Review: Frieren Vol 11-14

 Going into Frieren Vol 11 I finally got to the point where Macht is killed and the heroes are victorious over a "midas touch" demon as well as Solitar. We then go into an extended time travel sequence where Frieren swaps places with herself from prior to the series beginning (i.e., during the quest to destroy the Demon King), and gets to use her knowledge from the future to help her previous party overcome immediate challenges while they help her return to the future.

I thought this was a great sequence, and well setup to see both how much and how little Frieren herself has changed over time.

Unfortunately, the series came to a hiatus after Vol 14, while ending in a particularly bad place with the shadow assassins plotline coming together. The problem with Japanese Manga is that they're high on filler (lots of pages where nothing essentially happens) and so by the time you get substantial events you're 14 volumes into a series that wasn't finished. The characters also have a tendency to pontificate about their secret techniques while fighting, which is pretty unrealistic but I guess with manga there's no other way to get to know the characters' innermost thoughts!

Reread: Lord Valentine's Castle

 Humble bundle had a collection of Robert Silverberg's books on sale, and I had fond memories of Lord Valentine's Castle, so I bought them and started reading the book I had fond memories of. The book feels a bit cliche now, with an amnesiac protagonist wandering around and then getting picked up by a group of jugglers when he demonstrates talent juggling.

Over time, he discovers that he's the rightful ruler of the planet, via dreams. The rest of the book is his quest to be restored to his rightful position. The setting of the planet of Majipoor itself is a character, but we never get any explanation as to why the planet is so big but so density challenged (characters in the book do refer to the lack of heavy elements on Majipoor, so the author was aware of this), or how the planet got settled, or how the various mechanisms of population control work (how do dream sendings work, why did the society appear to lose all advanced technological knowledge).

The book does spend a lot of time on juggling, and it ends up being key to many scenes in the book. On the other hand, the battle sequences are lackluster and anti-climactic (very similar to The Sandman). I enjoyed the book (it's not one of those where it's no fun to read as an adult), and having 30 years or so between readings meant I did get surprised by many plot twists, including the one at the end when we discover who the villain was.

Regardless, it was a fun read and now I get to re-read all of Robert Silverberg's other books.

Review: Frieren - Beyond Journey's End Vol 6-10

 I kept checking out Frieren - Beyond Journey's End from the library, even though the books are quite slow moving, and sometimes the writer seems to have written himself into a corner. Getting to the end of the "Class 1 Mage" saga, the author seemed to change his mind on having a Battle Royale type reality show face-off and had each candidate interviewed by the master wizardess (who's an elf who knows Frieren). The decisions seem purely arbitrary, but at least it gets the story moving.

We get a continuation of the journey across the continent, with a bunch of side quests, but the story becomes more interesting as we see Frieren in action against demons, and an explanation that demons are completely a different type of sentient being with no emotions but seemingly evolved to prey on humans. That's interesting, but no explanation on the origins is forthcoming. As always, humans get the short end of the stick --- they don't live long enough, and all the non-humans are immortal. Makes you wonder how humans came to dominate the world, since according to the explication in the books, living longer accumulates magical energy (mana).

Finally, we get a long story arc about a demon that turns things into gold via a midas touch like spell. By the end of the 10th volume things still aren't resolved. We reach a climax where things have gone maximally bad for the heroes when the volume ends, keeping you wanting to reach for the next book.

Re-read: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

 The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest was the last book in the Millenium trilogy that Steig Larsson wrote before he died. The first book in the series was like a locked room mystery (though its setup was unlike any I'd seen). The second book started like a police procedural and ended up being a thriller. This last book started out like an espionage story, ran through the middle like a courtroom drama, and ended like a thriller. It's great, intense reading, and never fails to point to how women are treated even in Sweden, which to my mind is one of those Northern European countries that consistently seem to have it together.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl referred to in the title of all the books, plays a mostly passive role in the story. Picking up where everything left off in the second book, that's entirely reasonable, since there's only so much you can do while recovering from brain surgery. The plot revolves around her background, however, and all the events that led up to the first book are revealed. Blomkvist returns, and does behave a lot like the protagonist of the novel.

