The Estimation of Probabilties (Irving John Good) This slim volume is subtitled “an Essay on Modern Bayesian Methods,” and is a relatively quick read. I found the going a little tough at times, since the terminology is perhaps a little out of date and I’m not completely at one with all the statistics terminology. He talks a lot about Type I probabilities (priors), Type II probabilities (priors on priors), and even Type III probabilities (priors on priors on priors). Broadly, the book deals with estimation of distributions from samples — given a set of exchangeable samples from a distribution on t elements, how should you estimate the probabilty p_i of seeing element i? Later on, he talks about how to do this estimation when t itself is unknown, which leads to the famous Good-Turing estimator. There’s been a fair bit of work on these questions recently, which motivated me to read the book. Plus it has great quotes like:

If the Bayesian prefers, he can… with some boggle, imagine an infinite sequence of distinct universes selected at random… The notion of a random selection of universes is of course purely metaphysical… and any crutch to one’s judgement can be used unofficially. It might be inexpedient to mention to one’s customers that one had such naughty unscientific private thoughts.

The Thursday Next Adventures (Jasper Fforde) I finally read, or rather devoured, these novels. Set in a world which takes its literature very seriously indeed and the boundary between the written page and reality is thin and permeable, these mystery/adventure novels follow the adventures of Thursday Next, a Special Operations agent in charge of literary misdemeanors. The best thing about these books was that they actually made me want to go back and read Great Expectations and other classics. I suspect that was part of Fforde’s intent. But they’re good stuff.

The Big Over-Easy (Jasper Fforde) A spin-off from the above, this is a murder mystery set in a world populated by nursery rhyme characters. Detective Jack Spratt investigates the foul murder of Humpty Dumpty. Is Solomon Grundy to blame? Sometimes Fforde’s writing becomes a little too precious, but it’s just too fun to read, especially if you like a good mystery.

The Bartimaus Trilogy (Jonathan Stroud) Young-adult fantasy series about an England run by magicians whose power is entirely derived from enslaving djinns. I’d put this stuff up there with Diana Wynne Jones, and good reading if you like that genre.

Longitude (Dava Sobel) A book about the history of the longitude problem, which plagued seafarers for centuries. The historian in me liked the book quite a bit, but the engineer in me wanted more details about the construction of the (very clever) clocks that eventually solved the problem.

Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer) A hilarious and touching tale of finding one’s roots and discovering the past, told by a novelist (named Jonathan Safran Foer), who wants to reconstruct the shtetl in Ukraine where his grandfather lived, and his translator, whose English is deliciously massacred. I haven’t seen the movie, and I find it hard to believe that a movie could possibly do justice to the book.

Pastoralia (George Saunders) This collection of short stories was a bit hit-and-miss, subject-wise, but George Saunders’ writing is always spot-on. I particularly liked Pastoralia and The Barber’s Sadness. If you like George Walker’s plays, you would like George Saunders — they have the same concern with getting inside the heads of people whom society might classify as “losers.” I bet there’d be an interesting piece of criticism waiting in there, actually.

Bhopal (Rahul Varma) This play takes a hard look at the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, and the layers of complicity and complication. Varma is an Indian-Canadian playwright, and our “in” on the play is via a Canadian doctor who is doing some medical research on women and babies near the factory in Bhopal. What is interesting is how the play complicates this NGO involvement by asking us to consider how our medical research also manipulates the poor in coercive ways, even though we are doing it for “a good cause.”

Next on the list : Creating Modern Probability (von Plato), Desis In The House (Maira), and Magic for Beginners (Link).

I used to write a lot about each book I read but of course I don’t have the time. And besides, I haven’t been reading as quickly as I used to. Unfortunately my dream of more theory/nonfiction hasn’t come to fruition. So besides The New Yorker and Harpers I’ve delved into some more reads:

The Thursday Next Novels : The Eyre Affair, Lost In a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten (Jasper Fforde) — a bit of brain candy, these, but a lovely bit of literary comedy. It’s like Terry Pratchett with an ear for the classics (which I haven’t really read, truth be told). The books follow a Special Operations agent named Thursday Next, who lives in a world in which the line between fiction and reality is permeable, and in which there is a special division for literary crimes. What fun! Actually, the best part about it is that it actually makes me want to go back and read Great Expectations and the like. Even Jane Austen seems like it could be fun after these books, despite my falling asleep the last time I tried to read her. Maybe I have become more sensitive over time…

The Big Over-Easy (Jasper Fforde) — A spin-off series from the above, with a similar sensibility. Who wouldn’t like a murder mystery set in a world in which nursery rhyme characters populate the town? It’s more like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? than The Thin Man, so noir fans beware.

Speaking of Siva (AK Ramanujan)) — This was a slim volume of Bhakti-movement poems (vacanas, or utterances) from the Virasaiva community and were translated from the original Kannada. The poems themselves are quite beautiful — like most Bhakti poems, they get at the heart of what love and God and the self are in a relatively un-self-conscious way. One of the poems, by Allama Prabhu, is used in A Flowering Tree, the new John Adams opera that I am singing as part of a semi-staged SF Symphony concert at the beginning of next month. As one of the few, if only, South Asian singers in that concert, I feel a particular need to educate myself about the textual underpinnings. The poem was translated into Spanish before being set into music, and I’m not sure the music is appropriate to the relgious/philosophical outlook of the poem. Adams is free to set the poem as he likes, and he isn’t trying to don some mantle of authenticity, so I find his musical choices interesting, but I think the text serves his end, rather than the reverse. Perhaps I will write more on that later.

