silver

Some short reviews of books I read. Also I would like to point out that a lot of these I did read for book club - if it's really low rated I probably read it for book club. Life is too short, I usually ditch stuff I don't like.

City of Bones - Martha Wells
( review - 10/10 )

A College of Magics - Caroline Stevermer
( review - 6/10 )

I read several books about the southwestern deserts - A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the North American Deserts by Edmund C Jaeger. Actually I guess I mostly just browsed the second, but the first was a whole collection of essays on all aspects of the Sonoran desert: the geology, weather, physics, and biological life, flora and fauna (reptiles, insects, fish, mammals, birds). Of course, I read the bird section with greatest interest, but a lot of the essays were very interesting and informative. I read it after I came back from Arizona, in true myself fashion, but that helped make the facts stick better and it was nice to re-visit some of the birds I saw.

Light from Uncommon Stars - Ryda Aoki
( review - 4/10 )

Hickory Dickory Dock - Agatha Christie
( review - 9/10 )

Hench - Natalie Zina Walschots
( review - 7/10 )

OK I didn't get through as many as I wanted, more to come.

I have fallen terribly down on reviewing books but one lesson I have finally learned is that it's better to still do stuff for partial credit than throw one's hands up and totally abandon it, so recent things I have read!

The Age of Cathedrals - Georges Duby
Published in 1981 by Duby, who is a famous French medievalist, the book covers 980-1420, so the period after which the Viking raids began to taper off up until the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy. I read this in translation.

I always find it tough to review non-fiction, since I usually rate fiction just based on enjoyment, but my interest in non-fiction is different. The book definitely reads very different from a book that might be published today, however. Some of the terminology reads very dated; at the beginning of the book Duby calls the society "primitive", which feels like terminology that we've moved away from. It's not wrong, exactly. Thinking about the agricultural infrastructure and technology, the paucity of written sources, etc, it's very different from later medieval periods.

I got quite bogged down in this also - there's an exhausting section in the middle about theology and I confess I have never cared about any theology. Reading about how much effort and medieval scholarship (as in scholarship during the middle ages) went into it just made me frustrated with how inadequately it was grappling with the problems it was trying to solve. It's not that I don't value things that are not rock-solid empirical research. But we're physical beings and many of our problems result from actual physical causes, it's frustrating to see the masters and students attempt to answer questions by trying to square their religious belief with the scraps of translated Classical knowledge - that is, mostly Aristotle. Instead of actually looking at the world around them and testing what they saw. Ahh, I know it's because I've received the legacy of the scientific method and it's much easier to see how valuable feedback can be employed once you can see the system, so I was taught the knowledge that many others had to put together and make coherent, but it's frustrating.

The book is also very French (and Paris) focused. It's hard to judge whether this is justifiable or not. I honestly think a lot of medieval scholarship is very English and French dominated, perhaps because I learned it in an Anglosphere context, or because of the patchiness of data that's available (the English manorial court rolls are especially useful and don't exist elsewhere). Sometimes when Duby kept going on about how Paris or Ile-de-France was so central to Gothic whatever, I wanted to roll my eyes, but OK. I'm sure English books are equally Anglo-centric. And to be fair to Duby, in later eras, as influential artistic things shift to the Italian peninsula, he does acknowledge that.

I did enjoy and find a lot of the book really illuminating though, in drawing conclusions about the way art was made, by whom, in whose interests and how it was guided by those who commissioned it, the way this changed, and so on. I liked that Duby also occasionally said that there were some questions we couldn't answer because there simply wasn't evidence - things like the beliefs of the Cathars/Albigensians are hard to interpret, because their writing was destroyed and of course, the reports of them are all from the orthodox Christianity.

I found this book quite difficult to read in general. I think I'm a very strong reader (lol) and I'm interested in medieval history and this was in English. I honestly think it's the translation from French and some of the dryness of how Duby treated the subject, and finally, some of my unfamiliarity. For example some of his citations were tough to read (I am complaining about French translations but Latin is definitely worse) and/or I had never read them, so the references to Dionysius the Aeropagite I just had to kind of mentally move past, because I've never actually read his writing. I eventually started a strategy of deciding to read X number of pages to make progress, something that I have never done - I usually just like reading, so it's not like an effort is really required.

Death at the Bar, Death in Ecstasy, Surfeit of Lampreys - Ngaio Marsh
Started a Ngaio Marsh kick and this Death at the Bar is my favourite of the three I've read so far. Marsh seems to go for very public murders in her novels - the others like Artists in Crime, Death in Ecstasy, Surfeit of Lampreys - all have their victims perish within actual eyewitness-view or in earshot. The victim in this one is murdered when playing a round of darts as the lights flicker in a storm, and succumbs to cyanide poisoning.

