Ian’s recently lamented that if moving to Shanghai was a ploy to increase his blog stats, it hasn’t worked. I’ve got a solution for him.

Dude–you’ve just moved to Shanghai. But you’re posting, what, every couple of days? Sometimes only once a week. If you want to get your stats up, start posting every day!

I’m not talking about lengthy, detailed, analytical posts, mind you. You’re out and about every day in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Asia, a place where the truly bizarre (from my point of view) is commonplace. If each day doesn’t provide you with some small but noteworthy observation or anecdote about life in Shanghai, you’re not paying attention. At the very least, I’m certain that the Assistant to the Copy Boy is committing unavoidable faux pas three or four times a day (you’ve got to start keeping a tighter rein on that kid).

So tell us what’s going on. I, for one, would be fascinated. Anyone who wouldn’t can go talk to Churchill’s Parrot.

The estimable Terry Teachout has just posted on the subject of comfort books, and not for the first time I wish he allowed comments on his blog.

He mentions a number of my favorites, including Patrick O’Brian and P.G. Wodehouse, though he says he doesn’t like Wodehouse’ short stories as well as his novels. I have to question whether he’s ever read “Uncle Fred Flits By”, one of the best (perhaps the best) comic short story I’ve ever read. And he mentions a number of other authors I might take a chance on.

But the one that floored me was Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. I’ve heard lots of people rave about it, but I read the first three books (it’s a twelve-novel cycle) and frankly I can’t see it. The narrator is a non-entity, a mere observer, and the folks he’s observing are simply not that interesting. It’s the Eight Deadly Words: I Don’t Care About Any Of These People.

So tell me, Terry–what’s the attraction?

This is the first book of “The Chronicles of Prydain,” a five-book series
intended for younger readers which I first read in high school, and which
I’m now reading at bedtime to my almost seven-year-old, Dave. (In fact,
I’m reading it to him from the same copies I bought then.) He’s eating
it up.

A boy named Taran lives on a farm called Caer Dallben. He has no mother
or father; he’s being raised by Dallben the wizard and Dallben’s
assistant Coll. He’s not learning to be a wizard; he’s not even learning
the manly art of swordfighting, which is a great trial to him. Mostly
he’s learning how to grow vegetables and make horseshoes and tend to
Dallben’s pig, Hen Wen, none of which is terribly exciting. He yearns
for adventure, and to be a hero. Instead, he’s stuck being Dallben’s
Assistant Pig-Keeper.

Adventure has a way of seeking you out in books like this. Hen Wen is no
ordinary pig, but an oracular pig capable of telling the future. For
this reason she was once stolen by the dark lord Arawn, Lord of Annuvin.
Now Arawn is plotting once again to take over the
land of Prydain through his servant the Horned King, and he needs Hen Wen
to be sure of victory. As the Horned King approaches Caer Dallben, Hen
Wen runs away in fright. Taran chases after, and is soon lost–and has
two conflicting missions: he must find Hen Wen, and he must warn the High
King at Caer Dathyl that the Horned King is on the move.

I hadn’t read [btitle “The Book of Three”] in years, and never aloud
(It reads quite well aloud, I might add), and it’s been interesting to
revisit it. It’s much more clearly a juvenile series than I remembered;
Taran begins the series as an impetuous and foolish (if stout-hearted) boy,
dealing with the kinds of interpersonal problems boys are heir to; much
of the book is about how he learns to deal with these problems, and
thereby grows up. Indeed, the book hovers just on the edge of being
preachy without quite crossing the line–several of the other characters have no
compunction about rebuking Taran if he does something foolish or
inconsiderate, while others appear to be there mostly to serve as
moral exemplars (both good and bad).

Thus, the aim of the story is partly didactic: if Taran is to grow up to
be a virtuous, wise, and considerate man, he must first learn how–and despite
all the fantasy elements, growing up is the real story here. But though
didactic, the author isn’t heavy handed about it; and it certainly won’t
do Dave any harm to watch Taran mature into a decent human being.

