Kategori: Authors

The Fault in Our Stars – John Green

Mirthful 2 Comments

green_starsI finished The Fault in Our Stars a month ago, and the reason I haven’t blogged about it is twofold. Firstly, my blogging energy has been engaged in another project, secondly, I haven’t been quite sure what to say about it, or even how I really feel about it.

Sure, it’s a lovely book. I even cried a little towards the end. But the hype got the better of me, I guess, because I was left feeling a little disappointed. I liked it, but I guess I didn’t really love it. Certainly not with the all encompassing love evident almost daily on my Tumblr dashboard.

So will I read more of John Green’s books? Probably. And I’ll keep The Fault in Our Stars around for the lasses’ enjoyment, perhaps reading it at 14 or so will be more of a life-changing event than reading it at almost 40.

Bad Science – Ben Goldacre

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skattejakt-25I purchased Bad Science a while back (quite possibly as much as four years back) with the intention of reading it immediately. For some reason or another that didn’t happen, and it’s been hanging around on the shelf ever since. Now that I finally got around to it I’m very glad I did, and a little annoyed that I didn’t before.

Quite frankly, it’s brilliant. It should be mandatory reading, probably, as it would innoculate (ironically) most sensible people against falling for the more glaring whackery – and some of the not-so-glaring, too.

Goldacre has written what amounts to a textbook on scientific method, explaining by example how tests are supposed to work and how they quite frequently are mangled beyond belief. He also explains why important, but unspectacular results are frequently not published (that a given drug doesn NOT work is important, but it’s hardly exciting). And he teaches you how to tell a good science story in the news from a meaningless one (clue: the way numbers are reported, whether it seems to provide an easy solution to a complex problem and whether sources are referenced so that you could go and check them if you felt like it). Along the way he demonstrates that the human mind is mind-bogglingly strange (why clever people believe stupid things) and that its relationship with the body is even stranger (placebo).

I sure wish I could have read something like this when I was fifteen or so, it would have saved me reading about all the various religious and ‘New Age’ solutions to how the world works and wondering if there was something in it. I never really believed it, but I sure tried hard to convince myself about a few things, mostly religion. In the meantime I somehow grew up and decided I no longer needed a grand answer to life, the universe and everything (or rather a grand question, as we know the answer is in fact 42), and now I can smile in recognition at Goldacre’s waxing lyrical about photosyntesis and how our lungs work:

Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected – not to mention true –that I can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative’ nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work.

(p. 117. This in response to various ‘alternative’ claims about things that will ‘really oxygenate your blood’ and such.)

Which isn’t to say I nodded in recognition to everything in this book, because it also told me a lot of stuff that I only vaguely knew or that was news to me. The bit about the placebo effect, for example, is fascinating. I mean, the placebo effect is fascinating, did you know it even works on animals? I need to read more about it! Also, the sections on how to read statistics were very helpful. I sort of want to do a statistics course at some point, because not getting things like ‘correcting for cluserting’ annoys me. Even if Ben Goldacre describes it this way:

This is done with clever maths which makes everyone’s head hurt.

(p. 265)

All in all, heartily recommended!

Postscript: Other sections are not so much illuminating as infuriating. I read the chapter on Matthias Rath – The doctor will sue you now – just before bedtime, and it made me so angry I could hardly sleep. A short summary (though it will probably make you angry, too, apologies for that): Rath, not satisfied with selling ‘alternative’ cures to stupid Europeans who ought to know better because they have access to education and information, has taken his ‘cures’ to South Africa and managed to worm his way in to the already disasterous government mindset that HIV is some sort of conspiracy cooked up by the west, that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS and besides the drugs are really poison meant to kill off all Africans. Better spend the money on Rath’s wonder cures. Selling snake-oil to the victims of the HIV epidemic is simply criminal and Rath, from what I can tell, ought to be brought before the International Court of Justice in Haag.

Smakebit på søndag: The Fault in our Stars

Mirthful 10 Comments

Jeg har lest ferdig Bad Science siden sist, jeg har bare ikke hatt tid til å skrive et ordentlig blogginnlegg om den (og den fortjener et ordentlig ett). Det kommer…

green_stars

Nå har jeg begynt på The Fault in our Stars, som den siste personen i verden føles det som. Jeg liker den så langt, men er ikke frelst ennå. At det er en og annen språklig perle her, derimot, er hevet over enhver tvil. Som dette, sitert ganske ofte, med god grunn:

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

(s. 124-125)

Flere smakebiter finner du hos Flukten fra virkeligheten.