Honestly I'm not into mysteries for the mysteries. I don't really care and I'm usually reading too fast to think about it; I often read these in 1 or 2 sittings. I'm into the characters, the setting, and the prose . I've come to realize my favourite era of English prose is somewhere in the early 20th century. I'm not sure what it is - I enjoy Victorian prose, too, and I've read reams of modern stuff, of course, and liked a ton of that. But somehow the stylings of the 20th century really hit that sweet spot. This is a long way of just saying I really enjoy reading about Alleyn and Fox and the inter-war setting and all that. Death at the Bar has an amazing scene near the end where Fox is poisoned and Alleyn flips out and orders the roomful of suspects downstairs to stay there or be arrested for murder, and drags the pubmaster (where they're staying) upstairs to help save Fox. Look, I'm just very into competence, OK. Also Alleyn keeps calling Fox nicknames like Foxkin, and it's adorable. I enjoy the recurring characters very much.

I found Lampreys to be the weakest of the three, even though it's her tenth, and she definitely improved as she went along. I think it's maybe because I never quite liked any of the Lampreys, despite the POV character in the beginning being Roberta, who is enamoured of them. Also, I did say I don't care that much about the mystery, but I do feel it often chickens out if the murderer in a sea of gentry turns out to be a servant.

Published to rave reviews in 1993, Noah's Garden shows us how our landscape style of neat yards and gardens has devastated suburban ecology, wiping out entire communities of plants and animals by stripping bare their habitats and destroying their food supplies. When Stein realized what her intensive efforts at making a traditional garden had done, she set out to "ungarden." Her book interweaves an account of her efforts with an explanation of the ecology of gardens. Noah's Garden has become the bible of the new environmental gardening movement, and the author is one of its most popular spokespersons.

I picked up the book because of tkingfisher mentioned it influenced her, and I've always enjoyed hearing her talk about her garden, although our viewpoints differ a little.

Noah's Garden was published in 1993, and in its advocacy for restoring the previous ecology of America's now developed land, struck some very similar chords to Silent Spring, the landmark 1962 nonfiction book that called attention to the vanishing birds, including the bald eagle, caused by massive nationwide DDT spraying. Indeed, Stein calls the effect of Silent Spring "[galvanizing]...so powerfully that my children's generation, too, reverberates with alarm". I think that is what Stein herself is setting out to do in the book.

Through tracing her own journey in re-planting/landscaping her garden, which is a plot of land in upstate New York, Stein argues for a new gardening philosophy, or outlook, one that is focused on making gardens for native fauna and flora, and not for purely human ornamental purposes (i.e. the ubiquitous, inescapable flat green lawns that characterize suburbia). She argues that to do so - to bring back the former inhabitants which are adapted to this climate and soil - also lessens the burdens of the gardener. To plant exotics and our selected-for juicy vegetables, so appetizing to all kinds of pests, lays a tremendous amount of labour on the gardener to weed, fungicide, till, herbicide, fertilize, prune, pesticide, transplant and thin, hand-pollinate, mow, etc. Restoring the native flora and the other creatures that lived there creates a system where the inhabitants keep each other in check, rather than have to rely on external energy and resources like constant watering and fertilizer. She argues that the current fashion of suburbia supports very little, and because of the lack of diversity, also allows certain populations to become wildly overpopulated (such as deer). Much of the book also has quite strong patriotic overtones as well, to prefer the previous native plants as well as a broader sense of duty towards the other life forms that live/d on this continent.

On a more personal level, I enjoyed reading the book and thinking about the concepts that Stein argues for, and I fall pretty close to her on many of the subjects she touches on - gardening to support more animals (mammals, insects, birds, amphibians, worms and grubs, etc), the hope that a shift in gardening can create corridors of life for wildlife that can't just exist on a little quarter-acre plot, a general preference for native flora and fauna over the exotic, however it has arrived, accidental or deliberate. But I feel like I'm a little less along the native > exotic purity scale . To be fair, Stein, too, isn't that extreme - she will plant or not uproot well-behaved exotics where natives can't be found or survive well anymore. Stein recognizes that the ecology of the storied American past is gone, and I agree. Over the last few hundred years, we have destroyed what was there. Most of it just does not exist any more. Even reclaimed farmland that has been repurposed to suburbs is no longer - where she and I both live - the old broadleaf forest, which was cut down several centuries ago. So many of the species are simply gone, the many immigrants catching a journey here via ship ballast & accidental plantings & deliberately planted ornamentals have arrived, and it's futile to turn back the clock. You can't. It doesn't matter that you want to. And there are new biomes: the city, which many species have learned to successfully navigate and profit from. On the bird side, pigeons, house sparrows, European starlings and grackles, gulls, all do very well; on the plant side, the verges and unused lots aren't barren, they're full of weeds - i.e. plants that do very well without human assistance or even notice.

