Well, the first month of the new year is over and my reading has been all over the map. There is the review stuff, most obviously Flesh and Fire which I posted a review of last week, but also the heavily anticipated Imaro ‘IV’ The Naama War, a review of which will appear at Black Gate this week or next. Then there’s the stuff I can’t tell you about, under the theory that if I don’t get around to penning my reviews I won’t embarrass myself surprise is a powerful weapon in the reviewer’s arsenal. And then there is all the stuff I didn’t finish — quite a lot of that in fact as much of my reading has been divided up over several anthologies and collections this month including Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique, J. G. Ballard’s The Terminal Beach, Alan DeNero’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, and Descended From Darkness, the best of Apex Magazine v.1. So, between unfinished stuff and secret stuff, what can I even talk about here?
For starters I read one of the books in my 2010 Five Book Challenge. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is the biography of Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös, a man whose love of reasoning and problem solving propelled him on an enormously productive — and very eccentric — career. Erdös was essentially a vagabond, bouncing from place to place and collaborator to collaborator, living out of a single suitcase, paying little attention to money (which was lent or borrowed with equal nonchalance), but always, always doing math. With a perspective all his own, Erdös would work with other mathematicians on whatever problem was at hand, or pose to them problems of his own. Speaking his own idiosyncratic vocabulary, popping amphetamines, Erdös is at turns a hilarious and tragic figure, and his amazingly prolific life — he published nearly 1,500 papers, most of which with one or more of his 500 collaborators — makes for a fascinating look at a lifestyle of singular dedication. While the math in the book was beyond me — I break out in a sweat calculating tips — Paul Hoffman’s empathetic study of the man was an interesting as any equation. Probably not a book I would have ever known about, let alone selected for myself, it definitely stretched my awareness and understanding of mathematics and mathematicians.
And then there was the much more usual sort of thing for me in the form of Harold Lamb’s The March of Muscovy. While there is still a tremendous amount of Lamb’s fiction I have not read (and still some that isn’t easily available, though Howard Andrew Jones and Bison Books have recently redressed that lack with their tremendous collections of Lamb’s short fiction), I’m an old acquaintance of Lamb’s histories, which were some of the earliest ‘adult’ books I remember checking out of the library and, most probably, are a big part of why I love history today. The March of Muscovy was one I had not read before, and it covers the cohesion of the Muscovite state and the birth of Russia, focusing primarily on the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Lamb’s scholarship is rivaled only by his storytelling prowess, and this book was both fascinating and fun. After reading this, I’ve hatched a plan to try to read through my lovely (and jealously guarded) stack of pristine Lamb paperback histories this year –which means I may go back and read them in chronological order.
