I am not a teller of stories, at least not yet; while I can spin words when I put my finger to the keyboard, if you ask me to speak stories in person, I’m likely to stammer and step all over them, and fail to communicate nearly as much as I succeed. I couldn’t survive in the Homeric world; my skillz wouldn’t be leet enough.
But this was a momentous weekend, at least symbolically, and so I will try.
I am no longer a student. I have earned my JD. I’ve spent four years feeling like I can’t commit everything I want to to work, and can’t commit everything I want to to school, and can’t commit to everything I want to with my husband, or my friends and family, or my health, or anything. There have been times where I’ve felt like I’m failing at everything, and otherwise I’ve mostly just felt like i’m getting by. And yet: I was promoted this spring. And, pending grades from my final quarter, I’m currently in the top 10% of my class (and just outside the top 5%), am graduating with honors, and am graduating with a better law school GPA than my undergraduate or high school GPAs.
Also inside: the best science fiction novel i’ve read since perdido street station (and possibly since the week during which I read ender’s game and the doomsday book in the same week), and a history of coffee.
The weekend began, ridiculously enough given that I had no time off work, on Thursday. Thursday morning I rose from bed, where I’d had little sleep, and after some woolgathering and coffee-drinking, set out to finish the task for the week. I organized my thoughts, finished adding the missing section of my paper, revamped the conclusion (adding as much again as I’d added in the lost section), and then called it done: forty five pages, twelveish thousand words. A paper fit for publishing (perhaps; that was, at any rate the goal – it doesn’t have to be published, but it has to be publishable, a descriptor I think is dubious absent an actual publication). After some not very productive time at work, I printed out a couple copies of it, and drove to school, where I turned it in: the last assignment.
It’s a nice feeling, to have studied a small corner of the law so well that I now know more about it than almost anyone. It’s one of the first times I’ve actually felt the pleasure of specialization, rather than the pain of having to restrict my curiousity and focus on one thing: unless the law changes, and I fail to keep abreast of the change, I am now an ‘expert’ on a ridiculously narrow topic. (The summary version: back in the early part of the last decade, the Supreme Court decided a couple of cases whose holding basically was that, in cases where a mandatory sentencing scheme is set up so that the presence of an aggravated factor [such as, the crime being the result hatred for a particular religious group], the presence of the aggravated factor must be found by a jury, not a judge. The Court, without really justifying itself well, carved out a single exception: the fact that the dude had a prior conviction can be found by the sentencing judge without a jury’s determination. But what if the judge has to decide whether the prior conviction were particularly cruel, say, or whether the crime underlying the prior conviction had been done because of an impermissibly biased motive, etc? That’s the topic of my paper. 
)
It was also a surprising relieving feeling to be done. I hadn’t expected that; I hadn’t realized just how much stress was entailed simply in having the responsibility of being a student, even if I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed by whatever I needed to be doing just now – a low-lying underlying stress and worry which was present even when I wasn’t actively feeling overwhelmed, a constant undercurrent which only became noticeable when it was gone. It was gone. I was free. It felt glorious.
I picked up my cap and gown, drove back to work, and had a fight with a coworker. The short version: the project I was loaned out to is close to shipping, and one of the engineers is responding out of self-interest to the incentives that the management team has set up rather than responding out of concern for the quality of the product. In this case, the incentives are actively counterproductive and will result in a lower quality outcome, because people are so worried about how things look that they will sacrifice function for beauty, and prefer to paper over blemishes rather than admit that they are there and come up with a plan to remedy them later. This isn’t how I roll, and I find the experience of working with someone who does roll that way borderline infuriating.
I left the fight for the gym, had a nice workout, and then went to the weekend’s most somber event: dinner with erik’s widow and some friends of his that I mostly don’t know very well. I’ve gotten better over the years at making small talk with strangers, but this wierd semi-stranger state is harder, and the context made it difficult. I was glad to have gone – Erik dominated my thoughts for much of the week – but it was awkward nonetheless.
——–
Friday I was wiped out and didn’t want to get moving in the morning, and almost didn’t get the day started. I made it into work, got more work done than I’d expected, managed to get a brief gym trip in, and then drove to the city for dinner, with my husband, and my visiting uncle and my best friend and his wife. J had picked a set of restaurants for me to pick from (the weekend being mine); the list consisted of restaurants on the michelin ‘bib gourmand’ list (they don’t have stars, but they’re recommended for good value at a reasonable price). So Friday night we went to Colibri Mexican Bistro, whose food wasn’t spicy at all but was quite flavorful and very good.
Before dinner, after we’d been seated but before my friend and his wife arrived, my uncle gave me a graduation present: a pocket watch. which he’d gotten from his mother. which she’d gotten from her father.
I’m not a pocket watch kinda guy. Hell, I think watches in general are obsolete technology, supplanted by the cell phone. I would never buy such a thing. And yet … there’s something kinda neat about a century plus old family heirloom, given to me with respect; I cannot help but be touched by it. And … there are times, in my profession-of-becoming, when the ostentatious use of a pocket watch would be appropriate, and there are times when cell phones simply aren’t allowed and a pocket watch would be, and in those times, I will use this gift.
——–
Saturday was a bit rushed. I’d originally planned for a hike in the morning, but just didn’t feel like it; instead, we went to breakfast at an old favorite restaurant of our houseguests (who used to live up here but have not in five years – the waitress still recognized them, which was awesome). Then, after some hangout time while J baked a tart, I shaved, gathered my stuff, and drove to the city, where my friend B had lunch and a brief walk in the park. By the time we got back to the garage so I could change, J’s parents had shown up, along with his godfather, and I wandered around for a while trying to figure out where the overflow room for the ticketless was; I gave up on this task (which turned out to be unnecessary as he scored a last minute free ticket from someone), and went to go assemble for the giant class picture.