I can't quite go that far down that line regarding native and exotic plants, because I keep getting caught up short by natural history. Species try to expand wherever they can, it's what they do, and there's constant competition. If an exotic species rafts across the Atlantic and establishes itself, that's just what they have done since the Atlantic first opened up. But then I think about it personally: I have no doubt whatsoever that after we are gone, speciation will happen again (and it's happening now, really), we can't hope to extinguish life and its variety ever - but it will take tens of millions of years, and I, personally, would hate to live in a world that didn't have tigers and elephants, or snotty hagfish, or puffins, or or or a million species we are helping to exterminate by our many activities. So I'm torn. I think Stein argues convincingly that keeping biodiversity is itself a desirable goal, and I agree. But I feel sometimes, there isn't any holding back of the sea. Some species truly have naturalized so well that they are just part of this land. It reminds me also of the interesting way we regard "weed" - a category that separates out desirable and undesirable plants based on our utility. Some of the categorizations are irrelevant to the suburban yard-owner.

The book is also written very engagingly, and the prose itself was unexpectedly very enjoyable. I don't know botany well at all, so I mostly just let the species names wash over me, and enjoy all the common names, which tend to be colourful and interesting - the kind of evocative names that usernames try to be, honestly. I also thought Stein used unusual though perfectly fitting verbs, which I do love. The structure of the paragraphs are a bit dramatic, but I don't mind.

9/10

Hello flist! I post so sporadically now - I've become one of those people that apologizes for this! But I am resolved to post book reviews this year of everything I read (that is not embarrassing, lol) that I finish.

My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir

Nonfiction, journal. John Muir was a great lover of the natural world and the American Sierra especially, and the founder of the Sierra Mountain Club. It was pretty wonderful to read this. He was asked by a friend to assist moving sheep up to mountain pasture in Yosemite, accepted with great joy, and wrote a few paragraphs or pages every day.

You can absolutely read the love and wonder and delight he took in the natural surroundings in every entry he writes. He observes the clouds, and describes the rivers and streams, and notes down the little animal life and big animal life alike, from squirrels to bears. He catalogues and notes the botany too - the flowers and shrubs and trees - and there is much to observe as they move the sheep from the dry California scrub up through the greener mountain shoulder up till they start to thin out again from the altitude. He is just so full of admiration and joy, and it never ceases, it's refreshing to read.

I also enormously enjoyed his anecdotes of the people and the sheep especially. Sheep are pretty stupid and his accounts, interspersed here and there between the observation of Yosemite, of how he and the shepherd struggle to get them through various difficulties is both wry and hilarious. He doesn't have the money to just hare off into the mountains and bring enough supplies, so he jumps at these chances, but I wish I could read an entire book of John Muir's anecdotes about shepherding or something. They were so entertaining! 8/10



The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas

Mystery, historical fiction. This is the fourth book in Thomas's Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes pretends that her brother is an invalid and acts as his speaker and his eyes and ears, but of course it is her doing all the analysis, with some help from Mrs Watson. Charlotte is from a middle class family who wants to social climb, and Charlotte deliberately ends up ruining her reputation and getting away.

The books have one central mystery but the overall characters progress, we learn more about what's going on. I found that this one was easier to get into, and I liked the resolution of the plot. I do kind of forget how the different relationships are twisted though - I know the ACD canon very well and between books, forget how certain characters are related or who is who and what's a nod to what (there are Stapletons - no relation or association to Baskerville for example). And I found Thomas's writing sometimes really great and the conceits great - I enjoy Charlotte's conception of Maximum Tolerable Chins - but sometimes it falls short. I don't know. Maybe I've read too many of her books. I still think the romance is the strongest part.

Also, I think that the Lady Sherlock books must take place in the same universe as some of her other books. Miss Redmayne is studying to be a doctor - I think she is the fully-fledged physician that tends to Lady Helena. 7/10



Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

Post-apocalyptic, satire. In this future, the planet has gotten very cold, and to cope, humans hibernate - but not well. Some just never wake again, or they will partially wake and wander around like zombies. But it's not a planet of howling winters like Hoth with no infrastructure - it's one with a lot of corporate wealth at stake. Morphenox, a drug that mostly makes sure you survive the winter (except for that pesky zombifying thing), is manufactured by a massive pharmaceutical company.

I have so many thoughts about this novel. I'm actually having trouble getting them out because I have so many.

1. Jasper Fforde didn't write a book for...several years, before this came out. Before this, I think he wrote one a year. As someone who checked his website periodically to see when the Shades of Grey sequel would come out (please Fforde, you left us on a cliffhanger!) he actually writes he had an inexplicable and distressing period where he apparently just didn't write. And about this novel, that he sat down to try to write something that he eventually realized was not him - he tried to write something that was someone else, so he had to slash and rewrite it many times, and put himself back into it. He certainly does wry post-apocalyptic absurdity, but he does it with his own humour (this last clause is my thoughts, not what he said). And he also mentions that it's very anvilicious, but that there are times you just have to. This is just after 2016.

