tadhg.com » books

Favorite Books of 2008

Tadhg — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:42:29 +0000

I read 75 books in 2008, just managing to hit my target. (This year, I won’t make my target of 80, or even get close.) Some excellent books were among those 75.

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance was absolutely amazing. I would recommend it to everyone, but it was also utterly devastating. The simultaneous senses of realism and despair that it produces make it a masterwork, but one that I found difficult to handle emotionally. You should definitely read it, but don’t expect a light-hearted romp.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, was quite good. Not a particularly deep analysis of American Imperialism, but a fascinating on-the-ground account of the occupiers’ side of Baghdad.

I still don’t think that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is science fiction, but Michael Chabon’s multiple-award-winner is very good.

Are You Dave Gorman?, Join Me, and Yes Man were good comedy “non-fiction” works. I’m not sure I’d recommend reading all of them, but it would be worth it to try one. I found Join Me most interesting, but Yes Man might be funnier.

I really enjoyed Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings. A dark and gritty take on fantasy, but with a light narrative tone.

Another slightly different take on fantasy that I liked was The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. I previously called it “a cross between The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Heat, and Ocean’s Eleven”, and that still seems accurate. The sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, wasn’t as good, but I’m still going to read the next one when it comes out.

M. John Harrison’s Viriconium was good; as I wrote at the time, it’s not entirely clear what genre it belongs to, but I would recommend it mainly to fantasy fans, and/or fans of “literary” science fiction (whatever that means…).

Yet another non-standard fantasy series I read in 2008 was the Engineer trilogy by K. J. Parker: Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, and The Escapement. It’s a very “rational” form of fantasy, in that it deals with technology and problem-solving as some of its major themes. I also discussed it my Fantasy Novel Roundup from last year.

The Body Has a Mind of its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better, by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, was a fascinating pop science examination of how the body and the brain are integrated, how we learn how to use tools, our perceptions of our own bodies, and how body and brain differences affect consciousness.

I enjoyed Heather Byer’s Sweet: An Eight-Ball Odyssey the most of the various books on pool I read in 2008. It wasn’t as detailed as some of the others, and dealt with play on a much lower level, but I liked the writing style, and perhaps could relate better to the play level than was the case with the others.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace, was an excellent and disturbing read. Which is more or less what you’d expect from a collection of David Foster Wallace stories. One of those stories, “The Depressed Person”, inspired me to write this.

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger was really good, a deserving Booker winner, and I recommend it. I discuss it here.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America Erik Lauer’s non-fiction work about the Chicago World’s Fair and one of America’s first serial killers, was very good. 27 million people went to that fair, which I still think is an astonishing number, and its influence was considerable.

Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn was polished and compelling, and I recommend it.

The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, by Gordon Grice, is non-fiction about several classes of predator, and does an excellent job covering its material.

Jennifer Egan’s The Keep was an enjoyable, and unsettling, read. It’s “straight” fiction (i.e. not ghettoized in one of the science fiction, fantasy, crime, or romance genres), and I’d recommend it to most people. Some of the writing in it was really good, and I was taken off-guard by a number of the twists.

My full 2008 reading list (there’s also a fancier Freebase app version of this list):

Reaper’s Gale; Steven Erikson 06/01/2008
The Conscience of a Liberal; Paul Krugman 17/02/2008
Never Let Me Go; Kazuo Ishiguro 24/02/2008
A Fine Balance; Rohinton Mistry 16/03/2008
The Three Musketeers; Alexandre Dumas 21/03/2008
River of Gods; Ian McDonald 28/03/2008
Matter; Iain M. Banks 29/03/2008
The Hustler & The Champ: Willie Mosconi, Minnesota Fats, and the Rivalry That Defined Pool; R. A. Dyer 15/04/2008
Running the Table: The Legend of Kid Delicious, the Last Great American Pool Hustler; L. Jon Wertheim 22/04/2008
Into the Wild; Jon Krakauer 12/05/2008
Shaman’s Crossing; Robin Hobb 14/05/2008
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America; Chris Hedges 17/05/2008
Imperial Life in the Emerald City; Rajiv Chandrasekaran 19/05/2008
The Possibility of an Island; Michel Houellebecq 26/05/2008
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; Michael Chabon 30/05/2008
The Night Gardener; George Pelecanos 31/05/2008
After Dark; Haruki Murakami 02/06/2008
Are You Dave Gorman?; Dave Gorman, Danny Wallace 04/06/2008
Join Me; Danny Wallace 05/06/2008
Yes Man; Danny Wallace 07/06/2008
Kiln People; David Brin 17/06/2008
The Janissary Tree; Jason Goodwin 24/06/2008
The Blade Itself; Joe Abercrombie 25/06/2008
Forest Mage; Robin Hobb 27/06/2008
A Question of Blood; Ian Rankin 30/06/2008
Fleshmarket Close; Ian Rankin 02/07/2008
The Snake Stone; Jason Goodwin; 08/07/2008
The Naming of the Dead; Ian Rankin 18/07/2008
Before They Are Hanged; Joe Abercrombie 19/07/2008
Renegade’s Magic; Robin Hobb 21/07/2008
Storm Front; Jim Butcher 24/07/2008
The Forever War; Joe Haldeman 26/07/2008
The Lies of Locke Lamora; Scott Lynch 27/07/2008
Red Seas Under Red Skies; Scott Lynch 02/08/2008
The Name of the Wind; Patrick Rothfuss 03/08/2008
Throne of Jade; Naomi Novik 04/08/2008
The Pastel City; M. John Harrison 04/08/2008
A Storm of Wings; M. John Harrison 05/08/2008
In Viriconium; M. John Harrison 06/08/2008
Viriconium Nights; M. John Harrison 06/08/2008
Rainbows End; Vernor Vinge 10/08/2008
Exit Music; Ian Rankin 11/08/2008
Devices and Desires; K. J. Parker 13/08/2008
The Road; Cormac McCarthy 15/08/2008
Evil for Evil; K. J. Parker 16/08/2008
The Bourne Identity; Robert Ludlum 17/08/2008
The Body Has a Mind of its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better; Sandra Blakeslee, Matthew Blakeslee 23/08/2008
The One Kingdom; Sean Russell 02/09/2008
Blink; Malcolm Gladwell 06/09/2008
Mr. Dynamite; Meredith Brosnan 10/09/2008
Last Argument of Kings; Joe Abercrombie 12/09/2008
Anathem; Neal Stephenson 25/09/2008
Toll the Hounds; Steven Erikson 28/09/2008
The Escapement; K. J. Parker 04/10/2008
Winterbirth; Brian Ruckley 06/10/2008
Child 44; Tom Rob Smith 10/10/2008
Bloodheir; Brian Ruckley 11/10/2008
Sweet: An Eight-Ball Odyssey; Heather Byer 15/10/2008
Nova Swing; M. John Harrison 25/10/2008
Twenty Years After; Alexandre Dumas 28/11/2008
The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty; David Harris 29/11/2008
Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently; Gregory Berns 07/12/2008
The Left Stuff: How the Left-Handed Have Survived and Thrived in a Right-Handed World; Melissa Roth 08/12/2008
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; David Foster Wallace 11/12/2008
Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion; David Sirlin 11/12/2008
The White Tiger; Aravind Adiga 12/12/2008
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America; Erik Larson 14/12/2008
Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler’s Journey; David McCumber 15/12/2008
Motherless Brooklyn; Jonathan Lethem 17/12/2008
The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators; Gordon Grice 18/12/2008
The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance; Joshua Waitzkin 21/12/2008
Cosmicomics; Italo Calvino [translated by William Weaver] 23/12/2008
The Keep; Jennifer Egan 24/12/2008
The Manuscript; Michael Stephen Fuchs 25/12/2008
The Last Colony; John Scalzi 26/12/2008

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Doomsday Book Review

Tadhg — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:53:24 +0000

Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book won the Nebula award in 1992 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1993. I would describe it as a time travel plague thriller academic farce, and of all the triple crown winners it is my least favorite. Some of its ideas were good, and some of its passages powerful, but overall I found it disjointed and less than gripping.

That it centers around time travel is something I hold against it—I generally don’t like time travel stories. There are exceptions, but my tolerance for it is quite low. Willis doesn’t screw around with it, which is good, but there’s a vagueness around how it works that I dislike. This vagueness bleeds into the next aspect of the story I don’t like, which is the somewhat farcically poor preparedness on the part of the time travellers and their organization. This reminded me somewhat of The Sparrow, which also featured characters being entirely too blasé about entering dangerous and unknown situations. Unlike with The Sparrow, here Willis uses the lack of competence as part of the farce aspect of the novel, but I didn’t think that worked too well.