Smakebit på søndag: Bad Science

Mirthful 13 Comments

Nå er det lenge siden jeg sist serverte en smakebit, men her er i alle fall et lite utdrag fra Ben Goldacres Bad Science.

skattejakt-25En del av Goldacres prosjekt er å forklare vitenskapsteori med eksempler fra det vi leser om i media – særlig medisin, både alternativ og etablert – for å gi leseren verktøy til å plukke fra hverandre dårlig vitenskap og dermed unngå å bli lurt. Følgende eksempel kommer fra ganske tidlig i boka og omhandler fuktighetskremer, der Goldacres poeng er at det faktisk er veldig få ting som egentlig hjelper huden bli hydrert og disse er såpass generelt kjent at selv den billigste fuktighetskremen inneholder alt du trenger. Det produsentene gjør for å kunne ta mer penger for produktet sitt eller kapre markedsandeler er å hive inn alle mulige merkelige ingredienser i et vagt håp om at de vil virke og pakke det hele inn i en kvasivitenskapelig sjargong.

(…) on any trip to the chemist (I recommend it) you can find a phenomenal array of magic ingredients on the market. Valmont Cellular DNA Complex is made from ‘specially treated salmon roe DNA’ (‘Unfortunately, smearing salmon on your face won’t have quite the same effect,’ said The Times in their review), but it’s spectacularly unlikely that DNA – a very large molecule indeed – would be absorbed by your skin, or indeed be any use for the synthetic activity happening in it, even if it was. You’re probably not short of the building blocks of DNA in your body. There’s a hell of a lot of it in there already.

Thinking it through, if salmon DNA was absorbed whole by your skin, then you would be absorbing alien, or rather fish, design blueprints into your cells – that is, the instructions for making fish cells, which might not be helpful for you as a human.

(s. 24) Her må man jo få lov til å påpeke at Goldacres innvendinger er så opplagte – hvordan skulle lakse-DNA kunne hjelpe huden min? – at vi må konkludere med at journalisten i The Times enten bare skrev av pressemeldingen fra produsenten uten overhode å absorbere informasjonen eller virkelig ikke har noen anelse om hva DNA er, bare at det høres vitenskapelig og flott ut.

Og nettopp medias framstilling av vitenskap, enten det er seriøs forskning eller kvasivitenskap fra kvakksalvere og andre som hovedsakelig er ute etter å tjene penger, er en av Goldacres ‘pet peeves’ som det heter på nynorsk. Og hvis du virkelig skjønner det han skriver blir det fort en av dine også, om det ikke var det fra før.

Her føles det passende å lenke til en kronikk i Aftenposten i går av Sunniva Rose: Skremmende at det er «greit» å skryte av hvor lite realfag man kan.

Flere smakebiter finner du hos Flukten fra virkeligheten.

World Poetry Day

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Som de fleste sikkert har fått med seg nå er dagen i dag Verdens poesidag, i følge UNESCO.

En utmerket unnskyldning for å dele et dikt. Egentlig hadde jeg tenkt å dele et på engelsk fra en bok som heter The King of Twist, men den er sporløst forsvunnet just nu, så da blir det i stedet norsk og Trond Botnen. Han er en av mine absolutte favoritter, og jeg fatter ikke hvorfor de to diktsamlingene hans kun er tilgjengelig fra antikvariater. Egentlig burde de være allemannseie, men der er vel kanskje ikke resten av verden helt på bølgelengde med meg (altså, poesi som allemannseie?). Nåja.

Siden det snart er påske og jeg sikkert ikke er alene om å ha tenkt meg en tur over svenskegrensa i løpet av påskeferien synes jeg det kunne passe med dette, fra Nattordbok (1970):

Reisen til Sverige
ble ikke som planlagt

selv om vi fulgte
alle veier, brosjyrer
gode råd
førte bilen lengsels-
og forventningsfullt
gjennom et
brunt og grått og grønt
og tåket landskap
da vi kom til grensen

lå ikke
Sverige
der mer

Doktor Proktor og det store gullrøveriet – Jo Nesbø

Mirthful 1 Comment

proktor_gullrøveriJo Nesbø leverer igjen med Doktor Proktor og det store gullrøveriet, men skuddet sitter ikke så sikkert som tidligere. Etter min mening er dette den dårligste Doktor Proktor-boka. Men den er fortsatt veldig, veldig bra.

