David's Diamonds

Give the gift of Beauty! Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus is like a long luxurious dream, filled with striking imagery and suffused with passion, that simply heaps you with beauty. You awake from reading this forlorn. Doubleday.

Review--

The Night Circus is like no other book I have read. You may read it as a novel, with strong characters and enthralling story well and deftly handled, but these usual literary suspects are besides the point of explaining why this book is so strange and appealing. Really, the book is about a place, the night circus itself, with its impossible collection of acts, illusions, and wonders. The place in turn is a world of art, done up principally in silver and black, with other colors appearing as accents, to create for the reader a remarkable visual experience. And the art in turn expresses the interior life of dreams and passions. Everywhere there is beauty, more and more beauty. You read The Night Circus, finally, for the experience, for the intense experience of lapidary beauty and luminous imagination. What a wonderful, truly magical, book! --DJ

There's a lot to like in Neal Stephenson's new novel, Reamde. As a spy-action thriller, the book is fun and it is fast – it’s a terrific ride from beginning to end. Vintage Stephenson is very much in evidence too: the virtual reality worlds of Snow Crash and the meticulous descriptions in Wired magazine of the economic and engineering underpinnings of our digital world appear again to great effect. Much is new: I found Stephenson's description of the new China arising within the global economy completely fascinating.

Most fascinating for me, however, was something much more personal. Amidst all the action and fighting, as the Forthrast family and their friends attempt to protect themselves across several continents from the depredations of Russian gangsters and Islamic terrorists, Stephenson seems to be exploring what counts for him as essential moral or human values. He turns to virtues like courage, knowing how to deal with whatever stuff that comes down, the willingness to act violently when necessary, restraint, chivalry. In an earlier age these might have been called manly qualities, but they apply to women as well: after all, the women in this book are more manly than the men, as they kick ass and shoot and fight better than the guys around them, no question about it. In Reamde, Stephenson reminds us how to live. This above all makes the book great and worth reading. -- dj

So I asked friend and customer Douglas to pick out the one book he would have me read in the store, and he handed me Peter Watts' Blindsight. Having read it, I can say that this book will come as close as a book can possibly come to really and actually blowing your mind. It's a first contact story on philosophical steroids. Watts is fascinated by all the questions relating to identity: what makes us a person? what is consciousness? how does that differ from awareness? what is intelligence? Watts brilliantly uses the first contact situation of humans and aliens trying to figure each other out as a way to raise all these issues at once. So, you get a crew peopled by a) the main character who, having had half his brain removed to prevent gran mal epilepsy, thinks of himself as a living example of John Searle's Chinese Room argument against artificial intelligence; b) someone with multiple personalities, charmingly referred to as the Gang of Four, c) etc. etc. etc. Basically, Watts populates his novel with all the different varieties of consciousness he can think of, and watches them go off when they go up against the alien Other.

Very thought provoking, serious science fiction, fiction in the mode of Einstein's thought experiments. Douglas and I are still talking about it. Great stuff. Highly, highly recommended.