The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

I inadvertently picked up the second book of a series, having never read Caves of Steel. The Naked Sun stands on its own.

There has been a murder on Solaria, a world where the robot servants so outnumber the humans that the humans rarely see one another. The victim's wife was in the house, no one else was within miles, and the robots could not have done it, could they? So why do the Solarians need a detective all the way from Earth to puzzle out what happened?

I will start by saying that it is hard for a murder mystery to get that 4th star. That element of suspense falls when you already know the ending.

We have here a sci-fi murder mystery. We are investigating a crime, but we are also investigating a foreign society. This is the more extreme version of the detective working abroad, having as much difficulty navigating the culture as the criminal investigation.

Being Asimov, it is written well. Isaac Asimov produced quality prose at a pace faster than most printing presses. This is not the best example of his work, but it is not a bad example.

As a story, the structure is standard. Introduce the detective, give him a partner so that ideas can be explained aloud, present the crime and its impossible circumstances, develop suspects and circumstances while placing the detective in harm's way, moment of epiphany, and bring everyone together for the big reveal at the end. This is effective but not highly original use of the conventions of the genre. You can also see from the chapter structure how the story was originally serialized, with moments like the commercial breaks in a television investigative drama.

The major points of the book are sociological and psychological. The important thing is the exploration of what it means for a culture to grow in the direction that Solaria had or that Earth had. In many ways, this is the essence of science fiction: not the trappings of robots and spaceships, but the effects of taking a trend and letting it play out fully.

The robots are important not as a spectacle but rather as a plot device. Their programming allows rules for the game, a structure for the murder mystery where how some "people" will act is explicitly defined. Most of the robot stories involve defining the limits of robot behavior through the Three Laws then finding ways around them. Having robots lets us explore what it means to be human and how we define consciousness, along with a world where there is no poverty or suffering because technology has allowed everyone to live a life of leisure.

In that respect, the trappings of science fiction are minimal. Yes, we have globe-spanning cities, a trans-galactic confederation, spaceships, robots, holograms, fetal engineering, social conditioning, and everything you expect except lightsabers. They are just the window-dressing for the story. You could very easily adapt the story to Tibet, with pacifist Buddhist monks replacing robots.

This is a great strength of well-written science fiction and fantasy: the ability to explore a principle with greater clarity by abstracting it from its particulars. Several of the robot stories ask how you feel about paternalism when your robot servant/overlords really do know better than you and always have your best interests at heart. What is justified in war when the enemy really is an irredeemably evil other? What do you do when the literal end of the world is nigh?

(Of course, many authors instead make thinly veiled allegories about contemporary politics, where their enemies really are planning to destroy the world. But I digress.)

One theme that recurs in Mr. Asimov's writing is controlling changes in desires. The robots form a permanent slave class, but that is okay because they are perfectly happy with that and they are physically incapable of wanting to be anything else but your perfectly well-meaning servant. Or is there something wrong with building willing slaves? What if we bred them instead? There are shades of Brave New World here, but The Naked Sun's fetal engineering is breeding people who prefer one sort of culture over another. How does that affect the moral status of the culture they build, along with that of the breeders and the children? In another of his books, is The Mule's psychic ability to change what you want any different from the Second Foundation's hyper-advanced psychology? Is that a difference of kind or degree from normal persuasion? Is it wrong? And then we slip into questions of free will and make the review way too long.

It's a good story. It is not a life-altering piece of literature that will be cherished for millennia, but it compares favorably with watching another episode of Law & Order.

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Lunch Lessons by Ann Cooper

Rating - 1: not worth considering (burn it)

This book freely mixes political disinformation with health advice. You will have great difficulty learning anything new because the only way to separate the truth and false here is to already know what is true and false. Either nothing is new to you or else you stand to pick up as many inaccuracies as facts.

Lunch Lessons argues that we face a crisis of childhood obesity and malnutrition. We need to reform how we feed our children and get them on organic, locally grown produce. Half of the books consists of recipes.

Some of the claims are suspicious. Some of them are verifiably false. Others are great advice that are based on scientific research. Good luck working that out.

The obvious irrationalities to ignore are support of organic foods and opposition to genetically modified ones. Organic is a process, not a product. All foods are genetically modified, and modern techniques are safer and more efficient variations on the selective breeding we have been doing for centuries. Worries about corporate "frankenfood" have about as much scientific backing as worries about Communists fluoridating our water supply.

Some of the recipes do look interesting, however, so this may rise to a 1.5 at some point. The book claims to possess the best recipe ever, which I should try. How can you pass up literally the best recipe ever? Who knew that the best recipe ever was mac'n'cheese?

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The Beatrice Letters by Lemony Snicket

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Not so much a book as a puzzle, and a poorly defined one at that. This books serves mostly as an inducement to buy The End, without which the puzzle makes little sense.

Letters to Beatrice. Letters from Beatrice. Letters re: Beatrice. This is a supplement to A Series of Unfortunate Events, addressing Lemony Snicket himself and Beatrice(s).

An epistolary novel would combine the letters into a coherent storyline. This being A Series of Unfortunate Events, that does not happen. They letters do not form much coherent at all except anagrams.

There are many anagrams. If you like them, you will find them. If it does not occur to you to anagram words, the obvious one will be the only one you are likely to find. The book comes with punch-out letters in case you missed the pattern of letters (ABC) in letters (Dear sir), but other things like names and "baticeer" embrace anagramming. The letter letters anagram to more than one thing, by the way, all of which have multiple implications or interpretations.

So basically, that is a rorschach.

This book reads differently before and after The End, which is to say it hints at some things in the later book and makes less sense until you have read both books. Even if you have read The End, I would not recommend this book. It does not add anything significant to the storyline, and what it does add is shadowy.