It didn’t help that Doomsday Book also prominently features a trope I can’t stand: that of having a character with completely critical information fall ill and then mumble incoherent fragments that hint at but cannot be used to discern the knowledge the other characters need. This is a huge part of Doomsday Book, and I really couldn’t stand it.

I didn’t find the comic aspects of the book particularly comic. Instead of the farce providing comic relief, for me it underscored the incompetence of the people running the time travel operation in a frustrating rather than amusing way.

The idea of academics getting ahold of time travel capabilities and getting into tight situations while using it for research isn’t a bad one, but I don’t like its execution in Doomsday Book. It’s possible that it requires a certain type of suspension of disbelief that wasn’t forthcoming; I found myself thinking “that’s just ridiculous” too often, and not at the points where I think Willis wanted the reader to react that way.

Something about the text’s “Englishness” also threw me off, and I suspect that this was due to the fact that it’s set in Oxford, with primarily British characters, but is written by an American (I noted the awkwardness before I found out that Willis is American).

Overall I can’t recommend it, although I know at least one person who liked it, and it’s quite likely that it just happened to push all the wrong buttons for me.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Speaker for the Dead Review

Tadhg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:52:36 +0000

Speaker for the Dead is the second novel in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. It won the Nebula award in 1986 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1987. Its predecessor, Ender’s Game, is revered as a science fiction and geek cult classic that still has resonance in geek culture. I liked Ender’s Game when I first read it years ago, and when I re-read it recently (prior to Speaker for the Dead), I enjoyed it and thought it held up quite well.

Ender’s Game is quite a tightly-packed tale, one that carries the reader along with plot and character development that gel well with the gradual revelations about the larger setting. Speaker for the Dead feels much less convincing on a number of levels. It’s not as compact—we’re not following Ender as he grows older, the plot in synch with his development. Furthermore, while Ender’s Game seemed plausible in terms of characterization in its limited environment (I felt the weakest characters were Ender’s siblings, and the others outside of the military), Speaker for the Dead relies quite heavily on Card’s depiction of a broader range of people in far less restricted environments. I don’t think he succeeds with them, and the idea that Ender would be able to perceive them so clearly just rang false for me throughout.

I also felt that the concept that Ender and his friends and family were essentially the most important people in the universe wore thin. Again, that made sense in Ender’s Game, but works far less well in the sequel.

Overall I found it enjoyable, and thought it had some fairly interesting ideas, but it wasn’t a classic the same way Ender’s Game was, and it didn’t really feel like a deserving winner of the award trio.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Startide Rising Review

Tadhg — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:20:10 +0000

Startide Rising is the second novel in David Brin’s Uplift Universe series, and it won the Nebula in 1983 and the Hugo and Locus in 1984. I read its predecessor Sundiver first, and it nearly stopped me from going on to Startide Rising. I didn’t like the writing style at all, and it felt unpolished. It must be said that its ideas and setting were interesting: it’s “big universe” science fiction, with a multitude of alien races. The unique concept Brin came up with was that every alien race was raised to technological advancement (or even sentience) by some other race acting as “patron”—except for humanity, which reached a high degree of advancement, and raised dolphins and chimpanzees to higher-level sentience, without a patron.

Startide Rising concerns a dolphin-/human-/chimpanzee-crewed starship that comes across a significant secret, one that causes them to be pursued by many hostile (and competing) alien races in pursuit of it. Much of the novel focuses on the internal politics (both inter- and intra-species) on the Earth ship, and the conflicts between the alien species, with the thread of Earth’s place in the universe and the fairness (or lack thereof) of the political system in place for galactic civilization.

Brin handles all of that far better than he did in Sundiver, and it’s a far more accomplished novel. That being said, it still didn’t really work for me, particularly in terms of characterization. I thought that the sentient dolphins and chimp were handled quite well, but found the humans less convincing. The immediate plot, e.g. that of how the protagonists would extricate themselves from their predicament, wasn’t particularly compelling. The most interesting thing about it was the background plot, which concerned the larger milieu.

This larger milieu is why I think that Startide Rising won the triple crown. For all that I wasn’t convinced by the plot or characterization, and despite my not being that fond of the writing style, Brin nevertheless had me believing in his universe.

This is a phenomenon mostly confined to fantasy and science fiction works, the creation of a world (or more) that entrances the audience despite other flaws in the writing. For science fiction of this style, it’s critically important. The “big universe” has to be believable.

Note, however, the “believable” and “realistic” are very different things. I’m not at all convinced that Brin’s universe is realistic. The same applies to other fictional universes that I’m much more fond of, like Iain M. Banks’ Culture universe, Niven’s Ringworld universe, or the “Zones of Thought” setting of Vernor Vinge. It’s not that they’re realistic, necessarily, it’s that they somehow make sense to me (and lots of other readers). Even while reading Brin and thinking that individual pieces were unrealistic, I had already accepted the larger framework, and was analyzing the plot in its context.

I think this may be one of the most important skills of the “big universe” science fiction author: creating a setting that the reader, regardless of how realistic it is, accepts as making sense, accepts as a perfectly plausible way for the universe of the future to turn out to be. Brin got that right, and it was enough to snag him the triple crown despite what he got wrong.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Rendezvous with Rama Review

Tadhg — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:55:54 +0000

Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama won the Nebula in 1973, and the Hugo and Locus in 1974 (as well as the 1973 BSFA award and the 1974 Jupiter and John W. Campbell awards). After I read it I described it as “old school”, which still seems accurate.

It’s a tale of first contact, in which a gigantic starship enters the solar system and humans mount an exploration expedition to it. It’s very much “hard” science fiction, in which the technical aspects of getting to and exploring a massive spaceship take center stage. The impressive feat of authorship here isn’t characterization or plotting, but imagining in detail how such a scenario would play out in reality. Clarke does this extremely well, and Rendezvous with Rama definitely adds to his reputation as a pre-eminent hard SF author.

I enjoyed it, and appreciated it as an intellectual exercise, but it’s not my favorite style of science fiction. It deserves its reputation as a classic, but it’s a classic in a subgenre that’s not as interesting to me as other strains of science fiction.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Test-Driven Development: A Bad Example

Tadhg — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:59:49 +0000

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a programming methodology that calls for programmers to first write tests that will only be passed by code that meets the specifications for whatever component they’re working on, and then to write the code for the component and keep working on it until it passes the tests.

I don’t tend to use Test-Driven Development, even though I often think I should. When working on personal projects, I don’t even write many tests after the code is done, and that’s something I should definitely do. But I generally regard it as a good practice.

That being said, it’s not a cure-all, or even a “best practice” in the sense of being something that every programming team should use all the time. I think it’s likely to significantly aid code maintainability, particularly on larger projects, but can still imagine circumstances where it makes sense not to insist on it.

I also think that, as with so many other methodologies, whether someone uses it or not doesn’t tell you much about their ability as a programmer. An unfortunate example of this is covered by Peter Seibel, in a blog post discussing some of the responses to comments on TDD (and unit tests in general) in his book Coders at Work. The whole thing is fairly interesting, but the bit I found fascinating starts after the text “The only interviewee”[*]. This gets into a discussion of how Peter Norvig and Ron Jeffries differed in their approaches to writing a program to solve Sudoku problems. Norvig did it the “traditional” way, i.e. he immediately started trying to write code that would solve the problem. Jeffries, not incidentally one of the founders of Extreme Programming, started out writing tests first.

That Norvig solved the problem in one essay and about 100 lines of Python, while Jeffries gave up after five blog posts, doesn’t actually tell us anything about TDD and its efficacy (even if it does look somewhat bad). But it does demonstrate that use or advocacy of that methodology doesn’t tell you much about someone’s ability to solve a programming problem in any particular domain. Is that news? It certainly shouldn’t be, but from time to time the buzz around these things gets out of hand and people seem to need reminders that there aren’t many reliable shortcuts to figuring out how much a given programmer is going to contribute to a given project.

I haven’t read Coders at Work yet, but it’s on my list.

[*]

It’s long been a peeve of mine that you can’t link directly into the section of an HTML document that you want to hit unless it happens to have an id attribute, and I’ve always thought that every piece of HTML-generating software should sequentially tag paragraphs to support that functionality. I will eventually write a WordPress plugin that makes WordPress do this.

Tags: books, coding, python

Dreamsnake Review

Tadhg — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:02:02 +0000

Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake won the 1978 Nebula and the 1979 Locus and Hugo awards. I’m having trouble figuring out why. This is not to say it’s bad—it’s quite good, and I’ve definitely encountered worse award winners. But it won all three while seeming to me like a good but unremarkable novel, and my expectation is that the “triple crown” winners would be remarkable in some way.

