→ June 17, 2014
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The Dispossessed.

I answered questions from our fantasy baseball staff for a new Insider post today.

I’ve been an avid reader for most of my life, but often became burned out on reading when I was younger because I wanted to read something different from what was being forced on me in school. The drudgery of assigned reading in junior high school and my first two years of high school left me reading very little for pleasure, something exacerbated by a gift of a Commodore 64 around that same time that found me absorbed in games rather than pages. It was my chance discovery of a science fiction book that got me back on the reading track when I was 15, a spine that jumped off the shelf first because of the author’s name, Isaac Asimov*, and then because of the description of the book, which hooked me right away.

* I was familiar with Asimov’s name for a number of reasons, from the sci-fi rag that bore his name to the long out-of-print Realm of Algebra, which I used one weekend in sixth grade to learn the subject, because my school was switching me to a different math class. Any other famous sci-fi author’s name wouldn’t have had the same effect on me in the bookstore.

I wasn’t aware at the time that the book, Foundation, was an important work in the history of science fiction, or part of a long series. I saw what sounded like a cool story and bought the book, which prompted a stretch of reading for pleasure that ran right through college, through the entire Foundation series, then other Asimov titles, then the Dune series (pro tip: stop after book one), Lord of the Rings, the entire works of Kurt Vonnegut to that point, and even a dozen or so novels by Philip K. Dick, along with a handful of one-off works in the sci-fi and even fantasy genres.

There came a point in my early 20s, however, when that paroxysm of reading slowed to a near-halt. I gave up on fiction, for reasons I don’t even remember, and was only reading a book a month, if that. And when I gave up on fiction, I gave up on science fiction more or less for good. It wasn’t a conscious choice, nothing driven by disdain for the genre, but perhaps an association of science fiction with my own childhood that made me switch to more traditional, mainstream literature. There were exceptions, including the book that provoked my second wind as a reader, the first Harry Potter novel; I read that on a business trip to California in the fall of 2000 and have read over 600 novels since then because J.K. Rowling managed to reawaken in me the love of a great story, the desire to get lost in a dazzling plot with descriptions so vivid that I could be consumed by the words. (To this day, the only time I’ve ever had a dream that put me in a book was one where I was just a regular student at Hogwarts, witnessing the story as a classmate rather than a reader.) But even Rowling’s work didn’t push me to read more fantasy novels; I shifted to the classics, many of which appear to have been influences on the Harry Potter novels, and left science fiction almost completely behind me.

The closest I’ve come to sci-fi in the interim, aside from the two titles on the TIME 100 (Neuromancer and Snow Crash), are dystopian novels, those that depict an alternate society, sometimes set in the future, but nearly always incorporating some element of science into their visions of authoritarian regimes or personal struggles for identity and freedom. My interest in dystopian novels also dates back to that first fling with sci-fi in high school, when I read 1984 and Brave New World and Wells’ The Time Machine, but has never stopped even though the genre includes its fair share of solipsistic duds. (Its sister category, utopian novels, is even worse in that regard.) Reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We earlier this year made me seek out other highly-regarded titles in the catgory, which led me back into sci-fi and to The Dispossessed, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel by acclaimed sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Not only was it an excellent representative of what a good dystopian novel can accomplish, it balanced the fiction and the science beautifully, reminded me of what I once enjoyed so much about the genre.

Le Guin’s setup in The Dispossessed differs from those of all of the dystopian novels I’ve read previously. She’s set up two sibling worlds with antithetical societal structures, neither of them clearly utopian or dystopain. Shevek, the physicist and lead character, was born on Anarres, the large moon orbiting the planet Urras. Anarres was colonized by dissenters nearly 200 years before the events of the book, dissenters who called themselves “Odonians” and practice a form of true communism they refer to as “anarchy,” using the literal sense of the term (without government) than the colloquial one (chaos). Over several generations of isolation from Urras, the people of Anarres have organized into syndicates to allow for fundamental economic activities, but within those syndicates, there exist cliques and fiefdoms that stymie Shevek’s attempts to develop his science further (and his friend’s endeavors to develop his art), resembling authoritarian regimes in their denial of anything deemed subversive or unnecessary. Shevek chooses to become the first person from Anarres to visit Urras since the Odonians’ departure, hoping to expand on his research into “temporal physics” and to find the freedom the people of Anarres had lost.