In your first year of law school, you take all your classes with the same cohort, and for the night cohort, at least, there was a strong bond between us. Most of that cohort switched to the full time program after their first year, and graduated last year (I didn’t go to their graduation, but I was still reeling from Erik’s death). But there were a small handful of us left, and we gathered together during the general milling about, and congratulated each other, and hugged each other, and generally kept each other company for one last time. The picture taking process was painful – how do you corral two hundred plus giddy soon-to-be-ex-law-students and get them to smile on cue? – and the photographer seemed flummoxed by the process.
After the picture, we milled about, as you do when you’re playing the hurry-up-and-wait game, and eventually they formed us into lines, where we contined to mill about, and then they marched us in.
Graduation was in a cathedral. My school was a Jesuit school, built long ago; the stained glass was stunning, the artwork behind the altar was phenomenal, the decorations on the pillars were neat, and the flowers they had strung between the pillars across the base of the arches (not visible in the picture) were just awesome. The setting was regal, and majesterial, and just right for a ceremony. I’m not a believer in ceremony as a day-to-day thing – in another era they would have said I don’t stand on ceremony – but for major events, it’s an important thing, to have the ritual to mark the transition, to have the ritual to solidify the feeling of completion and closure. It’s not necessary for the completion or closure, but it enhances and solidifies it, and marks it, and calls it out for its significance. And having this building for this ritual enhanced it immensely.
We filed in, through the audience in the back, to our seats in the front.
The student speaker is a guy I quite like, who is somewhere between an acquaintance and a friend, who has this phenomenal openness and energy and joy that he brings to everything he does, who is one of those people who can bring anyone out of a dark mood by simply being himself and being there; his speech was phenomenal. J found it banal and lacking in any original thought or feeling; the graduating class by and large loved it. I wonder how much of this was the delivery – and the fact that we were up front and so heard him, and saw him, better than those further back – and how much of this was us reacting less to his words than to him as a person, his joy and his faith speaking so strongly to his community that it bouyed us. (Well, not all of it; I cried. He dedicated the speech to erik, and he talked, from the heart, about how erik had inspired him; and while that was just a part of the speech, a single section in a larger hole, it meant a lot to me, and even though I knew it was coming, I could not hold back the tears. Tears which had lifted by the end of the speech, to be replaced with the joy that comes as a byproduct of catharsis, and the feeling that we were together, as a community, for the last time – but that we will carry the community with us, wherever we go, forever).
The formal graduation speech, delivered by California Supreme Court Justice Ming Chin, sucked. It had one great section, where he talked about how his parents had come here and how they had cherished the freedom they found as immigrants building a new life in a new land, and what that freedom meant; but mostly it was a speech about himself, and what he had done for the world (including bizarre things like his recent dinner with Leon Panetta and how great a guy Panetta is, and the flag he got from Panetta’s son in Afghanistan). It was laced with conservative politics, which irritated many of my classmates; but that wasn’t the problem in my mind: the problem was that he utterly failed to tie any of it back to the graduating class, to our hopes and aspirations for the future. And, tellingly, while he talked about how personal responsibility is the other side of liberty, he never laid a charge on us, or spelled out what he thinks our responsibility, as either citizens or lawyers, is, to help preserve and protect the American system which he loves so much. If his speech were a slashdot post, I would have rated it -1 OFFTOPIC. It was a terrible, terrible disappointment.
(I’ve heard it speculated that he’s retiring soon – the man is, after all, 68 – and that this speech was in part a valedictory; and, as a valedictory, the speech might have worked. But as a commencement address, it was just terrible.)
My guests and I hung out a bit after graduation and I mingled; then we hightailed it up the road to Troya, for a late dinner (graduation had coincided in time with the rapture-which-wasn’t, leaving us to spend much joking about how we’d clearly be safe because were in a church at the time of the coming rapture). Dinner was phenomenal; it’s certainly not a good place for everyday food, but it was very, very good, nonetheless.
Everyone except me went home (past people’s bedtime); I went to a friend’s party, where she and her family (and her sibling’s friends), and her undergraduate friends, were hanging out playing beer pong. I’d expected more classmates, and was somewhat bummed to not find them there, but hung out anyway; I didn’t want the evening to end, and – while it was awkward at first – hanging out and talking to new people energizes me now, unlike a decade or two ago.
I made it home at 4.
———
My mother in law, at my request, hosted a brunch today, and J, and our guests, and I, wandered down to her house around 10 (note the implied lack of sleep in these two numbers). Some other local friends came, as well as friends of my mother-in-law’s; we hung out until three or so. J and I came home, we cuddled and $redacted; I cooked a sausage curry for dinner. I tried to go to the gym, but gave up when my body told me that it was too tired and I should go f- myself; so I came home and wrote this, instead.
———
In the just over two weeks since my last book update, I’ve read two new books. (Yeah, that’s not very many. But: Finals. But: Final Paper. But: rereading old books because I can. The internet is really really great.
Embassytown arrived on my Kindle Tuesday, at an amazingly inconvenient time. (Must. Finish. Paper. Must. Hangout. With. Guests. Etc). I read some of it at lunch on tues and weds, some at the gym on weds and thurs, a little bit friday night as everyone else slept, and then finished it in a blast this afternoon.
It is one of the best science fiction novels i’ve ever read.
I’ve liked China Mieville for a long time. I thought Perdido Street Station and The Scar were incredible. King Rat and Un Lon Don were a lot of fun. But … the Iron Council bored me, I couldn’t finish The City & The City (because the MacGuffin was simply so unreassonable in my mind that I couldn’t get past it), and Kraken … I liked Kraken, but it was a bizarre, frenetic, borderline incomprehensible in-joke which got tiresome and overwhelming.