Dreamsnake does stand out in some respects from the previous winners. It’s entirely planetbound, with no characters at any time leaving Earth. It’s postapocalyptic, depicting a world ravaged at some earlier date by nuclear war and containing communities with vastly different technological levels. (It’s not a “postapocalyptic novel” in the traditional sense, however, as it takes place long after humanity has recovered to a functional state.)

I mostly liked the writing style, thought that McIntyre had some good ideas about how societies might evolve in the future, and thought there were excellent pieces of characterization in it, although some of it was less convincing. Like the two winners before it, Dreamsnake contains some musings on how human sexuality might change over time, and I thought that was handled pretty well.

What makes it short of remarkable is that the plot and the world aren’t quite compelling enough. The plot, is is the usual approach, uncovers the world as it progresses, but about two-thirds of the way through it veers off and leaves quite a few questions unanswered. It’s a relatively simple quest plot, with the lead character, a female healer called Snake, searching for a replacement for her dreamsnake (an alien snake that grants visions and that healers use to ease the pain, and sometimes the passing, of their patients). It has a romance subplot tied into it also, which I found less than convincing.

I thought it was worth reading, and I suspect that other triple crown winners will strike me as less deserving, but there was something ultimately slight about Dreamsnake that made me surprised that it won—I woud have been less surprised by a terribly-written winner that had some kind of (purportedly) “big idea” at its heart. Dreamsnake is definitely better than that, and perhaps my own focus on plot is what makes me underestimate it.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Favorite Books of 2007

Tadhg — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:44:38 +0000

My total number of books read for 2007 dropped significantly from 2006, to 50. This was mainly due to not reading much in the first six months of the year. I read significantly more non-fiction, and that difference felt more marked because almost 50% of my favorite books from that year are non-fiction.

I liked The God Delusion, and my review of it holds the record for the most comments of any post on this blog. I might be more critical of it now, but I still think it’s worth reading, and expresses important ideas.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma was fantastic, influenced me strongly at the time, and continues to influence me now.

Sadly, my behavior has not been influenced as strongly by The Four Pillars of Investing—a book I recommend to everyone. No-nonsense and clear, it’s an excellent approach to money management.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed was nowhere near as gripping as Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I think that Diamond unfortunately started it with the weakest case study, but it was still worth reading, and hadp plenty of compelling and depressing facts about where the human race is currently headed—essentially along the lines of “current trends cannot continue”.

Empire of Capital, by Ellen Meiksins Wood, was an interesting brief outline of Wood’s ideas on how modern imperialism differs from its older counterparts. I think I’d like to re-read it in about ten years to see how well it holds up by then.

Richard Morgan’s Market Forces (a gift from my friend Brett) was an interesting take on a future where the movers and shakers of finance and capital reify their struggles as a form of car-based combat. Not as good as his takeshi Kovacs works, but I still enjoyed it.

Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, both by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, are fascinating examinations of empiricism, pyschology, philosophy, finance, and the always-present question of whether we really have any idea what the hell is going on. I recommend both very highly.

H. G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, upon which the television series was based, was surprisingly good. It held my attention throughout, and offered many insights, some disturbing, about both sports and education.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles was really good. Good enough that I think I should re-read it relatively. Like The Artist’s Way, it has some religion-related aspects that I’m not fond of, but its overall message and the tools it provides are more than enough to make up for that.

I quite enjoyed The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard; I wrote a review of it shortly after I read it.

Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint was rather good, and had quite a different tone to most fantasy I read. I’d like to get some people I know who don’t usually read fantasy to try it.

Spin, the first in a trilogy by Robert Charles Wilson, was quite enjoyable. Wilson seems to be quite good at mixing stories at the individual level with events that occur on a much larger scale. Spin’s larger scale includes the Earth being sequestered from the rest of the universe, and the passage of billions of years, and as such deals with some fairly major questions. I haven’t read the later books in the series yet.

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson, was probably the best of his work I’ve read since his Sprawl books—although it’s not quite up there with those.

King’s Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, and Wizard’s Eleven, by Sheri S. Tepper, were all interesting, more fantasy that has a quite “different” feel. They’re actually the first three in a series of nine, but the other six are hard to acquire, and I haven’t found them yet. I started out liking them more, and was less certain later. There’s a certain dreamlike, “anything goes”, feel to parts of them, something that isn’t that uncommon in fantasy and science fiction, and which I don’t seem to like much; I’ll have to write about this further. The other series that comes to mind with a similar feel is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series.

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine was excellent. I highly recommend it. In it Klein examines the ways in which capitalist elites have exploited disasters and disorienting circumstances to push their agendas onto unwilling populations, and also examines the effects of unrestrained “Chicago school” economics. It may place too much personal responsibility on Milton Friedman and his disciples, but apart from that is a very strong work, probably Klein’s best.

Blindsight, by Peter Watts, was the best fiction work I read in 2007. Extremely compelling science fiction with big ideas, plenty of neuroscience speculation, and one of the best takes on vampires I can remember.

Jon Krakauer’s exploration of Mormonism, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, was fascinating and rather depressing. The history of Mormonism is rather interesting, but the authoritarianism and hideous misogyny are just unbearably awful to read about.

I read No Country for Old Men after I’d seen the film, which is fairly unusual for me. The Coen Brothers adapted it very faithfully, so there weren’t too many surprises. I like McCarthy, and this was worth reading.

Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, on the other hand, might not be worth reading. Light fantasy around the idea of Napoleonic-era military dragon pilot corps, it strikes me as being close to a series based around non-sexual fan service. I know that the term “fan service” refers to sexual content, but it seems like it could reasonably apply to any content that was inserted into a work because fans would think it was cool (as opposed to titillating). I read a few of the series, all along wondering why I was doing so. I don’t really recommend it, although I admire it as an exemplar of coming up with a cool idea and running with it.

A number of my friends really liked The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, but I wasn’t too impressed by it. Structuring a novel such that some terrible event is known to occur, so that the reader is waiting for the revelatory details to hit, is tricky to pull off successfully. It didn’t work for me in The Sparrow primarily because I found the actions of the protagonists at key points to be incomprehensibly idiotic, and thus instead of feeling the author’s intended reader response of “those poor people, how terrible”, I was instead thinking, “how could they be so insanely stupid?”

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a short story collection by Haruki Murakami, and as such is something you should read.

My full reading list from 2007:

Cuba: A new history; Richard Gott 09/01/2007
The Borgia Bride; Jeanne Kalogridis 11/01/2007
The Bonehunters; Steven Erikson 21/01/2007
Gardens of the Moon; Steven Erikson 18/02/2007
The Immortal Game; Mark Coggins 22/02/2007
The God Delusion; Richard Dawkins 04/03/2007
King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero; David Remnick 01/04/2007
The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Michael Pollan 28/04/2007
The Four Pillars of Investing; William Bernstein 09/05/2007
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; Jared Diamond 31/05/2007
The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite; David McWilliams 09/06/2007
Empire of Capital; Ellen Meiksins Wood 10/06/2007
Market Forces; Richard Morgan 13/06/2007
Fooled By Randomness; Nassim Nicholas Taleb 16/06/2007
The Black Swan; Nassim Nicholas Taleb 27/06/2007
Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream; H. G. Bissinger 30/06/2007
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams; Darcy Frey 30/06/2007
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles; Steven Pressfield 30/06/2007
Zen in the Art of Writing Ray Bradbury 04/07/2007
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Edwin Lefévre 13/07/2007
War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Chris Hedges; 15/07/2007
Changing Planes; Ursula K. Le Guin 04/08/2007
Spin State; Chris Moriarty 04/08/2007
Spin Control; Chris Moriarty 05/08/2007
Failed States; Noam Chomsky 18/08/2007
The Pale Blue Eye; Louis Bayard 19/08/2007
The Dante Club; Matthew Pearl 21/08/2007
Swordspoint; Ellen Kushner 21/08/2007
A Shadow in Summer; Daniel Abraham 22/08/2007
Elantris; Brandon Sanderson 29/08/2007
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture; Ariel Levy 31/08/2007
Spin; Robert Charles Wilson 31/08/2007
Out on the Cutting Edge; Lawrence Block 31/08/2007
The Privilege of the Sword; Ellen Kushner 03/09/2007
Pattern Recognition; William Gibson 10/09/2007
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game Michael Lewis; 02/10/2007
The Blade Itself; Marcus Sakey 20/10/2007
The Art of Losing; Keith Dixon 20/10/2007
King’s Blood Four; Sheri S. Tepper 20/10/2007
Necromancer Nine; Sheri S. Tepper 21/10/2007
Wizard’s Eleven; Sheri S. Tepper 25/10/2007
Brasyl; Ian McDonald 28/10/2007
The Shock Doctrine; Naomi Klein 18/11/2007
Blindsight; Peter Watts 18/11/2007
The End of America: A letter of warning to a young patriot; Naomi Wolf 02/12/2007
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith; Jon Krakauer 17/12/2007
No Country for Old Men; Cormac McCarthy 18/12/2007
His Majesty’s Dragon; Naomi Novik 19/12/2007
The Wild Palms; William Faulkner 20/12/2007
The Sea Came In At Midnight; Steve Erickson 23/12/2007
The Sparrow; Mary Doria Russell 28/12/2007
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman; Haruki Murakami 31/12/2007

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Favorite Books of 2006

Tadhg — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:41:00 +0000

2006 involved quite a lot of reading, including perhaps a higher number than average of books in series.

