Blog: Articles filed under reading

Tonight Stargate Universe premiered, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. However, I feel guilty blogging about a television show when I haven’t blogged about arguably more important matters, such as life.

With a month behind me, I feel good about the school year so far. I only have four courses this year: Introductory Analysis, Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), Introduction to Mathematical Probability, and Speculative Fiction. Three math courses and an English course. All of my math courses are interesting, and I was excited to take the English course the moment I saw it offered. I’ll discuss it first, since the rest of the post will be about math.

My Speculative Fiction course is covering only science fiction this section—which is fine. Although I love literature in general and would gladly have taken something like Victorian Literature if this course hadn’t been offered, the chance to read and discuss science fiction for credit is not something I was going to overlook! We’re reading The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, The Left Hand of Darkness, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Neuromancer, Dawn, and Singularity Sky. We also have to watch Blade Runner (a film based on Do Androids Dream).

Of my math courses, Introductory Analysis is my favourite because it comprises my favourite aspect of math: proofs. Specifically, I love algebraic proofs—the more abstract the better. I love math but don’t like numbers so much. PDEs are fascinating and challenging as well; the course is very much oriented toward application, however, whereas I‘m more interested in theory. Unfortunately, my ardour doesn’t quite extend to probability, but I think I’ll survive—so far it hasn’t tripped me up too much.

My involvement in math at the university extends far beyond courses! Last term I marked assignments for a first-year calculus course; this fall I‘m marking a second-year linear algebra course. Moreover, I’m tutoring in the new Lakehead Math Assistance Centre (LUMAC for short). Both of these jobs are paid positions, which is a nice income in addition to my gallery job while also providing me with relevant experience for my future career.

Having spent a few sessions tutoring, I can already say that I enjoy it. We’ll see if it stays that way once the flood of people arrives the week before midterms! For now, however, it’s fulfilling. Plus, it gives me a nice review of first-year courses, like basic calculus, that contain skills I’ll always be needing but don’t always practise as I should.

So I have a very math-filled term, it appears. I like to use the phrase “inundated by math—and I love it.”

More Reasons to Love the Guild

I‘ve already preached my love for The Guild, a webseries by talented comedians and actors, including Felicia Day. Well, even as they work on a third season, they’ve released a fantastic music video:

Who Said Math Can’t Be Fun?

Well you were wrong, whoever you were. Mathematicians from Carleton University and the University of Ottawa modelled different responses to a zombie apocalypse and concluded that the best way to survive a short-term zombie apocalypse is to impulsively eradicate all zombies. Ladies and gentlemen, load your engines and start your shotguns.

I’m an Uncle

In July, my sister, Tara, gave birth to a very little boy named Clark! So I’ve got a nephew, which makes me an uncle, and that is sublime. I got to meet Clark today for the first time, which called for the typical point-and-shoot photos that wind up on Flickr somehow.¹ If I‘m short on words about Clark, it’s only because I don’t really know him yet—he doesn’t know himself yet, since he’s only a month old and still new to the world. I will report back in four or five years!

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• [ 1 ] I blame the gnomes, if only because they haven’t unionized yet like the orcs did.

Funny story. Last night I got an email from my friend Maria, who recommended to me her friend’s LibriVox audio recordings for my summer audiobook odyssey. Since it’s as good a place as any, I decided to begin with John Milton’s Areopagitica.

For those of you unfamiliar with Areopagitica,¹ Milton wrote it back in 1644. In many ways, the world was different back in 1644: global warming wasn’t as much of an issue back then, the roads were slightly better, and Clint Eastwood had just starred in his first movie. Yet in many ways, the world was very much the same: young kids listened to pop music that drove their parents crazy, celebrities got into tabloid scandals, and short-sighted people wanted to censor books.

Areopagitica is a polemic against the Licensing Order of 1643, which would essentially establish government censorship over all published works. Milton argues passionately and eloquently that such an order is foolish, that censorship is ineffectual and indeed harmful to a free society. He cites the examples of the Greek and Roman societies² and goes on to extol reading and learning in general.

Now, Milton’s idea of “freedom of speech” was slightly different from what we interpret it to mean today. To Milton, freedom of speech means the freedom to pursue the study of knowledge of the sake of worshipping God. And he wasn’t against burning books after they were decided to be harmful; he just didn’t want books to be censored before being published and judged by a wide audience. Most of Milton’s argument, however, remains valid today: censorship is a bad idea. Books are good.

So why do some people insist on ruining the fun for the rest of us?

