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Sitting on the shelf at a quiet moment this summer, Assembling California by John McPhee beckoned once again. (My first read was before I started clock.) McPhee’s quiet, steady gaze at a topic feeds a similar curiosity in the reader, even about topics previously unconsidered. This story is how California arrived at its current physical state, through plate tectonics and other geologic theories writ large.

McPhee’s “drive” through the geology of Route 80 is one I’ve made many times, in both directions. Having his eyes on the side of the road, where mine rarely stray, teases out the cause and effect in a process moving too slowly to witness. Because McPhee knows that people may be more engaging than rocks (!), we learn much about Eldridge Moores, the geologist who guides the author and readers through the evidence and the evolving story of what the rocks tell us about the state’s formation. The impact of the earthquake isn’t forgotten, but it’s just the surface expression of the larger forces, however important the “surface” is to those of us living in harm’s way.

On the physical book

The front of the hardcover, beneath the dust-jacket, carries an indelible outline image. This filled lined drawing demonstrates the coastal range, the pool-table flatness of the Central Valley, and the jutting slab of the Sierra Nevada — all in almost iconic form. But it’s not the dust-jacket image so easily found on McPhee’s website or in every other presentation of the book, so it’s not as well-known as it should be. If I had a scanner here, I’d add it.

The frontispiece, I notice this morning, crops from Raven Maps: Landform and Drainage of the 48 States. I own their large map of California, but not this starker, broader representation. I recommend their maps to anyone, and have given some as gifts.

(Note: I’m six months late in starting to catch up with my reading this past summer. Every journey starts with a single step, and all that. I started this post in June.)

Eighteen months after seeing the movie, I read Atonement with interest. The book drenched me in gloom, but in such a way that the pages kept turning. Ian McEwan colors his words with ominous anticipation. Some of that, certainly, owes to my knowledge of the story, but hardly all.

The writing displays sheer pleasure in authorship, which fits the story on many levels. While reading, I flagged a few passages.

I love the direct transmission of human experience envisioned here, but the sly wink from McEwan, using an unreliable narrator who also happens to be an author, makes it all the more delicious.

A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader–no intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. … It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. [page 35]

I also bookmarked pages 138-139 while reading. Upon re-reading several months later, more than one passage grabs me, but I’ll share this one, pulled from the thoughts of Emily, the matron.

Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of her marriage. [page 139]

More broadly, the movie and book told the same story, which always surprises me when done well. Some stories need to change more dramatically for the screen. (Emily’s point of view, for instance, disappears from the movie, but that’s a limited edit.) Two main differences occur to me. First, the movie’s flashbacks helped “deceive” the viewer into considering a more positive outcome. Second, when reading the book, I found the author’s presence was palpable.

Still, one final accord between novel and film: the green dress I so vividly remember from the movie springs straight from the page (91, to be exact).

Not planned, but found myself doing anything and everything but updating the blog this summer. More than a dozen books and a handful of movies await a capsule review, or at least an aside. School starts for the kids today, and the education from our adhesive customers is in the near future. Oh, and a move… just to keep things lively around here. More soon. Or later.

I spent a recent Tuesday evening watching Star Trek, the new movie with the old name. The Batman refresh opened doors for this movie. Adding in J.J. Abrams as director, at the height of his powers (and clout), gave Star Trek a great platform to go where we’ve all gone before, gladly.

My immediate reaction?

finally caught Star Trek. Fun, but needed some Klingons instead of deranged Romulan miner as foil for Kirk, Spock and crew. Red matter?!?

With a bit more reflection, and space, I appreciate the restart of once-compelling franchise. Handling the aging of Shatner, Nimoy, and crew was getting to be beyond awkward. Rewinding to the never-before-shown beginning of their “careers” gives the well-known characters additional years to tell new & different tales without apologizing or hiding their age.

In this movie, the scenes on planets (Earth and otherwise) are more compelling than the starship moments. Time travel plays too large a part, but I’ll forgive the trick as long as subsequent films take advantage of the wide open vistas of storytelling space generated by this gimmick.

Metacritic calculates an 83. I date myself by preferring Wrath of Khan still.