Most dystopian novels focus on tyranny by a single, usually totalitarian government, but Le Guin doesn’t take sides between Anarres and the pseudodemocratic regime Shevek visits on Urras. (Urras also has a Soviet-style regime, Thu, and puppet states where the two superpowers fight proxy wars.) Anarres has a social safety net, no inequality, and a high degree of mobility. Urras has an actual government, with poverty, conspicuous consumption, disease, and waste, but offers a kind of liberty that Anarres lacks – until it becomes clear that Shevek’s ideas may challenge the government there, at which point he encounters the limits of Urrastian liberty and has to make a choice that will affect the histories of both worlds.

Le Guin succeeds so well here in crafting a philosophical treatise within a novel because she focuses more than anything else on the “fiction” part of science fiction, notably the plot. There are science aspects to the work, primarily the settings – and her imagining of an inhospitable world of Anarres is superb, to the point where you can feel the dust on the pages – and the many references to Shevek’s physics work and its importance for interstellar travel, but those details are superficial, laid on top of a very serious work about freedom, especially that of choice. What does it mean for a human being to be free? Is it intellectual freedom? Freedom from want, unless others are also wanting? Freedom from envy? Freedom to choose one’s work, one’s partner, one’s abode?How petty can one despot be and still despoil one man’s freedom?

The Dispossessed won both of the major awards for the year’s best science fiction novel, although the correlation between the Hugos and the Nebulas is so high as to render the two redundant. I did pull the list of Hugo winners and found a number of interesting titles, including the most recent winner, the comic novel Redshirts, which I’ve already picked up based just on the description. With only ten read out of 62 total winners, I imagine this will help keep me busy even as I’m winding down my sojourn through the classics.

Next up: I’ve only got about a thousand pages to go in Victor Hugo’s The Wretched (Les Misérables).

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→ June 14, 2014
→ By

Saturday five, 6/14/14.

It’s been a light week for me at ESPN, by design, but I did write one follow-up draft post about which teams drafted their new #1 prospects, and conducted a Klawchat on Thursday. If you missed my draft recaps, you can find my AL and NL posts from last week.

I’ll be at Lakewood tonight for their game against Hickory, and at the Carolina-California Leagues’ All-star Game here in Wilmington on Tuesday, the 17th.

If you live in the area, I’m going to be a “guest bartender” at a charity event at Ulysses Gastropub in north Wilmington, at the intersection of Marsh Road and Silverside, on June 26th. More details to follow as I get them.

And now the links…

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→ June 11, 2014
→ By

The Checklist Manifesto.

I learned of Atul Gawande’s brief business book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right through a positive mention of it in Daniel Kahneman’s fantastic book on cognitive psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Gawande, a successful surgeon in Boston, wrote two books on improving medical care through optimizing processes (rather than throwing money at new equipment or drugs). His third book is aimed at a more general audience, extolling the virtues of the checklist as a simple, effective way to reduce the frequency of the most avoidable errors in any complex system, even eliminating them entirely, saving money and even lives at a near-zero upfront cost.

When Gawande discusses checklists, he’s using the term in the sense of a back-check, a list that ensures that all essential steps have been taken before the main event – a surgery, a plane’s takeoff, a large investment – occurs. This isn’t a to-do list to get you through the day, the type of checklist I make every morning or the night before to make sure I don’t forget any critical tasks, work or personal, from paying bills to making phone calls to writing a dish post. Gawande instead argues for better planning before that first incision, saying that key steps are often overlooked due to a lack of communication, excessive centralization in a single authority (the surgeon, the pilot, etc.), or focus on more urgent steps that detracts from routine ones.

