Artemis by Andy Weir

I devoured Andy Weir's first book, The Martian, in July 2014.  Loved it.  Loved the movie, too.  I thought it was a really good translation from the book to the movie.  That doesn't always happen.  I was pleased to learn, from The Husband, that Weir had another book out - this one called Artemis.  The Husband read it first then passed it on to me.  This was a super quick read - started 11/24 and finished 7 days later on 11/30/17.  

I read some critical reviews of certain elements of this book, but hey, not everyone will like everything.  For me, sometimes reading is an escape from the world around me.  It can be a fantasy world where I don't have to think about too much, be overly critical or sensitive, and can just BE with the words on the page.  Sometimes it is an enjoyable place to be, like with this book.  Other times it is a not so enjoyable place to be, like with The Angel of History.  I am sure there are many people out there who really enjoyed that book, I just don't happen to be one of them.

Like The Martian, Artemis was action packed, not completely predictable, entertaining, and funny.  It was thrilling, kept you on the edge of your seat, laughing, anxious, and everything in between.  This book is centered around a lady named Jazz who was born on and lives on the Moon.  Yes, THE MOON.  In this book, there is a colony on the moon, built by the country of Kenya.  Jazz may be in to some shady and not so shady stuff, but she's got the spotlight in the book.

Apparently on the Moon, like everywhere, there is an underground element, there are mafia people, rich people, poor people, and people who think they can get away with anything.  Jazz finds herself in the middle of all of this along with a random set of people who help and hinder her along the way.  Of course there are a few twists and turns along the way, and a lesson in economics.

     "The next big step is taxes."

     "Taxes?" I snorted [Jazz].  "People come here because they don't want to pay taxes." 

     "They already pay taxes - as rent to KSC [Kenyan Space Agency].  We need to change over to a property-ownership and tax model so the city's wealth is directly tied to the economy.  But that's not for a while."

     She took off her glasses.  "It's all part of the life-cycle of an economy.  First it's lawless capitalism until that starts to impede growth.  Next comes regulation, law enforcement, and taxes.  After that: public benefits and entitlements.  Then, finally, over-expenditure and collapse."

     "Wait.  Collapse?"

     "Yes, collapse.  An economy is a living thing.  It's born full of vitality and dies once it's rigid and worn out.  Then, through necessity, people break into smaller economic groups and the cycle begins anew, but with more economies.  Baby economies, like Artemis is right now."

     "Huh," I said.  "And if you want to make babies, somebody's got to get fucked."

     She laughed.  "You and I will get along just fine, Jasmine."

     I left without further comment.  I didn't want to spend any more time inside the mind of an economist.  It was dark and disturbing.  I needed a beer. 

And you have all of this set on the Moon (so there is sort of some science-y stuff in the book too)!  With cussing!!!

This is an entertaining story, fast-paced and interesting.  Two thumbs up from me.  Look forward to the movie!

Los Angeles Stories, by Ry Cooder

After finishing The Martian, by Andy Weir around July 14, I picked up Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder.  The husband and I were killing time in North Beach (San Francisco) one evening waiting for Tosca Cafe to open and some friends to arrive (side note:  GO HERE - the drinks are absolutely AMAZING).  

We wandered into City Lights Bookstore and browsed around.  I happened upon Los Angeles Stories and read the first few pages.  It was intriguing and I wanted to read more, so of course, I bought the book.  I started reading it on July 26th, and finished it on August 30th.  It took a little longer than other books for me to read, partly because it was strange, and partly because I wasn't reading it as much at night because I was tired, and because it was so strange.  Upon reflection, I guess I should have known it would be strange after reading the note on the back of the book:

"What's that you say?  Nothing ever happens in Los Angeles?  Ask your downtown friends and neighbors, working folks you pass on the street - the cross dressing piano player, the Filipino labor agitator, the Mexican bolero singer, or the steel guitar-playing dental technician - buy them a cup of coffee and they'll tell you their stories.  Sit down, take a load off, try some pork fried rice.  Dig it and pick up on it, it happened like this.