My high school coaches impressed upon me very clearly the importance of getting a good night’s sleep the night before the night before a race or competition. The theory — which I subscribe to — is that nerves and anticipation may disrupt your sleep on the eve of the event. Accept that, and don’t worry about it… you’ll just toss and turn a few extra times if you do.

But, if you can, get some extra sleep two nights prior. Rest is an edge, and once you’ve put in the work preparing to compete, you’d be foolish to give up such an easy advantage.

On Sunday, after two nights’ sleep, I’ll jump into San Francisco Bay to race in the 2009 edition of the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon. My training this year has been better documented than in the past, but I’ve made different choices, too, so not sure about comparables.

In 2005, my only previous Alcatraz race, I finished 181st among the amateurs, with a time of 2:52:45. The links in that old post are dead, sadly, but I have a printout of the 2005 results. 49:52 for the swim, 6:51 for the first transition (which includes a run of a half-mile or so), 56:29 for the 18 mile bike ride, 1:41 for the second transition, and 57:56 for the 8 mile run, including the sand steps/ladder in 2:17.

Thinking ahead to Sunday, I don’t expect much better for the swim, which put me in 655th place then. Again this year, I did enough in the pool to know I can finish it…but not much more. Realistically, I’ll come out of the water with plenty of people to chase.

I’ve been racing on the bike this year, which is new to me. Consider my 2005 words:

I wonder what’s it like to just race on the bike… it was fun to pour on the pedals with the streets closed to cars.

That’s what led to my starting bike racing last year, actually.

I commute on my road bike over much of the bike course quite regularly, so I have no excuses not to have a great ride, and I expect to. Still, not sure how much more time I can gain over my 2005 split, which was 63rd among amateurs that year.

I’ve been running a bit less, with fewer dedicated hill repeats this year. Several of my tempo runs have been excellent, though, so I’m hoping to gain a little time there, too. Not sure I can better my 115th place run from four years ago, but the pace is doable.

I was conservative in my 2005 predictions. I don’t think I’m being too aggressive now in saying I believe I can do better than last time, but Sunday will tell the story.

Rudo y Cursi was an unknown quantity when I entered the theater. A Mexican film (with subtitles) about two soccer-playing brothers, Rudo y Cursi mimics an earthier, adult Hoop Dreams. But it’s not a documentary: too raw and real to be anything but fiction.

This simple film delights in the very human flaws of the two brothers and their extended family. They support each other, fight each other, and end up facing each other on the field with their futures on the line. While soccer is the thread, not much action is on screen…and that works. However, the ending cycles back to an earlier scene in a knowing way, with a nod to the harshness of the game.

67 from MetaCritic falls short of my rating, though I wouldn’t go as high as the user rating of 90. We saw this film two weeks ago, and besides Up and Star Trek, I’m not sure what else worth seeing is out there right now.

Dreaming in Code covers three years of software development, without bearing witness to a final release. That’s really the whole story: software is hard, unpredictable, and never finished.

The book, by Scott Rosenberg, aspires to match Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the classic record of a technology team overcoming the hurdles of innovation to deliver a product to market. While James Fallows makes that analogy explicit in his cover blurb, Dreaming in Code fell short for me.

Rosenberg chose Chander (an email/calendar/lifestream program…at least originally) because it was an open-source project with a different structure: more centralized, and funded generously by Mitch Kapor. But the team members changed throughout the three years plus that Rosenberg followed the project, and the software wasn’t delivered during this period, either. Because the cast of characters changes significantly, I lost interest in the people — and stories of this kind are really about the individuals melding (or not) into a team. Without software in people’s hands, there’s no sense of accomplishment, and no closure, either. Chandler continues, but simply with diminished ambitions and a disinterested audience.

The fits and starts in the development provide Rosenberg plenty of pages to delve into the research and writings about software development. These sidebars weren’t necessarily new to me, but more enjoyable than reading about Chandler’s failure to cohere.

Those in the technology realm will nod their heads at the tales of failure here, but I’m not certain about its appeal to a broader audience. Scott’s blog Wordyard is worth following, though. And I see his next book, about blogging, is due this summer. I admire his willingness to dive in again on a topic that is very much not finished.

By blogging my enjoyable encounters with the books (1, 2) of Alan Furst, I gave my cousins an idea for a gift: The Good German, by Joseph Kanon. Score!