The book does contain some great bits of Lemony Snicket writing, as all the books do. It picks up some items from Snicket's self-referential statements throughout the book, most notably the 200-page rejection letter he once received as a suitor (carried by a pigeon). Root beer features, but sugar bowls do not.

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Bad Buster by Sofie Laguna

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Reviewing an early reader book puts me outside my field. I will try anyway.

Buster is a bad kid. His parents take him to play with dogs at the pound to keep him out of trouble. He becomes a somewhat less bad kid and does something good.

This could be a good story for a reluctant reader. A boy around age 7 with behavioral problems seems like a good target, someone who could sympathize with the protagonist. Other than that, it is a simple, unimaginative book.

Plus: this is not a story where the bad kid has a heart of gold underneath and everyone comes to love him. Score one for coherent psychology and group dynamics in a children's book. Minus: bad people have tattoos. That seems like a bad thing to teach kids, both in terms of over- and under-inclusiveness.

Leigh Hobbs's illustrations are simple but effective in an intentionally messy style. The dogs look good. The tree stump sculptures do not (which may be intentional).

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Sold by Patricia McCormick

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

What better way to follow a book on educating rural Nepal than with a story about a girl from rural Nepal?

Pause here if you plan just to take my recommendation and read the book. This review has no more spoilers than the back cover, and really the title gets you half-way there, but there is technically a plot twist about a third of the way through. Reviewing the book without giving it away would be like reviewing War of the Worlds without mentioning Martians (though the title again does the work there). So if you are really sensitive to spoilers, let me get one last sentence, and then you can go read the book and come back here to post comments.

Great cover.

Okay, if you are reading this far, I can now do the normal plot summary. 13-year-old Lakshmi thinks she is going to the city to be a maid, earning her family money. Instead, she has been sold to a brothel in India. This is the story of her endurance.

The great strength of the book is in its sparse style. The words are simple and plain. The story stands on its own merits. The presentation is straightforward and accessible, flowing very naturally.

It is told in mostly one- to two-page vignettes, which sometimes (often?) slip into free verse. The doses of Lakshmi's suffering are small, often poignant.

The great weakness of the book is its lack of harshness. It is a good thing to avoid sensationalism, and I have said elsewhere that I can do without graphic rape scenes in my reading, but it seems to matter little that this book takes place in a brothel. It makes some of the scenes a bit harsher, but it could be the story of anyone enslaved. It is a story filled with a dull ache, a burden that must be endured. The pain is not sufficiently sharp. Lakshmi is drugged or mentally absent, and forced sex with men four times her age is summarized in a sentence or two. The descriptions of hunger or beatings are explicit and repeatedly; the sex is abstract, distant. I should be more uncomfortable reading this, instead of thinking that I could recommend it to my mother.

The whole point is not to be comfortable with selling girls into sexual slavery. Hit me harder.

That said, the psychology of the book rings true. It is an easy read: anyone old enough for the subject matter should be fine. If you want a book for a high school or college discussion that is not going to leave anyone emotionally shattered, this is a good one.

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Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Good cause, poor book.

John Wood founded Room to Read, a nonprofit that sets up schools and libraries in rural Asia, along with scholarships so that girls can attend (boys do to, but parents are willing to do that on their own). Before we get to the book, you can visit their website and donate: $250 is a girl's education for a year, $2000 is a reading room, $8000 is a library, and an entire school is $11,000 to $18,000, depending on the country. They could also use funds to administer the program. Oh, and you can read more about the charity at the site: these are areas where the majority is illiterate, and the cost of a year of college here will build an entire school there.

One thing that this book is obviously doing is selling the cause. It does this well. Granted, I am a guy who writes a blog about books, but when you tell me that a village has no books, I ask where to send the check. If you want numbers, those are there. If you want sob or success stories, those are there.

There remains a question of ultimate effectiveness: do the libraries and schools translate to higher literacy, economic growth, etc.? The connection is obvious but the correlation is unknown, since many charities have enacted seemingly obvious solutions that were not effective due to other problems. Of course, Room to Read started in 2000, so the first students have not gone through the whole thing -- we are not in the long term yet. Access to education is necessary; we do not yet know if it is sufficient; that seems good enough to start with. I just have to mention it, because I would be untrue to my profession otherwise: building schools is what they do, but the goal is to improve literacy and life outcomes. It is important not to get lost on the more easily measurable output.

They do have good numbers there: about 200 schools and 3000 libraries/reading rooms. Go team! But I digress.

This is combined with a business book. There is not much to that. There are some philosophical and methodological points, but not really a lot to work with there. Think big, work hard, sell sell sell.

The third thing is an inspirational story of a personal journey. This does not work for me. Its intersections with the other threads distort it. For example, stories about the organization's successes sometimes come across as self-celebratory. For example, the chapter on Microsoft in China comes across as "I am smarter than Bill Gates," despite explicitly disclaiming that implication at the end. There frequent mentions of his journal seem odd.

The book would be stronger either as a purer personal oddysey or with less "me." If both aspects are going to be kept, along with the business story, the story will need more structure to keep things running on separate but overlapping tracks, instead of muddling them together into something vaguely narcissistic.

But seriously, yay books, and rural Asia needs more of them.

Amazon link

Author's website

Update: I think the addition of girls' scholarships is a great thing in terms of long-term effectiveness. No one wants a school or library that no one uses or one that marginally benefits those who were already had some sort of access. The funding for female students brings in daughters who would otherwise be seen as expensive liabilities and creates mothers who will teach the next generation. Much luck to Room to Read, and I have sent my donation.