Embassytown, on the other hand, is simply brilliant. It compares favorably with PSS and The Scar; it may even be better than they are.
It starts off very slow; much like the first third of The Fellowship of the Ring serves to set up the characters and build the atmosphere of the universe, the (long) first act of Embassytown is about setting the atmosphere, infusing it into the story and letting it steep. It’s utterly required for the rest of the book to work, but it’s a bit slow at times, and there was a point where I thought the book was going nowhere … and then everything snapped into place, and the book went from being pleasant atmospheric world-building to being a gripping thrilling story of revolutionaries in a desparate struggle to prevent an incomprehensible end-of-the-world catastrophe, against one of the best illuminations of alienness I’ve ever seen. Yeah, there’s something in the MacGuffin, near the end, which stretches credulity almost to the breaking point … but it doesn’t matter, because the story is otherwise so compelling, and the almost-past-the-breaking-point-of-credulity concept fits so well in the context of the story, that I could easily forgive it. In the end, the total package was just fscking incredible. It’s literally been many, many years since I’ve been this blown away by a science fiction nvoel.
(I should note that almost all of the negative reviews on Amazon are from people who gave up before the shift from slow atmospheric worldbuilding to bizarre crisis tale. I get it; it was slow, and you have to either like this sort of thing or believe in the payoff to get past it. But … I also think it was necessary that it be this way; the payoff wouldn’t work without the time spent steeping in the atmosphere of the world).
(Yeah, I had a similarly strong reaction to the Half-Made World. But (a) that was fantasy. (b) this is better – because, oddly enough, it works as a commentary on the real world in a way that the Half-Made World does not. I don’t think this was intended as allegory. But it works beautifully as one, which makes it all the more impressive).
Uncommon Grounds is a history of the modern coffee industry. It’s primarily a history of the American consumer coffee industry, with an occasional tip of the hat to the European consumer; but you can’t discuss that really without discussing the history of the producer industry. It wasn’t as good as Fur, Fortune, and Empire, but it was good enough.
The book actually answered one long-standing question I’ve had: why did 70s and 80s mainstream coffee suck? (The synopsis answer: there was a tremendous coffee shortage in the late 40s and early 50s as a result of a disastrous freeze in Brazil, which supplied most American coffee; the roasters responded not by raising prices as the commodity coffee price rose, but by (a) substituting in lower quality beans, (b) mixing chaff into the grind, and (c) running advertising campaigns about how you could stretch your coffee further with their grounds). And it brought to my attention another interesting question: back in the nineteenth century, coffee retailers sold unroasted beans, which people roasted themselves; why the shift to preroasted? (This was apparently driven by a combination of the invention of vacuum sealed packages and the desire of distributors to build brand names using the roast as the hook for the brand identity). Sadly, it didn’t explain how the abomination of preground coffee became the general mass market alternative. :{
——
As I said above, I am no longer a student. I have earned my JD. I’ve spent four years feeling like I can’t commit everything I want to to work, and can’t commit everything I want to to school, and can’t commit to everything I want to with my husband, or my friends and family, or my health, or anything. There have been times where I’ve felt like I’m failing at everything, and otherwise I’ve mostly just felt like i’m getting by. And yet: I was promoted this spring. And, pending grades from my final quarter, I’m currently in the top 10% of my class (and just outside the top 5%), am graduating with honors, and am graduating with a better law school GPA than my undergraduate or high school GPAs.
I didn’t think I would be, but you know what: I’m proud of this. Doing it became so normal that after a while i ceased to think of it as anything out of the ordinary. And yet … the relief I felt when I was done puts the lie to that.
I’m done.
Yeah, I have to study for the bar. details. It’s just work; I don’t have the terror of it that my classmates do, and it’s something different, not tied to the law school schedule, more in my control, without responsibility to anyone except myself. And in the meantime. No more school for me. Perhaps forever; perhaps only for a handful of years. Either way, it feels great.
Blather and books
It’s been a good day, mostly – work was a bit rough, because I’m dealing with a new product on new hardware and my primary contact hordes information and is not helpful (and not interested, it seems, in camaraderie with his coworkers), leaving me feeling clueless and like an idiot. But this will pass … and since i’m currently a hired gun brought in to help some other team, I can put on my mercenary hat and, beyond not liking feeling like an idiot, not care.
My first final was tonight – election law. Functionally five questions – one dealing with preclearance under VRA section 5, one dealing with a challenge to at-large districts under VRA section 2, one dealing with the constitutionality of a measure to ban (local) campaign contributions by foreign corporations, one dealing with the single-subject rule for initiatives, and one dealing with the substantial compliance rule for minor technical errors in initiatives. Just over 5k words written in two hours (I finished early. so did half the class.)
I got the “polished draft” on my paper (finished in the immediate post-coachella no-sleep zombie mood; I think the last 5 pages of the 32 are crap, and I ran out of time for an entire section about how the ninth circuit handles the issue under discussion). The prof’s comments boiled down to: this was really well written, you could probably just paginate it and turn it back in as the final. (Thanks, I think. I hate it when I’m harsher than the reviewer is, because it makes me think the reviewer isn’t doing their job or being honest. Still, nice to get that kind of feedback from an authority figure, it will reduce my nervousness as I finalize it in a week).
I’m finding it unusually hard to care about politics and the news. (FFS. the news is still going on about OBL.) I had a moment of obsessing over election results Monday night, because obsessing over election results is an independently fun thing to do, and because I care about Canada more than I care about any country other than my own. But otherwise … I can make it through the newspaper, maybe. But I have no desire to listen to NPR (and am listening to the local corporate modern rock station instead, when not to headphones), and my reading has shifted almost entirely to fiction and not history.
