What have you read lately?

[larryc]

I finally got around to John Sclazi's Redshirts, a science fiction novel set in a Star Trek adjacent universe, telling the story from the POV of a group of normally faceless minor crew persons who exist only to get killed to advance the plot. Slowly they realize that they are not just in a starship, they are in a narrative, and it is one that never ends well for them. They decide to do something about it.

I loved this book. It starts off as a romp, a hilarious sendup of the original Star Trek series, but it soon takes a turn, and then another... It is funny, thought-provoking, and moving. I think it is his best work.

[ab_grp]

Larryc, if you haven't read his Fuzzy Nation or Agent to the Stars, you might want to give them a try.  I think those two are my favorites of his so far.  They are plenty funny but are also really touching and interesting.  I thought Red Shirts was very good but a little inconsistent and probably could have been edited down a bit in places.

We finished Catalyst Gate (O'Keefe).  I thought she finished the trilogy very well, but the first book of the series (Velocity Weapon) was the best of them, in my opinion (my husband felt the same).  More of this book covered interaction with other life forms, which led it in an interesting direction but felt a little overdone at times.  Still, the same good cast of characters, action, and political intrigue made it a fun read.

Now we are on Hank Green's A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (follow up to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing).  We really enjoyed the first book, which was told from one point of view.  This sequel has several narrators.  We are barely into it, but it seems like a good set up so far, and I'm interested to see where it goes.

[FishProf]

Do audiobooks count?  I just finished a radio production of Babbit (Ed Asner, Judd Nelson, Hector Elizondo etc).  Great production.

But I didn't really get the book.  At the end, I still didn't really know what it was about.

I'm standing outside the gate, but I don't see any barbarians here....

[ergative]

Audiobooks definitely count!

I've recently been getting into Sarah Waters. I read The Paying Guests while recovering from Pfizer #2, and I've just started Fingersmith. She's a very engaging writer, and I enjoy the evocation of the time periods she writes in.

I also just finished Fredrik Backmann's Anxious People, which was outstanding, and Lucy Jago's A Net for Small Fishes, which was a little disappointing. The latter book is about the events surrounding the death of Sir Thomas Overbury in the court of King James I, but the problem is that Jago decided to humanize the characters that history records as scheming villains, and turn them into kind, earnest, sympathetic people who are driven by understandable motives. But after I read the history itself (there's a great chapter about the same events in Eleanor Herman's The Royal Art of Poison), I realized that I didn't want a book about kind, earnest, sympathetic people. I wanted the story about the villains! The book would have been so much more fun if people had leant into their villainy more.

[Golazo]

In nonfiction, Rosa Brooks' account of being a reserve police officer in DC, Tangled Up in Blue, was compelling. Her conversations with her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich (well known lefty, author of Nickle and Dimed) are hilarious, while the reflections on policing reform, interspersed with what she actually did, are interesting even when I don't agree with her takes.
I also read Liddle Heart's classic book on Strategy, which reinforced my skepticism of him. The cases are all structured to support his argument behind the superiority of the indirect approach, and the book seems like a classic example of problems that come from selecting on the dependent variable. McChrystal's Leaders: Myth and Reality suffers from a different problem--the cases, though sometimes interesting, don't align with his argument about leadership at the end, which is thus less compelling than it might be.

In fiction, I read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, which was fine but not outstanding, which I had hoped for given the book's awards, and Sarah Pinkser's We are Satellites , which is well written and grabbed my attention but suffered from some key parts of the plot not being at all convincing.

[Vkw10]

In fiction, I read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, which was fine but not outstanding, which I had hoped for given the book's awards

I found the audiobook of The Goblin Emperor better than the print, although I enjoyed the print. She's just published another book in the same world, Witness for the Dead, which is in my stack.

[ergative]

In fiction, I read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, which was fine but not outstanding, which I had hoped for given the book's awards

I found the audiobook of The Goblin Emperor better than the print, although I enjoyed the print. She's just published another book in the same world, Witness for the Dead, which is in my stack.