2. I can see all of that. Personally, I love Fforde's comic absurdity - I like absurdity generally, and I find his to be very entertaining. I absolutely love the weird (and impossible) inventions. But I felt the ending was weirdly not grim enough. It's a deeply messed up world - Morphenox's motto of equality in sleep is obviously undercut by the fact that only the rich can afford it (and to make it through the winter), plus the fact there's a small chance you'll become braindead and then treated as not-a-human and reassigned to the menial or dangerous tasks that no one wants to do, free slave labour. The book's obviously in response to our current problems; there are some books you don't need publishing metadata to know when it was published. The world has cooled almost catastrophically instead of warming. But all the other things of the world, the social parts, are still there. There are still huge corporations which may have started as small operations and for the benefit of others, but which have taken on a life of their own and become this juggernaut crushing anyone and everyone in the pursuit of expansion and profit. There's all the weird fairy tales and urban legends that spring up among a community, except centered very tightly around Winter. There's collateralized debt. There's much larger infrastructure around adoption and foster homes, because if there's a high risk of death every year obviously there'll be shifts.

3. However, I do know Shades of Grey pretty well and that familiarity made me more aware, I think, of the similarities between the two. There's a very similar protagonist in Eddie (SoG) and Charlie (ER). The baffling society that both operate in - though I suppose SoG's is governmental and ER's is corporate - also ring similarly. I mention it mostly because I find this kind of thing to be incredibly distracting, but I'm not sure it actually bothers other people. I don't mind this in a series, and in fact am quite happy to accept it then, but when authors or other artists create separate works and it still makes me think always of their other work, it distracts me a lot.

4. I do really enjoy all the wordplay that Fforde always brings. The Winter exerts an incredibly strong pressure on the society (maybe too strong - I mean this in a Doyalist way). Therefore there are different despised social roles, for example. Those who don't sleep through are seen as drains on society's resources, as they burn more in food while others are sleeping, they're Winsomniacs. Or there are nomads that exist outside of the general society (Womads). So many new terms, all winterized. I find them extremely entertaining, though in the beginning as they were being introduced in rapid succession, somewhat overwhelming. I still think even a society so shaped by Winter would still have new words that do not refer to winter so overtly, though.

5. It's set in Wales and Fforde has a nice selection of photos on his site about it, plus extra contextual information on how he reversed a lot of the Beeching cuts, though of course the train doesn't run in the winter. You only realize about 75% of the way through that they're not speaking English but Welsh (I enjoyed this) and also that's when you find out the Villains, which I had mentally grouped in a class like Womads, also outside of the general society, are English. I'm not sure what to say, except that's definitely very pointed, but Fforde can do what he wants. It was pretty entertaining though.

Overall, 8/10. The similarities to SoG just bothered me otherwise it'd have been higher.



How-To by Randall Munroe

Nonfiction, humour. This is I think Munroe's third book, and it's his book about how to do things just taken to hilarious extremes. After all, you can always just add a few more zeros to your input values!

I love xkcd and Munroe and absolutely loved this book. xkcd is a very long running series with a lot of content, and I think you can get a good sense of who Munroe is as a person from it - endlessly curious, willing to dig into the guts of things to find information, unabashedly interested in space and physics and robots and the natural world altogether, plus sf/f, and also, honestly, kind. He also has a pretty deadpan kind of humour too - the kind that looks at moon-sized-balls-of-moles and goes "huh". And that comes across very well here. It's never dry, even though it includes plenty of equations and stuff so you can follow along with the math.

I also admire Munroe's research. He often tries to model complex scenarios - not unusual - but also weird and funny ones, so there are a lot of calculations (including on xkcd/what-if) that are footnoted with approximations from a random obscure paper, because that was the closest he could get. There's an absolutely amazing chapter where he basically calls up Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, and asks him dozens of very specific scenarios to hear what Hadfield would recommend in order to land yourself safely. It was just so cool to read about and Hadfield has definitely put a huge amount of thought into it - he was a test pilot first, and has enormous amounts of experience in just this subject, and it's an absolutely fascinating interview. Seriously, worth the price of admission alone.

Also absolute gems are the sports chapter. Like I said before, it's pretty easy to slide into being derisive about things you don't like and care about, but Munroe isn't - he just adds his own twist on how sports might work. It ends up with estimates about the Rohirrim's charge through orcs. Really, overall great. 10/10



Field Manual For the Amateur Geologist by Alan Cvancara

Nonfiction, geology/science. I picked this up as well as another short introduction, because I don't know much about geology and it was sort of becoming more apparent as I was learning more about paleontology. Fossils are rock!