The book has aged quite a bit since 2010 when it came out. For one thing, back then, the United States still felt like a democracy where the rule of law mattered. Today, I would be very surprised if a novel came out with a sentence like this one:

Armansky had Blomkvist’s copy of Lidbom’s book An Assignment, and he was reading it with gathering astonishment. If this were the United States a dozen or so senior Säpo hands would have been arrested for obstruction of justice and forced to appear before a public committee in Congress. In Sweden apparently they were untouchable. (kindle loc 18671 in the kindle omnibus edition which is no longer sold!)

Nevertheless, the clue that the book is fiction is that everything ties up neatly, the bad guys are found (and revealed to be incompetent), and there's a happy ending of sorts. Like many franchises, this one sold too well to leave alone, and the publisher found another novelist to continue the adventures of Lisbeth Salander. A sample came with the book but after reading Larsson's writing it's clear that whoever followed him just doesn't have what it takes.

Re-read: The Girl Who Played With Fire

 I hadn't read The Girl Who Played With Fire for so long that it felt like a fresh novel. While the first book introduced us to Lisbeth Salander, this second book is her origin story. It's setup at first as a mystery novel, with a couple (who're introduced to us with sufficient detail to make us care and want to identify with them) who gets murdered early on, along with a character from the first novel (whom Salander has good reason to want to murder). There's a media circus that brings Salander to the public eye as a psychotic villain, and then we get what seems to be a police procedural novel about hunting down Salander.

Of course, from the first novel we know that she's a heroine (or maybe an anti-heroine), and while she's mostly missing from the first half of the novel when she's re-introduced to the narrative the pretense of a police procedural falls away and we get a full on thriller. The plot twists and turns are well done (including the reveal of who Salander's father is), and fair (i.e., I felt like there were plenty of clues and when the reveal happened I thought "oh wow, the clues were there all along")

The main character of this novel appears to be Mikahlle Blomvist, the journalist from the first novel, living like a private investigator. The book is full of references to that. I can see why this book took the world by storm when it was published. The only caveat I have is that the book ends with a cliffhanger/resolution that automatically leads into the third book of the series. Good thing I bought the series as a completed trilogy and can dive immediately into the third book!

Review: The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions

 The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions showed up in my kindle library, probably because another family member checked it out from the local library. I read it in a handful of days because it was relatively easy to read (no equations), and mostly covered stuff I already knew, from Newton to Einstein to Hubble to the Big Bang Theory.

Towards the end of the book, as she discusses the Big Bang theory, I started getting into stuff I either didn't know or didn't remember, such as the origins of Inflation, and the confirmation that the Big Bang Theory is correct mostly because of the proportion of the light elements that are present in the universe.

Helium, deuterium, and lithium nuclei are formed. The cosmic quantities of these elements are set, along with that of hydrogen, whose density has decreased as a result of the formation of helium. If we were to calculate how many of these elements were produced by nucleosynthesis, we would find astonishing results. The mass ratio between hydrogen and helium that we still observe in the Universe today is exactly that established in those first 3 minutes. For every three hydrogen atoms, there is one helium atom. This is one of the most surprising confirmations of the Big Bang theory. Without primordial nucleosynthesis, the amount of helium we observe in the Universe today could not be explained. (kindle loc 1218)

Cosmology is great fun, because it's astonishing how much we've been able to discover about the universe from mostly being Earthbound, and the astonishing idea that so much of what we know about the expanding universe will become unknowable in the far future, once the last external galaxy has been expanded out of our light cone.  We truly live in interesting times!

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm

 Philip Pullman rewrites a selection of stories from the Brothers Grimm. These aren't embellishments, as far as I can tell he didn't add any new twists to the original or expand on the story. The tone is "just so", the way fairy tales are written, and each one is at most 5 pages of reading material. He doesn't go into what his selection criteria is (the criteria for the last one is explained, however!),  and it seems to be a mixture of the classics (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel) and some stories that particularly catch his fancy.

