The recent Amazon kerfuffle, which now seems to be over, prods me to post my own preferred (and in some cases aspirational) mechanisms of getting hold of books to read.

Amazon have a huge market advantage. There are other alternatives out there too. If you tend to buy a lot of second-hand books, the places to go are AddAll and Bookfinder – both do worldwide searches, and both include the Amazon providers and others who may do the same books but cheaper.

I’ve also recently joined BookMooch, which I hope will live long and prosper.

Here in Belgium, I flirted a few years back with Proxis, but in those days Amazon’s rates were simply better. I may try Proxis again now.

Also, of course, we should support our local independent bookshops. For me, that means Sterling Books in Brussels, now that the American Book Center in Leuven has closed. Go on, pick up the phone and ask them to order that book you want. It will probably be no more expensive than Amazon would have been, and let’s face it, the walk to the shop won’t do you any harm. (Probably.)

A bleak, gripping post-holocaust narrative, focussed very very tightly on the journey of a man and his son across the blasted and horrific landscape. The setting has been done many times before (from my reading this year alone, here and here for instance) but I felt this was indeed something different – the psychology between the two key characters beautifully studied, and the moral questions posed by their survival and continuing need to survive neatly explored. Not a book to help you sleep at nights, though.

What’s so difficult about rollerblading anyway?

It’s just like riding a bicycle.

Well, like walking with a bicycle under each foot.

Well, like walking with two little bicycles under each foot.

You know, there is no shame at all in admitting that your wife and son are better at some things than you are.

Hello ground.

(Bump.)

What is the Irish for “political consultant”? (If possible implying that the politics in question are international?)

Latest in my set of Hugo nominees for this year (and Anathem is sitting accusingly on the bookshelf, while I’ve ordered the paperback of Zoe’s Tale for when it comes out later this month). Lots of good stuff here, with the setting a solar system where the robots have taken over after the extinction of humanity, and our narrator a sexbot designed to pleasure a race which no longer exists, dragged into espionage. Charlie gets significant points for insisting on the vast distances within the solar system, especially once you get out as far as Jupiter, never mind the Kuiper Belt.

He even came close to over-riding my general distaste for stories about cute (indeed, in this case, very sexy) anthropomorphic robots, with a decent ratiionalisation for their shape – the robots here are actually designed for functionality rather than anthropomorphism, and with sexbots the one implies the other. The prose is typically fastpaced and I’m afraid lost me a couple of times. Still, great fun as ever.

We’re not quite sure how this novel made it onto our shelves; it won the Whitbread Prize in 1999 and is set largely in the royal court of Denmark in 1629 and 1630, where a young English musician falls in love with one of the king’s estranged wife’s maidservants. There’s a lot of long lingering flashback to the earlier lives of the lovers, their respective bosses, and extended families; from my own interest, there’s a child with an Asperger’s-ish disorder; but I wasn’t quite sure what it all amounted to. Still, it was a picturesque ride.

I first read this the year it was nominated for the Hugo, and don’t have a lot to add to what I wrote then, except that for some reaon I didn’t enjoy it as much the second time round. Perhaps it is because I now know how the Sirius Black storyline ends?

< Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | The Tales of Beedle the Bard >

Stratfor have published a “Red Alert” about a potential revolution brewing in Georgia. (The former Soviet republic, not the U.S. state.) I’m a bit sceptical. It’s clear that Saakashvili is not as strong as he was a year ago, but neither is his popularity at the single-figure depths plumbed by Eduard Shevardnadze toward the end of his rule. The opposition has yet to demonstrate that it has a critical mass.

I’m also a bit sceptical about Stratfor’s speculations regarding the south of the country. Adjara is more firmly under Tbilisi’s control than Stratfor seems to think. Samtskhe-Javakhetia will take its lead from Yerevan rather than Moscow (if anywhere), and Armenia does not want its only land route to the outside world blocked (yet again) by crisis in Georgia.

Still, I agree with Stratfor that this is one to watch.

This was a recommendation from some time ago by , and is indeed a fascinating read. Ifrah has catalogued the totality of archæological and other knowledge about counting systems since the dawn of humanity, and put it all into a single book, with lavish illustrations (black and white line drawings) of how ancient cultures counted.