It’s even so bad that I didn’t vote in an election this week. It was a minor election – a local, mail-ballot only election, to elect a new county supervisor; the old one had resigned to become the county clerk. The issue with this is that because the county is sandwiched between two large cities, the county really doesn’t have its own media market – no tv, radio, or newspapers really local to the county, so there’s very little coverage of local issues. To really understand county supervisor stuff, I need to do a lot of research on the net, and go to candidate debates, etc … which is hard to factor in while working and going to school, particularly hard in a month where i’m away for a week at a music festival, and somewhat pointless when i’m moving out of the county in four months and so really just don’t give a shit. So … I didn’t vote. I didn’t even bother to send in the unvoted ballot as an undervote (which would cause my voter record to show me as having voted). I just … couldn’t be bothered to care.
Which … is the first time in my adult life that’s been true. It feels wierd. It feels wrong, as if I’ve somehow betrayed myself. And yet. I really don’t give a shit who the new county supervisor is. It’s been more than 24 hours since the election, and I haven’t even checked the results.
—-Feb/Mar/Apr books
I haven’t been reading much new. I’ve been rereading a lot of stuff I’ve read before – the robots & empire series, some of the stephen king stuff i liked, the four lords of the diamond series (nowhere near as good as i remember), the first dozen anita blake novels (trash, but fun), the Foundation novels, Battle Circle …
But I’ve read some:
The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
I loved the Name of the Wind, so it was only natural that as soon as I knew about the Wise Man’s Fear, I ordered it, and it arrived, a giant hardback, the day it was published. (I’d ordered it before I bought my kindle).
It was good. Perhaps not as good as the Name of the Wind, but it held up well, far better than many second books I could name. IT was entertaining, and kept my attention throughout.
And yet.
The underlying presumption of the story is that something *big* must have happened to Kvothe, to drive him into hiding and to set the great sense of despair which looms over him. And yet, at the end of book two, there is nothing that looks like it might be setting the stage for that. It’s not clear that there is room in book three to set that up … and worse yet, the structure of the series suggests that book three has to end with something which resolves the problem, which causes Kvothe to snap back into the world. Some realization which cures the despair. It’s even harder to see how there’s room for that.
All of which is to say: book 2 was good, but I’m really, really worried that book 3 won’t be able to pull off the conclusion in a way that makes the entire trilogy satisfying as a whole.
The Land of Painted Caves, by Jean M Auel
This book is, I think, the paradigm example of why I’m worried about Rothfuss. The Clan of the Cave Bear was awesome, the immediate two sequels were pretty good, and the last three books have all sucked. Painted Caves sucks for two completely unrelated reasons. For one thing, the writing quality has deteriorated, and it almost feels as though Auel is going through the motions rather than writing stories she finds compelling about characters she loves. For another … there’s an overpowering sense of ennui and disappointment; the earlier books suggested that Ayla has a grand destiny, which just doesn’t pan out in a way which justifies the fanfare. :{
Immortality, by Kevin Bohacz
I’m embarassed to admit that I remember virtually nothing about this book. I read it in a blaze (a day or two, if I recall correct – it was back in February). I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it, but it left no lasting impression, which can’t possibly be a good recommendation.
The Enterprise of Death, by Jesse Bullington
This was a highly entertaining light fantasy involving a lesbian necromancer placed under a horrible curse, and the friends she met along the way of trying to free herself from it. A deep, compelling, moving novel it wasn’t; it was, instead, a fantastic, amusing romp.
Hounded, by Kevin Hearne
Technically a May book – I just read it yesterday, based on a recommendation from Scalzi’s site. It was another fun romp; a fun romp involving an ancient druid living in Arizona. It was everything I wanted Norse Code to be and more. (Plus, the picture on the front is cute.)
The Half-Made World, by Felix Gilman
The best novel I’ve read so far this year. It’s a travesty that it wasn’t nominated for a Hugo. (Particularly since Blackout/All Clear was). It’s a fascinating, fantastic mystery set in a peculiar world with well-drafted magical elements. Somewhat bizarrely given the title and the fact that the world in question is, well, half-made, it’s the worldbuilding which truly made the novel. (I’d tried Gilman before and disliked him – Thunderer seemed like a failed attempt to imitate China Mieville – but in this book, Gilman has really hit his stride, and the novel was simply awesome).
The Native Star, by MK Hobson
Steampunk is in this season. Steampunk zombies are particularly in this season. Dreadnought was the epitomy of this a year or two ago, although the sequel failed to hold my attention. The Native Star is a fine implementation of that this year – better than Dreadnought in my mind, because the world is more interesting and complex, the view of America more detailed, and the story more deeply layered. I loved this book enough that I ordered the sequel on spec, as soon as I knew it existed.
The Hidden Goddess, by MK Hobson
This wasn’t as good as The Native Star, but that’s not unusual. It took a bit to get into, to fall back into the rhythm of the story, and the complexity of the story seemed periodically overwhelming. And yet, by mid book, the story was engaging, and the ending was well thought-out and well executed.
The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, and The Last Olympian, by Rick Riordan
These were entertaining light (juvenile) fantasy. The first book was particularly good, and as normal the second and fifth were less compelling (books 3 and 4 were unreadable due to formatting issues).
Breakthrough! How the 10 Greatest Discoveries in Medicine Saved Millions, by Jon Queijo
Meh. The stories were interesting pop history-of-science. But the book was .. how shall I say it? A combination of too light, with some nasty internal contradictions, and it left me with a general sense of wondering how well sourced it was. Not a good trait in a history book. But what can I expect, really, for free kindle books?
I haven’t finished a single history book in this time (other than Breakthrough); I haven’t even really gotten more than a fifth of the way through one. History requires too much concentration for what I have to spare right now.
