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.