Salt, The Caryatids, Books

Books, books, I buy too many books.  I have a strange relationship with books where I appreciate them so much as objects that I am often content to merely own them.  Sure I’d like to read them, but there are so many and I really struggle to maintain the patience required to read every night. Plus, when you consider the logical end of obtaining so many books, it’s not rewarding.  Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have to have huge book sell-offs annually in order to not die under the crushing pressure of paper and ink.  Owning books is sadly a losing proposition in the long run.

But I mean to say that the book I have stalled out on, Salt, is great, but I maybe only read 100 pages of it before life interfered and threw my pattern off.  Like Mad Men (at least for me), Salt is the sort of thing you have a hard time getting back into if you take a break, specifically because nothing ever really happens.  Sorry, Mad Men, your period detail is amazing but please can Don Draper do something interesting?

I say this because you should read Salt, by Mark Kurlansky—bestselling author of (wait for it) Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World.  I’m something of a neophyte in the non-fiction world, and practically everything I’ve read is about food in some way or another.  But in spite of my poor attention span I can recommend this book because, uh, it’s fascinating.  It’s not just sodium chloride, table salt—it’s all sort of chemical salts, including, for instance, gunpowder.  People used to kill each other to get a little salt, and now people kill themselves by consuming too much salt.  I can’t say much more about it other than that a whole chapter describes olives, my favorite food, so I love it, but I’ll just leave with Kurlansky’s opening line, which just accentuates the romantic aura this surprisingly non-dorky book entertains:

“The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.”

But I am trudging forward with another book I started a few months back – Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids.  Hey look, that’s the cover right up there.  I had heard some pretty rave things about this when it first came out, but a cursory glance at Amazon makes it appear like people mostly want to shit on it.  Which I sort of understand, even if I don’t agree. Some of the main critiques levied against it are that there’s a lack of characterization, a lack of plot, it’s too preachy, and that perspective shifts around too frequently to get a handle on what Sterling is even trying to say.  Well, slow down, mister, I’m only one hundred pages in.  But it definitely possesses the distinct reek of a work produced by a technofetishist. In this way, it reminds me of Charles Stross’ Accelerando, which was bursting with cool ideas but swept plot under the rug, or most of what I’ve read from Cory Doctorow.

I love this stuff.  It’s popcorn, but it’s smart popcorn, and it’s undeniably a product of our specific era in a way other sci-fi isn’t.  Near-future sci-fi has never been as close to the present day as it is now, and god, I could come up with a better way to say it but there it is.  I actually got back into The Caryatids after thinking all week about augmented reality, and I wasn’t really surprised when it turns out to potentially be a major plot point in the story.

Like I said, I’m only 100 pages in, thus far.  But with the disclosure that I love some good technoporn (and what nerd doesn’t?), you have another recommendation based on the strength of Sterling’s ideas here (and some pretty entertaining dialogue) and his surprisingly rewarding refusal to have people blow shit up to make things more exciting.  Yeah, that’s right – there haven’t been any explosions yet.  So you decide.