NPR's Top 100 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

NPR recently published its list of the Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books, as nominated by fans, weeded through by experts, then voted on by fans. It's a great list, though I should note that they left off all young adult sci-fi and fantasy (no Harry Potter or Narnia). They promised a separate list for the young adult books in future summers.

I'm sorry to say that I have only read a handful of the books that made the list*. Here are the ones I've read (if I've read at least one complete book in a listed series, I count that), with the brief description from the NPR list and my commentary:

#1 The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien's seminal three-volume epic chronicles the War of the Ring, in which Frodo the hobbit and his companions set out to destroy the evil Ring of Power and restore peace to Middle-earth. The beloved trilogy still casts a long shadow, having established some of the most familiar and enduring tropes in fantasy literature.

I actually didn't read this book/trilogy until shortly before the movies started coming out, and I have only read them through the one time. It's the movies that I have watched over and over; while Tolkien created this marvelous world, Jackson et al. may have had more...narrative finesse. But I still consider myself a huge fan of the books. I can speak a bit of Quenya, after all.

#2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

In the first, hilarious volume of Adams' Hitchhiker's series, reluctant galactic traveler Arthur Dent gets swept up in some literally Earth-shattering events involving aliens, sperm whales, a depressed robot, mice who are more than they seem, and some really, really bad poetry.

I finally got around to reading this one in college and found it absolutely delightful. The dolphins, the petunias, the galactic battle fleet swallowed by a small dog. It's a fun, fast read. The movie doesn't do it justice, but it does have some good bits (Alan Rickman is enjoyable, as always). The book is the first in a series, but the NPR list only credits this first one.

#5 A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin
Ummm, this description might count as spoilers (though ones you probably expected) if you've only read the first book/seen the first season. I'll let you highlight to read.

As the Seven Kingdoms face a generation-long winter, the royal Stark family confronts the poisonous plots of the rival Lannisters, the emergence of the Neverborn demons, the arrival of barbarian hordes, and other threats.

What is it about having two "R" initials in the middle of your name? (Martin has often been compared to Tolkien.) I read the first book in Martin's epic series, A Game of Thrones, a few years ago. Much darker than the fantasy I was used to, I liked it enough to buy the rest of the books, but at the time wasn't ready to dive into the second book. But this summer's excellent HBO show, Game of Thrones, brought me back to the series, giving me renewed appreciation for the world Martin created and strengthening my affection for his characters. As the first season of Game of Thrones conveniently covered the events of the first book, I'm now perfectly poised to start book 2, A Clash of Kings.

#7 Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit, in a chilling novel of a frightening near-future world.

Sadly, that summary is about all I remember of the book, beyond vague images of scenes and feelings I associate with it. I read this one in high school, and while I appreciated it for being a "great" book, I guess it didn't engross me enough to leave a lasting impression.

#9 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Huxley's classic prophetic novel describes the socialized horrors of a futuristic utopia devoid of individual freedom.

I read this one in high school as well, but somehow I felt far more engaged with the dystopian world it imagined and the characters who populated it than with Fahrenheit 451. "Ending is better than mending," "I'm so glad I'm a beta," horror at the idea of someone being a mother... I liked this one but it also disturbed me, which I think is why it has stuck with me so well.

#12 Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan

At 13 volumes and counting, this sweeping — some would say sprawling – richly imagined epic chronicles the struggle between servants of the Dark One and those of the champion of light known as the Dragon Reborn.

I've talked about this series on this blog before (I chose one of its heroines as a Character I'd Like To Be), as it's easily the series for which I've read the greatest number of pages (each book is about 1000 pages in paperback form). My mom somewhat randomly gave me the first in the series, Eye of the World, before one of our trips to Hawaii when I was 15. By the end of our trip, I had finished the third book. While I've taken issue with some of the plot points, and I recognize how the series started dragging on...and on (I don't recall anything happening in book 10, except maybe Mat going shopping for silks--seriously), I still adore this series. I've been immersed in its world so long, seen the characters through so much, I can't help but feel attached. And Jordan did create a beautiful, complex story that is brilliant in its own way. Book 11 really picked up again, and now the end is in sight. Though Jordan passed away, he left enough notes for Brandon Sanderson to finish it up. I'll definitely see it through.

#13 Animal Farm, George Orwell

Farm animals overthrow their human owners and set up their own deeply (and familiarly) flawed government. Orwell's mordant satire of totalitarianism is still a mainstay of ninth-grade reading lists.