Before those, however, I started the year with another excellent collection of David Foster Wallace essays, Consider the Lobster. Excellent stuff, highly recommended.

Then I went on another gambling/gaming book binge with A. Alvarez’ classic The Biggest Game in Town; David Kushner’s rather poor book on MTG star Jon Finkel, Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas; and Andy Bellin’s Poker Nation. Of those, I’d only recommend The Biggest Game in Town.

The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr’s book about Luca Turin and the vibration theory of olfaction, was an excellent read. It suffers from having its worth correlated to that of the theory Turin espouses, as much of it revolves around the idea that Turin is fighting the institutions of science over the nature of smell. This is still an open question, and while soon after I read it the research (from what I could glean online) seemed to be going against the vibration theory, it now appears to still be viable.

Woken Furies, the last book in Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs series, was good, and I think it finished the series well.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann, is an examination of the current understanding of what life was like in the Americas just before Columbus arrived. Short answer: quite different than you might think. Definitely worth reading, and it makes clear to what extent the common conception of this period is colored by what was/is essentially colonial propaganda.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was gripping and extremely interesting, structurally as well as otherwise. I don’t want to give much away, but it’s not terribly far from If on a winter’s night a traveller—although ultimately less frustrating, and less of an exploration of reading per se. I keep meaning to read more of Mitchell’s work, but haven’t gotten around to it.

The Thousandfold Thought finished off R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing series, and did so in satisfying fashion—but it’s just the first series in a larger set, and so I had to wait until this year for the next series’ first book, The Judging Eye.

The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood is a good read if you’re interested in how Hollywood and the American movie industry actually functions.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium was excellent, and I thought that it was by quite a bit the most developed of his works that I’ve read. Like those earlier works, it’s worth reading if you’re interested in human happiness and fulfillment.

Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys was a gift from Helen, and while I had some fears at the start that it might be a humdrum coming-of-age novel, it turned out to be fantastic, covering a fascinating and tumultuous period in Irish history and doing lots of things very well. Recommended.

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s epic, labyrinthine novel concerning the city of Bellona, which is in the United States but somehow not of it after “something” happened there, is amazing.

Among the series I read were: Walter Jon Williams’ Dread Empire’s Fall, which I rate so-so; George Pelecanos’ Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, which wasn’t bad; Bits of Denise Mina’s Garnethill and Paddy Meehan trilogies, which were quite good; a bunch of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series, which I like a lot; The Blood Knight, part three of Gregory Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, which sadly started rather better than it continued; and the first three books of Philip Kerr’s Bernhard Gunther works, which I thought were excellent.

Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore was good, possibly my favorite novel of his after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but that masterpiece remains far and away his best work.

I wasn’t that fond of Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, and wrote a detailed review of it.

Penelope Lively’s The Photograph started well but faded.

I was impressed by God’s Playground: A History of Poland Volume I, The Origins to 1795, by Norman Davies, but still haven’t picked up the second volume. I reviewed it as well.

Century Rain, a science fiction novel by Alastair Reynolds, was reasonable but not great.

The Glass Bees, a 1957 German science fiction novel by Ernst Jünger, was extremely interesting, particularly in its apparent prescience about the nature of industrial development later in the 20th Century. Apart from that, it’s also worth reading because it’s radically different from the American and English science fiction of the period (at least that I’m aware of).

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer winner, is excellent for the first two thirds. It’s not terrible thereafter, but didn’t sustain its earlier energy (part of this is probably deliberate, but even so the resultant experience felt off). Comics, love, lifelong friendship, trying to escape (and help loved ones to escape) from Nazi Europe, war, sexual identity—all mixed together in what is mostly a great book.

Don Quixote is clearly a great classic of literature, but I’m not sure about it. I think that I found the early going somewhat slow, and that it became more interesting a lot later. I also think that the humor isn’t quite right for me, although there were definitely some hilarious moments.

Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, Julian Dibbell’s exploration of virtual economies in massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games, was absolutely fascinating, and I’m quite sure it’s still very relevant—the names of some games might need to be changed, but I suspect that the broad strokes are still similar a few years later. The best part might have been the author’s conversation with the IRS as he tried to figure out whether his virtual earnings were taxable.

Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, a memoir of gameshow apearances by Bob Harris, was extremely good, and I was quite surprised by it. Harris managed to make a rather uplifting and seemingly profound story out of his time on (and around) Jeopardy!, and also made it seem quite relevant to anyone with an interest in knowledge (hopefully not too small a group).

K. L. Bishop’s The Etched City is a brilliant fantasy novel; I resisted the temptation to put “literary“ in front of “fantasy” there (I had a similar temptation with Dhalgren). I recall stopping while I was reading it several times to appreciate the language and the writing—not something that happens too often, and that should be recommendation enough.

The full list of what I read in 2006:

Consider the Lobster; David Foster Wallace 09/01/2006
The Biggest Game in Town; A. Alvarez 11/01/2006
Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas; David Kushner 12/01/2006
Poker Nation; Andy Bellin 13/01/2006
The Emperor of Scent; Chandler Burr 19/01/2006
Woken Furies; Richard K. Morgan 20/01/2006
Looking for Jake; China Mieville 21/01/2006
1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus; Charles C. Mann 03/02/2006
Oracle Night; Paul Auster 05/02/2006
Cloud Atlas; David Mitchell 17/02/2006
The Thousandfold Thought; R. Scott Bakker 19/02/2006
The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood; Edward Jay Epstein 02/03/2006
The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 16/03/2006
The Magus; John Fowles 30/03/2006
Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters; David D. Friedman 25/04/2006
Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity; Lawrence Lessig 29/04/2006
At Swim, Two Boys; Jamie O’Neill 07/05/2006
Norwegian Wood; Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin 13/05/2006
Dhalgren; Samuel R. Delany 25/05/2006
The Praxis; Walter Jon Williams 26/05/2006
The Sundering; Walter Jon Williams 02/06/2006
Conventions of War; Walter Jon Williams 03/06/2006
A Scanner Darkly; Philip K. Dick 05/06/2006
Redemption Ark; Alastair Reynolds 09/06/2006
Old Man’s War; John Scalzi 10/06/2006
Wonderland; Michael Bamberger 12/06/2006
No Place to Hide; Robert O’Harrow, Jr. 27/06/2006
Right as Rain; George Pelecanos 28/06/2006
Field of Blood; Denise Mina 29/06/2006
Mr. Irresponsible’s Bad Advice: How to Rip the Lid Off Your Id and Live Happily Ever After; Bill Barol 01/07/2006
Flesh and Blood; Michael Cunningham 02/07/2006
The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them; David Goodman, and Amy Goodman 09/07/2006
Hell to Pay; George Pelecanos 09/07/2006
Soul Circus; George Pelecanos 11/07/2006
Hard Revolution; George Pelecanos 13/07/2006
Drama City; George Pelecanos 13/07/2006
Garnethill; Denise Mina 13/07/2006
Kafka on the Shore; Haruki Murakami 16/07/2006
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes; Lawrence Block 17/07/2006
A Long Line of Dead Men; Lawrence Block 18/07/2006
All the Flowers are Dying; Lawrence Block 18/07/2006
A Simple Plan; Scott Smith 18/07/2006
Underground; Haruki Murakami 22/07/2006
The Blood Knight; Gregory Keyes 23/07/2006
The Ghost Brigades; John Scalzi 24/07/2006
The Ruins; Scott Smith 26/07/2006
Exile; Denise Mina 27/07/2006
Resolution; Denise Mina 29/07/2006
The Dead Hour; Denise Mina 30/07/2006
On Snooker; Mordecai Richler 31/07/2006
The Glass Bead Game; Hermann Hesse 14/08/2006
The Photograph; Penelope Lively 15/08/2006
God’s Playground: A History of Poland Volume I, The Origins to 1795; Norman Davies 30/08/2006
Century Rain; Alastair Reynolds 02/09/2006
The Ten Thousand Things; Maria Dermout 04/09/2006
The Glass Bees; Ernst Juenger 04/09/2006
Across the Nightingale Floor; Gillian Rubinstein 04/09/2006
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Michael Chabon 16/09/2006
Don Quixote; Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Edith Grossman 22/10/2006
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Carson McCullers 31/10/2006
The Kite-Runner; Khaled Hosseini 09/11/2006
The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America; Gus Russo 13/11/2006
The Immortal Game: A History of Chess; David Shenk 14/11/2006
The Meaning of Night: A Confession; Michael Cox 18/11/2006
Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot; Julian Dibbell 25/11/2006
In Persuasion Nation; George Saunders 26/11/2006
Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine; Allan MacDonnell 03/12/2006
Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!; Bob Harris 09/12/2006
Year of Wonders; Geraldine Brooks 16/12/2006
The Etched City; K.L. Bishop 18/12/2006
March Violets; Philip Kerr 20/12/2006
The Pale Criminal; Philip Kerr 21/12/2006
A German Requiem; Philip Kerr 22/12/2006

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Gateway Review

Tadhg — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:38:51 +0000

Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, the opening novel in his Heechee series, won the Nebula in 1977 and the Hugo, Locus, and John W. Campbell awards in 1978 (making it even more highly-decorated than most of the “triple crown” winners).