Ry Cooder is a guitarist, singer and composer known for his interest in roots music, and for his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries, including the Buena Vista Social Club.  He has composed soundtracks for more than twenty films, including Paris, Texas.  This is his first published collection of stories."

Um, yeah.  Strange, intriguing, weird, bizarre.  Yes, all of those things and more.  But for some reason, after reading the first few pages while killing time in the book store, I wanted to read more.

I grew up in Los Angeles, so I have a soft spot for books set in the area because it is interesting to me to read about other peoples' takes on the area, and it always lends a more visual setting to books when I know and have been to places that are being described in the book - it makes it seem all the more real.

The book begins:

"1940:  I work for the Los Angeles City Directory, a book of names, addresses, and job descriptions.  I am one of many.  Our job is to go out and collect the facts and bring them back.  Other people take our work and put it in the Book, but we do the important part.  Los Angeles is a big city, and the City Directory, is a big book...

I made the aquaintance of a Mr. John Casaroli.  Mr. John, as he was known, was a retired opera singer and teacher.  I listed him as Casaroli, John, vcl tchr, New Grand Hotel 257 Grand Ave.  It turned out we got along, and I was often a guest in his apartment.  One evening I arrived there to find police and onlookers crowded around what looked like a body on the sidewalk.  The police said Mr. John had jumped from the roof just minutes before and was dead.  They asked me if I was an 'associate' of his, and I explained that he was my friend and I'd been invited for a spaghetti dinner.  They took me to police headquarters and I was questioned for an hour.  When I asked why, the officer told me it was routine.  That's when I learned that Mr. John had made a will and left his record player and all his records and Italian poetry books to me."

Each of the 8 short stories in the 232-page book has to do with musicians, some kind of crime, and how the main character deals with it or gets out of a bind.  The stories are gritty, colorful, and full of details.  It wasn't until the end of the book that I realized that some of the characters in each of the stories had small supporting roles in other stories.  Some of the stories were more engaging than others, but they were all quite strange.

There is one about a cross-dressing piano player (a woman dressing as a man) who falls for a young girl (who thinks the piano player is a man), and the young girl ends up killing someone, and the main character of the story, Al Maphis, and the piano player, Billy Tipton, need to get her (Betty  Newlands) out of Arizona and away from the cops.  So Al drives her to Los Angeles and gets her in with a band that plays at a Filipino club...

"I introduced Johnny to Betty.  He was suave, Latin-esque.  He huddled with Betty in a booth, making diagrams in the air with his hands: I go from here, you come from there.  They went onstage and did some steps.  Johnny spun her around.  He threw her down and picked her up.  Betty was a cheerleader, she got it.  He counted off "Hernando's Hideaway" - a pop tango for straight-life moms and pops.  Johnny gave it the twist - a domestic scene from the dark side of town.  The man is aroused, the woman is coy.  He slaps her around a little just to get a mood going.  He preens, checks his attitude.  They embrace, they dance, she stabs him in the crotch with a big prop knife.  Olé, thank you ladies and gentlemen, especially you, ladies."

Colorful, strange, detailed.  John Lee Hooker makes an appearance in the story about Betty.

This book is eclectic, like most musicians are, I gather.  I liked it though, in a strange sort of way.

I don't give this book two overwhelming thumbs up, nor do I give it any thumbs down.  If you are in the mood for something strange, and off the beaten track, something the likes of you haven't ever read before, this may be just the thing for you.

Until next time..

The Martian, by Andy Weir

After finishing Nothing to Lose, by Lee Child on May 31, I had a small book hiatus.  I usually read at night before going to sleep, and during most of June, I was simply too tired to start a new book at bedtime.  I also did not have anything teed up that I was chomping at the bit to read.  The husband read about a new book in the Mercury Newspaper by an author that worked at the company I recently started working at.  Andy Weir was a software engineer, and an author on the side.  The husband thought the book sounded cool, and was intrigued that I worked with the author, so he picked it up.  During the time when he was reading it, he would be laughing out loud quite often, but would never tell me what was so funny.  Upon finishing the book, he announced that I was to read it now, please.  So, on June 29th, I picked up The Martian and started reading it.