This is another one I read in high school that I barely remember. It's not that I didn't like it, I just didn't love it enough for it to stick. Sort of sad realizing how much of my education I've lost. I can't even remember which year I read this one...

#15 Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

As former members of a disbanded group of superheroes called the Crimebusters start turning up dead, the remaining members of the group try to discover the identity of the murderer before they, too, are killed. A graphic novel.

I'm a geek, I used to watch loads of cartoons based on comics (Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four), and I love comics-based movies, but I'm not actually a comics reader. One week, my Entertainment Weekly had on its cover a collection of people who were clearly superheroes...but I didn't have a clue who they were. Nerd shame! Well, I quickly ordered Watchmen off Amazon and got caught up. This is the one graphic novel I've read, but it's a really, really great one. The movie doesn't do it justice at all. You just have to read it.

#32 Watership Down, Richard Adams

An allegorical tale of survival about a band of wild rabbits who leave their ancestral home to build a more humane society chronicles their adventures as they search for a safe place to establish a new warren where they can live in peace.

My dad regrets not reading Lord of the Rings to me as he did to my brothers when they were young, but he did at least read me Watership Down as a bedtime story. I was seven at the time, and it was the longest book I'd ever encountered. But I loved it: the rabbits, their world--especially the exciting section about Efrafa. Perhaps foreshadowing my future Quenya studies, I pored over the Lapine glossary at the back of the book--hardly a developed language, but fun nonetheless. It was my love of Watership Down that attracted me to the Redwall books three years later, and these were the books that really sucked me into the fantasy genre. So, even if my dad didn't read me LotR, he guided me in the right direction.

#66 The Riftwar Saga, Raymond E. Feist

Evil entities have opened a rift in the fabric of space-time, plunging the world of Medkemia into peril. As the battle between Order and Chaos threatens to engulf everything, reluctant wizard Pug is the only hope of a thousand worlds.

My sophomore year in high school, one of my older brother's friends (a senior, like him) founded a school club he called the Fantasy Reader's Guild. We didn't actually read anything together, it was just an excuse for students to get together and geek out. After they graduated I became the "president" of the club, and following the suggestion of our club's faculty advisor, everyone in the club read Magician (in two parts: Apprentice and Master). In case anyone out there was doubting whether women ever read fantasy books willingly in their book clubs, I'm living proof the answer is yes.

#67 Sword of Shannara Trilogy, Terry Brooks

Over the course of three novels, several generations of the Ohmsford family find themselves retrieving magical artifacts in the desperate hope to fight evil.

This was the next fantasy series I tackled after Redwall, when Sword of Shannara was on my summer reading list going into 9th grade. Sword (the first book in the trilogy) is a blatant ripoff of Lord of the Rings, but Brooks does manage to one-up Tolkien in one way: Sword of Shannara has even fewer women than Lord of the Rings! That said, at the time I was blissfully unaware of the many, many parallels between LotR and Sword (I hadn't read LotR yet) and didn't care about the lack of women. I was just sucked into this exciting, complex world of magic and battles. The second in the trilogy, Elfstones of Shannara, was much more original and--what'd'ya know--featured several important female characters (one of whom went on my list of Characters I'd Like To Be). I am very fond of that book. The third in the trilogy, Wishsong of Shannara, was also good, and different, but Elfstones remains my favorite in the series.

I'd like to note that I've also read parts of two more books on the list:
#46 The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien
I wrote a paper in college on the story of Beren and Lúthien.

#47 The Once and Future King, T. H. White
I read The Sword in the Stone in seventh grade.


Looking at the NPR list, I realize how much reading I have to do. The Mists of Avalon (#42, Marion Zimmer Bradley) sits on my bookshelf, as does the rest of the Song of Ice and Fire series. I've wanted to read Neil Gaimon and Terry Prachett for years, now. And some day I'll read all of The Silmarillion, I promise!

If you're looking for something to read, this list is a great reference (at least, if you're looking for something sci-fi or fantasy--if you're not, then I doubt you'll have read down to this point in the post ;). And if there's anything else that I should add to my list, let me know!


* To be fair, while I've only read entire books from 11 of the 100 publications listed, by some counts that would come to 28 books encompassed by the list. Not too shabby.

