Godfather / Losers 9-14 / Euclid's Window
Sep. 7th, 2004 11:14 pmMario Puzo, The Godfather
Picked this up at work one day and flipped through it, and decided I needed to sit down and read the whole thing. The prose has a lot of the same fluid quality of the dialogue in the film; I don't know if I can really describe it. It flows through the book like olive oil. You think, oh, that odd word choice or word order is just an affectation, nobody really thinks like that. But they do. Precision. Cold rage. "And perhaps someday, a day which may never come, you will do a favor for me" is an only slightly exaggerated example. I adored this book. Now I'll have to find something else interesting by Mario Puzo to see if the style can hold my interest for more than a single book.
Andy Diggle and Jock, The Losers: Island Life
Nine through twelve. I fear the comic may degenerate into a series of fetch-quests for the next Maguffin: this time they're after the contents of a safe, mostly because the Goliath corporation is also after it. There's bits of metaplot that trickle in, and this story arc has a volcano which makes everything better. I keep reading, and enjoying, but I start to worry.
Andy Diggle and Nick Dragotta, The Losers: Sheikdown
Two-part story, issues thirteen and fourteen. New artist. Bleh. I hadn't realised how much of my enjoyment came from Jock's art-nouveau characters [like The Kindly Ones, only good]: having full faces and less sharp angles feels jarring after a year of pointyness. The story is better, too, with a solid supporting-cast member or three.
Leonard Mlodinow, Euclid's Window
In which the author of Feynman's Rainbow documents the history of geometry. Which is kind of interesting stuff, to me at least. He sprinkles nifty factoids throughout [one guy "proved" the parallel postulate by positing an alternate form of the postulate and then deriving Euclid's statement of it from that, for instance] and uses his children in all his examples, but I still wasn't too thrilled by the book. I got even less thrilled when he tried to relate geometry to Einstein's relativity [which makes sense] and then to string theory [which doesn't, much]. Part of the problem may be that I still can't conceive of Lobachevskian ["hyperbolic"] spaces.
I'm mostly fascinated by the idea that not only is the parallel postulate [given a line and a point not on the line, there's exactly one line parallel to the line that goes through the point] unprovable in Euclidean geometry, but that breaking it gives you wonderfully consistent alternate geometries, which may even represent space better than Euclidean. If anyone knows of a good introduction to Lobachevskian geometry, I'd love to take a look at one.
Picked this up at work one day and flipped through it, and decided I needed to sit down and read the whole thing. The prose has a lot of the same fluid quality of the dialogue in the film; I don't know if I can really describe it. It flows through the book like olive oil. You think, oh, that odd word choice or word order is just an affectation, nobody really thinks like that. But they do. Precision. Cold rage. "And perhaps someday, a day which may never come, you will do a favor for me" is an only slightly exaggerated example. I adored this book. Now I'll have to find something else interesting by Mario Puzo to see if the style can hold my interest for more than a single book.
Andy Diggle and Jock, The Losers: Island Life
Nine through twelve. I fear the comic may degenerate into a series of fetch-quests for the next Maguffin: this time they're after the contents of a safe, mostly because the Goliath corporation is also after it. There's bits of metaplot that trickle in, and this story arc has a volcano which makes everything better. I keep reading, and enjoying, but I start to worry.
Andy Diggle and Nick Dragotta, The Losers: Sheikdown
Two-part story, issues thirteen and fourteen. New artist. Bleh. I hadn't realised how much of my enjoyment came from Jock's art-nouveau characters [like The Kindly Ones, only good]: having full faces and less sharp angles feels jarring after a year of pointyness. The story is better, too, with a solid supporting-cast member or three.
Leonard Mlodinow, Euclid's Window
In which the author of Feynman's Rainbow documents the history of geometry. Which is kind of interesting stuff, to me at least. He sprinkles nifty factoids throughout [one guy "proved" the parallel postulate by positing an alternate form of the postulate and then deriving Euclid's statement of it from that, for instance] and uses his children in all his examples, but I still wasn't too thrilled by the book. I got even less thrilled when he tried to relate geometry to Einstein's relativity [which makes sense] and then to string theory [which doesn't, much]. Part of the problem may be that I still can't conceive of Lobachevskian ["hyperbolic"] spaces.
I'm mostly fascinated by the idea that not only is the parallel postulate [given a line and a point not on the line, there's exactly one line parallel to the line that goes through the point] unprovable in Euclidean geometry, but that breaking it gives you wonderfully consistent alternate geometries, which may even represent space better than Euclidean. If anyone knows of a good introduction to Lobachevskian geometry, I'd love to take a look at one.