Meanwhile, Dave is simply thrilled. It’s got a hero he can
identify with, and a villain with horns on his helmet, and sword
fighting, and amusing companions who say funny things, and lots of
excitement, and a pretty girl. We finished it up the night before last,
and last night nothing would do but to start the second book in the
series. More on that in a few weeks.

Because I often review books that are out-of-print, I’ve never worried about linking to Amazon.com or the like; but I begin to wonder. Would it make my reviews more useful if I provided on-line bookstore links?

If you’ve got an opinion, add a comment!

Bill Walsh is the copy desk chief at the Washington Post’s
Business Desk, and this is his book on proper style, which a friend gave
to me for Christmas. I always enjoy reading books on style, if they are
engagingly written, and this one surely is. Whether I actually learned
anything from it is unclear.

Now, here’s a book with something for everybody–or, at least, everybody
who’s likely to be reading this review in the first place.

If you like mysteries, you’ll like this book. Lord Darcy is the Chief
Investigator for His Highness the Duke of Normandy, and is kept quite
busy investigating one murder or another, with the occasional jaunt into
counter-espionage.

If you like fantasy, you’ll like this book, for Lord Darcy’s right-hand man is
a forensic sorceror named Sean O Lochlainn. It’s his job to preserve the
victim’s corpse until it has been fully examined, to determine whether a
bullet was fired by a particular gun or not, to determine whether the
death was from purely physical causes or due to black magic, to recreate
aspects of the crime, and so forth.

If you like science fiction, you’ll like this book, for Master Sean’s
sorcery is a science rather than a art, in accordance with the magical
laws of Similarity, Contagion, and Relevance. Garrett has a deft touch;
the Laws of Magic are developed clearly enough that we can believe in a
magical “science” yet concisely enough that we avoid boredom. Moreover,
the mixture of magic with physical technology is a hoot.

If you like alternate history, you’ll like this book, for the major
premise (other than the efficacy of magic) is that Richard Coeur-de-Lion
does not die young but rather returns to England to rule wisely and well and
found a dynasty that will last until the present day. In the 20th century
the Anglo-French Empire is the dominant power, directly controlling
England, France, and the Americas (fetchingly called New England and New
France), and indirectly controlling much of the rest of Europe.

The amazing thing is that Garrett manages to combine all of these
elements into a single book and make it work–this is topnotch police
procedural of the classic English kind as
well as topnotch fantasy. I kept picturing Lord Darcy as a mixture of
Peter Wimsey and Roderick Alleyn.

The book is collection of short stories with one novel, Too Many
Magicians; the latter contains a Nero Wolfe pastiche that’s
especially choice (Ian, are you listening?). Garrett wrote these classic
tales in the 1960’s and 1970’s; the indefatigable
Eric Flint has collected them in a single volume, and I
suggest you buy it. My only complaint about it is that it isn’t longer.

Robert L. Glass is an old-timer in the field of software engineering;
this book is founded on decades of experience. Moreover, his discussion
of any given topic is based not only on his own experiences but also on
any relevant studies that have been done in the area (if any). As a
software engineer myself, I found his observations a refreshing change
from the usual sort of thing one hears: “If you’ll just look at things
my way, and follow my process, then all of your software
engineering problems will go away!” I found much of what he had to say
to be useful and timely.

The book isn’t perfect. In a number of places he
makes observations and then doesn’t follow up on their obvious
corollaries; he has a touching faith in ten and fifteen-year-old studies
that have never been replicated; and his attitude toward the Unix
programming community is almost patronizing at times, which is annoying.

On the whole, though, the book serves as a useful reality check,
especially for those who want to elevate the process over the people involved.

I’ve got three kids (soon to be four); the oldest is just shy of seven
years old. I’ve got a full-time job. And yet I’ve got a web log; I
write open-source software in Tcl; I’ve written a couple of (unpublished)
novels. (And my wife is still speaking to me!)

And, far from neglecting them, I spend a lot of time with my kids. How
do I have time for all of this?

Partly, it’s because Jane’s mostly a housewife these days. A lot of
household chores get done while I’m at work, and that gives us both more
time in the evening. (And may I say, both Jane and I are grateful that
we can afford to live this way.)