It tells the story of Robinette Broadhead, a prospector who struck it rich while searching for alien artifacts and/or significant scientific discoveries. It takes a split form, alternating chapters between Robinette talking about his past and about his present; the chapters in the present are all focused around his sessions with an AI therapist, Sigfrid.

This structural device means that the reader knows from the start that Broadhead is ultimately successful in his quest for riches, while both present and past strands move towards a common point of revealing the key traumatic event in his history.

The universe that Pohl sets up involves an Earth that is short of food and other resources. Pohl suggests that easily-accessible oil will run out with the result that shale mining is common, and Broadhead begins his adult life at that. He wins a lottery that pays enough to get him off planet, to Gateway. Gateway is an abandoned base, constructed out of an asteroid by the long-gone Heechee, aliens who apparently abandoned the human sector of space five hundred thousand years ago. Humans found artifacts of theirs on Venus, and then discovered Gateway, where the Heechee left abandoned starships. These ships have faster-than-light capabilities, but humans can’t figure out how they work, or how to really control them. They have navigation systems that seem to go to predetermined destinations and then return to Gateway, so the humans use them by trial and error.

This process is extremely dangerous, which is why the reward structure is such that lucky trips can mean retirement into a life of luxury. Broadhead initially refuses to take many trips, because of how dangerous they are, but economic and other pressures eventually push him to it.

As might be evident from its structure, the novel has a strong psychological bent, and there’s a heavy focus on Broadhead’s therapy, his complexes, and the relationship he has with his lover Gelle-Klara Moynlin. (Incidentally, I read this novel as encouraging toleration of homosexuality, and difference in general, something it shares with its “triple crown” predecessor.)

I liked it but wasn’t crazy about it. I’m curious enough to want to read the rest of the series, and while it certainly wasn’t bad, I thought it was weaker than most of the previous triple winners.

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Favorite Books of 2005

Tadhg — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:31:11 +0000

In 2005 I set myself a goal of reading 60 books, partly to try to make up for the low numbers in 2004. I barely made it, reading The Phantom Tollbooth on 31 December.

Getting Things Done is worth reading. I’m not sold on the system as a whole, but there are definitely good ideas in there.

The Táin was extremely interesting. I remember being fascinated by how modern some of it seemed, and how utterly alien other parts were—the morality of the hero, for example, just seems completely bizarre.

I’m surprised that I didn’t read Flow until 2005; I read Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity in 2000 and hence was already familiar with many of the concepts. I recommend it, as I think it contains some important insights about human happiness.

In April I was consumed by, and consumed, The Chronicles of Amber, reading all ten in two weeks. Aspects of the first few reminded me of the World of Tiers series by Philip José Farmer, and somehow the psychological attitudes of both series seem similar (and very Seventies, at least for the first few Amber books). They are classics.

The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time and One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey “The Kid” Ungar, the World’s Greatest Poker Player were both, despite the overly-long titles, quite good, as was Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. The last is probably the most over-hyped subtitle. All three are fascinating examinations of gambling, and I think the first sticks in my mind most: the story of businessman Andy Beal going head-to-head against some of the world’s top money poker players. My favorite tidbit from it is Beal trying to convince the pros to play for limits of $100,000/$200,000 because at that point they would no longer be able to keep their edge of treating the money as simply part of the game. Apparently there are two followup pieces by the same author: “The Banker, The Boss, The Junkman, & The Warrior Queen: The Return of the Richest Poker Game of all time” and “The Banker & The IceMan”.

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players, by Stefan Fatsis, was another excellent nonfiction work based around competitive gaming, and apart from the amount of money involved I’m not sure how much difference there is between the obsessives who excel at the particular games involved. Fatsis does a great job of describing the personalities and trials of some of the best Scrabble players in the world.

Anthony Beevor’s The Spanish Civil War is the definitive history of that conflict in English. It’s an excellent work, and definitely worth reading if you have even a passing interest in the topic.

I had read Gogol’s Dead Souls before, but not for years, and it was worth re-reading.

The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks’ non-Culture science fiction novel, was good. I don’t think it’s quite up there with his Culture work, but it was definitely a good novel.

Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian was enjoyable, but after I finished it I had trouble making up my mind about how good it was. I think it was excellent in terms of atmosphere, but a little less convincing regarding some of the relationships involved. If you like Dracula, you should probably read it.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond’s examination of the overarching trends in human history, is fantastic. You should read it.

I started R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series in 2005, which I consider thematically one of the most interesting fantasy series I’ve come across. There’s a very heavy philosophical bent to it, and the world Bakker depicts is an excellent mix of the familiar and the strange. Further, the protagonist Kellhus is a completely fascinating creation, and it would be worth reading just for him alone.

As a prelude to reading Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, I re-read American Psycho, which is very high on my list of novels. It has so far stood the test of time, and I still regard it as the novel for 1980s America in the same way that The Great Gatsby is the novel for 1920s America. Lunar Park, on the other hand, was a disapointment. I kept thinking that Ellis would do something more interesting than what he appeared to be doing, and it never happened. I think that Lunar Park is his weakest work.

The books I read in 2005:

Hegemony or Survival; Noam Chomsky 17/01/2005
Getting Things Done; David Allen 05/02/2005
The Táin; Thomas Kinsella, trans. 05/02/2005
The Medici; Paul Strathern 13/02/2005
Flow; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 29/03/2005
Foul Ball; Jim Bouton 07/04/2005
Nine Princes in Amber; Roger Zelazny 09/04/2005
The Guns of Avalon; Roger Zelazny 09/04/2005
Sign of the Unicorn; Roger Zelazny 10/04/2005
The Hand of Oberon; Roger Zelazny 12/04/2005
The Courts of Chaos; Roger Zelazny 14/04/2005
Trumps of Doom; Roger Zelazny 16/04/2005
Blood of Amber; Roger Zelazny 18/04/2005
Sign of Chaos; Roger Zelazny 19/04/2005
Knight of Shadows; Roger Zelazny 20/04/2005
Prince of Chaos; Roger Zelazny 23/04/2005
The Dark Fields; Alan Glynn 26/04/2005
The Briar King; Gregory Keyes 30/04/2005
Legends II; ed. Robert Silverberg 08/05/2005
The Charnel Prince; Gregory Keyes 12/05/2005
The Consumer Trap; Michael Dawson 15/05/2005
The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty; Buster Olney 18/05/2005
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; Susanna Clark 21/05/2005
Finding Flow; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 25/05/2005
Revolution and War in Spain 1931-1939; Ed. Paul Preston 29/05/2005
Memoir from Ant-Proof Case; Mark Helprin 11/06/2005
Olympos; Dan Simmons 07/07/2005
The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time; Michael Craig 30/07/2005
One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey “The Kid” Ungar, the World’s Greatest Poker Player; Nolan Dalla, Peter Alson, and Mike Sexton 31/07/2005
I Can’t Believe I Just Did That: How Embarrassment Can Wreak Havoc in Your Life—and What You Can Do to Conquer It; David Allyn 10/08/2005
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions; Ben Mezrich 11/08/2005
Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players; Stefan Fatsis 16/08/2005
The Spanish Civil War; Anthony Beevor 22/08/2005
Dance Dance Dance; Haruki Murakami, trans. Alfred Birnbaum 24/08/2005
Dead Souls; Nikolai Gogol 28/08/2005
Lost in a Good Book; Jasper Fforde 30/08/2005
The Algebraist; Iain M. Banks 02/09/2005
Neverwhere; Neil Gaiman 02/09/2005
Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science; Atul Gawande 06/09/2005
Bangkok Tattoo; John Burdett 11/09/2005
Jumper; Steven Gould 11/09/2005
The Historian; Elizabeth Kostova 18/09/2005
The Erotic Anime Movie Guide; Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy 24/09/2005
Midnight Tides; Steven Erikson 01/10/2005
Guns, Germs, and Steel; Jared Diamond 14/10/2005
The Darkness that Comes Before; R. Scott Bakker 18/10/2005
The Warrior Prophet; R. Scott Bakker 27/10/2005
Legends; ed. Robert Silverberg 29/10/2005
Status Anxiety; Alain de Botton 30/10/2005
In the Shadow of the Law; Kermit Roosevelt 06/11/2005
A Feast for Crows; George R R Martin 13/11/2005
The Risen Empire; Scott Westerfield 14/11/2005
The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Counterculture; Bob Levin 15/11/2005
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman; Richard Feynman 19/11/2005
The Great Unraveling; Paul Krugman 22/11/2005
The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry; Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne, Peter Pavia 25/11/2005
The Killing of Worlds; Scott Westerfield 11/12/2005
American Psycho; Bret Easton Ellis (again) 23/12/2005
Lunar Park; Bret Easton Ellis 26/12/2005
The Phantom Tollbooth; Norton Juster 31/12/2005

