Reading Into the Past: Week of 6/28/02

No new books this week, so I'm diving into the reading notebooks again. The RNG points me to 2002, so here are the books I was reading at this time that year:

Isaac Asimov, The Stars, Like Dust (6/22)

See below.

Isaac Asimov, The Currents of Space (6/23)

Ditto.

Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky (6/24)

So I'm pretty sure this is the first and only time I read these minor Asimov novels, and it was to decide if we at the SFBC should offer them. (Reader: we did, in the 2002 omnibus The Empire Novels.) I've always found Aimov's writing colorless to the point of being immediately forgettable: I've enjoyed some of his nonfiction, but his fiction is OK at best and usually deeply dull, with long, long stretches of colorless people doing colorless things in colorless words.

So I don't have any good memories of these three novels, and I'm not inclined to remind myself of what they were about. I read a lot of this stuff because I was getting paid for it, and I'm not going to spend any substantial time on it now that I'm not getting paid for it. If you are the kind of reader who enjoys bland prose about '50s white men doing whitebread things in cardboard SFnal settings, well, have at it, but also know I am judging you, and not all that silently, either.

Gilbert Hernandez, Luba in America (6/25)

This was the first collection of the post-Love and Rockets comics of Gilbert, focusing on his major character of the time. Well, post-the first L&R series, but we didn't know there would be four of them at that point, did we? I've since re-read the whole series in a "I Love (and Rockets) Mondays" subseries as part of my 2018 Book-A-Day run: see my post on the larger omnibus that includes this material. And I'm not going to try to reconstruct anything of my 2002 reading, given than I've got a much more recent memory of the same stories.

C. Northcote Parkinson, Jeeves: A Gentleman's Personal Gentleman (6/26)

Parkinson was a mostly serious writer (British, naval historian) with a sideline in quirky ideas: he also wrote a "biography" of Horatio Hornblower and was best known for formulating his eponymous law. ("Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.") This was another oddball thing, from fairly late in his career - 1981, a few years after the death of P.G. Wodehouse and when Parkinson was just past seventy himself - and is a fictional biography of the world's most famous gentleman's personal gentleman. As I recall, it doesn't try to mimic Wodehouse's humor, and does try to tie off all of the loose ends for all the major characters, which is pretty anti-Wodehousian. But my memory is that it meant well, was interesting, and generally was pretty good: Parkinson was old enough and British enough to really get the point of an old-school butler, which was of central importance.

Alan Moore and Alan Davis, Captain Britain (6/27)

A big collection of comics stories about the big beefy guy, in the costume that covered his hair - I think Captain Britain, like most superhero IPs owned by major corporations, has been other people since, and has certainly had other costumes since - written by Moore and drawn by Davis. As I recall, they originally appeared in UK-only publications, and the trade paperback was the first time they were widely available to American audiences - so it was seen, at least potentially, as a lost gem or something similar. I'm doing a bit of googling, and it seems like the situation is still muddied: this book collected a big plotline that opened up the multiverse of Captains Britain (which is what I remember) to battle Mad Jim Jaspers (who I don't recall at all) to save all the worlds from him Anti-Monitoring them, or something. After this was another, mostly just Alan Davis collection of similar material, and then it all led into the Excalibur series. Maybe. If I didn't get that wrong. As I remember, this is mid-80s Moore and mid-80s superheroing, with all of the stuff that was bubbling up out of the stew: world living & worlds dying, heroes meeting versions of themselves and huge numbers of other random heroes from other worlds, lots of exposition and lots of explosions. My memory is that it was a bit scattershot, from appearing a bunch of different places, but basically held together as a story.

Gerd Gigerenzer, Calculated Risks (6/28)

Um, what? This is utterly unfamiliar on first glance. Let me google. OK. I think this was a pop-science book by a cognitive scientist, of the "people are horribly stupid about statistics" type. In other words: that the things people are frightened of are mostly really unlikely, and the things they don't worry about are vastly more likely to be troublesome. It looks like Gigerenzer was a big fan of expressing probabilities as absolute risks - x chances in 1000, for example, and keeping that consistent rather than talking about "25% increase" in this and "40% decrease" in that. Because, as you know Bob, for most risks, the absolute numbers are small to begin with, so minor shifts turn into big percentage shifts (from 2 in a million to 4 in a million - a 100% increase!!!!) and focusing on those percentages just leads to panic and bad decision-making. At this distance, I can't evaluate his argument, and I suspect there may have been some buried political points (in which direction,. and from which country, I can't say) in there as well: that era of statistics/economics books were riddled with them, usually in deeply coded language.