I enjoyed most of them, and obviously the original tales frequently had bite that the Disney version don't. What gives these stories more meaning are the notes that Pullman attaches to the end of each story. In many cases these notes provide a deep look at the symbology or the origins of the story (including a retelling of Ali Baba that leaves out the last bit!)

Review: From Star to Superstar - the Asian American Guide to Elite Colleges

 From Star to Superstar is a guide for Asian Americans for college applications. While demographic transition is likely to make colleges easier to get into in general, the opposite is true for the elite colleges, which draw from an international pool of students and are generally immune to US demographics. This book acknowledges the unspoken truth of college admissions, which is that Asian boys are at a particular disadvantage, suffering from both internal competitions (schools use a quota system to places a ceiling on how many Asian kids they are willing to admit), and from artificial barriers (originally introduced to limit the number of Jews in colleges and now redeployed to protect college campuses from over-performing Asians) such as personality scores, holistic review, and video submissions (that way even if you don't have an Asian name, just looking Asian can tank your application).

With this in mind, the book takes a multi-prong approach. Of course, academics is a given (hey, if you're Asian, this is expected of you, and at a higher level than your non-Asian peers). Then, you've got to demonstrate service that shows impact, leadership that demonstrate values (not just being president of school societies --- that might work if you're non Asian), essays, recommendations, and interviews.

Over and over again, the book covers much the same material in Cal Newport's book, How to Be A High School Superstar, but because it's got the word Asian in the title, my suspicion is that more Asians will read it. The basic thing is that your extra-curriculars have to demonstrate impact, and you have to actively cultivate your school teachers (and other adults) to be able to provide you with a recommendation and testimonial that reinforces the story you're trying to tell the admissions office.

There's also a section on tailoring the colleges you apply to your strengths, as well as taking an unconventional rather than direct approach to your major. (e.g, applying to be in Information Science instead of Data Science or Computer Science)

If you read this book, you'll come away with an idea of how much effort it takes for an Asian kid to compete and get into an elite school. You might even get angry about how all this additional side-work is a misallocation of resources that could be used elsewhere (e.g., maybe kids could spend more time outside or something). If you think this, rest assured that there are elite colleges elsewhere that don't make you jump through these hoops. It's just that none of them are in the USA (University of Waterloo, Cambridge, Oxford, ETH). But of course in those cases, you might actually have to study hard and do well on exams. But hey, if you're Asian, maybe that would fit your strengths. Having lived with those systems I'm actually quite relieve that I didn't quite have to do the holistics process back when I was applying to colleges. I probably wouldn't have gotten in.

Review: Racing Through The Dark

 It's easy for me to be cynical about professional cycling as a sport. When I read that the speed of the current top racers are higher than during the EPO-doping era, I find it hard to believe that the sport is clean. Racing Through the Dark is David Millar's memoir about his cycling career. Like many professional athletes, he graduated high school and proceeded to aim directly for a career as a professional bike racer, with a half-hearted application to an art school only as a backup.

David Millar must have been extremely talented, because by his account, he did not dope and in fact, won many of his races clean, including his debut at the Tour de France. His account of his descent into doping was largely a story of being influenced by the culture, first, with teammates injecting themselves with vitamins and iron for recovery (interestingly enough, with no scientific studies showing that this was better than eating or drinking those nutrients), and with his team, Cofidis, deliberately turning a blind eye to drug use, employing metrics and bonuses that paid of with race results. Of course, at that time all professional cycling teams were like that, so it wasn't as though you could join a team that was clean.

The book was written and published before Lance Armstrong confessed to being doped up when winning his 7 Tours and being stripped of his title. Millar confesses that he didn't know one way or another whether Armstrong was doping, though he must have heard rumors.

Ultimately, Millar served his suspension and returned to racing, though much older. He describes his work and advocacy of anti-doping agencies, as well as his struggles against the French tax authorities because his agents had setup tax avoidance schemes on his behalf. I thought the book was well worth reading, and depending on how you view his credibility, makes it seem like it is possible to race professionally and win against dopers with good results. Then again, even if he was doping, he would lie and say that anyway, right?