Back home for Christmas
December 14, 2001 (8:32 PM) ( link )

I'm back home for Christmas now, after taking a very early-morning flight from Boston to LAX. It was cold and rainy in San Marino when I finally got to my house, a real disappointment after the perpetual spring that I had been anticipating since Boston's first snowfall. And right now, in my back patio room, it's actually pretty cold. But I expect things to get better soon. I had an excellent lunch, and so far I've just been loafing around, so it's not as though Christmas vacation is being wasted.

In my spare time I have been pushing through Starship Troopers. Reading this directly after A Prayer for Owen Meany is interesting; both of them use their characters to broadcast the author's beliefs, but in Starship Troopers at least those beliefs have something important to do with the plot—in a way that the foreign policy diatribes in A Prayer for Owen Meany really didn't seem to have much to do with anything else (the religious messages might arguably be somewhat relevant). But Starship Troopers still isn't such a great book: it's more of a "society study" than anything else, with Heinlein setting up and then (self-)justifying a particular way of organizing civil society. Aside from that study, there isn't too much going on: Johnnie's character isn't exactly well-defined, and whatever definitions come through are lost in the middle of lengthy speeches about civic responsibility, the chain of command, and theories of punishment.

I expect to read a lot of fun stuff over winter break; hopefully I'll be regularly updating this site with reviews.