Eighty-three-year-old French writer Lucie Ceccaldi minces no words in her contempt for fellow countryman and scribe Michel Houellebecq:

So what is Ceccaldi's problem with Houellebecq? Well, for starters, she deems him an "evil, stupid little bastard," a "liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all—above all—a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame." Of Elementary Particles [one of Houellebecq's best-known novels], Ceccaldi says: "That book is pure pornography, it's repugnant, it's crap. I don't understand its success at all, that just shows the decadance of France." And the rest of his ouevre: "What's this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who's never done anything, who's never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior ... Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq's a stupid little bastard..."

The punchline:

It should be noted, though, that Ceccaldi is currenly promoting her own memoir, titled L'Innocente, and is obviously trying to gin up interest in the book. And perhaps it should also be noted, in the spirit of full disclosure, that Mme. Ceccaldi is M. Houellebecq's mother.

I bet their family reunions are a hoot.

HT: reason's Hit & Run.

Book meme from karmabreeze and elsewhere:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

( the list )

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

— Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

I read Rendezvous With Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey (and watched the movie, multiple times) in the early 80s and immediately declared Clarke the greatest science fiction author ever.  Nothing in the years since has changed that sentiment.

No one among the hard SF greats did more to make science accessible and entertaining than Clarke.  He was the eternal optimist among SF visionaries from the classic era; he rarely wrote about misuse of technology leading to a dystopian future, although he frequently explored ethical concerns and spiritual themes in his work.  Mostly he wrote, in both fiction and non-fiction work, about technology expanding humanity's reach beyond Earth (and, in Childhood's End, evolving humanity to another plane of existence altogether), and was a keen advocate of space exploration.  He was also comfortable introducing social mores in his stories that were considered deviant or even taboo at the time, including homosexuality and polyamorous relationships.

Like a lot of hard SF writers, Clarke wasn't much for characterization, and he hardly ever wrote character-driven stories (the sequels to Rendezvous With Rama are an exception, but those were mostly written by Gentry Lee, using story elements provided by Clarke).  What he could do—better than anyone—was combine science and speculative technology with some cracking good yarns.  He wasn't just one of the greats; he was the great.  The universe, and our understanding of it, is poorer without him.

Random Friday linkage:

• Warren Meyer on why the labor market is largely immune to the minimum wage:
  
  

  Correcting for higher state minimum wages, but also adjusting for illegal immigrants (who are a special case with super-low bargaining power) and factoring in salaried workers (who by law to be salaried have to be making much more than minimum wage) one still finds that less than 2% or less make minimum wage, about half of whom are under 25.

  
  And here's another post (from Cafe Hayek) which suggests that the number actually earning minimum wage could be as low at 0.5% when tipped wage earners are taken into account.
  
• Some people just never learn, and now German researchers have discovered genetic proof.
  
• Freakin' cool: a working model of a V-12 engine made from paper.
  
• Praise Allah and pass on the left: Saudi Arabia is set to lift the ban on women drivers.
  
• Tightening emissions and fuel-economy standards prompt Chrysler to kill its legendary Hemi engines.
  
• More problems solved in Zimbabwe: the central bank issues a $10,000,000 note to battle hyperinflation.  Now you just need $5,000,000 more to buy a hamburger (about $6 US at black-market exchange rates).
  
• Novels composed on mobile phones and read by other mobile subscribers top Japan's bestseller lists when published on dead trees.

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to finish the 12th and final book of the late Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.  Which is great—and inevitable; it would have been almost criminal for such a massive epic to be left unfinished—but who the hell is Brandon Sanderson?

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

— from The Wheel of Time series

"I’ll keep on writing until they nail down my coffin."

— James Oliver Rigney, Jr., aka Robert Jordan (1948 - 2007)

RIP.

I must be the last Harry Potter fan on the planet to finish The Deathly Hallows.  It seemed everyone else was done and blogging about it after about three days, tops.  Finally I turned off the TV, ignored my computer and stayed up past 1 AM Thursday night to knock it out.