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Favorite Books of 2004

Tadhg — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:13:25 +0000

I read only 37 books in 2004, the lowest total since I started keeping track. I’m not sure why I read so few that year, particularly since quite a few of the books on the list are books that I was completely absorbed by and went through quickly. The quality is mixed, but some of them were excellent.

The first standout is China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, a wonderful science fiction and fantasy creation set in a city-state called New Crobuzon on the somewhat bizarre world of Bas-Lag. I loved this book, and also loved The Scar, set in the same milieu. Iron Council is set on Bas-Lag also, and is worthwhile, but I found it far less gripping. I highly recommend these, particularly the first two. One of the things that impressed me about them was the high degree of political realism, which helps drive the narratives and plots.

I finished two Robin Hobb trilogies, The Tawny Man and The Liveship Traders, both set in the same world as her Farseer Trilogy. The former is more of a continuation of the Farseer story, and the latter is more of an offshoot. They differ significantly in quality: The Tawny Man series is quite good, whereas The Liveship Traders is pretty bad. I’m not sure what the precise categorization is, but there’s a certain style of fantasy that I really don’t like, and which I perceive as being overly simple and engaged in something similar to wish fulfillment (or fan service)—and The Liveship Traders fits right into that category. This didn’t stop me from buying and reading all three, but I kept hoping that Hobb would return to the form of her other work.

The Count of Monte Cristo was excellent, as you would expect from such a classic.

I think that The Confusion, the second book in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, was the best of that series. Second and third were both better than the first. Overall it’s a good series, but I still feel that his best works are Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, with The Diamond Age up there as well. It must be said that he ends The Baroque Cycle far better than his earlier work (not a high bar there).

I like the “hard-boiled neo-cyberpunk” of Richard K. Morgan’s novels featuring Takeshi Kovacs; Altered Carbon and Woken Furies were both highly enjoyable. (This reminds me that I have to investigate his foray into fantasy, which begins with The Steel Remains.)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is an amazing collection of essays, and more or less everyone should read it. David Foster Wallace was brilliant, and I’m sad that he’s gone.

Nature’s God was a disappointment; the first two volumes in The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles were much better, and I got the distinct impression with this one that Wilson either didn’t know how to really continue them or had lost his inspiration for the series and just wanted to wrap it up.

Power Play was a great look at the history of electrical power systems throughout the world, and at how they have been the domain of mercenary monopolist types for most of their existence. Definitely worth reading if you’re interested in energy, politics, or economics.

Candide; Voltaire (in Candide and other stories) 03/01/2004
Advanced Hold ’Em Poker; David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth 17/01/2004
Golden Fool; Robin Hobb 04/02/2004
Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software; Sam Williams 04/02/2004
Perdido Street Station; China Miéville 01/03/2004
Omon Ra; Victor Pelevin 05/03/2004
The Matrix and Philosophy; William Irwin, ed. 27/03/2004
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers; Rennie Browne and Dave King 27/03/2004
The Count of Monte Cristo; Alexandre Dumas 18/04/2004
The Confusion; Neal Stephenson 06/05/2004
Jennifer Government; Max Barry 10/05/2004
Outlet; Randy Taguchi 14/05/2004
The Peace War; Vernor Vinge 15/05/2004
The Shadow of the Torturer; Gene Wolfe 21/05/2004
The Claw of the Conciliator; Gene Wolfe 21/05/2004
Ship of Magic (The Liveship Traders, Book 1); Robin Hobb 04/06/2004
Mad Ship (The Liveship Traders, Book 2); Robin Hobb 07/06/2004
Ship of Destiny; Robin Hobb 12/06/2004
Chasm City; Alastair Reynolds 18/06/2004
Altered Carbon; Richard K. Morgan 19/06/2004
The Scar; China Miéville 22/06/2004
The Corporation; Joel Bakan 02/07/2004
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again; David Foster Wallace 09/07/2004
The Continental Op; Dashiel Hammett 15/07/2004
The Forty-Seven Ronin Story; John Allyn 24/08/2004
A Game of Thrones; George R. R. Martin (again) 30/09/2004
A Clash of Kings; George R. R. Martin (again) 15/10/2004
A Storm of Swords; George R. R. Martin (again) 19/10/2004
Broken Angels; Richard K. Morgan 21/10/2004
The System of the World; Neal Stephenson 09/11/2004
Iron Council; China Miéville 13/11/2004
Nature’s God; Robert Anton Wilson 17/11/2004
Lust; Simon Blackburn 20/11/2004
Test Card F: TV, Mythinformation, and Social Control; Anonymous 22/11/2004
Eats, Shoots and Leaves; Lynne Truss 26/11/2004
Fool’s Fate; Robin Hobb 12/12/2004
Power Play; Sharon Beder 19/12/2004

Tags: books, reading, reviews

The Forever War Review

Tadhg — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:16:53 +0000

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is the fifth winner of the science fiction “triple crown”, winning the Nebula in 1975 and the Hugo and Locus in 1976. It is a story of future interstellar war, between humanity and a species known as “Taurans“. It focuses on the war career of its main protagonist, William Mandella. I consider it an anti-war novel, and was quite impressed with it when I first read it last year.

Mandella is a conscript recruited to an elite force, one composed of highly fit and highly intelligent recruits who were selected in the hope that they would be better able to cope with whatever unknown dangers the war would bring. Some aspects of the book I found interesting include:

The effects of time dilation on soldiers fighting wars involving extremely high travel speeds (as far as I know, Haldeman was one of the first to write about this).
The idea that Earth would adopt/accept a centralized economy/political system/bureaucracy due to an alien threat.
Military service being mixed-gender and enforcing sexual pairings among troops.
Homosexuality being state-mandated (with the aid of genetic alteration) as a method of population control.

The first is completely critical to the novel, and allows Haldeman to cover a vast amount of time while making clear his protagonist’s difficulties in adapting to changes at home. Haldeman served in the US Army in the Vietnam War, and the novel can certainly be read as a science fiction treatment of what he and other Vietnam veterans went through in terms of cultural changes at home while they were in the military.

Mandella ends up experiencing Earth after extremely long gaps in time (as it has passed on Earth), and its culture changed dramatically in that period, with much of the change as a result of the centralized political structure brought about due to the war.

This centralization is taken for granted fairly early on. The idea that an external threat would unite Earth is a common one in science fiction, and here the unification takes the form of a militarized bureaucracy running things ostensibly for the good of the entire planet, with the underlying idea that the “Tauran” threat makes petty concerns such as national identity, democratic control of human affairs, and so on. The changes wrought by the central government are extreme, and become more so over the course of the novel; they begin with the conscription that results in Mandella’s service, continue through the reworking of the entire global economy around a new currency based on calories (because food production is strained), and move on to somewhat draconian population control.

Mandella is heterosexual, and apparently so are the majority of the troops in his cohort. The troops are both male and female, and apparently military custom and regulation at the start of the war attempt to deal with the mixing of the genders by more or less insisting that sexual pairings at night can’t really be refused. This is presented in a sex-positive light: everyone in the group is sexually active, attractive, and inclined towards sex in a way that is at least playful. The regulations don’t extend to officers in the same way, just troops at approximately the same rank level, and mainly those at the lower levels. The atmosphere presented suggests that the regulations aren’t used very often, and that culturally the individuals all feel that the sexual pairings are a fun part of their contribution to the group as a whole.