January/February Books:
The kindle is having odd effects on my reading habits. It seems to make me read more slowly (not because of the page turning, but because somehow high-level skimming seems harder). But, more importantly, because I subscribe to two newspapers, it means a fair amount of time is consumed by newspapers. Moreover, short stories are viable in a way they weren’t before – carrying around a big book of short stories is a non-starter, but reading a short story over lunch isn’t so much a problem when it’s on a kindle. (And don’t even get me started on erotica).
The net result is I don’t have many books to show for the last five weeks (although, to be fair, this time period has included reading the longest court opinion ever handed down by the California Supreme Court, and one of the longest ever handed down by the US Supreme Court; school time can cut into reading time, sometimes).
And I’ve read parts of three other books, but it doesn’t count until I’m either finished or give up on them. The Kindle promotes book switching even more than I had done before; I can carry multiples with me, which means that switching is easier than when I could only carry one.
Note: I’m writing this while drinking a mix of black cherry soda and vodka, and I’m already drunk, so this may have drunk diary potential.
- Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi
This was actually the first book I bought in ebook format – last summer, when I thought I would try using the Kindle reader on my PC. (It was a failed experiment, not worth repeating). The book took a while for me to warm up to; it didn’t grab me the way The Windup Girl did. Still, it grew on me.
The story centers on two children (it’s a juvenile novel – many science fiction writers seem to have gone off and done juveniles in the last few years, and usually I avoid them, but it’s Paolo Bacigalupi!) who are growing up in an impoverished community where the children are expected to work scavenging goods from broken down ships (as children actually do, in parts of India, today). Events happen which change the world; the protagonist goes off into the wider world and comes of age in response to them; and the ending, unusually for the genre, is ambivalent.
It was very well done, and serves to bolster Bacigalupi’s reputation as one of the great science fiction authors of today.
- Servant of the Underworld, Aliette de Bodard
I have no memory of why I picked this book up (although I do remember a note of surprise when reading her story in the January Asimov’s: wait, this writing seems familiar … oooh, that’s it!
). But it was a great read; I ripped through it in about two nights and immediately bought the sequel. It’s a murder mystery set in a fantasy world modeled on the Aztecs; the Gods are real, magic is real, but the setting and mood derive as strongly as possible from the record of Aztec civilization. It was *quite* well pulled off.
- >Harbinger of the Storm, Aliette de Bodard
This was less good. It wasn’t bad, but … some of the charm had worn off, and it suffers a bit from second-book syndrome. The story seemed forced, the characters slightly out of character, and the worldbuilding less compelling. A disappointment.
- Bright of the Sky, Kay Kenyon
Ye Gods. Where to begin? I picked this up because it was free. As in beer. And, free as in beer is kinda good for an ebook, right? (I mean: I fell in love with the writing of Brandon Sanderson this way). And … it was awful. First, its font and the use of white space of the ebook edition sucked donkey balls, but that’s cosmetic. The writing itself left much to be desired. It took me two and a half weeks to read the thing, not because I was slow, but because every time I picked it up, it put me to sleep; getting through it was a slog …
until the last 20% of the book, when it suddenly became interesting, fast-paced, and entertaining. And then it ended on a cliffhanger.
I don’t know if the 80% was worth the 20%. And I’m curious about the rest, but not enough to buy them. Maybe library books? In a bit I’ll need something to read in the gym.
- The Return of the Great Depression, by Vox Day
This book has some seriously wierd pricing going on. It sells hardcover for $17.98, but the ebook version is $1.59. I’d think it was a mistake, but it’s been like that for well more than a month.
Anyhow, I picked this up after commenting in channel about the pricing oddity, mostly because I figured it might be worth reading and the price was sure to go up, right?
The book is simultaneously three things: a critique of modern economic theory, an analysis of the economic crisis of 2008, and a prediction of the future.
One of his underlying premises is that the cause of the 2008 crisis was really a global overabundance of debt, which the author blames in part on the perfidy of fractional reserve banking. The fear of debt unwinding has resulted in policies which encourage more debt-taking, causing a spiral which will inevitably end in a debt crisis: the debt *will* unwind, and it will take down the global economy with it.
One of his other underlying premises is that economic data – inflation, gdp, etc – are useless; they are so fundamentally flawed that there’s no point in using them to discuss anything, so we should instead ignore them and argue from first principles. (While I’m with him on the first claim, this one seriously gets under my pragmatic engineer skin: if the problem is the data sucks, then let’s get better data rather than ignoring data altogether).
His third underlying premise is that economic modeling is impossible because the systems are simply too complicated to model in a meaningful fashion. It relies on conceptual oversimplification which is so extreme as to render itself useless.
(At this point, I found myself wondering how he can possibly predict anything with that set of assumptions).
His fourth underlying premise is that Keynes sought theories and data to support his preconceived notions, and therefore his theories are unreliable, and his idea of countering the business cycle was wrongheaded. (to which i’d respond: well, they’ve never really been put into practice, because politics seems to make it impossible for a democratic state to pursue countercylical policies).
His fifth underlying premise is that monetarism is just wrong: it was another attempt to defeat the business cycle using technocratic methods, and 1990s Japan and modern America have proven it to be a failure.
His sixth underlying premise is that the Fed exists to promote inflation (and has reduced the value of $1 to $.05 since its creation)
So, basically: it’s an assault on everything you think you know about economics. He has some good points (particularly about the problem with data), and some of his policy proscriptions are good ones … but he undermines his case with a combination of strident insistance on ideological purity, surrender to the vice of being easily distracted, and geeky arrogance. It’s hard to get past the messenger, sometimes.
- Last Call
This book was a Christmas present, and I read it entirely at the gym.
It’s a retelling of the story of the politics behind prohibition: the long struggle of the Anti-Saloon League and its allies to ban alcohol, and the unravelling after prohibition was imposed.