Reasons not to eat dolphins

In my last post, I talked about how I thought The Cove was a great, entertaining documentary that deserved its Oscar win. I did not talk about the reasons why I agree with the message it was trying to give: Dolphins are friends, not food.*

People who protest the killing and consumption of dolphins are often criticized by cynics as defending dolphins "just because they're cute." While this may be one of the reasons I don't like to see dolphins slaughtered, it is not a convincing reason to stop the practice, since cuteness is subjective; if someone told me that they think ducks are adorable so I should stop eating them, I would tell them no way, ducks are delicious, so quack off. Really, ducks are pretty cute (think mallard family crossing the street, a la Make Way for Ducklings). So are baby carrots, and only that fruitarian in Notting Hill would protest the murder and consumption of carrots. It seems cuteness alone is not a deciding factor for why something shouldn't be eaten. More importantly, it will not change anyone's mind who has already decided that, whatever the animal looks like, it is still good to eat.

So why shouldn't we be eating dolphins?


Health

Whatever your vegetarian friend tells you is unhealthy about beef, dolphin is worse. Dolphin is known to contain dangerously high levels of mercury, reaching about 20 times the recommended limit. Why so high? Mercury is naturally deposited in the ocean, but current levels are very high due to our burning of fossil fuels. In the ocean environment, mercury enters the food chain at the lowest levels and then bioaccumulates. This means that when an animal consumes something that contains mercury, the mercury in the eaten is retained by the eater. As it works its way up the food chain, higher and higher concentrations of the substance are found (bald eagles had a similar problem with DDT, if you're familiar with that story--lucky thing no one was eating bald eagles). Since dolphins are the top of the food chain and relatively long lived, they accumulate extremely high levels of mercury.

Mercury inhibits brain function, and the effects of severe mercury poisoning are heartbreaking. So it's not just that dolphin meat is unhealthy--it's that it's poisonous. There are much better foods out there to be feeding people than dolphin. This is perhaps the strongest case for crossing dolphin off the menu. It is for this reason, after all, that members of the school board in (dolphin-hunting town in The Cove) Taiji itself were able to get dolphin taken out of school lunches: parents were fearing for their children's health.


Environment

Have you ever calculated your ecological footprint? There's a really cute site here (takes just a couple minutes), or a simpler one here. I can't find the site that I used back in an undergrad course, but I remember learning two main things from it. First, if everyone lived like me we would need over 4 Earths to support everyone (and I think of myself as fairly eco-friendly), and second, the best way for me to reduce my ecological footprint was to be vegan. Think about it. How much land over how much time does it take to grow the food to feed a cow until it has grown enough to kill for meat, or to give milk so you can eat cheese? How much more food could you have made if you had just planted soybeans (or whatever veggie) instead? The answer to both questions is a lot. So much energy is lost at each trophic level that the higher up the food chain you eat, the less efficient your food source is. And remember what I was saying about dolphins being at the top of the food chain? Eating herbivores like cows is environmentally bad enough, but dolphins are carnivores that eat carnivores that eat carnivores... That's very inefficient. So basically we have the "it's like eating cows but much worse" argument again.

Not only do we not have enough Earths to support people eating high order consumers, but from what I hear, we're likely to run out of the phosphorous stores that we use to fertilize our fields before the end of the century. This really is a legitimate problem to consider.


Intelligence

Here's a sticky argument. Like the cute argument, it's not likely to change the minds of many people who already think that dolphins are reasonable food--after all, I'll eat pig but not dog, even though pigs are supposed to be smarter. But it is an important reason to me why we shouldn't eat dolphins; the previous arguments explain why it is impractical to eat dolphin, but not why it might be morally wrong to do so, as I believe it is. And since this reason is one attacked by many cynics and skeptics, I feel I should take the time to defend it.

There are few who would deny that killing innocent people is very wrong. It is possible that we believe it is wrong merely because of an instinct that evolution has granted us, since our genes may be better propagated if we don't kill our own, but I think there is more to it than that--it is something we can justify with morality and reason. We know how we ourselves would feel to face death. We know the pain of watching people we care about pass away before us. If we ourselves value our own lives and want to live and experience more life and can't bear to think of how our loved ones would react to news of our death, we can assume that other people feel the same way. Thus, through fairness, a do unto others as you would have them do unto you agreement, we should not kill other people.

Such reasoning, however, allows us to justify the killing of other organisms as long as we believe that they do not feel and think the same way we do. If they do no feel pain as strongly, if they do not love their lives and experiences as dearly, if they don't care as much for their loved ones--if all the things that make our own lives worth saving are lacking (or sufficiently lesser) in other creatures, then their lives are worth less and we can justify their killing if it benefits us. In a way, it boils down to relatability. If the life in question is a life we can relate to--if we can believe that it feels in a way sufficiently similar to the way we feel about our own lives--then it is wrong to kill it. Otherwise, it can be sacrificed, for example for food.

