Books in December

Do you know what makes perfect Christmastime reading? Serial killer novels. OK, maybe not really, but it was what I was reading for fiction through most of December. I started with The Dracula Dossier by James Reese, a book someone handed me and insisted was just my sort of thing. I wasn't sure at first - serial killers are not my usual sort of thing - but this is a story told from the POV of Bram Stoker about the Jack the Ripper killings. Having already read Alan Moore's From Hell plus all of his exhaustive notes, I'm pretty familiar with the details of Jack the Ripper, familiar enough to appreciate their use here anyway, and I particularly loved all of the other writers that appeared as characters (Oscar Wilde's mother was a particular favorite of mine).

The back of that book had a blurb from Caleb Carr, bringing to mind that I had bought two of his novels ages ago and they had been languishing in the depths of my To Be Read stacks for quite some time. So I dug them out and plunged into them next. I'm glad I did. Like The Dracula Dossier these are immersed in their historical setting (these both in New York City circa 1900) and intermixed historical figures with fictional characters. My favorite here was Teddy Roosevelt, trying to clean the corruption out of the police force before going to Washington to run the Navy. The killer in the first book The Alienist is a bit Jack the Ripper-y, but in the second book Angel of Darkness it's a woman who offs the children in her care, including her own. They were both interesting, set at the time that psychology and forensics were just starting to enter the world of police work (fingerprints were not yet trusted, nor ballistics, but people did believe if you photographed a victims eyes an image of the murder would appear on the film). Both of these books were engrossing; I highly recommend them both.

The remaining work of fiction I tackled this month was The Tales of Beedle the Bard by JK Rowling. I read it in just under two miles (yes, I was on the treadmill). The stories themselves are solid enough, but it's the notes (by Dumbledore) and the notes on the notes (by Rowling - am I wrong in my sense that this is the first time she's inserted herself into her own fiction?). She takes the opportunity to get a few digs in at those that don't think children should be exposed to stories about death and darkness, at those who try to remove books from libraries. A slight read, but an enjoyable one.

Most of my nonfiction reading was novel research. I'm gearing up to my week off at the beginning of February, which will be only enough time to get started on the revision of MITWA, not enough to complete it, but I'm hoping to get enough of a start on the thing to build a little momentum.

At any rate, the first book I was hoping would help me visualize Barnacle Town better. (Did I mention when I saw The Hulk how overwhelmed I was at the sight of the slums of Brazil, with the water collectors everywhere and Bruce's little inventive ways of making his own centrifuge and that? Exactly what I want to capture). I had to send to Germany for this, a photo book about the inventive uses the people of Thailand find for the things around them: Thailand: Same Same But Different by Thomas Kalak. A wonderful book, but I'm still feeling inadequate in the coming up with my own inventive things department.

The rest of my research was on space stations, since that's where the bulk of my action takes place. Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars and Imagining Space:Achievements, Predictions, Possibilities 1950-2050, both by Roger D. Lanius, were good places to start, nice overviews with lots of pictures and lots of further reading suggestions. Home on the Moon and Space Station Science: Life in Free Fall by Marianne J. Dyson are both books written for kids, but kids books are wonderful for writing research; they always include those interesting details that really bring things to life (like how astronauts poop in zero G. Not sure how I could possibly use that, but it's a nice detail to know). Space Station: Policy, Planning, and Utilization and Space Stations and Space Platforms: Concepts, Design, Infrastructure and Uses are both NASA publications and dry, dry, dry. Lots of information, but since it's mostly from the time of Skylab it was only of peripheral use to me.

Living in Space by Giovanni Caprara was very cool: an overview of the US and USSR space programs from the point of view of an Italian science writer. Plus the book has lots of blueprints of the various spacecraft. Even more helpful for my purposes was High Frontiers by Gerald K. O’Neill, mostly because he describes the sort of massive space stations that I'm actually using as a setting (although Barnacle Town contains things like the ISS and Skylab, so the rest wasn't a complete waste of time either).

I wrapped up the month by reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. A book you have to read for yourself; don't let anyone else summarize it for you (that includes me). A very thought-provoking read, one which I mostly agreed with, but where I disagreed with him I did so strongly. I won't go into it; that sort of thing invites trolls who don't normally read this blog to swing back and pick fights, which is no fun for me. If you're going to read only one Dawkins book, this is the one (although you really ought to read more).