A menacing, heartening mystery, set in Berlin as World War II has rattled to a close, The Good German collapses a very personal reunion with the rumblings of geopolitics.

More of a police procedural than a spy story — albeit with a journalist leading the investigation — this novel weaves in the larger realities. Again and again, the mundane details of larger issues are bluntly laid out for review: assigning blame for the Holocaust, the whitewashing of the sins of weapons developers, and the ominously clear rising conflict between the West and the Russians.

And it does all that in prose more direct and readable than my own. My thanks for the gift! I never saw the movie made from this book, but now I’m curious.

At the same time I found a volume of three lectures by Wallace Stegner, I picked up American Places. Originally published in 1981, this collection from Wallace Stegner and his son Page Stegner was re-released in 2006. I enjoyed these essays several weeks ago.

Father and son share an ethos that quietly, insistently urges a change in the way Americans enjoy and exploit America. But I wonder if being quiet does the trick. As Wallace writes in one chapter, “Last Exit to America,”

The unexamined life is not worth living, but it is precisely the life toward which Americans as a people desparately yearn. (page 53)

Without a jolt, stasis rules. Coming up on thirty years after these essays were written, all is recognizable, for better and for worse.

The first chapter sets the historical stage for how Americans use America, scanning many stages of exploration and exploitation over more than 500 years. The final chapter gazes slightly forward in time, with hope (albeit) faint for change. Each of the 11 chapters along the way narrows to a single place.

The chapter about the Great Salt Lake, “Dead Heart of the West,” taught me a lot about a anomalous fixture I’ve only skirted once, late at night on Interstate 80. It also reminded me that I want to read Stegner’s history of the Mormons (Mormon Country and, later, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail).

The Stegners live in these words: both writers use personal history in their work. Their human relationships serve as a lens to focus attention on landscapes and environments. I wonder if their friends and colleagues accepted being grist for the mill. Not that the authors diminish these people in any way, but their lives become symbols, small and large.

With the title The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity, Stefan Klein echoes my own thoughts about the years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds skipping or struggling by.

Klein is a science journalist who’s found success in taking on big topics with catchy titles. I haven’t read The Science of Happiness or All by Chance, but The Secret Pulse of Time read like a Malcolm Gladwell book, with a few differences.

Klein covers his topic more broadly and often deeper than Gladwell’s investigations. That’s not always positive — Klein’s book lacks Gladwell’s sense of narrative and purpose. Where Gladwell’s books at times feel like the extended, but focused, magazine articles they often are, Klein forces a bundle of research on his reader. Fortunately, I embraced this topic, so the tidbits and esoterica rewarded my perseverance. I looked forward to this book (a Christmas gift), but I didn’t fly through it. It’s a reference book, not a story. It may reward skimming in the future.

Below are some tidbits I marked along the way.

Increasing the volume of a uniformly ticking sound makes the listeners think the beat is accelerating, too. Klein calls this the Bolero affect. (p. 39)

Goethe complained about the undue focus on speed, and the increasing pace of communication…in 1825. (pp. 151-152)

“When Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction classic 2001 – A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, the movie’s boldly rapid cuts pushed the viewing habits of moviegoers to their limits. Today, we tend to lose patience with those same shots of spaceships gliding slowly through the universe to classical music, which move far too slowly for our current pace.” (pp. 152-153)

“Multitasking is a trap.” (p. 183)

“A lack of control distresses people far more than having a great deal demanded of them, as countless studies have shown. … ” (p. 204)

“Having small children in the house means living with endearing egocentrics who are not willing to delay their needs for a single moment, thus fragmenting their parents’ routine to an extreme. This also explains why many mothers and fathers feel rushed, although they theoretically have plenty of time to get things done.” (p. 205)

“Feeling rushed is decidedly unpleasant. You are obliged to do something, such as to take care of the children, but you don’t feel like doing it. This lack of motivation constitutes the third member of a trio of debilitating time wasters, along with the inability to concentrate and the feeling of being overwhelmed by stress.” (p. 219)

“Our everyday language is revealing: In describing time, we use words from the world of finance. We have and save and invest and waste it.” (p. 264)