Later Mandella becomes an officer, and the only partner he’s particularly interested is his lover Marygay, also now an officer, but they are separated. The culture of military sexual permissiveness takes a turn at this point: on Earth, the world government has mandated homosexuality, and is genetically altering all human fetuses (all babies are at this point born out of test tubes) so that everyone is homosexually inclined.

This could be read as a horror story from the black helicopter crowd, “OMG the evil UN will make us all gay/lesbian in the future!”, but my interpretation is that it’s significantly more interesting. The government line is that it’s for population control, but Mandella himself notes that enforced vasectomies would be a lot easier, and I think that there’s a suggestion that this tinkering with sexuality is done for reasons of social control. Not that it makes much sense that entirely homosexual populations would be easier to control, but it’s entirely possible that some bureaucratic committee might think so.

In any case, this shift means that from being a heterosexual infantryman in a group of mixed-gender heterosexuals, Mandella goes to being a heterosexual officer in a unit (and an army) where everyone else is homosexual and thinks that heterosexuality is a weird aberration. Mandella is apparently mostly untroubled by this, and maintains a tolerant attitude throughout. My reading of the book’s take on sexuality is that it’s pushing for tolerance and understanding, and for common humanity to be respected despite vast changes wrought by time or distance—or by other differences.

I do find problematic the apparent ease with which Earth adopts a single government, although the text makes clear that there are upheavals which Mandella, away at war, doesn’t witness. It makes some sense that to someone in the armed forces controlled by the ruling bureaucracy, the various changes the bureaucracy has implemented would appear to occur smoothly and without much resistance.

Overall I recommend it, and I may read Haldeman’s related works Forever Free and Forever Peace.

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Favorite Books of 2003

Tadhg — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:34:50 +0000

This time, I’ve managed to let just a day pass since my last roundup of books from a given year.

2003 started slowly on the reading front; apparently The Idiot took me three months to get through. The first five months of the year saw me read just four books, an extremely low rate. I returned to a normal reading pace thereafter, with some dips and a surge in December.

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman was excellent, if disturbing. It didn’t dislodge At Swim-Two-Birds from its spot high in my book rankings, however.

Infectious Greed, by Frank Partnoy, was fantastic, and contained plenty of warnings about what would arrive a few years later in terms of the “credit crisis”. Partnoy laid a lot of it out, and covers fascinating other developments in the modern financial world as well. Probably still relevant.

I really enjoyed Positively Fifth Street, I think it’s one of the best poker books I’ve read. Despite the diminution of the poker craze in the US, it’s still worth reading.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius was an excellent and interesting biography of a rather unique character, and prompted me to look further into Wittgenstein’s work—something I’ve only made a little progress on, sadly.

D. B. Weiss’ Lucky Wander Boy was a novel I enjoyed a great deal at the time, but I’m not completely sure that this tale of dot-com life entwined with arcade nostalgia and a quest through a kind of childhood would have aged well. It’s probably still fine, but I don’t know about it ten years from now.

Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was good, and to my mind is vastly superior at least to the first Harry Potter book (which is the only one I’ve read).

I started Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle in 2003, and was conflicted about Quicksilver. I felt that it started extremely slowly—not a feature I associate with his work—and that he really put some of the least interesting stuff in it at the start.

I started some other series in 2003: The Hammer and the Cross series by Harry Harrison and John Holm, which had some great ideas about what might happen to 9th Century Europe if slightly more advanced technologies were dropped into it; Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy, which was excellent and which I definitely recommend; and the Ilium/Olympos cycle by Dan Simmons, which I enjoyed but kept hoping would be as amazing as The Hyperion Cantos.

Zen Without Zen Masters is a great book, and is something I should probably reread—perhaps frequently.

Looking at this list, I think that the quality of books on it is quite high, and that it’s significantly better in quality terms than 2002. Pretty much everything on it is worth reading, although perhaps some of the Hiassen, Block and Rankin would only be for people who know they like those authors.

This is the full list for 2003:

The Third Policeman; Flann O’Brien 01/01/2002
The Idiot; Fyodor Dostoyevsky 03/2003
Dr. Strangelove’s Game; Peter Strathern. 12/04/2003
The Eyre Affair; Jasper Fforde 21/04/2003
Infectious Greed; Frank Partnoy 05/06/2003
Positively Fifth Street; James McManus 17/06/2003
Gardens of the Moon; Stephen Erikson (again) 24/06/2003
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius; Ray Monk 25/06/2003
Deadhouse Gates; Stephen Erikson (again) 29/06/2003
The Art of War; Sun-Tzu (trans. by The Denma Group) 17/07/2003
Memories of Ice; Stephen Erikson 18/07/2003
Bangkok 8; John Burdett 19/07/2003
Lucky Wander Boy; D. B. Weiss 22/07/2003
Hardcase; Dan Simmons 23/07/2003
Moneyball; Michael Lewis 24/07/2003
Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time; Stephen A. Mitchell 27/07/2003
Wicked; Gregory Maguire 01/08/2003
The Crook Factory; Dan Simmons 08/08/2003
Coyote v. Acme; Ian Frazier 12/08/2003
Innumeracy; John Allen Paulos 25/08/2003
True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier; Vernor Vinge, et al 15/09/2003
The Golden Compass; Philip Pullman 21/09/2003
The Subtle Knife; Philip Pullman 24/09/2003
The Amber Spyglass; Philip Pullman 27/09/2003
The Dark Domain; Stefan Grabinski, trans. Miroslaw Lipinski 28/09/2003
Quicksilver; Neal Stephenson 13/10/2003
The Hammer and the Cross; Harry Harrison and John Holm 01/11/2003
One King’s Way; Harry Harrison and John Holm 02/11/2003
King and Emperor; Harry Harrison and John Holm 06/11/2003
Ball Four; Jim Bouton 08/11/2003
Assassin’s Apprentice; Robin Hobb 10/11/2003
Hope to Die; Lawrence Block 10/11/2003
The Chronoliths; Robert Charles Wilson 11/11/2003
Basket Case; Carl Hiaasen 14/11/2003
Royal Assassin; Robin Hobb 18/11/2003
Assassin’s Quest; Robin Hobb 22/11/2003
Fool’s Errand; Robin Hobb 29/11/2003
The Politics of Experience; R. D . Laing (incl. The Bird of Paradise) 03/12/2003
Enough Rope; Lawrence Block 16/12/2003
Ilium; Dan Simmons 17/12/2003
The House of the Spirits; Isabel Allende 19/12/2003
House of Chains; Steven Erikson 23/12/2003
A Good Hanging; Ian Rankin 24/12/2003
Worlds Enough and Time; Dan Simmons 24/12/2003
The Acid House; Irvine Welsh 25/12/2003
The Book of Illusions; Paul Auster 26/12/2003
Zen Without Zen Masters; Camden Benares 26/12/2003
Light; M. John Harrison 28/12/2003
After the Quake; Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin 28/12/2003
Micro Fiction; Jerome Stern, ed. 29/12/2003

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Favorite Books of 2002

Tadhg — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:54:41 +0000

Yet again it’s taken me more than a year since the last collection of book favorites. Part of the reason for this delay is that I’ve made abortive efforts to improve the display of book information on this blog, but none of those have reached a point where I think they’re usable. So, basic text lists it is.

2002 was another year where I didn’t read that many books, 46. Looking over the list I feel as if it wasn’t a particularly great year of reading.

David Zindell’s Neverness was good, and I’ve learned that there are sequels, so I might re-read it and then read those. It’s far-future science fiction that presented a rather alien universe quite well.

The best book in the science fiction genre I read that year, however, was definitely Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, which was fantastic. The core idea, “zones of thought” in the galaxy where different physical laws apply and where certain technical advances are possible in some but not others, is extremely interesting, and the civilizations that inhabit this fictional galaxy are done well. I felt as though there were strong similarities with some aspects of the setting for Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, in a good way.

I find it hard to believe that I didn’t read the Principia Discordia until 2002, but that’s what my notes say. I feel that I should read it again and see how I feel about how it’s aged.

I think I might have read some of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series when younger, but could be wrong. It was a strong series and is definitely worth reading, but somehow didn’t compel me to devour all related materials in the way that some series do—I’ve had the fifth and sixth books around for a while and haven’t gotten to them.

60 Stories is a good collection, but it’s hard for me to recommend it over 40 Stories; really, if you like Barthelme, or you like quirky and vaguely postmodernist short stories, you should read both anthologies.

Mother Nature was a fascinating study of motherhood, and I would recomend it quite highly if you have even a passing interest in the subject.