Gawande illustrates his points about the design and use of checklists primarily through his own experiences in surgery and through his work with the WHO on a project to reduce complication rates from surgery in both developed and developing countries – a mandate that included the requirement that any recommendations involve little or no costs to the hospitals. That all but assured that Gawande’s group would only be able to recommend process changes rather than equipment or hiring requirements, which led to a focus on what steps were often skipped in the operating room, deliberately or inadvertently. Several common points emerged. For example, other medical personnel in the room saw surgeons as authoritarian figures and wouldn’t speak up to enforce key steps like ensuring antibiotics were being delivered prior to incision, or critical information wasn’t passed between team members before the operation began. To solve these issues, Gawande needed to devise a way to increase communication among team members despite superficial differences in rank.

The group took a cue from aviation, with Gawande walking the reader back to the creation of preflight checklists and visiting Boeing to understand the method of developing checklists that work. (There’s been some backlash to Gawande’s recommendations, such as the fact that surgeons can “game” a checklist in various ways, detailed in this NEJM subscriber-only piece.) A checklist must be concise and clear, and must grab the lowest-hanging fruit – the most commonly-missed steps and/or the steps with the greatest potential payoff. The checklist also has a secondary purpose – perhaps even more important than making sure the steps on the list have been followed – which is increasing communication. Gawande fills in the blanks with examples from medicine, aviation, and finance of how simple and perhaps “stupid” errors have helped avoid massive mistakes – or how skipping steps or hewing to old hierarchies of command have led to great tragedies, including the worst aviation disaster in history, the 1977 runway crash of two Boeing 747s at Tenerife North Airport in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people. (This isn’t a great book to read if you’re afraid of flying or of surgery.)

Gawande reports positive results from the implementation of pre-surgery checklists in both developed and developing countries, even in highly challenging conditions in Tanzania, Jordan, and India. Yet he also discusses difficulties with buy-in due to surgeons being unwilling to cede any authority in the operating room or to divert attention from what they see as more critical tasks. Acceptance of checklists appears to have been easier in aircraft cockpits, while in the investment world, Gawande presents a little evidence that checklists have made virtually no inroads despite a few investors finding great success in using them to override their emotional (“fast thinking”) instincts.

Even if you’re in an industry where checklists don’t have this kind of immediate value, it’s easy to see how they might apply to other fields with sufficiently positive ROIs to make their implementation worth considering. A major league team might have a checklist to use before acquiring any player in trade, for example – looking at recent reports and game logs to make sure he’s not injured, talking to a former coach or teammate to ensure there’s no character issues, etc. A well-designed blank scouting report is itself a checklist, a way of organizating information to also force the scout to answer the most important questions on each player. (Of course, having pro scouts write up all 25 players on each minor league team they scout runs counter to that purpose, because they’re devoting observation time to players who are completely irrelevant to the scout’s employers.) The checklist is more than just a set of tasks; it’s a mindset, a way of forcing communication on group tasks while also attempting to avoid high-cost mistakes with a tiny investment of time and attention. If the worst thing you can say about an idea is that people need to be convinced to use it, that’s probably a backhanded way of saying it’s worth implementing.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian/dystopian novel The Dispossessed.

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→ June 10, 2014
→ By

Tranquility.

My draft analyses went up over several days, so here’s a link to the key columns:

* Draft recaps for AL teams
* Draft recaps for NL teams
* Friday’s Klawchat, which came during rounds 3-4
* Day one reactions, covering just rounds 1 and 2

I’ll have one more draft-related post on Thursday and then it’s time to turn the page.

I’m not even sure where I heard about Attila Bartis’ book Tranquility, the only one of Bartis’ books available in English. Born in Transylvania but of Hungarian descent, Bartis has won several major awards for Hungarian literature, including a prize named for the writer Sándor Márai, whose book Embers appeared on the second version of my top 100 novels ranking, although it was pushed off in the most recent update.