It reinforces just how revolutionary the discovery of the concept of zero was – a lot of cultures had groped toward a place value notation system, ie writing 429 instead of (400) (20). (9), but this falls down when you try and write 409 unless you have something signifyng nothing. It is pretty clear that our use of it stems from Indian mathematicians of around 800 AD.

A lot of the book is simply well-illustrated cataloguing, but there were a few other points of analysis that jumped out at me. Ifrah lays out several proposed explanations for the origin of Roman numerals, before coming down with an interpretation where they came from notches on tally sticks. His description of the destruction of Mayan civilisation is intriguing and awful – is it really true that only three Mayan manuscripts survived the Spanish conquest? And of course I was interested to see how the medieval numbers that I was once familiar with fit into the longer tradition of the Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Solid stuff.

This excellent book has already won the Newbery Medal and is up for the Hugo this year. Bod Owens (the “Bod” is short for “Nobody”) is adopted by ghosts and brought up in a graveyard after his family are murdered by the sinister man Jack. His attempts to attend school and befriend a normal girl become entangled with Jack’s continued pursuit.

Gaiman fans will recognise a few things here: in particular, the split between the real world and the supernatural world of the graveyard, and the single-minded hunting of Bod by the man Jack, are respectively reminiscent of London Below, and Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, from Neverwhere. I think that both are done better in The Graveyard Book – I rewatched Neverwhere quite recently and was a bit underwhelmed. The most obvious creative debt here, however, is not to Gaiman’s own previous work but to H.P. Lovecraft: in one memorable chapter, Bod is captured by ghouls and brought to a subterranean world very similar to that of the Kadath stories. Again, I think Gaiman has improved on the original – it is less whimsical, and fits better with the overall worldview of the story.

Diana Wynne Jones blurbs the book as the best Gaiman has ever written, though we must bear in mind that she is occasionally guilty of hyperbole (Coraline does not appear yet to have displaced Alice). While I agree that it has few of the flaws that bothered me about American Gods and Coraline, I still prefer Anansi Boys (which Gaiman withdrew from the Hugo shortlist the year it was up for the award); it is both deeper and funnier. But The Graveyard Book must stand a good chance of winning this year (though I haven’t yet tackled Anathem).

Me good friend Nicu Popescu has full details here and here.

I’ve been watching The Prisoner over the last few months (having bought a complete set of videos at auction from the estate of the much-missed David Stewart) and reached the end this evening, treating myself to a double bill of Once Upon a Time and Fallout.

There are those who say that Fallout, the final episode is a true work of genius, and those who say that it is total nonsense. (I suppose there may be some who maintain both points of view.) Myself, I love it to bits. IMHO the only moment where it falters is where Number Six, The Kid and The Former Number Two are shooting down the bad guys to “All You Need Is Love” – I think that is in somewhat poor taste. But all the rest is brilliant: a triumph of showing rather than telling, leaving the viewer to put together his or her own interpretation. (Even if that interpretation may be “What a load of rubbish!”)

My favourite moments: are: 1) when the Controller puts on his mask and robe and goes to join the other masked, robed guys; 2) when they all echo Number Six’s first person pronoun to the point of drowning out what he is saying; and 3) at the end when Number Six and the Butler cross the road together. But I think it is almost all sheer genius.

What about you?

And what reference book about The Prisoner should I get?

I took B to the nature reserve at Het Vinne today, not too far from where she now lives. Part of the plan was to try and get decent pictures of her for friends and family. I think I succeeded. Her hair has gone very curly.

If you consider the square numbers in base 10, very few of them end in repeated digits, apart from the trivial case of all squares of multiples of 10 ending in multiple 0’s.

Square numbers which end in 1 or 9 always have an even number in the 10s column. (01, 09, 49, 81, 121, 169…) Square number which end in 6 always have an odd number in the 10s column. (16, 36, 196, 256…) Square numbers which end in 5 always in fact end with 25, so never with 55.

Square numbers which end in 4, however, always have an even number in the 10s column (04, 64) and so we get plenty ending in ..-44 (starting with 144 which is 12 squared) and even …444 (starting with 1444 which is 38 squared). But there it stops. If the last three digits are 4’s, the number in the thousands column is odd: 462 squared is 213444, 538 squared is 289444, etc.