I can't rate it on how accurate it is, being a complete amateur. Cvancara goes through the various landforms and how they are molded - by the plate tectonics, or wind, or waves, or rivers, or glaciers - as well as rock type (my head spins, there are too many, can't we just crush up a sample and just mass-spectrometer it or something). Then, he also has a few interesting chapters like "how to start a rock collection" (be alert, be ethical, organize it in some way for heaven's sake), or "how to pan for gold" (fascinating), "broadly how petro-geologists look for oil" and such. I felt he didn't define terms enough sometimes and wasted it on instead including pronunciation guides on words that are pretty common - seriously, I'd rather you just gave a definition. It's quite compact - there's a lot of ground covered in not much space.

I also have new admiration for geologists. So many of the formations seem so similar at first glance and even at second or third glances. Plus, and this must be so aggravating, when you are interested in the rock underlying us, so much of the world is overlaid with soil and plants (sometimes thickly, in forests) and also human infrastructure - so you can't exactly peel them off and see underneath it. Cvancara advises you to look for anywhere the ground is cut into, like by a river or even in a man-made cut, like the passes blown through rock to make highway roads straight.

Also! This book was published in the 1990's and it is so 90's in so many ways. He helpfully includes detail to help you get more information. For example, send off to this PO box by mail to get maps. There's no mention whatsoever of GPS or satellites. And the naming of the geological ages - which I am at least slightly familiar with - are a little different, reflecting the changes that have been made in the intervening 30 years to the GTS. It was pretty entertaining! 8/10

(and I'd like to say that I have my computer screen half-and-half with this Create Entries on the right, and an Excel spreadsheet of this year's reading on the left, for reference).

*I think I talked about Mary Beard's SPQR and...uh...I just went back. No, I did not talk about that.

Mary Beard - SPQR
- I really liked this. I only have a glancing, overview knowledge of classical antiquity, so this was extremely helpful. It's a very high level overview, starting all the way from the mythical beginnings of Rome.

- One of the things I really appreciated about SPQR is how clear Beard was about presenting the evidence (this is the observations we have from archaeology) and then presenting her interpretation, as well as other scholars'. I can turn off my brain for fiction, mostly, but it's hard to do in non-fiction that wants to teach, so I appreciate how she really laid out the evidence. Not to mention it's interesting to me to see what kind of evidence exists, how we use it, etc.

Robin Lafevers - Dark Triumph
-This is a YA about young women in a convent dedicated to Mortain, the god of death. They are trained as assassins, and play silent roles in the medieval Brittany in which they live. This is basically so many things I love all bundled up.

- Alas that it is YA. I don't know what it is, but it's some combination of this writing style that seems to be so uniform across the genre, and shallow treatment of everything. I've spilled enough e-ink on how I don't think grittier = realer, but I feel like maybe the length isn't enough, or there just isn't enough treatment, because everything feels superficial. I've mostly given up on YA at this point.

- Also. ( SPOILERS as this is the third book )

- However. Obviously, considering that I read all three books....Can we make these medieval assassination convents a trope themselves? I would read so many...

Seth Dickinson - The Traitor Baru Cormorant
- One of the best fantasy novels I've read this year. Baru Cormorant sees the invaders come to her island as a little girl, sees her mother and two fathers torn apart, goes to the colonists' boardingschool at her island. And she scores exceptionally, and is granted a post as Imperial Accountant at distant Aurdwynn. Aurdwynn is full of rebellion, and she intends to forment it, and use her position to destroy the Empire of Masks.

- It's hard to describe all the things I loved about this novel, not least because there are a lot of twists, and it would ruin the novel if I talked about them in my enticement.

- I thought it was a very clear, unflinching look at imperialism and its expansion. Baru herself is clear-eyed too, and pretty much prepares herself to be just as hard. Such a good character - it's from her perspective, but you don't get that softening as you see the internal thoughts the way you do with a lot of "from the perspective of villain" stories. Which isn't to say Baru is a villain. It's complicated.

- It's also quietly beautiful in prose. It was written in a way that induces rapid page turning because OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED i can't turn pages fast enough, but there was an understated, unshowy gorgeous prose.

- That ending was hard to read. It hurt.

- I'm a huge nerd and enjoyed that monetary policy got a look in. Though...if your economy isn't very developed (as Aurdwynn's is, because it's still mostly agrarian without a ton of loans, the loans are to the nobility mostly), I'm not sure how much of a lever monetary policy is. But I digress. The one part I totally call BS on is Baru reconciling the accounts of a country in one day. I'm sorry HAHAHAHAHA NO. oh my god especially since they're all on paper do you know how long those columns of numbers to add up are?

