Back to work and back to nursery today. Getting up at just past 7, rather than the more leisurely almost-nine we’ve been doing recently, did no good to Ingrid’s mood. And trying to get her dressed when picking her up from nursery led to the same kind of screaming kicking aggression as before Christmas. Took me 15 minutes to get her dressed, and it ended with me holding her down and forcing her into her snowsuit and boots, while she was kicking, howling, squirming, and trying to tear them off again. Had it not been –15°C outside, I would have let her go without any clothes, but with these temperatures I didn’t dare take the chance. Perhaps I should have.

Since I haven’t seen anything of the kind during the holidays, I had thought it had passed, but apparently not.

Clearly there is something in our daily routine that sparks these tantrums, that we didn’t encounter during the holidays. And equally clearly I need to take some sort of measure to try and avoid this in the future. My first guess is tiredness combined with low blood sugar, so I will be arming myself with a banana tomorrow afternoon.

20°C below freezing (–4 F). The coldest day yet since we got back to Sweden.

Last winter it never got below –14° or so, but that was enough to demonstrate the weak insulation in this house. For this winter we’ve put in place a new electric heater in the bathroom, and bought a large extra heater that we can put up when it’s particularly cold. In practice it’s been up and running whenever the temperature outside gets close to –10°.

Now at –20° all the heaters are turned on, and yet we cannot get the indoors temperature to above +16° (and +14° in the bathroom), which is just a little bit too chilly for comfort but actually not too bad, except when undressing. As long as it doesn’t get much colder outside, and as long as we don’t have a blackout.

We ventured outside yesterday when it was only –16° outside. Luckily there was almost no wind, so with proper clothing it didn’t feel too cold, except for the nose and cheeks.

I remember the poor Brits describing the weather as “bloody freezing” when it was +7° or so in London. Wish I could transport them here for a day and show them what real freezing feels like!

The Automatic Detective is a strange but funny blend of hard-boiled detective story and retro sci fi.

Mack Megaton is a robot. Originally built for destruction , he has gained free will, given up his violent ways, and now earns a living as a taxi driver. In a city bustling with mutants and sentient robots (many of whom are even full citizens), he actually sort of almost blends in, even though he is huge, red, and almost indestructible.

One day his human neighbours are kidnapped. Mack gets mad. (He has issues with anger management.) He gets no real help from the police, so he decides to track them down and rescue them himself.

The rest of the book is full of what would be standard for a detective novel but comes across as funny in this setting. Confrontations with mob bosses, intimidating their underlings, exchanging macho but witty comments with sassy blonde girl, gunfights and sneaking around.

The Automatic Detective feels sort of like a what-if game by the author – “let’s see if I can make this work”. Since it is founded on a cliché, it feels worn at times, but the mixture as a whole is nevertheless distinctive enough to stand above cliché. Not an unforgettable work of great literature, but good light-hearted fun all the way through.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

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Well. Wow. Where to begin.

Anathem is a book of ideas. It is intellectual, complex, and amazingly ambitious. It is not like anything else I have read. It is a science/philosophy thriller, which sounds really dry and serious, but is much more engrossing than that. Anathem is both funny and fun, if philosophy and quantum theory is your idea of fun. But reading it requires attention and almost feels like work. It is the kind of book that makes me feel dull, and 100 pages in I was already thinking that I should probably really start over, taking notes, and perhaps read up on some philosophy before I do that.

Brief plot summary: On the planet Arbre, scientists live segregated from ordinary people, in convent-like places. The flow of information in both directions is strictly controlled, as is the scholars’ use of technology. This separation was put in place a few thousand years ago after some vaguely described Terrible Events, in order to limit the power of scientists’ ideas, and the risk of dangerous technologies being developed and used.

The convent doors are opened only once per year (or once per 10, 100 or 1000 years, for different parts of the convent). So the scholars inside their walled communities think and theorize, and watch cities come and go outside their walls over thousands of years, and civilization rising and falling and rising again.

Around one of these door-opening times, something happens in the skies of Arbre that changes everything. Some scholars get busy speculating on what exactly happened, and figuring out how it will affect their world – using precious few observations, and their impressive deductive abilities. Events grow, some scientists are even called forth from their convents in order to work together, and finally grand things happen.

This is all told through many philosophical debates and entire chapters filled with theoretical discussions that are crucial to the plot – you can’t skip any of it and still be able to follow the action. It is a Socratic novel. Stephenson manages to cover several major strands of the history Western thought from the ancient Greeks onwards (the history of philosophy on Arbre is similar enough to Earth’s to be clearly recognizable, but obfuscated just enough to make it an effort to match up the two) as well as some interesting parts of quantum theory (and I do mean theory, there are no “quantum wormhole warp drives” in this book).

To quote another reviewer: Anathem is “a unique, impressive but fairly mad novel: one part hubris to one part taking the piss to one part gnarly geek awesomeness” (Strange Horizon Reviews). An Amazon reviewer said it felt like a novelization of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and I can sympathize with that, too.

It was a wonderful if somewhat daunting book. If you haven’t read any other books by Stephenson, don’t start with this one – it might be too big a shock. Which doesn’t in any way mean that it isn’t good – you just need a warm-up first. Stephenson’s scope and ambition have definitely grown over the years but luckily the page count has come down since the Baroque Cycle. (This book is a mere 900 pages, plus appendices with more science if you feel you didn’t get enough.)

Amazon UK, Amazon US.