Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: Ivanhoe (1819) by Walter Scott.

In brief: Somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and Tolkien resides this beautifully written romance of 12th-century derring-do, an exemplary specimen of literary nostalgia for some good old-fashioned English chivalry. Armed with a healthy measure of Norman-Saxon linguistic hostility, a critique of Christian anti-Semitism, and a bit of Robin Hood here and there, Ivanhoe is, in a word, ideal. While the novel loses its focus as the plot expands in scope, and at least one plot thread feels resolved by divine providence rather than moral action, Scott’s colourful supporting characters and sweeping historical reach keep the story alive at every turn.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Ivanhoe, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (2006) by Marvin Minsky.

In brief: In The Emotion Machine, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky presents his theories on the “big-picture” questions pertaining to the human mind—emotions, consciousness, common sense—in plain English and easy-to-follow diagrams, but one wonders if he goes too far in distilling his ideas for a layman’s audience, at the cost of the specificity and rigour that readers from a more technical background may demand. Minsky’s most insightful philosophical premises appear as corollaries and implications, and beg for further development. Nevertheless, the book fulfills its purpose as an expressly non-technical overview of how one might develop models for decomposing higher-order thought into manageable representations.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Emotion Machine, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2006) by Stanley Crouch.

In brief: Jazz critic Stanley Crouch has a reputation as an abrasive, stodgy curmudgeon of the emperor’s-new-clothes school, beholden to a restrictive aesthetic orthodoxy and unaccepting of experimentation. This anthology of essays from 1982 to 2004 reveals that Crouch’s reputation is well earned, but well defended. In collected form, his controversial views on race—easily misunderstood if read in the context of one piece alone—cohere into an appraisal of America that is at once complex and mature.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Considering Genius, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy.

In brief: Life after the end of the world is hardly new territory where literature is concerned, so McCarthy’s book—a simple story about a man’s efforts to keep his son alive as they trek across a charred and desolate America—lives and dies by its delivery. And my, what delivery: McCarthy chisels every sentence down to something material and terse. The novel’s instant canonization into American literary history is not without justification: the deceptive simplicity of plot and prose alike echo Hemingway, while its Southern Gothic undertones capably extend Faulkner’s study of how to make sense of a world in decay.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Road, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Red Mars (1992) by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In brief: Robinson’s exhaustive (and often exhausting) treatment of Martian colonization is one of those uncommon novels that is far more fascinating when people sit around arguing about issues than when they actually do anything to move the plot forward. The result is a tale that flaunts its intelligence and attention to scientific detail through and through, but bores as often as it stimulates. Read it for the gorgeous landscapes and its lucid presentation of the terraforming debate, but be warned that the characters never exhibit enough agency to be interesting.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Red Mars, keep reading below.)

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