Vacation Double Feature

Vacation accomplished!

At Sandy Island Camp, I spent most of the time relaxing and reading and catching up with my parents (neither of my siblings made it this time). I didn't get out on the lake at all. It was beautiful, though, and I enjoyed reading on the beach.

Late in the week, I came down with the worst cold, like an Everlasting Gobstopper of disease, a different flavor every day! (Including some of the worst congestion I've ever had, plus bizarre symptoms like persistent hiccups.) And then Julie also caught it just in time for international travel. Got through it somehow, with a lot of cough drops and mint tea.

(My mom thinks I'm sick all the time now... it's just that when I'm under the weather I tend to take the time to write something in my blog.)

Despite being under the weather, the London trip was certainly fun. Julie's folks put us up in a really nice hotel, and it was good to spend time with family and friends. I enjoyed seeing the niece again, she's going through a shy phase but seems as cheerful as ever. (Hopefully we avoided this cold jumping to her or anyone else.) All the adults in the family seem to be spectacularly busy with work, though in a good way. We got in some London tourism that I had little time for on my first conference trip (Tower of London tour, viewed the city from the London Eye, climbed the Monument to the Great Fire, went on a pub crawl, window shopping at Harrods). We even got the chance to catch up with Xave and Sarah on their London sabbatical (in the moments before they headed off for a holiday in France).

Vacation Reading

Wanted to write a bit about what I read at Sandy and during all that plane travel:

Seveneves: My Neil Stephenson tome for the summer. It took me until halfway through the book before I realized how the title is supposed to be pronounced. It's not Stephenson's best, but I thought it was a good book, especially if you like your science fiction with a lot of orbital dynamics.

Theories of Translation: A set of essays on translating literature. I read the companion volume, The Craft of Translation, some summers ago. The themes are pretty interesting, but a lot of the essays cover the same themes (e.g. the great debate between literal translation that makes manifest the foreignness of the original text and artfully paraphrased translation that's the sort of thing the author would have written, had they written in the target language in the first place). A few of the essays are extremely entertaining, though, in particular José Ortega y Gasset's "The Misery and the Splendor of Translation" and Nabakov's "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English" (Nabokov has some very interesting and well-argued ideas about how he intends to write his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and his commentary on earlier translations is quite funny, though presumably not for the earlier translators).

Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Only made it through the first half, but was interesting enough that I plan to read the rest. Piketty does a little bit too much discussing literary or pop-culture examples of the trends he's analyzing for my taste, but overall it's mostly well-grounded and interesting historical discussion of the macro political and economic trends that are likely to define significant differences between the 20th century and the 21st, as the "demographic shift" (the effect of slowing population growth) continues to take its course. If you already have a strong opinion about whether it's the sort of book you'd find interesting, you're probably right. (Bill Gates's review of the book is also worth a read.)

Halting State: The first book in "a trilogy of near-future Scottish police procedurals about crimes that don't exist yet, written in multi-viewpoint second person". Really enjoyable pulp sci-fi. Unfortunately this trilogy stopped at two books because all the speculative elements have turned surprisingly realistic since the series was started in 2006.

Apex: More pulpy sci-fi. If you liked the first two books in the series, definitely worth a read. If you have no idea what I'm talking about and you'd like a sci-fi thriller by an author who's big into transhumanism, start with the first book.