Was it the crown jewel of the series, as the last book of fantasy epics should be?  Hard to say.  I think it was the best-written of the series by far, which is only natural; I'd be worried if a writer hadn't considerably improved her wordcraft after seven novels.  But the pacing did suffer a bit due to the long stretches of wandering around the countryside.  Rowling employed a lot of time compression in the story and it felt disjointed at times.  Maybe Harry Potter and the Deathly March would have been a more suitable title.

( probably an unnecessary spoiler cut )

I'm struggling to make progress in James Wallace's 1997 Microsoft exposé Overdrive; I've only finished about a third of it after nearly a week, and it's less than 300 pages.  I don't know if it's because I'm already familiar with much of the history Wallace covers, or if it's because he uses the phrase information highway about 8,342 times in the space of a half-dozen pages.

And then I come across a gem like the following, where he describes the naming of the computer lab used to develop the original version of the Microsoft Network, code-named "Marvel":

In keeping with the comic-book motif, it became known as the Manga Lab because the man who ran it had spent a lot of time in Japan, where a manga is an erotic comic book.

Uh . . . yeah.  Keep in mind that Wallace lives in Seattle and is a reporter for the Post-Intelligencer, where he currently works the aerospace beat.  Given the higher profile of Japanese culture on the West Coast, you'd think he'd know what a fucking manga is, or would ask someone who does.  It's a comic book, period.  Erotica (or porn, more commonly known as hentai) is but one genre.  You could say I'm nitpicking (or acting like a loser otaku), but this is the sort of mistake which should be caught during editing, and I've read few books more poorly edited than this one.

But since I have a bad habit of putting a book down and never finishing it (indeed, I've stopped reading for months at a time because of this), I'll stick it out.

Stanislaw Lem dead at 84.

First Octavia Butler, now Lem. Butler's death was untimely, but it still feels like an era is passing; of the true early giants of the genre, only Arthur C. Clarke remains.

Total shock.

Octavia Butler was one of the most talented and original writers in science fiction.  I haven't read nearly as much of her work as I should, but Wild Seed ranks among the great SF novels of the last 25 years or so.  This is a terrible, terrible loss.

I read this story to Alex the other night:

( Li Chi Slays the Serpent )

The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection.  1,082 titles.  $7,989.99.  Sorry, not eligible for Super Saver shipping, and bookcases and librarian not included.

Not that I have the perseverance to read that many books (if you do one every week, you'll finish the collection in 20 years), but damn.  I love it.  It's like the literary McDonald's menu, every item Super Sized and with a toy surprise.

I said I don't have time to write in my journal, but I have to share:

OMG CHELSEA CLINTON IS A CHILD OF RAPE!!!1!!1!!

. . . according to Ed Klein in his new book The Truth About Hillary.  Bill Clinton, Klein reports, raped his wife during a trip to Bermuda in the late '70s, and Chelsea was supposedly conceived as a result.  I'm no fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton, but this is just low.

Even more surprising is that Klein is not your typical anti-Clinton right-wing loony.  He's a serious journalist with serious credentials.  But one wonders what his "sources" were for this one.

Waiting to see how far the Republicans distance themselves from this one, if indeed they distance themselves at all. . . .

[cross-posted from libertarianism]

The conservative weekly rag Human Events has published a list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries":

1. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (# 1 with a bullet, it appears!)
   
2. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
   
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong
   
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey
   
5. Democracy and Education, John Dewey
   
6. Das Kapital, Karl Marx
   
7. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
   
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte
   
9. Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
   
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes

From a conservative viewpoint, no surprises on this list, really.  I wonder what the list would look like if put together by The Nation or a similarly liberal publication; other than Mein Kampf, perhaps, I can't think of a single book they'd have in common.

So, what would a libertarian-minded list of "most harmful books" look like?  Would we also include Mein Kampf and Marx' works?  Would Keynes be ranked even higher?  What about anti-capitalist screeds such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle?  (Note, however, that there is no fiction on the Human Events list.)

Personally, I'd start with the Bible, but it was written some time before the 19th century. . . .