Tranquility has nothing in common with the subtle Embers; instead, it beats the reader over the head with obscenity, taking its cue from Portnoy’s Complaint but upping the ante of demented familial relationships while shifting to the setting of post-communist Hungary. The Weers, the family at the center of Bartis’ work, are a new kind of train wreck. Narrated by the son, Andor, who lives with his reclusive mother, Tranquility jumps backward to retrace the Weers’ descent into a sort of controlled depravity while Andor attempts to sever his dysfunctional and possibly incestuous relationship with his mother so he can begin a new relationship with the troubled Eszter. Andor uncovers very uncomfortable truths about his own family history, including his father’s disappearance, followed by his sister’s, and learns that sexual misdeeds are sown deep in his lineage, along with madness, betrayal, and emotional and physical violence.

Reading Tranquility would have been a chore given its callous and graphic depictions of sex, violence, and the intersection between the two, but Bartis infuses the novel with black humor and what I believe was an angry metaphorical depiction of Hungary’s own difficult transition from communism to something like democracy. (I have no idea if this was Bartis’ intent, but the interpretation came to me pretty easily and I doubt it’s a coincidence.) That transition led to economic upheaval that hasn’t ended, along with the paradoxical desire by part of the population to return to the certain misery of authoritarian rule rather than the uncertain freedom of its post-communist government. In this interpretation, Andor’s mother represents the communist past from which the Hungarian population refuses or is unwilling to fully leave behind; Ezster, herself a victim in multiple senses who has several difficulties with conception and pregnancy, is herself a symbol of freedom, volatile and damaged, capable of evoking emotions in Andor with which he is uncomfortable or flat-out unfamiliar. Breaking with his mother involves coming to terms with awful events from the family’s past, known and unknown; forging a real relationship with Eszter, however, requires emotional depth and strength the callous Andor lacks. To make matters worse, Eszter introduces Andor, a writer by trade, to an editor, Eva Jordan, with whom Andor engages in a violent affair. Eva is his mother’s age, and Andor appears to be unable to stop himself from giving in to his hate-filled desires for her – or to revisit the relative certainty of the past. Even if the past was lousy, at least you knew what you were getting. The message seems to be that freedom is scary because it’s unpredictable; the “tranquility” of the title is ironic, clearly, as there’s nothing tranquil about this screwed-up mother-son relationship, but also refers to the safety of a life without upside.

Where Bartis diverges from the tradition of lunatic families and sexual perversion launched by Portnoy’s Complaint and more recently revived by Alessandro Piperno is in its association of sex with violence. Where Roth and Piperno use sex (especially masturbation) for laughs, Bartis’ depictions of sex are rife with violence, whether it’s outright violence as with Eva Jordan or emotionally violent as with Eszter, and Andor’s reactions after sex are shockingly clinical. It’s discomfiting, but I doubt Bartis wanted the reader to ever feel comfortable in a story about life in Hungary after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Next up: I finished Atul Gawande’s brief The Checklist Manifesto last week and have moved on to Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hugo Award-winning novel The Dispossessed.

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→ May 31, 2014
→ By

War Eternal.

Arch Enemy’s upcoming release War Eternal (due out June 10th) is the Swedish melodic death metal band’s first with new lead growler … I mean, singer Alissa White-Gluz, their tenth album over a now 19-year-career. Arch Enemy has always been among the most accessible acts in the melodeth subgenre, producing fast and heavy but, other than their debut album, not brutal tracks with clear melodic elements, technically sound guitar work, and solid vocals that didn’t distract from the underlying material. War Eternal has several tracks with the same musical strengths, but White-Gluz’s vocals and lyrics are a big step back from the band’s previous work, and sometimes it seems as if the vocalist change may have spurred a change in musical direction toward less adventurous material.

War Eternal opens somewhat promisingly, with a brief instrumental (in F minor, as the title tells us) before we get to two of its strongest tracks, the muscular “Never Forgive, Never Forget” and the raging title track. “Never Forgive” is driven by a simple six-note guitar riff repeated throughout the song that breaks apart the high-tempo verses and the staccato-plucked interludes, and the shredding in its two-part solo is probably the album’s strongest for pure technical skill. “War Eternal” opens with a marching pattern at machine-gun speed before downshifting into a pattern that seems drawn from classic ’80s thrash acts like Testament or Exodus, adding sophisticated melodic twists before each chorus to distinguish the song. It’s a shame that it’s brought down by its simple-minded lyrics (“Friend or foe/There’s no way to know” … this is the best they could come up with to open the song?), something that plagues much of the disc.

