The Reality Dysfunction Part 2: Expansion, Peter Hamilton
I had previously abandoned part 1 half-way through because of the utterly mediocre writing. I picked up part 2 five years later in a used bookstore because of lingering curiousity about the story and a desire for mindless, low-risk reading. I can confirm that I scanned almost all of the lines of text in the book, that I was mildly entertained, and that I was quite diverted from my mundane life. Beyond that, there is little to recommend and much to criticize. Most of the ideas, characters, and plot lines are trite at best. The prose is the florid production of a tin ear for text; if Robert Heinlein set the gold standard for effortless integration of futuristic technology into fiction writing, with the canonical example being "The door irised open," Peter Hamilton sets the carbotanium standard. No, I don't know what carbotanium is, but despite his having invented it, I suspect neither does Peter Hamilton. After all of that, the repetitive grammatical errors and the occasional gross mistake in physics are hardly worth mentioning.

The difference between a guilty pleasure and Peter Hamilton is that, when I realized that I would have to read three more books to get to the end of the story, I didn't for one second consider doing so. Also, I threw the book in the recycle bin when I was finished. But I will concede that I finished it.

Everything and More, David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace writes non-fiction with such skill and confidence, and is so grippingly able to evidence deep understanding of complex subjects, that it takes conscious effort to remember, while reading his work, that he is capable as anyone else of jumping to conclusions and ignoring a shaky foundation, and that he has in fact been caught out on factual correctness in the past. That notwithstanding, this is a great read, a great introduction to infinity, and a great source of grief that he started teaching at my alma mater a decade after I left. When Wallace is on target, he's more than capable of expressing in full effect thoughts you only suspected you had:

Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. 'Us' meaning laymen. It's like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time. As in for instance we 'know', as high-school graduates and readers of Newsweek, that time is relative, that quantum particles can be both there and not, that space is curved, that colors do not inhere in objects themselves, that our love for our children is evolutionarily preprogrammed, that there is a blind spot in the center of our vision that our brains automatically fill in. That our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pate. That we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, and hydrogen is flammable, and yet we are not flammable. We 'know' a near-infinity of truths that contradict our immediate commonsense experience of the world. And yet we have to live and function in the world. (Everything and More, David Foster Wallace, p22)

The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
Exactly what I wanted—a reasonably comprehensive survey of philosophy (though I missed the Eastern stuff), in very readable and personable prose, written by someone who understands everything being discussed, in under a thousand pages. While it must certainly be colored by Russell's particular comprehension, such bias is very consistent and thus easy to compensate for; or at least it will be once I find a point on which I differ substantially from Russell, which apparently hasn't happened yet. His snark livens things up without cheapening them too much. It did take about a year to make it through, and I fell asleep a lot, but I think that's mostly because it's about philosophy, and reading it seriously takes a lot of thought, which consumes glycogen stores in the brain and produces sleep.

Reaching the home stretch—ideas less than six hundred years old—and having read a few biographical notes, I found increasing kinship with Russell. A common complaint of atheism is that it takes away the comforting certainty of a personal yet omnipotent God, and forces non-believers to live alone with their thoughts in the universe. This train of thought, with or without other philosophical brain traps, can certainly lead to nihilism and existential despair of the sort attributed to beret-wearing Frenchmen smoking cigarettes and dressing in black, and it seems silly, but it has a real bite. If you think too hard about the universe and your role in it, and about death, and what the lack of an afterlife means; or even if you just keep asking "why" as hard as you can, you can really freak yourself out and get stuck in a dark and lonely place. The fact that I think belief in God is ultimately untenable doesn't preclude being jealous of it. Russell apparently lived with depression on and off throughout his life, maybe from thinking about living in a material world, more likely mostly from other sources. Reading this book, at times I felt, in a secular and materialist way, spiritually connected to the author. I may be alone in the universe, but I'm not the only one. So to speak.

Air, Geoff Ryman
A spectacular combination of Maureen McHugh's deep humanity and sympathy for her characters with Connie Willis' deadpan comedy of manners, plus a dash of Douglas Coupland's invention. The story of the last village in the world to get something like the internet, except that it's called Air, and it runs inside your brain, and it has metaphysical aspects, and there's a glitch in the first trial. Reading this book filled me with a double sense of happiness; its so good that I enjoyed how much I was enjoying it.