See, today I learned that yet another group of people want to burn books. So it’s serendipitous that I’m listening to what we might call an ur-tract—in the English language, at least—against censorship. Milton’s arguments remind me, a bibliophile and staunch opponent of censorship, why we shouldn’t burn our books.

To clarify, if you haven’t read the article, this Christian group wants the right to burn library books. I don’t care if people burn books they‘ve purchased or published themselves. It’s their property, and they have a right to do with it as they please. However, burning library books would be, in my perfect world, a capital crime. Burning a book is a terrible thing:

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.³

And see, Milton’s a Christian. He’s all about God in this matter. So when I say this is a “Christian group”, I mean it’s a group of people who say they’re Christian (according to the newspaper article anyway). They don’t seem to be acting in a very Christian matter. But whatever; it’s a free country, right?

Well, only as long as you don’t publish “explicit” books, apparently. This group wants to remove a book called Baby Be-Bop because it discusses homosexuality and has some fairly explicit content. I haven’t read the book, so I won’t judge.

The group argues it could be mentally and emotionally damaging to children. I’m not a parent, but maybe I will be one day. And it seems to me that if you consider your child too young to protect himself or herself from “dangerous” material, then you shouldn’t let your child wander around alone in a public space. It’s that simple. I’m not against parents deciding what their children read—I would hope that parents educate their children widely and openly, but ultimately it’s their business. There comes a time, however, when you have to let your child grow up.

For that reason, I find this quotation from the Guardian article particularly laughable and dangerous:

Their suit says that “the plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, claim their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by this book at the library,” and that it contains derogatory language that could “put one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.”

It’s one thing to argue that material could be harmful to children. I personally take such claims with scepticism, but I at least understand that they originate from a desire to keep children safe and healthy. All right. But now you want to censor books because they might harm adults? All my life, I grew up believing that to be an adult is to have the ability to do whatever one wants (within reason), including reading whatever I want. The idea that I need a moral “Big Brother” is … well, it’s offensive. It implies I’m not mentally fit to judge what may harm my emotional wellbeing. If that’s the sort of society we want, then it wouldn’t really be free, would it?

Interestingly enough, I came across another free-speech-related article in the book I’ve just finished, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. This from Daniel Gilbert’s “dangerous idea” entitled “The Idea That Ideas Can Be Dangerous”:

We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.

Last week, Iran held national elections in which the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, supposedly won the vote by a landslide. Amid accusations of rigging the election, Ahmadinejad’s government has continued to block access to the Internet, to mobile phones, and harshly beat and interrogate rioting protesters. That is what happens when freedom of speech becomes less important than creating a rosy world.

I may not like what you have to say—I may think that you’re an idiot for saying it—but because we live in a free society, because I want to live in a free society, I’ll let you say it. You can shout it from the rooftops. You can shout it because you’re free.

Now that freedom is under attack, not by external forces of terrorists or British pop groups or European soccer stars, but by internal forces who seek to censor, to slash, to burn. They want to suppress what doesn’t fit their picture of a rosy world, to judge you mentally incapable of conducting your life, and rip knowledge—regardless of its quality—from this Earth, driving us back into the dark age of 1644. This is an insidious threat, because it can’t be fought with guns or bombs or tactical nukes.⁴ To stop this threat, you need to do something far more dangerous: you have to stand up and say “No.”

So stand up. Read the books you want to read, and fight for the right to stock libraries full of any and every book, whether it’s Twilight or Shakespeare, and seek knowledge in all its forms. We live in an age of astounding literacy, with technologies poised to deliver books to our fingertips no matter where we are or what we’re doing. We can have our rosy world and read it in too.

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• [ 1 ] I‘m guessing that’s most, but certainly not all, of you. And that’s not a bad thing.
• [ 2 ] The classical period was a big deal back in the 1600s.
• [ 3 ] Areopagitica, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
• [ 4 ] Although tactical nukes are always cool, if not always practical….

I did a terrible thing today. I bought more books.

This is how it works: Chapters is located in a mega-lot that also includes Staples, Future Shop, and Wal-Mart, any of which I may need to visit a couple of times a month to purchase stuff. However, when my body comes in proximity to Chapters, my addiction centre sends signals to my legs to move in that general direction. Once in Chapters, I am utterly at the mercy of how the sales staff has laid out their enticing displays.

The books on the left are from a previous expedition—actually, the two Umberto Eco books and Sundiver (the book I’m reading right now) came from Chapters Online. I love their shipping. The book with the spine faced away from the camera is Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen. I forgot to turn it the proper way before I snapped this photo. Stephen Baker was interviewed in a recent episode of Spark, so I decided to purchase his book. Similarly, I bought The Stillborn God today because Mark Lilla was on Ideas.

