I liked The Name of the Rose, so when I saw Foucault's Pendulum at the bookstore, I decided to grab it.  Unfortunately for me, it’s a rather different sort of book than The Name of the Rose.

The Name of the Rose is essentially a detective story.  It’s set in medieval times and is told in a wonderfully baroque manner, but with all the descriptive flourishes pared away its story is relatively straightforward.  Foucault's Pendulum is more of a surrealist book—the journey matters more than the destination, and the book’s climax is just a single element in the tapestry of the narrative, a fact for which I was not completely prepared.

The pacing of the book is also rather slow, and not always in a good way.  In, say, A Fire Upon the Deep, the pace is slow, but there’s a feeling of grandness, of something gradually but inexorably building as the story progresses.  I often felt that Foucault's Pendulum was dragging along without necessarily going anywhere, especially during the elaboration of the Plan, where the characters just keep piling details on details seemingly without end.

I should not that the edition I read had an annoying synopsis on the back cover.  It claimed that the main characters put facts into a computer that drew connections between apparently disparate facts.  In the book, those events don’t take place until about two-thirds of the way in, and the actual details are somewhat different than those which the synopsis implies.  At least it didn’t completely give away things, like the summary text at the beginning of my copy of Archangel.

I’ll discuss the ending below the spoiler barrier.

Spoilers

Again, Foucault's Pendulum is not a straightforward tale.  Since I was expecting one, the ending came as something of a disappointment to me.  Throughout the entire book, the narrator referenced the events of that night in terms that were filled with portent.  When the book actually got around to describing it, I thought it very anticlimactic.  There’s the implication that the main characters have somehow divined something true, but the climax arrives and the reader is told, “No, sorry.  It’s all fake.”

I suppose I should read it again in the right frame of mind, but it’s really dense and I’m not sure the effort would be worth it.  Goes on the “someday, if I get around to it” list.

For about the last week, Simplex has been plagued by electricity problems.  Which is why I’d been off the ‘Net for a while and why aperiodic.net was unreachable for that period of time.  In the interests of archival, here’s the timeline:

§ Wednesday, Jan 28th, night

I’m playing Simpsons Hit and Run with Leah when the power flickers.  The UPS with a bad battery just barely manages to keep the computer and PlayStation 2 alive.  I learn the hard way that you can’t save in the middle of a mission, right before the power cuts out entirely and the game goes bye-bye.  We figure it’s an area problem and that BGE will fix it.  The power continues to flicker on and off throughout the night, so we just shut off all of the computers.

§ Thursday night

The problems persist.  We realize that everyone else seem to be doing okay, so I resolve to call the leasing office in the morning.

§ Friday morning

The power is mostly on, but keeps flickering off and back on.  I call the leasing office after I get to work.  They haven’t heard from anyone else, so it’s probably just us.  They promise to send out someone to look at it.

§ Friday late afternoon

A maintenance person goes to the townhouse.  Ray is home at the time.  Naturally, the power works while the maintenance person is there.  He’s got other calls, so promises to return on Saturday and look more closely.

§ Friday evening

I get home and note that the electricity is still having problems.  Ray’s already left, so I don’t know about the visit from the maintenance person.  I call the emergency service number and leave a message.  When I don’t get a response, I call BGE.  They have an automated menu system that works me though the symptoms that I’m seeing.  It ultimately tells me that this sort of thing is usually internal to the house and not something they can fix.  It offers to set up a service call, but warns that if the technician determines that the problem is not something BGE can fix they will charge me $80.  I call the leasing office again.

§ Friday, about 11:00pm

The power flickers off and back on again for what will be the last time that night.

§ Friday night

The maintenance person calls back.  I talk with him for a while, giving him some more background on what sorts of things are happening.  He says he has a pretty good idea of what’s going wrong and will be in first thing on Saturday morning.

§ Saturday late morning

The maintenance person arrives, looks at the circuit breaker panel, and says he has to leave again.  I’m left with the impression that he’ll return; Ray is left with the impression that he won’t.  Regardless, he doesn’t.  Power works all day.

§ Sunday night

Power problems manifest again.

§ Monday morning

I call the leasing office to report the continuance of the problems.  They say someone will be out to look at it.

§ Monday evening

I return home to find that someone came, more or less just looked at things, and left.  Ray was home at the time and was told that they’d get someone more knowledgeable out there.

§ Tuesday, 3:30pm

I call the leasing office to see how things are going.  I’m told that an electrician has been called, but has not yet responded.

§ Tuesday evening

I get home to find that no one has yet been in.

§ Wednesday, early afternoon

I call the leasing office again to see if they’ve actually done anything.  I’m told that the electrician is currently in the townhouse.

