34. Love in the Time of Cholera

34. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (10/21/2011 - 11/1/2011; 12/24/2011 - 1/14/2011)

I ran into a problem with this book: it's interesting, but it's not super engrossing at the beginning; thus, I put it down around November 1st and didn't pick it up until the end of December.

Gabriel García Márquez is an amazing author -- I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is one of the best books I've ever read, so I was excited to pick up Love in the Time of Cholera.

This was an unusual book.  The beginning takes a really long time to get going; there's a lot of background information that Márquez uses to get to the actual story, and it turns out that most of that background information really isn't that important to the plot.  From there, the story is told largely through flashback -- most of the 300 pages of the book is a really long flashback -- but it eventually makes a full circle back to the end of the first chapter of the novel.

The love story is that of Fermina Daza and Florentina Ariza, two individuals who fall in love while they are teenagers.  Their love is interrupted by Fermina's realization that it was all an illusion, and she instead marries a rich and successful doctor.  They live out about 50 years of marriage in relative happiness, and she doesn't give Florentino much of a second thought.  But Florentino never forgets his love for Fermina; he ends up having over 600 affairs to pass the time between Fermina's rejection of him and the death of her husband more than 50 years later.

It's a very confusing thing, this book.  My empathy went back and forth for Florentino; sometimes I was on his side, but sometimes I decided he was probably the creepiest character I could think of.  And Fermina seemed very stuck up at times, so I wasn't really on her side either.  But the end of the book is quite spectacular.  After Fermina's husband dies, Florentino seeks her out to profess his love to her again.  And, surprisingly enough, there is a happy ending for the two of them, despite pretty much all the odds in the book, including Fermina's own professed hatred for Florentino.

So I liked this book, but ultimately, I think One Hundred Years of Solitude is a better example of Gabriel García Márquez's work.

33. Bicentennial Man

33. The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov  (10/2/2011 - 10/20/2011)

Since I was so fired up by i, Robot, I started this book immediately after finishing it.  However, I have to say I was rather disappointed.  Some of the stories were downright amazing, but some kinda sucked.  So I would have to say that I would recommend some of them but not all.

I would avoid the following: "Feminine Intuition," which was ironic but kinda bizarre, "Waterclap," which was just awful, "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," which is a conversation between two robots and doesn't make a lot of sense, "Strangers in Paradise," wherein two brothers meet in a future where siblings are one of the rarest and strangest relationships on the planet, and "The Life and Times of Multivac," which is about a supercomputer that makes all of humanity's decisions for them.
Actually, these stories make up roughly the first half of the book. Yeah, I'd avoid the first half of this book.

But the second half -- this is where this collection of short stories got good.  "The Winnowing" is about a group of humans that, in an effort to solve world hunger, ask a scientist to develop a virus that will arbitrarily kills about 80-90% of the people exposed to it. This virus will be packaged with food parcels sent to starving villages, thus wiping out most of the population and solving the hunger problem.  The twist is awesome and I won't give it away except to say that the story is definitely worth reading.  "The Tercentary Incident" is about an accident that kills one version of the president of an organization that is basically all countries on Earth (there are two versions to prevent problems arising, one human and one robot copy).  The problem is, no one can determine whether the robot was killed -- which is totally acceptable -- or if the human was killed, which is a huge problem because then the world is being led by a robot.  This was my favorite story from this collection (other than "Bicentennial Man").

"Bicentennial Man" is the story of a robot that wants to be human and so gradually humanizes himself, starting with wearing clothes and eventually escalating  into surgeries and operations that make him physically into a human.  This is the story that the movie with Robin Williams is based on and it was amazing.  I mean, the movie is good (a childhood favorite of mine), but the subtleties of the novella are amazing.

If nothing else, read "Bicentennial Man."

Another General Update

As I move through my final year as a graduate student, I find myself busier and busier, and I know that's not going to change.  It does go a long way toward explaining why I only read one book in September, though :)

But I would like to start to change something on this blog.  In one of my education classes, we have been discussing how to recommend books to our students, especially considering reading level and what's content appropriate for a high school student and about a dozen other issues.  So I'm going to try something a little different and see if I like it -- I'd like to start thinking about whether or not I'd recommend books that I read to my students.  Of course, not everything I read is good, which is a major consideration, but beyond that, I'd like to be able to share this blog with my students, and I think that best way to hopefully get them interested in reading some of what I've read is to make it relevant to them. 

I really want my students to want to read, I want them to see that reading can be fun and it's not boring the way school makes it seem.  And I think that I can start to show them that through this project.

32. i, Robot

32. i, Robot by Isaac Asimov (9/14/2011 - 10/1/2011)

This book was truly awesome. Its contents are so different from the previous Asimov story I read (Foundation) that I was barely sure that both novels were written by the same author.  Foundation was so removed from the action, whereas these stories plunge the reader right into the heart of robotics and its consequences.

Technically speaking, this isn't a novel -- it's a collection of short stories connected through the simple framework of a reporter interviewing Dr. Susan Calvin near the end of her life.  Each short story is Calvin recounting some conflict between robotics, humans, and the Three Laws of Robotics that create all these insane problems.  The 3 Laws are as follows:

     1.  A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

     2.  A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the    First Law.

     3.  A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Each story can stand on its own without trouble -- "Robbie" is about the thin line between human and robots, "Little Lost Robot" is about a modified robot (the first Law has been altered so he can perform a certain task) who goes missing, "Reason" is about a robot who gradually comes to believe that a man-made laser is a god and will only follow its 'orders,' and so on.  The set-up makes for quick reading; each story can be easily read in one sitting, and each is so engaging that the book is genuinely hard to put down.  

The short stories included in i, Robot are:

• "Introduction" 
• "Robbie"
• "Runaround"
• "Reason"
• "Catch that Rabbit"
• "Liar!"
• "Little Lost Robot"
• "Escape!"
• "Evidence"
• "The Evitable Conflict"

I would highly recommend this book, especially if you have any interest in Asimov's writing.  I will point out that the movie i, Robot is not based on any one story from the collection but is rather a Hollywood creation in the same general universe as the rest of Asimov's robotics writings.