Norges banks gullbeholdning (en hel gullbarre) blir stjålet, og det bare en uke før Verdensbanken skal komme på inspeksjon. Dersom det blir oppdaget at gullet er borte vil Norge bli kastet ut i økonomisk krise. Kongen gjør det eneste rette og tilkaller Bulle, Lise og Doktor Proktor. Ferden går til London, og dere har våre tre helter flere helt utrolige eventyr før de – selvsagt – løser oppdraget og redder Norge fra katastrofen.

Jeg vet ikke helt hvorfor det ikke fungerte optimalt denne gangen. Kanskje er tanken på økonomisk kollaps litt for abstrakt til å fungere som trussel? Det burde selvsagt ikke være slik, særlig siden jeg visstnok er voksen nok til å forstå konsekvensen av noe sånt, men jeg fikk ikke den store trusselfølelsen her. Nåja. Morsomt er det. Spenningskurven er bra, om ikke toppen er like høy som i de tidligere bøkene. Krumspringene, både handlingsmessig og språkmessig er der i hopetall, og mye av det er skrevet for voksne, selv om jeg ikke tviler på at ungene synes det hele er storveis også. Selv setter jeg pris på et godt (og ofte også et ikke fullt så godt, noen kaller meg lettmort) ordspill, så jeg flirer høyt av slike ting som dette:

Riktignok var Rublov verdens rikeste mann, rikere enn Olav Kron, Steinrik Hagen og Skillinge Røkke til sammen.

Kan media fluksens begynne å omtale de relevante herrer med deres nye kallenavn, please? Som den anglofil jeg er setter jeg selvsagt også pris på puber som heter ‘Løven, Hamsteret Og Den Ganske Skjeve Oksekjerra Til Herr Woomblenut Som Pleide Å Selge Rugøl Borte På Gamlemølla’.

Snart på tide å teste første boka som høytlesing for seksåringen, kanskje?

London – Edward Rutherfurd

Mirthful 2 Comments

london_edward_rutherfurdI’m finally done! And the reason it took so long is really none of Rutherfurd’s fault (well, except in writing such a thick book, though I’ve read worse), but simply because life, really.

Anyway, I liked it. I felt I learned quite a bit, which is nice, though I must admit my head is not made for remembering dates, so I got confused several times and had to search backwards to a page with a date on it. Several people on Goodreads have complained that since it spans such a lot of time and events there is no time to get to know the characters, but I found that to be a minor problem – and I do tend to dislike being rushed on to a new set of characters just when I’ve gotten interested in the present set. This is why I’m not a major fan of short-stories. But Rutherfurd’s trick is to stick to a few families, and to give them somewhat hereditary traits – not just physical, but also of temperament – so that one the whole you can tell from the name of a character whether he/she will be a «hero», a «villain» or someone bumbling but generally well-meaning for example. Well, towards the end the families intermarry and intermingle and it all gets somewhat complicated, but by then I was hooked anyway, and there was still a sense of «I will root for you since your grandfather was so nice» or perhaps «I will root for you since your father was so shitty».

I had one small, but niggling quarrel with the book, though. I may have mentioned that I’ve learnt pretty much all the history I know from novels, which makes this a perfect fit. And more than anything, I love the little daily-life details. The «how a Roman forged coins», for example. Interesting stuff, I tell you. But I need to trust the author, I need to believe he (or she) knows what he (or she) is talking about. And therefore passages such as this one throws me:

But Dame Barnikel was happiest of all when she was brewing ale, and sometimes she would let young Ducket watch her. Having bought the malt – «it’s dried barley,» she explained – from the quays, she would mill it up in the little brewhouse loft. The crushed malt would fall into a great vat which she topped up with water from a huge copper kettle. After germinating, this brew was cooled in throughs, before being poured into another vat.

(Page 524) Except barley (or any grain) won’t germinate after it’s been milled. In fact, «malt» isn’t dried barley, it’s barley that has germinated and is then dried, and there is a crucial difference. «Dried barley» is just a grain whereas the germination means the «malt» is bursting with sugars which is what the yeast later feeds on in the process that actually makes alchohol. What happens after you mill is quite rightly that you add hot water to the «coarse flour» (called «grist»), but that water is meant to extract the sugars (and partly set off enzymes that convert even more of the starches into sugars to be extracted, if you want to get really technical) in a process called mashing.

And I know it’s a very, very small detail and not at all important to the story, but it grates, and it makes me wonder where else he’s tripped up and which details I now think I’ve learnt turn out to be less than accurate.

