Month: September 2008

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de Camp, L. Sprague: Lest Darkness Fall

I’d been vaguely meaning to read L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall for a while, and Jo Walton’s post about it on Tor.com brought it back to mind. It’s a very short book and seemed like moderately light reading.

My opinion of it is much closer to Chad’s than Jo’s: some good bits, but too much of its time for me to really get into. As Chad notes, the characterization is thin at best (particularly, I think, of the women); I also had the sense that the political plot would have worked much better if I knew more history. And a really egregious bit of Eurocentrism at the end left a bad taste in my mouth.

I do like the technical, rather than political, aspects of the book (minor spoiler, ROT13: V jnf fhecevfrq naq cyrnfrq gung ur qvqa’g trg thacbjqre jbexvat), in the same way that I liked the nonfiction Engineering in the Ancient World. If that’s your kind of thing, you might just stick to the first half of the book, which I probably should have done.

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Sears, William, Martha Sears, and Linda Hughey Holt, Pregnancy Book, The; Penny Simkin, Janet Whalley, and Ann Keppler, Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn

I read two reference books during my pregnancy, The Pregnancy Book, by William Sears, Martha Sears, and Linda Hughey Holt, and Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn, by Penny Simkin, Janet Whalley, and Ann Keppler. Both were recommended by the ever-helpful Rivka, who saved me from browsing through the vast array of pregnancy books and, very likely, having a meltdown.

The Pregnancy Book is a month-by-month discussion of maternal emotional and physical changes, fetal development, and family concerns. Any chronological breakdown of pregnancy is going to be imprecise, and so occasionally I’d find that a later chapter addressed an issue I’d experienced (I went through phases when I was reluctant to read ahead). Overall I found its tone reassuringly matter-of-fact and helpful.

Since the Searses have another book specifically on birth (called, of course, The Birth Book), The Pregnancy Book has relatively little detail on labor and delivery. Since for various reasons we chose not to attend a childbirth class, and the library’s Lamaze DVD was approximately twenty years old and quite horrible, Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn was a great relief. It is considerably more medical than The Pregnancy Book, with much detail on medications, interventions, terminology, and so forth. I found the sections I’d read useful, and if I’d not superstitiously avoided the chapter on Cesarean sections, that would have been useful too.

A note on diversity: I hadn’t realized that all of the sketches in The Pregnancy Book portrayed people who were not obviously non-white, until I opened Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn and saw photographs of non-white people. I did think, while reading The Pregnancy Book, that occasionally it assumed a middle- or upper-class reader; if Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn had class biases, I didn’t notice them in the sections I read.

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Scalia, Antonin, and Bryan A. Garner, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges

On my suggestion, the local library system ordered Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner . . . and I only got around to checking it out now. Hey, I’ve been busy.

This is a compact, readable distillation of advice on legal reasoning, brief writing, and oral argument. I didn’t find anything new in it, but it was a nice refresher, and I think it would be a fine overview for new attorneys.

The other thing of note is when Scalia and Garner disagree, which they do four times, over whether to use contractions in briefs, to put citations in footnotes, to put substantive discussion in footnotes, and to use “he” as a unisex pronoun. The remarkable thing is that I agree with Scalia on the first three (no, no, and yes), and yet his arguments, especially regarding the fourth and in comparison to the rest of the text, are so remarkably cranky that they nearly make me want to change my mind.

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Pratchett, Terry: (23) Carpe Jugulum

I don’t have much to say about Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum, which I re-read after Maskerade. My previous review was a little generous, as time has made me less tolerant of the similarity in plot to Lords and Ladies. Other than that, all I have to add is that I’d be curious to know more about Oats, and I still want to know if Pratchett has an end in mind for Granny (and Carrot, and Vimes, but particularly Granny).

(Oh, and a comment about the physical volume, not the book; recent US releases of Pratchett’s novels have been notable for their bad proofreading, but this ten-year-old British edition suggests that Pratchett just has bad luck with copyeditors, or something: in several places, “baby” is rendered “babby” (if that’s dialect, it’s extremely inconsistent), and one of the witches gets called the wrong name at least twice.)

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Pratchett, Terry: (18) Maskerade

After re-reading Lords and Ladies, I gave into the urge to re-read the rest of Terry Pratchett’s Witch sub-series of Discworld books, starting with the next, Maskerade. This is probably funnier if you know Phantom of the Opera well, or even at all—I’ve seen it, but I don’t remember a thing about it. However, though it’s much lighter than the books it comes between, it’s still an enjoyable enough diversion, perhaps especially when sleep-deprived.

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