I think what I liked most about The Goblin Emperor, aside from the wildly inventive and systematic onomastics, was the fact that it was a book about a good guy, trying his best to do a hard job, and by sheer dint of earnest good faith he manages to bring around enough people to his side to change a political snakepit into something that seems like a functional government. That kind of fable is so refreshing.

Witness for the Dead, which I read not too long ago, is similar, but on a much smaller scale. I enjoyed it, but the plotting wasn't as coherent as The Goblin Emperor. There were multiple different plot threads that didn't all connect, but together they formed a loose weave that characterized a month or so in the life of the main character; and if you like the world building and society building, it was a comfortable, restful book to spend time in.

[spork]

Finished Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, by Suchitra Vijayan. Some chapters are high quality writing. Others are more legalistic in style. All present accounts of atrocities in Kashmir, Assam, etc. One of Vijayan's conclusions is that the Indian state is becoming genocidal. Can't say I can argue strongly against that.

Now halfway through Noise by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein. Liking it so far, but I like anything that Danny Kahneman writes.

[Vkw10]

Larryc, if you haven't read his Fuzzy Nation or Agent to the Stars, you might want to give them a try.  I think those two are my favorites of his so far.  They are plenty funny but are also really touching and interesting.  I thought Red Shirts was very good but a little inconsistent and probably could have been edited down a bit in places.

Thanks for mentioning Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation. You reminded me of Piper's Little Fuzzy, the basis of Scalzi's story. Searching my shelves for it led to A Planet for Texans, aka Lone Star Planet. I'd forgotten both how much I enjoy Piper's work and how useful it is for starting ethical discussions. Most of his material is available through Project Gutenberg, too, which gives me an opportunity to introduce my students  to an excellent resource.

[ergative]

Larryc, if you haven't read his Fuzzy Nation or Agent to the Stars, you might want to give them a try.  I think those two are my favorites of his so far.  They are plenty funny but are also really touching and interesting.  I thought Red Shirts was very good but a little inconsistent and probably could have been edited down a bit in places.

Thanks for mentioning Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation. You reminded me of Piper's Little Fuzzy, the basis of Scalzi's story. Searching my shelves for it led to A Planet for Texans, aka Lone Star Planet. I'd forgotten both how much I enjoy Piper's work and how useful it is for starting ethical discussions. Most of his material is available through Project Gutenberg, too, which gives me an opportunity to introduce my students  to an excellent resource.

I'm not a huge fan of Golden Era scifi (I have to make way too many concessions to 'ugh, of its time, of its time'), but Piper did have one really outstanding short story, called Omnilingual, which, despite its icky exotification of a Japanese woman, did one of the best jobs depicting how linguists might go around deciphering an ancient (or extraterrestrial, in this case) language. My particular favorite bit was how they assumed that some document must be an academic journal, which meant that the bit of text in the top corner must be the volume and issue and date information, and from there managed to work out the dating system, number system, and morphology of the language. It struck me as really funny, but really accurate: goofy-ass assumption, but hey--if it seems to work, then run with it!

[Parasaurolophus]

July:

Simon Scarrow - The Emperor's Exile: It was OK. I'm not a fan of when these books centre on imaginary events instead of real ones, and I confess that I don't like where the ending is taking us, which seems to run against the grain of the characters a fair bit. But whatever, I guess. It'll have to end somehow. Cato was somewhat less annoying this time around.

Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross - The Rapture of the Nerds: It's OK. It clearly wants to be The Hitchhiker's Guide, but is only very mildly amusing. Far too much slapdash-running-around plot for my liking. SciFi's at its best when it's about ideas, and this wasn't.

Jack McDevitt - Infinity Beach: Found it in a book box and gave it a spin on the basis of his Priscilla Hutchins series, which was pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised--it's a solid first contact thriller that had me gripped, and I enjoyed the wrongfooting. I'm also pleased that it's not characterized by the overt misogyny of the late novels in the Hutchins series--there are a few dodgy moments, but I might have missed them if I hadn't been on the lookout for them. I think this is the best of his novels that I've read.