- But really. I loved the politicking, the characters, the plot, the writing, solid 10/10 would recommend.

Elizabeth Wein - The Winter Prince
- About Medraut, and his relationship basically to Arthur's son.

- Somehow my copy had these illustrations at the heading of every chapter, and they were distracting; they were black and white pen drawings, and they looked amateur. The net result on me was that I would go from emotionally quite engaging and fraught scenes, to un-skippable drawings that reminded me of angsty teenagers, which meant I got taken out of the novel every chapter.

- There's more incest than I expected. And it being Arthurian lit, I expected incest.

- I don't know. I don't feel very motivated to read more Elizabeth Wein, to be honest. I know people rave about Code Name Verity, but meh.

Chris Hadfield - An Astrounaut's Guide to Life on Earth
- Chris Hadfield - Canadian astronaut, commander of the ISS - wrote an autobiography.

- Mostly what I've come away with is that I would love to meet Chris, he really does come across as an incredibly good and humble and persevering person. I also enjoyed learning about what kind of training the astronauts get, mentally and physically, in the real world. I like space opera! It's neat to see what actually happens outside stories. It's as much a story about what happens before anyone can go to space as it is about the fun quirks of what life in space is like. Staggering amounts of work.

Dorothy Dunnett - Niccolo Rising
- Historical novel about Nicholas de Fleury, a dyer's apprentice, set in 15th century Bruges to start. It's part of an eight-novel series that follows him - mind like a whip, full of schemes and ambitions, but irrepressibly cheerful despite the beatings.

- One reviewer described it as "pungently historical" (paraphrase) which I agree with. It's obvious Dunnett did her research. There are also real life figures that appear as minor characters - I saw one of them's portraits in the Met on Saturday! That was like an unexpected Easter egg in real life.

- I also found this to be a slog initially. Until about 40%. You're left to draw your own conclusions a great deal, and there are a lot of names and places and relationships to keep track of, and if you read it piecemeal like at lunch in 5 min snatches between getting distracted, it's kind of hard to enjoy. But then the plot picked up and it flew. Some very good twists, especially with Katalina.

- On the other hand, the next seven books are daunting. I'm not sure I want to start one any time soon...

- These also tie into her more famous Lymond series. Niccolo is an ancestor, I believe.

Agatha Christie - And Then There Were None
- Murder mystery, where ten guests are summoned to an island, each by a different person they'd answer a summons for, to attend a party. The host just doesn't show up and the whole party is marooned on the island - deliberately, apparently. And then one by one, they all begin to die...

- I am a wimp and it totally gave me the creeps. It's very much the locked room mystery - one of those characters is a murderer!!!

- If you read too many Christie mysteries (actually, golden age mysteries in general) you notice a lot of character archetypes that crop up frequently. Young society miss, red-faced colonel who rather wishes he was still in the war, the misfit only American there, etc. I offer this observation not as an insult or accusation, but just as an observation.

all of Prospero's War, Dirty Magic to Volatile Bonds by Jaye Wells
- Think police procedural except in novel form, and instead of the war on drugs, potions and magic have taken the place of cocaine and heroin. Kate Prospero is a beat cop that patrols the magic side of the city, but her position is somewhat precarious and unusual; she grew up as the niece of Abraxas Prospero, who was gang leader of one of the three strongest covens that operated in the city. Abraxas is in prison now, she refuses to touch potion cooking, and is raising her younger brother. But her strong desire to do right by the city draws her into conflicts about all this.

- I actually really like Kate as a character. She's complicated and has a lot of conflicting loyalties. She's very against using magic - she attends an AA style magic-rejecting group (people get addicted to potions) - she was a very talented potion cooker as a girl - the police force use 'clean' magic to operate more effectively - 'clean' magic is just what mainstream drug companies use, 'dirty' is street, there's regulation but really it's magic anyway. And her little brother wants to cook potions...

- The internal police politicking sounds quite realistic. And exhausting.

- But let's be real. I am desperately awaiting the next book because I am so interested in Volos/Kate becoming a thing. It's the emotional core of all this, and it's a hell of a magnet.

Nate Silver - The Signal and the Noise
- Non-fiction, about statistical modelling. Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, which rose to fame during the 2008 American presidential elections run-up; his modelling of the electoral college was both very accurate and fairly precise.

- It is a book written to appeal to a broad base of people, so there really was not much math in it. Some graphs, which was nice, but I wanted more statistical treatment (ugh go read a textbook.) He focuses heavily on Bayesian statistics, which, to prosify and simplify hard, means you should make a prediction initially based on your knowledge, then incorporate further evidence and weigh it more heavily depending on how confident you were in your initial prediction and how un-like your initial prediction was.

- Some of the cases, like epidemiology and economics, I found much more interesting than the poker and baseball bits. I just don't care that much about poker and baseball...but Silver does, and sabermetrics is how he got interested in statistics in the first place.