There’s a lull mid-album, including the cloddish “As the Pages Burn,” where War Eternal loses some steam, but a second instrumental, the glam metal-inspired “Graveyard of Dreams,” serves as a bit of a reset button before the furious strumming that opens “Stolen Life,” the track that should most satisfy fans of Arch Enemy’s previous work. The album needed a song like this: a taut, straightforward three-minutes of speed metal, with riffs to make Dave Mustaine proud (if he could stop patting himself on the back for a few moments). That combination of songs gives the listener a chance to breathe before the last standout on the album, the five-minute opus “Time is Black,” a theatrical and sometimes bombastic song with several tempo shifts and classical elements better integrated here than on “Avalanche,” which has “trying too hard” written all over it. It might have been better to follow “Time is Black” with “Down to Nothing,” which opens with a heavy grindcore pattern that reminded me of vintage Carcass – unsurprising, as Arch Enemy was founded by former Carcass guitarist Michael Amott, who worked on their landmark album, Heartwork, the album that did the most to establish melodic death metal as a viable style.

The main drawback in White-Gluz’s vocals is her style of growling, where she’s reaching so far down to get that gutteral sound that she sounds like she’s retching, and she rarely varies this style so the listener never gets a break. Extreme metal already has a sort of built-in bias against female vocalists because of the genre’s preference for these Cookie Monster vocals, rather than the kind of operatic singing associated with British metal of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the sing-talking of 1980s speed metal, or the death-screeches of Chuck Schuldiner (of Death) or Jeff Walker (of Carcass). White-Gluz’s predecessor, Angela Glossow, found an adequate medium with a higher-pitched growl than male death-metal vocalists employ, but White-Gluz is aiming for a lower register and it doesn’t work for me. She also is far too prone to employ the most cliched move in extreme metal, roaring at maximum volume over the opening riffs. (Note to aspiring death-metal vocalists: Don’t do this.)

War Eternal also suffers from a lack of ambition, outside of “Time is Black” and perhaps “Avalanche,” sticking mostly to straightforward thrash with death-metal vocals and blast beats, when they’re at a point in their career where you’d expect more experimentation. I prefer metal with progressive or technical elements, such as on Insomnium’s Shadows of a Dying Sun, but if you’re interested in Arch Enemy I’d suggest starting with 2003’s Anthems of Rebellion.

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→ May 31, 2014
→ By

Saturday five, 5/31/14.

My content from ESPN.com this week:

* My second attempt to project this year’s first round. I’ll do another one on Tuesday, and a final one the morning of the draft.
* An updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors.
* This week’s Klawchat.

And this week’s links:

Finally, the highlight response from my Twitter arguments with a couple of creationists, most of whom trotted out the same tired and very wrong arguments against evolution, was this doozy (and please don’t go on Twitter and harass the poster):

Carbon dating is just another godless conspiracy, I guess.

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→ May 28, 2014
→ By

Aké: The Years of Childhood.

In case you missed it, my second go at projecting this year’s first round went up for Insiders on Tuesday. My next mock will go up on Tuesday, June 3rd, and I’ll have an updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors this Friday. I’ll also be on Baseball Tonight tomorrow night, May 29th, at 10 pm ET.

—

At the turn of the century, the rush to compile “best of the last 100 years” lists of books tended to leave a lot of postcolonial writers behind, something that the Zimbabwe International Book Fair attempted to address by assembling a list of Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century. I saw the list not long after it was released in February of 2002, and had heard of exactly two books on the list: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I’d already read once and subsequently re-read; and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, the first book of his “Blood in the Sun” trilogy.

Within that broader list, the jury identified a dozen titles as the best of the best, without trying to rank any of the books, probably a thankless task given the effort required just to compile the nominations for the final hundred. The Nigerian-born author Wole Soyinka, the first native African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, made the top 100 twice, with his play Death and the King’s Horsemen appearing on the main list and his first memoir, Aké: The Years of Childhood, earning special mention in the top twelve.