[apl68]

Just finished The City in History, by Lewis Mumford.  It attempts to survey the history of the urban idea from ancient times up to the early 1960s.  The sections that deal with the medieval city try hard to rehabilitate the Middle Ages.  Efforts to correct the common Monty Pythonesque view of the Middle Ages as all one grotesque spectacle of degradation are always welcome, but he does take rather a rose-tinted view of the time.  Mumford considers the medieval city to have been the apotheosis of the human, livable urban settlement.  A lot of his enthusiasm for medieval cities comes down to "small is beautiful"--medieval cities were built on a human scale, within a decentralized political order that let local communities find the best available solutions to their needs.

Mumford considers that the world has taken several disastrous wrong turns since the Middle Ages.  During the Baroque Era tyrants centralized power and authority, and channeled society's resources into grand palaces, capitals, and fortifications that only made things worse for most people.  Then laissez faire capitalism subordinated everything to economic activity that benefited only the few.  Laissez faire capitalism combined with the dirty machines of the early industrial revolution turned cities into hell on earth for most people.  And the continued rapid development of technology in the 20th century, though it solved problems of material scarcity, has continued to develop cities and societies in ways that put human needs last, in both capitalist and centrally planned socialist societies.

Mumford was an early proponent of the now commonplace (but still mostly unheeded) observation that over-reliance on automobiles for transportation results in vast waste of land and resources, pollution, and cities that are engineered around cars, not human beings.  He diagnosed a lot of our urban problems before they became so acute.  But he wrote too early to recognize what have turned out to be the two greatest existential threats to our world--the global climate change that is wrecking the environment in ways that the ecological alarmists of the 1960s never dreamed of, and the proliferation of information and media technologies that are laying waste to our economies, society, and politics.

Mumford, as he admits on the first page, is a generalist.  Books this broad usually end up containing a lot of nonsense and rhetorical excesses, and The City in History is no exception.  It nonetheless also offers some striking insights.

[apl68]

Two things that occurred to me while reading Mumford.  First, the sorts of cities that he considers the best for human beings are actually what the modern world would call small towns--communities of a few thousand to a few tens of thousands.  Having grown up in a small town, and moved back to one after some years' residence in a big city, I'm a great believer in the virtues of small towns.  At their best they're human-scaled communities that have a lot of the "walkability" and other neighborhood qualities that the New Urbanists wanted so much to see preserved in cities.  Unfortunately the destructive forces that Mumford identified have only continued to run amuck in the 60 years since he wrote.  In my own lifetime I've seen these economic and social forces destroy small towns--my own hometown included--in droves, while all the wealth and population and opportunities continue to be sucked into a handful of over-built, over-crowded, increasingly uninhabitable urban areas. 

Second, at the beginning of his consideration of the Middle Ages Mumford offers this interesting observation concerning how Christianity (of a sort) became the dominant faith of medieval Europe:

"Many reasons have been assigned for the triumph of Christianity; but the plainest of them is that the Christian expectation of radical evil--sin, pain, illness, weakness, and death--was closer to the realities of this disintegrating civilization than any creed based on the old images of `Life, Prosperity, and Health.'"  He goes on to describe how Christian teaching's emphasis on charity and self-sacrifice proved an adaptive response to a disintegrating civilization.  Sounds an awful lot like what we see happening to the world now.  If only more in the church now could stop worshiping the same gods of 'Life, Prosperity, and Health.' like the pagans did.

[downer]

Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

[hmaria1609]

It's been awhile since I've posted in this thread.

Finished from the library: "Verity Kent Mystery" series by Anna Lee Huber
In 1919 Verity and Sidney Kent are solving cases related to their wartime experiences in the UK. By the same author of the "Lady Darby Mystery" series.

Now: "Lady Helen" trilogy by Alison Goodman (YA)