But the main reason is that we’ve never accepted the notion of quality
time.

Quality time, so far as I understand, is all about making up for the fact
that you don’t have much time to spend with your kids. Since you’re
short of time, make the most of the time you have! Make it time of high
quality! On the face of it that’s a fine thing–for some definition of
“high quality.” What people usually seem to mean is “making the child
the center of your attention.”–by playing a game together, say. Or
reading a story. And that, by itself, is also a fine thing. Put them
together, though, and you’ve got a problem. More to the point, you’re
depriving your kid of what I call “quantity time.”

Quality time is about spending your time doing things with your kids; quantity
time is about making space for your kids in the things you do.

For example, I spend a lot of time sitting in a comfy chair in my study
with a book or my laptop. I share my study with a playpen, several small
chairs, a Nintendo GameCube, and a fluctuating population of Lego, K’Nex,
and sundry other toys. And if the kids are awake, I’m often sharing it
with one, two, or all three of them. They get my attention when they
want it–say, to separate a pair of Lego bricks, or answer a question, or
sometimes just to sit in my lap for awhile. My little girl Anne has
been in my lap twice just in the twenty minutes I’ve been writing this.

A digression: I recently installed Mac OS X 10.2.3, code-named “Panther”,
on my laptop. And one of the new features of Panther is called Expose.
And the neatest feature of Expose, from my point of view, is that I can
press a single key, and all of the windows on my screen fly off to the
sides, almost completely exposing the desktop. A second press, and they
all come flying back. And this is neat because I’ve got a picture of
David and James as my wallpaper, and almost every day little Anne walks
up to me and says, “Where David? Where James?”

And I push F11, and she smiles and points and says, “There David! There
James! There Scooby!” (David is wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt.) And I
nod, and she smiles, and then I push F11 and go right back to what I was
doing.

Though I know you couldn’t tell, I just took a break to tell bedtime
stories to David and James. (I’m reading Dave The Book of Three,
by Lloyd Alexander.)

I don’t often take the kids out just to spend time with them; but if I
go out to run errands, I usually have one or two of them with me.

When I wash the dishes after dinner (that’s one chore that
doesn’t get done while I’m at work), I make David come help
me. He doesn’t always want to; he often has other things he wants to do.
But that’s another side of quantity time–it’s not always fun. The night
before last, consequently, David and I had a long conversation about
making the best of it–about how to be cheerful even when you’re doing
something you don’t want to do.

And that’s really the key: quantity time teaches kids amazing
things. Because I’m doing my own things, they learn that they aren’t the
center of the universe. They have to amuse themselves, so they learn to
be self-reliant. On the other hand, they know that I’m there if they
need me, so they learn trust. They get to see me doing whatever I’m
doing, whether I’m shopping, or paying bills, or washing dishes, or
writing software, or just sitting and reading a book–and that’s how they
learn how life is lived.

And sometimes, of course, I spend time just playing with them, because
that’s part of life too.

This the third and (to date) final volume in Hughart’s tales of Number
Ten Ox and Master Li Kao. There won’t be any more as Hughart got
little support from his publishers and gave up writing novels in disgust.
This an extreme pity, as he’d originally planned on writing a series of
seven
books. Agony!

This particular story begins in Peking, where a vampire-ghoul interrupts
a public execution and causes the official headsman to miss his stroke,
thus losing his chance to break the standing record for the longest run
of consecutive clean kills. So sad, especially as it led to a temporary
reprieve for Sixth Degree Hosteler Tu, a loathsome murderer and gourmand.
The vampire-ghoul leads Master Li to yet another murder, a series of
strange encounters with ancient demons, and a dragon boat race on whose
outcome the fate of the world rests.

Stylistically, this one is close to its predecessor,
The Story of the Stone; it’s both interesting and funny, though
for different reasons. Overall I think I prefer it.

Over at Brandywine Books, Phil Wade has rashly tried to convey the essence of P.G. Wodehouse‘s Bertie and Jeeves stories in a single post.

The only thing that saves him from a fate worse than being badly dressed is that he relies on the Master’s own words.