- Silver also references some very random things, and will allude at intervals to isolated historical facts or incidents or pop culture, and I don't really think it adds much to the credibility of the book. It doesn't discredit but I've always hated the way that introductions to subjects - like accounting - must always dive into a poorly researched and not terribly interesting historical diversion to pull as an example 15th c Italian double-bookkeeping as The First Accounting, or worse, pull even more loose examples like shopping lists etched on stone tablets... Stick to your own damn expertise, I am not interested in Your Thoughts On Something You Do Not Study.

Michael Scott Rohan - The Hammer of the Sun
- The third book of the original trilogy, it's a high fantasy set in an interglacial period. The protagonist is Elof Valantor, a smith, and other than the interglacial setting, it's otherwise quite standard high fantasy in technology levels, magic presence, fantastical species, etc. It picks up seven years after the previous Forge in the Forest - I do love the evocativeness of the titles - and Elof tries to chain his love to him. Oh, he has his justifications, he fears the influence of an evil Louhi over his wife, but that's what he tries to do, and it backfires on him spectacularly. She shapeshifts into a bird and flies away, and he takes a boat and pursues...

- This is the third book that I read, so obviously it was not intolerable. But I read this book in a fit of apathy. By which I mean, I would open up Moonreader on my phone, and The Hammer of the Sun would be already loaded and open to the last page, and I wasn't feeling like reading it but also without enough emotional energy to start something new...so I kept reading.

- Seriously, the part where he tries to chain Kara bothered me so much. Obviously the narrative doesn't agree with his decision, since she kind of just flees, but...he also just goes and pursues her, which was eyeroll-inducing.

- The most interesting thing about these books is actually the glaciers and their inexorable advance. It's weird to read it today, because climate change seems to be happening also inexorably, in the other direction, and it's been hot, and in temperatures like this I feel like packing up and moving to Nunavut.

- I do not like Elof. He has never interested me in the slightest. I wish there was a more personable and interesting character to center the books around. I can't believe I read three books' worth of mediocre fantasy for glaciers...

- The prose, bless it, tried so hard. It used big words and grown-up constructions, but it never actually clicked properly. There's an incredibly satisfying feeling you get when you read someone like Diana Wynn Jones' writing, for example - it's a little tongue in cheek, but not arch, and the words and descriptions fit so perfectly, and so unerringly describe sensations and sights that it's a pleasure to just take in the words. Or authors who can give their work a sweeping depth that transports you. This was none of this, and the subtly not quite there constructions were distracting instead.

- It's so trying after Tolkien it's just embarrassing instead. After I finished the book, I went onto Goodreads. I didn't mean to - I just googled first. There's a reason I'm not on Goodreads, and I speedily remembered why. There are many people that I would sincerely like to take a look out their eyes sometime, because I don't understand. So many white men writing glowing praises of the prose and how it's like Tolkien and I think we have read different copies. Oh yes, it's like Tolkien, in that it's a heavily watered down attempt.

- Oh my god it was so slowwwww, the first half, the sea-journey. I just did not care for Elof. I did not care for his journey. I thought his companion Roc was a fool for coming with him. I thought Elof's total fear for the Ice vaguely ridiculous.

OK, I've done a bunch. Gotta sleep. Still a few more to go, including DOROTHY SAYERS ♥

Freakonomics is a book exploring questions about society with the tools of microeconomics and statistics. It's a book full of interesting questions--why did crime fall in the 1990's? can we detect cheating by teachers in standardized testing? do real estate agents try harder with their own houses? why do drug dealers live with their mothers if they're making riches?--which are asked with some economics framing and some very clever experiment set-ups. The thing with research into these fields is that they're impossible, either because of ethics or sheer impossibility, to control variables the same way you might an inorganic chemistry experiment. But Levitt uses opportunities in different data ingeniously to extract data. For instance, Chicago's public school system created a lottery assignation of spots in different schools in the city--this is the sort of thing a researcher can only dream of, to randomly be able to place subjects in different "treatments" i.e. schools (without regard for socio-economic status and similar factors that might be the reason for attendance at a particular school) and thereby tease out differences in education. This is what they call randomized controlled trial, by the way.

The questions are treated in an economics way, by which I mean there's discussion of common concepts in economics (incentives, etc). But the questions themselves are rather a departure from most economics texts--for one, they're not macro! (I feel macroeconomics--you know, GDP, unemployment, monetary policy, exchange rates--has practically dominated the field, and the perception of the field, for a long time. Then again, what do I know?) The book's written in a very non-technical manner. If you look very closely Levitt and Dubner actually talk about multiple regressions and dummy variables when discussing methodology, but for the most part the technical part about statistics and economic theory are completely elided.