A couple interesting points:
(a) in the nineteenth century, alcohol consumption was associated in the public imagination with men who shirked their responsibilities and failed to take care of their wives and children. That’s a large enough sin today, but in that era, when women were essentially financially dependant, it was a huge problem.
(b) proponents of prohibition allied with the womens’ suffrage movement (because it was assumed that newly-voting women would side with the prohibitionists) and supported the federal income tax (because this would allow the abolition of the alcohol excise tax, one of the primary sources of federal government funding). In an ironic twist, much of the push for repeal came from wealthy Rockefeller-Republican types who thought that repeal would reduce the income tax. (They were, mostly, wrong).
(c) the South, despite its strong endorsement of prohibition locally, and despite its reluctance to repeal, wasn’t very supportive of federal prohibition, for reasons like this: prohibition would give too much power to the federal government, and Loving v Virginia would be its inevitable end. (Although, once prohibition was a done deal and the debate had moved on to how the alcohol interests should be compensated for the deprivation of their property, at least one southerner argued that because the slaveholders hadn’t been compensated, neither should the liquor and beer interests.
(d) Prohibition was a failure pretty much from the start. Part of this was because the Harding administration didn’t put enough resources into it, part of it was just the sheer magnitude of the task. Importers set up barges just outside the international waters lines – as in, long rows of barges – where people could sail out under cover of night and get some; smuggling across the border from Quebec was common. English Canada, which had its own prohibition rules, turned a blind eye to production for outgoing smuggling. When Canada cracked down and enforced rules that stuff have legal destinations, St. Pierre became a major transhipment point, and had its biggest economic boom since the 1580s.
(e) The rules were riddled through with exceptions (home production of cider, for example; medical use of alcohol by prescription) which drinkers drove a truck through.
(f) by the end of prohibition, while actual quantities of alcohol had dropped, drinking had become glamorous.
Kind of makes you wonder, if marijuana prohibition ever ends, if it will have a moment of glamour, too.
Anyhow, it was a very good book on a largely forgotten topic.
- The Lavender Scare
Another Christmas present, read at the gym.
As a kid, learning about the 1950s, you learn about the red scare – the theory that the US government was overrun with Communists, followed by intrusive investigations and a purge, spreading out through society via blacklists of suspected Communists.
What they don’t teach you about, what America has largely forgotten about, is that there was simultaneously a panic about “sex perverts” in government – sex perverts who, it was believed, outnumbered communists and who threatened America more than the communists did.
This was exaggerated by the Republicans to whip up opposition to the Truman administration, and Truman responded to this the same way he did to the Red Scare: investigations and a purge. A purge which was intensified by the Eisenhower administration. During the course of this purge, homosexuality and communism became associated in the public imagination (despite the fact that the communist states were even less tolerant of homosexuality than the US was, and despite the fact that there was no statistical correlation between the two). But it extended far beyond government; private industry adopted the homosexual purge into its own security screenings, because gays were a “security risk”: weak of character, talkative, involved in a secret worldwide cabal of homosexuals, untrustworthy.
Eventually, gay employees began to resist, and by the end of the 1960s they got a court order forcing the government to stop firing people who were arrested for having gay sex; the policy brought about its own death. But it took a while, and many lives were harmed in the process – harmed or ended, as it was quite common for fired gay federal government employees to react to the disgrace and the shame by killing themselves.
It’s a dark corner of US history, and I can understand why many would prefer to forget it. But we shouldn’t; it’s a striking reminder that intolerance can lead to evil, even in a democracy. And it provides a contrast to the way we treated Muslims over the last decade, showing that even though we have not reached the promised land, we hew much closer to our ideals today than we did then.
It was another very good book on an obscure and forgotten topic.
- The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han
Another Christmas present, read at the gym.
I have a hard time understanding Chinese history. It’s a subject which is opaque to me; surveys often fail because I can’t visualize the geography and the way that names shift location over time, not to mention the problem of names which look similar to me but which aren’t actually all that similiar (imagine, say, the difference between Prussia and Russia to one not versed in European history). Non-surveys often fail for me because they assume too much knowledge.
This brief, focused tome on the Qin and Han eras, was a good partial antidote to that. It began by explaining the geography of the region, then explained the way the political culture of the warring states evolved, thereby allowing the basis for a picture of the Qin as one of the warring states, with a political economy based on conscript militry service and direct administration of the localities by the center, which achieved military pre-eminence and was thus able to replicate its internal system over the entirety of China. The problem, of course, was that once they’d conquered everywhere, the state failed the transition from a state based on conquest to one based on the steady-state occupation of existing territory (a problem Rome encountered, as well); the state collapsed within a generation of successful unification.
It was replaced in relatiely short order by the Han, who kept most of their institutions but managed to not be dependant on constant expansion. However, this state too built the seeds of its own destruction: it kept internal peace by being somewhat less centralized than the Qin, meaning that over time power slowly devolved away from the center. Worse yet, it failed to prevent the concentration of land ownership (the Qin had regularly broken up large landholdings and redistributed them to peasants), creating a situation where peasants were dependant clients of the large landholders, increasing the power of the landholders vis-a-vis the state. And, perhaps worse of all, it abolished conscription and did away with the army internally, using professional soldiers and convicts to man the frontiers; when the frontiers were penetrated, there was no central military power in the interior, and the landlords ended up having to raise their own armies to protect themselves. An intolerable situation for any stat.e
I feel like I’d have to read the book again to be sure I’d gotten everything, but it’s nice to have a solid background for future understanding of a period of Chinese history. This is something I’ve wanted for some time.
Amusing quote from a science fiction story
“I don’t have a problem with government. It’s like mild psoriasis, annoying but ignorable most of the time. If it flares up you just rub some emolument on it and it goes away for a while.”