I’m currently working on a number of books in parallel. More when I actually finish some of them.

(by Peter Shaffer) Equus is one of those famous plays that I never read but could probably fake knowledge of it. It’s the story of a young man, Alan Strang, who is put in a psychiatric hospital after blinding six horses. The play centers around the doctor, Martin Dysart, and his attempt to unravel the cause of Alan’s actions. Dysart has his own neuroses — a distant wife, a recurring dream about carving up children, and he constantly questions the morality of his job. Alan, for his part, is deeply suspicious of Dysart’s objectives, but eventually opens up. Dysart interviews Alan’s parents — a very religious mother and an atheist and overbearing father. He elicits from Alan flashbacks and dreams and eventually pieces together a psychosis in whose logic the blinding of the horses is inevitable.

The original stage directions are given in the version I have, so you get a real sense for the theatricality of Shaffer’s writing. That is, I think, the strongest point in the whole piece. What bothered me was the cleanliness of the psychoanalysis. It’s appealing to think that even the most horrific events have rational antecedents, that we can make acts of cruelty into acts of passion, and while this story may exemplify that approach, I got the sense at the end of the play that I had witnessed a particularly clever sleight of hand. It’s a very neat case study. However, apart from that, we have the effect of the process on Dysart himself, which Shaffer teases out in a really beautiful and true way.

It’s definitely a play worth reading and I’m sure worth seeing as well. I’ve heard there’s a movie version, but I think the play is too theatrical to be suited to a realistic film, so I think I’ll give it a miss. I’m sure it would only accentuate the things I didn’t like about the script and eliminate the theatricality by using real horses or something.

Three more…

The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri) — I think I devoured this book in about two sittings, it was so good. Or maybe it was more that it was so relevant. Most books by authors of Indian descent are set in India, but Lahiri is American, like I am, and this book is about that experience, or rather the experience of Gogol Ganguli, the child of Indians who immigrated to the US. It’s one of the few stories I’ve read like it that really hit me with its truthfulness and compassion.

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) — I don’t have much to say about this, except that I enjoyed the read but never bought Gibson’s premise. A world in which people are obsessed with out-of-sequence movie footage released by some unknown auteurs? Confusing.

City of Djinns (William Dalrymple) — This is a very engaging travelogue and history of Dehli, a city which I now want to explore. Dalrymple writes about his year living there and trying to dig through the various incarnations of the city : modern, Raj, occupation, Mughal, Sultanate, all the way back to the Mahabharata. What was most amazing to me was how many ancient gardens, palaces, and so on have just vanished or gone to seed. In some sense it’s a city with no sense of history, but you get the impression that many of the residents are anachronisms in their own right.

By “recent” I mean “since January, more or less.” These are in no particular order.

The Cheese and the Worms (Carlo Ginzburg) — This book, translated from Italian, is an attempt to reconstruct what peasant culture in 16th century Italy was like through the story of a miller named Menocchio who held a number of unorthodox beliefs and was condemned to death by the church. I saw a play about Menocchio at the Berkeley Rep a few years ago, so I knew the story. In the play Menocchio seems like a bit of a hero, speaking truth to power, and is punished. That doesn’t seem to be the play’s intent, but performance makes the audience sympathize with the miller, so it was a little unavoidable. The book is clearer but still very engaging, especially if you like history with a story.

When Gravity Fails (George Alec Effinger) — This is the first instance of Arabian cyberpunk that I’ve come across, and it was really engaging. I think it appeals to the parts of me that like Naguib Mahfouz and sci-fi and noir all at once. It’s a gritty detective murder tale set in the Budayeen, a run-down district in a nea-futuristic Arab city. People can chip in new personalities and abilities into a port connected to their brain, drugs are everywhere, and there’s more intrigue than you can shake a stick at. Good stuff.

A Fire in the Sun (George Alec Effinger) — This is a sequel to the above, with the same main character, Marid Audran. Marid has to unravel a tangled web of back room deals while dealing with his past and trying to do the right thing. This one settles into some real character development that was lacking in the first book.

The Arabesk Trilogy (Pashezade, Effendi, Felaheen) (Jon Courtenay Grimwood) — More Arabian sci-fi! Although this is less cyberpunk and more alternative history. The trilogy is set in a world in which Germany won WWI and the Ottoman Empire still exists. The action centers on El Iskandriya and the prodigal Ashraf Bey, who is thrust into the middle of more intrigue than you can shake a stick at. Pretty good reads, I think.

Old Man’s War (John Scalzi) — This one is up for a Hugo. At the risk of sounding like every other review of the book, I’ll say it’s a must-read for Heinlein fans. It’s big in scale and has the same kind of humor.

The Algebraist (Iain Banks) — This one was up for a Hugo last year. It’s monstrously long, and as a friend put it, it’s like “taking an amusement park ride through Iain Banks’ imagination.” Interstellar plots, psychotic religious despots, civilizations that live inside gas-giant planets, and a humungous mystery hunt to save the world await. I liked it, but it’s not the best Banks book I’ve read.

Mumbo Jumbo (Ishmael Reed) — A hugely imaginative farcical take on American (and world) history. It’s all about the African-American artistic movement of the Harlem Renaissance era (Jes Grew) and its conflict with the Eurocentric artistic establishment (The Wallflower Order). The best thing about it is the writing, which really demands some attention to get it in your ear (or in your soul). This is a re-read for me, but I liked it even more the second time.