Friday, December 30, 2016

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker

When my father bragged about finishing an 800 page book in a week, I was surprised and intrigued. He doesn't read much so I had no idea what kind of book would grab his attention so completely. Typically, I'm not very good at taking other reader's recommendations and I had serious doubts about taking my father's advice. But there was something titillating about The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair that seemed to tell me that this was no ordinary "affair". I decided to give it a go. (Full disclosure, I read it in Finnish.)

Harry Quebert is a famous novelist and Marcus Goldman, his protege. When the body of a young girl, missing since the 70's, is found on Quebert's property, America is shocked to find out that Quebert's most successful work was based on his relationship with a 15-year old girl. And now the girl's body has been found rotting under the roses of Quebert's  garden. Goldman on the other hand is riding the last ripples of the success of his first novel and dealing with a crippling writers block. When he gets the news of Quebert's arrest, he drops everything and heads to Aurora, a coastal town in New Hampshire, where Quebert has been living for over thirty years.

The premise is simple enough, but the plot is dense and easily keeps the reader's interest through the whole book. The Harry Potters and Millennium sagas of this world may approach similar lengths but often involve multiple storylines that run in circles only to keep the plot going. Dicker is able to build a story that evolves naturally and (mostly) doesn't resort to cheap tricks. The novel feels well rounded and intimate despite its vast scope.

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a rare work because it is both accessible and profound. On the surface it is a crime thriller, but it never really plays out that way. The story is driven equally by Goldman's personal growth and the labyrinthine social connections of small town America. It succeeds on the strength of its characters - not only Marcus and Harry but the whole ensemble - and the classic story that draws equally from Nabokov's Lolita and Twin Peaks. Unlike other popular murder mysteries of the past years - Gone Girl and Girl on the Train, for example - Harry Quebert is completely un-cynical.

Its biggest success is that it truly grabs the reader from the first pages and doesn't let go. Dicker's storytelling acumen is notable as is his ability to write with humor and wit. Without his ability to bring levity to some mundane plot twists, the novel would read more like a run-of-the-mill detective story than the character study that it aspires to be. Readers will find favorite characters in the large cast, mine was the no-nonsense cop Gahallowood, whose verbal sparring with Goldman make for a great buddy comedy in itself.

Overall, I highly recommend this one. It may or may not endure as a classic of the genre, but for anyone who wants to spend quality time with a book, there is little wrong that can be done by picking up The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. As always, I had some minor objections, but listing them here would be a waste of everyone's time. Harry Quebert is so good that even my father read it. In a way, there is no higher praise.

Jumalainen näytelmä by Jarkko Ruutu

Here's something completely different. The autobiography of a notorious Finnish ice hockey player, who recently quit the money leagues. Jarkko Ruutu played in the NHL for the Vancouver Canucks and the Pittsburgh Penguins, among others, and had a spotty career, where he was constantly being sent down to the AHL and then being called back up to the NHL. He played a mean game and was constantly in the news for his fighting, heckling and provocations toward other players. He would do everything he could so that his team could get the other hand in a game.

What makes this book interesting is the way that it portrays a completely different kind of professional sports career. Ruutu isn't loved by everyone. Actually he was once voted the most hated player in the league. His antics put him on the front pages of newspapers, but rarely in a good light. He cherishes his profession but also cries in frustration after games because as his career doesn't always go as planned. Before each season he would make a bet with a friend on the number of penalties that he would get during the season. Ruutu always underestimated his capacity for giving in to his animal instincts. And so every year he would lose that bet. His guesses were never even close.

I was surprised by how poorly his teams were managed (if you take Ruutu's comments at face value). Managers and coaches, both in the NHL and in Finland, treat players as property or assets and give very little attention to actually leading them. The business world has already understood that treating your employees as humans greatly increases output. So why is this so difficult to believe in a sports setting? I imagine that the effect would be even bigger in professional sports, where star athletes put themselves under immense pressure to perform. A prominent Finnish coach gets an especially bad rap. I could only wonder how on earth he could be one of the top dogs with such poor personal skills. His method mostly involved insulting, yelling and playing players against each other.

So grab this for the entertainment value and occasional insight, but don't hesitate to skip passages or chapters entirely. Comments from Ruutu's team mates and coaches add little, and Ruutu's own diary entries mostly show the repetitive and banal side of the sport. Surprisingly, a good companion to this book is YouTube. Television cameras were present for a lot of what is described, and reading about ice hockey only takes you half the way.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

Mathematics, at it's core, is the act of coming up with a set of rules and using those rules to make deductions that expand their reach. It can be applied to any other aspect of life because, unlike other sciences, mathematics is universal and incontrovertible. Once something has been set in stone in the mathematical world, there is little that can be done to undo it elsewhere. Conversely, a breakthrough in mathematics has often led to surprising developments elsewhere.

Jordan Ellenberg's How Not to Be Wrong is a wonderful look into how mathematics allows us to have a clear understanding of a variety of topics from genetics to lotteries to politics. Above all, it is a universal work, one that demands nothing more than a middle schooler's understanding of mathematics to feel enlightening and insightful.

Ellenberg's style is especially delightful. Experts in many fields take themselves too seriously and treat the reader like an ignorant child. Academic writing is full of obfuscation as researchers try to make their work seem more important and complicated than it really is. Ellenberg manages to reach out to all kinds of readers with prose that is succinct and clear headed. The illustrations are a highlight; one that I won't spoil for any would-be readers.

I have some background in mathematics (a Master of Science with a minor in applied math), so I wasn't really expecting How Not to Be Wrong to challenge me as much as it did. I had heard of Russell's paradox before but Ellenberg introduces the problem through its mathematical history and not as a singular event in time. As with many other science stories (Age of Wonder for one), the context of a discovery is often as important as the discovery itself.

Russell's paradox broadly states that any formal set of rules is bound to give rise to a contradiction. But the story only becomes memorable once you see it from the point of view George Cantor, a fellow mathematician, who had just finished his magnum opus on set theory, only to see his life's work wasted, as Bertrand Russell pointed out his shortcomings. The pressing of the book had to be stopped and an additional line added to it's first page that stated the inherent contradiction built into Cantor's theory. Mathematics would never be the same again.