Aké is the name of the town where Soyinka grew up, on the grounds of a parsonage with his mother, whom he calls “Wild Christian,” and his father the teacher, whom he calls “Essay,” as well as a nearby collection of relatives, friends/workers, and spirits. The book takes magical realism and transplants it into the realm of the autobiography – Soyinka never pauses to consider whether these memories of ghosts, spectres, or other otherworldy entities are real; they simply are. Yet the stories he remembers revolve around more mundane matters, not least of which is what on earth a family was to do with a precocious, argumentative child in a country still ruled autocratically by the local puppets of a distant white government.

The memoir, however, is a joyous one, even around the crises and tragedies and the eventual buildup to the book’s concluding chapters, where the women of Ak&ecaute; agitate for more local rights, less corruption, and lower taxation. Soyinka renders even those scenes, which always threatened to devolve into violence, humorously, through the eyes of a mischievous child watching when he shouldn’t be watching or playing rebel by delivering message between various outposts of protesters. His memories of his time in school, where the lawyering he used to stymie his parents runs up against the wall of a headmaster who’s already seen that act before, and of the town’s market, with extensive descriptions of fresh fruits and African foods of which I’d never heard, show off Soyinka’s ability to evoke colorful scenes with precise descriptions and light prose that puts the reader right on the dirt road in the middle of all the market’s vendors.

Soyinka devotes another section to his childhood addiction … to powdered baby formula, which he sneaks from the family’s pantry now that their youngest child no longer needs it, only to end up playing cat-and-mouse with his parents to avoid detection. He also offers several anecdotes on the local blend of Christianity and native traditions, such as the fellow student who tries to counter “bad juju” by repeating “S.M.O.G.” – which stands for “Save Me Oh God” but he claims is faster to say in acronym form while running from your enemies.

The one weakness of Aké is its lack of structure; it’s a collection of stories and recollections, but there’s no single narrative because the book ends while Soyinka is still a child, so we haven’t driven towards a specific goal or endpoint. That doesn’t make the book less enjoyable or less vivid, although it means it more resembles a set of interconnected short stories than a non-fiction novel. It compares favorably to my favorite memoir, Gabriel García Marquez’ Living to Tell the Tale, although GGM’s prose flowed more easily, as Soyinka’s syntax and even punctuation often threw me off (e.g., he omits a lot of commas we’d consider essential in American English). For me, Aké ranks somewhere in the middle of the seven titles I’ve read from the top twelve on that African literature list, below Things Fall Apart, A Grain of Wheat, and Nervous Conditions but above Sleepwalking Land, Chaka, and L’amour, la fantasia.

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→ May 27, 2014
→ By

Bleak House.

My second “mock” draft for 2014 is up for Insiders today.

I’ve had mixed views on Charles Dickens over the years, loathing his work when forced to read Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities in high school, only to enjoy The Pickwick Papers tremendously when I read it at age 34, picking up more of the wordplay and sarcasm but also benefiting from a more free-wheeling storyline. I even read abridged (Moby books) versions of at least two other Dickens novels when I was about my daughter’s age, and still remember hating Fagin – probably a reason I’ve never read the unabridged Oliver Twist to this day. My goal of completing the full list of titles on the Bloomsbury 100 forced me to decide on Dickens’ longest and most highly-regarded work, the 350,000-word Bleak House, a legal drama, soap opera, romance, and mystery all wrapped up in an overarching work of stinging social criticism.

The central plot device in Bleak House is a never-ending lawsuit in England’s Chancery Court, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, a case that originated as a dispute over a will that has since devolved into a nightmarish sequence of legal maneuvers designed only to rack up billable hours, with no evident progress toward a conclusion. The suit has already driven one claimant, the dotty Miss Flite, to madness, and its promise of lucre if it ever reaches a conclusion will lead other characters down that path over the course of the book. Dickens uses the lawsuit as a method of introducing a panoply of main and secondary characters, and splits the narration between his omniscient voice and the orphan Esther Summerson, who becomes a ward of John Jarndyce and companion to another of his wards, Ada Clare. Ada’s romance with her cousin Richard Carstone, and his subsequent search for an actual career, form the basis for one major plot thread, while the unknown history of Lady Dedlock, another claimant to part of the Jarndyce fortune, forms another. The latter story eventually leads to murder, a mystery that gives the novel some much-needed narrative greed just as Dickens seemed to be passing his pitch count and losing his fastball.