But let’s return to happier thoughts, because I really did like the book, and end with a quote which is really a much better representation of Rutherfurd’s skill:

And so with confidence he could give his children these two important lessons: «Be loyal to the king.» And perhaps profounder still: «It seems that God has chosen us. Be humble.»

By which, of course, he really meant: be proud.

(Page 787)

London – Tor Åge Bringsværd

Mirthful 2 Comments

london_bringsværdNå har jeg i alle fall lest den ene London-boka. Siste halvpart av Rutherfurd får bli med på turen (ja, jeg har begått bokmord, jeg har splittet den tjukke paperback’en i to med papirkniv). Men Bringsværd hadde jeg jo lånt på biblioteket, så han får bli igjen hjemme (hel og fin).

Det var et hyggelig gjensyn. Dette er ikke en reiseguide, akkurat, selv om du sikkert kan legge opp en tur helt og holdent etter Bringsværds anbefalinger. Her er anekdoter, pubanbefalinger og historieforelesninger i et herlig sammensurium, akkurat slik jeg liker det. Og nå GLEDER jeg meg til å sitte på pub i London og bare være der. Ok, det gledet jeg meg vel til uansett, men jeg gleder meg enda mer nå. Kanskje kommer jeg til å føle at Tor Åge Bringsværd er med meg i ånden, så kan vi prate litt om Brumm og om Themsen og slikt mens vi sitter der. Det blir bra.

En dag her i Kew Gardens er en glitrende avkobling – selv for dem som ikke tror de er interessert i hager … for det å sitte ved et utebord ved Pavillion Restaurant (avmerket med nr 31 på gratiskartet du får ved inngangen), drikke kaffe eller hva vet vel jeg, se barn som leker på gresset under skyggefulle trær – og innimellom la øynene hvile på en gigantisk kinesisk pagode som ikke har noen som helst dypere mening, men bare er satt der fordi det passet seg slik … jeg mener, mye kan man si om en slik dag, men bortkastet er den i hvert fall ikke!

(s. 259)

The Sandman: Season of Mists and A Game of You – Neil Gaiman

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I’ve had The Sandman on my wishlist for a while, and got some for Christmas 2011 (which I read at the beginning of 2012, but neglected to blog about) and two for Christmas 2012. However, I had to exchange one because I goofed, I put vol. 3 onwards on my wishlist, but I already had 3. Luckily, Outland were nice about it and let me exchange vol. 3 for vol. 5, so I have now just finished vol. 4 Season of Mists and vol. 5 A Game of You.

Every volume I have read so far is beautiful in its own way. The cast of characters, both the recurring ones and the ones who appear in only one storyline, are by turns electrifying, charming, terrifying and lovable, but always fascinating. The themes are far-reaching and open ended, leaving more questions than they answer. Gaiman borrows lavishly from pretty much every mythology, and puts his loot to good use.

And on top of that the illustrators do their job beautifully throughout.

In Season of Mists, Dream of the Endless accidentally (sort of) aquires the key to hell, and much chaos ensues while he tries to figure out what to do with it. Along the way we get chilling images of boarding school life as well as philosophical musings on the role of hell and humankind’s need for punishment.

IMG_7239

A Game of You appeals to me even more, with its captivating set of somewhat lost humans getting involved in something far beyond their conscious imaginings.

It’s hard to say much more without spoilers, I find. I’ll leave it there.

Eon: Syvende mor i bedehuset – Lars Lauvik

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eon_7Dette var julegave fra meg til mannen. Vi hadde ønsket oss bok 8 (men fikk den ikke), men kom på at vi manglet sju også, så da kjøpte jeg den like gjerne.

Jeg vakler stadig i forhold til spørsmålet om hvilke som er mine favorittserier blant de nye norske tegneseriene. Nemi vinner, men Pondus, M og Eon er alle utrolig gode og Kollektivet, Rex Rudi og Lunch puster dem i nakken. Lauvik har hatt noen fantastisk fine juleheftehistorier, og en av dem er gjengitt i denne boken, noe som trekker opp. Ellers er det en del harselering med konspirasjonsteoretikere som jeg finner særdeles fornøyelig, spesielt side jeg har lest en del om slikt i år (blant annet hos Tjomlid).

Anbefales, men kanskje ikke som en intro til Eon-universet, det hjelper å vite hvem som er hvem fra før (det er ikke negativt, altså, jeg ville uansett alltid anbefale å starte med første bind i en serie).