The books on the right are from today’s expedition. My dad generously orders Chapters gift cards with his Air Miles (best use of Air Miles ever!). Thanks to him, my iRewards discount, my coupon, and some in-store discounts, I only spent $15.81 of my own money today. Thanks, dad! In addition to The Stillborn God, I couldn’t resist an anthology of over sixty short stories by Canadian authors. Another Salman Rushdie book caught my eye. The Assassin’s Song is more Indian fiction, which I‘m finding I enjoy more and more. And of course, I couldn’t buy books without getting Neil Gaiman‘s latest book, The Graveyard Book! Lastly, I purchased Watchmen to lend to people in case they were interested in reading the graphic novel before seeing the movie that’s coming out next year.

Am I addicted? Yes. Thanks to discounts and gift cards, it’s mitigated to the point where my addiction is not a problem—for now.¹ Hopefully, as I get older, I will adopt a less expensive habit, like sneaking into photos of local sports teams, or compulsively stealing the 32nd page of every phone book in the city.

In fact, if you‘ve read this and are bored, why don’t you leave a comment with an idea of some truly unusual addictions? Stretch that imagination a bit!

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• [ 1 ] Sort of like in House, where House admits he’s addicted to vicodin but doesn’t have a problem.

Last February, I drew your attention to Harper Collins’ free online browsing of American Gods. Well, they are doing if again, this time with Neverwhere!

You can read it for free or download it as a PDF. You don’t get to keep it forever (the PDF will self-destruct in thirty days) but it’s an excellent offering nonetheless.

I mean, I could go off on a tangent about how self-destructing PDFs is an example of “tethered appliances” taking over the Internet and taking away our control over what content we can access. Then I could casually mention Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. But I won’t.

Literacy is wonderful. I love reading. I spent most of this summer reading Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, fed to me by my coworker. So I went to the library for the first time this summer last week and got out the books you see in the stack on the right. Three of those books are the second or fifth book in a series, however, so I’ll need to read the other books in those series before I can begin reading them. Naturally I made a list of books I wanted to get at the library. However, I forgot the list at home, and I ended up not needing it anyway, because I pretty much took home the New Books shelf, as I often do.

But first, The Pillars of the Earth! I bought that copy for my friend Carly for Christmas. She foolishly¹ mentioned that she was intending to read The Pillars of the Earth, and she did indeed have a copy, although it was a tattered paperback. There’s nothing wrong with cherished tattered paperbacks, but trade paperbacks are wubbly too. Now I’m finally ste—er, borrowing—this from her so I can read it.

The books in the stack below Pillars all came from Chapters. I love shopping at Chapters! Their shipping is amazingly fast. At first I was just ordering The Lies of Locke Lamora, Sundiver, and The Name of the Rose, because my local library does not have any of these. However, that was still under the $34 minimum needed for free shipping, and I figured the difference was small enough that adding an extra book would be a better value—so I bought Foucault’s Pendulum as well. Another coworker has recommended Umberto Eco to me. We shall see!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned Goodreads much yet—I linked to it once obscurely in my entry trumpeting the new site design, but otherwise it’s just been sitting in my sidebar there. For those of you other bibliophiles out there, you can see what books I’m reading on the sidebar, and if you follow the link to my profile, you can learn what other books I‘ve read or plan to read and even read reviews I’ve left on some. Goodreads is a fantastic site; I have a terrible memory, so being able to keep track of my books in this fashion is quite helpful. Plus, it lets me see what my friends are reading. I’ll often see my friends reading something interesting and mark it as to-read for the future. It’s a great way to get suggestions.

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• [ 1 ] Never mention to me that you have nothing to read or that you are planning to read book x but don’t have it. Many a friend has realized the error of such statements in my presence.

As previously mentioned, Neil Gaiman and Harper Collins have put the entire text of American Gods online. You can read it for free here.

I own a copy of American Gods, of course, so it’s redundant for me. Nevertheless, it’s extremely cool because, hey, let’s face it: it’s free stuff. And it exposes more people to Neil Gaiman and one of his wonderful novels.

So, as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation says, Share and Enjoy!™

Got your attention, didn’t I?

Neil Gaiman, one of the greatest authors of our era, is going to offer one of his books online for free to celebrate the seventh birthday of his blog. But that’s not the best part. We get to choose which book! Head on over to his blog and vote for the book you want to see online for free. Take his advice, though, and instead of voting necessarily for your favourite book, vote for the one you’d give to a friend. I just introduced a friend of mine to Neil Gaiman and lent her my copy of American Gods.