Dickens published the novel in monthly installments, something he did for many of his novels, which is the common explanation for his verbose prose, mostly comprising overly detailed descriptions of anything worth describing in the text. But the style also likely encouraged Dickens to craft chapters as individual episodes, moving the stories along and creating cliffhangers and twists to conclude them, so that even the modern reader won’t get too bogged down in lengthy descriptions of a stand of trees or the furniture in a sitting room. I also got the impression while reading Bleak House that the serial nature of the initial publication may have helped blunt the impact of the numerous deaths, mostly tragic (and one, Mr. Krook’s, rather comic), that occur over the course of the novel, ranging from deaths due to poverty and disease to those due to drug abuse, mania, or a broken heart.

The social criticism within Bleak House remains the book’s main selling point in modern reviews and rankings, with Daniel Burt naming it the 12th-best novel of all time in The Novel 100, tops among the Dickens novels on his list. The theme of a chasm between the haves and have-nots still resonates today, especially in the United States where the safety net is tattered and worn, but it’s somewhat obscured by the soap opera that dominates the novel’s plot. To make the story appeal to a large audience, Dickens included no end of romantic entanglements, loony side characters (some enjoyable, some just too ridiculous), and deaths and illnesses, all of which serve both to stretch the book out and to provide entertainment value. The absurd Mr. Smallweed (whose physical state seems a dead ringer for J.K. Rowling’s depictions of Lord Voldemort at the beginning of Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire), the rakish Mr. Skimpole, and the doomed Mr. Krook all have their moments of humor, often dark, but Dickens overplayed many of his other jokes, such as Mrs. Jellyby, a woman obsessed with Africa to the point of ignoring her own children – a metaphor for England and for missionaries more worried about converting African natives than feeding the local poor. (I’ve already slipped one reference to Mr. Krook into an ESPN column, and there will be more when Oregon pitcher Matt Krook is draft-eligible again in 2016.) That’s the main reason why the third quarter or so of the book began to drag, along with Dickens’ too-prolix prose, before he inserts a murder and the ensuing mystery to ratchet the tension back up in a race to the finish. Without that, finishing Bleak House would have been quite a chore.

I haven’t seen the award-winning 2005 mini-series (free for Amazon Prime members) which adapted the book into an 8½-hour serial and included in its large cast a young Carrie Mulligan (as Ada Clare), Gillian Anderson (as Lady Dedlock), and Patrick Kennedy (as Richard Carstone), but would welcome any feedback on whether it’s worth tackling.

Next up: I’m behind on reviews, having already finished Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka’s memoir Aké: The Years of Childhood, and just started Attila Bartis’ Tranquility.

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→ May 24, 2014
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Saturday five, 5/24/14.

My ESPN content from the past seven days:

* My 2004 redraft, going back to that year and redoing the draft with the benefit of hindsight.
* And a companion piece looking at the 2004 first-rounders who didn’t work out.
* How the Rangers should respond to Fielder’s injury.
* My SEC tournament wrapup.
* Friday’s Klawchat.

My next mock draft goes up Tuesday, and I’ll have a pro prospect ranking update later in the week as well, because I don’t have enough going on right now.

I left Alabama a little earlier than expected, since the 3 pm game on Friday didn’t include anyone I needed to see, but I did stop by Octane in Homewood for an espresso and a bag of beans (Rwandan, since I enjoyed the Four Barrel beans from that country). The space is bigger and brighter than the Octane I visited in Atlanta, too.

And now, this week’s links, with two extra today since I went a little heavy on the vaccine topic.

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→ May 20, 2014
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Insomnium’s Shadows of a Dying Sun.