–Ware of the Worlds, Michael Alexander.
December Books
You’d think with the holidays and all I would have read more in December, but apparently not; I only got through eight books in their entirety, although I’ve gotten through a smattering of others (half of a reread of Eifelheim, for example, and some of Gardner Dozois’ 2010 compendium of science fiction stories, and part of Last Call … but those aren’t finished.
I feel diminished by my slower reading speed. 
The Vanished Kingdom: Travels through the History of Prussia
A relative got this one for me off of my Amazon wishlist as a birthday present. As often happens when people do that, it wasn’t quite what I’d expected.
It isn’t a bad book, but it’s not really a history book. It’s more of a travel book: someone driving around old east prussia and talking about the history of places he encounters. The history is interesting, but it’s incomplete; more than anything else it renders an impressionist image of the history of Prussia, rather than an actual history.
Still, it contains one of the best expressions of nationalism I’ve ever seen, something that really doesn’t register for Americans but which rings true for Germans, and many others:
To plant your feet in the ground, to know it’s yours and that the beautiful fields and the woods so carefully tended are only that way because your family made it that way – that is my idea of a homeland. And I do not mean that your father, or even your grandfather, hierd a few men with a team of oxen or a tractor to clear your land, and then you farmed it. I mean ancestors you never knew about, hundreds of years ago, who first had to fight for the land and Christianize it, had to lose it perhaps, then win it back again I don’t know how many times before they could truly call it their own. Always, always prepared to die for it! That’s what Prussia means to me. The land out there has been a sponge for my family. It soaked out our sweat and our blood and it bloomed like an oasis in the desert. I am old enough now to realize that I will never see it again as something mine in the legal sense. Because of that, I’ll never go back there to visit it, though I know I could. It would be too much pain.
Part of belonging to an immigrant society is that my ancestors deliberately abandoned whatever feelings of this sort they had, to seek a new land where things would be better. My grandfather’s family is ancient, on these shores, and yet even it can trace no more than three hundred years … and during that time it has moved so frequently that there is no patch of land which any of us could point to and say, this has been a sponge for our family. So this long-term association with a single parcel, this sense that it is imbued with the sweat and blood of ancestors, is emotionally baffling to me.
(It does not help, perhaps, that I have no connection, really, with any ancestors beyond my grandmother’s generation, or with any other than my grandmother in her generation; that simply serves to make the overall concept even more incredible).
This was a light (in the sense that it wasn’t very difficult or serious reading), entertaining, and dark (in the sense that the characters in it come out of a very, very unpleasant world; the main character is running from an abusive father, and his relationship with his absent mother plays a huge part in the book’s plot). It wasn’t a great piece of science fiction – and the macguffin is particularly silly – but it was highly entertaining, and much, much, much better than the movie, which took everything interesting from the story and abandoned it in favor of emphasizing the silly macguffin.
The sequel to Jumper. It wasn’t quite as good as the first one, and managed to make the macuffin even more unbelievable, but it was still fun.
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
A friend of mine has been traumatized by watching the series Hoarders, causing him to feel like he needs to purge. (He doesn’t have that much stuff to begin with, so I find his reaction amusingly exaggerated). He asked my husband to take a bunch of books to the library to donate them, and I fished this out, because I’d heard about it and was curious.
It’s a bit difficult to characterize.
On the one hand, it works very well as a description of what life is like for lower class white people in America, and how they’ve basically been screwed for decades, and with good reason trust nobody in the political world to do anything other than sell them out to the elite business interests. It’s a picture which middle class liberals would do well to look at, because (a) it’s a world which is mostly incomprehensible to us, with an outlook based on completely different life experiences and assumptions about our interactions with people, (b) it’s a worldview with particularly strong political power because of the sheer number of people whose lives are like htis, and (c) the antipathy that many in this group have for educated urban liberals, driven by mutual misunderstanding that has degenerated into mutual contempt, is responsible for the inability of liberal policies to draw support in much of the country. (Which is to say: often it’s not the policy that’s the problem, but the contempt for the person promoting the policy … said contempt arising out of decades of miscommunication and misunderstanding). The New Deal coalition fell apart at least in part because urban liberals and the rural poor stopped talking to each other, and this book is an attempt to jump across the chasm.
On the other hand, holy **** is this a rant. Like all good rants, it’s over the top and exaggerated, and that makes it hard to tell what to take seriously and what not to. And because it is so filled with sarcastic anger, it’s difficult to engage with.
I’m aware that my objection to the anger may be a reflection of my privilege. But … seriously, a less sarcastic and over-the-top version of this book would be easier to read. This is particularly true because the author’s contempt seems to be for everyone, as evidenced by this:
Bobby Fulk, millionaire realtor, sits in the back booth of Royal Lunch waiting for his burger and fries. The newspaper lies on the table in front of him. Stylish, jowly, and red faced, he is well dressed in a dark gabardine sports coat and beige cashmere turtleneck. The best description of what he is doing with the newspaper is ‘looking at it’. YOu certainly couldn’t call it reading because he just scans the headlines. Bobby can’t read in any meaningful sense of the word. He has never purchased a book from a bookstore and probably has never read a book on real estate. He doesn’t even read the real estate ads in the paper because he has access to the MLS on the internet in his office, and his secretary prints out the listings for him. Presented with a newspaper, he sucks in the headlines as complete summaries of the text: COUNTY REPORTS 7 HOMICIDES THIS YEAR (nobody he knows, so who cares?); BUSH STANDS FIRM ON OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM (good man, everybody needs freedom, Bobby thinks to himself); and DEVELOPER APPLIES FOR NEW PUD (he knew the planned development was in the works six months ago). If there’s a story about a local high school football or basketball game, he might wade through the first few paragraphs, but only because he’s looking for the score.