§ Wednesday, late afternoon

The leasing agent calls back to say that the electrician had been in.  Naturally, the electricity did not misbehave while he was there.  Going on what he’d been told about the problem, he rewired several of the circuit breakers.

§ Wednesday evening

I get home, verify that the power seems to have been working continuously, and power up all of my computers.  It has now been a week since we first started having problems.

Had dinner at Phở Ðật Thành last night.  Very good Vietnamese food.  (Well, the food was very good, and it’s a Vietnamese restauraunt.  I would have to leave it to someone more familiar with that cooking style to judge its authenticity.)  It’s good food, and it’s Columbia.  Go there.  They have a huge menu.  Go there a lot.

(Really, I just made this entry because I could put the full name of the place in Unicode.  I’m a dork.  But the food’s really good.)

I recently had the use of my sister’s car for almost a month.  During that time, I didn’t rely on the MTA for my transportation needs, and I was reminded again just how inadequate Baltimore’s public transportation system is.

I like the idea of public transportation.  It’s a more efficient method of travel, in terms of energy expended and pollution generated per person.  I like the idea of settling back to read a book while someone else drives me to my destination.  I even like walking from place to place, provided it’s not too far.  (“Too far” varies depending on my level of interest, but generally runs between 10 and 30 minutes of walking.)

In an ideal city, public transportation would be a useful way to travel around, smoothly moving you from place to place without inconveniencing you as you traveled.  The city would have a subway or elevated train system with several lines that connected disparate portions of the city.  Traveling within the city would generally be as simple as walking a few blocks to a subway stop, changing trains once or, at most, twice, and walking a few more blocks to your destination.  Buses would fill in what gaps were left, as well as servicing the outlying areas that didn’t have a subway extension or light rail nearby.  Naturally, those trains and buses would have reasonable schedules that provided frequent and timely service while the organization running things would keep signs and scheduled up to date and inform riders of any problems with the service.

I don’t live in that city.  I live in Baltimore.  Baltimore has one subway that allows people to travel between Johns Hopkins, Lexington Market, and Owings Mills.  It has one set of Light Rail tracks (on which it tries to run three different lines) that will take you anywhere you want, as long as it’s BWI, Linthicum, Howard Street, Timonium, or Hunt Valley.  Most of the city is only accessible by bus, and those buses are frequently off-schedule.  In some cases, such as the #8 route, the schedule serves only to give a rough idea of the travel time between two points; the buses are so erratic that the schedule cannot be relied upon to indicate when one will arrive.

The city is also bad at communicating with its riders.  Light Rail passengers are occasionally forced to wait through several scheduled train arrivals for a vehicle, with no feedback from the MTA on what the problem was or when service would resume, despite the presence of public-address systems at every stop.  (Not to mention the mailing list, where the timely and useful messages from the MARC division arrive in stark contrast to the mute silence from the Light Rail devision.)  Bus routes get diverted without any effort to update the signs and schedules along the affected portion of the route.  I’ve waited and I’ve seen others wait at stops that declare buses from such-and-such route will be by at so-and-so time, only to be disappointed, enraged, and disheartened when bus after bus fails to show.

I used to declare that when I got a new car I’d eschew its use for day-to-day purposes and continue to rely on public transportation, giving me time to relax and read while allowing me to spend less money per month (a monthly bus pass costs less than a month’s worth of gas for me).  Much as that would be a good and ecologically sound idea in an ideal city, it’s one that’s far too annoying in a city as inconvenient as Baltimore.

I occasionally venture beyond my fiction readings into the realm of non-fiction, and I’m pretty sure it counts even if the book is itself about reading.  I saw The Child That Books Built mentioned in a post on Neil Gaiman’s blog and it sounded interesting enough, so I bought it the next time I was in a bookstore.

I found the book to be a rather mixed bag.  There were parts that I, like Gaiman, found eerily similar to my own experiences—the way reading can blot out all that transpires in the surrounding world, the discovery of SF, reading The Hobbit, reading the Narnia books.  (Though in my case, the Narnia series were the first “real” books I read with The Hobbit following shortly thereafter.)  There were other parts that didn’t necessarily resonate with my experiences but which I nevertheless found interesting—the discussion of lingual development in children, for instance.  Some things were just there as autobiographical but didn’t have echoes in my life—much of Spufford’s childhood reading differed from mine, being separated by both distance and time, while there were books that interested him but not me, such as the Little House on the Prairie series.  Possibly related to those were the parts where I felt that the book rambled without any clear purpose or result—the discussion of the primeval forest, or the exploration of small-town America.

Overall, I found it interesting but not really compelling.  Yet another book tucked into the category of, “Huh?  Oh, yeah, I’ve read that.”