I have two new posts up for ESPN.com Insiders today – my 2004 redraft and my review of 2004 first-rounders who didn’t pan out.

Finnish melodic death metal band Insomnium have one of the broadest wingspans of any artist in that subgenre, incorporating theatrical and symphonic elements without eschewing the heaviness and rapid riffing that keep one foot firmly planted in the death-metal sphere. Their latest release, Shadows of the Dying Sun, continues that tradition and then some, veering from over-the-top extreme/speed metal to operatic tracks that you might even call death-metal ballads.

Melodic death metal generally includes two major elements: technically proficient, hook-laden guitar lines, and screamed or growled vocals. Insomnium adds many other twists to their particular flavor, with strings, pianos, acoustic guitar lines, and vocal harmonies (sung in normal voices) in choruses. It hasn’t been a straight line from the genre’s originators like Celtic Frost and Carcass, but the result is a more accessible brand of “melodeth” that should appeal to fans of everything from contemporary extreme metal to the earliest waves of speed and thrash.

Shadows of the Dying Sun starts innocuously enough with “The Primeval Dark,” a slow-building doom track that clocks in at barely over three minutes, a sign that Insomnium aren’t trying to pummel the listener with unnavigable ten-minute songs, and the song is just the teaser for the tremendous “While We Sleep,” into which it leads without a break. The lead guitar line is joined by a second axe for some parallel riffing before we get an actual sung verse, musical motifs that continue even as the song shifts tempo and direction multiple times. It’s among the most overtly listener-friendly death metal tracks I’ve ever heard: melodic, theatrical, even bombastic, and far more coherent than I’d expect from a six-minute snog of this complexity.

The abrupt tempo shifts of “While We Sleep” are a recurring musical theme for Insomnium, driving other tracks as well. “Revelation” opens with a straightforward European speed metal riff, then drops the pace by more than half for the funereal verses, picking back up in the bridge to the initial tempo, then finding the middle ground for what passes for a chorus here. “Ephemeral” is similarly catchy, an abject lesson to pop acts that try to appropriate punk or metal for commercial airplay, thanks to memorable guitar lines and a growl-along chorus that play well with the heavy rhythm lines and the rapid percussion that marks this clearly as death metal, while also playing around with timing and rhythm. Meanwhile, “Collapsing Words” dispenses with those velocity changes – the song drives in with a rapid-fire pedal-point sixteen-beat riff that evokes 1980s European speed metal and even its predecessors like Iron Maiden and Diamond Head, although it’s probably the one track that would have most benefited from a traditionally-sung vocal.

The album’s centerpiece track is the eight-minute opus “The River,” comprising several movements, including the juxtaposition of slow-changing guitar lines over blast beats, as well as an acoustic intro where lead singer Niilo Sevänen actually sings – although the lines sound more effete than he likely intended because of his accented English. The track builds from the slow intro into multiple swells of machine-gun drumming and fast-picked guitar leads, but the bridges between the choruses are major-chord interludes with clear and compelling melodies. That song and “Lose to Night,” which I’d call a ballad if I didn’t think that would be offensive to Insomnium fans, show both growth in Insommium’s songcraft and breadth in their musical interests – you don’t write this kind of song if you only listen to metal and hard rock.

There are misses here; “Black Heart Rebellion” is just a giant blast-beat, a sop to the portion of the crowd that just wants it faster and louder and more annoying, while “The Promethean Song” would have worked better at about half its 6:40 running time. Even the title track suffers from the same issue of bloat – and as the tenth song on the album, it ran into my own fatigue by the time I’d reach it on straight listens through the disc because of its length and languorous pace. That’s also a function of the overall ambition of Shadows of a Dying Sun, which, at 70 minutes, is almost double the length of some recent indie releases, and has appropriately high musical aspirations without forgoing Insomnium’s sense of melody and even commercial appeal. It’s the best new melodeth album since Carcass’ Surgical Steel, although with Arch Enemy and At the Gates coming out with new albums soon, it’ll be an epic summer for fans of the genre.

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