What about other bases? Well, in binary, every even number’s square ends with at least two zeros (because they are all multiples of four), and every odd number’s square ends in …001 (because they are always one more than a multiple of eight).

In hexadecimal we start off promisingly:

Now we have to go up considerably in scale, and there aren’t any squares ending in more than five repeated 4’s, as the sixth last digit is always odd (1’s and 9’s, however, continue)

And I guess that we can keep going with steadily increasing numbers of 1’s and 9’s (this is probably trivial enough to prove).

Counting in an odd-numbered base, it is also pretty easy to build up repeated digits as the distinction between odd and even numbers no longer applies.

I was very amused to come across þis essay, advocating þe return of þe old letter þorn, instead of “th”.

In fact, “th” represents two different sounds in English, a voiced and an unvoiced consonant. (Þink of þe difference between “them” and “thick”.) But we never really notice þe distinction; þey operate as one phoneme in English. Þe only modern language þat uses þe letter is Icelandic, but in þeir spelling “þ” is always “thick”; þe softer, voiced consonant is spelt ð.

Apparently þe reason þat “þ” was dropped from English is þat when printing began, þe font sets arriving from France and Germany had all þe oþer letters except þis one, so we slipped into þe situation of spelling þe sound “th”. (For þe same reason, we dropped þe old letters wynn – ƿ – and yogh – ȝ – þough þe latter survives in þe name of Sir Menȝies Campbell.) Þis process has left English as a language using very few diacritical marks in its version of þe alphabet, which I have always felt is raþer dull.

Þere are a number of oþer languages which also have þe “th” spelling mainly for þe unvoiced version – Welsh and Albanian are þe two I am most familiar wiþ – þough in Castilian Spanish, “c” and “z” are often used for it, and in Turkmen, oddly enough, it is represented by þe Latin letter “s”. In a number of languages (including again Castilian Spanish) “d” generally represents þe voiced sound; in Albanian it is spelt “dh” and in Welsh “dd” (and in Fijian, apparently, “c”).

I am not committing to write all my future livejournal entries using þis neglected letter. But I am not going to ignore it eiþer!

My grandfather and Charlie Haughey
My quote on the 1996 elections

Doctor Who
Wendy Padbury brings Daleks to Dublin, 1968
Introducing Tom Baker
Doctor and monsters apply for US visas
Irish Times anticipates New Who, 1996
Irish Times anticipates New Who, 2005

The day I was born (of course, the news is published the following day):
Stormont minister sacked, cont page 7
Greek King appeals for return to normality; cosmonaut buried in state funeral
Michael Foot speaks at TCD, Stalin’s daughter speaks in New York

Why is Kindred such a good book?

It has some noticeable problems. We never find out exactly how or why our narrator gets repeatedly yanked back in time from contemporary California to early 19th-century Maryland. She and her husband accommodate themselves to their peculiar situation remarkably quickly. The end of the book is abrupt and jars with what we have learnt about Dana over the previous 250 pages.

And yet, it is a really good book.

I’ve written before about Butler’s take on gender and race, in her most famous short story. I’ve also written before about antebellum slavery, on a plantation owned by a family whose name, oddly enough, was Butler. In Kindred, Octavia Butler takes her narrator back to the early nineteenth century, but she also brings slavery forward to our own time, both the physical marks of it in the scars on Dana’s back and her missing arm, and the changes it makes to her mental map of her past and present, and it’s that jarring disconnect/connect which makes the book so memorable and thought-provoking.

Also, Butler’s writing style is memorably sparse. She shows rather than tells; sometimes I wish she would even show a bit more of her characters’ emotional reactions to what happens to them. But it’s not always a bad thing to make the reader work a bit to grasp what is going on. And the brutal facts of slavery and of the human spirit’s adaptation to it pretty much speak for themselves; at least, they do when Butler is describing them. Although the brutality of her fictional Maryland slaveholding is actually not as bad as the real Carolinas plantation described by Fanny Kemble a little later in time, it seems more shocking to have it witnessed by someone who is a contemporary of ours.

I read this book for the book club, and I’m glad I did.

Not mine, but ‘s of Bujold, starting here, and ‘s of The Lord of the Rings, starting here. Both on Tor.com.