The book starts, literally on page 1 with:

I'm pretty much fucked.  That's my considered opinion.  Fucked.  Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it's turned into a nightmare.

Um, so yeah, there is a lot of cussing in the book.  But it is funny.

The book is about a group of astronauts who land on Mars.  There is a big dust storm, and the astronauts have to abandon their camp and high tail it back to their ship.  In the commotion and chaos of getting out of their living quarters and back into the ship that takes them from the surface of Mars back to their ship in the space around Mars, Mark Watney, a somewhat salty botanist/engineer, gets skewered by an antenna.  His co-astronauts frantically try to find him in the blinding Martian dust storm before the wind knocks over their ship (their only escape), but are unable to.  They tried everything they could to locate them, but were unsuccessful.  Very reluctantly, they had to leave the surface of Mars without Watney.  Unbeknownst to them, he did not die.  His space suit did begin to depressurize, but the small hole was sealed by his congealed blood.  His suit re-pressurized and pretty much saved him.

The book is basically about Watney's life on Mars and his antics and adventures to try and save himself.  He is literally all alone on Mars and has no way to communicate with Earth nor with his co-astronauts.  He is fucked.  Or so we thought...  Watney is one crafty dude.

At one point, he had a zany idea on how he could possibly communicate with Earth / NASA by using the abandoned Pathfinder ship and accompanying Mars rover, Sojourner.  Being the computer engineer he is, Weir, of course figured out how to incorporate tech-speak into his book:

So, I'll have to use ASCII.  That's how computers manage characters... How do I know which values go with which characters?  Because Johanssen's laptop is a wealth of information.  I knew she'd have an ASCII table in there somewhere.  All computer geeks do.

The way the story is told is very clever - it is told by Watney in a series of journal / blog / log entries he writes while trapped on Mars.  Watney is not only crafty, but he's really funny too (and apparently doesn't follow instructions):

My conversation with NASA about the water reclaimer was boring and riddled with technical details.  So I'll paraphrase it for you:

Me: "This is obviously a clog.  How about I take it apart and check the internal tubing?"

NASA: (after five hours of deliberation) "No. You'll fuck it up and die."

 So I took it apart.

In another portion of the book, Watney has to drive a very long way from one part of Mars to another, but he has no navigation equipment, maps, or anything to help him find his way.  In addition to being crafty, funny, and fucked, Watney also has a knack for either directly or indirectly screwing things up.  Once his saving grace, the jerry-rigged Pathfinder / Sojourner communication with NASA becomes useless because of a small mishap by Watney.  So, he's all alone again on Mars and has to high tail it to where the next mission to Mars was going to land in order to have the remotest chance at rescue.  So, he made a sextant:

Latitude and longitude.  That's the key.  The first is easy.  Ancient sailors on Earth figured that one out right away.  Earth's 23.5-degree axis points at Polaris.  Mars has a tilt of just over 25 degrees, so it's pointed at Deneb.

Making a sextant isn't hard.  All you need is a tube to look through, a string, a weight, and something with degree markings.  I made mine in under an hour.

So I go out every night with a homemade sextant and sight Deneb.  It's kind of silly if you think about it.  I'm in my space suit on Mars and I'm navigating with sixteenth-century tools.  But hey, they work. 

I kept expecting for this to turn out to all be a dream - like Watney was just some dude dreaming about being an astronaut.  But, thankfully, it didn't turn out that way.  The book had many twists and turns, and near death experiences for Watney.  But it also had a great conclusion.

The book really sucks you in.  It was difficult to put down, even when I was doing the falling-asleep-head-nod-read-the-same-page-over-and-over-again-thing.  I just wanted to see how it ended.

I finally got there this past Saturday.  I was not disappointed.

I am disappointed that Andy Weir is no longer working at the company.  I did meet him once and overheard him saying his book was optioned and might possibly be made into a movie!  So, that's pretty exciting.

Pick this book up - you won't be disappointed.  And, you might learn a thing or 2 about being an astronaut, Mars, and how to make viable soil with your poop, reclaimed water, and sheer will.

Next up - either a book about Los Angeles, or a book about Paris...  Stay tuned!