But where do we draw the line? What counts as "sufficiently similar"? And if we cannot effectively communicate between species, how do we even know how the other species feel?

It is a difficult dilemma, but everyone draws a line somewhere. Some draw the line right below people: If it's not exactly like me, then it doesn't deserve saving. Some draw the line right above fish, refusing to eat chicken or beef but enjoying tuna. Some take into account how the animal was treated in life--it's OK to kill it, as long as it lived a comfortable life. Some draw the line somewhere in the invertebrates, not eating meat but never mourning the death of a spider, or maybe a flatworm. At the very least, people draw the line after animals, since otherwise they could not justify eating vegetables. Besides, surely non-animals are not conscious in the way that we are. Right?

There is no perfect place to draw the line. Many positions can be defended. Apparently, I draw my line somewhere between dolphins and pigs. I believe that some animals, including dolphins, chimps, orangutans, and gorillas, have exhibited evidence of intelligence and depth of feeling that make their lives valuable enough to make sacrificing them wrong.

What is so special about dolphins? They exhibit complex communication. They have even been taught to communicate simple concepts with humans. They play; there's a beautiful clip in The Cove of a dolphin playing with a ring of bubbles, and, after all, dolphins are the original surfers. They even have sex for fun. They are self-aware, recognizing their own image in a mirror or in a picture. There is plentiful if anecdotal evidence that they have deliberately saved the lives of humans. And they just seem to have have a knowingness about them that I also sense when a gorilla looks into my eyes at the zoo. Maybe some of these are misunderstandings, or things I'm seeing as I want to see rather than for the truth. But I can't believe they all are. For these reasons, I believe that dolphins are intelligent enough that I do relate to them and their feelings. They are "sufficiently similar."

In The Cove, surfer Dave Rastovich tells a story about how a dolphin once saved him from a tiger shark. Maybe the dolphin was being self-serving, or it was confused, or just aggressive toward the shark. But maybe to some extent, dolphins identify with us humans, and they deem our lives worthy of saving. Having watched clips in The Cove of Mandy-Rae Cruikshank swimming with curious dolphins in the open ocean, I could certainly see this being the case. Can't we return the favor?


To lighten the mood, I leave you with these two amusing bits:

From The Onion: Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs. "Holy f*ck" says mankind.


From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie: "So long and thanks for all the fish" (starts 25 seconds in)



* It's a modified Finding Nemo quote, though it loses the alliteration of "Fish are friends, not food." Maybe "Dolphins are darlings, not dinner"?

So long, and thanks for all the blue crabs!

Yesterday was my last day of work. I was about a week and a half short of living and working at the lab for two years, though if you count the three months I spent there one summer as an undergrad, that puts me over the two year mark. This was my first job out of college, and my first real job with yearly salary and paid leave and benefits and the whole deal. there were some good times (my paper getting published) and some bad times (getting my paper published), but overall it was a great experience.

I hadn't thought there was anyone in particular that I would miss. I didn't get as close to anyone there as I had gotten to my friends in college, and my closest friend at the lab had already left in May. Yet when I stopped by this morning to turn in a separation/termination form, I started getting a little teary-eyed as some of the students who saw me said final goodbyes and wished me luck. I probably should have said more to them, but I made a hasty escape once the tears started threatening; I didn't want to cry in front of anyone who wouldn't cry for me. And I don't think any of them would have cried for me.

The sadness may not come from missing anyone in particular, but missing the place. It was home for two years, it was familiar and known, it was comfortable, and now it's a memory. I don't know when I'll go back, if ever. I cried a little on my 8-hour drive back to my parents'. It was something on the radio that set me off, but I don't remember what song... it was probably something embarrassing, anyway.

Somewhere in Connecticut, it started drizzling, but it was still perfectly sunny where the sun was setting in the west. For about 10 minutes, I had a perfect view of a huge, brilliant, full double rainbow from the highway. I was kicking myself for leaving my camera somewhere in the great big pile that was the back seat of my car. I suppose if I had been bolder I might have pulled over on the side of the highway to fish out my camera (as I contemplated this, I saw a sign telling me "Pull over only for emergencies" and debated with myself whether or not my need to take a picture was an emergency), but I decided it was a bad idea. I really wanted a picture of the rainbow (a fitting sign, perhaps, in my sadness at moving), but alas, it will exist now only as a memory.

On the bright side, I will soon be moving to Hawaii, the land of "liquid sunshine" and rainbows. I expect many pictures of double rainbows to come.