Assignment 2 — Theodore

While I adore math, I prefer relaxing with a book. High school limits the time available for reading, so I tend to not finish books nowadays. Instead, books such as the 750-page-long Gödel, Escher, Bach — a humorous description of the nuts and bolts of math, consciousness, language, and artificial intelligence — gather dust in my bookshelf. But I have an excuse for leaving GEB incomplete: a science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, swept me off my feet. I lack impulse control towards books; I finished Liu’s series in days. Part of its appeal was guessing its genre: time travel, sentient machines, or something completely different? If you only read one science-fiction novel this year, don’t read this one; it will compel you to read others.

    As I read The Three-Body Problem this June, another book (Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent), which was necessary for my summer annotated bibliography, lay unread.  Perhaps I ignored it because of past experience with books about present-day America, which fall into two types: parables asserting that only traditional values can save America and diatribes blaming everyone earning over $200,000. Once I started reading Time to Start Thinking, I discovered that the author, journalist Edward Luce, did not write it because of the 2016 election, as the title suggests. Instead, the book, completed in 2012, concludes that America is faltering in innovation, in education, and in government — but not because of one particular political viewpoint.

    Besides my appreciation for bipartisan doomsayers, I also read Sherlock Holmes pastiches, imitations by authors other than the original creator (Arthur Conan Doyle). Strangely enough, I rarely read Conan Doyle’s works. The pastiche category includes not just stories by other writers, but also nonfiction (e.g. a guide to playing chess narrated by Holmes). It’s possible that modern, exaggerated characters appeal to me. But I prefer to think that authors who — unlike Doyle — genuinely appreciate Holmes create copies less artificial than the original.