The narrator of Janna Levin’s novel can’t stop thinking about Turing and Gödel — “my two mad treasures” — and what their lives have to say about genius, human fragility and abstract truth. This narrator, it should be noted, is a somewhat spectral presence in the book. Although there are few textual clues, we are meant to guess (so says the dust jacket) that it is a woman and a scientist who is addressing us — rather like the author, who teaches physics and astronomy at Columbia University. At a few points in the book, the narrator briefly pops up to tell us that she’s crossing a New York City street, that she’s headed for a subway entrance and that the story she’s relating is a lie. Yet that “story” consists of alternating scenes from the lives of Turing and Gödel — scenes that, though imaginatively filled out, are based on fact and drawn from published biographies. Which raises the question: is this really a novel?

Well, if you accept Randall Jarrell’s famous definition of a novel — “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it” — Levin’s book certainly qualifies. In fact, it fits squarely in the subgenre of the novel of ideas. The big idea associated with Gödel is “incompleteness”: no logical system, he proved, can possibly encompass all the truths of mathematics. The big idea associated with Turing is “undecidability”: no purely mechanical method, he showed, can reliably decide what is and what is not a logical truth. Both incompleteness and undecidability are technical notions. Yet they sound existentially fraught, and so (up to a point) they are. Brood on them a bit and you may be led to think about free will, the limits of understanding, the nature of truth, the existence of God. As it happens, both Gödel and Turing exploited the ancient paradox of the liar. This paradox can be succinctly captured in the statement “I am lying,” which is true if it’s false and false if it’s true. So when Levin’s narrator says that she is lying, one should not be too hasty to dismiss this as a cheap metafictional trick.

NYT seems unimpressed, as does Publishers Weekly, but the book earned praise from Brian Greene, Lee Smolin, and Alan Lightman.

'A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,' by Janna Levin

In one episode of "The Simpsons," Marge asks, "Did you know there are over 600 critics on TV and Leonard Maltin is the best looking of them all?" (Lisa sensibly replies: "Ewwww!")

Inside the List

Until the beginning of the 20th century, Arabs didn’t write novels, in large measure because Arab society didn’t recognize the individual.

Man in the Middle

That humans have been afraid of snakes for a long time is not a fresh observation; that this fear may be entwined with our development as a species is. New anthropological evidence suggests that snakes, as predators, may have figured prominently in the evolution of primate vision — the ability, shared by humans, apes and monkeys, to see the world in crisp, three-dimensional living color.

Talk about an obscure strike at fifteen minutes of fame!

Snakes on the Brain

Undergirding Mr. Tolkin’s trenchant take on the small world known as the West Side of Los Angeles — undermining that world, really — is his devastatingly pessimistic vision of the future of the movie business, not to mention of planet Earth.

If you haven't read "The Player" or seen the movie, check them out.

Michael Tolkin Publishes a Sequel to “The Player”

Sloppy or not, Dylan is astonishingly prolific; he has written more than five hundred songs. Most of them are lovely (or angry or joyous or wickedly sly or all of those things together). Many of them are unforgettable. (A new album, Dylan’s forty-fourth, called “Modern Times,” is being released this month. The songs are simple riffs, with laid-back arrangements, and all feature prominently Dylan’s gorgeous late-period croak. It sounds a little the way “Buena Vista Social Club” might have sounded if Cuba had been the birthplace of the blues.) The only comparable pop songbook from the era is Lennon-McCartney—and there were two of them. Dylan is also, despite the silly things people said about his voice when he started out, one of pop music’s greatest vocalists. His chief weakness is a tendency to shout, particularly in performance (and he is, let us say, an inconsistent performer); but, when he is in control of the instrument, no one’s voice, with that kind of music, is more textured or more beautiful.

BOB ON BOB, by Louis Menand | The New Yorker

The Coen brothers' latest work in progress.

Set in the late 1970’s in West Texas, the story is an ultraviolent neo-western about an antelope hunter, Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin), who stumbles across $2 million in a drug deal gone awry. Moss takes off with the money, prompting a chase up and down the Mexican border, as a psychopathic hit man (Javier Bardem) follows him, leaving a slew of bodies in his wake. On their trails is the aging local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones).

Hollywood Stampedes a Texas Town, and Tranquillity Rides Into the Sunset

This is the funniest movie I've seen in a long time.

"Little Miss Sunshine" doesn’t look particularly ambitious, in terms of either its narrative or its function-over-form visual style. But tucked in between all the hurt and the jokes, the character development and the across-the-board terrific performances is a surprisingly sharp look at contemporary America, one that sets the metaphor of the stage (and, by extension, competition) against the cherished myth of the open road.

You should definitely check this out.

Little Miss Sunshine

This movie seems worth seeing.

“Factotum” presents the age-old struggle of man against mediocrity. Henry Chinaski (Mr. Dillon), Bukowski’s familiar alter ego, is the heroic survivor of countless benders, brawls, rejection slips, crazy women and soul-killing, mind-deadening jobs. Or, as he puts it so nicely in the novel: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed” — there is, naturally, a scatological dimension to this list — “brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

Factotum

Tolkien's first job, on returning home from World War I, was as an assistant on the staff of the OED. He later said that he had "learned more in those two years than in any other equal part of his life." The Ring of Words reveals how his professional work on the Oxford English Dictionary influenced Tolkien's creative use of language in his fictional world.

Here three senior editors of the OED offer an intriguing exploration of Tolkien's career as a lexicographer and illuminate his creativity as a word user and word creator. The centerpiece of the book is a wonderful collection of "word studies" which will delight the heart of Ring fans and word lovers everywhere. The editors look at the origin of such Tolkienesque words as "hobbit," "mithril, "Smeagol," "Ent," "halfling," and "worm" (meaning "dragon"). Readers discover that a word such as "mathom" (anything a hobbit had no immediate use for, but was unwilling to throw away) was actually common in Old English, but that "Mithril," on the other hand, is a complete invention (and the first "Elven" word to have an entry in the OED). And fans of Harry Potter will be surprised to find that "Dumbledore" (the name of Hogwart's headmaster) was a word used by Tolkien and many others (it is a dialect word meaning "bumblebee").

Few novelists have found so much of their creative inspiration in the shapes and histories of words. Presenting archival material not found anywhere else, The Ring of Words offers a fresh and unexplored angle on the literary achievements of one of the world's most famous and best-loved writers.

The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary