What have you read lately?

[apl68]

Quakeland:  On the Road to America's Next Devastating Earthquake, by Kathryn Miles.  It's a fascinating piece of journalism.  The author investigates the geology of earthquakes and earthquake prediction, has a good bit to say about recent and historical quakes, and talks about the risks of a catastrophic quake in various parts of the country and how to prepare for it.  California isn't the only place that's at risk.  Several other parts of the country have real risks of a catastrophic quake within not too many decades.  Even New York City has a slim but real chance of a quake that, in a worst-case scenario, could render the whole city as uninhabitable as New Orleans after Katrina.  Think about that for a moment.

Miles devotes a couple of chapters to the New Madrid fault zone.  I've known all my life that our whole state lies in that zone, although I've always lived in areas far enough out that serious damage would be unlikely.  Most of our state seems fairly safe.  Neighboring regions, such as the city of Memphis, are another story.

There are a couple of pages on the long-term effort to retroactively quake-proof the DeSoto Interstate 40 bridge across the Mississippi at Memphis.  I've crossed that bridge about a hundred times (No hyperbole) over the last 31 years, and had wondered why it had construction on it for so long.  They had to do the retrofitting while keeping it open.  It was one of the first bridges to receive such an upgrade.  It carries such a huge volume of commercial traffic that it could cripple the nation's economy if it were destroyed.  Now it should be proof against a 2,500-year quake.  Good to know somebody has been on the ball there.

And now the DeSoto Bridge, on which hundreds of millions of dollars were spent making it supposedly proof against a 2,500-year quake, has up and cracked for no obvious reason.  Traffic on both I-40 and the Mississippi are snarled, and the Tennessee and Arkansas departments of transportation are busy seeing what can be done.  This is dispiriting.  We keep hearing about the massive amounts of infrastructure repair the nation needs, and now it appears that one of the best recent efforts to fix infrastructure in time has been botched somehow.  Most Americans are willing at this point to pay serious money toward infrastructure improvement (If Congress can ever stop arguing over it), but only if they can trust that the jobs will be done right.

[Myword]

Regarding PIRATES, to answer you, I read them all and my favorites are An Adventure With Napolean, and Adventure With Scientists. It is oddball silly humor that some readers will like and others may think is stupid or childish. Does not matter what order they are read....very short novels. Characters have no names. "Pirate With a Scarf" "Pirate in Red"   etc. Napolean and Captain compete to be president of the Condo Association.

[ab_grp]

Regarding PIRATES, to answer you, I read them all and my favorites are An Adventure With Napolean, and Adventure With Scientists. It is oddball silly humor that some readers will like and others may think is stupid or childish. Does not matter what order they are read....very short novels. Characters have no names. "Pirate With a Scarf" "Pirate in Red"   etc. Napolean and Captain compete to be president of the Condo Association.

Thank you! If it doesn't matter what order they are read in, maybe we will put the ones you listed on the list first.  It's hard to know what humor will resonate.  But if Eric Idle approved it, it's worth a try.  We just got in a boatload of sci fi, so I'm not sure when we might get to this.

[hmaria1609]

Started The Steel Beneath the Silk by Patricia Bracewell
It's the finale to her "Emma of Normandy" trilogy. I had read the first two novels so I'm eager to read Emma's story.  It's only been 6 years!

[Golazo]

I owe an update now that I've caught up on my

I read Promised Land (Obama's memoir) and found it quite disappointing. Far from being the honest memoir a lot of reviews suggested, this was a well written defense of Obama's first term, including things that I find quite hard to defend (ie Libya policy). Some interesting tidbits but hard to recommend.

I also read Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency (on Biden's win), and though it was quite mediocre. I know Halperin (of Game Change) had me too issues, but he had much better access and also wrote better than  Allen and Parnes. This read like a collection of Politico articles.

I also read some assorted sci-fi and fantasy. Among these, Johnson's The Space Between Worlds is an interesting take on moving between earths though a bit dystopian for my mood, and  A Memory called Empire an interesting take on intersteller diplomacy, language, etc.

[Parasaurolophus]

I came across an unexplained reference to "O'Neal's Razor" today, and the internet isn't helpful. I gather it's got something to do with fiction--perhaps historical fiction? But what is it, ô wise forumite readers?

[mamselle]

I"m going to guess it's some sideways take on "Occam's razor" (or maybe a misunderstood Autocorrect...)

   https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Occam%27s%20razor

M. 

[Parasaurolophus]

Yes, but what?

[ergative]

I also read Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency (on Biden's win), and though it was quite mediocre. I know Halperin (of Game Change) had me too issues, but he had much better access and also wrote better than  Allen and Parnes. This read like a collection of Politico articles.

Given the delay between final MS and actual printing and distribution, I'm not surprised to hear this book wasn't great. How quickly must it have been written? When was the MS submitted to the publisher? Did it include January 6th?

I also read some assorted sci-fi and fantasy. Among these, Johnson's The Space Between Worlds is an interesting take on moving between earths though a bit dystopian for my mood, and  A Memory called Empire an interesting take on intersteller diplomacy, language, etc.

I loved The Space Between Worlds, and put it on my Hugo ballot. I thought A Memory Called Empire was great, but perhaps not quite as astonishing as a lot of the noise around it made it out to be. But I also discovered that I knew the author when I was in college (she was a friend of a friend), so it was good to see her reappear in this way.

What other assorted SFF have you read?