Objections to tone are always a risky business, as anyone who has gotten into an internet description of racism can attest. But … this contempt isn’t even directed at me and it leaves me squirming inside.
In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the Counter Look at the Fast Food Chain that Breaks All the Rules
This came out of the same pile of books, and was much better. I’m a sucker for well-written histories of somewhat obscure topics, and histories of companies are always a good game for this – particularly companies which are prominent today; they scratch the itch that wants to know how did things get the way they are?.
The politics of inheritance of family-old successful companies is often ugly, and there’s some dark family history involved here – every member of the second generation of owners died before their mom did, leaving her to stop back in and take control of the company at an advanced age; and there’s some evidence that as she was deteriorating, old and and infirm, she became a pawn in a nasty internal power struggle, was captured by one side of the struggle, and was gradually cut off from her friends and isolated in her ‘palace’ so that she couldn’t interfere with what those who had captured her were doing.
This won’t keep me from eating there, though, any more than the christian references on their packaging do – because they’re a rare beast, a fast food chain focused on quality ingredients, and for that I’ll forgive their owners much.
The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
This was a fascinating history of the interaction between the plasmodium virus and humanity, including the brief period where DDT seemed to be winning the war before DDT-resistant mosquitos came into their own, the failure of the modern mosquito net movement, and the recent development of a new, chloroquine-resistant, form of the plasmodium bacteria.
One of the best parts of this was the discussion of the failure of mosquito nets. It seems that people in malaria-endemic areas consider malaria to be a normal part of the landscape, much as we would consider the common cold, and so simply don’t remember to do the ihngs that westerners say will prevent malaria (if they even believe the claims in the first place) … meaning attempts to prevent malaria which depend on locals doing something as a part of regular behavior are simply doomed.
Fur, Fortune, and Empire: the Epic History of the Fur Trade in America
This was a very good history of the American fur trade. Unfortunately, I was expecting a history of the global fur trade, which is silly because I can read the title, but there you have it.
I was particularly interested in the discussion of the short-lived Swedish colony on the Delaware river, something I’ve long known existed but have seen little to no information about.
I was also interested in the discussion of why, when the American beaver was hunted to near-extinction in the 1830s, the Canadian beaver wasn’t – it turns out the HBC had established, essentially, a crop rotation system, wherein creeks were divided into several different sets, and only one set could be trapped on in a particular year … allowing the beaver in the other sets to (a) grow larger by not being hunted every year, and (b) have offspring who would then move into the vacant areas which had been hunted up. There’s a tragedy-of-the-commons aspect to this, as the HBC could only do that because it had an effective monopoly; and it’s instructive to note that their behavior was totally different in Columbia, where the US-English condominium encouraged them to hunt the beaver to extinction under the theory that this would keep the Americans out.
Another interesting factoids: Prince Rupert claimed to have invented the torpedo!
Anyhow, of the books I’ve read in the last month, this was the best, and I’d heartily recommend it.
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.
This was the first, long, chunk of The Golden Age of Science Fiction: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories, where, as a long novel in its own right, it simply didn’t belong.
It was, quite frankly, terrible.
The premise of the story is: some people on a boat encounter this manuscript in a copper cylinder, floating on the high seas; when they open it, it tells a tale of some people swept away by a current to the unbelievable world of the poles, where people love death and hate life.
Leaving aside the wierd anti-socialist propaganda aspect of the story, and leaving aside the actual lack of science and the silliness of the macguffin … the prose was tedious. (To be fair, I find that’s generally true of nineteenth century serial prose). And the book suffers tremendously from unnecessary exposition; a number of the scenes on the boat include a pompous know-it-all explaining esoteric knowledge to his companions with the tone of a lecture and the airy superiority of an aristocrat.
The book was everything modern science fiction claims to be a reaction to; it deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Just. Say. No.
Every so often I read a book where my response is to want to thwack the author for writing it. The last one of these was when I was on vacation in March, and I picked up what looked to be a fascinating post-apocalyptic good vs. evil story, only to find out that it was a Shannara lead-in.
I read another one this week.
In its defense, I knew it was a prequel. So I should have expected some of it.
But ye gods, there is no good reason for Louis Wu to show up in Betrayer of Worlds. The story could have been told just fine without him … in fact, better, because then there wouldn’t have been the jarring discontinuity arising from the fact that his character in this book isn’t the same as it was in Ringworld, that the history of his character put forward in this book undermines the history in Ringworld, and that certain other facts about the universe make less sense in Ringworld if this story is true.
It was almost as bad as the bizarre appearance of C-3PO in the Phantom Menace.
And … was it also necessary that Nessus be one of the prime movers of the story?
Seriously, authors: I understand the desire to tie all your stories into a neat little world. But, really and truly, doing so often reduces the credibility and value of the stories. Yes, some fans want to see new stories with the same old characters. It’s usually a mistake to listen to them. You risk ending up with bad stories that muddle the good ones which preceded them.
Boneshaker
One of this year’s Hugo nominated novels is Boneshaker, an alternate history novel set in a mid-nineteenth century Seattle which has been overrun by a zombie apocalypse. The novel was written by Cherie Priest, whose ouevre includes Four and Twenty Blackbirds, a novel which I just couldn’t get into.
The premise is an interesting one, and the opening of the book is carried off quite brilliantly – the mood and atmosphere and tone-setting are all awesome, the characters are interesting, and the way the characters get drawn into the plot is exciting.
Unfortunately, the promise of the opening was not carried out in the rest of the book; it failed for me – because it didn’t answer the questions I was interested in, and because the resolution to the book resolved a drama that I didn’t find compelling or interesting while leaving alone the things that I did find interesting. What started out appearing to be an incredible novel turned out to be an ok, if somewhat disappointing, one.
—————SPOILER WARNING————
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