2002 was the year I encountered George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, and it drew me in immediately. Political realism, grit, intricate plot, a strong setting, willingness to kill off just about any character—lots of things to attract me to it. I still consider it one of the best fantasy series of the last few decades, even though it’s not finished and the remaining volumes are coming very slowly.

The full list of what I read in 2002:

Deadhouse Gates; Steven Erikson 03/01/2002
Neverness; David Zindell 08/01/2002
The Falls; Ian Rankin; 08/01/2002
Resurrection Men; Ian Rankin 08/01/2002
Groucho; Stefan Kanfer 15/01/2002
A Fire Upon the Deep; Vernor Vinge 18/01/2002
The Big Sleep; Raymond Chandler (again) 02/2002
Into Thin Air; Jon Krakauer 14/03/2002
Riding the Rap; Elmore Leonard 20/03/2002
The Brethren; John Grisham 30/03/2002
Sandman: The Dream Hunters; Neil Gaiman (illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano) 31/03/2002
Ishmael; Daniel Quinn 03/05/2002
Beyond Civilization; Daniel Quinn 05/2002
Principia Discordia; Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley 04/06/2002
The History Student; Graham Jones 08/06/2002
Darkness at Noon; Arthur Koestler 10/06/2002
Strip Jack; Ian Rankin (In The St. Leonard’s Years) 20/06/2002
The Black Book; Ian Rankin (In The St. Leonard’s Years) 21/06/2002
Faster; James Gleick 24/06/2002
A Wizard of Earthsea; Ursula Le Guin 24/06/2002
The Tombs of Atuan; Ursula Le Guin 24/06/2002
The Farthest Shore; Ursula Le Guin 24/06/2002
Tehanu; Ursula Le Guin 25/06/2002
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians; Ambrose Bierce 06/2002
American Gods; Neil Gaiman 07/2002
The Third Reich: A New History; Michael Burleigh 18/07/2002
60 Stories; Donald Barthelme 20/07/2002
Smoke and Mirrors; Neil Gaiman 20/07/2002
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories; Joyce Carol Oates ed. 21/07/2002
Holy Blood Holy Grail; Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln 22/07/2002
Society Against the State; Pierre Clastres 26/07/2002
A Deepness in the Sky; Vernor Vinge 27/07/2002
Fudge 44; Graham Jones and Garret Sexton (unpublished script) 21/08/2002
Mother Nature; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy 29/08/2002
The Difference Engine; Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson; 04/09/2002
A Game of Thrones; George R R Martin 10/09/2002
A Clash of Kings; George R R Martin 15/09/2002
Angel Tech; Antero Alli 14/10/2002
A Storm of Swords; George R. R. Martin; 25/10/2002
Undoing Yourself; Christopher Hyatt 17/12/2002
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; David Eggers 21/12/2002
Slaughterhouse 5; Kurt Vonnegut 22/12/2002
River of Time; David Brin 24/12/2002
Cosmonaut Keep; Ken Macleod 25/12/2002
A Thousand Acres; Jane Smiley 26/12/2002
The Marquise of O— and other stories; Heinrich von Kleist, trans. Luke, David and Reeves, Nigel 29/12/2002

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Title Capitalization

Tadhg — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 06:15:20 +0000

I capitalize the title of my blog posts (evidently), which means that five days a week I get to consider precisley how to do that. Often, as in today’s case, it’s simple and doesn’t require any thought. But sometimes it does, and—worse—sometimes it does but I don’t notice.

I have a reasonable intuitive grasp of when initial capitals should be applied and when they shouldn’t, but not a firm understanding of the rules governing this application. Naturally, this being a matter of both English grammar and writing style, the rules aren’t perfectly clear.

An example of one I just didn’t notice: “Moving From Word Processors to reStructuredText”. Generally the rule is to not capitalize prepositions (except when at the start of the title). Since “from” is a preposition, it shouldn’t be capitalized in that title. I’m not sure why it doesn’t look wrong to me, as “to” would if it were capitalized, but unless there’s an exception I’m unaware of, it’s wrong.

This means that I need to actually think about the capitalization of titles, rather than relying on my intuition to guide me. I need to remember that a) prepositions shouldn’t be capitalized, and b) “from” is a preposition.

The latter requires more thought than it should. The formal rules of English grammar, unlike the rules of English spelling, have never entirely worked their way into the depths of my brain.

Naturally, there are also plenty of edge cases, such as: “Crows Are Smart—And Hold Grudges”. I did think about this one, and decided to leave it as “And” despite the fact that it’s a conjunction, on the basis that its role in starting a new phrase in the middle of the title gave it special status. Is this correct? I actually don’t know.

While I don’t have a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style, apparently the best resource for this particular issue, I do have a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2003 edition), which I bought more or less as soon as I read “Tense Present” (I read the longer version in Consider the Lobster). Garner doesn’t explicitly address the rules for title capitalization when you’re writing your own titles, but does cover rules for “Up-Style Headings”, and I’ve decided that there’s no reason why those rules shouldn’t also work for the titles of my blog posts. His pointers on what to capitalize:

First and last words.
“That”.
“With” if it’s close to or used with “Without”
Everything else, except:
- articles;
- conjunctions;
- prepositions shorter than five letters (usually); and
- ‘to’ in infinitive form.

(Paraphrased from p128–130. Brian Garner. Garner’s Modern American Usage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. )

Note that even here there’s a nod to how tricky it can be, with the “usually” rider in reference to the definition of short as five letters or less.

So, those are the rules I intend to follow from here on out. They still don’t tell me whether I was right or wrong about the title of “Crows Are Smart—And Hold Grudges”.

(Shamefully, this is the first time I’ve opened Garner’s Modern American Usage in years. It’s excellent, and since looking over capitalization I’ve found quite a few other tidbits, and now intend to both consult and peruse it regularly.)

Tags: Blog, books, grammar, language, writing

The Dispossessed Review

Tadhg — Fri, 01 May 2009 07:49:29 +0000

Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed won the Nebula in 1974, and the Hugo and Locus in 1975. It’s a classic of science fiction, but represents a clear break from the three preceding triple-crown winners. It’s much “softer” science fiction, with less focus on technology (even though, in a sense, a technological breakthrough is at the core of the plot) and more focus on social and political issues.

There are really two key stories in it, both of which focus on a collectivist anarchist society on a poor, relatively inhospitable planet, Anarres. This society was founded by political exiles from the richer sister planet, Urras. The narrative, which is split into a contemporary stream and a flashback stream, is about a phycisist from Anarres, Shevek, his life, and his journey to Urras as the first person from Anarres to visit Urras since the exiles founded their society.

As an exploration of what it means to be human, examined in the light of vastly different circumstances, it is a tour de force. LeGuin does an excellent job of illustrating the impact of social differences on individuals, and her characters are compelling and realistic. Further, the societies themselves seem realistic, and perhaps the most radical aspect of the novel is not the story of the founding of Anarres, coming out of industrial capitalism on Urras, but the demonstration of the need for a kind of revolution on Anarres itself, one hundred and seventy years later.

As an anarchist, I’m probably predisposed to like the book, but I think that it’s an excellent inquiry into the nature of freedom itself, and into the question of what it is, and how it relates to community, safety, custom, law, and money.

I now want to read “To Read The Dispossessed“, Samuel R. Delany’s critique of the novel, to see what Delany felt its weaknesses were. It certainly has some, and I do think that stylistic issues are why I had trouble getting into it when I first read it in 1999. I’m sure that there are many significant arguments to be made against its vision of how Anarresti society would work, and exploring those would be fruitful. Nevertheless, it’s an important and powerful portrait of a society built entirely on the notion of individual freedom, a modern industrial society deliberately engineered to be without a state, and in its examination of the problems such a society might face, it raises issues that are relevant to the key question of “how do we get there from here?”

It’s my favorite, by quite a margin, of the triple-crown winners I’ve read so far this year (Ringworld, The Gods Themselves, Rendezvous with Rama), which I wouldn’t necessarily have thought before reading it this month, and I highly recommend it.

Tags: books, reading, reviews

tadhg.com » books

Favorite Books of 2008

Related Posts

Doomsday Book Review

Related Posts

Speaker for the Dead Review

Related Posts

Startide Rising Review

Related Posts

Rendezvous with Rama Review

Related Posts

Test-Driven Development: A Bad Example

Related Posts

Dreamsnake Review

Related Posts

Favorite Books of 2007

Related Posts

Favorite Books of 2006

Related Posts

Gateway Review

Related Posts

Favorite Books of 2005

Related Posts

Favorite Books of 2004

Related Posts

The Forever War Review

Related Posts

Favorite Books of 2003

Related Posts

Favorite Books of 2002

Related Posts

Title Capitalization

Related Posts

The Dispossessed Review

Related Posts