I just finished The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E Harrow, and loved it so much. It is what I hoped Lolly Willowes would be, and so much more. I wish I had read it earlier, so I could have put it on this year's Hugo Ballot. But maybe someone else will have put it on, and then when voting comes around I can vote for it. But I don't know how I'd rank it in respect to The Space Between Worlds. They're both so good.

[apl68]

I just finished Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee.  It's the story of a Korean girl in "trouble" in the early 1930s who marries a tubercular young minister and immigrates to Japan.  It follows her family across fifty-odd years of struggle and discrimination (Japan has long harbored a very poorly-treated Korean immigrant community).  It's an impressive-written and researched work.  The author is unquestionably talented and deserves the praise she has received from reviewers.

Unfortunately Pachinko is also an example of why I really don't much like reading contemporary "literary" fiction.  It's a miserable story about miserable people being miserable.  Often predictably so.  I've promised myself that I'm going to let myself read things I might actually enjoy for at least the next few weeks, before doing my duty as a reader and subjecting myself to another "serious" novel.



I've also recently read The Tudors, by G.J. Meyer.  It's a bestselling popular history of the notorious dynasty.  It's well-researched and well-written popular history.  It's also a very aggressively revisionist history.  Revisionist history is usually worth paying attention to, since it tends to point out things that older received interpretations of history don't adequately address.  It also has a tendency to be highly agenda-driven, and to overstate things, often very badly (Which is a big part of why I don't trust the 1619 Project).  Meyer is very deliberately trying to perform a hatchet job on all the Tudor rulers and their underlings, with the predictable exception of an attempt at rehabilitating Queen Mary as a sympathetic sort who wouldn't have hurt a fly.  I'm not convinced.

It's not that I've ever found much to admire in Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, or Elizabeth I.  Most of them were appalling egoists and tyrants, and Henry VIII's and Elizabeth's behavior can only partly be explained as being a product of their times.  But I believe that it's a mistake to throw out the old Whig interpretation of British history altogether, especially when it comes to representing the whole Reformation as nothing more than a monstrous crime.  Personally I believe that Simon Schama gives a better assessment of the Tudors than you'll find here.

[ergative]

Unfortunately Pachinko is also an example of why I really don't much like reading contemporary "literary" fiction.  It's a miserable story about miserable people being miserable.  Often predictably so.  I've promised myself that I'm going to let myself read things I might actually enjoy for at least the next few weeks, before doing my duty as a reader and subjecting myself to another "serious" novel.

Yes, exactly. Absolutive and I once went through a long list of book award nominees or new books to watch out for, or something, and actually kept count of how many of them were driven by a tale of trauma. The number was very high.

While I guess I approve of this move away from middle-aged English professors having affairs, the new favorite focus is not any more attractive. I'll stick to dragons and spaceships and check in again on the next litfic paradigm shift.

[apl68]

Unfortunately Pachinko is also an example of why I really don't much like reading contemporary "literary" fiction.  It's a miserable story about miserable people being miserable.  Often predictably so.  I've promised myself that I'm going to let myself read things I might actually enjoy for at least the next few weeks, before doing my duty as a reader and subjecting myself to another "serious" novel.

Yes, exactly. Absolutive and I once went through a long list of book award nominees or new books to watch out for, or something, and actually kept count of how many of them were driven by a tale of trauma. The number was very high.

While I guess I approve of this move away from middle-aged English professors having affairs, the new favorite focus is not any more attractive. I'll stick to dragons and spaceships and check in again on the next litfic paradigm shift.

Personally I'm not a big genre fiction reader either.  I mostly read nonfiction.  I have been reading a bit more sci-fi lately.  Much of that is older stuff that I didn't get around to reading when I was a kid and was really into it.

I go over the jacket copy of most books for grown-ups that come across my desk at the library, while writing my weekly library newspaper column.  Most of what we get for our readers is genre fiction.  Sometimes I go over a week's batch of new books and feel like I haven't seen a single fresh idea.  It's all P.I.s, and FBI agents, and undercover agents, and women making terrible discoveries about their family pasts, and bonnet romances.  Right now we're at the time of year when we get all the books with beaches on the cover.  You'd be amazed at how many women in mid-life crises apparently have family beach houses in Nantucket to fall back on.  And meanwhile guys can still read new (or at least recently-composed) stories about Texas rangers chasing outlaws circa 1875.

I just remind myself that even people who read the same genre over and over again are still exercising mental muscles that watching TV tends not to exercise.

[spork]

Continuing on my Michael Lewis binge -- most of the way through The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. It's sort of a professional biography of Kahneman and Tversky.  Basic conclusion: if you have the choice between a human physician or an AI system for a medical diagnosis, choose the AI, because the AI can accurately incorporate probabilities into decision making. The part of the book about how medical experts were diagnosing stomach cancer was terrifying.

[hmaria1609]

Finished from the library: Katharine Parr, the Sixth Wife by Alison Weir
The 6th and finale novel in the "6 Tudor Queens" series. I've enjoyed reading this series about Henry VIII's wives and Mrs. Weir's non-fiction books.

Here's a link to the landing page for the novels:
https://sixtudorqueens.co.uk/

[Golazo]

Given the delay between final MS and actual printing and distribution, I'm not surprised to hear this book wasn't great. How quickly must it have been written? When was the MS submitted to the publisher? Did it include January 6th?

Jan 6th was only briefly mentioned in the intro. This is really different from Game Change and Double Down, which were more than a year after the election. But of course we are in a different era now in terms of timing and expectation. But even worse, it didn't seem like the authors had the access they needed to write the book. Heilemann and Halperin broke a lot of actual ground on the reporting. I felt like I could have written a lot of Lucky based on following the campaign.