For me, the most interesting part of the book wasn't necessarily the conclusions that Levitt reached or the anecdotes, though both were excellent, but instead the way Levitt got them. Designing experiments to test hypotheses is sometimes really hard, and Levitt extracts meaningful data from larger pools (e.g. government records on whatever) to make sense of it. I really love experimental economics and the elegance of these experiments are amazing and fascinating.

However: the reason why this review has languished since June 2013--Levitt's conclusion regarding abortion and crime rates came under criticism. Not from random pro-choice people but rather pretty respected economists like ones who work at the Boston Fed. Here is a link to the paper that Foote and Goetz wrote: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf It's been ages and I've still not read that stupid thing so I have been holding off posting this review but really, enough is enough and it's clogging up my desktop (purposefully, I mean, I put documents on my desktop when I want them to be done ASAP because it drives me mad to have a cluttered virtual desktop. But less about me.) So grain of salt, as with every economics paper you ever read.

(Reinhart and Rogoff, anyone?)



Finally, I would like to quote a part of the Q&A that is appended to my version of the book, which made me laugh:

Tell us about the criticisms you have received from traditional/academic colleagues over Freakonomics--J Plain.

Levitt's academic colleagues tend to react in one of two ways. The majority of economists thought about it like economists: the success of Freakonomics probably increased the number of students wanting to take economics courses, and since the supply of economics teachers is fixed in the short run, the wages of academic economists should rise. That makes economists happy. A second group of economists decided that if Levitt could write a book that people would read, surely they could too. So there has been a flurry of "popular" books by economists--some good, some not so good. And then, inevitably, there are a handful of economists who feel that he violated the secret handshake of economics by showing the outside world that what economists do really isn't that hard or complex. They will never forgive him.

supply of economics teachers fixed in the short run, it's like the most basic essence of economics distilled into one sentence. I'm laugh-crying into my fingers at this paragraph.

This is a nonfiction book that deals with the intersection of humans and technology. Vicente first argues that our thinking has become two separate views that don't interact: what he terms mechanistic and humanistic. One view primarily considers people (he cites cognitive psychology as an example of one such discipline); the other is an analytical, technical science, like engineering. He argues that we have become used to seeing the world by dividing it up into these two views, and thereby blinkered by attempting to solve problems while only considering one view.

He begins by explaining what he calls "Human-tech", a mix of the two competing views mentioned above. In the lowest rung of the ladder, what Vicente calls the physical level, is indeed the physical compatibility of some technology with human physiology. Is the toilet paper dispenser in public bathrooms easy to use? (Since he brings it up, the answer is "not always" – trying to get the last bits of paper out of the kind that have teeth demonstrates that toilet-paper dispensers eat human flesh). In later chapters he talks about the fit between humans and other types of technology, things that aren’t usually considered "tech" – psychological, team, organizational, political. In each of these different topics, which Vicente stacks in a ladder, the focus is on the interaction between humans and the technology, not the merit of technology alone.

In this way, the book argues for a different way to design things. He reiterates throughout the book that technology, no matter how well designed from a mechanical/technical perspective, can never do better than how well people can use them. Examples range from Three Mile Island disaster to hospital and aviation systems to the fender stratocastor (an immensely popular electrical guitar). As he moves up the ladder, like when considering the Walkerton disaster*, the effects of more than one level are felt. In Walkerton, for example, there were significant organizational flaws, such as the fact that the man who was employed as foreman at the plant had little training and didn't even know what E. coli was; political flaws such as the Conservative party's slashing of the number of public employees played a major part as well, since there simply weren't enough resources to properly inspect Walkerton. On a organizational-human basis, the examples of hospital work is brought up. Vincente argues that hospitals and health care should avoid pointing fingers at mistakes, because most mistakes are neither malicious nor infrequently made, and workers are aware and unhappy that mistakes are made in the first place. Instead, the book suggests hospitals work on reporting issues and trying to make systems that avoid the error in the first place. Cited as an example is three separate disasters involving vincristine, a drug to treat cancer; in three geographically distinct and unrelated cases, doctors accidentally administered it intrathecally instead of intravenously, which is fatal; because there was no reporting system, doctors were suspended or punished, but the information wasn’t passed on, and steps to actually prevent the wrong administration weren’t taken.

The book is composed in three parts – introduction, examples explaining the levels and the misfits between humans and technology, and a conclusion which tries to address what we should do next and what’s currently happening. Theoretical explanations are form a small iintroduction, but the bulk of the book is taken up with examples. Though I have not independently verified the sources, the book is actually footnoted and references respectable sources. A very informative, interesting book.

*Walkerton, Ontario, had an E. coli breakout in 2000. Population of 4,800: seven died and about 2,300 became sick; applying these figures to a larger city is horrifying.