you’ve settled the question among yourselves.

As an amateur historian, the main reason I dislike Brown’s book is the way he plays so carelessly with history. He seems to think that you can change the authorship or dating of a manuscript almost at will, and that there will be no “ripple effect.” The dating of manuscripts is a difficult thing, and there are many points we use in figuring it out. In many ways, it’s like solving a sudoku puzzle; if a manuscript is mentioned in a known document, then we know it predates that document. If it shows the writer was familiar with another document, then it postdates that one. Slowly we block out the years the document cannot have been found in, and arrive by elimination at when it was probably written. But that process means that if you change the date of one document, that will cause you to completely revise other dates, and eventually, as in sudoku, you will end up with an insoluable puzzle because you’ll find documents that cannot have been written by people whom you have absolute proof wrote them.

I wasn’t at first able to maintain the suspension of disbelief required to fully enjoy the book, and this was the author’s fault for being such a careless researcher. But once I realized Brown wasn’t writing about reality, but rather an alternate universe where these bizarre assertions might be true, that changed.

When dealing with Da Vinci Code, I’m reminded of Errol Flynn’s intro to Robin Hood, “believe only what you see, and then, only half of that!” When reading the Da Vinci Code, remember the book is fiction, not fact, and remember also that most, if not all, of the “facts” claimed in it are also fiction. It helps to remember that in one of the plagiarism lawsuits that followed publication of the book, the judge called Dan Brown a liar. He writes fiction for a living, so why would it be surprising that most of his “facts” are fiction as well?